What can "City Folk" do to support local farmers and the food security movement?
1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If
you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny win-
dow, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your
kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food
for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy
cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to
offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for
any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it.
You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.
2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own
mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should
enable you to eat more cheaply, and will give you a measure of
“quality control.”
3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that
is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality
should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes
several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most
secure, freshest and the easiest for local consumers to know about
and to influence.
4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener
or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion
apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole
pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers and advertis-
ers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.
5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and
technology of industrial food production. What is added to the
food that is not food, and what do you pay for those additions?
6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.
7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experi-
ence if possible, of the life histories of the food species.
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