InFocus Magazine

You’d need to have spent the last couple of years locked in the warehouse of a big-box supermarket not to have noticed all the interest in local eating. The locavore movement, as it’s sometimes called, is big news and big business.

Books with titles such as The 100-Mile Diet, Food Not Lawns, and Animal Vegetable Miracle: A Year of Food Life, all about eating from one’s own region, are bestsellers; farmers’ markets are thriving, and restaurants based on local ingredients are proliferating.

On the one hand, the eat-local trend is a powerful social movement, a logical response to the threat of climate change, and a grassroots-led restructuring of the food economy. On the other hand, sometimes it can seem like a calculated new marketing ploy aimed at stimulating consumption, with zealous foodies driving their SUVs for hours through the countryside hunting down locally-produced heirloom tomatoes.

A group of Denman Island residents have brought the local eating movement back to its roots with a project aptly nicknamed SPUDS, which celebrated its first harvest this September.

SPUDS, which stands for Sowing Potatoes Underground for Denman Sustainability, is a potato co-op—a remarkably simple idea revolving around a simple vegetable. Co-op members—in this case, approximately 30 individuals or families—get together regularly to plant, water, weed and eventually harvest a field of potatoes. The bounty is shared among the 30 members.

This is not just about local eating; it’s about growing your own food, beyond the borders of your own garden, as a community. Potatoes by the people, for the people.

“Developing a local food system is the most responsible thing we can do with our lives at this point,” says Peter Janes, one of the founding members of SPUDS. Global warming, financial collapse, the loss of agricultural land to residential and industrial development, the environmental damage caused by chemically-dependent factory farms—all these phenomena point to the desirability of developing reliable local food sources.

The case for producing food locally becomes even stronger with the application of full cost accounting, says Janes. This term refers to an approach that looks at the hidden costs of producing goods and services, including social and environmental ones.

“There are so many costs that are not factored into traditional economic thinking—if we did full cost accounting for a bag of potatoes, we’d need to add in pollution costs, transportation infrastructure costs, habitat destruction, the effect of chemicals. Typically these are not considered because the economy doesn’t put a value on them.”

An oft-quoted 1980 study from Iowa University shows that the average piece of food travels 1,500 miles before it hits our plates; this has only increased since then. This means that a lot of fossil fuels are burned for a typical dinner.

It also means our access to food depends on a complex, and therefore vulnerable, network of distributors and transportation.

“One of the things our group talked about was the reality that food production has shifted to the United States from Vancouver Island,” says Corinne Bjorge, another SPUDS founding member.

“Eighty years ago, the sparsely occupied areas of Vancouver Island were responsible for their self-sufficient food supply. Now, with the competition created by produce from Mexico and California, and the false economy created by cheap fossil fuel, local food production has dropped severely, and our bio-region has about a three-day supply of produce, should there be a major interruption in transportation.”

Although it’s easy to believe we will always be able to drive to the grocery store to pick up our sustenance, this may not always be reliable, says Veronica Timmons, also a SPUDS founder. Timmons has been reading about the state of the world’s oil supply, and what she’s found is not reassuring.

“We’ve used half of the world’s oil in the last 30 years, and there’s half left. In North America, we’re using it up awfully quickly, and now China and India are growing at an amazing rate and they wants lots,” she says, crediting James Kunstler’s book, The Long Emergency, for these statistics.

“Oil is going to get more and more scarce and more and more expensive.” Inevitably, she says, our social and economic systems will change dramatically. “It might become very valuable to be able to walk over to the farmer’s field rather than drive to the supermarket.”

She acknowledges that these may sound like exaggerated doomsday messages, but asks, “What if only half of it is true?”