A pinch of optimism

Recipe for America: Why our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It, by Jill Richardson. Ig Publishing, 2009.

Like Coming Home to Eat, Recipe for America is book that popped up in a search for something to read. I had never heard of it or Jill Richardson before, though the latter’s blog, La Vida Locavore, did ring a bell.

The book is a succinct summary of the major issues facing the U.S. food system. I appreciated Richardson’s attempt to pull together and lay out the social, political, and environmental issues that plague our food system. Out of necessity, she couldn’t go very deeply into any one of them. Most of the points Richardson raised were already familiar to me, so I was able to detect occasional bias or extra emotion.

Richardson mentioned a handful of things that I hadn’t heard before. She spent some time working at a Whole Food bakery, and could describe how the bread slicer, certain spoons and pitchers, and a separate sink were dedicated for organic products, because “accidentally mixing [a customer’s] organic latte with a few drops of conventional dish water would be a violation of trust (and the law)” (68). That’s dedication! On paper, at least. In practice, the employees must actually follow the conventions and stipulations for Whole Food's dedication to be actualized. Richardson did. Other employees didn’t necessarily.

Another example that I was unfamiliar with was the cooperative CSA. Richardson visited a cooperative of several Amish farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Posted by Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative on Thursday, April 9, 2015

Each farm grows several crops rather than all of them to protect against coordination problems with crop variety and quantity. The cooperative model allows farmers to share costs, time, and split up marketing and financial management responsibilities. The model also softens the blow of natural disasters and poor crops that affect one farm. Of course, if the farms are located near one another, a drought in the region could affect them all equally.

I found the last chapter on the Farm Bill to be the most interesting. I don’t know very much about this piece of legislation except that it’s huge and passed about once every five years. Richardson’s brief treatment made me want to learn more.

The Appendix, "How to Cook Up a Recipe," for America is also interesting. It lists five ways to get involved and resources to do it.

1. Sign up to receive action alerts
2. Follow issues on blogs
3. Track legislation
4. Watch congressional hearings
5. Write letters to the editor.

I looked up all of the blogs and added them to my Google Reader. But I haven’t yet looked up the organizations she recommends:

• Organic Consumers Association (organicconsumers.org)
• Food and Water Watch (foodandwaterwatch.org)
• Consumers Union (consumersunion.org)
• Union of Concerned Scientists (ucsusa.org)
• The Cornucopia Institute (cornucopia.org)
• Food Democracy Now (fooddemocracynow.org)

Recipe for America pushes me in two directions: to get more involved in changing the food system and to work for a publishing company, copyediting. (This book had several baffling typos, including “stsy” instead of “stay” and random switching between rbGH and rBGH.) I’d be cool with either route.