Local Foods and Food Safety

Food safety is a concern on everyone's mind. The very fact that we have an editorial department on Justmeans dedicated to sustainable, healthy food, is immediate proof, but there's no need to stop there. A quick search on the Internet will lead you to many different avenues of sustainable food choices and arguments.

The local foods movement is ambitiously fighting to make safe what is currently unsafe. Committees in every community are created in, what I believe to be, a natural response to a public health threat. And while usually I'm suspicious of committees and bureaucracies, there are some good eggs in the bureaucratic basket.

In February, I attended our annual Local Foods Forum held by Farm Fresh Rhode Island, our enthusiastic local foods network. The keynote speaker was Gus Schumacher, a Massachusetts native who grew up on his family's vegetable farm and went on to become USDA Undersecretary of Agriculture under President Clinton. Schumacher has worked in federal and state government to open opportunities for family farms and to open low-income families' access to quality, fresh produce. He has a broad vision and deep understanding of how policy making can rebuild robust local food economies and healthy communities.

One thing Mr. Schumacher made extensively clear was that local foods cannot fall prey to irresponsible practices. With recent salmonella outbreaks in  tomatoes, spinach (and most recently eggs), consumers will turn towards more local choices, but if our local producers are irresponsible and create the same mistakes as the corporations, we have made no progress.

Shumacher is part of a solution to a great problem. As I understand it, he is not so glassy-eyed to think that commercial farms don't occasionally need to use chemical management of pests and/or weeds, but he is working steadfast on the practice of using them as a last resort; notably, he "fostered a program with UMass in Integrated Pest Management to assist farmers in improving the management of their farm chemicals"

At the local foods forum, Schumacher suggested that we take the most important care to tending our fields, keeping clean, organic methods as the main account of organic practice so that the consumer base not only turns to local food, but remains there. We need to have more Gus Shumachers in the world that work within the system to fight for local economies and food safety for those who grow, sell and consume local food.

Photo credit: Mass.gov