New book charts course to a sustainable, healthy food system

‘Fair Food’ author Oran Hesterman offers a vision of better taste, better nutrition, and new local and regional business opportunities.

Troy, Michigan, May 13, 2011

This isn’t a book about what’s wrong with the U.S. food system. That one’s been written – more than once.

Instead, Oran Hesterman’s new book, “Fair Food” (320 pages, Public Affairs,  $24.99), focuses on solutions that would provide fresh, healthy food for consumers, fair wages, and sustainable businesses for growers, and greater food security and a healthier environment for all of us.

“Individuals are engaging at an unusual level,” says Hesterman, who heads the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based nonprofit Fair Food Network. “They’re paying attention to where their food comes from and how it’s produced."

“That’s nice,” he says, “but it’s not going to change the system. We need changes in public policy.”

Yes, that means reshaping the farm bill – the massive federal law due for renewal this year. But Hesterman’s roadmap for a healthy food system also means changing practices in school systems and hospitals, the buying policies of big retailers and even, perhaps, the zoning policies in your neighborhood.

“This can work for everybody,” says Hesterman, “families, kids, the environment and local economies. If more food is locally grown, processed and retailed, local business and health benefit from affordable fresh food.”

Indeed, shifting just 20 percent of the food spending in greater Detroit to food that is grown, processed and distributed by local companies would have a half-billion-dollar impact on the region’s economy, says Hesterman, an agronomist who spent 15 years working on food issues at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The highly readable “Fair Food” is packed with examples of:

• Individual farmers and cooperatives like North Dakotan Fred Kirschenmann, who converted his family’s 3,100-acre grain farm to organic, and Appalachian Sustainable Harvest, which bridges the gap between farms and stores with facilities to pack, market and ship vegetables and eggs produced by former tobacco farmers.

• Retail behemoths such as Costco, where a “values based” supply chain is beginning to address  the prices paid to growers, and small local grocers like New Seasons Market in Portland, Ore., which purchases from local growers (and fishermen and ranchers) first, offers employees health care insurance and donates a fixed percentage of after-tax profits to local charities.

These examples illustrate the feasibility of operating differently and expose the policies that create unnecessary challenges. When a 1990s farm bill excluded sunflowers, for example, Kirschenmann’s neighbors abandoned the crop, leaving him as the sole source for hungry blackbirds; they wiped out his harvest. That spelled not just the loss of a previously profitable crop, but one that was important to the crop-rotation plan that allows Kirschenmann to farm without synthetic chemicals.

Hesterman argues that the food system is simply broken, but that we can create a healthy, sustainable system if we shift our role from “conscious consumers” to “engaged citizens.”

Toward that end, he provides a 60-page resource section pointing readers to organizations involved in redesigning the food system. It’s a partial list, but the author promises updated information at fairfoodnetwork.org.

The Kresge Foundation supports the Fair Food Network with a four-year, $980,000 grant that has helped launch Fair Food Detroit, a program to help the city realize the economic and health benefits of locally produced food.

That Detroit program lets city residents eligible for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, stretch their budgets when they buy Michigan-grown fruits and vegetables. Known as “Double Up Food Bucks,” the effort doubles the value of shoppers’ dollars at farmers’ markets.

In a city of more than 700,000 that lacks even one full-service supermarket, the “Double Up” program is a start to demonstrating how to organize a food system that is good for our health and our economy, Hesterman says. “We’re shifting the idea of who can shop at farmers’ markets.”

Hesterman is marking the publication of “Fair Food” with a book launch in Ann Arbor at Cobblestone Farm on Thursday, May 19, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. He’ll be at Detroit’s Eastern Market, 1445 Adelaide St., on Sunday, May 21, from noon to 2 p.m.

Information about additional cities can be found at the Fair Food Network website.

For more information on the Kresge Foundation, contact Cynthia Shaw, cbshaw@kresge.org or call 248-643-9630.

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