What can you do?
“Gaining popularity” has many entry points: on the dinner plate, in the grocery aisle, on Capitol Hill and on the farm. How everyone participates in the system drives where it goes. This includes where and what you buy and how you vote.
As a farmer, Myer urges consumers to buy in season. “To me, the seasonality of food is exciting because you can’t get it all the time, and it’s not going to taste like this all the time. I think that’s a positive rather than a negative.
“When I have a thousand heads of napa cabbage,” she continues, “I want people to think, ‘oh my gosh, it’s napa cabbage season! I should make up a bunch of kimchi or blanch it and throw it in the freezer.’ Maybe that’s too old-fashioned for people or too homestead-y,” she says, but it is indeed what being connected to our food—and food source—looks like.
Myer also says focusing on how food tastes, and less on how it looks, helps producers. “I tend to grow really ugly sweet potatoes,” she says, “but they taste amazing and they’re good for you!”
As an activist, Hamerschlag advises you to engage in advocacy with the companies and stores you buy from. That means contacting them and demanding better options. “For a healthy diet, it’s not just what kind of food, but how food is produced. In the case of meat, we want to get antibiotics and hormones out of the meat, so consumers should be asking companies to sell meat that is raised without the routine use of drugs.” Hamerschlag believes companies are much more sensitive to consumer pressure than policy makers are.
Even so, she says, consumers must be citizens, too. “People do need to let their representatives know that they want more organics.”
As a nutritionist, Falbo’s recommendations center around what consumers buy and where they buy it. “First and foremost,” she says, “shop with a grocer who is committed to sourcing food from producers who are using practices that are more sustainable.”
Here she begins to sound like a commercial for her employer, but not without merit. Natural Grocers indeed presents the highest product-sourcing standards among the larger retail chains: It sells only organic produce and pasture-based dairy, for instance, with an emphasis on 100 percent grass-fed producers who are using regenerative agricultural practices. Many small, independent natural retailers have similar high standards.
“It is important to know where your food comes from, how it was produced, and the impact on the land, the animals, the people and the economy,” Falbo says. And then act according to that knowledge. Where and how you spend your money, and how you engage with those you support, is not to be understated, each of these experts agrees, as acts of positive change—or collusion with the status quo.
Myer is grateful for what she considers a great privilege: access to family farmland. She is determined to do something meaningful with that opportunity. It was a search for meaning, after all, that called her back to her roots.
“I’m getting closer,” she says, eight years in. She is also personally enriched by the farm ecology—floral, faunal and microbial—which, she says, is developing around her. “Even when I don’t cover-crop, if I’m growing food crops I can still see the soil getting better just because of how we’re using it.”
Myer is a key—if humble—part of this farm ecosystem, and perhaps that’s the drive behind building a wholesale network that will give her more time on the farm and less time out selling. “I want to stay here and grow food,” she says, presenting, perhaps inadvertently, another subtle way you can help: Buy real food, grown well. If the market creates the demand, the farmer doesn’t have to create the market. Help farmers do what is best for farms, people and the planet: grow food.
