KEXP Presents Mind Over Matters; Sustainability Segment: Vicki Robin

this is diane warren your host on the sustainability segment of mind over matter is uncanny x the seattle many point to the fm and on the web at atx p dowd orgy my guest this morning is vicky robin i mean an innovator writer and speaker vicki has been at the forefront of the sustainable living movement and is co author of the bestselling book your money or your life she has helped launch many sustainability initiatives including the new robot foundation that simplicity forum sustainable seattle the center for a new american dream transition would be and more she has received awards from cop america and sustainable northwest and was a speaker on relational eating at ted seattle to get robin is here today to tell us about her most recent book blessing the hands that feed us what leading closer to home can teach us about food community and our place on earth published in two thousand and fourteen welcome peggy thank you dan would lead you to write your book blessing the hands that the us it's sort of like that question about my whole life journey or not to do all that but it's you know i've been involved in sustainability for twenty years an adult my a work and that my partner joe dominguez never

human ear life which was a bestseller and i work for a decade on lowering consumption in north america but actually the one form of consumption that was off the table was eating because it was not for examination because i'm a sporty gear and my feeling about eating in diet was really all about how can i just the size of my body so that i'm more acceptable socially are what can i n i can't eat in order to be healthier or more by grant or have wider eyes or whatever you know it's like they talk about yo yo dieting and i think it wasn't just the weight the yo yo but it was yo yo ing between the typo die oh yes should eat meat no no john robinson and finding out about a frozen confined animal feeding operations known and i should meet me so it was a yo yo ing because i had no relationship with food really i mean that whole the realm was an unexamined realm of craziness where i was as a woven into the ideas of the north american

consumer culture as anybody with your money or why i had examined my relationship with money and staff and i was naturally furlough and i was completely consistent with my sustainability values but in this area i wasn't so fast forward from that decade of working on your money your life and then in two thousand forest agnes a cancer so i really resigned from the whole sustainability movement but eventually after several years and i went to a conference and peak oil that got me in the presence of people who are talking about this whole other area sustainability that i hadn't paid attention to it was the climate change piece it was about resources and burning through the supply of what we have and getting to a point of constraint and it just woke me up and that's what got me onto what makes sense to me is real close asian would make sense to me as communities and hawking as much as possible from these global supply chains and are gonna

get disrupted so i dove into that as she said i was parra transition would be and from that i became aware of how food insecure or my little weepy island is end because of that i was quite open to a challenge from a friend who's a farmer who said she was looking for somebody who for thirty days with simply eat which she could grow and that led to the ten mile diet which led to the book roasted you set for yourself or your month on a ten mile diet or ten my dad started out as this partnership with a farmer we agreed that i would do it in september twenty ten we got a little nervous about it because that one was a sure there was enough food coming out of her market garden and then i realized no there's no cheese is no need is no milk is no honey and within my ten miles there's no grain there's no beings there's nothing to stick to the ribs here so we agreed that says she was within ten miles of my home that we would do it in ten mile radius and it go out into my

ten miles as the crow flies so they got me if anybody knows would be and dummy all the way north to north or freeland always south to just about midway in the ferry and so i found the thief she can melt that was an interesting thing as i discovered that raw milk is illegal and there's no processing plant on my ten miles so i found illegal raw milk and illegal goat cheese and honey i went to the grocery store it's amazing to me i was so proud to mild it is good grocery store right now where the grocery store in the only ten mile from my store was honey so those are my rules and i gave myself or exotic iowa live for months about salt and a few other seasonings or oil or caffeine or lemons so those are my four exotic says and i gave myself a pass on that one did you like the most about your ten mile diet i liked a lot about it it like a lot about a thing because you know number one i know knots i had no grains or no crackers

no cookies nothing to cringe on there was really hard i had no easy fast food everything was slow food because it could yet i was only working with whole ingredients and it excluded me in a sense from cowing down with everybody else in certain situations but what i loved was the creativity because i learned to cook now with recipes those ingredients it was like ok i got a turnip and the leak now what i discovered a week have been mowing my yard was actually oregano so i had ten mile oregano and my farmer attrition would bring me some basil and i met harold time so i started learning to take just a few ingredients that were available to me and make them into something yummy but the most important thing for me was this experience of belonging that eating is an act of belonging it locate to some place on earth i sort of landed somewhere in a real community not just of people now are buildings but of soil

and that sense of being in malicious typical relational eating that was the bead aha and it changed me going diane horn and my guest is figure out an author of the book lessing the hands that feed us what eating closer to home can teach us about food community and our place on earth and you return to the sustainability segment of mind over matter some listener howard k e x feat and on the web at atx we know it were you brought up relational eating what is relational heating which is a more yeah it's a term that i coined to describe an experience i was having and it's the experience of the shift from being what i call an anywhere anytime anything here in a global industrial corporate food system where every flavor in the world is available to use if you have money it's like a vast food court so we treat the food system like a vending machine we don't have to

think about where it comes from how it gets to the store we don't have to think about what's in the packages all we have to think about it is going to the store the restaurant and getting food somebody told me in new york now that people eat some of takeout food that when one finally reports that the kids know it's dinnertime because the doorbell rings so we don't have any relationship with the food that we eat and it passes very quickly for bodies whenever any with any relationship with what comes out we take no responsibility for that forty percent of the food worldwide is wasted the industrial global corporate food system is a non relational food system the relational food system is being an ear with an experience of standing in the middle of food feeling yourself surrounded buy food by farms farmers forests waters cooks you know you have this feeling radiating out from you and starting with one's own psychology the relationship was what you'd demands are around food

how we've gotten accustomed defending so cheap we spend the least percentage of our budget on food of any country in the world so food is cheap press we infuse it you know think ok i can eat a carnivorous kin leila prisoners gonna hurt as me so it's working with our psychology our culture what it it when i was growing up when my emotional associations with food has my body work having a relationship with the whole rubber to between your mouth mean your butt and realizing that that's a whole colony that's by testing your food so that's just the person will mean you go out to your kitchen and realizing that the kitchen as a site of creativity it's not the drudgery of like you know just make three meals a day you know at open a canned beans and it's out to your yard and it's out to the wild plants with a clean plants and it's the soil and realizing that the soil is a living river of nutrients its minerals and micro organisms and so you start to have this feeling that everything is alive and

food east most intimate relationship by that you know there's only two orifices that we letting thing in and very different as a day which the other one we don't use that often except for teenagers so it is the most intimate contact we have with the world around us we have this amazing time that can taste all these different very case that we are designed to be contiguous member of the natural world so it is sort of a bluesy feeling this feeling of being tucked in and belonging to a place and it's also vulnerable feeling of realizing that if you sir let go of the control system of the corporate industrial food system and make yourself vulnerable to the place you live you have a huge commitment to that place flourishing not under some concept about you know i mean to sustainability know i'm a place to bubble but no no you have a visceral literally of visceral experience if i succeed this place has to succeed

would you say more about how relational eating can make a difference for society as a whole as a good question is the question i asked myself it's local food or relational heating assistance something for hippies in yuppies you know that engaging with whom in this way takes a little bit more to repair sometimes but it's not always sometimes it's more expensive but i started to realize that once you fall in love with the place you live and once you realize how grateful you are that their farmers there were growing this beautiful food you realize that all is not well you realize that the grocery store is like a stage set it's like the back lot a metrical maire it's the endpoint of an industrial system that what's in that store is in that story thanks to the whole logistical process of getting food from someplace in the world to the shelves it's not because it's been grown in your area so you realize your vulnerability some studies in our region say twenty five percent of our food weekend

source within a region i doubt those numbers i don't think it's that much i think it's probably closer to ten percent currently it could be up to you know a very large percent but that would take a complete political social engagement in transforming our food system it goes right up against property rights it goes right up against subsidies it goes right up against transforming are for root system our own regional food system so that it could provide even fifty percent of the nutrition for the people who live here would change everything so what happened for me with relational eating as i realized that our relation leader becomes committed to restoring the prosperity and abundance and productivity of the regional food shed which includes that is the food because out of it but the farmers who grow it in the soil it's grown in and the whole life of the

community you've alluded to this that during your experiment the thought occurred to you that would be iran would not be able to feed itself on local food would you like to say more about your thought is about that as sheriff says starting to wake up to this in three days from the grocery store i asked a local farmer could we fear sells and woody allen from woody allen and so she did a back of the envelope calculation every people on the island two thousand calories a day a man of land it's in agricultural zoning things a crow well and would be island issue really did fairly thorough analysis of this and she said yup we could survive for two weeks in august so it made me realize that my island which is semi world that you drive up the island and you see all these beautiful farms that the farms are the hobby farm somebody can buy a twenty or five or ten acres and put one horse on it and it's their land and that's what they can do with it you also see that there's a lot of food being produced that goes off island

that you know and there's a us and it grows beats are bean seeds therefore off island use a lot of the land is used for hate for animal feed see realize that the island is not a ranged around feeding its people where it was even fifty sixty years ago much more the food was local food we lost our dairies we had quite a few theories and we lost them at a time when the price of milk was fixed but the price of feed was fluctuating and so the dairy farmers in our region many of them went belly up in the same month two year period so you realize that even though it's a rural place it's not arranged to produce the food yet we have some the most productive farmland on maybe island it's let's get a valley we have farmland that a one time a hundred years ago that it won the national price of the tonnage of wheat that was taken of him off the land so we have this

capacity but were not socially and politically arranged to exploit it to feed ourselves and when i thought about my ten mile that i realized if a hundred people decided to do a ten mile diet welcome goodbye dear goodbye bunnies you know any good by nelson goodbye enchanter else if a hundred people had to do it i was doing it we wouldn't have enough cars are not arranged around that value but it's not inevitable that that happens it's only how it's turned out and we can't change it you're tuned to the sustainability segment of mind over matters and t x t seattle ninety point three of them and on the web add k e x t dido archie i'm dianne harman my guest is iggy robin author of the book lessing the hands that feed us with eating closer to home can teach us about food community and our place on earth how do you see the local food systems in are connecting with a larger industrial food system well right now the larger industrial food system edges out the local food

system to a very large degree number one they have strong lobbies and so the playing field is tilted toward what they called vertical integration and consolidation of the market this for companies that grow most of our c one of them being monsanto you know those famous for pushing the edge of gmo seeds and i'm not a rabbit activist making monsanto the devil but it is true that the dynamics of the corporate industry system would ever it's producing it goes toward consolidation and vertical integration because that's where the profit is the corporation's as you well know diana corporations primary goal is to make money for shareholders is not to feed the people so that's how that's a stem is designed to work so it makes it much harder for small scale farmers are made scale farmers to make enough money and that becomes problematic because that's a cat how much food can

be grown in the region most people who farm have to have off farm income but we can change those laws we can have cottage close we can take the onus of the kinds of regulations and licensing thats done for the large scale producers that can be makes gail appropriate regulations of the small scale people don't have to pay the same fees as a large scale people we could have different outcome based systems of confirming their produce and meat is wholesome to eat we don't necessarily need the regulations of the usda's we can monitor our own meat producers this many things that can be don't we could actually take this summer regulations off of raw milk which is actually happening in many places and there was a bill here in our area for that where you give a few goats or a cow or something like that you can sell milk to your neighbors so it's like this arid aiding the industrial system that has a set of rules that his disadvantage in the

local systems in you can actually recognize you differentiate what kinds of rules and regulations and licensing and controls need to be put on a local system where people know each other you know the poisoned your neighbor by selling bad milk what else do you recommend to enhance local food systems well i think there's a lot that eaters can do so far we understand what we can do is join a csa week ago farmers market week ago the farm stands we understand we can buy organic but we also can't take it several steps further week it actually asked our grocery stores you to keep that pressure on non hostile way but asked about produce person you know all those five hundred different things that are there where does this come from so we can ask more about the provenance the sourcing of the fruit in the grocery store and put pressure on i want to have more local produce in my store but we can also you know we're all in a variety of social roles like you're a radio talk show host and so what you're doing right now by having me talk to you

is an action of being a food system transformer because you're bringing out information from somebody who's thought a lot about it so that you can share with other people people who work in hospitals and schools everywhere you work the ways you socialize all these are areas where we can influence their purchasing to share aimed at cooking talking about local food so what are the issues for scaling up of local food think interesting question because inherently local food can scale up because it's local but what i saw when i was doing this is it can scale sideways the communities can develop what i call a complementary food systems it's not to eliminate the investor system we need the industry system number one because logistically it is feeding many people in the world even though there's a lot of injustice in a bag you know you take people off of the industrial food system you got mass starvation so we don't want to do that we want to do a blended process of industrial food for when this

appropriate level scale perhaps like from grain production work deal means are certain things or maybe their whole idea of comparative advantage genome bananas mangoes just think about our local systems and what we can produce locally and what they call specialty crops fruits and vegetables are inherently fresher when their local see you think about complementary food systems where were scaling sideways this capacity for communities to feed themselves to put more land in agriculture to support young and new farmers and prospering to get loan guarantees an actual loans to yemen youth are is to subsidize several years like you might with the gi bill you do all these things to fill out bulk up create more prosperity in your local system all the while you are engaging with industrious system in terms of justice in terms of sustainably harvested in terms of all the values that you want to express through your

global system that you can see the touch taste and feel but there's important things about creating those supply chains to be more sustainable and holistic you've been a proponent of frugality for many areas to what extended buying local and sustainably conflict with the taliban is a great question why things that this ten mile diet did for me was put me right up against that conflict when i was out there looking for me to somebody said i'm a friend who participants chickens you can buy the chickens from i thought well that's great and nine go are there in his can sell me to chickens in missouri salaries and i say how much are they in their twenty five dollars the chicken was like five dollars a pound like i was trapped out or you know like when i get into year i won that meat and i really want a bargain i really wanna figure out some way these guys can give me that need but i realized you know it it raised my consciousness about

how much that person put into that animals being in his hands and available to me the costs and the labour are associated with that and it actually that chicken should cost that it should cost five dollars a pound when you do the analysis so the question for me was a wise that even so expensive the question was wise and just chill from sochi bassett sent me on that hunt and you know i could say it's somewhat true that i would pay anything to my local farmers for the food that they produce just out of love but it's not just that it's not like i made a decision i don't care how much it is i'll pay that it is respect for the whole process of growing harvesting bring to market delicious nutritious food an appreciation for that that i realize my purchasing allows me to produce a painted now mind you i still cook your food i

really like and it's not local and i'm not ideological about it but when people asked me or you still doing it yes i'm a relation leader through and through i love eating the food is produced by people i know now people are my neighbors and that feeling that warm feeling of being fully connected is totally worth it to me in the other part of it too is that once you get off the idf think your money your life helped people see themselves as an individual who could extract himself from the thrall the consumer culture and make better judgments about what's actually worth it to purchase but there was a very individualistic strategy now this book is really about a social strategy it's not about an individual maximizing their dollars it's about a person in community recognizing that if i won a grocery store in my community i'm going to buy food from their grocery store maybe it

is ten cents a pound more but in the grand scheme of things i need the grocer to prosper if the grocer is gonna feed me it's understanding myself in a context it's highly values based it is a survival then you know just like your money or like a survival thing but it's realizing that one does not survive by oneself when you start to get into the whole idea of sustainability realize the unit of sustainability is not the individual unit of sustainability is a community that's flourishing and so it's protests a painting in that one small part of my effort is a patient is buying my whatever at my local grocery store and eating less at sea of a part of it is i realize what a high quality food media is not just because it's a mammal that was killed and butchered but also because they saw huge amount that's gone into the production of that you know it's different from a mushroom hugo and

forage in the forest and so it to me is a treat not as a meal and that's really been a shift for me i think i need a quarter of a third of the meat i used to eat now that ideology but out of respect for the quality of that particular food so one of the ways i manage my frugality was i thought well i'll buy the five dollar pound chicken only half i turned it into verbal chicken by adjusting my have it's not to the point where i feel deprived the two point where i feel its own proportion what's the message you'd like to leave our listeners well i think it's a message of engagement that there's benefits to engaging in local food far beyond the ones that are always presented that it's fresh air it's healthier et cetera but to engage in it as a person in community to engage and local food air is in a way it's an act

of not just food security like if we have more local food there were more food secure but it's at its food sovereignty it's like taking that weed eaters reclaiming our right to growing feet food for ourselves and our family to do that economically and to do that abundantly it's like a kiss a painting actually a very quiet revolution that is growing like an amoeba in our society it's growing to some of the top down with some regulations that help us but a lot of its or latterly people figuring out things at the margins it's hugely creative to be part of restoring our regional food systems i would invite people adopt a food in just one local food and one recipe you make all the local ingredients gross browser new windows to do something to step into this world and become part of it and then see what happens or thanks so much for being here baby you're so welcome than you were just listening to thinking robin author of the book the blessing the hands that feed

us what eating closer to home can teach us about food community and our place on earth published in two thousand and fourteen by viking for more information check on the web at the gate robin dot com biggie will read from her book in seattle on monday january thirteenth at seven pm et elliott bay book company again bet's january thirteenth at seven pm et elliott bay books i'm diane warren thanks for listening and be sure to tune into the sustainability segment again next week i must work hard many point to the fm in k x p dot origin ii