Nutrition and Food Systems

Sanet Post, Greg Bowman,
RE: Quality of organic dialogue
December 13, 1996

Three comments on listening to new voices and the hidden bright spot in hollowing out local areas of intelligence about real food.

  1. Thanks, David Leonard, for a start in helping agriculture types to learn more about nutrition and health. There may be other contributing causes for the Big 6 diseases, but your explanation makes sense to me. I'm ready to learn more from nutritionists, the professionals at the other end of the food chain. You folks are the magnet for people suffering the most obvious effects of a food system gone industrial. What you find should be of great interest to those of us trying to make the producing end more healthful.
  2. Sustainable ag people keep telling the rest of the world to pay attention to farmers and food and ecological systems. Build coalitions. Reach across boundaries to dialogue with people who used to fear and loathe us because they saw only the deconstructive part of the challenge to conventional farming.

It's going to be tough building trust with new constituentcies if SANET can't learn to listen to a range of voices within complementary disciplines. Assertions and challenges on points of fact help non-scientists like myself learn where the shared truth and the ragged edges of science are.

Not helpful are trashings of posts where the trasher assumes some superior knowledge but doesn't spell out what the actual points of debate are. Remember, we generalists don't know the "hot button" terms that are thought to reveal a person's ideology or school of thought in the disciplines where you might spend your life.

  • RE: establishing premium value for whole, local, well-grown foods in a food world of industrial food-like products.

    My wife asked: Why/how can corporations successfully create demand for non-foods, when farmers, their marketers, concerned mothers and health associations combined can't (anymore) maintain similar demand for real food?

    Part of the answer is that the messages to eat right are usually general and at times diverse in their rationale, while the temptations to eat junk are superbly targeted and specific--they always show the package.

    Part of the answer is that 20 years of popular environmentalism has largely ignored farmers who use their land redemptively. It's a long sell to go from being perceived as part of the problem to being part of the answer.

    And part of the problem is spiritual, in as much bored, insecure, alienated, lonely, busy people (especially parents who feel guilty) are looking to food products to do all the good, happy, satisfying, exciting things that advertising shows they will--but can't. So they buy more, or try the improved version, always hoping....

    Real food that is ecologically grown, cared for, harvested, prepared and/or enjoyed by people who have some connection with each other is a different entity. People who create the time for these activities have to have good reasons to do so. They've have transforming experiences at some level -- intellectual, physical, cultural or whimsical -- that made something click.

    What's great is that those moments happen best when real people are attached. That reality makes local and regional relationship marketing and education viable, indeed gives it an advantage--at least to consumers who trust real people more than electronic images.

    There still are some of those folks, aren't there?

    And yes, real food needs lots of skilled marketers and packagers to create the best market presence possible for everybody that hasn't yet had the experience that flips their switch.

    Greg Bowman, Editorial Director
    Rodale Institute
    611 Siegfriedale Road, Kutztown PA 19530-9749
    phone 610.683.1487
    fax 610.683.1494
    gbowma@rodaleinst.org

    ....Communicating to create whole farms, whole food, whole communities for the whole world...