WA: Does choosing local foods hurt poor farmers overseas?

Kingsolver: It’s a good question, and the answer is very good news: as we strengthen our local food economy here in the United States, we are helping to break some of the chains that are exploiting farmers in Third World countries. We break the chains of debt, chains of obligation, and chains of international trade pressures that are preventing Third World farmers from growing food to feed themselves.

My husband sums this up well: The world’s farms right now are producing enough to overfeed every person on the globe, yet still 800 million are hungry. That’s not because their countries don’t grow food, it’s because the hungry don’t have the money to buy it. Industrial production is efficient at producing commodities that industry markets to people who already have money, who already have enough food. Industrial agriculture does not feed the hungry per se, it’s not organized that way. It’s poverty—not agriculture—that causes hunger.

The Green Revolution made all of these promises that industrial agriculture would make food cheaper and available to more people. And intuitively, as a culture, we’re still buying that. But it’s turned out not to be true. Industrial agriculture has helped to make more people in the world become less healthy. Now, eating too many calories of poor quality food is a bigger problem than under-nutrition.

Most of the farmers in poor countries are not farm owners, they are farm laborers, often barely making a living wage, using very toxic chemicals, working on land under control of international corporations that has been taken out of the service of the local food economy. Soybeans are a good example. In Brazil, there are a couple of mega corporations that grow soy on a large scale. To do so they are clearing rainforest, destroying villages and removing land from the possibility of ever growing food for Brazilians.

Most of us understand that buying cheap clothing made by children in Asian sweatshops is not doing those children a favor. The exact same thing is true if we’re buying cheap food from far away. Our consciousness of agriculture has been lagging behind, but it’s catching up.

It’s also interesting that the average American citizen is more aware of kids in sweatshops than they are about U.S. farmers. We have poor children in our country who live in our rural areas, because people are not buying food from the United States. It’s time to attend to our own farmers.

WA: What can we do to connect with where our food comes from even if we don’t live on a farm? 

Kingsolver: People who live in cities are actually in a better position to eat locally than people living in rural areas. The fastest growing piece of our agriculture economy is small, diversified family farms on the outskirts of cities. Farmers markets, community-supported agriculture farms and farm-to-table programs are all growing at unprecedented rates. There are more than 4,000 farmers markets in this country and that number goes up every time I check!

The grass-fed meat industry is expanding as people understand the health and environmental benefits of supporting farmers who turn grass into food. Solar power is an infinitely renewable resource and it makes so much more sense to have animals on pasture versus feedlots. In many parts of the country, keeping land in pasture is much better environmentally than tilling it every year to grow soy or corn or other crops. For when you leave grass in place, instead of tilling, you have those deep roots keeping the land intact.

People who shop in supermarkets can also look at labels and learn whether the apples they’re about to buy come from their own state or New Zealand. Every part of the country has something that it produces well locally. We can all learn to find out what it is and celebrate it in our cuisine. All of these choices make a difference .

We wrote this book as a valentine to our urban readers to help share with them the miraculous process of the food we eat: how food grows, when it grows, how it’s harvested. The more you know about these processes, the more than you can become engaged in your local food economies—wherever you live.

WA: Do you feel like there is a shift in consciousness across the country around food?

Kingsolver: There’s no doubt that the sustainable food movement is exploding right now. It’s in people’s awareness in a way I never dreamed it would be.

When I was on the book tour, I discovered every city in this country has an exploding local foods scene. It’s different in Chicago, Dallas or San Francisco, but the movement is undeniable. We are looking at change. We have no choice. The encouraging thing is that so many people seem excited about making this change happen in a way that’s good for our neighborhoods and for the green spaces around our cities and that it is also moving with the tide of an international sense of responsibility.

WA: Did connecting with your local food economy make you reflect differently on Heifer International?

Kingsolver: I appreciate Heifer International for the same reasons that I wrote this book: Heifer International is a rare organization that really understands the importance of farming and sustainable agriculture. Heifer understands that people who have some control and engagement with their local food economies are the only ones who really have power and a future in this world. This goes for us and it goes for people everywhere in the world; it’s true in Africa, it’s true in India—and it’s true here.