Growers and Grocers

I had a bit of trouble obtaining a copy of Eat Here: Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, by Brian Halweil. First, I checked my local library. Then I checked the local Barnes & Noble, who drove off all of the independent booksellers in my hometown a while ago. Then the not-so-local Borders. Finally, I was traveling on business and ended up being in Chicago twice in the space of two weeks and the Barnes & Noble near my hotel agreed that they would order it and ship it to my local B&N in Ohio. But that’s when the comedy started. A day before my second trip to Chicago, the store in Chicago called to say they had the book in. I was a bit puzzled, but hey, however I can get the book is OK with me. Then, an hour later, my local store in Ohio called with the same message; the book was waiting for me to pick it up at the front counter. All’s well that ends well, though, and I picked it up in Chicago and spent several enjoyable hours reading it in various spots around the city.

Halweil is a senior researcher with Worldwatch Institute, and it shows in the book, which reads more like a technical paper being presented at a scholarly conference than straight non-fiction. The constant annotations about sources are annoying, but easily ignored if you’re not interested. I was interested and from time to time, found myself flipping back and forth from the text to the bibliography out of mild curiosity.

He makes a heck of a case for seeking out food that is produced in your local area; I do highly recommend the book for anyone interested in global supply chains or how your food gets from the farmer to your table. It is a rather circuitous journey; if, for example, a farmer growing lettuce in Nebraska wants to sell that lettuce to his local Wal-Mart, (world’s largest seller of groceries, according to Halweil) that lettuce must first be shipped to a distribution center in Colorado for “quality inspections” and then shipped back to Nebraska. Bewildering, isn’t it? The waste of fuel, time and money to ship the lettuce around a significant portion of the United States, just to sell it a few miles down the road from where it was grown.

He also spends quite a bit of time talking about bio-engineered food, how the push for easily crated and shipped food has made endangered species of certain kinds of tomatoes and corn, just to name two. Personally, I’ve never thought too much about food production; at least, I didn’t until I started writing for Growers & Grocers. Food came from the grocery store, plain and simple. I no longer see it that way. There are many references in the book to the few large producers of food, Con-Agra, Monsanto, ADM, and I realized that the seemingly dizzying array of food at the local mega-mart is in fact manufactured entirely by just a few really large companies, which fool us all into thinking that we have such a wide assortment of choices when we’re shopping for food.

The book isn’t all doom and gloom; Halweil devotes significant portions of the book to people who are working hard all over the world to keep local food, well, local. He also offers a list of suggestions at the end of the book for readers who are interested in eating local; what to do, where to go, questions to ask at your favorite restaurant and grocery store.

I read really fast, always have. This book took me a little over 2 hours to read cover to cover, and gave me so much to think about that my brand new copy looks like it has been around for several years - I highlighted, underlined, turned pages down and marked pages with sticky-note flags to return to for future reference. So that second copy that is waiting for me at the store at home in Ohio will probably come home with me as well, so that I have a “nice” copy to share with friends. And believe me, I will be trying to get like-minded friends to read this book; it has changed the way that I think about making food purchases.