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Connection and Resilience Through Local Food

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Commons Team
May 20, 2025

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Farmers market season is upon us! As we've started seeing spring crops here at markets in the Northern Hemisphere, we're thinking about the power of locally grown food. As our food supply chains have gone global — we’ve gained more access to nutritious foods in areas where they may be hard to grow — but we’ve lost touch with seasonality and the source of our food. And we’ve lost touch with plenty of foods altogether.

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Locally grown food not only gives us more nutrients, but done right, it can bring biodiversity to local land, build climate resilience, and even offer diversity and economic resilience in our communities.

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Today we're reconnecting to local food through our global community, connecting the dots between food justice and equity,
and learning more about how our food system favors big agriculture.

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Here are some of the people you'll hear from in this episode:

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Episode Credits

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  • Listener contributions: Elizabeth, Stella, Joao Vilca Soto, Lin Diaz Maceo, Airlea Rasul, Jessika
  • Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
  • Hosting and production: Katelan Cunningham

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Citations and Further Reading

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Full Transcript

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Katelan (00:00):
Welcome back to Second Nature, a podcast from Commons. Commons is the app that over a hundred thousand people use to live sustainably by buying less and buying better. On this show, we talk to people about how they're living sustainably in an unsustainable world. It's finally here. Farmer's market season is upon us, folks, it's warming up here in the Northern hemisphere and you might be starting to see crops like strawberries or artichokes or asparagus popping up at your local farmer's markets or in your CSA boxes or even your own backyards. Over time, as our food supply chains have gone global, we've gained more access to foods in areas where they may have been hard to grow, but we've lost touch with seasonality and the sources of our foods and we've lost touch with plenty of foods altogether.

Katelan (00:59):
Produce often has to travel hundreds of miles from the field to the store. So grocery stores typically sell varieties of fruits and vegetables that have been engineered and optimized for efficient travel. That means more delicate or short season Crops are too much trouble for big grocery stores to deal with. For example, the bananas that most of us get from the store, they're all one variety. The Cavendish, she is sturdy, she travels well. She has high yields, but did you know that there are over 1000 varieties of bananas that we haven't tried yet, or at least I haven't. A lot of other varieties just aren't ideal for travel. I'm not saying that anyone can start growing bananas, but when you choose local produce, you might be able to indulge in unique varieties of other local produce like peppers or tomatoes or avocados that you can't find in most stores. Eating is something that most of us are lucky enough to get to do multiple times a day. And when we can eat food that's grown locally, we can develop a stronger connection with the seasons, our communities, and even the ecosystems that can contribute to the land that feeds us.

Katelan (02:13):
I'm your host K Cunningham, and today on Second Nature we are reconnecting with locally grown food and discovering the good it can do for the planet and our bodies. Let's dig in. One of the most common environmental arguments for eating locally grown food is food miles. Food miles are the distance that food travels from production to you, the consumer, from the processor to the grocery store, from the farm to the farmer's market. Those miles are food miles and there are definitely some fossil fuel emissions attributed to those journeys. It's totally valid to want to limit food miles and in turn limit the emissions of your food. But food miles are not the biggest factor in the carbon footprint of your food.

Katelan (03:06):
Research finds that 83% of emissions actually happen in production before food miles even begin. For many foods, those emissions come from the farm stage from things like fuel burning machinery or methane from fertilizers or even cow burps. In the case of beef production, on average food miles account for just 11% of household food emissions, the most impactful way to lower the emissions of your grocery bill. You may have guessed it already, especially if you listen to this show, but it's cutting down on animal products because raising animals requires deforestation. Shifts in the soil's ability to capture carbon, as well as all the farming emissions that I just mentioned. But there are some fruits and vegetables that have disproportionately high travel emissions. I'm looking at chew imported asparagus. Highly perishable fresh produce that's imported from overseas has to travel really fast, which means it's hitching a ride on a plane.

Katelan (04:08):
Asparagus, green beans and berries are commonly air freighted foods here in the us. When you're shopping in the store, it's not always easy to know how far your produce has traveled, but you should be able to find its origin somewhere on the label. If you are in a grocery store in Dallas holding a bag of fresh asparagus that was grown in Peru, it took a plane trip to get to you and air freight causes about 47 times more emissions than ocean freight. Of course, there are plenty of less perishable foods that don't need a plane ticket. Lots of produce may have come by boat road or train, and it may have been stored for a while before you bought it in the store, sometimes even months. And did you know that fruits and vegetables start losing moisture and nutrients right when they're picked? That means the longer it goes un eaten, be it in a grocery store or your fridge, the fewer nutrients you're gonna get when you do eventually eat it. One study found that vegetables lost 15 to 55% of their vitamin C after being refrigerated for just one week. One more perk of eating local fruit and veg, and this might be my personal favorite, is that eating locally grown food can actually make us more in sync with nature. Think about it. Rather than eating a mealy flavorless grocery store tomato in January, you could eat a juicy, flavorful one from the farmer's market in August. And that my friends, is nature telling you to hold out for the good stuff.

Katelan (05:47):
We heard from you, our community about why eating locally grown fruits and veggies is important to you and how you make it work for your lifestyle.

Joao (05:59):
Why is locally grown food important to you and what excites you about it?

Joao (06:10):
I grew up in a small rural town in the northern part of Peru and when I grew up as a kid, we still had a open air market that we went to to get our foods. We would get our foods there from the people that were collecting it from the fields that were nearby and between the market and our home, there was a space where there were a few shops that had some freshly baked bread and other goodies. It was just amazing being able to get meals and get food and get ingredients that were so fresh and the food was delicious. Even in my short life in this planet, I've noticed a difference in taste when I go to places like South America, uh, especially the rural places.

Jessika (06:53):
Locally grown food is important to me since society usually experiences sort of disconnection to food in general when they shop for groceries in supermarkets there you don't see the people who grow produce process and distribute the food and you don't feel any connection to them. As people

Jessika (07:11):
Living where I do in Italy, we truly eat seasonally. That means I don't consume as many things as I would like, like bananas, avocados, or other tropical produce. It's a conscious choice and while it requires some sacrifices, that also deepens my appreciation for what's available at different times of the year. There's something really special about knowing certain fruits and vegetables are gonna be available only for a short time. So making eating feel more intentional helps me stay connected to nature's rhythm.

Airlea (07:42):
I source my locally grown produce from farmer's markets, urban farms and local grocers in Toronto that prioritize Ontario grown products. And it's always inspiring to see how much fresh, high quality food is grown within our province.

Elizabeth (07:57):
Some of my locally grown produce is grown in my own garden and I also trade with other people who grow things that I don't or can't grow. I also get locally grown produce at our local farmer's market

Jessika (08:09):
Whenever I can, I get my produce from a woman who has a small farm. I also have neighbors who grow blueberries and I grow my own tomatoes and other seasonal produce as much as possible. There's something for me deeply fulfilling about harvesting food with my own hands. Even if it's just a few small things that I can do during the year, it makes my meals feel much more personal. You know,

Airlea (08:32):
Eating locally grown food makes me feel great on all levels. Mentally I feel reassured knowing where my food comes from and that it's grown sustainably and ethically physically. I of course feel healthier and emotionally it's fulfilling to support local farmers and build a connection to my community.

Elizabeth (08:54):
I live in Iowa where our growing season food isn't incredibly long and so during the winter especially, I have a hard time finding locally grown food. I can find some things at the farmer's market throughout winter. However, most of the fresh things that I really like to eat are difficult to find when the sunlight is less and the temperatures are so cold here. Thankfully I know some really talented people who are able to can and jar things that they grew locally. And so I am able to enjoy some of those throughout the winter. I also dry things like herbs from my garden and try to save as much as I can in the freezer so that I can enjoy the things that I have grown in the colder months as well.

Jessika (09:35):
Factors that keep me from eating locally grown food as much as I'd like are definitely income and my disabilities with inflation and rising prices. While the amount of state support I currently receive stays the same, I can't afford as much regionally grown food as I want to eat.

Jessika (09:52):
There are moments when it's not possible to get the exact products I want locally. And while I do my best to adapt, sometimes I have to find alternatives or just make compromises.

Joao (10:04):
I live in more of a city space, suburban city space here in Bellevue, Washington. And even though we have a couple local farmer's markets, things are getting so much price in the area that you just find less spaces where you can find a stand for fruits and foods and such. I wish the city would implement something like that, but even every now and then some drivers come by and they sell mangoes or oranges that have been picked and brought by recently. I love going by and grabbing some

Stella (10:34):
Uh, my locally grown produce I get from the farm that I currently work at. I take all the food home with me that would get thrown away. Well, I don't take all of it home with me 'cause that's not possible. It's way too much, but I try and distribute it to friends and family and ask them, Hey, do you need food? Come to my garage, I will put it in there and you can just pick it up locally. Grown food is empowerment, it's security, it's love, it's health, it's resilient. And that excites me beyond words. <laugh>,

Katelan (11:12):
As a few of our listeners mentioned, getting local food isn't always easy or accessible. You may have to go miles out of your way or spend more money to get locally grown food and I hate to have to say it again, but the main reason for that is the system. The food system, especially here in the us, incentivizes big farm production and operates with a status quo of exploitation. And you don't have to take it from me. Tagan Engel is a chef and food justice organizer and community builder with over 30 years of experience in food systems. She's the host of the radio show and podcast, the Table Underground, and she's on the faculty at the Yale School of Environment where she leads the regenerative agriculture and just food systems lab. I called her up to talk about systemic inequities and solutions in our food system and how we can connect more people with local farms and local food. Hi Tagan, thanks for coming on the show.

Tagan (12:14):
Hi Katelan. Thanks for having me.

Katelan (12:17):
A lot of your work focuses on creating and enabling just food systems. So I wanted to start out by asking how can a food system even be unjust and what kind of work goes into shifting those systems?

Tagan (12:30):
Yeah, well a food system can be unjust just like any other system where there's things that aren't fair for people or for animals or for the earth. So when we think about a food system being unjust, it gets a little complicated, but I'll try to keep it simple. The food system in America is based on stolen land and enslaved people and we've never actually reckoned with that to repair the harms from that or to change the economics or the logistics of that foundation, right? So we're still living on a system we're people aren't really paid fairly. Like there are some people who are living in somewhat something you would consider as working in slave conditions, but even for people who are working in paid conditions, they're often not paid fairly. They're often not treated very well. The systems of food production are really based on making a profit at this point, right?

Tagan (13:25):
And so when something is based on making a profit and only a profit without enough regulation, we tend to forget about caring for people, caring for land, caring for animals in a way that respects their lives and respects their wellbeing. And at this point, many decades and centuries into this process, we have a food system that is really based on exploitation much more than based on caring for all of the beings that are in the system globally. You know, when we started having unions and protections for workers here, a lot of labor started being shipped overseas because it was cheaper and didn't have the regulations that we have here as well as sourcing food from overseas. And so we have this going from what was a very local and regionalized system of food production. And actually if you go back to indigenous peoples living on this land, they were stewarding food and forests on this land in a way that in western context we wouldn't even recognize as farming.

Tagan (14:23):
Everything was so integrated, you would just see it as like, oh, this is a diverse ecosystem, you know, but that's really what we need is to be growing food in a way that is in harmony with the nature that we're growing in versus as in conflict with it. And so globally and locally we've seen this real industrialization. So going from local and regional food systems to this real global industrialized food system. And so unfortunately there's a lot of harm that comes out of that. Your second question, how do we work on shifting that when we talk about trying to fix problems in this country at least we often talk about what individuals can do, like buy local or you know, get an electric car or eat vegan or something like that. But each of us individually can only have a small impact, right? And so we really, really need to remember to talk about systemic changes around policies, around regulations, also around things that can have huge impact.

Tagan (15:21):
So like if there's a regulation on corporations and businesses that purchase or produce millions and millions of pounds or dollars of something and we put a regulation on them, the impact of that is enormous. And then when we have policies and regulations, it changes a whole industry. And so we really systemically need to be looking at policies and regulations that bring things back into like a human and nature scale while still of course thinking about how do we feed the world, um, but doing it in a way that is not harming the planet or people or animals. And then on a local scale it's like how do we rebuild relationships with the natural world, with all the people who are around us, with all the animals that are around us and how do we create programs and services that really meet people where they're at?

Katelan (16:11):
Yeah. On this show we've talked a little bit about the food apartheid and how agency and resilience that come from growing and sourcing local food can really make a difference. How have you seen farmer's markets and other services like this change communities or change people's relationships with their food?

Tagan (16:30):
Well, I'm glad you used the word food apartheid, which is so important for people to remember that like we talk about food deserts, but a desert is a natural thriving ecosystem. Food apartheid is a human created system of oppression, right? Right. And so I'm really appreciate that you use that term. I worked for an organization for nine years that started the first farmer's markets in recent years and ran them in New Haven and Connecticut where I'm based, I wanna say farmer's markets and local food are one tool among many tools in addressing people's food needs. They are by far not the only solution. And there's certainly a lot of challenges involved in local food, which we're gonna talk about, but farmer's markets do a lot of great things. So let's start there. First of all, they build community around food, which is really wonderful because a lot of us are experiences like go to a grocery store, maybe you talk with a cashier or someone stocking the shelves, but you know, you don't have a lot of community in there and that's something that's really fallen apart in our world.

Tagan (17:25):
So there's a really beautiful piece of like building community, getting to talk to the farmers who grow the food, getting to meet other people in your community who have some shared values. It also helps build this economy, you know, a lot of small scale farmers can't sell to grocery stores because you have to sell usually to a distributor and then you're selling wholesale. They take a cut of your profits and then they sell to a grocery store. And a lot of small farmers just can't afford to do that. They don't have enough volume of food to do that. And so farmers' markets create this reconnecting of rural and urban communities as well as urban farmers and the community outside of their neighborhood, giving them an economic opportunity to make a good living from the food they're growing. This other really important piece is the food access piece.

Tagan (18:12):
How do we get food from farmers that are near where we live to people who really need that food, especially people living under food apartheid and having really like fresh life-giving delicious nutritious food. One thing that a lot of farmer's markets are doing is accepting WIC and food stamps snap, right? And also having programs that double the value of them knowing that, you know, some of the food that's at farmer's markets is more expensive than at grocery stores because it's coming from smaller farmers because it's not in this kind of subsidized by the farm bill and subsidized by being food that's maybe grown with workers that are really not paid well in other countries and being shipped in or within this country with immigrant labor that's not paid well necessarily. And so having programs that have people, first of all be able to use their food assistance benefits so that the market feels welcoming to them and then doubling the value of them. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Um, so that people can get, you know, more food for their dollar is really great. You know, sometimes farmers' markets can be a gentrifying element of a community and, and that can be really problematic because it can push people out of communities as the ripples of like economic development and rents, prices go up and you know, new businesses come in. And so it's really important when we're running markets to really try to avoid doing things that push people out but that really are about serving the whole community and over the long term. Yeah.

Katelan (19:38):
I wanna dive into that a little bit more, but first to understand, you know, we've talked about fast fashion previously on the show and we had this question of like, should a t-shirt be able to cost $5? And that sort of it, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that like when, when produce is so much cheaper at the grocery shirt probably reflects some sort of exploitation or shortcoming in the supply chain itself. That's like allowing that thing to be as cheap as it is as opposed to perhaps at a farmer's market where that type of thing isn't happening as much. Hopefully

Tagan (20:07):
You do find that there's farmers that grow things at a RA and sell things at a range of prices, right? And so there's a lot of factors that go into that. It could be what is the cost of the land that they're on, what is the cost of their growing practices that they use, their labor pricing? Also, what community are they trying to sell to? One of the challenges is that our idea about food prices and of course there's been a huge amount of change in our food prices over the past few years, but yeah, let's say even just thinking about like post covid o our food prices, but even still now, they don't actually match what it costs to grow our food for the most part. Hmm. Because a lot of things are subsidized. So we have a farm bill that creates insurance and subsidies for certain types of foods like commodity foods like corn and soy and, and other things.

Tagan (20:56):
There's just a lot of factors that go into food not actually being priced as we said, it's, it's based on like unfair labor prices and other things. And so when a small farmer is growing food and they're then thinking about what is my land cost, what is my labor cost, how much do I need to sell this for so that I can actually still live on this farm <laugh>? And they don't necessarily have all these other subsidies or corporate backing or other things, they're often trying to price things at that real cost. And so it can be shocking to us because the food in the grocery store is not at that real cost. I'm always pinching pennies with my family and trying to balance this, like how do I buy food that feels ethical and supporting local economies and you know, match my budget? And I definitely do a mix of like buying at chain stores and buying at farmer's markets and try to do a little bit of both where I can.

Katelan (21:48):
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you were saying about how farmer's markets can bring gentrification, but there's sort of like possibly some tools or strategies to avoid that.

Tagan (21:58):
Trying to avoid gentrification is complicated because we don't usually have control over all of the pieces of it. But I will say one of the things that I've seen in a number of wonderful farmer's markets is first of all, trying to include racial and economic and geographic diversity of vendors at the market is really important because that also changes who comes to the market. Mm. And so that helps to kind of change the face of the market. To do that, you often have to recruit people. We have to assume that like the systems that exclude people are sort of the norm. If we want to break down these systems that kind of inherently segregate us, we have to be intentional about them. So that means that folks who run farmer's markets need to reach out to farmers and vendors who are folks of color. They might only be connecting with folks who are rural to bring them in.

Tagan (22:44):
So they might need to be intentional about bringing in urban folks. Also promoting organizations that are working against gentrification and for a city that support everyone. So a lot of farmers' markets have organizations that set up a table and tell people about stuff. So doing things to support organizations that are working for housing fairness and fair wages for workers and other kinds of protections in communities can be really helpful. And then when possible, having organizations that run farmers' markets be involved just in local politics that support anti-gentrification things or even put it in your newsletter to promote it to folks who come to your markets and say, Hey, you know, we're trying to have a zoning thing that ensures that a huge percentage of any new buildings have affordable units, actual affordable units, not pretend affordable, actual, affordable units in them and other things like that. And so they can just be an agent of showing that these values of caring about local food are also about caring about local communities and how people can take action to do that.

Katelan (23:45):
We've talked about how money is very tight right now for a lot of people and there's just a lot of uncertainty. Tariffs are going up and down, grocery prices are rising. But on the other hand we've heard from a lot of folks about how like growing your own food or sourcing your own food locally can feel like resilience and like a real source of power. And so I just kind of wondered how have you seen people change or prioritize locally grown food as part of their budget and their lives?

Tagan (24:11):
I think we've all struggled. Prices just skyrocketed through covid. And I was really upset during Covid that people were just talking about inflation. And I was like, but can we talk about corporate greed? Yes. Because the CEOs of these companies of grocery stores and food producers, they're making huge profits, but they're charging us more money when egg prices just went up because we had avian bird flu happening. Even as it's settled down in some places, there's certain chain stores that have not brought the egg prices back down. This gets into the food system is not an isolated system. It's part of our larger economic system. And even though we've had an effort to like bring minimum wages up to $15, right? If we look at inflation since the sixties, minimum wage should be like $22 or higher, I think. You know, to actually be quote livable.

Tagan (25:00):
And at this point where prices are going up and up, it probably needs to even be higher than that. It's important to put this in that broader economic context. It's not only about food prices, it's also about economic fairness in our entire society. When you're trying to choose between food or rent or medication, that is a difficult thing. Ultimately we need a society that creates the safety nets that people need so that they have their basic, basic needs met. And then choosing what we're gonna buy for food would not actually be, are we buying food? Am I buying the cheapest, maybe lowest quality food and not so much, you know, much more processed food 'cause it might be cheaper. Or because I'm working three jobs and I even though the fresh food in some cases could be cheaper, but I don't have the time to cook it.

Tagan (25:45):
So there's like so many factors that go into this, but my experience of kind of being in community where I work, like on the ground in community all the time, people love food. Often people are like, I wanna know how to cook. Like my grandma used to cook this really good thing, but I never learned how to do it. Often we've lost a lot of that skill and knowledge about how do we cook food that's nourishing, that tastes really good, that reflects the cultures that we come from or that we're connected to, and that I can do it in a way that works with my work schedule and with the time and stresses of my life, you know, the tariffs that are happening just draw even more uncertainty. I think we've had something like a 23% rise in food costs since before Covid, since 2020. Our food costs have gone up more than inflation has gone up. So a lot of challenges there.

Katelan (26:37):
When we talk about the cost of food and food justice, regenerative farming, which you do work in as well, industrialization from the outside looking in, it feels like these things may seem tangentially related. Can you tell us more about how they're all connected?

Tagan (26:52):
Well, in the simplest way, industrialization is a big part of the problem in our food system. And regenerative farming and food justice are a part of the solution. Part of what we need to think about is how do we re regionalize our food system? So if we look at what happened in Covid where we had empty grocery shelves and we had people working in like meat packing facilities where Covid was running rampant, people were dying, people were getting each other sick, food was getting contaminated, all kinds of terrible things happening. This is part of industrialization, right? And part of globalization. So if we think about how to re regionalize and create agriculture, I'm not talking about everyone's on these teeny tiny farms, right? Like obviously we have to have some big farms in order to feed people, but we can be doing farming practices in a way that happens at a little bit more of a human in nature scale.

Tagan (27:46):
And just as an example of this avian bird flu in America had us killing 20 million egg laying hens. I think because people were trying to not have the flu spread to more and more birds in Canada, they didn't have this happen because their farms are smaller. Oh. So then if an animal gets sick, it's easier to contain and to deal with it and not have it spread. Not only are they smaller, but I think they have different regulations on growing conditions and how animals can be kept. And so real regenerative farming is thinking about how do we farm in with an ecosystem approach where we are actually caring for every living thing in the ecosystem of farming, whether it's land farming or ocean farming, and how do we leave the environment better than we found it? Right? We are regenerating the environment that we are growing food in, not just like taking nutrients out of the soil or taking things out of the ocean.

Tagan (28:44):
And if we think about how do we do this more at a regional scale, then we actually are able to support our supply chains when there's a pandemic, right? We don't have this global interruption or national interruption because we can't move things around. We actually start to rebuild the infrastructure, the warehouses, the mills, the storage facilities, the distribution networks in a regional fashion so that we can support our local economies, create better health within the food system and have resiliency within the food system when crisis happens. The other piece of this is the humans. If we don't have humans involved in agriculture, that's nature. Yeah. <laugh>, right? <laugh>. So like we cannot talk about agriculture without humans and that's where the food justice piece comes in because sometimes we need to remind people about justice and about humans and that this is about creating a system that works for everyone, all beings.

Tagan (29:44):
And I wanna tie this into this piece around this attack on DEI in this moment, because the way that that's being framed by our president and some people is that it's like special things for some people. But that's not what DEI is. That's not what justice is. That's not what regenerative farming is. We're talking about that We live in a system, as I said, that's based on inequity. Wealthy people have things that low income people don't have access to. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. White folks have privileges that black and brown folks don't have because that's how this society was set up. So if we want a society, if we want a farm and a farming system and food system that works for everybody, we actually have to be intentional about including the people who are automatically left out because of the system we live in. And we have to actually be intentional about doing those things.

Katelan (30:37):
I really appreciate all of your work, <laugh> and all of these different areas, um, to connect the dots for us. This has been super helpful in illuminating. So thank you so much.

Tagan (30:46):
Thank you so much. This was such a lovely conversation.

Katelan (30:56):
Even if you don't have farmer's markets in your area, you may have CSA boxes you can sign up for or you could grow some food yourself in your backyard or a community garden. You could even go in with neighbors to split up your crops. You can each focus on just a few crops and share your harvest with each other.

Katelan (31:14):
Of course, if we're eating as many fruits and vegetables as we should be, many of us don't have the time or space to grow all the produce that we eat, and we may not have access to buy it all from local producers, which means even in the best case scenario, we may have to rely on chain grocery stores to help stock our fridges and pantries. And that brings us to industrial agriculture, AKA big ag. I called up Sanchali Seth Pal to get an idea of how big ag seems to be getting bigger and how it's affecting our economy here in the us. Hey Sanchali, today we're talking big ag.

Sanchali (31:55):
Yes. The massive industrial agriculture industry.

Katelan (31:59):
All right. Let's start things off with just a clear definition of what we talk about when we talk about industrial agriculture.

Sanchali (32:06):
Of course, industrial agriculture is the large scale production of crops and animals. So that's everything from apples to wheat, pork, or milk. Industrial agriculture is basically all about producing large quantities of food as cheaply as possible. And that often comes at the risk of the environment because this type of farming relies on large scale chemical fertilizers and antibiotics.

Katelan (32:30):
And that's not to mention deforestation and monoculture practices. That's when you plant huge fields of the same crop and that can totally wreck the soil and make it harder to sequester carbon.

Sanchali (32:41):
Yes. Industrial farms are definitely not operating right now with the earth as their primary stakeholder, which is kind of ironic because their business is literally built on it. And right now the primary goal is profit.

Katelan (32:54):
How is business right now for these big industrial farms?

Sanchali (32:57):
Depends who you ask. For Big Ag, it's pretty good. In the us, a handful of large scale farms brought in nearly 50% of all revenue from crops and livestock, and that's a huge industry. But most farms, 86% are small farms, and those guys are making less than $350,000 a year.

Katelan (33:17):
So these industrial farms are just a small portion of overall farms, but they're making nearly half of all the farming money.

Sanchali (33:24):
Yeah. And it's not by accident. They're getting a lot of help from the government

Katelan (33:27):
In the form of subsidies. Right?

Sanchali (33:29):
Exactly. The US pays out over $30 billion a year to support farmers with subsidies on everything from insurance to disaster relief to conservation. But it's not going to everyone. Some farms get a few dollars a year and others get millions of dollars.

Katelan (33:44):
I'm guessing that the little farms are not the ones getting those multimillion dollar checks.

Sanchali (33:49):
Exactly. Right. From 2019 to 2023, over half of producers received an average of just $2,730 a year. But the top a hundred producers, they received an average of nearly $6 million per year.

Katelan (34:04):
That kind of checks out because I've heard that more and more small farms are closing. That's

Sanchali (34:09):
Right. It's been happening, you know, sort of gradually over time, but it's now looking pretty dramatic. According to the USDA, the average farm size has increased two and a half times since the mid 1990s. At the same time as the number of farms is decreasing since 1980, we've lost over 20% of all farms.

Katelan (34:27):
Wow. So small and medium farms are closing

Sanchali (34:30):
And they're getting bought up by large farms.

Katelan (34:32):
Got it. What kinds of foods are these big industrial farms producing?

Sanchali (34:37):
This is another interesting thing. A lot of the subsidy money for the big farms is going for growing livestock feed like corn and wheat.

Katelan (34:44):
It seems like on the show we're always finding more reasons to eat plant-based, and another one might be to rely less on big agriculture

Sanchali (34:53):
<laugh>. It definitely wouldn't hurt over half of emissions from global food production comes from raising and feeding animals we eat. And that's because raising animals for meat is incredibly inefficient. So whether it's for ethical health or financial reasons, Americans do want fewer subsidies for animal production. Johns Hopkins found that 78% of Americans want federal farm funding to prioritize food for people over feed for livestock.

Katelan (35:18):
What are the environmental repercussions of big eggs expansion?

Sanchali (35:22):
Well, we touched on some of them more pesticide and fertilizer use soil degradation, but there's also less diversity in our foods. And when we can't produce the foods we want, we import them.

Katelan (35:32):
And that has a huge environmental footprint.

Sanchali (35:35):
It does, especially if there's air, air freight involved for especially perishable produce. But moreover, it's just expensive. And with the talk of tariffs, it could make a lot of foods even more expensive. Pretty soon.

Katelan (35:47):
My grocery bill is already too much. I can't imagine what it's gonna look like if we have more tariffs.

Sanchali (35:52):
I know. And the expansion of big farms and industrial agriculture, it's having real life effects on local communities where smaller farms used to be. For example, discriminatory lending practices and farm consolidation have really limited who can succeed in farming. In the US today, 95% of American farmers are white according to the census.

Katelan (36:14):
That is completely shocking to me. And as the system continues to incentivize and support these big farms, it's harder I imagine to get support for new farms, especially if they're owned by people of color.

Sanchali (36:26):
It is. And you know, it's not really on our radars when we're buying food, we're not thinking about it necessarily the same way as when we are thinking about if a company aligns with our values. You know, in other parts of our life, we might be trying to support women or minority owned brands or local stores where you know, the owners, you know, everyone might have their own type of thing they're trying to support, but we think about it when it comes to produce, you might not think about it as much.

Katelan (36:49):
Yeah, totally. I I totally get that. But when I'm at the farmer's market, it is top of mind because you're there and you're seeing the farmers in person.

Sanchali (36:56):
Exactly. It's harder when we buy the bulk of our food at grocery stores, but it's more obvious maybe when you're in the farmer's market and you can actually see the local farmers that you're supporting. There's this real through line of diversity and not just diversity in the backgrounds of the farmers. It's about biodiversity and variety and how that contributes to ecosystems and protects us from climate disaster. Diversifying food sources is good for our supply chains too, because then we're not reliant on just a few producers and

Katelan (37:26):
Local farms can give us a more diverse array of fruits and vegetables, which is good for our diets.

Sanchali (37:30):
Totally. It's better for our health, for our family's health. It's better for our local ecosystems, for our communities'. Long-term resilience and it's cost resistant to industrial food trends,

Katelan (37:41):
I am convinced. Thank you so much Sanchali. Really appreciate it.

Sanchali (37:44):
Thanks, Katelan.

Katelan (37:52):
I really believe that connecting with your food is such an important way to connect with the earth. And I don't care if that sounds super cheesy. Everything we have from our clothes to our cars comes from the Earth's resources. But fruits and vegetables are so untempered with they're plucked right from a branch or a stem or a pod that's growing right out of the soil, and then we eat them. And we can live without new clothes or cars, but food, we can't live without that. It reminds me of that proverb that's been attributed to Native American tribes. It goes, only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned. Will we realize we cannot eat money.

Katelan (38:41):
Whether you visit a local U pick farm, hit up your local farmer's market or just start some lettuce seeds in your backyard. I hope you have some opportunities to get all the delicious benefits of locally grown food. And oh, by the way, you could be earning rewards on all of your farmer's market and CSA purchases in the Commons app. If you wanna grow at home and you need some inspiration or motivation to get gardening, we got you. Scroll back through the past episodes and you'll find one on urban gardening. There's one on composting and community gardens. Thanks to our listeners for sharing how they eat local. Today, you heard from [credits-.

Katelan (39:43):
If you are not hanging out with us on Instagram yet, you're missing out my friends. Join us at Second Nature Earth. This episode was edited and engineered by my friend Evan Goodchild. It was written and produced by yours truly. Kaitlyn Cunningham. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you back here next week.

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May 20, 2025
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Connection and Resilience Through Local Food

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Farmers market season is upon us! As we've started seeing spring crops here at markets in the Northern Hemisphere, we're thinking about the power of locally grown food. As our food supply chains have gone global — we’ve gained more access to nutritious foods in areas where they may be hard to grow — but we’ve lost touch with seasonality and the source of our food. And we’ve lost touch with plenty of foods altogether.

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Locally grown food not only gives us more nutrients, but done right, it can bring biodiversity to local land, build climate resilience, and even offer diversity and economic resilience in our communities.

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Today we're reconnecting to local food through our global community, connecting the dots between food justice and equity,
and learning more about how our food system favors big agriculture.

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Here are some of the people you'll hear from in this episode:

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Episode Credits

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  • Listener contributions: Elizabeth, Stella, Joao Vilca Soto, Lin Diaz Maceo, Airlea Rasul, Jessika
  • Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
  • Hosting and production: Katelan Cunningham

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Citations and Further Reading

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Full Transcript

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Katelan (00:00):
Welcome back to Second Nature, a podcast from Commons. Commons is the app that over a hundred thousand people use to live sustainably by buying less and buying better. On this show, we talk to people about how they're living sustainably in an unsustainable world. It's finally here. Farmer's market season is upon us, folks, it's warming up here in the Northern hemisphere and you might be starting to see crops like strawberries or artichokes or asparagus popping up at your local farmer's markets or in your CSA boxes or even your own backyards. Over time, as our food supply chains have gone global, we've gained more access to foods in areas where they may have been hard to grow, but we've lost touch with seasonality and the sources of our foods and we've lost touch with plenty of foods altogether.

Katelan (00:59):
Produce often has to travel hundreds of miles from the field to the store. So grocery stores typically sell varieties of fruits and vegetables that have been engineered and optimized for efficient travel. That means more delicate or short season Crops are too much trouble for big grocery stores to deal with. For example, the bananas that most of us get from the store, they're all one variety. The Cavendish, she is sturdy, she travels well. She has high yields, but did you know that there are over 1000 varieties of bananas that we haven't tried yet, or at least I haven't. A lot of other varieties just aren't ideal for travel. I'm not saying that anyone can start growing bananas, but when you choose local produce, you might be able to indulge in unique varieties of other local produce like peppers or tomatoes or avocados that you can't find in most stores. Eating is something that most of us are lucky enough to get to do multiple times a day. And when we can eat food that's grown locally, we can develop a stronger connection with the seasons, our communities, and even the ecosystems that can contribute to the land that feeds us.

Katelan (02:13):
I'm your host K Cunningham, and today on Second Nature we are reconnecting with locally grown food and discovering the good it can do for the planet and our bodies. Let's dig in. One of the most common environmental arguments for eating locally grown food is food miles. Food miles are the distance that food travels from production to you, the consumer, from the processor to the grocery store, from the farm to the farmer's market. Those miles are food miles and there are definitely some fossil fuel emissions attributed to those journeys. It's totally valid to want to limit food miles and in turn limit the emissions of your food. But food miles are not the biggest factor in the carbon footprint of your food.

Katelan (03:06):
Research finds that 83% of emissions actually happen in production before food miles even begin. For many foods, those emissions come from the farm stage from things like fuel burning machinery or methane from fertilizers or even cow burps. In the case of beef production, on average food miles account for just 11% of household food emissions, the most impactful way to lower the emissions of your grocery bill. You may have guessed it already, especially if you listen to this show, but it's cutting down on animal products because raising animals requires deforestation. Shifts in the soil's ability to capture carbon, as well as all the farming emissions that I just mentioned. But there are some fruits and vegetables that have disproportionately high travel emissions. I'm looking at chew imported asparagus. Highly perishable fresh produce that's imported from overseas has to travel really fast, which means it's hitching a ride on a plane.

Katelan (04:08):
Asparagus, green beans and berries are commonly air freighted foods here in the us. When you're shopping in the store, it's not always easy to know how far your produce has traveled, but you should be able to find its origin somewhere on the label. If you are in a grocery store in Dallas holding a bag of fresh asparagus that was grown in Peru, it took a plane trip to get to you and air freight causes about 47 times more emissions than ocean freight. Of course, there are plenty of less perishable foods that don't need a plane ticket. Lots of produce may have come by boat road or train, and it may have been stored for a while before you bought it in the store, sometimes even months. And did you know that fruits and vegetables start losing moisture and nutrients right when they're picked? That means the longer it goes un eaten, be it in a grocery store or your fridge, the fewer nutrients you're gonna get when you do eventually eat it. One study found that vegetables lost 15 to 55% of their vitamin C after being refrigerated for just one week. One more perk of eating local fruit and veg, and this might be my personal favorite, is that eating locally grown food can actually make us more in sync with nature. Think about it. Rather than eating a mealy flavorless grocery store tomato in January, you could eat a juicy, flavorful one from the farmer's market in August. And that my friends, is nature telling you to hold out for the good stuff.

Katelan (05:47):
We heard from you, our community about why eating locally grown fruits and veggies is important to you and how you make it work for your lifestyle.

Joao (05:59):
Why is locally grown food important to you and what excites you about it?

Joao (06:10):
I grew up in a small rural town in the northern part of Peru and when I grew up as a kid, we still had a open air market that we went to to get our foods. We would get our foods there from the people that were collecting it from the fields that were nearby and between the market and our home, there was a space where there were a few shops that had some freshly baked bread and other goodies. It was just amazing being able to get meals and get food and get ingredients that were so fresh and the food was delicious. Even in my short life in this planet, I've noticed a difference in taste when I go to places like South America, uh, especially the rural places.

Jessika (06:53):
Locally grown food is important to me since society usually experiences sort of disconnection to food in general when they shop for groceries in supermarkets there you don't see the people who grow produce process and distribute the food and you don't feel any connection to them. As people

Jessika (07:11):
Living where I do in Italy, we truly eat seasonally. That means I don't consume as many things as I would like, like bananas, avocados, or other tropical produce. It's a conscious choice and while it requires some sacrifices, that also deepens my appreciation for what's available at different times of the year. There's something really special about knowing certain fruits and vegetables are gonna be available only for a short time. So making eating feel more intentional helps me stay connected to nature's rhythm.

Airlea (07:42):
I source my locally grown produce from farmer's markets, urban farms and local grocers in Toronto that prioritize Ontario grown products. And it's always inspiring to see how much fresh, high quality food is grown within our province.

Elizabeth (07:57):
Some of my locally grown produce is grown in my own garden and I also trade with other people who grow things that I don't or can't grow. I also get locally grown produce at our local farmer's market

Jessika (08:09):
Whenever I can, I get my produce from a woman who has a small farm. I also have neighbors who grow blueberries and I grow my own tomatoes and other seasonal produce as much as possible. There's something for me deeply fulfilling about harvesting food with my own hands. Even if it's just a few small things that I can do during the year, it makes my meals feel much more personal. You know,

Airlea (08:32):
Eating locally grown food makes me feel great on all levels. Mentally I feel reassured knowing where my food comes from and that it's grown sustainably and ethically physically. I of course feel healthier and emotionally it's fulfilling to support local farmers and build a connection to my community.

Elizabeth (08:54):
I live in Iowa where our growing season food isn't incredibly long and so during the winter especially, I have a hard time finding locally grown food. I can find some things at the farmer's market throughout winter. However, most of the fresh things that I really like to eat are difficult to find when the sunlight is less and the temperatures are so cold here. Thankfully I know some really talented people who are able to can and jar things that they grew locally. And so I am able to enjoy some of those throughout the winter. I also dry things like herbs from my garden and try to save as much as I can in the freezer so that I can enjoy the things that I have grown in the colder months as well.

Jessika (09:35):
Factors that keep me from eating locally grown food as much as I'd like are definitely income and my disabilities with inflation and rising prices. While the amount of state support I currently receive stays the same, I can't afford as much regionally grown food as I want to eat.

Jessika (09:52):
There are moments when it's not possible to get the exact products I want locally. And while I do my best to adapt, sometimes I have to find alternatives or just make compromises.

Joao (10:04):
I live in more of a city space, suburban city space here in Bellevue, Washington. And even though we have a couple local farmer's markets, things are getting so much price in the area that you just find less spaces where you can find a stand for fruits and foods and such. I wish the city would implement something like that, but even every now and then some drivers come by and they sell mangoes or oranges that have been picked and brought by recently. I love going by and grabbing some

Stella (10:34):
Uh, my locally grown produce I get from the farm that I currently work at. I take all the food home with me that would get thrown away. Well, I don't take all of it home with me 'cause that's not possible. It's way too much, but I try and distribute it to friends and family and ask them, Hey, do you need food? Come to my garage, I will put it in there and you can just pick it up locally. Grown food is empowerment, it's security, it's love, it's health, it's resilient. And that excites me beyond words. <laugh>,

Katelan (11:12):
As a few of our listeners mentioned, getting local food isn't always easy or accessible. You may have to go miles out of your way or spend more money to get locally grown food and I hate to have to say it again, but the main reason for that is the system. The food system, especially here in the us, incentivizes big farm production and operates with a status quo of exploitation. And you don't have to take it from me. Tagan Engel is a chef and food justice organizer and community builder with over 30 years of experience in food systems. She's the host of the radio show and podcast, the Table Underground, and she's on the faculty at the Yale School of Environment where she leads the regenerative agriculture and just food systems lab. I called her up to talk about systemic inequities and solutions in our food system and how we can connect more people with local farms and local food. Hi Tagan, thanks for coming on the show.

Tagan (12:14):
Hi Katelan. Thanks for having me.

Katelan (12:17):
A lot of your work focuses on creating and enabling just food systems. So I wanted to start out by asking how can a food system even be unjust and what kind of work goes into shifting those systems?

Tagan (12:30):
Yeah, well a food system can be unjust just like any other system where there's things that aren't fair for people or for animals or for the earth. So when we think about a food system being unjust, it gets a little complicated, but I'll try to keep it simple. The food system in America is based on stolen land and enslaved people and we've never actually reckoned with that to repair the harms from that or to change the economics or the logistics of that foundation, right? So we're still living on a system we're people aren't really paid fairly. Like there are some people who are living in somewhat something you would consider as working in slave conditions, but even for people who are working in paid conditions, they're often not paid fairly. They're often not treated very well. The systems of food production are really based on making a profit at this point, right?

Tagan (13:25):
And so when something is based on making a profit and only a profit without enough regulation, we tend to forget about caring for people, caring for land, caring for animals in a way that respects their lives and respects their wellbeing. And at this point, many decades and centuries into this process, we have a food system that is really based on exploitation much more than based on caring for all of the beings that are in the system globally. You know, when we started having unions and protections for workers here, a lot of labor started being shipped overseas because it was cheaper and didn't have the regulations that we have here as well as sourcing food from overseas. And so we have this going from what was a very local and regionalized system of food production. And actually if you go back to indigenous peoples living on this land, they were stewarding food and forests on this land in a way that in western context we wouldn't even recognize as farming.

Tagan (14:23):
Everything was so integrated, you would just see it as like, oh, this is a diverse ecosystem, you know, but that's really what we need is to be growing food in a way that is in harmony with the nature that we're growing in versus as in conflict with it. And so globally and locally we've seen this real industrialization. So going from local and regional food systems to this real global industrialized food system. And so unfortunately there's a lot of harm that comes out of that. Your second question, how do we work on shifting that when we talk about trying to fix problems in this country at least we often talk about what individuals can do, like buy local or you know, get an electric car or eat vegan or something like that. But each of us individually can only have a small impact, right? And so we really, really need to remember to talk about systemic changes around policies, around regulations, also around things that can have huge impact.

Tagan (15:21):
So like if there's a regulation on corporations and businesses that purchase or produce millions and millions of pounds or dollars of something and we put a regulation on them, the impact of that is enormous. And then when we have policies and regulations, it changes a whole industry. And so we really systemically need to be looking at policies and regulations that bring things back into like a human and nature scale while still of course thinking about how do we feed the world, um, but doing it in a way that is not harming the planet or people or animals. And then on a local scale it's like how do we rebuild relationships with the natural world, with all the people who are around us, with all the animals that are around us and how do we create programs and services that really meet people where they're at?

Katelan (16:11):
Yeah. On this show we've talked a little bit about the food apartheid and how agency and resilience that come from growing and sourcing local food can really make a difference. How have you seen farmer's markets and other services like this change communities or change people's relationships with their food?

Tagan (16:30):
Well, I'm glad you used the word food apartheid, which is so important for people to remember that like we talk about food deserts, but a desert is a natural thriving ecosystem. Food apartheid is a human created system of oppression, right? Right. And so I'm really appreciate that you use that term. I worked for an organization for nine years that started the first farmer's markets in recent years and ran them in New Haven and Connecticut where I'm based, I wanna say farmer's markets and local food are one tool among many tools in addressing people's food needs. They are by far not the only solution. And there's certainly a lot of challenges involved in local food, which we're gonna talk about, but farmer's markets do a lot of great things. So let's start there. First of all, they build community around food, which is really wonderful because a lot of us are experiences like go to a grocery store, maybe you talk with a cashier or someone stocking the shelves, but you know, you don't have a lot of community in there and that's something that's really fallen apart in our world.

Tagan (17:25):
So there's a really beautiful piece of like building community, getting to talk to the farmers who grow the food, getting to meet other people in your community who have some shared values. It also helps build this economy, you know, a lot of small scale farmers can't sell to grocery stores because you have to sell usually to a distributor and then you're selling wholesale. They take a cut of your profits and then they sell to a grocery store. And a lot of small farmers just can't afford to do that. They don't have enough volume of food to do that. And so farmers' markets create this reconnecting of rural and urban communities as well as urban farmers and the community outside of their neighborhood, giving them an economic opportunity to make a good living from the food they're growing. This other really important piece is the food access piece.

Tagan (18:12):
How do we get food from farmers that are near where we live to people who really need that food, especially people living under food apartheid and having really like fresh life-giving delicious nutritious food. One thing that a lot of farmer's markets are doing is accepting WIC and food stamps snap, right? And also having programs that double the value of them knowing that, you know, some of the food that's at farmer's markets is more expensive than at grocery stores because it's coming from smaller farmers because it's not in this kind of subsidized by the farm bill and subsidized by being food that's maybe grown with workers that are really not paid well in other countries and being shipped in or within this country with immigrant labor that's not paid well necessarily. And so having programs that have people, first of all be able to use their food assistance benefits so that the market feels welcoming to them and then doubling the value of them. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Um, so that people can get, you know, more food for their dollar is really great. You know, sometimes farmers' markets can be a gentrifying element of a community and, and that can be really problematic because it can push people out of communities as the ripples of like economic development and rents, prices go up and you know, new businesses come in. And so it's really important when we're running markets to really try to avoid doing things that push people out but that really are about serving the whole community and over the long term. Yeah.

Katelan (19:38):
I wanna dive into that a little bit more, but first to understand, you know, we've talked about fast fashion previously on the show and we had this question of like, should a t-shirt be able to cost $5? And that sort of it, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that like when, when produce is so much cheaper at the grocery shirt probably reflects some sort of exploitation or shortcoming in the supply chain itself. That's like allowing that thing to be as cheap as it is as opposed to perhaps at a farmer's market where that type of thing isn't happening as much. Hopefully

Tagan (20:07):
You do find that there's farmers that grow things at a RA and sell things at a range of prices, right? And so there's a lot of factors that go into that. It could be what is the cost of the land that they're on, what is the cost of their growing practices that they use, their labor pricing? Also, what community are they trying to sell to? One of the challenges is that our idea about food prices and of course there's been a huge amount of change in our food prices over the past few years, but yeah, let's say even just thinking about like post covid o our food prices, but even still now, they don't actually match what it costs to grow our food for the most part. Hmm. Because a lot of things are subsidized. So we have a farm bill that creates insurance and subsidies for certain types of foods like commodity foods like corn and soy and, and other things.

Tagan (20:56):
There's just a lot of factors that go into food not actually being priced as we said, it's, it's based on like unfair labor prices and other things. And so when a small farmer is growing food and they're then thinking about what is my land cost, what is my labor cost, how much do I need to sell this for so that I can actually still live on this farm <laugh>? And they don't necessarily have all these other subsidies or corporate backing or other things, they're often trying to price things at that real cost. And so it can be shocking to us because the food in the grocery store is not at that real cost. I'm always pinching pennies with my family and trying to balance this, like how do I buy food that feels ethical and supporting local economies and you know, match my budget? And I definitely do a mix of like buying at chain stores and buying at farmer's markets and try to do a little bit of both where I can.

Katelan (21:48):
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you were saying about how farmer's markets can bring gentrification, but there's sort of like possibly some tools or strategies to avoid that.

Tagan (21:58):
Trying to avoid gentrification is complicated because we don't usually have control over all of the pieces of it. But I will say one of the things that I've seen in a number of wonderful farmer's markets is first of all, trying to include racial and economic and geographic diversity of vendors at the market is really important because that also changes who comes to the market. Mm. And so that helps to kind of change the face of the market. To do that, you often have to recruit people. We have to assume that like the systems that exclude people are sort of the norm. If we want to break down these systems that kind of inherently segregate us, we have to be intentional about them. So that means that folks who run farmer's markets need to reach out to farmers and vendors who are folks of color. They might only be connecting with folks who are rural to bring them in.

Tagan (22:44):
So they might need to be intentional about bringing in urban folks. Also promoting organizations that are working against gentrification and for a city that support everyone. So a lot of farmers' markets have organizations that set up a table and tell people about stuff. So doing things to support organizations that are working for housing fairness and fair wages for workers and other kinds of protections in communities can be really helpful. And then when possible, having organizations that run farmers' markets be involved just in local politics that support anti-gentrification things or even put it in your newsletter to promote it to folks who come to your markets and say, Hey, you know, we're trying to have a zoning thing that ensures that a huge percentage of any new buildings have affordable units, actual affordable units, not pretend affordable, actual, affordable units in them and other things like that. And so they can just be an agent of showing that these values of caring about local food are also about caring about local communities and how people can take action to do that.

Katelan (23:45):
We've talked about how money is very tight right now for a lot of people and there's just a lot of uncertainty. Tariffs are going up and down, grocery prices are rising. But on the other hand we've heard from a lot of folks about how like growing your own food or sourcing your own food locally can feel like resilience and like a real source of power. And so I just kind of wondered how have you seen people change or prioritize locally grown food as part of their budget and their lives?

Tagan (24:11):
I think we've all struggled. Prices just skyrocketed through covid. And I was really upset during Covid that people were just talking about inflation. And I was like, but can we talk about corporate greed? Yes. Because the CEOs of these companies of grocery stores and food producers, they're making huge profits, but they're charging us more money when egg prices just went up because we had avian bird flu happening. Even as it's settled down in some places, there's certain chain stores that have not brought the egg prices back down. This gets into the food system is not an isolated system. It's part of our larger economic system. And even though we've had an effort to like bring minimum wages up to $15, right? If we look at inflation since the sixties, minimum wage should be like $22 or higher, I think. You know, to actually be quote livable.

Tagan (25:00):
And at this point where prices are going up and up, it probably needs to even be higher than that. It's important to put this in that broader economic context. It's not only about food prices, it's also about economic fairness in our entire society. When you're trying to choose between food or rent or medication, that is a difficult thing. Ultimately we need a society that creates the safety nets that people need so that they have their basic, basic needs met. And then choosing what we're gonna buy for food would not actually be, are we buying food? Am I buying the cheapest, maybe lowest quality food and not so much, you know, much more processed food 'cause it might be cheaper. Or because I'm working three jobs and I even though the fresh food in some cases could be cheaper, but I don't have the time to cook it.

Tagan (25:45):
So there's like so many factors that go into this, but my experience of kind of being in community where I work, like on the ground in community all the time, people love food. Often people are like, I wanna know how to cook. Like my grandma used to cook this really good thing, but I never learned how to do it. Often we've lost a lot of that skill and knowledge about how do we cook food that's nourishing, that tastes really good, that reflects the cultures that we come from or that we're connected to, and that I can do it in a way that works with my work schedule and with the time and stresses of my life, you know, the tariffs that are happening just draw even more uncertainty. I think we've had something like a 23% rise in food costs since before Covid, since 2020. Our food costs have gone up more than inflation has gone up. So a lot of challenges there.

Katelan (26:37):
When we talk about the cost of food and food justice, regenerative farming, which you do work in as well, industrialization from the outside looking in, it feels like these things may seem tangentially related. Can you tell us more about how they're all connected?

Tagan (26:52):
Well, in the simplest way, industrialization is a big part of the problem in our food system. And regenerative farming and food justice are a part of the solution. Part of what we need to think about is how do we re regionalize our food system? So if we look at what happened in Covid where we had empty grocery shelves and we had people working in like meat packing facilities where Covid was running rampant, people were dying, people were getting each other sick, food was getting contaminated, all kinds of terrible things happening. This is part of industrialization, right? And part of globalization. So if we think about how to re regionalize and create agriculture, I'm not talking about everyone's on these teeny tiny farms, right? Like obviously we have to have some big farms in order to feed people, but we can be doing farming practices in a way that happens at a little bit more of a human in nature scale.

Tagan (27:46):
And just as an example of this avian bird flu in America had us killing 20 million egg laying hens. I think because people were trying to not have the flu spread to more and more birds in Canada, they didn't have this happen because their farms are smaller. Oh. So then if an animal gets sick, it's easier to contain and to deal with it and not have it spread. Not only are they smaller, but I think they have different regulations on growing conditions and how animals can be kept. And so real regenerative farming is thinking about how do we farm in with an ecosystem approach where we are actually caring for every living thing in the ecosystem of farming, whether it's land farming or ocean farming, and how do we leave the environment better than we found it? Right? We are regenerating the environment that we are growing food in, not just like taking nutrients out of the soil or taking things out of the ocean.

Tagan (28:44):
And if we think about how do we do this more at a regional scale, then we actually are able to support our supply chains when there's a pandemic, right? We don't have this global interruption or national interruption because we can't move things around. We actually start to rebuild the infrastructure, the warehouses, the mills, the storage facilities, the distribution networks in a regional fashion so that we can support our local economies, create better health within the food system and have resiliency within the food system when crisis happens. The other piece of this is the humans. If we don't have humans involved in agriculture, that's nature. Yeah. <laugh>, right? <laugh>. So like we cannot talk about agriculture without humans and that's where the food justice piece comes in because sometimes we need to remind people about justice and about humans and that this is about creating a system that works for everyone, all beings.

Tagan (29:44):
And I wanna tie this into this piece around this attack on DEI in this moment, because the way that that's being framed by our president and some people is that it's like special things for some people. But that's not what DEI is. That's not what justice is. That's not what regenerative farming is. We're talking about that We live in a system, as I said, that's based on inequity. Wealthy people have things that low income people don't have access to. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. White folks have privileges that black and brown folks don't have because that's how this society was set up. So if we want a society, if we want a farm and a farming system and food system that works for everybody, we actually have to be intentional about including the people who are automatically left out because of the system we live in. And we have to actually be intentional about doing those things.

Katelan (30:37):
I really appreciate all of your work, <laugh> and all of these different areas, um, to connect the dots for us. This has been super helpful in illuminating. So thank you so much.

Tagan (30:46):
Thank you so much. This was such a lovely conversation.

Katelan (30:56):
Even if you don't have farmer's markets in your area, you may have CSA boxes you can sign up for or you could grow some food yourself in your backyard or a community garden. You could even go in with neighbors to split up your crops. You can each focus on just a few crops and share your harvest with each other.

Katelan (31:14):
Of course, if we're eating as many fruits and vegetables as we should be, many of us don't have the time or space to grow all the produce that we eat, and we may not have access to buy it all from local producers, which means even in the best case scenario, we may have to rely on chain grocery stores to help stock our fridges and pantries. And that brings us to industrial agriculture, AKA big ag. I called up Sanchali Seth Pal to get an idea of how big ag seems to be getting bigger and how it's affecting our economy here in the us. Hey Sanchali, today we're talking big ag.

Sanchali (31:55):
Yes. The massive industrial agriculture industry.

Katelan (31:59):
All right. Let's start things off with just a clear definition of what we talk about when we talk about industrial agriculture.

Sanchali (32:06):
Of course, industrial agriculture is the large scale production of crops and animals. So that's everything from apples to wheat, pork, or milk. Industrial agriculture is basically all about producing large quantities of food as cheaply as possible. And that often comes at the risk of the environment because this type of farming relies on large scale chemical fertilizers and antibiotics.

Katelan (32:30):
And that's not to mention deforestation and monoculture practices. That's when you plant huge fields of the same crop and that can totally wreck the soil and make it harder to sequester carbon.

Sanchali (32:41):
Yes. Industrial farms are definitely not operating right now with the earth as their primary stakeholder, which is kind of ironic because their business is literally built on it. And right now the primary goal is profit.

Katelan (32:54):
How is business right now for these big industrial farms?

Sanchali (32:57):
Depends who you ask. For Big Ag, it's pretty good. In the us, a handful of large scale farms brought in nearly 50% of all revenue from crops and livestock, and that's a huge industry. But most farms, 86% are small farms, and those guys are making less than $350,000 a year.

Katelan (33:17):
So these industrial farms are just a small portion of overall farms, but they're making nearly half of all the farming money.

Sanchali (33:24):
Yeah. And it's not by accident. They're getting a lot of help from the government

Katelan (33:27):
In the form of subsidies. Right?

Sanchali (33:29):
Exactly. The US pays out over $30 billion a year to support farmers with subsidies on everything from insurance to disaster relief to conservation. But it's not going to everyone. Some farms get a few dollars a year and others get millions of dollars.

Katelan (33:44):
I'm guessing that the little farms are not the ones getting those multimillion dollar checks.

Sanchali (33:49):
Exactly. Right. From 2019 to 2023, over half of producers received an average of just $2,730 a year. But the top a hundred producers, they received an average of nearly $6 million per year.

Katelan (34:04):
That kind of checks out because I've heard that more and more small farms are closing. That's

Sanchali (34:09):
Right. It's been happening, you know, sort of gradually over time, but it's now looking pretty dramatic. According to the USDA, the average farm size has increased two and a half times since the mid 1990s. At the same time as the number of farms is decreasing since 1980, we've lost over 20% of all farms.

Katelan (34:27):
Wow. So small and medium farms are closing

Sanchali (34:30):
And they're getting bought up by large farms.

Katelan (34:32):
Got it. What kinds of foods are these big industrial farms producing?

Sanchali (34:37):
This is another interesting thing. A lot of the subsidy money for the big farms is going for growing livestock feed like corn and wheat.

Katelan (34:44):
It seems like on the show we're always finding more reasons to eat plant-based, and another one might be to rely less on big agriculture

Sanchali (34:53):
<laugh>. It definitely wouldn't hurt over half of emissions from global food production comes from raising and feeding animals we eat. And that's because raising animals for meat is incredibly inefficient. So whether it's for ethical health or financial reasons, Americans do want fewer subsidies for animal production. Johns Hopkins found that 78% of Americans want federal farm funding to prioritize food for people over feed for livestock.

Katelan (35:18):
What are the environmental repercussions of big eggs expansion?

Sanchali (35:22):
Well, we touched on some of them more pesticide and fertilizer use soil degradation, but there's also less diversity in our foods. And when we can't produce the foods we want, we import them.

Katelan (35:32):
And that has a huge environmental footprint.

Sanchali (35:35):
It does, especially if there's air, air freight involved for especially perishable produce. But moreover, it's just expensive. And with the talk of tariffs, it could make a lot of foods even more expensive. Pretty soon.

Katelan (35:47):
My grocery bill is already too much. I can't imagine what it's gonna look like if we have more tariffs.

Sanchali (35:52):
I know. And the expansion of big farms and industrial agriculture, it's having real life effects on local communities where smaller farms used to be. For example, discriminatory lending practices and farm consolidation have really limited who can succeed in farming. In the US today, 95% of American farmers are white according to the census.

Katelan (36:14):
That is completely shocking to me. And as the system continues to incentivize and support these big farms, it's harder I imagine to get support for new farms, especially if they're owned by people of color.

Sanchali (36:26):
It is. And you know, it's not really on our radars when we're buying food, we're not thinking about it necessarily the same way as when we are thinking about if a company aligns with our values. You know, in other parts of our life, we might be trying to support women or minority owned brands or local stores where you know, the owners, you know, everyone might have their own type of thing they're trying to support, but we think about it when it comes to produce, you might not think about it as much.

Katelan (36:49):
Yeah, totally. I I totally get that. But when I'm at the farmer's market, it is top of mind because you're there and you're seeing the farmers in person.

Sanchali (36:56):
Exactly. It's harder when we buy the bulk of our food at grocery stores, but it's more obvious maybe when you're in the farmer's market and you can actually see the local farmers that you're supporting. There's this real through line of diversity and not just diversity in the backgrounds of the farmers. It's about biodiversity and variety and how that contributes to ecosystems and protects us from climate disaster. Diversifying food sources is good for our supply chains too, because then we're not reliant on just a few producers and

Katelan (37:26):
Local farms can give us a more diverse array of fruits and vegetables, which is good for our diets.

Sanchali (37:30):
Totally. It's better for our health, for our family's health. It's better for our local ecosystems, for our communities'. Long-term resilience and it's cost resistant to industrial food trends,

Katelan (37:41):
I am convinced. Thank you so much Sanchali. Really appreciate it.

Sanchali (37:44):
Thanks, Katelan.

Katelan (37:52):
I really believe that connecting with your food is such an important way to connect with the earth. And I don't care if that sounds super cheesy. Everything we have from our clothes to our cars comes from the Earth's resources. But fruits and vegetables are so untempered with they're plucked right from a branch or a stem or a pod that's growing right out of the soil, and then we eat them. And we can live without new clothes or cars, but food, we can't live without that. It reminds me of that proverb that's been attributed to Native American tribes. It goes, only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned. Will we realize we cannot eat money.

Katelan (38:41):
Whether you visit a local U pick farm, hit up your local farmer's market or just start some lettuce seeds in your backyard. I hope you have some opportunities to get all the delicious benefits of locally grown food. And oh, by the way, you could be earning rewards on all of your farmer's market and CSA purchases in the Commons app. If you wanna grow at home and you need some inspiration or motivation to get gardening, we got you. Scroll back through the past episodes and you'll find one on urban gardening. There's one on composting and community gardens. Thanks to our listeners for sharing how they eat local. Today, you heard from [credits-.

Katelan (39:43):
If you are not hanging out with us on Instagram yet, you're missing out my friends. Join us at Second Nature Earth. This episode was edited and engineered by my friend Evan Goodchild. It was written and produced by yours truly. Kaitlyn Cunningham. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you back here next week.

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