The first interview with a panel of experts, Twilight Greenaway. 09/30/10
She is Visual and Visual Education Manager of the Center of Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture.
Twilight edits the weekly e-letter, maintains the website and produces various print collateral for CUESA. She was raised on an organic coffee farm in Kona, Hawaii and has worked in an online editorial capacity for websites such as Wiretapmag.org, Alternet.org, and Current TV. She also contributes articles to magazines and websites, including Culinate.com, Edible San Francisco, Meatpaper, and Common Ground. When she's not at the market, she can often be found gardening in her Berkeley backyard.
Here are my questions and her answers.
1. As Visual and Visual Education Manager, what are your greatest concerns when you stress the importance of locally grown food?
When it comes to promoting the importance of locally grown food, I've come to believe that transparency is the most important factor. When you buy food locally, you are more likely to have a relationship with the food producer in questions, meaning you can find out about their growing/production practices. For example, it's important to me to buy food from farmers who take care of the soil, use little or no chemical inputs, and care about biodiversity. Local farmers are more likely to make this kind of information available and if I have a question, chances are good that I can approach them directly and ask. This means a lot to me, and to other eaters who want safe and sustainable food.
The recent egg recall, and others like it, have brought a lot of attention to what happens when there is an absence of transparency. In other words, within the industrialized food system it is very common to buy food made by very large producers who ship all over the country. Not only is that food untraceable, it is often produced with a focus on efficiency rather than on environmentally sound, humane or socially just practices. Buying local -- and directly from farmers when possible -- is one way to invest in a different kind of system. It's not the only way to do so, but it can have a significant impact when it comes to keeping small-scale sustainable farmers in business.
I will also say that while reducing food miles is an important goal of the local food movement, it's been shown to be far more complex in recent years than was originally thought in the context of local food. How food is grown has been shown to be as important as how far it travels.
2. Which visual methods in the current system of CUESA would you consider are attracting attention effectively?
We have a farm map that shows market customers where the farms in the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market are located. There are two versions; one that can be seen in-person in the market and another that uses Google Maps to help concerned eaters look up the farms they buy food from. The great thing about the latter is that one can see exactly what the farm looks like from above, how big their fields are, how many trees there are on the land, etc.
Our weekly newsletter is another good example; we use an array of colorful images to convey the vitality of the farmers market, local produce and the local food system.
3. How would you improve the current methods to raise customers' awareness of carbon footprint?
I'm not clear if you mean our methods at CUESA or methods used in general. Carbon emissions are a pretty small part of our mission here at the moment. That said, if we had more funding and a larger staff, there's a lot we could do to make the connections for our customers between their food choices and their carbon footprints. One of the most important shifts we would advocate for would be the move to pasture-based animal agriculture, as opposed to confined feeding operations. Pastured meat -- when eaten in moderation -- is a far better choice than the current model of livestock production, for a variety of reasons.
