A woman pulled up in a Lexus at the farmers' market in Bel Air recently and approached the man who had sold her husband a bag of tomatoes earlier in the day. "I want my money back!" she snapped. "I don't know what my husband was thinking, paying $5 for a quart of tomatoes."
Watching and listening to this, Dene Bruce, a Harford County agriculture teacher who grows flowers and vegetables, laughed and shook her head.
"These were beautiful tomatoes, the first of the season," Bruce said. "I bought some and made the best BLT with them. They were fresh, beautiful and locally grown. I don't know what this woman was thinking."
She was probably thinking that a local farmer should charge less for his produce than the supermarkets do - and that all food, from everywhere, should be plentiful and cheap. A lot of us think that way.
Of course, the cost of fuel and fertilizer threatens that mind-set. The cost of shipping produce, fish and meat from across the country - from all around the world, for that matter - contributes in a big way to the rising price of food.
We've had it easy for a long time, sustained by subsidized, globalized agribusiness that grows, harvests, processes and ships food from distant places, so much so that most of us have lost our connection to the land that produces it. Small, local farms have disappeared, replaced by sprawling suburbs. Today in the United States, there are fewer choices when it comes to locally grown food.
I am usually reluctant to reminisce in print about my boyhood, but in this case I make an exception. When I was a kid in a small town, there were four local farmers, one of them a dairyman. They produced milk, eggs, vegetables and fruit. The dinner table in my house followed the seasons - greens and asparagus in spring; tomatoes, berries, fruit and corn in summer; potatoes, turnips, squash, apples and grapes in fall. We managed through the winter on canned or frozen vegetables, and the cycle started over again in spring.
This sounds like nostalgia.
But all this has to come back - smart people are working on it - and it is going to be revived by market forces. The question is how we achieve a green renaissance and make it last.
Community planners, capital investors, entrepreneurs, public health scientists and the agricultural education system all need to get in the same room and create a business model for it. Political leaders need to hear from consumer-citizens who demand more local farming for three primary reasons:
