Open Letter to Board of Supervisors

Dear Supervisors:

I was moved to write you after spending 3 days at the first National Heirloom Exposition held September 13-15th at the County Fairgrounds. The Exposition was sponsored by the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company and the Petaluma Seed Bank. What can I say but Wow! The exhibitors, demonstrations, tastings, presentations, music, food vendors, documentary films – even the food waste was segregated for composting by Green Mary and her team of volunteers…it was as if a someone had taken all the dreams I’ve ever had for a consciousness raising food event and manifested it in our own backyard.

The day before the Expo began, a young woman named Sara Salo from Bend, Oregon spent the night at our home on her way to promote the elements of healthy eating and physical activity through a brainstorm she calls the School Food Tour; a 6,000-mile bicycle ride that will stop at 30 community schools in 16 states. Sara was excited to attend the kid-centered “Educational and Fun Day” on Wednesday and to hear the inspiration from world renowned chef Alice Waters and her efforts to get free school lunches into all schools in California.

For a mere entrance fee of $25, I spent the first day listening to speakers talk about everything from Why Heirlooms Matter to Dirt to Dessert featuring the creator of the 16 foot tall pyramid of pumpkins, squash and gourds that greeted all participants as they entered the hall of flowers.

The networking was fantastic. I’ll be contacting Norcal Growers in Sebastopol about banana plants for next spring and contributing to the Spiral Foods Cooperative in Graton to assist them in establishing their dream of a village marketplace that strengthens community participation in the food system, supports local farms, and provides increased food security and access to fresh produce for everyone.

I took my video camera around the fairgrounds one day and captured 2 hours of all the happenings. The heritage animals were some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, the vegetable and fruit displays were indescribable – colors, shapes, sizes and aromas – one table must have had 100+ varieties of heirloom garlic, another with the same amount of apples, and another with tomatoes. Tastings and demonstrations ranged from butter churning to a cob pizza oven built in less than a day. My favorite was Fermentation Nation’s demo on making your own ginger ale.

I was honored to be on a panel of Sonoma County Food System Advocates and Stakeholders including Gail Atkins of the Redwood Empire Food Bank, Jim Shelton, former owner of Food For Thought stores, Stephanie Larson, director of the UC Cooperative Extension and Food System Alliance coordinator Miriam Volat to discuss the results of the recently completed Food Assessment for Sonoma County. The need to work cooperatively with the private and public sectors to chart a path for the next 10 to 20 years was apparent and correlated with your efforts to promote Health Action’s goals.

The constant repeating by panel members of the Food Assessment findings, the Food Forum Recommendations and the Aggregation and Marketing Study analysis to holistically integrate our crops and livestock into a polycultural system that will achieve food access for all of Sonoma County residents with the environment and social and environmental equity in mind, was echoed Wednesday night by Alice Waters. Then again on Thursday night, Vandana Shiva illustrated in her analogy about Gandhi at the Salt mines and Rosa Parks who would not give in to a segregated system, that we have to stand together to demand change when we see abuse in a broken system. Her reference was to the multinational Corporations devastating her country where farmers have paid, at times with their lives through suicide, for the genetic drift that polluted and ruined their farms from genetically modified organisms, but we got her point that our conventional food system dictates the policies of what we can and can’t do on the local level.

As our Supervisors, I’m asking for guidance, education and directive from “above” on the wonderful and powerful things the Food System Alliance is doing in the county to bring about change to a food system that until this year has never been analyzed in as complete a manner with regard to production, processing, distribution, access, education, economic viability, social equity, and the external or hidden costs of that system with regard to obesity and climate change. Because food is so integral in all we do as a community, a government that does not have a comprehensive food policy cannot, by extension, have a comprehensive health policy, energy policy, environment policy, climate change policy, job creation policy, food security policy, immigration and housing policy, or – most pertinent – agricultural policy.

Our message could not have been heard without the Heirloom Expo taking on the monumental task of organizing this well choreographed event. My hope is that the Expo will have at least broken even and that plans for next year’s event are already being discussed. The nation’s focus is now on Sonoma County. Let’s show our leadership by infusing the local food system with this new energy in the form of action plans, resolutions, and food policies that transforms our community so that at next year’s Expo, a panel of experts will be able to report back on positive and meaningful progress.

Sincerely,