The Road To Local Is... Short

Ironically in this time of crisis and empty grocery shelves, your best food source is right around the corner or just down the street. Producing and consuming local food matters for the immediate deliciousness of it but more importantly for the security it provides our community in the long run. It is going to be a long road, but one in which we all learned something: local matters.

‘Buy Local’ has existed for a long time, advocating the patronage of local restaurants, shops, food producers, and farmers.  We did enough, or so we thought. After the tornados and onset of Covid-19, the importance of local businesses to the economic underpinnings of Nashville became a clarion call. Governor Lee reported 95% of businesses in Tennessee are small businesses.

The disintegrating local food economy hit restaurants fast. And with it, the multitudes of people relying on us eating out. The cash flow tentacles spread quickly to local farms. Numbers who were food insecure swelled, as volunteer programs shuttered. Second Harvest Food Bank began to buy large quantities of food while competing with large grocers who aimed to restock their shelves. The Nashville Food Project quickly embarked on finding new ways to respond to the crisis, joining forces with restaurants as satellite kitchens to keep needed meals flowing, sourcing from local farms and keeping cooks employed. They typically serve 5,500 meals per week, but in March served 10,000. TNFP also began distributing grocery support boxes through local food businesses for their laid off workers, called Community Covered. Organizations helping homeless people struggled to find new solutions to densely packed shelters and feeding programs. We all got a quick lesson in what a local food economy under stress looks like and the under belly that has always existed. It is sobering.

Now, all of us know with certainty that ‘local’ means supporting lives.

Local economies have always been important. This devastating experience opened all our eyes to the reality of how reliant communities are on local dollars. Tallu Quinn of TNFP said, “it made us reflect on how so many of the existing aspects of our global food system were brittle and broken to begin with.” Local grocers, restaurants, and farms keep money in the local economy, rather than moving it to corporate headquarters and investors.

A Broken Food Supply
For the more food secure, we’ll see what comes as large grocers continue to increase social distancing and struggle to keep items stocked. Large farms who sell to restaurants and schools have found themselves with large crops with no where to go. As a result, cabbage, green beans, and onions are being plowed under, chicken farmers are breaking eggs rather than hatching out more chicks, and dairy farmers are forced to dump their milk. All this while at the same time larger swaths of the population require food assistance. The Tennessean reported low paid chicken processing workers in Goodlettsville, often immigrants, are working in cramped conditions and getting ill. The largest pork processing plant in the nation, Smithfield, closed until further notice, effecting Tennessee pig farmers. Our dependence on a long-distance food supply is becoming more precarious by the day as transportation systems reduce shipping for lack of people and trying not to spread the virus.

Enter Your Local Farmer
Enter small business and small farms. In Nashville, small businesses employ the most people who make and spend their dollars here. The importance of small business to local communities is emotionally rooted in buying and selling with friends and neighbors. The Nashville Farmers’ Market had its vendors online in record time. Farmers, not always high tech and with the resources to do so, had online ordering systems put in place within days, enacting a “straight to consumer” route. Local sources are not robust enough to feed the current population, we know, but keeping local farms solvent for the future increases flexibility to respond to rapidly changing conditions.

SHOP LOCAL
Grocers in Nashville that carry local products. Please support them:

Produce Place, Sylvan Park
OH My Chives, Nolensville
Demeter’s Common, Lebanon
Nourish Marketplace, Kingston Springs
Hendersonville Produce, Hendersonville
Green Door Gourmet, Nashville
Turnip Truck, East Nashville
Charlotte Pike, Gulch
Osborne Bi-Rite, Belmont