A tweet providing food for thought
Until about two months ago I was an unapologetic Luddite when it came to social media like Facebook or Twitter. Staying off Facebook has been, and still is, an easy call: I cultivate the friends I can see and hang out with in person, and welcome the occasional surprises when someone I haven't seen in years somehow finds me and reconnects.
Thanks to Mainebiz's tech-savvy online editor, Dylan Martin, I've had to revise my views about Twitter. With Dylan's tutelage I've opened a Twitter account and have begun cultivating followers (just over 100, but continuing to grow). I'm tweeting stories to help them reach a wider audience. And I'm following people I think might alert me to potential business stories that would be of interest to our Mainebiz audience.
Occasionally, a tweet catches my eye and proves useful … such as this one that Maine's 1st District U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree sent out on Nov. 12:
Great #slowmoney14 talk w/ Wendell Berry yesterday! You can watch it here http://t.co/seST3F39RO pic.twitter.com/Yn2g8gbJtn
I've been reading Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry since the early 1980s, when I was a green reporter working for a weekly newspaper in North Conway, N.H., and purchased his book of essays “The Unsettling of America.” Until then, I hadn't given much thought to where my food came from, who made it, or why I should care about such matters. Berry opened my eyes to the importance of those questions, and over the years I've come to rely on his essays, poetry and novels for their wisdom on such diverse topics as conserving local communities, homeland security, marriage and being better stewards of our soil, water and each other.
“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you” is just one wise saying of many from his pen that have stuck with me.
Pingree's link took me to a YouTube video featuring her conversation with Berry, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer and Woody Tasch, founder and chairman of Slow Money, which, among other initiatives, seeks to connect “investors to the places where they live, creating vital relationships and new sources of capital for small food enterprises.”
Pingree is very much a rock star in the Slow Money universe for her “Local Farms, Food and Jobs Act,” which introduced a number of crucial reforms into the 2014 Farm Bill. Thanks to the initiatives championed by Pingree and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, it will be easier for low-income families to use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (i.e., food stamps, now called SNAP) to purchase locally grown food. More funding also will be available to promote farmers' markets, assist farmers seeking organic certification and help small farmers find ways to create local value-added food products.
Pingree told her Louisville audience that Maine's small farmers are working hard to make our state, once again, a regional bread basket. The trends, she said, are encouraging: Maine has the largest per-capita proportion of Community Supported Agriculture farms in the country; the number of young farmers is going up; the amount of land devoted to agriculture is going up; local farmers' markets are booming; 50% more locally grown food is being sold in Maine compared to the previous decade.
Even so, Pingree acknowledged the complexity of rebuilding a locally based food economy. I wasn't surprised that Berry succinctly framed the problem as a two-fold question that would not be quickly solved: “How do we get farmers well enough paid, and how do we get poor people well enough fed?”
It's a problem both rural and urban communities have a vested interest in solving.
In my view, it would go a long way toward closing the gap between the two Maines — which Portland Press Herald columnist Bill Nemitz, in a recent post-election column, characterized as “no longer north versus south, or rich versus poor. It's now officially urban versus rural.”
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Another thing about Maine: It doesn't shut down after Labor Day
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