HomeGrown Festival Review

Last week, a2ethics.org went to the first HomeGrown Festival held across from the Farmer's Market in Community High field. The weather was a farmer's dream, because we needed rain. And it rained for most of the afternoon.

But as all nonprofits and most people who know about these events, if people know there will be food, they will come. And they did. According to one account, there were 1,500 festival goers. If a2ethics.org had 1,500 hits for this post, we would declare a festival too. We don't know yet how to deliver food through our ponderings.

And food delivery was, in part, what the HomeGrown Festival was about. As most people who were there already knew, the idea was to showcase and feature the virtues of becoming educated about, buying and then eating food that comes from local farms and local businesses.

I very much enjoyed going to the HomeGrown Festival. The best part about it for me was the amazing number of local nonprofits and businesses who were able to collaboratae for one event. While my sense is that the more food tastings and benefits hosted by nonprofits engaged in community education on the issues of food security, the better off we are. People never tire of food tastings is my guess.

But food tastings for the cause of food security can only go so far in my beginner's and completely uninformed food security analyst opinion.

What was most important for me to remember from where I stood in the wonderful mud of that afternoon, was that it is not just about the tasting and the celebrity chefs. Nor was it just about the virtues of eating local. The ethics of the afternoon in my opinion focused on issues of food security for our community.

And toward that end, I spent a good part of my time at the Festival asking a few people what they meant or what they thought food security is. If I accurately understood their thoughts, food security, as the name implies, has a safety component. The thinking is that if we know where we get our food from and how it is grown, then we are more likely to be able to determine whether it is safe, and free of toxins as well. It also includes an environmental aspect. To the extent that we get our food from within a small geographic radius, we are helping to reduce fossil fuel use and slow global climate change and warming. Finally, food security involves a social justice component. Not everyone in our community has adequate nutrition, access to, nor can they afford the food they need, even if it is locally grown.

It is this last issue where I would submit three well-intentioned suggestions for next year's HomeGrown Festival.

First, it would be more educational I think to integrate or pair the nonprofit presenters with the restaurant contributors. As community food security requires a number of cross institutional connections, so too, it seems as if this integration should be made more transparent. By separating the for-profit restaurants and farms they use for their food, from the nonprofits who are working hard to increase awareness and to educate members of the community about food security, it gives the impression they are not really connected. HomeGrown is a geographically visual concept. Make it so at the HomeGrown Festival as well.

This would seem to be rather simple to do, given the fact that so many groups came together to put on the Festival to begin with.

Second, I would offer a few education "demos" from the nonprofits too. For example, I talked to this amazingly knowledgeable volunteer from the Washtenaw Land Trust. I had never heard of this group, but they are helping to preserve farming land so that it will not so mindlessly be eaten up for commercial development and speculation. I also talked with Jennifer Fike, the Executive Director of Food System Economic Partnership. If you don't know what they do, as I didn't, check out their website: www.fsepmichigan.org.

And finally. I am all for for-profit and nonprofit collaborations. And I think that there are thousands of businesses, both big and small, local and nonlocal, that are committed to social responsibility and can improve the inequities and disparities between with access to adequate nutritional food and those who do not. At the same time, I believe we need more effective regulations from government institutions to ensure that think local first does not come to mean going to certain individuals and groups in our community who have first access and can afford it first.