The Town That Food Saved

CHAPTER ONE

If you come into the town of Hardwick, Vermont, from the east, you come in on Route 15, weaving through a series of curves that begin as gentle sweeps and become progressively sharper until you find yourself leaning in your seat, the view through your windshield tilted just a few degrees off its axis. That's the Lamoille River on your right, gurgling and churning over water-worn stone and gravel; it cuts a course through the center of town, and there's a nice little walking bridge that crosses the water. It's on Main Street. It's not hard to find.

On your left, the land rises steeply from the highway's shoulder. It's mostly wooded, but just outside town, you can see where the hillside washed away a few years back; it's since been reinforced with a massive pile of rocks, but the homes visible at its crest still look disturbingly vulnerable, as if the slightest shift will send them bouncing down the hill to splinter across the roadway.

Hardwick sits in a shallow hollow; the town and its 3,200 residents live in the shadow cast by Buffalo Mountain, which rises to nearly 3,000 feet at the southwest corner of town. Buffalo Mountain is at once craggy and lush, populated by a mix of eastern hardwoods: birch, beech, ash, and the state's vaunted sugar maple. There is no road to the top, although all-terrain vehicle trails crisscross its flanks.

If you claw your way to the top of Buffalo Mountain and look out over the town, you'll see how Route 15 becomes Main Street, and Main Street lasts for about a quarter-mile before it hits the town's only traffic light, which consists of a single flashing orb at the junctions of Routes 14 and 15. If you turn right, continuing on 15, you'll immediately pass the former home of the Amateur Boxing Club, a garage, a gun shop, a pizza house, and a lumberyard, in that order. A bit farther out, there's a bank and a tractor- repair business. A Ford dealership. A gas station. If you go straight through the light onto 14 South, you'll pass two auto-parts stores, a school, a cemetery, and a series of modest residences. In either direction, you'll see how you could drive through Hardwick in two minutes or less, pushing on the accelerator as the speed limit rises again to 50 and the road unfurls across the lush Vermont countryside, drawing you in and on, helping you forget about the small town you just left behind.

Here's what you won't see: Over the past three years, this little hard-luck burg with a median income 25 percent below the state average and an unemployment rate nearly 40 percent higher has embarked on a quest to create the most comprehensive, functional, and downright vibrant local food system in North America. In the process, Hardwick, Vermont, just might prove what advocates of a decentralized food system have been saying for years: that a healthy agriculture system can be the basis of communal strength, economic vitality, food security, and general resilience in uncertain times.

Indeed, the sudden growth in Hardwick's ag infrastructure has been nothing short of explosive, with numerous food-based businesses and organizations settling in the region, seeking to become a part of the town's answer to the vexing question of what a healthy food system should look like. Vermont Soy Company. High Mowing Organic Seeds. Jasper Hill Cheese. True Yogurt. Claire's Restaurant and Bar. Pete's Greens. Vermont Food Venture Center. The Center for an Agricultural Economy. The Highfields Center for Composting. Honey Garden Apiaries. While a few of these enterprises have been quietly operating and growing for the past 5 to 10 years, most of them have arrived in the past 3 years, bringing nearly 100 jobs to a region that very much needed 100 jobs.

No, you won't see this from the summit of Buffalo Mountain, but you can see it along Hardwick's block-long Main Street business district, where local food-based enterprises (Claire's Restaurant and Bar, the Buffalo Mountain Food Co-op, the Village Diner, the Center for an Agricultural Economy) dominate, in some cases inhabiting buildings that had long sat idle. This is not the end of it. Soon, the Vermont Food Venture Center, a shared-use commercial kitchen and product development, processing, packaging, and shipping facility, will open in Hardwick, providing a place for small-scale producers to create and distribute valueadded goods made with local ingredients, saving them the massive expense and hassle of installing such a facility on their own properties. And the nonprofit Center for an Agricultural Economy recently purchased 15 acres of prime agricultural land only two blocks from downtown; plans call for establishing what the center has dubbed an Eco-Industrial Park, which will potentially include shared office space for the town's ag-based businesses, a year-round, indoor farmers' market, farm and garden demonstration sites, a communal composting operation, and rental plots for budding farmers.

The recent growth in Hardwick's ag-based commerce is notable for something else: These outfits are, by and large, operated by youthful entrepreneurs possessing a surprising degree of business acumen. These are not the back- to-the-land dropouts of the region's 1970s' homestead agricultural revolution, smoking joints, hand-milking goats, and bartering Grateful Dead bootlegs for bunches of warty carrots (well, okay, perhaps some of this is happening); these are, by and large, graduates of our nation's elite liberal arts colleges who have sought ways to apply their six-figure educations to occupations rooted in the soil. They spend their days tending livestock, fields of lettuce, and racks of cloth-bound cheddar and their evenings convening to quaff beers and brainstorm the next step forward for this little settlement that just might be the most important food town in the United States.

If that seems like an outsize claim for a small town with a hard-bitten reputation, one need only consider the most recent outbreak of bad food news. The rise in energy and fertilizer prices has led to double-or in some cases triple-digit food inflation. In early 2008, the price of rice nearly doubled ... in a single month. Milk prices are up nearly 100 percent in two years; ditto for wheat and corn prices. And with the average piece of American food traveling nearly 1,500 miles from farm to table, it's likely to only get worse as finite fossil-fuel reserves continue to shrink. On average, every calorie that lands on your plate soaked up 11 calories of fossil-fuel energy as it was sown, grown, harvested, processed, and shipped. When the price of those 11 fossil-fuel calories doubles, then triples, and finally rises exponentially, the cost of that single calorie of nourishment will rise, too.

It's no great secret that over the past century, America's food system has become increasingly industrialized and centralized. It's an economy of scale that has served us well, at least in strictly economic terms. In 1930, the average American family spent 24.2 percent of its income on food. That number has declined in every single decade since; by 2007, it had fallen to 9.8 percent. Of course, there are hidden costs in the form of health problems wrought by processed foods and an agriculture industry that has become heavily reliant on subsidies paid out of your taxes. But the fact remains: Until very recently, our food has never been cheaper. It has also never been more corrosive to our health and environment.

There are other problems with our centralized food system. Most critically, it's vulnerable to energy-supply disruptions, terrorist attacks, widespread outbreaks of food-borne illness, and any unforeseen emergency that disrupts the constant flow of trains and trailers. And recent events suggest that it simply might not be able to keep up with a population that's growing at the rate of three million mouths annually. Consider this: In 2001, the United States had a $14.3 billion agricultural surplus. By 2005, that surplus had shrunk to $3.8 billion.

It might seem crazily, disturbingly pessimistic to think that the United States, a nation renowned for abundance, could run short of food. But in 2007, driven by drought, biofuels, and the simple limits of soil, global grain stocks declined to a level not seen in 34 years. Given that 2008 saw continued drought in major grain-producing nations such as Australia and biblical flooding in the midwestern United States, it's unlikely the situation will resolve itself soon. In fact, much of the steep run-up in rice prices last spring was due to many rice-exporting nations exporting less. The result wasn't merely an expensive pot of rice; many Costco superstores limited sales of the grain to their customers. That's right: Food rationing, in the United States, in 2008.

What conclusion might we draw from this? Unfortunately, it isn't pretty, because the fact is that our nation's food supply has never been more vulnerable. And we, as consumers of food, share that vulnerability, having slowly, inexorably relinquished control over the very thing that's most critical to our survival. We have become utterly dependent on a supply chain that is entirely beyond our control, in no small part because it typically starts a half-continent away. There is no single action, corporation, or agency that can secure this fragile infrastructure and deliver us a steady supply of nourishment. We could debate endlessly and vigorously over the root cause of this tragic disconnect, and perhaps there's some value in that. But the truth is, we've arrived at this crisis from many and varied directions. Is it the modern archetype of agriculture as a corporate entity, with its deep pockets and unquenchable appetite for profit? Yes. Is it the intricate web of governmental regulations and subsidies that have supported the food-as-a-commodity model? Yes. Is it the inexorable chipping away of our land and skills base, to the point where the vast majority of us no longer possess the means or the knowledge to produce even a head of lettuce? Yes. Is it our willingness to allow these things to slip through our fingers in favor of the ease of supermarket shopping? Yes.

The cheap-food boom has been seductively comfortable for us all. Let's face it: Farming is damn hard work, typically done for damnable pay. By relinquishing this burden, by handing the reins to the corporations, we relieved ourselves of a lot of backaches, sunburns, and financial strains. We struck a deal: The agribusinesses got a guaranteed chunk of our income and our full faith in their ability to keep us sustained. In return, we got to pursue lifestyles that don't revolve around soil and toil and that allow us a measure of leisure time unprecedented in human history. In early 2009, American television viewing reached an all-time record of a stunning 151 hours per month. That's more than five hours per day, and let's be clear about something: You and I don't get to sprawl across the sofa masticating pork rinds and watching American Idol unless someone else is growing the food.

As long as the corporations keep their end of the bargain, it's a pretty sweet deal, presuming one overlooks the pallid, depleted nature of the foodstuffs they're providing. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that they won't be able to hold up their end of the bargain forever or, if recent events are any indication, even for much longer. This leaves us facing a rather daunting truth: The fact is that we need to rethink our entire food-supply chain for reasons of economic security, health security, and even social security. We need to reinvent how we grow and distribute food; we need to re-scale and decentralize.

It is hard to grasp the enormity of this task on a national scale. It is no less challenging or important than wrenching our economy and way of life from the clutches of petroleum. And yet there has been no consensus on the issue; indeed, there has been little in the way of serious debate among anyone beyond the growing but still very much in the minority community of locavores who bounce around farmers' markets with their reusable organic- cotton satchels. To be sure, they are an important part of our agricultural renewal. But between them and a healthy national food system lie thousands and thousands of acres of corn and soy and wheat sown in depleted soils and coaxed to life with chemical fertilizers, waiting to be harvested, amalgamated into shelf-stable concoctions, packaged, and trucked to a nation of people who have already forgotten it wasn't always like this. And who can't imagine that it won't always remain so.

To understand how Hardwick has gotten to this place and to know where it might go from here, it is necessary to understand where it has been. In many ways, it is not unlike scores of other rural communities scattered throughout the American landscape, built on industries that long ago packed up their bags and left. In Hardwick, that industry was granite, and it's hard to overstate how much vibrancy, excitement, and money the stone provided the town. Over a period of three decades, spanning the late 1800s to the early 1920s, nearly 300 granite companies operated in the Hardwick area, mining the rock veins that run like spiderwebs throughout the surrounding hills. By 1918, the largest of these outfits, the Woodbury Granite Company, was the biggest granite operation in the world. It supplied the stone for the state capitols of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as Chicago's City Hall and Cook County Courthouse. Even a cursory exploration of the region's densely wooded hills will reveal the century- old detritus of the trade: lengths of frayed and rusted cable, pieces of corroded metal shorn from some mysterious tool or another, impossibly heavy slabs of discarded stone jumbled together like a god's game of pickup sticks.

These were raucous times, marked by the swagger and pent-up energy of men who spent the week engaged in hazardous duty and needed to blow off a little steam on weekends before returning to the constant dangers of tumbling stone and the pervasive granite dust that caused silicosis-induced lung disease, known throughout the region as "stonecutter's tuberculosis." The accident reports of the day read like gruesome parodies of themselves, bearing phrases such as "crushed between stone blocks," "wound around machinery gearing," "crushed between two railroad cars," "struck by flying metal from an exploding steam boiler," and "premature quarry explosion." If you'd just maneuvered through your week without having had your name attached to one of these scenarios, you'd want to kick up your heels a little, too.