Transforming Petaluma’s Food System

As we’ve seen, the list of ailments related to our current food system is long. One of the challenges to addressing these ailments lies with adopting a frame of reference that is large enough to accommodate a transformative solution that addresses many of them simultaneously.

The frame of reference called for here is a system view that takes into account the long-range economic, social and environmental impacts of intended actions. This is fundamentally a “sustainability” perspective, and is critical to our ability to successfully address a complex challenge such as improving our regional food system.

One of the tools of systems thinking is lifecycle analysis. Lifecycle analysis attempts to identify and quantify the social, economic, and ecological impacts of significant activities, which standard accounting doesn’t recognize.

Under standard accounting practices, the social and environmental costs of many of our market systems are either not recognized, or appear later on accounts that are unlinked to the activity that caused them. As examples, birth defects among farmworker families is not only a costly tragedy for those families, it also increases our society’s overall long-term healthcare costs; poor learning among nutritionally deprived children not only results in diminished educational and career opportunities for the children, but also increases additional ongoing “social” costs associated with government and NGO assistance; groundwater contaminated by nitrates from intensive factory farming may require remediating or relocating an entire regional water supply. When such costs are anticipated in advance, the opportunity to avoid them by investing in a safe food system early on will become much more attractive than solving the larger problems later on.

Guided by a sustainability perspective, we may be able to design and implement solutions that, instead of spawning multiple unintended consequences, yield multiple benefits. For example, creating a new community garden can bring together neighbors who have never before spoken to each other to work together to improve a small piece of land in their neighborhood that, in turn, can: produce healthy, fresh, pesticide-free produce for pennies on the dollar compared to what it costs in the local supermarket; strengthen the social network of the neighborhood which reduces crime; provide important new self-reliance skills to people with limited means and education; create opportunities for cross-generational interaction and healthy pastimes (as seniors living in the nearby senior housing complex find themselves working alongside children and teenagers they may have never even seen before, yet who live on the same block). Community gardens can improve property values while helping to improve local air quality and decrease climate changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These are not imaginary benefits—these are well-documented outcomes associated with community gardens throughout the country, including Petaluma. Community Gardens are just one of many components of a healthy local food system, which we’ll explore in subsequent sections.

In Petaluma, we have many existing local efforts upon which to build. These include a healthy and growing network of organic family farms, perhaps the largest remaining concentration of relatively small, family-owned dairies in California, one of the nation’s leading local government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a constrained water supply that is stimulating new approaches to resource management, and widespread consumer interest in healthy lifestyles.