I've actually never been to a community garden that didn't have a substantial portion of its plots devoted to local food banks, as well as plots in which low income households were enabled to grow their own. I agree with you that this helps, but we also need more community gardens, more gardens in general, better agricultural policies (right now, regional food banks are dependent on industrial agriculture and offer them tacit support, for fear that people will go hungry - setting agricultural activists and anti-poverty activists against each other on the subject of things like the farm bill, which is disastrous - we need not only more food for the poor, but better food policy so that there are fewer poor), more food and housing security (there is no incentive to plant gardens and fruit trees in houses you will be evicted from shortly) and a host of other major shifts. I know you know this, but it is worth re-articulating.

Food has got to get on the front burner, ahead of most other things. Because there are plenty of good mitigation strategies out there for transportation and a host of other things. But the only answer to the coming food crisis is radical transformation.

Sharon

To give an idea. In the community garden which my wife and I run:
2/3 of the people are transient - often Chinese grandparents who are visiting for most of a year to help their kids with new babies. Language problems are a real issue. How can you enforce garden rules when you can't communicate?
Just to be different, other community gardens in town have waiting lists.
Theft is an issue. At least yearly we have people who stop by and just start picking things. After all it's a "community" garden and that means that you can help yourself right?
A small fraction is always well meaning, but never ending talkers, who plant very little and are forever asking for advice about everything.
Another fraction is always taking whatever they can - using the walkways, stretching their garden every way possible.
We've tried to set odd plots and unused space for the Food Bank - but people who are assigned to weed and water it do nothing. Trying to deal with the Food Bank is another issue. Fresh Food!?? What's that? You try to drop it off, but the place is close; they're only open wierd hours or don't know how to handle food that isn't in a cardboard box. It makes us wonder if it's ever used.

Many couples new to the country come and plant gardens - bringing varieties (and pests) which we've never seen. Very few gardeners are WASP's as it were. This is also true of big parks in town - English is a rarely heard language on weekends when the rich white folk escape to where ever it is they go with their kids.
Rarely do people in our garden plant crops that can be stored. This year the Chinese went beserk with the tallest sunflowers I've ever seen. Now we've got stocks from hell that don't compost ....
Of course we can't have composters (pile or box) because they get stuffed full quickly of weeds and plastic bags of dog droppings and refuse.
I'm the only one who planted potatoes and carrots and few planted onions and only 3 plots planted corn. The coons got the corn (my "indian" corn was attacked last and I was forced to pick it before maturity). Rutabaga doesn't seem to mind the hard soil and loved our Square Food Garden.

The soil is clay crap and we're bringing in (at personal expense) a 22 yd truck of mushroom compost. My spidey senses are tingling - I'm going to have to distribute it and work it into the soil in all garden plots. People will buy bags of weed seed infested "black earth" bags, but trying to get a group (transient) to pay for a truckload of compost is nigh on impossible for us. For the curious that compost is around $5/ton and delivery is about 2/3 of the cost (22yds is around 20 tons). It's dirt cheap compared to any other compost or soil ammendments.

My expectation is that these gardens will be pillaged if times get tough. There is nobody there watching over them.

I expect that food growing will move closer to home ASAP when things get worse - taking over the front yard, sidewalks ... Seed saving will become the issue. I'm working on that with potatoes this year as spring supplies go in just a few days.

If I was buying another house I'd buy backing onto a park and extend the garden into the park (I've seen that many times - and the city will do nothing about it - even if they fence off the garden) or onto power lines (we have a CSA which has about 2 acres under cultivation - all in the powerline right of way).

Leanan-- do you have a link for lawsuits such as you mentioned? Or is that just urban folklore?

I suspect that most of the food destruction by supermarkets is done more to keep prices up than to protect against lawsuits -- but I could be wrong

I once had a job in the warehouse of a supermarket chain. The waste food was kept secure until the disposal van arrived. I was told this was because they would be held liable if anybody ate the food and got ill.

Pretty much agree, Airdale. However, I would beware excessive romanticism about the past.

A lot of the people I followed, and who followed me, "back to the land" were funded by family trusts and food stamps. They were gone when the money dried up, or when they got bored -- or when they finally landed a lucrative job in an investment bank.

I very much take umbrage to your characterization of the homeless as "the underbelly of our countries misfits." This sounds like something Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly would say.

With the current economic downturn there will be many more unfortunate souls who join the ranks of the homeless. And the social safety net in the United States has all but been dismantled.

I lived in downtown San Antonio some years back and the many homeless living on the streets became a "problem" because downtown SA is also a tourist destination. The city fathers began a program to systematically remove them. This caused a huge uproar from many of San Antonio's more compasionate citizenry. A huge public debate ensued and the end result was the city fathers ended up with egg all over their faces.

One of the things that came out then was that many of the homeless are not "misfits" or "the underbelly" but persons with mental or emotional problems. Under the "starve the beast" philosophy that has dominated our country's political scene for the past 35 years funding for mental institutions has been slashed, and many people who once had a place to live are now put out on the streets. Granted, this is just one facet of a very complex problem, but my point is that many of these homeless people are not on the street because they are "misfits" or refuse to work. Many, if not most, are unfortunate people with problems not of thier own making.

I think we have rising food prices and deflation, which is a very scary situation. Rising food prices can't compensate for the loss of money in the total economy, so we have deflation, but people aren't finding it easier to eat, but harder.

As Airdale points out, food prices for farmers aren't rising, particularly given the high price of inputs. And that is likely to lead to less food, not more - in the poor world, that's already happening, fields aren't being planted because people can't afford it.
I suspect it will happen here too.

Leanan, I agree there is a lot of waste - but food waste is one of those things that is likely not to decline that much in a Depression - we may find people allowing the hungry to eat expired canned goods, but there will be fewer canned goods going around, while more fields sit empty or aren't harvested and food is lost to lack of refrigeration by those who can't afford it or those who experience power losses. I really recommend everyone read this (I only wrote a bit of it, most of it is an excerpt from testimony given to congress about the food situation during the Great Depression).

http://sharonastyk.com/2008/10/05/the-great-depression-the-credit-crisis...

I agree that strategies for reducing food waste are important - but I also think that the forces working to increase waste will be powerful, between people's ignorance at how to handle food without energy to varieties not bred for a low energy society to transport loss, etc... I am all for the reduction of waste where it is possible, but I doubt that most of the major gains in food security will be had there.

Sharon

So do we have inflation? Or do we have deflation?

Things just keep getting curiouser and curiouser.

There is about a 5-6 month lag between raw food input prices and prices in grocery stores and restaurants - remember early this year grain prices were flying but prices in stores were not going up? but then they did this summer? Minneapolis wheat was at $25 per bushel and now below $6. corn dropped more than half etc. - in a few months food prices will come down sharply, and probably with less options availabile...

A WSJ story about UK food prices:

U.K.'s Rising Food Prices Hamper Economic Policy

LONDON -- The cost of food in the U.K. is rising at a faster rate than elsewhere, putting more pressure on an economy already squeezed by the credit crisis.

A 12.7% increase in food prices in September from a year earlier helped to drive overall inflation last month to 5.2%, its highest level in 16 years, the Office for National Statistics reported Tuesday.

Amid the global banking crisis, the high food prices are further crimping Prime Minister Gordon Brown's ability to adjust economic policy. Because they add to inflation, they affect the Bank of England's ability to bring down rates, and take more money out of consumers' pockets. Though Mr. Brown's handling of the banking crisis has boosted his standing from its lows a month ago, food prices are politically damaging: They're immediately visible and can make people feel poorer quickly.

Here's a local story I heard at a county Health Action meeting about one family's response to high food prices.

A 12 year old girl came to the local Boys and Girls Club to receive some of the charitable distribution of fresh fruit. They passed a plate of cut-up fruit around, but when it came to her, she held onto it. When asked to pass it on, she said, no, she needed it all. She said she never had breakfast or lunch. Every day, however, one of her parents would take her to McD's on the way home from school and get her a Big Mac and maybe some fries and a drink. That was her daily diet.

How do we meet these kinds of needs and take these non-solutions "off the table"?

There are store brands of cereal selling for about $2 a pound, and some unadvertised brands at about the same price. Those are the ones we buy, when we want cereal. Mostly we use a store brand of bread that costs $1.70 for 20 ounces -- bread is just another form of cereal after all. I don't know how Kelloggs and General Mills manage to move their high-priced over-sweetened products -- advertising, probably. And the consumer pays for the ads.

At $4.00/bu there's about a nickle's worth of corn in a box of corn flakes.

There's probably about $0.20 worth of diesel in the transport.

Firstly, I don't always eat when I'm hungry but often at the time when I'm at home so I can cook or when the people I want the company of want to eat. I think there has been some degree of people "eating when convenient" since the development of cheap clocks (since they corresponded to people starting to be paid for hours worked rather than job done).

I don't know about in the US, but I think a big part of the food wastage in the UK is "not eating enough": people buy what they think they'll eat at the supermarket and then don't finish the prepackaged portion and throw the rest away and have food that goes out of date/mouldy and gets thrown out. Ironically I probably waste less food (directly at least) than my parents partly because I live five minutes walk from a tiny inner city supermarket whilst they live in the suburbs. So they tend to do "the weekly shop" at a big store and buy things "in case" whereas because I know I can buy whatever I want immediately if the urge takes me, I can afford to wait until an urge does actually take me.

Dealing with food wastage (in the short term) is probably best tackled by working on people's planning skills and encouraging local stores.

Thoreau,
Whom someone bashed on a DB a day or so ago, spoke this way:

Clothes are to preserve body heat.
A habitat is used to alter outdoor weather.
A fire does the same by making it like summer.
Food does aught but create body heat.

All things revolve then around FOOD, and the rest is just to make it last or preserve the heat of the body. However out current culture uses it as a drug or addiction.

They would not be able to understand Thoreau's exposition.

Without food all the rest is just gilding the lily.

We have zero concern for out foodstuffs currently.
All that is about to rapidly change..IMO of course.

Those who grow food,and covet it are very aware of the work involved but its really what man was created for...(if you believe so)...to tend the Garden...know as Pardes. Actually produce from trees(the orchard) but with the downfall then the soil was where man obtained his needs ..needed body heat.

YVMD(your views may differ) and most likely do. I find some solace in the bible more of late than previously..and study it in Hebrew...slowlllyyyyyy

Airdale