Activating the Full Circle Economy
By Brad Masi

In the film Stranger Than Paradise, directed by former Akron resident Jim Jarmusch, we find the character Willie seated at the dinner table with his sister Eva, who has traveled to New York City from Hungary to visit him. She appears bewildered as she watches him gobble down a T.V. dinner.

Confused and staring at the meat, Eva asks Willie, “Where does that meat come from?” After several attempts to answer Eva's question, the frustrated Willie puts down his fork and jabs a finger at each of the items sectioned off in his tray. “Look, Eva. Stop bugging me. This is the way that we eat in America. I've got my meat, my potatoes; I've got my vegetables, and I've got my dessert. And I don't even have to wash the dishes.”

This movie scene depicts the convenience factor that has come to dominate our American food system. It suggests that a lack of connection to our food is not only better, but preferred. Most people in the U.S. fail to take the time to consider the origins of their food or the amount of fossil fuel needed to transport it or the fate of its discarded packaging. Country highways, littered with disposable meal containers and soda bottles, display a visual of this disdain – open the window, toss it out and keep right on going. No worries and certainly no dishes.

Litter is but one obvious negative side effect of a lack of connection to a healthy food system. Add to that personal health issues such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and planetary health threats such as soil erosion, habitat loss and climate change. Eva's innocent bewilderment of her brother's behavior speaks volumes as to how distorted our food has become. When we re-connect the food on our table with the impact it has on the broader world, we begin to understand how each of our daily dietary choices really does shape the world in which we live.

Fortunately, we still have choices. An increasing number of food producers, transporters and retailers are choosing to make public health, ecology and a sustainable economy a priority in relation to our dietary practices. As more consumers move toward eating within their own local “foodshed,” those previously disparate strands of health, land and economy become more tightly intertwined. We then can look to our local food system as a starting place for discovering food alternatives and understanding how a truly sustainable or “full-circle” economy might look. As a contrast to Willie's factory-produced meal, a full-circle meal links the eater to the string of connections that brings the meal together. Those connections include the farmer that produced it, the land that yielded it, the soil and water that nourished it, the family and neighbors who share it, and the web of connected partners that build a local economy around it.

In the City of Cleveland and in Lorain County, the City Fresh program offers a structure for creating a full-circle economy. A network of local farmers directly supplies 16 neighborhood “Fresh Stops.” Each neighborhood features a collection of “shareholders” who pool their financial resources in order to support the farmers in their own city and the wider region. Shareholders also adjust their own weekly share payments, with some paying more so that the cost of food is reduced for folks with fewer resources. Instead of consuming factory-produced food that converts fossil-fuel energy into highly processed and often unhealthy foods, local food changes hands directly. Instead of a 2,500 mile linear chain of food distribution where the farmer and consumer never meet, shareholders can visit the farm where their food is coming from and learn about its origins. In a local food system, money travels through a tighter web of connections, which keeps the dollars multiplying and yielding benefits within the community.

The full-circle economy that City Fresh cultivates goes beyond the simple transaction of supplying healthy food to Northeast Ohio neighborhoods. An ecological and sustainable difference also is being realized through the organization's efforts. The distribution truck for City Fresh is powered by vegetable oil. Through a partnership with Bon Appétit, Case Western Reserve University and Oberlin College, the truck operates from waste grease, which it collects while making food deliveries to the two institutions. As food is dropped off, a pump system collects waste grease from the cafeterias and stores it in an on-board tank where it is later filtered and then utilized as fuel. Within the City Fresh system, waste is translating into food and fuel, thus realizing the beginnings of a food system free of fossil-based transportation.

But avoiding the use of fossil fuels is not the only way City Fresh is walking their talk. The program is administered by the New Agrarian Center which operates out of an office constructed from strawbales, earth-plasters and locally-harvested timber. In the same way that City Fresh fosters a local food system, the strawbale building demonstrates the potential for a locally-based materials economy. The building taps into three resources abundant in Northeast Ohio – clay, plaster, hardwoods and straw. In addition to local material origins, the structure provides the best possible means of taking advantage of passive energy savings. The strawbale construction keeps the building cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. The building literally grows out of the ground and can be turned into compost to grow food after its useful life has expired. This building epitomizes the practice of a full-circle economy – every use has an adaptive re-use that does not add carbon to the atmosphere or burden future generations in any significant way.

In many ways, the full-circle economy is about restoring direct connections between a community and its surrounding lands. In the movie scenario, Willie represents that cultural aspect of America that is so busy or disinterested that it does not want to be bogged down by a connection to a wider community of life. The very act of eating local foods will begin to restore lost connections with the land and the wider community.

In the film Real Low Calorie Diet, fifth-generation farmer Joe Logan stands in front of a century-old barn and recalls, “Historically over the millennia, there has been an extremely intimate relationship between humankind and the food that we eat. Over the past 50 years especially, that relationship has become quite estranged. We do not know the foods that come to our table anymore… and frankly, there is a lot of justifiable anxiety about that.” Beginning to know the foods that we eat means reviving the community way of life. When we begin to think about energy, transportation and shelter in the same way, as a people we can begin to see our way out of some of our larger global predicaments. It can be easy to get overwhelmed by the bad news about climate change or spreading poverty. But we all need to take a first step toward an alternative way of living and being. An effective and easy first step is to start with the food on our plates, which embodies our most intimate connection to the world; then let it grow from there.

Brad Masi is the executive director of the New Agrarian Center, based in Oberlin, Ohio. Masi is a graduate of Oberlin College and has a master's degree in urban studies from Cleveland State University. He works extensively on supporting local-food systems through writing, speaking, teaching and organizing. More information about the low-carbon diet and urban agrarianism can be found at www.GotTheNAC.org.