What does local food mean in Thailand? This question was at the center of a "Youth and Local Food" weekend event, hosted a few weeks ago by
Action Aid Thailand and
Biothai in Bangkok. Six members of SFS' "Kids Love Nature" club attended the weekend of local food campaign brainstorming (and practice), and exchanged with students from Ranong and Pattaloong Provinces in the south, as well as college students from Bangkok.
Conference attendees (between 11 and 20) defined local food with a list: local ingredients (bought or grown/found), representative of the culture of the region, preserves local plant genetics, promotes ecological health and supports the local economy. Clear enough?
Campaigns must seek to make long term impact and help others make real change in their lives. If the goal is to have consumers buy organic food or change the way they buy food, we can't force this change - this isn't fair to them and it is an unachievable goal. (Opening the Surin Green Market - providing an alternative - allows people to come on their own and purchase using their own change of thinking) It is important to change one's way of thinking about food, but how do we know/when do we know that it actually has happened?
The youth conference distributed information directly to students, naming the corporations that have power in Thailand’s food system (agro-industry): Cargill, Monsanto, Syngenta, Nestle, ADM, Tyson and Unilever among others. This was thanks to P' Gae's entertaining power-point and break-down of the students' purchases from our market excursions:
She's headed to Slow Food's
Terra Madre Conference in Turin, Italy
Students also got an update about Thailand’s “chicken industry”: 70% is controlled by three companies (50,00-10,00 “broilers” per farm, raised in about 40 days and often exported to Japan), 20 % is considered small-scale (less than 50,000 chickens per farm) and 10 % is what one might call in the U.S.; “free range” (raised by small-scale farmers and sold locally).
The experience of “non-local” food after being in a context of “ultra-local” food (small-scale, integrated farms here in Surin) is bizarre – everything looks less appetizing when bought in a crowded, less-than-clean market on the side of a Bangkok street. Prices seem entirely unrepresentative of the labor and resources put into everything being sold (5 B, 10 B, etc. per quantity). Yet, this is reality in a system that increasingly separates us from our food.
Witnessing packaged foods from Tesco Lotus and Carrefour – ostensibly the same as buying from a supermarket in the U.S. – had generated a feeling almost like anger. Yet apparently this is what Thai consumers want?
(add for US Imports in the Sunday Bangkok Post - "USA FOOD FAIR 2008")
The same foods that we purchase at a outdoor market are repackaged and “consumerized” in a new way, for the purpose of convenience and (modernity)? Nonetheless these foods are still more “local” than most of what one can buy at U.S. supermarkets. The Surin Green Market seems such an abberation from the direction in which the global food system is headed. Foods become without meaning when we are distanced to such extremes.
Michael Pollan's recent letter to the President-elect, "Farmer in Chief," speaks clearly to this kind of consumers' predicamant in the U.S.:
"The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another."
This kind of technological access is a long way off for consumers in rural Thailand, but it is important for us to consider. Buying from the fresh market means a direct purchase from a small vendor who may know how far it has come/if chemicals were used in production, while Carrefour/Tesco can clarify “food safety” or chemical-free, we don’t know where it comes from before it reaches distribution centers in Ayuttaya and the corporations reap the benefits of production. Middlemen control (lower) the price, locally, after know what products will sell at what prices in the market. Both are operating in grey areas for the consumer – tradeoffs must be made for a consumer who works to educate themselves.
Lower costs of production for supermarkets, but the costs of operating a supermarket are higher (A/C, marketing, packaging). Consumers chose to buy things, but they have an alternative – not do buy – but they need to have somewhere else to go. Average income per product might be less for supermarkets than small vendors, but they sell a significant amount more.
In caring for a local food system, what does it mean in Surin? What is important for our local foods?
For the "Kids Love Nature" group, a local food system means being able to produce it themselves (and make it delicious without using MSG) and not using chemicals in production. A simple answer, yet also representative of the economy and environment that these village kids live in. We still have a lot of homework to do - we'll need to carry out a local food campaign, take pictures of our events or bring what we grow to the next event in Bangkok (sometime next spring). In the meantime, some of our campaign brainstorms:
The cooperative mill finally got the rice bran press it was waiting for. By pressing the bran that is polished off our finished product - white rice - we can make a high-quality oil to be used for cooking or as a dietary supplement. While for many health-conscious consumers, leaving the brain on the rice grain - brown rice - is prefered, our largest markets, both domestically and abroad, demand for white rice. Further, there is a growing market for rice bran oil, and this is especially true for organic oils.
Rice Fund usually distributes the rice bran to our members for use in making compost or animal feed, but we're hoping that this investment pays off and we can reinvest some of our earnings into SFS projects. Producing rice bran oil allows the cooperative to diversify products and earn more short-term income. We haven't developed a finished product yet, but as our small "lab" below shows, the mill is testing the right filter techniques and bottling-methods. Also below, the bags of dry bran "cakes" that are left over, are still good to use for making animal feed.
We're hoping to have some "Rice Fund Cooperative Organic Rice Bran Oil" ready for sale next month.
