Institute For The Future

What Beer can Tell Us About the Future of Local Food

 

Last week, the Slow Money Alliance posted the results of a survey finding that 98 percent of independent retailers in New England would prefer to carry foods and other products sourced from the region. Just a few days later, the New York Times highlighted one of the key challenges in making local food products more widely available: Plenty of local farmers in Vermont and nearby states have the land to raise animals, but don't have access to slaughterhouses and other critical infrastructure to make local animal husbandry practical.

 

The challenge of developing local systems for meat production have been exacerbated by conflicting desires among local residents: At the same time that demand for local food is increasing, most people don't actually want to live near a slaughterhouse. "“We’re not against slaughterhouses,” one leader of an effort to prevent local slaughterhouses told the New York Times. “But you wouldn’t open up a discotheque next to a church.”

 

In fact, these sorts of concerns and infrastructure problems are one subset of challenges facing the local food movement. Local food isn't always viable, or, for that matter, the most environmentally friendly way of growing food. For example, even in California, which has one of the best climates on the planet for growing a diverse array of foods, it can sometimes make better environmental sense to ship fresh fruits thousands of miles than attempt to grow the same fruit out of season.

 

But I don't think the local food movement, at its core, is just about environmentalism. Rather, I think it's also about reconnecting food--an emotional item if ever there was one--to something more emotional than a drive-thru.

 

Which is what caught my eye about a new beer called Jubilee. A couple weeks ago, the Atlantic's Clay Risen highlighted Jubilee, developed by a friend of his, that has a unique way of creating social connections and community relationships through food.

 

I haven't tried the beer, but what makes it worth noting is that 50 percent of Mark's [the brewer's] profits will go to the Oasis Center, a one-stop-shop nonprofit for at-risk youth in Nashville. Why Oasis? In part because another classmate of ours, Anderson Williams, is a director—oh, and also because it's an amazingly successful effort to bring real change to the lives of Nashville's lower-income families.

 

Mark's not making a one-off charity beer, though. He plans to turn Jubilee into a viable brewing business, and the mid-South craft-beer market—which the few regional brewers, including Yazoo, in Nashville, and Old Towne, in Huntsville, are much too small to fill—is a great place to start. At the same time, he hopes to keep his commitment to Oasis, thereby proving that craft beers can be good for the palate and the community at the same time.

 

 

 

 

As Risen adds, "Looked at one way, it's a horrible way to get rich. But for those who go into brewing for the love of the beer, it's a great way to give back to the community." And that, I think, is why Jubilee beer offers such a strong lesson about the future of local food--in many cases, local eaters and small-scale producers are more interested in creating social value and making a decent living, rather than simply making money for the sake of making more money. And projects like Jubilee, which, as best I can tell, doesn't set out to use local ingredients (which would likely be impractical for a variety of sourcing reasons), offer a different way of creating those local connections.

 

None of which is to doubt other forms of local food--my sense, for all that slaughterhouses and other pieces of infrastructure can be controversial is that the food web will see a strong wave of de-globalizing forces that push toward more local forms of production over the coming decade. But I also suspect we'll see a recognition that there are foods like beer that can't be produced in many climates, at least not in environmentally friendly ways. And in those instances, we'll see different--but equally strong--efforts to connect purchases of global foods to some other aspect of the local community.