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RE: Quality of organic dialogue



Three comments on listening to new voices and the hidden bright spot in 
hollowing out local areas of intelligence about real food.    

1. Thanks, David Leonard, for a start in helping agriculture types to 
learn more about nutrition and health. There may be other contributing 
causes for the Big 6 diseases, but your explanation makes sense to me. 
I'm ready to learn more from nutritionists, the professionals at the 
other end of the food chain. You folks are the magnet for people 
suffering the most obvious effects of a food system gone industrial. What 
you find should be of great interest to those of us trying to make the 
producing end more healthful.

2. Sustainable ag people keep telling the rest of the world to pay 
attention to farmers and food and ecological systems. Build coalitions. 
Reach across boundaries to dialogue with people who used to fear and 
loathe us because they saw only the deconstructive part of the challenge 
to conventional farming.

It's going to be tough building trust with new constituentcies if SANET 
can't learn to listen to a range of voices within complementary 
disciplines. Assertions and challenges on points of fact help 
non-scientists like myself learn where the shared truth and the ragged 
edges of science are.

Not helpful are trashings of posts where the trasher assumes some 
superior knowledge but doesn't spell out what the actual points of debate 
are. Remember, we generalists don't know the "hot button" terms that are 
thought to reveal a person's ideology or school of thought in the 
disciplines where you might spend your life.

3. RE: establishing premium value for whole, local, well-grown foods in a 
food world of industrial food-like products.

My wife asked: Why/how can corporations successfully create demand for 
non-foods, when farmers, their marketers, concerned mothers and health 
associations combined can't (anymore) maintain similar demand for real 
food? 

Part of the answer is that the messages to eat right are usually general 
and at times diverse in their rationale, while the temptations to eat 
junk are superbly targeted and specific--they always show the package.

Part of the answer is that 20 years of popular environmentalism has 
largely ignored farmers who use their land redemptively. It's a long sell 
to go from being perceived as part of the problem to being part of the 
answer. 

And part of the problem is spiritual, in as much bored, insecure, 
alienated, lonely, busy people (especially parents who feel guilty) are 
looking to food products to do all the good, happy, satisfying, exciting 
things that advertising shows they will--but can't. So they buy more, or 
try the improved version, always hoping....

Real food that is ecologically grown, cared for, harvested, prepared 
and/or enjoyed by people who have some connection with each other is a 
different entity. People who create the time for these activities have to 
have good reasons to do so. They've have transforming experiences at some 
level -- intellectual, physical, cultural or whimsical -- that made 
something click.

What's great is that those moments happen best when real people are 
attached. That reality makes local and regional relationship marketing 
and education viable, indeed gives it an advantage--at least to consumers 
who trust real people more than electronic images.   

There still are some of those folks, aren't there?

And yes, real food needs lots of skilled marketers and packagers to 
create the best market presence possible for everybody that hasn't yet 
had the experience that flips their switch.     
  
-------
Greg Bowman, Editorial Director 
Rodale Institute
611 Siegfriedale Road, Kutztown PA 19530-9749
phone 610.683.1487
fax 610.683.1494
gbowma@rodaleinst.org

....Communicating to create whole farms, whole food, whole communities 
for the whole world...


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