RE: Quality of organic dialogue

Greg Bowman (gbowma@rodaleinst.org)
Fri, 13 Dec 1996 12:51:18 -0800

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...