**Summary Nuggets:**

- **Adaptation & Seasonality:** Traditional cooking in the Caribbean and elsewhere was largely intuitive, grounded in the use of in-season, locally available, or preserved ingredients, reflecting resilience and adaptation to local environments.

- **Transmission of Knowledge:** Food traditions and recipes, such as Trinidad’s Palau, are handed down informally, highlighting the importance of oral culture and family in maintaining culinary heritage.

- **Global Network & Slow Food Connection:** There is recognition that safeguarding biodiversity and traditional food practices is part of a larger, global movement that transcends single countries, especially critical in times of crisis.

- **Artisanal & Small-scale Production:** The popularity of artisanal foods is rising, emphasizing small-batch, traditional methods that support local economies, foster sustainability, and reduce environmental impact.

- **Regenerative Farming & Sustainability:** Advocates argue that supporting small-scale farmers using regenerative agricultural practices is essential for a sustainable future, as these methods restore soil health and foster resilient food systems.

- **Historical Context & Place:** In places like Lamu, Kenya, history and local food traditions are intertwined with architecture and community, suggesting the slow food ethos naturally aligns with longstanding local practices.

- **Community & Climate:** Initiatives like F&B waste reduction and sharing excess produce highlight grassroots approaches to sustainable food, gaining support from significant authorities (e.g., Pope Francis for biodiversity efforts).

- **Response to Globalization:** Recent global supply chain disruptions underscore the fragility of industrialized food systems, making a case for building localized food economies that enhance security and resilience.

**Key Ideas:**
The Slow Food movement is not solely a Western construct but resonates with diverse, localized food cultures worldwide.

**Summary Nuggets:**

- **Adaptation & Seasonality:** Traditional cooking in the Caribbean and elsewhere was largely intuitive, grounded in the use of in-season, locally available, or preserved ingredients, reflecting resilience and adaptation to local environments.

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Intuition Is The Main Ingredient In Authentic Caribbean Cuisine

Caribbean culinary traditions originated with intuitive or “feel” cooking. The most common foods associated with the region were not born of recipe books or cooking shows or popularized by the latest influencers or Instagram feeds.

The most popular Caribbean dishes have been a product of adaptation. The Taino Indians and African Maroons of Jamaica originally used Jamaican jerk seasoning as a preservative. The Barbadian national dish of cou-cou, made of corn meal and okra or ochroes (which came to the region from Africa) typically paired with flying fish, became popular during the early colonial period due to its affordability, and bears a striking resemblance to Ghanaian Banku.

Caribbean intuitive cooking was conceived on early Amerindian settlements, in the heart of West Africa, on Trans-Atlantic slave ships, in the migration of Chinese and Indian indentured labourers, through Syrian merchant migrations and accentuated by English, Spanish, Dutch and Danish colonial influences. The earliest Caribbean food pathways were rooted in struggle and— in resilience— and despite the advent of technology, Caribbean culinary traditions remain in the most authentic of places, in the DNA and the souls of Caribbean people.

Intuitive cooking in its purest form uses ingredients that are in season, doesn’t depend on a well-stocked pantry and is both mindful and “heartful.” There is no room for fad diets, strict recipes or ultra-processed packaged meals. Creativity, innovation and ingenuity are all born here.

“Cooking from an intuitive standpoint allows our kitchen to express itself daily based on what’s available,” says Chef Digby Strideron, a Contemporary West Indian Chef from St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands.

Seasonal ingredients and regional recipes inspire Strideron, “bringing out” his creativity and allowing him to “grow with” his cuisine. He has spent the past decade as a forager, “chasing flavors and stories” and says that “focusing in on the technique and ideology behind the recipes is more important than creating the same dish over and over in the same manner.”

“Being intuitive in the kitchen allows me to tap into the creative process behind cooking and express who I am,” says Strideron. “Traditionally, intuitive cooking made sense as our ancestors had to rely on what was in season— what they were able to hunt or preserve. These things changed daily but the cuisine remained and while all recipes continue to change, understanding why is the most important part.”

While food traditions are a form of cultural inheritance, the culinary ingenuity that has extended into modern times, has built on the Caribbean’s spirit of resourcefulness and resilience, creating space for healers, high-end chefs as well as Diasporic and foreign interpretations.

Chef Sherri Hillman is not your ordinary chef— in fact, she refers to herself as a cooking gypsy. She has travelled the world delighting clients and audiences with her “back to the earth” perspective on cooking— but she says that when she arrived to Barbados in 1990 and the Cayman Islands, in 2007, her soul found its home.

During her years in the Cayman Islands, Hillman hosted regular farm to table dinners, becoming somewhat of the Tony Robbins of the anti-ultra-processed food movement, evangelizing her guests around the importance of seasonal, local eating and “cooking from scratch.”

“When I cook for someone, I cook with my intuition in the moment, my connection to what is available and with intention to provide the healthiest, most delicious meal possible,” says Hillman. “Food is our connection to life and I feel people have forgotten that. We have bodies that can heal themselves if fed the right food. So few people and doctors share or push that value. It is not even something that is taught in schools.”

And Jamaican Chef, Ben Tsedek knows a thing or two about healing through food.

Tsedek is a Rastafarian raw vegan chef, an organic farmer, a medical qi gong practitioner and an African bio mineral balance practitioner who commutes between the hills of Mandeville Jamaica and his farm in Boca Raton Florida.

“You don’t have to take a life to sustain a life,” says Tsedek, who ascribes to the Yoruba perspective of asé as life force that can be found in the foods we eat. “If I eat a pumpkin, I don’t have to kill the pumpkin plant. My food doesn’t carry a karmic debt.”

The former owner of popular Kingston raw vegan restaurant, Firelight, Tsedek believes in the “power of the sun” to cook his food and stresses that “if people would listen to their bodies and cook accordingly, they would eat in harmony with their genetic predisposition and prevent or cure themselves from ailments.”

Tsedek says that his intuitive process of cooking his prized soups and other dishes aids with cleansing, digestion and regeneration. His favourite ingredients are all found in the context of his natural environment and include pumpkin, green bananas, string beans, okras, amaranth, scallions, thyme and sea moss, the latter of which he says, “naturally fortifies and harmonizes the elements in the pot.”

And just as intuitive cooking connects with energy and life force, it also connects with ancestral and family traditions.

Stephanie Ramlogan knows this concept all too well. As a Trinidadian residing in New York, she reconnects with home by putting her own spin on familiar dishes, using Diasporic flavours and spices that are available and that “speak” to her.

“I wasn't taught how to cook, I just inherited my mother's sweet hand,” she laughs. “My mother is a fantastic chef, and I never saw her follow a recipe. I remember as a child asking her how she remembered all the measurements and she said that she just made them up as she went along.”

Living in the United States, Ramlogan learned to improvise on what she saw her mother doing in her kitchen in Trinidad. Using taste and smell as her barometer, she has become accustomed to substituting American ingredients in her “classic” Trinidadian dishes and has begun to work on a Diaspora-inspired cookbook.

“I have been pulling together recipes for Trinbagonian food that I make in New York— using substitutions,” she explains. “I playfully refer to it as Trini Cooking For People In Foreign, and as an example, for one of the recipes I imagined my mother's voice telling a 21-year-old me how to make Palau over the phone. The book is intended to be a place where people who love cooking can come to share, laugh and learn. It isn't intended to just have recipes, but stories too, about Caribbean food and how I have adjusted to living abroad when all I crave is macaroni pie and red bean stew.”

Intuitive cooking techniques have permeated Caribbean life.

Take bush cooking, for example. Picture it— no controls, no heat settings, no scales, no timers— just fire. And whether it is a pot of corn soup over a flame, featuring a bubbling hodgepodge of coconut milk, corn, pumpkin, scotch bonnet and herbs on the side of the road, or a breadfruit buried in the burning sand as dead leaves crackle in the embers overhead— this is not cooking with your head, but with your heart. And it is ready to eat, not with the buzzing of a timer, but when the chef says so.

The authentic Caribbean palate originated with and continues to be driven by seasons, senses, creativity, migration and survival. Whether the Pepperpot of Guyana, the Ackee and Saltfish of Jamaica, the Oil Down of Trinidad or the variety of whole foods and techniques that were brought to the New World hundreds and thousands of years ago, intuitive cooking is critical to cultural survival and resilience that is being threatened by the mass influx of imported and ultra-processed foods into the region.

Nourishing the body should also nourish the soul.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn

I’m an environmental writer with a focus on food and agriculture, and commute between the Southern Caribbean (Barbados) and the Northern Caribbean (Cayman Islands). I

I’m an environmental writer with a focus on food and agriculture, and commute between the Southern Caribbean (Barbados) and the Northern Caribbean (Cayman Islands). I have a Master’s Degree in International Economic Policy from Columbia University and am passionate about food systems, the environment and Caribbean development. I am intrigued by the resilience of Small Island Developing States and I love stories of sustainable and regenerative growth through food systems and agriculture. I have headed up two communications projects at the Food and Agriculture Organization and serve as a Communications Advisor at the World Food Programme’s Caribbean Headquarters. I have contributed to a wide cross-section of publications, including the Sunday Times (of London), The New York Times and and the International Monetary Fund (Finance & Development Magazine). I was a finalist of the UN-OHRLLS Island Voices Journalism Competition (2019) and won the PAHO/CDB/CBU Award for “Celebrating Responsible Coverage of Mental Health and Psychosocial Support During COVID-19” (2021). I served as a food sustainability judge for the Zayed Sustainability Prize in the United Arab Emirates (2019 and 2021) and as a judge for the Rockefeller Foundation’s $2 million Food System Vision Prize (2020). Follow me on Twitter at @daphneewingchow, on Facebook at @daphneewingchowwriter or on Linkedin @daphneewingchow

On returning to traditional food methods

- **Transmission of Knowledge:** Food traditions and recipes, such as Trinidad’s Palau, are handed down informally, highlighting the importance of oral culture and family in maintaining culinary heritage.

- **Global Network & Slow Food Connection:** There is recognition that safeguarding biodiversity and traditional food practices is part of a larger, global movement that transcends single countries, especially critical in times of crisis.

Title:

Content: Breaking The Industrial Cycle With Slow Food

Where do you go to get your groceries? If your first thought was your local supermarket, you are not alone. Shopping in large grocery stores became the norm for many of us, and we rely on these outlets more than we realise. They are convenient, filled to the brim with seemingly every product you could imagine and have a price point that fits most pockets.

From afar it seems like the perfect solution, but we all witnessed what happened in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic turned life on its head and among many others, highlighted the fragility of our food economy and the part supermarkets play in it.

The University of Oxford describes our food system as “a complex set of interconnected practices and relationships that ultimately deliver food from farms, processing facilities, factories, warehouses, and retailers, to the dinner table.”

Slow Food

The industrial food system is built for scale and efficiency with an aim to maximise production, reduce cost, and function much like factories.

Although many supermarkets and producers are taking steps to include the origins of their products on their labels, there is still not enough transparency around where our food actually comes from. This industrialised structure offers customers accessibility to a wider range of products at more affordable prices but has economic and environmental impacts that many are not aware of.

Industrial agriculture is notorious for using a range of fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides in their processes to maximise output, some of which stays present in the soil long after the crops are harvested. The products are then processed in factories, stabilised with preservatives and packaged in plastic, all occurring before they are loaded onto long haul freights, planes, lorries to arrive in distribution centres and eventually to supermarket shelves.

BBC Good Food reported that “DEFRA estimates that moving food is responsible for 25 per cent of all miles covered by heavy goods traffic in the UK. Transporting food within, to and around the UK produces 19 million tonnes of CO2 annually – equivalent to around 5.5 million typical cars.”

The length of the supply chains involved in industrial food systems result in a fragile structure as any slight disruption throughout the intricate process can halt the supply chain at any time.

However, this industrial food system is not the only one available to our economy. While our modern supermarkets heavily rely on large-scale agriculture, large scale production and precise, uninterrupted international food trade and fast turnaround times, the alternative slow food system focuses on a more resilient structure.

As the resilient alternative to this industrial cycle that many in the industry are championing, Slow Food is focused on returning to the traditional methods and celebrating all things local.

The not for profit grassroots organisation, Slow Food was set up in Italy in the late 1980s in a bid to promote traditional food preparation methods and locally sourced ingredients, going against the arrival of the American fast-food chain McDonald’s in Rome. The eco-gastronomic organisation now has around 100,000 members in over 150 countries.

Recognising and raising awareness of the negative impact the industrial food system had on society, the economy and the environment, the organisation ignited a Slow Food movement: a new way of conscious consumerism that takes seasonality, locality and tradition into account.

A slow, or resilient food system can take on many forms, starting with us as individuals making a conscious effort to engage with producers, venues and outlets that are aligned with the slow food values, to foraging, growing our own produce and going to local farmers’ markets.

Any involvement in the movement can make a significant difference in local communities and build a more sustainable, resilient and eco-friendly food system.

As the first accredited Slow Food destination in Northern Ireland, the Causeway Coast and Glens have been spearheading the move toward this resilient system and together with Taste Causeway, the collaborative network of local food and drink businesses.

From exciting slow food events to highlighting producers and awarding them with Slow Food accreditation, Taste Causeway and Slow Food NI are putting local suppliers and venues at the forefront of consumers’ minds, one business at a time.

To find out more about how you can support the Slow Food movement, the businesses involved and the upcoming events on the Causeway Coast, go to https://slowfood.tastecauseway.com/

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On returning to traditional food methods

- **Artisanal & Small-scale Production:** The popularity of artisanal foods is rising, emphasizing small-batch, traditional methods that support local economies, foster sustainability, and reduce environmental impact.

Title:

Content: Philippine agriculture

[OPINION] The future of food: Regenerative farming is the key to securing our food future

Louise Mabulo
'Supporting small-scale farmers and producers who prioritize regenerative practices is crucial to beginning to create this more sustainable food system'

Food is an essential part of our lives, but the way we produce and consume it has enormous impacts on not only our individual health – but the health and longevity of our planet.

Unfortunately, the food industry’s large-scale pursuit of fast, easy, and cheap food has come at the massive expense of our environment, and it is responsible for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and pollution.

In the Philippines – where 40% of the population relies on agriculture, and a sector that contributes 20% of the country’s GDP – many people are faced with challenges like food security, sustainability, and environmental problems. Additionally, small-scale farmers face challenges accessing markets and obtaining fair prices for their products, further perpetuating poverty and food insecurity.

The good news is that we’re not too late to do something about it, and through a combined effort, we have the power to reverse this situation.

As Earth Day 2023 draws near, it’s the perfect time to contemplate the future of our food industry, and begin the transition towards regenerative food systems that close supply chains and promote sustainable practices.

Food security comes full circle

While sustainability is about slowing deterioration, regenerative food practices go even further to future-proof what later generations will inherit of our food systems. In short, regenerative agriculture is a focus on soil health and biodiversity, which uses cover crops, crop rotation, and natural fertilizers to improve soil quality, sequester carbon, and increase yields.

If you’re not sure why this is important, think of it like this: the soil acts like the skin of our planet. It’s a barrier and an important layer that holds nutrients and water, as well as key organisms and organic matter. Without it being healthy, we simply cannot grow quality food. And with food demand set to rise by as much as 50% by 2050, and one-third of our soil estimated to be degraded by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), this is a big problem.

But transitioning towards regenerative food systems requires a mindset shift away from the linear “take-make-waste” model associated with conventional farming practices, and towards a more circular one that closes supply chains. This means reducing waste, reusing resources, and recycling materials – but it also means connecting producers and consumers to create more localized food systems that are resilient to shocks and disruptions.

This is, of course, easier said than done when it comes to the dominance of large agribusinesses and the industrial food system. And this is why supporting small-scale farmers and producers who prioritize regenerative practices is crucial to beginning to create this more sustainable food system.

In 2016, I started actively engaging our farmers in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Nock-Ten, and as a result, I founded The Cacao Project, a social enterprise that promotes sustainable farming practices, supports, and empowers local farmers and communities in the Philippines. By providing training to farmers to improve their yields and income, the project promotes sustainable and high-in-demand crops, including cacao seedlings and short-term crops such as bok choy, okra, pumpkins, and more. We also utilize unused or otherwise barren lands to create productive economic forests and livelihoods for local and indigenous farmers. Our project ensures that farmers receive fair pay and are better positioned for sustainable success.

Additionally, we are continuously exploring ways to reduce waste and maximize our crop utilization. One of our recent innovations is using leaf fossilization to create stunning crafts and accessories, which upcycles waste while generating a secondary source of income for farming communities.

At the end of the day, I want to bring people closer to our food systems and cultivate an understanding of where our food comes from, how it is produced, and how it reaches our tables. It is a privilege for me to be featured in National Geographic’s Earth Day shortform Nat Geo Presents that will be premiering in the month of April where I can shed light on sustainable food systems and diets to a wide audience, creating a collective sense of responsibility and respect for the resources that sustain us.

The benefits of regenerative food systems extend beyond environmental sustainability – not only does it provide a host of natural services (such as acting as wind breakers and food shelters), it can create self-sufficient, healthier, and resilient communities.

As we approach Earth Day 2023, let’s take a moment to reflect on the impact of our food choices on the environment, and maybe make small changes to live more sustainably. Whether it be buying produce from local markets, supporting small-scale farmers who prioritize regenerative practices, reducing waste, and recycling. Let’s think before we shop and choose to live more lightly on the planet for the benefit of ourselves and future generations. – Rappler.com

Louise Mabulo is a National Geographic Explorer, chef, and founder of The Cacao Project.

What are the supporters of slow food movement advocating?

On returning to traditional food methods

- **Regenerative Farming & Sustainability:** Advocates argue that supporting small-scale farmers using regenerative agricultural practices is essential for a sustainable future, as these methods restore soil health and foster resilient food systems.

- **Historical Context & Place:** In places like Lamu, Kenya, history and local food traditions are intertwined with architecture and community, suggesting the slow food ethos naturally aligns with longstanding local practices.

On returning to traditional food methods

- **Community & Climate:** Initiatives like F&B waste reduction and sharing excess produce highlight grassroots approaches to sustainable food, gaining support from significant authorities (e.g., Pope Francis for biodiversity efforts).

Title:

Content: About a fortnight ago in Rome, Pope Francis received a group of Italian activists, who drew his attention to an important initiative concerning the deteriorating situation of biodiversity and of bees in particular. The activists asked for the Pope's blessing for the European Citizen Initiative (ECI) launched by nine NGOs, including Slow Food - which calls for the phasing out of synthetic pesticides and a reduction in their use of at least 50% by 2030. Such an initiative, if signed by a million European citizens, could force European policy makers to take an initiative. Now, the European Commission in Brussels has announced the so-called 'Farm to fork strategy', one of the objectives of which is to...reduce pesticide use by 50%. The ECI could come as a powerful support for this.

Agrochemical companies such as Bayer, Basf and Syngenta hope that this ECI will fail because it directly affects their multi-billion dollar business, and an agrochemical lobby is going on to sabotage the Farm to Fork.

At the moment volunteers and many NGOs across Europe are campaigning hard to get those one million signatures. There is a deadline towards the end of September and it is therefore still very exciting whether the one million will be reached.

The role of citizens

Italian citizens can make a difference. Why? Because surprisingly few Italians (25,000) have signed up to this initiative so far. And because I know that many Italians feel attached to the land of their ancestors and to biodiversity, both of which are necessary for the production of healthy agricultural products and therefore the good ingredients of Italian cuisine... And which are also simply crucial to our survival. Years ago, I once had the honour of speaking at the great Slow Food Conference in Turin and that gathering of so many food producers, activists, scientists from all over the world and especially from Italy, all fighting and working for more sustainable food production, was simply impressive.

But despite the growing culinary and ecological awareness and the great appreciation for sustainable agriculture, the destruction machine of agrochemical agriculture and food production is unfortunately still running at full speed. Although the European Commission, announced its Farm to Fork strategy, there is still the recently approved European agricultural policy, which (also thanks to MEP Paolo di Castro) was supposedly reformed to better reward environmentally friendly production, but which unfortunately will continue to spend billions of euros annually on the destructive practices of industrial, agrochemical agriculture.

The harmful effects of pesticides on the environment and human health should have been reduced long ago with the implementation of the European directive on the sustainable use of pesticides adopted in 2009; And agriculture's dependence on synthetic chemicals should have been significantly reduced by now. This directive was revised in 2019, as an audit by the European Court of Auditors found that its implementation was inadequate in many member states, including Italy.

In March this year, a large group of Italian organisations sent an open letter to Italian policymakers to remind them of Italy's commitments to reduce pesticide use. The national action plan for the sustainable use of plant protection products expired in February 2018 and the new text submitted for public consultation in 2019 has already been overtaken by the objectives of the EU's Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies (which still need agreement).

More than 30 associations and citizens' committees, coordinated in Italy by the WWF, sent the open letter to the three ministers (Patuanelli, Cingolani and Speranza), to the chairmen of the parliamentary committees on agriculture, the environment and health, and to the president of the Conference of the Regions, all of whom are responsible for regulating the use of pesticides, asking them to adopt courageous and far-sighted positions in Europe. “Italy must make up for serious delays in updating the national action plan (NAP) on pesticides, drawing up the national strategic plan for the CAP after 2023 and adopting the national law on organic farming, all of which are indispensable instruments for protecting pollinators, agriculture, the environment and the health of citizens” they wrote.

Biodiversity at risk

Last week, three UN agencies (FAO, UNEP and INDP) published a major emergency report on the agricultural policies of western, rich countries. The report concludes that global agricultural support from rich countries to producers currently amounts to almost $540 billion a year "at a time when many countries' public finances are under pressure, especially in the developing world" and that "more than two-thirds of this support is considered price distorting and largely environmentally damaging". According to the UN institutions, the climate and millennium development goals (SDGs) are not achievable in this way.

Pesticides are a major cause of collapsing biodiversity, degrading soil fertility and depriving small farmers of a reasonable income. Scientists have already spoken of an 'insectageddon' due to the loss of insects. A few years ago, scientists published an extensive, global analysis in the scientific journal Biological Conservation, in which they calculated that the total insect population is declining by 2.5 percent per year. If this trend continues, there will be no insect left within a century. Today, about one third of all insect species are threatened with extinction, and 40 per cent of species are steadily declining.

Agriculture and food production are not sustainable in the long term like this. A transition to environmentally friendly agriculture is inevitable for the climate, soil and for a viable countryside, healthy local food and a financially healthy and vibrant countryside.

Democracy tools

The ECI instrument is intended to actively involve citizens in EU policy. We are making use of this now, in order to be heard. This is another important reason to ensure that this initiative is successful. Unfortunately, it seems that the government in Italy does not appreciate this, because it is throwing up some barriers to participation. People have to fill in their ID card number, while in countries like Belgium or the Netherlands only a date of birth is sufficient. Yet that is no reason to renounce your democratic rights as an Italian citizen. The data are not for the organisation, but only for the government to determine the percentage of valid signatures in a random sample. Afterwards, the data are deleted. So don't be put off and sign while you still can!

That Italians can mobilise en masse was proven by, among others, the successful EU citizens' initiative Stop Vivisection, which was signed by no fewer than 690,000 Italians.

And Pope Francis, did he sign? That is not known. But he did give his blessing to this ECI and that is not so surprising. In 2015 Pope Francis published the encyclical Laudato si'. For the first time, a pope put forward ecology as a theme in such a world letter. Inspired and informed by scientific and political findings, he knows what is at stake when it comes to pollution and climate change, water, loss of biodiversity and how urgent the problems are. Francis is critical of the idea that science and technology will solve everything, as many European politicians claim. The fundamental problem is that we have a wrong vision of our relationship with nature. In spite of the slogans of the agrochemical lobby, imitated by many politicians, it is indeed possible to produce enough healthy food for everyone without waging chemical warfare against the land and nature.

© Riproduzione riservata

What are the supporters of slow food movement advocating?

- **Response to Globalization:** Recent global supply chain disruptions underscore the fragility of industrialized food systems, making a case for building localized food economies that enhance security and resilience.

Title:

Content: Supply Chain Failures Prove Growing Need for Localized Economies

The mainstream media — television, print and digital — routinely cycle through the litany of crises gripping the world. One week they’ll tell us about the latest climate disaster. The next, the focus may shift to the war in Ukraine. A few days later, COVID-19’s latest variant might be trending. The hot topic of the day is picked up, described in isolation and then discarded.

What we never hear is the fact that these crises are, in fact, connected. They are symptoms of a global economic system that is not only driving up resource use and pollution; it is squeezing people financially, undermining democracy, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of unaccountable global corporations, and exacerbating conflict and violence.

In addition, recent events have highlighted how vulnerable we are because of our dependence on the global economy. Long-distance supply chains are failing around the world, and the cost of living is skyrocketing as a result.

This is clearest when it comes to our most basic need of all: food. At the grocery store, Americans are paying 10 percent more for food than a year ago, while the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that global food prices hit record highs in March. In the United Kingdom, the price of chicken is set to soon match the price of beef.

Why? Largely because economic globalization — which, in short, involves using public monies and government regulations to favor exports over self-reliance — has ensured that we source our food from ever farther away, via ever longer, more complicated supply chains.

That means that when China shuts down in response to COVID, it affects the whole world. When Russia invades Ukraine, global supplies of grains, vegetable oil and chicken feed are jeopardized. When energy prices rise, so do food prices, because industrial agriculture for export is built on fossil fuel-based fertilizers and fuel-guzzling transport. When synthetic fertilizer production facilities shut down because the price of fracked gas is too high, chemical-dependent farmers’ yields fall.

And when fears grow, they snowball: Countries across the globe have halted food exports for fears of food insecurity.

This would not be nearly so big a problem if the entire globe hadn’t been made so dependent on global trade for basic needs. Consider the fact that global trade volume is now roughly 40 times greater than it was in 1950. As governments — at the behest of global corporations — continue to subsidize and regulate in favor of global trade, people’s lives and livelihoods are at the mercy of middlemen operating transnationally.

Thanks to globalization, food produced regionally or nationally is more likely to be exported than to feed the local population: They’ll eat food imported from elsewhere. The situation is now so absurd that countries regularly import and export nearly identical quantities of identical products. In 2019, for example, the United States imported 1.53 million tons of beef, even as it exported 1.51 million tons. In 2020, Germany was the world’s top importer of butter ($851 million), and also the fourth-largest exporter of butter ($653 million). That year, France both imported and exported about $1 billion worth of beef. These are not outliers but typical examples of “redundant” trade in the global economy.

The list of actual and potential hiccups along these fragile supply chains is virtually endless. Those we have experienced recently include pandemic lockdowns, a blockage in the Suez Canal, and avian flu outbreaks. Last week, the Royal Bank of Canada reported that one-fifth of the global container ship fleet is currently stuck in congestion.

These are but harbingers of worse to come. The global food system itself — based as it is on chemical-intensive industrial monocultures for export — has decimated seed and livestock diversity, and is rapidly eroding topsoil and depleting fertility in our most important food bowls. Add to all this the fact that this food system is responsible for up to 57 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, and widespread food system collapse is very possibly imminent.

Can we assume that these and other real-world effects will finally lead to a rethinking of “comparative advantage” — a cornerstone of the modern economy? The 1817 theory — an article of faith among supporters of “free trade” and globalization — asserts that if countries specialize in what they produce best and trade for every other need, all countries will be better off.

The theory of comparative advantage may have been plausible 200 years ago, but globe-spanning supply lines make no sense in our increasingly fragile world. During the pandemic, most countries would have been far better off had they relied more on local production, rather than on specialized production for global trade.

Unfortunately, political leaders on both left and right have ignorantly continued to promote economic globalization despite its mounting costs. Their policies have enabled multinational corporations and banks to accumulate immense wealth: By 2000, more than half of the largest economies in the world were corporations. Their wealth enables them to distort the democratic process through campaign donations and vast lobbying efforts, and to spend billions of dollars shaping public opinion through advertising, data mining and media ownership. Trade agreements even allow transnational corporations to sue governments if environmentally or socially conscious laws or regulations get in the way of corporate profits. In short, globalization has reshaped society in the interest of unaccountable, internationally mobile corporations.

For many rather obvious reasons, this is a bad idea. For example, it is the main reason why governments have continuously failed to act on the climate crisis. It is why profit-driven media have become ever more polarizing and incendiary. It is why local businesses are being driven to bankruptcy by global giants, and why communities are being broken apart and amalgamated into ever-bigger, more anonymous, more resource-intensive megacities. It is why billionaires continue to get richer and richer, even as the majority of the world’s people must run ever harder and faster just to stay in place. As the resources needed to fuel this globalized system become more scarce, conflict both within and between countries is seen to rise.

The fact that these seemingly disparate issues are connected by their shared roots in the globalizing economic system is, perhaps counterintuitively, a reason for hope: By focusing on that root cause, we can more easily take steps that address all of those problems simultaneously.

And although we haven’t heard much about it in the media, initiatives across the world are proving the multiple benefits of shifting away from dependence on global corporations toward place-based, community businesses. These projects can be seen on every continent and constitute a movement toward what can best be described as “localization.”

Ordinary people are responding to the specter of food insecurity by boosting localized production of food and other basic needs. At the onset of the COVID pandemic, small farmers from Melbourne, Australia, to Mexico City were able to ramp up production in a matter of weeks to meet a doubling of demand, proving that local farms and businesses are not only much more resilient in the face of global crises but also far more responsive to the needs of their communities. We have heard from a number of sources that these farmers didn’t raise their prices, even though they ended up working harder and employing more people.

Similarly, people are organizing into informal community networks to help each other deal with the havoc of COVID lockdowns and — increasingly — climate shocks. In many cases, these informal groups have proven to be much more effective than centralized bureaucracies. They also galvanize community solidarity and lift people’s spirits in ways that simply cannot be achieved by large-scale organizations.

Because they’re happening under the radar, no figures will do justice to the proliferation of such informal groups. But it is telling that, in the U.K., more than 4,000 mutual aid groups emerged in 2020 alone.

Community mutual aid networks represent but one facet of a much broader movement for localization. Although sorely underrepresented in the mainstream media, concern for climate change, corporate rule and mental health are giving rise to a plethora of localizing responses.

A local food movement is growing on every continent. While the number of farmers’ markets in the U.S. has quadrupled over the last 20 years, organizations fighting for local food sovereignty are among the largest social movements in the world, representing more than 200 million small farmers.

Local food systems — which are based on small-scale, biodiverse production — not only dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions but actually regenerate the land. Studies by the Rodale Institute suggest that shifting to such techniques on all cultivated and pastureland would enable us to rebuild soils and sequester over 100 percent of current CO2 emissions. This doesn’t mean a reduction in production: Small farms produce up to five times more food per acre than industrial monocultures.

What’s more, reorganizing our economies around local interdependence instead of global dependence would significantly increase community prosperity. A 2021 U.K. study, for example, reveals that local food outlets create three times as many jobs for the same amount of food sold as supermarket chains.

The benefits of localization apply to more than just the food system. A case study on independent versus chain bookstores found that money spent locally left three times as much money in the local economy as money spent at a chain store — resulting in three times the job impacts, three times the income effects, and three times the tax proceeds to local government. Another study showed that every square foot of retail space occupied by a local business generates 70 percent more local economic impact than a chain store.

Meanwhile, regional government support for local, craft-based economies in some parts of rural India has increased earnings by more than 60 percent for hundreds of thousands of people, while slowing the widespread and damaging trend of hyper-urbanization.

Stronger local economies are important not only for the financial and employment benefits they provide, but also for the closer contact with nature and with community they offer. In a Norwegian study, the simple act of community gardening was shown to be more than twice as effective in treating depression as chemical antidepressants. Participants in such programs have overcome devastating mental illnesses and have described their experiences movingly (“as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom”).

By understanding the root causes of our global crises, we can begin to identify systemic solutions. What’s more, we can also see that these solutions are already being pioneered by ordinary people all across the globe, acting with little if any government support but on goodwill and common sense.

This June, under the banner of “World Localization Day,” numerous projects and networks working toward economic localization are coming together to make their global movement known. The campaign demonstrates that localization is not about isolationism — in fact, cross-cultural collaboration is an integral part of the movement. World Localization Day is also an attempt to break the corporate stranglehold on information: While the mainstream media excels at highlighting the disparate symptoms of systemic breakdown, it fails to connect the dots between these symptoms, nor does it identify the plethora of real-life systemic alternatives.

The next time the daily news makes you painfully aware of the many crises we face, remind yourself that we don’t have to fight each problem on its own. We can instead expose their root causes and work together to withdraw dependence on the global system while reweaving local interdependence. We can join the movement to solve multiple crises at once.

**Key Ideas:**
The Slow Food movement is not solely a Western construct but resonates with diverse, localized food cultures worldwide.

How many countries have members of Slow Food organization?

On returning to traditional food methods