Eve Andrews challenged herself to find someone in every state in the nation who’s breaking the status quo and becoming more sustainable when it comes to production of, access to, and education about food — but in a way that’s characteristic of, or addresses a particular need in, their home state.
Why is she doing this?
"Let’s be real', she says, "The American food system today has some pretty daunting issues. We’re saddled with a farming system that, on the whole, releases a massive amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (675 million metric tons annually at the most recent tally, to be exact), sucks nutrients from the soil, and leaches chemicals into the water table. And in regions with some of the richest farmland, historically speaking, you can’t buy a fresh vegetable for love or money — but you can get a two-liter bottle of potable sugar and an endless variety of nutritionally vacant foodstuff approximations at any corner store."
Eve is not trying to find out how we got ourselves in this dietary and environmental crisis, but the much, much more important question is how we can get ourselves out of this mess.
"What interests me are the choices that each of these people are making in terms of how to produce food more sustainably. When there are so many problems, how do you pick which one to tackle first? In these fairly nascent stages of turning around the food system, it’s unfair to say that there’s only one correct solution.
If you want to see the answers to her inquiries in each state of our union and the sustainable food production efforts across our land, go to her blog map, click on each state (plus Washington, D.C.) to see 51 answers to the question: How can we build a more sustainable American food system?
