Step Six is the Big Box Boycott.  A big box store is any chain – from the mega-chains like Wal-Mart and McDonalds, to products made by giant corporations like Kraft, even to “smaller” or “eco-friendly” chains such as Whole Foods or a ‘locally owned’ franchise.  (Note: I shopped at Whole Foods for many years, and for some folks they are the only option for buying organic food.  Whole Foods does use many good practices, but they are still a huge corporation which comes with a lot of inherent issues, and if you have other places to buy organic, I strongly encourage you to give your money to your neighbors.)

Why boycott big box stores and large corporations?  The very simple answer is that money is power.  When we give our money to huge corporations, we are freely giving them power, and oh boy do they use it!  Particularly in a political system where we allow lobbying, our government and the decisions made by it, is basically for sale.  Individuals and small businesses do not have the monetary power to affect legislation, but big corporations do.  We can vote, we can petition and demonstrate, but our most effective tool is to not give them our money.

A prime example of the sort of ridiculous behavior we get from chains is one happening here in our Valley.  In Hadley, some of the world’s best soil is being paved over for a Home Depot and Lowe’s, right next door to each other.  And right across the street from the wonderful Hadley Garden Center.

It’s extremely hard for me to believe that our community is large enough to support even one of these mega-stores, much less two of them!  I imagine they will fold in a few years time, leaving us with huge empty eyesores, and a whole lot of concrete covering up that beautiful soil.

Chains siphon money from our communities in the form of tax cuts, falsely low wages, and reduced local jobs, not to mention robbing your town of its soul (who wants to live there or visit when it looks just like everywhere else?).  Chains keep prices falsely low by strong-arming farmers and suppliers – if you want to sell to them, you have to sell at the price they name (we have personally experienced this).  They are also part of the system of planned obsolensence – selling items that are so poorly made they will quickly break, are made so that they can’t be repaired, and you have to buy another one.  And another.

I highly recommend watching The High Cost of Low Prices or Fast Food Nation, for an understanding of how corporations like Wal-Mart and fast food companies truly cannabalize our friends, neighbors, and culture in order to make more money.

Think your local store is more expensive?  That’s because they’re not getting tax incentives from the town, government incentives for hiring, etc etc .  . . They are paying fair wages, creating interest and life and teaching skills to your neighbors and friends.  They will work their hardest to meet your needs, because to them you’re a customer and a friend, not a number.  If times get tough, Wal-Mart will not help you keep your family fed or clothed, but your local grocer, baker, or clothes store might.  (But not if they no longer exist!)

(Some late fall swinging fun at our local coop.)  Amanda Blake Soule of Soulemama shared some great thoughts recently on shopping at big box stores in this interview.  Have any favorite tips to share, on how to avoid corporations and big box stores?  Feel free to share!

feed the world thing

our Top 10 Steps

Oh yeah, that project.  Photos of crafts and our sweet daughter and parties aside, this is what keeps us going.  Some of your recent comments and emails have got me thinking – how much do people really know about what we do?  How can they help?  What does our work mean, in the bigger context of the good work so many people are doing?  So call this a little housekeeping if you will – here are a few answers.  A beginning to the conversation, which I really hope you’ll join.

When we started our bakery almost five years ago, we did it because we loved food and loved making food.  But not just any food.  We had a strong commitment and belief that so much of the food being consumed in our country was destroying our health, our communities, and our Earth.  (Our only Earth, as the Wombat reminds us.)  We had begun growing vegetables at home, we had tasted real, fresh, loved food and had an inkling of how important that was.  We hadn’t yet truly begun to understand peak oil, the environmental (and human) impact of shipping ingredients across the continent and back again (or worse yet, across oceans and back again), or the frightening rate at which our country is losing farmland, but we had enough of an inkling to make local, sustainable, real foods and community our goal.  When we look back now on our original mission statement, we still say, Yeah, that’s it, which is pretty amazing I think.  We even thought at the beginning, Wouldn’t it be great to bake with locally grown flour?  Living in a relatively blessed farming region, we called around, but no one was growing wheat, so we put that on the back burner while we started our business and learned many, many things the hard way (including how to bake – we are primarily self-taught).

While the bakery was turning from an idea into a reality, our vegetable garden doubled or tripled each year.  One season we grew on town conservation land and hauled buckets of water from Ameythst Brook to water our plants.  When we bought our house in Shutesbury, we turned a blind eye to the crazy sea-foam green siding and the crazy shag carpeting upstairs, and started digging in the dirt.  We taught ourselves to farm, with the help of some wonderful books, and with each passing day in the bakery and in the garden, with each bite of real food we understood more and more how truly precious and fragile our blessed Earth is.  How deep our calling is to be stewards of the land, not plunderers.  To be builders of community, providing bread for our brothers, teaching skills to our sisters.

And how much we hope for all of you to join us.  Because our task, my friends, is enormous.  We have already passed 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we are contaminating our limited water supplies as if they were limitless, we are paving over farmland to build giant box stores that sell goods we don’t need, made “cheaply” by exploiting people, land, and our tax dollars, and we are, as a nation, deeply depressed and unsatisfied.

So what the heck?  I say, what have you got to lose?  We may as well work our tails off for a future worth living in – one where we can feed our children, drink clean water, and know our neighbors.  Someday soon we may not be able to drive our cars anywhere we want, whenever we want, or eat asparagus anytime of year, or air-condition our houses.  We may not have cars or electricity at all, in fact.  I, for one, am willing to learn how to live without many of these “conveniences” now, in order to ensure that this girl here will have food and water and shelter, instead of famine, pollution, and disastrous weather patterns. In the meantime, I get the pleasure of good work, a healthy body, beautiful animal companions, and good friends.

Want to join us? Don’t know what the heck peak oil or climate change are?  Check out this article, this website, and Global Warming Fast Facts. Don’t know where to start?  I’m going to work on adding a book resource page, but in the meantime, here’s my top ten to help save yourself, your family, the world.  And I must tell you, the up side is that you may find, as we have, and as Colin Beavin’s family of No Impact Man did, that you really love it.  Already doing everything in your power?  Well then, thank you deeply and truly.

1.  Stop buying a bunch of junk you don’t need.

Seriously.  Every object comes with a trail of packaging that will never biodegrade (there is no such thing as throwing something away – it just goes to someone else’s backyard), electricity, CO2 emissions, fuel (from transportation, and you driving to get it), and in most cases, underpaid workers, environmental destruction, and contamination of air and water.

If you really truly need something (not want, need – a really hard difference to learn for us who live in a land of seemingly endless bounty), then buy it used!  It is really amazing what’s out there.  Craigslist and Freecycle are your friends.  If you live in the Pioneer Valley, I highly recommend the thrift stores and also Kay Baker Antiques in Amherst.  We’ve committed to buying used, and it’s awesome.

Super bonus of buying less – you spend less money, you need to work less, you get more time with your friends and family.  This temptation is especially hard to resist at holiday time – try giving gifts to charities, handmade gifts, or best of all, the gift of yourself – coupons for a home-cooked meal, babysitting for a friend with children, a massage, etc.  Great green holidays article in the current issue of Mothering Magazine.

2.  Grow food.

Maybe you thought this would be number one, and it’s a hard pick, but the problems caused by the useless exchange of unwanted goods is huge.  Now, grow some food.  Start with herbs in a window, or a single zucchini plant (they’re super easy and produce lots!).  Join in with Food Not Lawns.  Or just use the time you previously spent applying pesticide to your lawn and trimming dandelions, and eat those dandelions instead!  Don’t be afraid of a little “hard work” – humans are programmed to enjoy physical labor, so try gardening instead of jogging.

3.  Eat local foods.

You’ll notice that quite a few of these center around food, because it is a high-impact way to affect change.  We all eat, everyday, in pretty substantial quantities.  And while Americans spent much less of our income on food than Europeans, if we stopped buying some of that useless junk mentioned above, we could use that money to buy healthier, fresher food grown without chemicals by our neighbors.  You’ve probably heard that the average bite has traveled 5,000 miles before it reaches you.  Sound fresh?  Buying locally grown food ensures that food will continue to be grown in your community, which may become critically important in the not-too-distant future.

And you’ve probably heard that for every dollar you spend at a local business, and 45 cents stays in the community (as opposed to 13 cents staying in the community when you spend a dollar at a chain).  One of the best reasons to eat local?  It reconnects you to the pleasures of the seasons, of anticipating the first ripe tomato, and the incredible taste of an actual fresh tomato (ones that are being shipped are harvested green and gassed until they turn red – yummy).

4.  Eat less meat.  Especially red meat.  Eat it grass fed.

This is one that Ben struggles with, but also takes pleasure in.  What you eat has even more impact on CO2 emissions than where your food comes from.  Eating meat one less day a week reduces 1,000 miles of driving worth of CO2 – wowzer, eh?  Livestock create a lot of methane emissions, and industrial meat factories (yes, they are factories, not farms) also create an insane amount of manure waste, contaminated with antibiotics, hormones, etc, which often contaminates local water supplies.  If you do eat meat, try to reduce it, and eat it grass fed – cows are meant to chew grass, not corn.  There are also awesome health benefits to reducing the amount of meat you eat – we have never as a species eaten meat multiple times a day, or even every day!

Here in the Valley, we highly highly recommend Chestnut Farms meat CSA.

5.  What you do buy, buy in bulk, bring your own packaging.

See The Story of Stuff (it’s free and only 20 mins long).  See number 1 – you make trash, you pollute the world, we all pay.  Bring your own shopping bag, but also bring bags to put your produce in, your flour or sugar, better yet – just order a 50lb bag and stop driving to the grocery store every week.  Bottled water and other drinks produce a ton of packaging, contaminate your body with BPA, and just all around suck.

6.  Big Box Boycott.

Don’t shop at big box stores.  If it’s a chain, it is taking money from your community in the form of tax cuts, falsey low wages, and reduced local jobs, not to mention robbing your town of its soul (who wants to live there or visit when it looks just like everywhere else?).  Chains  also keep prices falsely low by strong-arming farmers and suppliers – if you want to sell to them, you have to sell at the price they name.  Rent The High Cost of Low Prices, and shop at a locally owned store (yes, even Whole Foods counts as a big box).

Think your local store is more expensive?  That’s because they’re not getting tax incentives from the town, government incentives for hiring, etc etc .  . . They are paying fair wages, creating interest and life and teaching skills to your neighbors and friends.  They will work their hardest to meet your needs, because to them you’re a customer and a friend, not a number.

7.  Reduce the Amount of Seafood you Eat (Especially Shrimp and Tuna)

This one is particularly hard for me, having grown up on the coast.  But after reading All You Can Eat, I’m so horrified I’ve hardly eaten seafood at all.  Basically, we’re destroying our oceans to get seafood (mostly wasted) just like we’re destroying our topsoils to grow massive amounts of corn.  We use giant bulldozers to roll across the ocean floor, crushing coral and gobbling sealife, to get a few choice species.  The ocean is our largest ecosystem, and we’re working hard to destroy it for cheap shrimp buffets.

8.  Clean it green.

Household cleaners are seriously scary stuff.  There’s a reason housewives used to pass out while cleaning the bathroom – it’s toxic. Did you know that manufacturers don’t have to do any sort of safety testing before releasing new household chemical products?  Yes, you heard me right.

My two best friends at home are baking soda and vinegar – I’m convinced that if I just keep trying, eventually those and some homemade soap are all I’ll need (and they clean way better than any store-bought product ever did for me, plus they’re way cheaper!).  I highly recommend this post by No Impact Man Colin Beavin, and the book Organic Housekeeping by Ellen Sanders, for information on what’s being sold in stores, and how to do it better.

While you’re at it, go through your house and get rid of all the stuff you don’t want/need anymore – less stuff to clean and have to sort through!  We’re in the midst of this ourselves and it is so awesome.  What you’re not using, someone else might be looking for.

9.  Use less power, pay for green power, drive less.

Turn off your lights, change your bulbs to CFLs, offset your electric use through Native Energy or the New England Wind Fund, dry your clothes on a clothesline, be mindful of consolidating trips in the car.   Observe an Eco-Sabbath if you can.  Turn off the TV!  These are so simple, and yet so easy to not do.  They add up folks – let’s do it.

10.  Be more joyful.

That’s right!  Take time to count your blessings, make friends, enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature, make music, tell your family you love them.  Joy is free, joy doesn’t harm the world, it enlivens it.  Celebrate each small step you take towards a happier, lighter life.  Know that what you do matters.

What would you add?  What’s your favorite way to be the change you want to see?  What other questions do you have?