With the World Bank projecting that in just 35 years we’ll need to produce at least 50% more food to adequately feed the planet, food security is quickly becoming one of the most critical issues of our time. Resource scarcity and the looming global food crisis—compounded by climate change—is exposing how unsustainable and ultimately ineffective our current industrialized system is.

This is why we need a Local Food Revolution. Food localization is the only real path to food security, food justice, and food sovereignty. But how do we end our complicity? How do we contribute to this great and urgent cause? How do we become revolutionaries?

There are myriad ways to participate. And there are countless courageous and innovative efforts already underway that we can join. But perhaps we can begin with a simple declaration:

The Local Food
Declaration of Independence

We, the undersigned, declare our independence from the global industrial food system.

We join a growing community of local eaters and local food producers who are building regional foodsheds.

Together, we are reclaiming our food sovereignty by shifting our food supply from the global to the local.

We hold local food and our foodsheds as sacred.

We pledge to eat (and drink) as local as possible.

We pledge to actively support our local farmers and ranchers who produce food for our community.

We pledge to actively support local food enterprises that source from local farmers and ranchers.

We pledge to seek the appropriate role of animals in our agriculture and in our diets.

We pledge to grow some of our own food, more every year.

We pledge to rebuild soil, more every year.

We pledge to grow our community, more every year.

To this local food revolution we commit our lives, our health, our well-being, our financial and social resources, and our sacred honor.

We will honor and nurture the sacredness of food and the sharing of food.

We will honor and nurture our lands, our waters, and the living soils from which our food arises.

We will honor and nurture the living ecosystem of plants, animals, and microorganisms that nourishes us.

We will honor and celebrate the natural cycles and seasons of life.

We will cherish, cultivate, and protect the conditions that make life possible and allow it to evolve.

We will love our living foodsheds into sustainability and resilience.

And we will do whatever we can to support our brothers and sisters everywhere who are reclaiming their food sovereignty and building their own regional foodsheds.

Together, we are the local food revolution.

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“The Local Food Declaration of Independence” excerpted from The Local Food Revolution by Michael Brownlee © 2016, North Atlantic Books.

 

Share your declaration.
Start the revolution.

In The Local Food Revolution, Michael Brownlee tackles the question of how humanity will continue to feed itself in the coming years, calling for a full-scale localization paradigm shift. Going in-depth in his explanation of the status and insecurities of the current system, Brownlee shows how we can ignite the local food revolution through phases of engagement, infrastructure, and scaling.