John Castagnetto stands in the fields of celery and mint in front of his purple house looking every inch the farmer. Tanned and handsome with dark chocolate-colored eyes, he laughs as he talks about the six-foot long Italian squashes he grows as a hobby. He wears a buttoned-up flannel shirt, jeans, a baseball cap and drives a blue pickup truck.

He’s been farming his whole life. His father and grandfather started the business back in 1898 on the outskirts of the Mission in San Francisco before that area was zoned for housing. Today, Castagnetto has a total of 38 acres of land in Pescadero where he grows a variety of vegetables year-round: leeks, celery, mint, beets, cauliflower, artichokes, anise, kale and five different kinds of Chinese vegetables.
Castagnetto wakes up around 6 a.m. every day and goes to bed around 1 the next morning. Every night, he drives north and makes a delivery to a produce market in South San Francisco. On Saturdays, he goes to the Alemany Farmers’ Market. Saturday night, he drives a truckload of produce into Chinatown in San Francisco. Mollie Stone’s and Berkeley Bowl buy directly from him. Overall, his produce goes to more than 10 different stores in the Bay Area.

Beyond the fact that he has more control over his profit margin, Castagnetto is participating in the latest politically correct trend in food.

San Francisco has become a pioneer for the "eat local" movement. People in the politically conscious area are spearheading challenges to eat local by providing resources and support groups for people attempting to curb their appetite for imported foods.

The locavore movement stems from an awareness of where food comes from—close to home or thousands of miles away. It pushes consumers to make a decision with every meal. Buying food supports the farmers, supports sustainable farming practices and is a healthier way to eat. Eating local is also a statement against the corporate takeover of our food system.
“It seemed like a really interesting project and the more I got into it, the more interesting it became,” says Laird Harrison, who ate entirely local foods for a month while researching for a book on the subject. “I discovered a lot of foods that I hadn’t been eating before that I really enjoyed.”

Castagnetto's favorite aspect of the job is “not working for nobody.” In fact, he runs the farm with just seven other people, including his mother, sister and nephew.
When Castagnetto sells his kale, beets and other produce to the Berkeley Bowl, an independently-owned grocery store, the mark-up is about 30 percent. If the store sells his fruit or vegetables for $1.30, for example, Castagnetto earns a dollar.

Farmers who sell to the big chain stores are not always so lucky. During the peak seasons of production, a surplus of one crop will force farmers to drive their prices lower while competing with each other to get rid of their produce before it spoils. During the beginning of October, the going price for lettuce was $4 for a case of 24 heads, or 17 cents each. There’s no profit in 17 cents per head – it’s just enough for farmers to break even. At the same time, Safeway was selling the same lettuce for $1.49 a head making a $1.32 profit. “Those guys gouge everybody,” Castagnetto says. “Instead of putting [the price] a little cheaper so the farmer can sell more and make the price go up a little better, they just put their price on it.”

If you can’t be a vegetarian because you can’t stay away from carne asada, you can’t eat raw because soaked squash “spaghetti” will never be as good as the real thing, and the mere idea of veganism makes you hanker for a loaded banana split (with extra whip cream), then maybe the locavore movement will satiate your cravings for politically responsible eating. All you have to do is eat food grown, caught or raised within 100 miles of your home. “It links local to global. It is a wonderful way to be a global activist,” says Anuradha Mittal, director and founder of the Oakland Institute, a local think tank.

Produce sold in supermarkets is bought at the cheapest price from farmers around the world and has to last longer and look perfect. The commercialization of food has created a huge disconnect in the minds of consumers. Fewer and fewer people have tasted the sweetness of a freshly picked ear of corn, the fullness of cherry tomatoes ripened in the sun or know anything about the lives and business aspects of the people who produce the food that sustains us all.

“Instead of food being seen as food to feed communities and families it has become a commodity for trade,” Mittal says. “And it makes no sense in terms of our environmental, economic, social and political costs. But it makes sense for the big profit of agro-businesses, which are involved in food trade.”

Increasingly, American corporations are moving farming and animal production overseas to developing countries where environmental and humane standards are lower. This business model increases corporate profits while creating new dangers for the consumer.

The miles food travels contributes to our already sickened atmosphere. A study released in March by the journal “Food Policy” found that the average meal travels 1,500 miles, causing unknown damage from fossil fuel emissions and air pollution. The environmental damage of such a journey outweighs the benefits of buying organic.

Something happens to food that travels thousands of miles between vine and plate. It has to be picked earlier, before it is ripe, so it can sustain miles of travel. “Certainly you can make the argument that food that is fresher is better for you,” Harrison says. “If you have to ship food long distances, even using refrigerator trucks, then the most unstable vitamins—for example, vitamin C—will disintegrate and oxidize in the course of transportation.”

San Francisco is not Des Moines. It is surrounded by ocean, farms and pasture land. There are cattle ranches as close as Marin where you can purchase a share of the cow while it is still alive—which also ensures a more humane slaughter—so you don’t have to give up any particular food group to stay on the plan.

What eating local means is a little more effort and a lot of new culinary experiments. It means getting up on Sunday to go to the farmers market and buying foods that are in season. That, in turn, means eating tomatoes and pit fruits during the summer months, squashes in the fall and a lot of leeks and potatoes to get you through the winter.“We’re not advocating that people adopt local food as a diet and I don’t think a lot of people are,” Harrison says. “I think the ideal is for people to buy whatever they can locally.”

When you buy locally produced foods, you have control over the practices used to raise your food. You know where it comes from, how it was raised; often you can meet the farmers themselves. “The decision we make [about our food] is very political and also very personal,” Mittal says. “It is so personal – it goes right inside of our bodies as mothers, as parents. It is a very political decision because when we grab something from the market shelf we are making a decision about how our food is grown, who controls it and who gets to eat it.”