Eric Barber ’24 is one of 26 student fellows conducting research with a community-based organization in upstate New York this summer as a part of the Upstate Institute Summer Field School.
This summer, I was lucky enough to work under Adam Dewbury, PhD, at the Adirondack North Country Association (ANCA) through the Upstate Institute Summer Field School. ANCA is an economic development agency that aims to help build wealth and prosperity throughout northern New York. They have four program areas that work on myriad issues like clean energy, small business services, and diversity, but the sector that I am specifically working with is focused on food systems. This means helping to create networks between food producers and consumers that facilitate local and sustainable economic growth, along with food security and a sense of community. This includes many different programs, such as the SOIL loan fund, food system security grants to keep farms up and running during the COVID-19 pandemic, building farm-to-school programs to give schools increased access to locally grown food, and providing technical business assistance for farms and food hubs to expand and diversify in the region.
Though I worked mostly remotely, I was living on Dacy Meadow Farms in Westport, N.Y., and because of this I still felt connected to the area that ANCA was serving. It was fascinating living in this area because it was something totally new to me. I grew up in the suburbs, so although I have seen farms before, being here it felt like there were farms around every corner. That being said, whenever my housemates and I would go to the store to buy food, we noticed that none of it was produced locally. While every farm seemed to have chickens and cows, meat and eggs were all produced hundreds of miles away. The same goes for fruit and vegetables that we know could have been grown less than 10 miles from the store. This was especially frustrating because the food was expensive, and we didn’t have other options nearby.
This problem is exactly what ANCA, and numerous other organizations in the area, are attempting to fix. Adam asked me to construct an annotated bibliography to look for articles about the food production potentials of the area, and what I found really helped elucidate the problem. I learned that this region, like almost every region in New York State (understandably excluding New York City) could be self-reliant on their own agriculture purely in terms of caloric energy produced and consumed. Yet this wasn’t happening.
Adam and others who are doing similar food system work focus on creating the channels through which to get people local food at a good price. As part of this project, I will be lucky enough to talk to many nearby farmers to hear their opinions on this problem as well. I hope to learn where they tend to sell most of their products, as well as their general thoughts on the problems of food production in the area. I also hope to do a comparison between foods sold at farmers markets vs. those sold at mass-market grocery stores. While there is a stereotype that farmers markets are significantly more expensive, research has shown that this is not necessarily true, so I want to compare the prices of a basket of goods from these two places, as well as the locations they were produced.
I’ve really appreciated this opportunity as it combines research in two topics that I study, sociology and economics. It has helped me better understand the market mechanism that actually gets food to consumers’ tables, and it has also helped me better understand all of the factors of food that markets simply don’t take into account. Calories are necessary to survive on a purely biological level, but they also represent much more. The growing, cooking, and appreciation of food can create a sense of community. Not only did my research focus on the problems of food production and distribution, it also focused on the communities that can be created when there are relationships between growers, buyers, and sellers.
This interdisciplinary approach was really important to me because it allows the goals of the program to constantly shift. Rather than solving one problem while leaving others unaddressed, the goal was to have a holistic approach. As someone who will be taking courses in the future on the sociology of food systems and food justice, this research has given me real appreciation for the work that people are already doing in the field and on the results that can be produced by advocating for food justice.