To the editor:

Neil’s and Village Pizzeria and the Fish Bowl are all local businesses. The owners are our neighbors, and we need to think of rising costs of the ingredients of the meals they serve us every day as our concern as neighbors, not just theirs as business people.

We are all being affected by higher fuel and grocery costs and in poorer countries — Haiti, Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso — many are now so hungry that food riots are erupting. In other countries — Morocco, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Mexico and Yemen — food protests are increasing.

Your article says no one could have predicted that shifting farmland priority from food to fuel would trigger higher food prices, but in fact many economists did; the government just ignored the warnings. So the cost of a meal at the Clover Patch isn’t just a local event, or a temporary one. Climate change, diminishing global oil output as well as demand for biofuels all indicate that we are in for a long-term change in price and availability of things we really depend on every day.

We can hunker down, tighten our belts and deny ourselves those occasional pleasures like a restaurant meal or we can rethink some other choices and see how to make life better, not worse. Neil said he now has local food on his menu. It costs 10 calories of oil for every one calorie of food produced by industrial agriculture, but buying from our local growers, many of whom use organic fertilizer rather than fossil fuel fertilizer, can nourish us with minimal gas cost added.

Let’s reward with our patronage those local restaurants owned by local folks who put local food on their menu. Tilth, Pam Mitchell and others are offering gardening classes so we can all increase our own local production for our dinner tables. Many people could be gardening coaches and come to our homes and help us build vegetable gardens. We can grow a bit of our own — even people whose thumbs have yet to turn green. All this can send our grocery bill down, allowing us to keep a few restaurant meals in our budget.

There are also classes and books about cooking from scratch, which is far less expensive than packaged, canned and frozen foods. The Northwest Earth Institute offers a fascinating group-study course. It’s Menu for the Future, on the state of our food system and what we can do. Laurie Keith and Linda Lindsey are island gals authorized to get groups going. Once you understand the oil, pesticides and dubious additives that go into packaged and non-organic foods, you’ll be eager to go to the fresh and bulk food sections of the market and stock up.

Just because the global food system is reeling from forces far beyond our control here on Whidbey doesn’t mean we have to diminish our quality of life. We do need to make some changes, and even though adaptation might be challenging, it will ultimately make us healthier and more secure.

Also, Transition Whidbey is a network of island citizens who have seen these resource constraints coming and decided to “catalyze our community to work together to increase our food, energy and economic self-reliance.” Our safety in the years ahead will come from the community pulling together, sharing, trading, learning, giving, celebrating and experimenting. In easy times, people have the luxury to go it alone. In harder times, communities help each other out, and find they have a lot of side benefits from neighborliness. The hard times become the good times. Among other activities, Transition Whidbey is sponsoring monthly “Potlucks with a Purpose” to which the whole community is invited. There’s good food, networking, kids programs, music and speakers. At the first one, Aug. 6, Pam Mitchell gave us a sober but empowering look at what it would take to really feed ourselves with what we can grow and harvest on the island. Future ones will help us look at energy and economic and healthcare and elder care systems, to see where we can grow our own island solutions rather than be so dependant on larger systems that may be shaky for years to come.

Maybe a totally home-grown pizza isn’t in our future anytime soon, but pizzas with local cheese, tomatoes, basil, onions and even ground beef isn’t too far fetched. In fact, we can fetch them all from our island neighbors.

Vicki Robin

Langley