By Oswaldo Martinez, Raychel Brown and Rochus Sison
Today we visited Inaba Farms and talked to Lon Inaba. His family has owned this farm for three generations, but now he is selling it to the Yakama Nation. This will be a big step for the farm and the indigenous people reclaiming the land. He touched briefly on how chain grocery stores negatively impact the ‘growers’ – also known as the farmers. If produce is too big, too small, scuffed, or misshaped, they get thrown away because grocery stores don’t want them. The chains’ selectivity and idolization of the “perfect” produce leads to an accumulation of food waste.
We saw a perfectly good crate of green bell peppers all being donated to an organization because they didn’t fit the criteria of the superstores, which leads to growers having more cautions when picking and shipping produce. This gave us the ability to pick some ‘imperfect’ food of our own. We were able to pick our own bell peppers and squash to take back to the farm we are staying at.
Mr. Inaba believes to help fix this system we need to make sure to support local farmers by buying from local farms. He referred to this as being a “selective consumer”. This means knowing where your produce comes from and knowing the impact your purchase has on the food system.