By Chris Flood
Staff Writer
    If you’re like most American’s, when you sit down to eat you’re thinking one of two things: Is this fork full of food, that I’m about to stick in my mouth, healthy? Or, I know this food isn’t healthy, but I’m going to eat it anyway because of any one reason off of a list of reasons you’ve created within yourself (it tastes good, it was easy to make or I didn’t have the time to cook a real meal).
    If you’re Scarborough resident Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardeners International and discussion leader at the March 16 presentation of The Global Banquet: Politics of Food at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church, you’re thinking about how local is the food I’m about to eat and if it’s not locally produced, are the conditions that it was produced under fair to the people and animals used in the process?
    “I want people to think a little bit more about the process behind the product,” says Doiron, who believes most Americans look at eating food as the end product and don’t think about the process. “That’s a real focus. I want people to not just be a passive consumer that forks over money.”
    The process Doiron is referring to is how industrial companies that produce farm produce and meat on farms in other countries, don’t treat their workers like they do in the United States.
    Doiron says there are many horror stories about large industrial companies who, because of their size and location, have gone with out paying their workers and used chemicals in other countries that wouldn’t be allowed here in the United States, all in an effort to produce the cheapest produce.
    “These farm workers aren’t the rugged individuals that we picture here, who are working for themselves,” says Doiron. “These farm workers are working for a very, very large industrial farm and they’re very small pieces of that company.”
    For Doiron one of the most difficult things he believes that his group and anyone trying to take an active role in the process faces is that people are working against convenience.
    He says that the food produced by these large companies is more accessible than food produced fairly – which you can tell it was because it will have the “Fair Trade” sticker on the product – making buying the cheaper food more practical and financially less of a burden.
    “It’s not like there are a 1,000 different places [to buy the fair produce],” he says. “But there are more and more options becoming available.”
    He points to the Whole Foods and Wild Oates supermarkets in Portland, local health food stores and local farmer’s markets as options for people interested in becoming more active in the process of their food.
    Doiron does concede that the food that has been fairly produced is more expensive, but he says if you take into account what it costs to produce it fairly and that these farmers are living off of the money, it makes sense. He also says it says something about our society that fairly produced food is that expensive.
    One of the ways Doiron says that people can over come this expense is by creating their own garden.
    “It’s not about the expense in your own garden,” he says. “It’s more about the question of know-how.”
    Practicing what he preaches, Doiron has an extensive garden on 1,000 square feet of his back yard, apple trees, a peach tree, herbs, flowers and strawberries.
    Another one of the ways Doiron says people who are interested in being part of the solution is by eating with the seasons.
    “We’ve gotten used to thinking everything is in season because when we go to the supermarket everything is always there,” he says, pointing to strawberries and watermelon as perfect examples of two types of produce that aren’t always in season, but are always in the stores.
    He points to the problem that Americans have lost some of the know-how on preserving food for the future because we’re getting to the point that so many families are generations away from the last generation that produced and preserved their own food.
    “Pickling and freezing, many years ago, were part of survival techniques,” he says. “I’m not promoting the idea of people becoming homesteaders that are cut off with the world and completely individual. I’m saying we need to become more self reliant and become better at doing what we’re capable of doing.”
    Doiron actually believes that having the garden in his back yard, and a small one in his front yard, has actually done the opposite of becoming an individual who’s cut off from the world. Personally, he’s seen an interest from his neighbors throughout the neighborhood.
    “So many people have stopped and gazed at what we’re doing. We’ve gotten great community support,” he says.
    He also says this is where people can learn what they don’t know about gardening saying there’s something pretty healthy, on a community level, with food being swapped back and forth amongst neighbors.
    “We’re creating mentor networks,” he says. “People who have the knowledge can become known as individuals who are a source of information.”
    Doiron says that buying food that’s grown locally with in the region is a way to assure that you’re buying fairly produced food and food that’s in season.
    As an example, Doiron points to Aroostook County as a place to buy more than just potatoes, saying the county used to be considered the breadbasket of New England and farmers up in that area are trying to return it to that by getting back to growing a variety of wheat products. He also says that a recent big success in the county has been broccoli.
    He also points to new technology where local farms are producing products all year round in green houses. He uses Laughing Stock Farm, in Freeport, as an example of a farm that is using old fry oil as a heating source for their greenhouse.
    Moving out from there if you can’t buy locally, buy with in your region says Doiron.
    “You can buy stuff that’s shipped from New Jersey earlier because their growing season is two weeks to a month sooner that ours,” he says.
    A statistic that Doiron uses that shows how much Mainers actually buy locally is this: Mainers spend close to $3 billion dollars on food a year and Maine farmers only capture about 4 percent of all food expenditures. Buy comparison for every $1 spent locally in a business setting, it will circulate seven times before being sent out of state.
    Doiron isn’t just working on the agricultural side of food production; he’s also working with Maine fishermen, who are currently struggling with how to save their lively hoods. He says just like small local farmers, small fishermen are trying to compete and to come up with ways that aren’t going to hurt themselves in the end.
    For more information on Doiron, the work he’s done and the work he’s doing, you can go to his Kitchen Gardener’s International web site at www.kitchengardeners.org. Again, he’ll be at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church on March 16 at 7 p.m. leading a discussion on the moving The Global Banquet: Politics of Food.”