Hardwick VT: Sounds Familiar

The Town that Food Savedopens with a brief history of its protagonist town, Hardwick, Vermont, and it’s rise and fall since the late 19th century.  Seems Hardwick experienced a 30-year granite-fueled boom that earned it the nickname “Little Chicago” back when courthouses and capitols were erected with solid rock slabs. The boom lasted until architects and builders learned it was cheaper to use concrete and simply face an edifice with stone, around the end of World War I. The town and surrounding area were hit hard.

What kept the region from experiencing total dereliction was the growth of the dairy industry, which peaked in the 1950s, when Vermont had over 10,000 dairies. The town’s industry became geared toward the support of area farms. And as the dairy industry began it’s decline in the ’50’s (Americans’ milk-consumption peaked in 1945 at 46 gallons per capita per year; today Vermont has less than 1,000 dairies), Hardwick suffered along with it. When the 21st Century dawned, Hardwick’s unemployment rate was chronically higher than the state average, its per capita income chronically below. Beginning in the ’70’s, the area’s depressed land prices, fertile soils and bucolic appeal made it a haven for back-to-the-landers.

There are a lot of parallels between Hardwick’s story and that of my community in Chatham County, and thousands of other rural towns in the Carolinas have experienced the same long-term decline. “Export” industries–textiles, furniture, tobacco, etc., whose products were destined for sale outside the community–for a while pumped towns up. Global market forces in the later 20th Century sucked the wind back out, leaving towns struggling and dependent on imports from outside the community for all basic needs, including food. (Although not all regions got their hippie influx à la Hardwick, Chatham County, or Asheville.)

The other part of the book that is familiar so far is the litany of industrial agriculture ills, cribbed from the same sources as The Omnivore;s Dilemma, Food, Inc., Pew Commission reports, Deep Economy, and other recent texts. I do wish this portion of the book was more original and sensitive to the plight of the farmers who are stuck on the commodity ag treadmill. The language used here antagonizes needlessly an audience that might otherwise be open to a vision of agriculture-driven rural economic development.

Not that Hewitt doesn’t extol the virtues of industrial ag. He talks about he amazing productivity of commodity agriculture today, and how humankind has substituted chemicals and petroleum for solar energy to achieve that productivity and allow billions of people to avoid the toils of farm labor. This then sets up the central question of the book that Hewitt promises to explore: Is it even possible to restore a decentralized food system that is economically viable for the farmer and the consumer, and what changes in how Americans work and live are necessary if we are to achieve it?