OPINION: In the wake of Thanksgiving, let’s review Alaska’s food security

Being off from work and thinking of the Thanksgiving feast this season, the one thing that bubbled to the top of my mind is: the importance of food, and, as President Abraham Lincoln initiated it during the Civil War, a day of thanksgiving and praise. Leaving aside culture wars, which historical narrative is right about the holiday’s origin four centuries ago, the role of Providence, the subsequent expanding railroads and Indian wars, etc., I think that in our state, we are going to individually take more seriously the individual responsibility for figuring out how to get what we need to eat.

While, by and large, the handful of grocery and restaurant stores are undoubtedly the primary, though not sole, source of providing food to the majority of Alaskans, those provisions are tenuous and might at some point largely evaporate for an acute amount of time. What if two of the state’s largest grocers merged and ended up in a near-monopoly position over daily store stock and selection? What if another earthquake slammed the piers at the port in Anchorage for an additional minute longer than we experienced four years ago, thus crippling the weekly offloading of more than three-quarters of the state’s overall grocery supplies from the few barges bringing in commercial provisions from Seattle? What if historically unpredictable freeze-ups and breakup ice jams up waterways along the state’s west coast and river routes threw supply schedules off for barge deliveries? What if hacked navigation and/or electrical utilities disabled the communication and logistics of deliveries? And, my favorite as an economist, what if exacerbated inflation up here makes it too expensive to make the dollar stretch so it can cover a minimal monthly food budget?

As Alaskans, we could lobby the Legislature for a year-to-year Band-Aid of larger one-time transfer payments, in other words, the Permanent Fund dividend — but how does that work as a long-term solution, with the political, trailing roller coaster that is often being pulled year-to-year by the front car, known as the extremely variable price of crude oil? I think that shoveling out more annual payments from state government to individuals will not build enduring supports, nor will shoveling it to the state’s sole public university. The one department dedicated in the university system around food has been unabashedly asking for $45 million of $50 million sequestered to food security monies, primarily for its research endeavors at the public higher education experimental facilities.

This is not a promising, nor efficacious, solution currently in making the most headway per our state’s tenuous food insecurity condition. I do not denigrate the scientists at the University of Alaska who study plants, animals, agricultural lands, etc. All the same, as a resident, this soliciting has clearly come off as a blind one-trick pony plea, asking our executive branch to commandeer the lion’s share of public research money to solve the problem. And yet it is not efficient nor equitable spending in a parity sense, given that the disjointed priority mechanisms within the university have been functionally deteriorating into shambles, so that those employees who are tasked with distributing external funding often don’t know where things are in the accounting system.

Our food-growing problem is also structural, so that networks of industry are not going to pull the cat out of the bag. And while the state is growing well in the rates and percentages of new farms comparative to other states, the USDA’s 2017 Agriculture Census for Alaska found more than two-thirds of our agriculture operations are 50 acres or fewer. No matter the recent annual growth rates, this is not really large enough to create the absolute linkages, equipment clusters and attract honed skill assets to scale things sufficient for the food needs if the current state of affairs kinks up.

Not being red, blue or purple in the established political camps, I keep thinking that it boils down to each Alaskan and their family figuring out the source their supply — and adequate storage — of food stock.

I grew up low-income under the care of a mother who came through the end of World War II in a county seat smack dab in big agriculture country. I learned there would be less free time come spring, as Mom planted the backyard in April, and that in end of August, it would be steamy enough to detach the wallpaper from the kitchen due to a couple weeks of vegetable preservation. This wasn’t out of an edification of reviving “the old ways,” nor a feel-good hobby. Primarily, it was done annually to help keep us stocky enough.

On the other side of the family, I grew up under a dad whose family started ranching in Colorado just over 100 years ago, and were respectively bankrupt from prairie flooding and then the recession of the 1980s. During high school, I’d be woken up at a miserable 3 a.m. in fall to trailer horses and get them above timber line, so that in groups we could flush out elk or mule deer after sunrise to get a couple months of needed food down to the storage locker. It wasn’t subsistence in the rural Alaska sense, but it was getting groceries in the woods.

While not every Alaskan is going to go hunting or grow gardens and can their harvest, I think it is time everyone thinks about our food sources and, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, what are you doing to personally be responsible for effective nutrition and cost-effectiveness before some kink leads to empty shelves, disrupted food supply chains or inflation at the dinner table?

Art Nash is an energy specialist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Cooperative Extension Service.

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