Pedaling the Local Food Movement

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Community Plot Lines: Episode Four

In this episode, three young women chronicle community agriculture efforts on a bike trip from D.C. to Montreal. We also check in on Mark's garden and discuss Dino's newfound fame. Video by Whitney Shefte / washingtonpost.com Episode 3

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Just thinking about the scaled-back version, however, is enough to make the hamstrings quiver. The journey, roughly, took them to Baltimore, through Amish country to Philadelphia, Princeton, N.J., New York (all five boroughs in one day), up the Hudson Valley and on to Montreal. At the Canadian border, immigration officers asked if they were employed. "They let us in, but it took some time," said Tylander.

They returned via Vermont, riding to Burlington and Middlebury, and then traversed Massachusetts to Boston.

Needless to say, their touring bikes -- they paid about $800 each for them -- look well used. (They own no cars.) Sheets calls hers Iridium Flare, Tylander's is Pearl, and Shiffler's L'etoile Noir.

Sheets's bike has a sticker that reads: "Minimize Your Miles to Market. Shop Local." She also has the backbone of a fish taped to the handlebars and, secured to the front, an owl emblem she found in Vermont. "Wisdom," she says. Tylander's has its own cryptic talismans from the trip, including a cattle vertebra attached to the crossbar with plastic flowers. Shiffler's sports a simple sticker, "Cars Suck."

The three would stay with friends and remote acquaintances, and sometimes they would knock on the door of a house that gave off friendly vibes and ask to pitch their tent in the garden. In a village in Vermont, they were drawn to a pink house draped in vines and featuring mannequins as outdoor sculpture. A sign announced free gardening classes once a week, and "we also fix broken violins." The lady of the house was a free spirit who invited them in, fed them, and told them her life story of hardship and love. She read some of her poems. "After that experience, it was embarking on a journey that was something imaginary," said Sheets.

Sometimes the back roads were just beautiful and they took their time; other times were harder. Approaching a city was always tense, the conflict with traffic tightened their grip on the handlebars. They worried about getting lost. "If you go the wrong way on a bike, it takes much longer to correct than if you're in a car," said Shiffler. Approaching Montreal, they were hours behind schedule. They were tired, it was getting dark, they checked into a chain hotel. "The only time," said Tylander. "The only time," added Sheets. "I want you to document that."

Their itinerary was driven by research into the innovative urban agriculture projects that they could film along the way.

One might expect echoes of the hippie movement, except this is different. In the 1960s "you went to a farm to hide," said Nestle. "You didn't go to a farm to make money, unless you were farming marijuana."

Amy Trubek, a food science professor at the University of Vermont, agreed, saying that the local food movement is "a much more pragmatic notion."

Michel Wattiaux, a professor of dairy science at the University of Wisconsin, said he sees his students "I wouldn't say rejecting, but questioning the traditional methods of industrial agriculture based on a large amount of inputs and chemicals and things like that."

But more than a documentary film, he says, the check on the agribusiness model of large-scale production and long-distance shipping is the rising cost of energy.

"The situation we are in right now forces us to go back to basic assumptions," he said, though "we aren't going to go back to hunters and gatherers; it's a matter of degrees."

Bill McKibben, an author and food activist, makes the point in the documentary that were it not for the current back-to-the-land movement, the tradition of local farming to fill that void would have been lost. "Farmers markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy, and it happened just in time, just before the last links with the last generation of people who knew how to grow food were completely broken."

Probe a little deeper, and you find something else in these young women: a rejection of the consumer-driven, debt-financed, career-funded lives of their parents' generation.

Back at the Twin Oaks Community Garden, Lara Sheets is talking about her own future. "I want to go into farming, and I want to be as self-sufficient as possible," she said. "A life seems much more fulfilling to me by becoming as self-sufficient as possible."

Meanwhile, she and her fellow cyclers are reliving the Summer of 2007. "Sometimes it was really beautiful," says Tylander of the trek. "And sometimes it was really hairy."