Idaho's Bounty is a group of regional environmental advocates who are forming an Internet-based purchas-ing cooperative to serve southern Idaho. Since the group is made up of Wood River Valley residents, this will be the first area in which the program will be available.
The group includes Judy Hall, Kaz Thea, Laura Theis, Kelley Weston, James Reed, and Judd McMa-han. Their impetus is to create a cooperative that sup-plies regionally grown food, thus maintaining sustainability among regional resources and agricul-ture, and reducing energy use.
Much of what spurred the group into action was the realization that the majority of the food produced in Idaho is marketed out of state while much of the food consumed locally is imported.
"There is no reason we shouldn't get our food from less than 1,800 miles away," Weston said. "It's a shift in thinking."
Indeed, according to Michael Pollan's 2006 best sell-ing book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," the industrial food chain accounts for the bulk of our diet.
"Our food supply has been co-opted by huge indus-trial agricultural businesses," Weston said. "It's not food, or nutrition, it's a manufactured product. We're in danger of losing the option. That's the real danger in the long run."
Weston said the real issue is how we think of food to begin with. The co-op will be an alternative for food shopping as well as an enhancement of the Wood River Farmers' Market, of which Thea is a board member, and the Sawtooth Botanical Garden's Community Sup-ported Agriculture program, which Weston helped found in 1994.
"Pollan's book is driving this whole thing," Reed said. "All our producers have read this book. There is nothing more radical than people taking their food power back.
"This is not a Wood River Valley food-buying group. The co-op will focus on southern Idaho, bringing local food to local people. We're relying on the Wood River Valley to launch because it's an educated group. It's a bite-size piece we can take. It's tricky to match the supply to the demand. If we go into the valley and work hard, we can put it together and have it function ele-gantly. Then we've succeeded in our test area. Then we can broaden into southern Idaho."
There are many similar co-op programs across the country. One, which particularly impressed Idaho's Bounty, is based in Oklahoma. It's set up very simi-larly to the one planned for here.
"What's so exciting for me is I've been talking to and studying the farmers' and ranchers' businesses," Reed said. "They're struggling. They've lost their value-added niche and are under pressure from the food in-dustry. This answers a lot of their problems. Being able to help these guys is really important to us. (We think) this is a system that can help revive an agrarian southern Idaho."
As her Community Action Project, Laura Theis, an Environmental Resource Center AmeriCorps member, put together a survey that is accessible online to help Idaho's Bounty decipher and organize the co-op to match the community's needs. Theis said people should e-mail idahosbounty@yahoo.com to be sent the survey before the Feb. 22 deadline.
"In order for us to produce enough food over a pe-riod of time, we need to know what people's concerns are," Weston said. "I'm confident it will work if enough people show support. We're shooting for this summer on a limited basis, but hopefully we'll be able to offer a fairly broad pallet of food. There's great potential, but it will take time and effort, like
Farmers? markets bring local food to local people. A group of Wood River Valley residents, calling them-selves Idaho?s Bounty, is aiming to do more of that. Photo by David N. Seelig
