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Among our community tours the eco-tour focuses each year on a different environmental theme to give us a greater sense of place. Where does our water come from in Philadelphia? Where does our energy come from? Where does our waste go? We have community-garden tours in the inner city and affordable housing tours; we do a Child Watch tour, a concept started by Marian Wright Edelman at the Children's Defense Fund. That's where the slogan, "No child left behind," came from, but she really means it! We have different themes—such as juvenile-justice, education, health care, or recreation—for our trips to the inner city to see what programs are succeeding and what needs of inner-city children are still unmet. There are community service days, many run by my daughter Grace. She also runs our film series. We've recently shown "Outfoxed" about the Fox News channel and "Life and Death," which describes how the global economy has affected Jamaica. We just showed "End of Suburbia" about the rising cost of oil. Sometimes people say that I'm not really in the restaurant business, that what I actually do is use good food to lure innocent customers into social activism! Yes, we did organize buses to go to Washington to protest the war in Iraq. We had several buses for that and more recently for the pro-choice march.
Fun is also a big part of the business, and we celebrate the joy of community. When you come to the restaurant, you don't have to think about all the problems in the world. You can eat, drink, and be merry. We have many events that are just for fun. We celebrate diversity on the street with our Rum and Reggae festival or Noche Latina nights with dancing and live bands. On New Year's Day we have our annual Pajama-Party Brunch, which we've been doing for twenty years. As people arrive in their pajamas and robes, I take pictures, which we post on the wall each year. A college student came in this year with his girlfriend and pointed to a picture of him in his pajamas, holding his teddy bear, taken when he was four. That builds a real sense of community.
On the Fourth of July eve we have the Liberty and Justice for All ball, and I put on a skit called The Birth of the Nation. First comes a Revolutionary War soldier with his drum, then a midwife with her lantern, and then I come out dressed as a pregnant colonial woman, with a clown face, a little colonial cap, and a sign on my back that says, "George Washington slept here." I get into a big bed in the street, and my midwife delivers twins, a white woman and a black woman dressed in red, white, and blue, holding signs saying "Justice" and "Liberty." They hop onto the stage and do a tap dance to "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Then we wheel out the Statue of Liberty. Grace, all in green, has been the statue several times because she's tall. We light our sparklers and sing "God Bless America." It's very patriotic!
Once I had a dream of walking into a restaurant. Instead of asking for a table for two or for four, I said, "I'd like a table for six billion, please," envisioning a world where there was no hunger and where everyone had a place at the table, both politically and economically. At the time, the United States was supporting the Contras in Nicaragua. President Reagan said the Sandinistas were communists. In my younger days I had been tricked in the case of Vietnam, so I decided to go down there and find out for myself what was happening. That visit led to our first sister restaurant in Nicaragua. The idea is to take our customers and our staff to countries that are at odds with the United States, to find out how U.S. foreign policy is actually affecting the lives of people in different countries, and to show that it's through dialogue and understanding and communication that we achieve world peace rather than through economic and military domination. Our travels have taken us to Cuba, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, El Salvador, Mexico, and the Middle East. We've eaten with the Zapatistas, the Sandinistas, the Viet Cong, and the Soviets, so our nickname is "Eating with the Enemy."
We try to develop economic ties wherever we go, to use the power of economic exchange to help others. In 1997 I was very upset by the Acteal massacre of indigenous people in Mexico and wanted to figure out what more I could do to be of help rather than simply taking our customers to Chiapas to learn about the Zapatista pro-democracy movement. I decided to take a delegation of business people who source coffee or textiles from Mexico to observe and to witness how the violence was affecting the economy of the indigenous people. We held a press conference in Mexico City, and many reporters showed up because we were business people instead of peace activists. We talked about the need for peace and for autonomy for the indigenous people. The headline in the paper the next day said, "U.S. Firms Call for Peace in Chiapas." That showed me first hand the power of the voice of progressive business people. I returned every year for five years, always bringing other business people to support the Zapatista economy. We succeeded in financing the first shipment of coffee from the Zapatista autonomous zone to the United States market, coffee we serve at the White Dog Cafe.
I believe that the purpose of business is to serve, and so the White Dog mission is, very simply, to be fully of service in four areas: serving our customers, serving one another as fellow employees, serving our community, and serving the earth. There are many different ways we do this. One of the most important ways of serving the earth and our community and our customers all at once is for us to buy locally from organic farmers, at the same time educating people around the issues surrounding sustainable agriculture and letting them know that we're poisoning ourselves and poisoning the land and our water and our air with chemical pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Education has become a product of the White Dog along with food and service. I once heard Willis Harmon say he believes that eventually all businesses will have education as product. I think that's true; it has certainly happened for us.
For a long time I've known about free-range chickens and eggs. I've known the importance of making sure the veal we serve is raised naturally, with its mother. But I had no idea about how pork was being raised in this country until I read John Robbins's book Diet for a New America a while back and learned about the atrocious way sows are kept on factory farms, locked in tiny metal crates where they can't move at all, forward or backward. They stand on cement their whole lives, their excrement drained into a lagoon that then pollutes the water table. They never feel sunshine or a breeze coming through, they never feel what it's like to breathe fresh air. Highly intelligent and very social creatures, these pigs never have the opportunity to socialize with other animals, to raise and care for piglets, to do anything that gives them delight in being a pig or in existing as part of the Universe, as nature intended. The cruel way they are treated is such a perversion, a violation of nature. It is an example of the industrial system gone amok when living creatures are treated as though they're machines. To me, this is sacrilegious; it's a breach of our duty to be good stewards of farm animals and to respect life. I was outraged, so I went to the kitchen and said, "Take all the pork off the menu," because I realized that the pork we were serving came from those barbaric conditions. Most of the pork in this country does, unless you seek an alternative. I said, "Take off the bacon, the ham, and the pork chops—until we can find a humane source for our pork." We asked the farmer who was bringing in free-range chicken and eggs from Lancaster County if he knew a place that raised pigs in the traditional way, and he did. He started bringing in a pig every week, and now we get two pigs a week, the whole pig. This means you have to find a way to use all the parts, which is actually quite a good thing environmentally and a creative challenge for our chefs.
In the meantime I found out about the atrocities in the beef industry and the importance of buying pastured beef for the health of both the animal and the consumer. Eventually I was able to find sources for all of our meat products—our beef, pigs, lamb, and chickens—from small farms in our own area where we know how the animals are being raised. When I finally got all that taken care of, I thought, well, I'm finished now; we have a cruelty-free menu. We're the only restaurant in town that can say it, so this can be our market niche. But then I said to myself: Judy, if you really care about those pigs that are treated so cruelly, if you really care about the small farmers who are being driven out of business by large factory farms, if you care about the environment that's being polluted by the system, if you care about the rural community that's changing so drastically because of those horrible factory farms in their neighborhoods, if you care about the consumers who eat meat that's full of antibiotics and hormones, then you would teach your competitors to do what you're doing. That was the next step for me, and it was a huge one because as business people we're taught to be competitive and to want our restaurant to be the best restaurant. It shouldn't even occur to me to share what I know with competitors, but I realized that this was my challenge.
It's not enough to attain the best business practices within our own business; we need to work outside our own companies and share our knowledge with others, including our competitors, if we want to bring real change. So I started a nonprofit, the White Dog Cafe Foundation, and I put 20 per cent of our profits into the foundation and other nonprofits. We run programs through our nonprofit as well as giving small grants. We started with pigs. I asked the farmer who was bringing in two pigs a week if he would like to expand his business. When he said yes, I asked what was holding him back. He said he needed $30,000 to buy a refrigerated truck. I loaned him the $30,000, and he bought the truck.
The job of the foundation's first director was to provide free consulting to our competitors—the chefs and restaurant owners in Philadelphia—to teach them the importance of buying humanely raised pork and other products from local family farms. Eventually she started the Fair Food Farm Stand in the Reading Terminal; 100 per cent of our products come from local farms and small food processors in our area rather than from the industrial system. Our other project is the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, which supports and connects locally owned independent businesses that measure success by the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. Personally, it's a vehicle for me to teach what I've learned in business to other entrepreneurs and spread the White Dog model. The Foundation now has four full-time employees. Its many events and programs have the mission of helping to build a local living economy in our region.
Two events took place in the fall of 1999 that caused me to direct my full attention to building a movement and co-founding the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). The first one was the massive protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999. I was so impressed by the young people who actually became knowledgeable about what the WTO is all about. I myself didn't know what was happening in Seattle, but my daughter Grace went. She brought back with her the shirt she wore while she was at the protest. She couldn't get to her hotel room because of all the street blockades, so she wore the same shirt for three or four days. I have it in a box in the china cupboard along with the other family heirlooms. It reminded me of when I was a little girl, going up to my grandmother's attic and opening up a creaky old trunk. Inside was my father's naval uniform from World War II, and I knew that my grandmother really cherished it the way I cherish Grace's dirty shirt from Seattle. To me, her shirt represents the simple, humble uniform of the nonviolent revolution against corporate tyranny. When I looked at what was happening in Seattle, I saw environmentalists, labor union leaders, farmers, students, and so on, but absent was the voice of progressive business. The protest was against everything we don't like about business, but no one was articulating a new vision of what business should and could be. I asked myself, How can we direct the energy of young people toward building a positive alternative?
Only days after Seattle, the second event happened: Ben and Jerry's was sold to Unilever. It wasn't by choice. The company fought it, but because it is publicly traded, by law it must sell to the highest bidder if that is favorable to the financial interests of their stockholders. When it finally sank in, I sat up in bed in the middle of the night and said to myself, "My God, they've got Ben and Jerry's!" I just couldn't believe it. That company was the leader of our movement and had taught us so much. I learned about the living wage from Ben and Jerry's. It was Ben and Jerry's that came up with the idea of measuring success by a multiple bottom line. With the sale of Ben and Jerry's to Unilever as well as Odwalla to Coca Cola, Cascadian Farms to General Mills, and most of Stonyfield Farm's yogurt to Groupe Danone (the parent company of Dannon Yogurt), I realized that our movement for socially responsible business needed to rethink itself. We had never dealt, for instance, with the issues of ownership, size, and place. Though the movement for responsible business has grown, it is still the case that the environment has gotten worse, wealth inequality has gotten worse, and we have a social crisis because of family farms being forced out by factory farms, family businesses being forced out by Wal-Marts.
Recently I spoke in Indiana in the little town of Greencastle. As I was being driven into town, I asked the driver about this community. He pointed out the empty storefront where the locally owned video store used to be. Now there is a Blockbusters. At the dinner that night I met a woman whose husband had started a hardware store. He had it for eighteen years until he was forced to close its doors because a Home Depot had opened nearby. The young man who introduced me that night had been given a scholarship by a Greencastle department store that gave scholarships to local college students. Now that store is out of business too because of competition from chains and big-box stores.
We also are faced with a political crisis in which multinational corporations are increasingly dominating our lives—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the news we see and hear—and controlling our government. Politicians and government administrators, who are frequently former CEOs and lobbyists, often owe their jobs to the corporations that fund political campaigns. The merger of corporate interests with government is defined as fascism. We need to bring power and freedom back to "we the people." We can do that by transforming our economy.
I see now that there are two fronts in the movement for responsible business. One front is trying to reform large corporations; the other front is working to create an alternative to corporate globalization that will build economic power in our communities through local business ownership. That is why, three years ago, I co-founded BALLE. Our purpose is to catalyze, strengthen, and connect local business networks across the country, and we have about twenty-five networks we're working with now, including one near here in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, which is called the Valley BALLE. As I was reading Small Is Beautiful, I realized that we are organizing BALLE according to a concept similar to what Schumacher suggested when he said: "We always need both freedom and order. We need the freedom of lots and lots of small, autonomous units, and at the same time the orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and coordination." That is something we honor in BALLE. We provide a vehicle for unity and coordination, but our members are autonomous local business networks that make their own decisions. Being in BALLE helps these local networks to share best practices, develop shared values, and articulate a new vision for the role of business in our lives.
This movement is essentially about decentralization and the freedom that comes with it:
-decentralizing the economy by spreading ownership more broadly to bring economic control back to communities;
-decentralizing our source of energy so that we're not dependent on oil from far-away places and every community has energy security that's sustainable;
-decentralizing our food system so that we have food security--as Chief Lyons said earlier, in order to have freedom we must have access to food;
-decentralizing communications, which promotes independent media (the internet has been helpful in decentralizing the media);
-decentralizing culture in order to protect local cultures because corporate globalization has created a mono-culture, bringing Western culture to the rest of the world.
This is not a sustainable culture. It's a violent culture and one that doesn't take proper care of the elderly, our children, and the animals. We're a culture that consumes more than our share of the earth's resources and pollutes more than the earth can absorb. It is not a culture that should be exported; instead, it should be reformed and made more like the indigenous cultures we're destroying.
The lifeblood of corporate globalization is global transport. Though we talk about global warming, we continue to ship things all around the world unnecessarily. Why should we in Philadelphia buy yogurt that comes from New England? We should be buying yogurt from our own yogurt companies that buy from our local dairies. Why should we buy beer from Europe when we have breweries in our own towns? Every town should have its own brewery, bakery, and creamery. Our vision is that our communities should be self-reliant, that we shouldn't depend on large corporations for our basic needs of food, shelter, clothing, and energy.
In the process of building local economies, many small businesses will be created, businesses that grow, distribute, and process food—making preserves, sauces, and soups from local farm products—as well as businesses that design and make clothing from locally grown fiber crops. When a product is not available locally, consumers should buy in a way that helps and supports the local community where the product, such as coffee or chocolate, originated. It's important to know where your purchase comes from, to know that through fair trade other communities in other parts of the country or the world are the beneficiaries of the purchase.
BALLE directs consumers to locally owned businesses through Local First campaigns in cities, using one another's best results as models; it distributes to our members Local First how-to kits based on successful campaigns. Our Local First in Philadelphia will be launched next year. The most successful one so far is in Bellingham, Washington. It has put together a kit that we're distributing to all the members of BALLE.
Through BALLE we are setting up an on-line marketplace. Each network member of BALLE will enter the names of its community's products. When you are looking for a product, the marketplace will search within fifty miles first, then one hundred miles, and if it doesn't find that product, it will go into the national database so that you can identify small businesses in different parts of the country. In this way we are beginning to build an economy of small to small around the world.
The role of investors is crucial. We must start directing money toward our communities. Putting money in the stock market is a mistake that a lot of progressive people make. They think that by investing in socially screened funds they are doing the right thing. Well, after I put money into screened stocks, I saw that Wal-Mart was listed among them! So five years ago I took all my money out of stocks and put every cent into The Reinvestment Fund in Philadelphia, where my money is loaned out to small businesses and nonprofits in my own community. The Fund even provided the money to build the windmills in central Pennsylvania that I now get my energy from. An important part of the local-living-economy movement is to invest capital locally.
One of the most dangerous aspects of corporate globalization is that large corporations have historically used force and militaries to protect their access to cheap natural resources, cheap labor, and the development of new markets. Thomas Friedman, who has a column in The New York Times, said you can't have McDonald's without McDonnell Douglas, the weapons defense contractor. Perhaps the greatest benefit of the local-living-economy movement is that by creating self-reliance we are creating the foundations for world peace. If all communities had food security, water security, and energy security, if they appreciated diversity of culture rather than a monoculture, that would be the foundation for world peace. Schumacher said "People who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade." There you go!
Let me capsulize the local-living-economy movement for you by contrasting what it is and what it is not, what it does and what it does not do:
maximization of relationships, not of profits;
-growth of consciousness and creativity, not brands and market share;
-democracy and decentralized ownership, not concentrated wealth; a living return, not the highest return;
-a living wage, not the minimum wage;
-a fair price, not the lowest price; sharing, not hoarding;
-simplicity, not luxury;
-life-serving, not self-serving;
-partnership, not domination; cooperation, not competition;
-win-win exchange, not win-lose exploitation;
-family farms, not factory farms;
-biodiversity, not monocrops;
-cultural diversity, not monoculture;
-creativity, not conformity;
-slow food, not fast food;
-our bucks, not Starbucks;
-our mart, not Wal-Mart;
-a love of life, not a love of money.
In our revolution against corporate tyranny BALLE is adopting a strategy that Gandhi used in his nonviolent revolution against British tyranny. When India was colonialized, the fields were planted in export crops, with the result that the Indian people lost their food security and millions starved to death. Gandhi said to the people, Plant community gardens so that you will have food security. He said, Take all the clothes made in Britain, put them in a big pile, and burn them. That's why you often see him pictured at the spinning wheel, teaching people to spin the flax and cotton that is grown in India instead of shipping it to London to be made into fancy clothes and then sent back to India. The Salt March was really a march against privatization: the salt should belong to everyone. We could use more salt marches today.
When I walked into the kitchen that day and said, "Take all the pork off the menu," I realized that I was following a strategy of Gandhi's and Martin Luther King's called the tactic of non-cooperation. When you refuse to cooperate with an evil system, that is the crucial first step. Whether it's the Montgomery bus boycott or the refusal to go along with factory farming, once you say no to the evil system, you are in the position of having to create an alternative, which is what I did when I stopped buying factory meat. We each can find our entry point into this movement by resisting something we see as an evil system: if it's sweatshop clothing, you can make a commitment to knowing who made your clothes; if it's industrial agriculture, you can buy food from local farmers by going to farm markets or becoming a member of a CSA (community supported agriculture) farm; if it's the stock market, you can disinvest in stocks and invest locally. There are many ways to participate.
We are taught that we're losers if we don't pay the lowest price as consumers, earn the highest profit as business people, and make the highest return as investors. We need a revolution in values so that we will value life more than money and so that we can make decisions as consumers and business owners and government leaders in our enlightened self-interest, at the same time benefiting all of life. This is really a battle of the small against the big. We used to think that the global battle was between communism and capitalism, between big government and big business. But nowadays I realize that it's a battle between the small companies and the big ones. We need to choose between a system that's controlled by Wal-Mart and Monsanto or a system that's built around family businesses and family farms. We need to choose between corporations driven by profit and beautiful businesses that are run with love and care. I'd like to end by imagining that table for six billion--all the world's people sitting down at life's great banquet. Joining hands around the table, we might offer this grace:
Mother Earth, heavenly Father, Universal Spirit who dwells in all life,
Forgive us for the harm we have done to our planet and the plants and animals who live here with us,
Forgive us for the harm we have caused each other.
Thank you for giving us the courage to put aside our fears of not having enough for ourselves
So that we could make room for every one of us around this table of great abundance and nourishment,
Thank you for the creativity it has taken to find ways for each of us to participate in the making of this great feast
So that we may all join in the satisfaction of our work well done.
As we gather now in Beloved Community,
We offer our gratitude for this food we share with the greatest joy,
Knowing that you are present in the pleasure of every bite
And the love that shines all around us from each and every smiling face.
Amen.
Question & Answer Period
(Questions were inaudible; only the answers follow.)
Obviously, we cannot get all of our produce locally in the winter. One of the problems in Pennsylvania, as I'm sure is the case here in New England, is that the cost of fuel is so great that it's hard to raise much in greenhouses in the wintertime. But we have a farmer who has been collecting oil from restaurant fryers and using that fry oil to heat his greenhouses. He's been able to grow cucumbers and a few other things that you never could afford to grow in greenhouses because of the cost of the fuel. Our foundation is helping him get a grant to expand his business, and on our block we're starting a model recycling center with a tank that holds fry oil from the surrounding restaurants. We're hoping that we can help him revolutionize farming in Lancaster Country by having more and more greenhouses that can be heated inexpensively when it's cold. We try not to order food from California, but we have to. Right now we're looking into ways of getting to know some of the farmers in Florida. We were getting tropical fruits from Puerto Rico in the wintertime from an organic farm that would ship directly to Philadelphia. We bought there because we actually knew the farmer. Now we're trying to find an organic citrus grove in Florida, a small one that we could have a direct relationship with.
We're not against global trade. What we're saying is, be conscious of whom you're trading with. Do as little long-distance trading as possible because of the transport costs, but if you have to do it, then buy in a way that supports the local community you're buying from. Even if we buy from far-away places like Florida and California, we're trying to identify small farms rather than going through a corporate system.
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Right now our ratio of the highest paid to the lowest paid is four to one. Someday I may have to pay a chef more, and that will change the ratio. I don't know many companies that have a ratio like that. As for employee participation in deciding how we give our money
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Humane and Heart-touching story. We become necessary only when we meet need of others. That's only when we fill our own needs.
Wow, really enjoyed the read!!! Couldn't help but feeling all along a strong desire to come and visit and why not, partake by volunteering... Doable?? Lots of love and blessings from a "Black Cat!"
This was a part of my morning read and so inspiring! Thank you for all that you have done and do for your community and The opportunity to inspire small business owners!