Kupfer: Your restaurant has become quite an educational force. What inspires this?

Wicks: When I see an interesting project in our community, I want my customers to know about it. For instance, I was driving around the city and saw these incredible outdoor murals, so I found out who was responsible for them, and I organized a tour to show my customers how these murals were beautifying the community. If I see someone who’s showing leadership in the arts or civil rights or public education, I bring them to the White Dog and feature them in a program. People who come to the events then become supporters of the organization we are featuring.

We also travel to other parts of the country, or the world. There was a shy legal assistant who came with me to Vietnam, and the experience changed her life. She’s gone back there ten times and works with a Vietnamese orphanage. Somebody I brought to Cuba now works to help Cubans develop their economy. After Hurricane Katrina, we took a group of customers down to New Orleans to help rebuild, and some of them have stayed in touch with families there.

It’s hard for people to break out of their own neighborhoods, where they feel safe. We have a program in which we establish sister relationships with minority-owned restaurants in low-income areas of Philadelphia. We take our customers, who are mostly suburbanites and center-city people, to those neighborhoods for a meal and a cultural event. The first time we did it, we planned to go to an art opening at a Puerto Rican art center and then to dinner at a Puerto Rican–owned restaurant, followed by dancing at a Latino nightclub. Right before we went, the newspaper published a city map with black dots on high-crime neighborhoods, and there was a dot right on the corner where our sister restaurant was. The paper called the area the “Badlands” and said it had the worst drug trafficking in the whole city. Worried that no one would come to the “Badlands” for dinner, we held a program at the White Dog called “The Good People of the Badlands,” and we invited community leaders from that neighborhood to come and talk about all the positive things that were happening there. Our dinner in the Badlands was sold out, and we went back every year for three years. Once my customers found out that they could go there and not get shot, they were more likely to go back for dinner on their own. It’s about breaking down barriers and stereotypes.

Kupfer: You’ve been a part of the socially responsible business movement almost from the beginning. Did alarm bells go off for you after Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was bought out by the Unilever Corporation?

Wicks: Yes, I had always looked to Ben & Jerry’s as an example. It was from Ben & Jerry’s that I first heard about a “living wage”: the concept that an employer would voluntarily commit to paying the wage that workers actually needed to live in that community. And it was Ben & Jerry’s that came up with the concept of “multiple bottom lines,” which measures success not just by the amount of profit, but by the positive impact on society.

When Ben & Jerry’s was bought by a multinational, it was a wake-up call for me. Of course, Jerry and Ben did not want to see their business compromised this way. It was a forced buyout. They were heartbroken to lose the company.

Kupfer: How was it forced?

Wicks: Because Ben & Jerry’s is publicly traded, by law the company had to make decisions that were in the financial interest of its stockholders. If a buyer is offering more than your stock is worth on the market and you don’t sell, you’ll be sued by your shareholders. Ben and Jerry tried to get around it. Vermont even passed a law saying that businesses incorporated in Vermont had the right to make decisions that favor other stakeholders, such as employees, customers, and suppliers. But that wouldn’t hold up in federal court, where the old law still governs publicly traded companies.

The buyout showed the dangers of defining success as continual growth. Ben & Jerry’s grew so big it became a target for corporate raiders. We have to change our definition of success and show that we don’t have to grow in size to be successful. We can grow deeper roots in our community. We can grow by expanding our knowledge and consciousness, developing our creativity, deepening relationships, and having more fun. Rather than starting a chain of White Dogs, I’ve tried to make our one restaurant a special place. Rather than spreading my brand, I’ve tried to teach my business model to others.

It used to be that when I saw a Ben & Jerry’s or a Body Shop, I would think, Oh, a little oasis of hope and goodness. Now when I see a Ben & Jerry’s, I feel almost the same way I do about any chain. I’d rather see a locally owned ice-cream store, especially if they are using local milk from grass-fed cows.

When we talk about local economies, it’s important to recognize the co-optation of the word local. Wal-Mart is threatened enough by the buy-local movement that its ads now say, “Shop at your local Wal-Mart,” and they refer to themselves as “your town’s Wal-Mart.”

Kupfer: After your restaurant became such a success by offering fresh, locally produced food, you decided to share the lessons you’d learned with your competition, to encourage them to buy local too. What was the reaction?

Wicks: There was a real sense of gratitude. Sharing our knowledge of how to buy directly from farmers has bred generosity and a more cooperative spirit among Philadelphia restaurateurs and promoted the idea that we are all part of the same local food system. Obviously people aren’t going to eat out at the same place every night. They’re going to go to different places. So it’s more about raising the quality of the food in our whole city, putting Philadelphia on the map as a restaurant town. In the end that helps us all and is much more satisfying to me than running just a successful restaurant myself.

Kupfer: You’ve also financially sponsored community self-reliance projects in other communities.

Wicks: Yes, the first loan we gave was twenty thousand dollars to finance a coffee harvest in the Zapatista Autonomous Zone in Chiapas, Mexico. Another time I loaned thirty thousand dollars to a Pennsylvania farmer who needed a refrigerated truck to deliver pastured pork and other products to restaurants in town. This raised the demand for pastured pork, so White Dog Community Enterprises got a fifty-thousand-dollar grant to assist four pig farmers who wanted either to expand their pastured herds or to transition from indoor production to pastured production.

By helping these pig farmers, and the coffee cooperative, and the farmer making deliveries, I was supporting the system of which I am a part. I’m also not funding something far off that I don’t really understand. There’s true transparency in a local system.

Kupfer: When Mahatma Gandhi fought British tyranny in India in the 1940s, he emphasized the need for Indians to produce food and other products locally.

Wicks: Exactly. Corporations today are controlling our lives the same way the British controlled life in India, and I’m basically using Gandhi’s methods to fight them. His vision was that a self-reliant population could throw off British rule nonviolently. So he advised people to grow their own food and make their own clothes. That’s why you see photos of him behind a spinning wheel, because he tried to teach the Indian people that, rather than send the raw materials to Britain to be made into clothing, they could make their own homespun clothes, which he always wore. The Indian people had gotten themselves into a situation of reliance on the British, who had turned all the family farms into plantations to grow cotton or flax or bananas for export.

The U.S. did the same thing to Cuba: turned the whole island into farms producing sugar and beef and tobacco for export, so that there were no community farms left. In India millions died of starvation, and Cuba almost experienced famine when the Soviet Union collapsed. To survive they beat their swords into plowshares, training soldiers to become farmers. In fact, everyone became a farmer — at least, part time — even doctors, and they turned every inch of available land into gardens. I went to Cuba five times during that period, and it was amazing to see the community gardens. One time I brought along an organic farmer from Pennsylvania, and he told me how amazed he was that the Cubans had such advanced organic-farming methods. They were organic by accident, because they couldn’t afford petroleum-based fertilizers and chemicals, or even gasoline to run tractors. But now they’re ahead of the curve when it comes to reducing dependency on oil and building a healthy, self-reliant food system.

Kupfer: Do you think your contemporaries from the countercultural movements of the sixties have reassessed their relationship to money?

Wicks: Yes, I know I have. The first business that I started, in 1970, was the Free People’s Store. We thought that the Vietnam War was being fought to protect U.S. business interests, and we didn’t want to be part of that. So we said that our store was “nonprofit.” We didn’t have legal nonprofit status, but we were committed to not taking a profit to enhance our bank accounts. We took only what we needed to live on. We even had a free bin in the store, filled with donated clothes and other items for people who didn’t have any money.

As a generation, I think that we’ve certainly overcome — if you will — the idea that profit is evil, to the point where a lot of us have embraced what we opposed back then. I, myself, have come to understand that profit is not a dirty word. It’s necessary to keep a business alive, and you can use profits in ways that are beneficial to the community.

I think what needs to happen for real social change to occur is to have two generations in a row that share a desire to change society. We didn’t have that with our parents, who were relatively content at having survived the Depression and World War ii. But the Vietnam War and the civil-rights movement gave our generation a longing for peace and justice, and many of us have passed that along to our children, who are now having children. I think the number of people who want peace is growing with each generation. Looking back, during the Vietnam War, there were few people of our parents’ generation out there protesting. But these days you’ll see three generations protesting the war in Iraq.

Kupfer: Have you noticed a rise in the number of people consciously trying to reduce their carbon footprint?

Wicks: It is growing, but not fast enough. You hear more lately about the concept of “food miles” — how far food travels to get to your plate. To most people fewer food miles just means that it’s fresher, but others are starting to make the connection to carbon emissions, though I don’t think that’s the primary reason people buy local. I think the local-food movement is more concerned with nutrition and community connection: people want to meet the farmers who grow their food, and they know that local food tastes better and is healthier and more nutritious. Food that’s shipped many miles is engineered to have a long shelf life and bred for conformity of shape and size and color; unfortunately taste and nutritional value are lost.

Kupfer: The New Yorker recently ran an article citing evidence that apples flown from New Zealand to England actually have a smaller carbon footprint than locally grown English apples, because the climate in New Zealand is better suited to farming apples. And beans imported from Kenya have a smaller carbon footprint than European beans, because farmers use fewer petroleum products in Kenya. How do we balance the many environmental costs when determining which apples or beans to buy?

Wicks: I believe it is always better to buy local. The cost of oil will continue to rise, and climate change is bringing different weather conditions everywhere, so the future is unsure. What if Africa has a severe drought and produces no beans, or the beans produced there are needed by Africans? It’s critical for each region to develop local food security and be self-reliant rather than depend for survival on food transported long distances. Each region should be continually developing better agricultural methods appropriate to its own climate. And by buying local, consumers strengthen their local food system rather than send capital elsewhere.

Kupfer: Is there a danger of isolationism if too much emphasis is placed on self-supporting localities? Could self-sufficiency undermine feelings of interconnectedness?

Wicks: I don’t think the corporate-controlled global economy gives us a feeling of interconnectedness. I see it as largely based on exploitation, which is just the opposite. Some of the world’s people — like us — take much more than their share of the world’s resources, while others barely survive. We should be moving toward a more reciprocal system based on fair trade. I don’t think we can trust the current system to make sure everyone has enough. Just look at the current global food crisis. In some parts of the world, people are going hungry because they can’t afford to pay the rising prices in the global marketplace. These are often countries that once had plenty of locally grown rice to feed their own people. But that was before U.S. corporate rice farmers put them out of business. The U.S. and EU governments subsidize large corporations that grow commodity crops like corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, and cotton. This allows those companies to dump their products on the market at below the cost of production, putting local farmers out of business and making the world’s people dependent on imports, with no control over price or quality.

There are many goods the people of the world can trade in besides crops that can be grown most anywhere. We can develop a feeling of interconnectedness through exchanging art and music, ideas and culture, and by getting to know each other as human beings rather than as producers and consumers. We can trade in what is culturally unique to our region. These products bring a greater sense of interconnection than beans and potatoes.

Kupfer: Where are we today in the history of the local-economy movement?

Wicks: Near the beginning, but it’s growing fast. I think it’s logical that the movement start with food, because that’s what we buy the most, and it’s so easy to understand why we should buy local food. Energy is the next thing that has to become local, because we can’t keep fighting wars over oil. I think clothing is going to take longer, because it’s costly and complicated to make fabric, and it’s not something we use up every day like food and energy. When the time comes, White Dog Enterprises would like to start Fair Fiber, a clothing counterpart to our Fair Food project. It’s “farm to back” instead of “farm to table.” We hope to experiment with a small-scale project that grows fiber crops, turns them into fabric, and then makes the clothes. I know nothing about making clothes, so it’s all new for me. I find it absurd that the native fiber crop of our region is outlawed. I would like to sue for our right to grow hemp, or nonpsychoactive cannabis. In colonial times all of the clothes were made from hemp. There’s even a town in Pennsylvania called Hempville.

One of the hardest things to become self-reliant in is going to be transportation, because we’re not in a position to manufacture cars locally.

Kupfer: But you’ve predicted that vehicles will someday be customized to each region.

Wicks: Right, because the type of car that would run best in Arizona, with the dust and the sand, might be very different from the ideal car in Vermont, with the hills and cold weather. I like the idea of having workshops where maybe a few artisans would put a whole car together, instead of working on assembly lines. It could be fun to make cars. And if we scaled down by using public transportation, bicycles, and shared cars, and lived in walkable communities, we wouldn’t need that many of them. Jobs could be more meaningful if we moved away from the industrial cookie-cutter approach and broke it down into small companies, where there’s more employee ownership and a more holistic vision of what you’re building, instead of an employee putting in one screw over and over again. In the slaughterhouse, the fast-food chains, and the industrial farms people are just cogs in the machine. One aspect of the local economy is that workers have more-enjoyable, more-meaningful employment.

Kupfer: Given that the U.S. economy could be upset even more at any moment, isn’t local self-sufficiency paramount to our survival?

Wicks: Absolutely. A lot of people feel that the stock market is going to crash and that the U.S. infrastructure is falling apart, partly because we’re spending all our money on war instead of things like bridges and a healthcare system for all. And I think when the crash comes, there’s going to be a panic. What we’re doing now in the local movement is building the infrastructure before the panic, whether it’s caused by the collapse of our economy or by global warming.

Most crises push people to find security in community. There’s a “we’re all in this together” spirit during hard times, and the instinct is to shore up the home base and seek control over basic needs. The recent food scares — such as tainted meat, tomatoes, and spinach — are causing people to want more transparency in food production, which is possible only when food is produced locally. Industrialization has led us far from community self-reliance, but I think we have enough sense left to embrace the concept in the face of adversity. When times get tough, some people will panic and compete and hoard resources, but hopefully the crisis will bring out the better angels in most, and we’ll recognize that our survival depends on cooperation.

Kupfer: Is there any way to build the movement without cynically hoping for a disaster that forces people to change their ways?

Wicks: People tend not to change if they feel comfortable and satisfied, but the truth is that we are not satisfied in a spiritual and emotional way. Studies show that Americans are less happy now than they were in the fifties. I think going local and sustainable is part of the pursuit of happiness. We have a craving for community. We want relationships with the butcher and the baker and the farmer who grows our food and the person who makes our clothes. As I said, there is no such thing as one sustainable household or business; it’s about being part of a community. Sustainability requires working together toward a common goal, and there is joy in doing that. If more people realized this, I think they’d get on board. Nevertheless, it will take a disaster to change some people’s behavior. I just hope that, as climate change makes life harder and harder and the price of transportation gets higher and higher, those of us who are working now to build sustainable local systems can provide an example that others will follow.

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