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The Heart of Urban Ag Is Still Beating…In Kansas?

A note to my readers : Writing this post during the high light of summer felt almost out of place against the gloominess that has enveloped us over the last few weeks. Not wanting to succumb to the darkness, however, I persevered because it’s a story about people and a place that have worked long and hard to build a beacon of light and hope. That’s also one way of explaining why this post is so long. I just can’t be short and pithy when the subject cries out for many words. So, open it, start reading, take a break, weed your garden, get a glass of iced tea, and come back, even two or three times, if necessary, to finish it. Thank you for making the effort, and may you revel in summer’s effulgence!

Just like words, looks can be deceiving. Such was the case with my journey down an arrow straight county highway in eastern Kansas that was lined with newly fabricated malls carved from tidy rectangles of former farmland. Land that once supported precisely laid out rows of corn and soybeans now sprouted America’s meccas of materialism, whose physical profiles, brand names, and endless parking lots had become the universal language for Consumer Nation—devoid of character, regional identities, or accents.

At first glance, my destination that day seemed to echo a landscape that had been stripped of its former pastoral beauty and re-dressed in Chamber of Commerce tropes. I was looking for Innovation Drive, the site of the Kansas State University Olathe campus, whose website’s promotional prose spoke of “education that drives business,” “upskilling opportunities,” and “course material…built with the input of industry partners.” Not that there was anything new here—higher education has been prostrating itself before the STEM gods for some time now, urging young people to relinquish their doomed pursuits of the humanities in favor of joining today’s work force. But the words of the university’s ad-copy writers and the visuals of the immediate surroundings did not comport with what I found at the Olathe campus, site of K-State’s Urban Food Systems Initiative.

An urban food and agriculture initiative? Excuse me, but aren’t we in Kansas? The contradiction first hit me a couple of years ago when the Initiative’s director, Eleni Pliakoni, asked me to join the advisory committee for their GRIP Project. GRIP is an acronym for “Game Changing Research Initiative,” which like the campus’s street name, Innovation Drive, is meant to inspire faculty and students to take their own professional moon shot. But after a couple of longish Zoom calls with their faculty and staff, and reading between the lines of their promotional copy, I found my cognitive dissonance slowly dissolving.

Instead of a bastion of corporate agribusiness, I was hearing about a large research farm where appropriate-scale technology was helping urban and peri-urban farmers churn out both big yields and decent livelihoods; research, monitoring, and remediation methods that were turning lead-laden city lots into productive and safe urban growing and living spaces; and graduate students, many from conventional Kansas farms, with a desire to stay in agriculture, but only if it leads to a stronger sense of community and upholds their beliefs in social justice. Intrigued, I invited myself for a visit to the campus, which included a sampling of the Kansas City urban farming scene, many of whose players partner with the Urban Food System Initiative.

Located only 25 miles from Kansas City, Missouri, the Olathe campus was opened in 2009 and houses programs in hospitality (it includes a state-of-the-art, multi-purpose community kitchen space), animal health, agribusiness, horticulture and natural resources, and urban food systems. Though its building looks every bit the corporate citadel, the daily comings and goings of those inside its glass skin are decidedly warm, welcoming, and community friendly. With a PhD in Agriculture Sciences, Eleni has a focused and intense nature, sharpened a bit by a pronounced Greek accent. Under her leadership, she and her colleagues have created what is still an emerging, comprehensive approach to teaching and researching urban food systems. Becky Stuteville, a PhD in political science who’s developing a food policy course for 2025, called it a “radically inter-disciplinary” program that, like the more expansive understanding of food systems implies, draws from a wide array of academic and experiential learning. “This is a great, innovative environment where faculty have complete agency,” she told me. Becky also sent a jolt of electricity through my system when she told me she was a niece of one of sustainable agriculture’s academic icons, John Ikerd.

My tour of the facility literally starts at the molecular level of the food system. Eleni escorted me into her inner sanctum—the chemistry and biology laboratory where food and plants are tested and analyzed for a number of ingredients, attributes, and purposes. I enter a lab with some trepidation because I’m still haunted by images of high school chemistry class and 17-year-old boys playing with Bunsen burners and, at the other end of the spectrum, people wearing HAZMAT suits. Fortunately, I find neither as I enter a darkened room packed with highly sophisticated instruments capable of measuring every facet of the tiniest compounds, and then displaying the results across computer screens.

There’s a spectrophotometer that is used to measure total antioxidants, total phenolics, anthocyanin, Vitamin C, chlorophyll, and other compounds important for human health. Then there is high-performance liquid chromatography which, Eleni explains, “We are using to measure individual phenolic, flavonoids, and carotenoids, (important compounds for human health). When we analyze hemp samples we are measuring cannabinoids.” They also use gas chromatography which is used for aroma volatiles and terpenes.

Realizing I had just had more chemistry in the last five minutes than I’ve had in the last 50 years, I ask Eleni if something like smelling a fresh tomato isn’t just a subjective experience. She reminds me, with just a hint of “tsk, tsk,” that what you are smelling are very precise compounds. “The consumer wants a nice red tomato that smells good,” she says. “In our role within urban food systems, we’re evaluating the quality of fresh produce grown under a number of very different conditions.”

Photovoltaic system in field trials with tomatoes at OHREC Farm

Over the next 48 hours, I was to see and hear about those “conditions” including urban soils that face multiple challenges. By taking an integrated approach, the Olathe program evaluates a number of opportunities to assist growers. For example, agrivoltaics technology now under development at the Olathe Horticulture Research and Extension Center (OHREC), a 300-plus-acre farm owned by K-State located only 20 minutes from Olathe, includes vertical solar panels spaced at 12-feet intervals in small, trial tomato plots. The hope is that small growers will reap the benefits of solar energy without sacrificing limited land space or the quantity and quality of their produce. Trial tomatoes from the research farm go to Eleni’s lab where grad students, who are learning to do research, analyze every feature of the tomato with the ultimate intent of sharing results with urban growers.

Carefully navigating my way through the laboratory’s sensitive and expensive instruments, I ask Eleni about a small, hand-held metal press sitting on a shelf. It seemed out of place in a room that looked a lot like a NASA mission control center. She picks up the object and grabs a rubber tomato out of a basket of toy vegetables that I just notice. To illustrate its function, she places the “tomato” on a metal tray, pushes down hard with the press’s flat bottom until the rubber bulges out around the edges in a mildly amusing manner. “This is how we start the testing process” she says with the hint of a smile. For a real tomato, the resulting pulp would then go through a dehydrator and extractor, be fed into various measuring devices, and display everything humanly knowable about itself by way of points and lines on a grid scrolling across a computer screen. I took some solace in knowing that a little bit of human touch is still necessary to start the scientific ball rolling.

Since I was a freshman in college, the thing about academia that most perplexed me was its obsession with proving what often seemed to be a keen sense of the obvious. But as I’ve hopefully matured over the years (some will differ), I now see how many of my so-called commonsense assumptions (e.g., nature is good for you) have been wrestled to the ground by scholars who, believe it or not, have often proven such vague notions to be true. And more importantly, the best among them have endeavored to place those truths in service to the public good. As if to subscribe to Edmund Burke’s prescription, “It is not only our duty to make the right known, but to make it prevalent,” the people associated with K-State Olathe disseminate their findings as rapidly as possible into the community.

A case in point is the work of Ganga Hettiarachchi, an agronomy professor of Sri Lankan background who is based at the K-State main campus in Manhattan, Kansas. As a soil scientist (she laughed when I said, “Oh, you’re a diva of dirt!”), Ganga’s research and educational scope goes to the heart of one of America’s longest-standing public health threats and environmental injustices: lead toxicity. As the country’s post-World War II urban decay led to the demolition of millions of lead-based painted buildings, lead levels in soils of the resulting vacant lots soared to dangerous levels. As part of a seven-year brownfields study, Ganga’s research found lead levels in some areas of Kansas City, Missouri as high as 400 parts per million (ppm) compared to what were normal ranges nationally of 15 to 30 ppm. Due to the high concentration of lead in these areas—50 percent of 262 lots tested had elevated levels—lead levels in children from these largely disadvantaged communities were nine times higher than the national average. This much lead in soil also posed risks for vegetable production due to a variety of factors such as what crops were planted (e.g., lead tends to accumulate in roots crops) and water hitting the soil and splashing on leafy vegetables.

“When you consider the benefits of gardening and the limited capacity of many under-resourced cities to monitor lead and implement abatement procedures,” Ganga explained, “we had to find other solutions.” Phytoremediation—using plants to take up soil-based toxins, then harvesting and destroying the plants—works on some contaminants like arsenic but not lead. Her resolution was determining that phosphorous, one of the three basic elements for soil fertility (nitrogen and potassium being the other two), and heavy applications of compost, also good for soil health, were effective in making them safe for vegetable production by reducing the bioavailability of lead.

Ganga sees herself as a scientist in service to the community. “It’s my responsibility to educate,” she told me. To that end, she has developed written material on the subject of soil safety and gardening in potentially contaminated environments for university extension bulletins that are used frequently by the Master Gardeners program. She’s particularly proud of the fact that she was able to get those materials translated into Spanish for the many Spanish-speaking gardeners in the Greater Metro Kansas City area.

In a similar vein, her students benefit greatly from her commitment to education, which drove me to ask about a quote in her university bio which read, “I advise my students to find a niche they enjoy, rather than just seek out the best job prospects.” I wondered if such a remark didn’t fly in the face of the higher education trend that allows earning potential to determine a student’s learning path. A recent New York Times (5/26/24) report examined the growing propensity of college graduates to “sell out” in favor of high paying jobs. “In an age of astronomical housing costs, high tuition, and inequality,” the Times wrote, “students and their parents…see college as a means to a lucrative job, more than a place to explore.” Ganga stuck quietly to her guns. “I went with my gut feeling to be a soil scientist. We should find what excites us.”

As I was speaking to Candice Shoemaker, a retired K-State professor in horticulture therapy, it dawned on me that gut feelings and individual passions can play a bigger role in the evolution of higher education than universities may care to admit. Amanda Lindahl, one of the program’s earliest graduates (2016) and now an educator for K-State Extension, credits Candice as a catalyst for the urban food system program. “The reason the program is in Olathe,” she tells me, “Is due to some very passionate people like Dr. Shoemaker.”

For Candice, the passion was stirred early in her life while working at a foster home for 15 children in Seattle—she lived in a tree house on the home’s grounds—where she first learned to use horticulture to reach children with serious disabilities. She fondly speaks of a 9-year-old with cerebral palsy named Danny who helped her understand how plants’ healing powers extended far beyond nutrition and aesthetics. Her observations were later confirmed when she studied the seminal research of Roger Ulrich who explained why exposure to nature reduces psychological and physiological stress. Later, during a professional stint at a psychiatric hospital in Georgia, Candice would see for herself how patients who worked at the facility’s farm healed faster than those who didn’t.

After earning a PhD at Michigan State University in plant physiology, she worked for a while at the Chicago Botanical Garden. In 2000, Candice landed one of the two faculty positions in the horticulture therapy program at Kansas State, the first such program in the nation. Though her journey up until this point might be called a slowly evolving but essential part of the Urban Food Systems’ creation story, it wasn’t until Candice connected with Katherine Kelly that sparks started to fly.

Katherine Kelly and the uncooperative goat

As the head of Kansas City’s premiere urban farming non-profit, Cultivate KC, Katherine was on a tear to not just make urban farming known, “but to make it prevalent.” Though not from a Kansan farm family by birth, she grew up working on Mr. Nuttle’s farm, a Wichita neighbor with a 1200-acre spread that grew and raised everything. “I was always at my best when I was riding horses, driving cattle, or taking hogs to market,” she tells me. But powered by an innate sense of social justice, she later grew agitated upon eyeing Kansas City’s thousands of vacant lots and became determined to put them into production. Her larger goal, as she put it, was to “normalize urban agriculture.” Being pragmatic, however, Katherine knew she needed deep support to attain her goals, and not just from the garden variety partners available in the non-profit world.

“If you can get in with the university and help them do what they do, but only better, they can be great partners,” she states in a manner that sounds as cleared eye today as it must have been 15 years ago when she forged ties with Candice. Together, they began the long, slow slog of bringing Kansas State, with its deep roots in conventional commodity agriculture, into the ill-defined, still hippie-influenced world of urban agriculture. Candice took on the necessary chores of writing the curriculum, developing educational goals, and addressing an infinite number of details required to secure university sanction. Katherine would add her energy, advocacy, and strong background in diversified forms of food production to the mix. They drew in a couple of other Midwest agricultural legends, Dan Nagengast, former director of the Kansas Rural Center, and Mary Hendrickson, an agricultural economist at the University of Missouri for advice and further legitimacy.

At 62, Katherine is a wiry, bespectacled woman constantly in motion. My first encounter with her occurred atop a mulch pile at the Olathe Research Farm where she was attempting to corral an ornery goat refusing to join the herd in a nearby trailer. Like chemistry, goat herding is not one of my strong suits, but I was conscripted on the spot to block one escape route that the agitated culprit was trying to reach. Seeing that I was of minimal use, I was quickly relieved of my duties and would catch up later with Katherine at a picnic table under the shade of large ash trees. Having left Cultivate KC four years ago, she now runs her farm that uses goats for two purposes: to perform what she calls targeted grazing services which harnesses goats’ propensity to eat anything to clear areas of browse not accessible by cutting machines; and as meat (she didn’t say if uncooperative goats ended up in this category) for Kansas City’s large Afghanistan community.

Currently taking an extended break from nonprofit work, she reflects candidly on her experiences and the role of urban agriculture in today’s food system. She confesses to being very entrepreneurial and hard driving with the organizations she’s spearheaded and the networks she’s built. Not only has this led to the rise of the Urban Food System Initiative within a major university, it has made the metro Kansas City region a hotbed of urban agriculture. Yet that kind of start-up energy can also feed an impatience with bureaucracies, technocrats, and even the staff from many urban farming organizations who, in her estimation, don’t have the same fire in the belly that she has. Honestly assessing her own personality traits and leadership style, she readily admits that, “Sometimes I could be a real asshole!”

In spite of her deep introspection, Katherine remains a dogged proponent of urban agriculture. When I raised some of the attacks brought by the concept’s opponents, such as the futility of ever growing enough food to feed a hungry world from small, densely built places, she vigorously counterattacked. “Cities are where most people live; that’s where they encounter food choices,” she says, noting that the more you can “integrate good food into people’s lives, the more you can change the basic framework [of the food system].” This is another way of saying that wholesale economic and social change is actually the goal, and that urban agriculture is only one piece of a much larger strategy.

But the other major element she raises is that urban agriculture is also a way of not just humanizing the food system, but of reestablishing community ties that have been severed by rural and urban divides. One example she offers is the Kansas Farm Bureau which like state farm bureaus around the country, is known for some conservative and entrenched positions on the American food system. “We have younger members of the Kansas Farm Bureau selling in the cities,” she says with almost as much incredulity in her voice as I feel when hearing it. According to Katherine, farmers are establishing new relationships with city folks that are breaking down their former stereotypes. “When today’s young farmers see they are growing food for a young mom with a diabetic daughter, they see things at a more human level.”

KC Farm School’s Mission Statement Greets All Visitors

Maybe the best defense of urban agriculture is, well, urban agriculture. A tour of two nonprofit farms in Kansas City, Kansas, directly across the Missouri River from the other Kansas City—about the distance a professional outfielder can nearly throw a medium kohlrabi—demonstrates the multiple benefits that unconventional farming brings to a community. At the KC Farm School (Eleni Pliakoni is one of their board members), 3 acres of land and 6,000 sq. ft. of high-tunnel greenhouses located in a modest residential neighborhood are a springboard for about 10,000 pounds of produce each year, as well as bountiful crops of new farmers. Over 500 volunteers, tens of thousands of starter seedlings for backyard gardens, an on-site farmers’ market that serves the neighborhood and accepts SNAP and Senior Double Up Buck coupons, and a recent purchase of an adjacent 11-acre parcel across the street, make this urban farm a small gem whose luster enriches the lives of residents and the value of properties for blocks around.

But the value of the farm’s human capital exceeds even that of its food, land, and greenhouse outputs. Young children come to the farm for special nature and gardening programs (kids sometimes cry because they don’t want to leave when their parents pick them up). And high school age apprenticeships provide paid work and learning experiences that have morphed into jobs and even careers on area farms. In this regard, Olathe’s Cary Rivard, director of the OHREC research farm, noted that this is part of the Growing Growers program, which has produced 275 graduates since 2004, of which 22 percent started a farm, 67 percent went to work on farms, and a substantial number of others went to work in other parts of the food system. As one high school teacher said who had instigated the program for 13-to 17-year-olds, “We need ‘hands-on’ programs like the one at KC Farm School because we don’t want our kids spending their life on a couch!”

Not far from KC Farm School is Juniper Farm, which is part of the Cultivate KC network but with a very special purpose: to give “New Americans” (immigrants and refugees) with agrarian backgrounds a fighting chance to farm in the USA. Walking onto Juniper’s property is an exercise in visual contrasts, with the Kansas City, Missouri skyline looming to the east and the remnants of a vacant, 250-unit public housing project surrounding three sides of the 9-acre farm oasis. Hoop houses, assorted agriculture hardware and out buildings, and 18 neatly tended quarter-acre plots gracefully slope downhill toward the Missouri River.

Over the course of a 4-year program, this infrastructure is put into service to prepare recent arrivals from such places as Somalia, Thailand, Burundi, Congo, and Burma—with cultivation methods required for the American Midwest. Just as importantly, they are also equipped with the marketing tools necessary to meet the consumer demand they’ll find in metro Kansas City farmers’ markets and beyond. Juniper is the antithesis of the scruffy community gardens often found scattered among orphaned wedges of city land. It’s a beautiful place with a serious purpose. By the time these New American farmers get their production and marketing mojos working, people like Biak Par, Ca Saw, and Ngun Tial are earning an admirable $15,000 to $20,000 a year from product sales off a quarter acre of land.

Juniper Farm, Kansas City, Kansas, Surrounded by Vacant Public Housing

On the same site, Juniper also manages a 100-member CSA as well as sales to restaurants and a food hub that provide their farmers with additional sales revenue. By the end of the four-year training period, farmers are expected, with Juniper’s assistance, to find a place of their own, preferably a half-acre piece of land with a house on it. Over the past 10 years or so, 46 farmers have graduated from the program, and, according to Juniper’s records, 32 are still farming.

When I asked farm staff how easy it is to find suitable land, they told me it’s getting harder. Even with 10,000 vacant lots in the KC metro area, land is growing less affordable. While Kansas City, Missouri has a comprehensive 14-year urban agriculture land use ordinance on the books (Kansas City, Kansas, where Juniper is located, has almost nothing), it doesn’t make it any easier to compete against new multi-story residential projects, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants hungrily eyeing the same empty land.

Urban agriculture’s challenges aren’t based on inherent flaws in its concept or methods, but rather in the systemic failures of American land use policy. The ruthless efficiencies demanded by modern capitalism are deployed to exploit land for its so-called highest and best use. This means wringing the greatest financial return from every square foot of land. To do that, developers and city officials must dismiss or minimize the softer and more diversified returns of recreation, beauty, food production, environment, skill-building, mental and physical health, to say nothing of that old fashion idea called quality of life that just about every household seeks from the place they live.

Leaving Juniper Farm, Cary takes us past the property’s southern end, which is still used by Somali-Bantu farmers for food production (a project that was originally funded by a USDA Community Food Project grant). Nearby, we stop for a moment at the site of the housing project’s former basketball court. Rather than young people lobbing long arcs of 3-pointers, the site now sports the framing of a just-erected 54-feet-by-96 feet greenhouse, soon to be sheathed in plastic, that will be integrated into Juniper’s program. “It took lots of volunteers, donated equipment from the research farm, private donations, and plenty of muscle to build that thing,” Cary tells me with both satisfaction and a hint of relief. “And it started by ripping up and hauling 14 dump truck loads of tarmac off this site!” It’s what the Olathe staff do in their “spare time”—they find creative and flexible ways to make their expertise and resources available to the community.

To judge the value of urban agriculture, a judgment that in this case applies as well to the underlying value of Olathe’s Urban Food System Initiative, you have to ask the most important stakeholders—the students. Presently, the initiative has 37 graduate students (an additional 23 have graduated from the program since its inception) of which I was able to chat with nine, including two alumni. Over lunch, as well as a Zoom call, I discovered a strong undercurrent of passion for sustainable food, farming, and social justice. Their backgrounds varied considerably—some grew up on large, traditional Kansas farms, two students were from Ghana, while others had no or limited agricultural experience.

Alex had just finished his first semester and was engaged with the agrivoltaics work at the research farm. He told us that he chose the program because of something he called “self-ownership,” which was a form of self-sufficiency. “I hadn’t grown anything from seed in a long time; now I spend all my time at the research farm learning skills so that I can own myself.” His political analysis of the food system targets planners and certain agribusiness interests that he feels have an anti-urban food system bias that deters progress toward individual self-sufficiency. For him, urban agriculture’s major benefit is its “undoing of consumer indifference toward food.” He was the source of the most memorable quote during my time in Kansas: “If someone who doesn’t love you controls you, they own you!” I would catch Alex the following day at the research farm where he was wearing a floral coolie hat and doing as poorly as I did corraling goats.

Comfort is a young woman from Ghana working on a masters in advanced food systems. Her reasons for being in the program are perhaps a bit more sobering than the American students. As she said, “I’m from Africa, which has lots of food insecurity and high rates of food-borne illnesses.” Those starker realities are why she’s working with Eleni in the laboratory on food safety. “I’m here because I want to help the poor people in my country, not like the corporations who are there to profit.” After seeing snow for the first time in her life, she naturally wondered how one grows food in the winter, and “then I see hydroponics, greenhouses, and food growing inside buildings!”

Besides the majority of students who are in their twenties, there are a few older, what might be referred to as nontraditional students. Vanessa, perhaps in her early 50s, already has a degree in clinical social work, is a master gardener, and uses a version of horticulture therapy with children in a high-poverty area of Wichita. Drawing from her training, she starts with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to explain, “If we don’t have food and can’t eat, we can’t do anything.” She says that as a child she went to a school where 80 percent of the students qualified for free and reduced-price meals. “I grew up on paper food stamps, before SNAP/EBT! For me, autonomy and choice are social justice issues. I’m in this program to make the food system more resilient.”

All the students and alums had fascinating stories, deep wells of commitment to food system change, and well-thought-out reasons to be in the Olathe program, but Ryan’s story struck a particular chord. He’s in line to become the sixth-generation owner of his family’s traditional Kansas farm, but before he signs on the dotted line, he’s exploring alternatives which included a B.A. in social work and, currently, working at the Kansas Rural Center. At a practical level, he liked that the university program was online which meant he didn’t have to commute 2½ hours to the campus. But philosophically, he felt that “Olathe is more ‘on the ground’ and applied…it’s uplifting for small farmers and not there to serve corporations.” He wondered out loud “if there’s space within a conventional agricultural system to care about people,” but immediately checked his thoughts with, “Is that too harsh? Am I repudiating my family’s agricultural lifestyle?” Ryan’s thesis at this point in his exploration is that urban farming offers an antidote to large-scale, agricultural anomie because of its “proximity to people and the nature of relationships.”

As might be expected, the Urban Food Systems Initiative’s core staff are tenacious defenders of not just their respective disciplines but the object of their scholarship—urban food systems. While they will acknowledge their inherent bias, they conduct their work with rigorous methods and an allegiance to the data and evidence. I’m sitting around a faculty table with Tricia, Cary, and Eleni with hopes of digesting the massive load of stimuli I’ve ingested so far. Eleni eases my discomfort a little bit when she says, “What you see now [physically and programmatically] took 14 years of work.” She’s referring to a confluence of timing, history, circumstances, advocates, and funding—some of which is intentional and some of which is luck—that makes up their story. For instance, much of their classroom teaching (not the lab or research farm) was online before the onset of Covid, which actually helped to increase the number of students threefold to an average of 32 per class. Money helped as well. “We gained trust and respectability when we received the $1 million GRIP grant,” she said.

Those things and the fact that food security was built into the mission of the larger Olathe campus helped them outlast a string of CEOs, including one of whom was obsequiously pro-industry and decidedly anti-urban food system. With both pride and a note of defiance, Eleni said, “We earned the right to be here because we were successful.” And their right to remain for something close to eternity will be assured if they are successful in securing a $10 million grant from the AFRI Sustainable Agricultural Systems (SAS) program, an application whose chances of success are enhanced by the $1 million GRIP grant.

Bonding with the region’s urban agriculture community, achieving academic and institutional respectability, and mustering the necessary multi-disciplinary brain trust and resources have positioned the Urban Food System Initiative at the national forefront of urban agriculture. But what of the concept itself? Does small scale farming, even gardening, to say nothing of the often feisty, sometimes obstinately undefinable world of peri-urban and urban agriculture have a future? When millions of hungry mouths are added to planet Earth every month, or even when well-intentioned local officials push growers off a city lot to make room for 10 units of much-needed affordable housing, how will urban agriculture argue its case?

These questions are precisely the ones the UFSI’s GRIP grant is addressing. Tricia Jenkins is using the Community and Agriculture Resilience Audit Tool (aptly acronymed as CARAT) “to assess how urban agriculture production sites influence community food resilience, community health, food production, and environmental sustainability by doing surveys in communities.” One obvious application of this tool, Tricia explains, is that once they’ve identified and have metrics for urban agriculture’s co-benefits—assuming that “feeding a hungry world” is not the primary goal—then both academics and practitioners will have stronger leverage with public officials to make land use decisions more favorable to urban agriculture. Ultimately, they expect to create an AI tool that will enable city planners, for instance, to identify the multiple values of placing, let’s call it the Fats Domino Urban Farm, at the corner of 12th Street and Vine.

Cary puts the argument another way. “We see people with diabetes and other

Cary Rivard Showing Off OHREC’s Greenhouse on Rails

health problems that are the result of a broken food system that doesn’t value real food,” he says, “The symptoms of that broken system are seen most acutely in urban communities.” These seemed like slightly more idealistic sentiments than you’d expect from a man of science. But then I remember riding with him in an ATV across the research farm’s fields and dirt roads as he enthusiastically showed off low-cost agrivoltaics systems, high tunnel greenhouses that could be moved manually along rails, fruit and vegetable seed trials for small-scale, commercial production, dozens of master gardeners tending community garden plots and dispensing advice to thousands of people across the county, and eager packs of graduate students managing all this apparatus while dutifully recording every minutia of data. All of this is low-tech and low to moderate cost—not computer-controlled, energy intensive, multimillion-dollar price tags, indoor vertical agriculture systems accessible only to venture capitalists. This is the nuts and bolts, applied research that the 21st century urban and peri-urban grower needs to competitively feed—if not a hungry world—at least a hungry city.

The question of whether or not urban agriculture can feed a hungry world seemed increasingly ironic to me. Has conventional, large-scale agriculture as we know it in the US fed a hungry world? Not if you ask the 828 million people that the U.N. identified as food insecure, or the 40 million U.S. citizens who were identified similarly by the USDA; not if you ask the 35 percent of Americans who are obese, or the over 10 percent who are persons with diabetes; not if you ask folks and farmers in western Kansas where the Ogallala Aquifer is drying up; and not if you ask those of us choking on record heat from greenhouse carbon emissions, 25 percent of which are agriculture generated.

The Urban Food System Initiative at K-State Olathe doesn’t pretend to have answers to all of these immensely important questions, but at least there is a place with the demonstrated competency, capacity, and partners to take up the challenge of feeding our cities. And it just so happens to be in Kansas.

Rise Up for CFP!

The Community Food Projects (CFP) grant program is to the U. S. Department of Agriculture what one tomato seed is to a large garden. It may not look like much in the palm of your hand, but when handled properly, it’s a mighty force for community food system change. Since CFP is harbored within the Farm Bill and occupies a small slip within the SNAP program, it, like numerous other food and farm programs is up for Congressional reauthorization this year. That means we — Food Citizens United! — must rise up now to ensure CFP’s inclusion within the new Farm Bill, and that it receives $10 million per year in funding, up from its current level of $5 million.

Like this newsletter that you read for free, CFP is a bargain. I have seen dozens of funded projects and the communities they benefit over the years. I have written about many of them ( Twenty-five Years of Food Security, Good Food, and Empowerment * | Mark Winne, New Mexico Goes for the Whole Enchilada* | Mark Winne, The Julietta Market Brings the Community Together*(##) | Mark Winne, Taking Back a City the Green Way | Mark Winne) to illustrate the thousands of food system jobs those projects create, the tens of millions of local and state dollars they leverage for healthy, local food, and the contribution they make to the vivacity, sustainability, and quality of community life. Punching way above its weight, CFP gives the imaginative among us—those possessed of a vision for a healthier and prosperous place—permission to dream and the means to bring that dream to life.

Other than the ten minutes of your attention this newsletter requests of you each month, I have never asked for even a modest subscription fee, nor a portion of any negotiable securities you may possess, not even a few trinkets from your semi-precious jewelry. Well, it’s payback time! All that I ask you to do in return for this humble blog is to contact your Member of Congress and your two U.S. Senators and ask them to include CFP in the Farm Bill and authorize a funding level of $10 million annually (I’ll give you more details in a minute).

What happens if you don’t? Well, not only may CFP get washed out to sea via some industrial farm’s pesticide-laden drainage ditch, but the opportunity also to advance food system change will be seriously diminished. How will I know if you don’t contact your elected federal officials? The algorithm I designed for this blog tracks it all! It knows if you garden, the kind of peanut butter you feed your children, and the last time you ate a hot dog. It also knows the two subscribers who voted for Trump in 2020 (You have six months to get right with your Lord!).

Wherever a CFP grant lands, serious amounts of good gets done. In Dorchester, Mass., CFP funding helped community residents fulfill their long sought after hope of developing a food coop, Now largely staffed by the people who live there, it’s bringing healthy, local and affordable food to a neighborhood that has had limited access to the same. Along the shores of the Klamath River in northern California, a CFP grant has enabled the Yurok Tribe to reclaim the food sovereignty it once enjoyed a century ago, and in so doing, restore the health of their tribal members. After the Flint, Michigan water crisis forced two grocery stores to close, CFP funds and the North Flint Development Corporation, serving a 98 percent Black community, are putting the finishing touches on a new grocery store. Converting a 21,000-square-feet, former church to a full-service coop supermarket, this enterprise is owned and loved by over 1,000, North Flint community member investors.

How do we keep this ball rolling? Contact your Congressperson, each of your two senators, and, if you have one or more Congresspersons in your state who serve on the House Agriculture Committee, contact them too. You can Google your Congressperson’s name, go to their website, and leave your message. You can also call the Congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to be connected to your member (you’ll have to do it one member at a time) and then leave a message. To see if you have a House Agriculture Committee member in your state, check here Committee Members | House Agriculture Committee.

What do we say? Ask them to please keep the Community Food Projects grant program in the Farm Bill and to authorize spending at $10 million per year. If you know anything about a CFP project in your area, leave a brief and positive description of it. If you have friends or family, ask them to speak up as well. If you don’t, CFP is a great way to make some. I met a couple once who met each other while turning the compost pile at their CFP-funded community garden. They married a year later.

Since you’re reaching out to your elected officials any way, there’s one more thing I’d like you to ask, and this is from my friends at the Food Research Action Center (FRAC). Request that your members “oppose a Farm Bill that would make harmful cuts and policy changes to SNAP and any other federal nutrition program.” You see, those House Republicans are always up to some mischief. After all, their first priority is making the world safe for billionaires by keeping their taxes low while looking for ways to cut food stamps. I’ve always wondered what church or temple they attend, and try as I may, I’ve yet to find scripture that says, “Thou shall take from the poor and give to the rich.”

What I’m asking you to do is a prime example of food democracy—people speaking up loud and clear for what they want. With Community Food Projects, we are not only striking a blow for food security and food justice, but we are also providing the tools that communities need to build the food system they need.

Thank you, and don’t worry, your subscription is safe!

The Choice is Clear

“We must cultivate our garden.” Voltaire

The crack of the bat. The soft shoosh of the shovel blade sliding into the yielding earth. The satisfying humpf of a baseball smacking a leather mitt. Coming out of its winter hibernation, the wheelbarrow squeaks its way across the backyard, signaling resistance to the heavy load of manure. Cool and moist, the early morning dew settled across the local baseball diamond, then rose in a mist before the sun’s early rays. The garden bed thawing in the April warmth exhales a last cold breath followed by hints of richly scented fecundity. The dirt is already under my nails; the first beads of perspiration bubble across my brow.

Whether scooping up ground balls or plunging garden implements into the ground, spring’s necessary rhythms ground me. The weekend’s choices boil down to two: do I spend the day in my favorite sun-drenched seat, ten rows back from first base at the nearby minor league baseball park, or, wrapped in my ill-fitting, unfashionably ripped denim work jacket (it was roomy 40 years ago), do I push snap pea seeds knuckle deep into the moist soil until my fingers grow stiff with cold.

For a moment, fantasy gets the best of me. I see myself moving with balletic grace around my living room sofa to spear a sizzling hot groundball. With a pivot that would put Derek Jeter to shame, I make a whiplash sidearm throw to my television set across the room turning the double play. The crowd erupts; the fans are on their feet; I tip my cap.

Then reality sets in. The garden won’t plant itself. Those hundreds of seedlings I started indoors under Gro-lights are screaming for more space. Night temperatures still hover around freezing, but the days are warm and welcoming. The planting instructions on the Johnny’s seed packet issue a Calvinist warning, “Begin sowing in spring as soon as the garden soil is prepared,” implying that those who are lazy and negligent will bring shame upon themselves and endure a long, hungry winter. Bouncing a rubber ball off my back wall does little to advance my food security; a hotdog-chomping day at the ballpark creates a mountain of opportunity costs I can’t afford. And in spite of my wildest hopes, The Baseball Encyclopedia has no record of someone my age ever being called up to the majors.

But even stronger forces eclipse the garden’s seasonal imperatives, my fantasies, and the fable of the grasshopper and ant. Taken individually and spread out across the globe as they are, any one event now impinging on food production or distribution may elicit our sympathies but may not necessarily raise a personal alarm. Food inflation is one item that makes shoppers skittish, especially as it did this past summer when it was rising faster than the foam on a badly poured beer. Though the upward food price trend has moderated substantially, the Republicans love to gin up their base with fears of mass starvation based on months-old data. However, they give little attention to the underlying and shifting causes of food inflation that don’t often find their way into our daily newsfeeds.

For instance, the war in Ukraine has thrown grain markets for a loop, droughts in India, Indonesia, and other Asian food exporters have reduced harvests, and Pakistan lost much of their crops to torrential flooding in 2022. The litany of man-made causes of hunger and food insecurity (war and the real starvation in Gaza due to the near-genocidal behavior of Israel), and the man-nurtured causes (natural disasters that have a close climate change link) can send world food supplies and prices into a tailspin. Some of these forces were responsible for driving up the Asian benchmark price for rice by 25 percent last winter. Hiral Patel, the head of sustainable and thematic research at Barclays in London, summed up the world food situation this way: “There’s a range of new external shocks. The range of factors make it even more challenging to predict how volatile it will be going forward” (The New York Times, 8/11/23). In other words, there’s an interconnection of international economic, political, and climatic events that send ripples of food system pain, large and small, across the globe—and don’t expect to receive a notice early enough to be well prepared!

On the domestic front, it’s probably not prudent to expect American food corporations to restrain food prices for the benefit of the American consumer. That’s asking too much. But some recent research has raised the question as to whether food companies used the excuse of the Pandemic’s impact on disrupted food supply chains a little too long—after those disruptions had been resolved—to keep prices artificially high for consumers. And recently, the Federal Trade Commission has announced its opposition to the proposed merger between the two food retail giants, Kroger and Albertsons because it will increase food prices. The corporate argument—they need to get bigger to compete with Wal-Mart—is one of those disingenuous claims that always fails to bring a tear to my eye.

As if I needed more reasons to roll off my couch and turn over the garden’s back 40 (square yards), I only have to look at the beautiful mountains and basins that surround me. Like the rest of the West, they are drying up. In the Southwest, our stingy 12 inches of annual precipitation rises and falls slightly based on which La Nina/El Nino cycle we’re in, but more people mean more water demand and more competition between developers and farmers for our region’s most precious asset. In an outstanding series on the decline of groundwater across the U.S., The New York Times (9/2/23) documented a frightening picture of aquifers that irrigate vast expanses of farmland being so severely depleted that they may never recharge, hence becoming unusable. “Groundwater loss is hurting breadbasket states like Kansas, where the aquifer beneath 2.6 million acres of land can no longer support industrial-scale agriculture,” The Times reported.

A recent fund solicitation letter from the American Farmland Trust reminded me of what environmental movement was ultimately about. It said, “Imagine celebrating Earth Day in a world where everyone can access affordable, nutritious food. It’s a shared goal, but one that is truly becoming more elusive as record-setting droughts, floods, storms, and other extreme weather wreaks havoc on our agricultural systems — causing crop failures and livestock losses. Climate shifts also disrupt pest and disease patterns, posing additional challenges to food production” (4/18/24). According to the Trust’s data, for most of this century’s first two decades, America has been losing or compromising 2,000 acres of farm and ranchland every day (AFT_FUT2040_AbundantFuture_ExecutiveSummary.pdf (farmlandinfo.org). This simply can’t continue if America is to feed itself and a world that is frequently upended by catastrophes—what I would increasingly call natural man-made catastrophes—in ways we couldn’t have even imagined 20 years ago.

In view of these events and the likelihood that they’ll only grow more severe, my whining about garden work is unlikely to elicit much sympathy. After all, the return on my annual investment of about $125 in seeds and composted cow manure more than justifies the many hours of glorious exercise I get from gardening. By my most conservative estimate, the annual net savings in fresh fruit and vegetable purchases for 2023 was $1,000. This is what I ate fresh, canned, and frozen, and shared with friends and a local food pantry. I even took a portion of that food savings and donated it to the New Israel Fund to help alleviate food shortages in Gaza. All in all, this was a satisfying payback for doing something that I inherently love.

So, I put my shoulder to the plow once again. My motivation is reconstituted, and the spring’s priorities are clear. The garden must be prepared, seedlings transplanted, and direct seeding begun. This doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t succumb to the occasional whimsey, as when a non-decomposed avocado pit is surfaced by my hoe. Tossing the ping-pong sized pit up in front of me—a bit high and to the outside—I swing the wooden-handled garden tool connecting with it solidly. The pit clears my garden fence by a wide margin but lands a little too close to my neighbor’s new truck. Fortunately, they don’t notice, but I make a mental note to give them a few more tomatoes this year.

The Taste of Food Books

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Francis Bacon, 17th Century English philosopher

Shelves stuffed with books are supposed to be a symbol of their owner’s intelligence, culture, and a certain savoir faire. Not only is a subjective assessment of your refinement on display, but the quantity and composition of your collection speaks to your values, identity, and idiosyncrasies. They can make an emotional statement as well. After quickly perusing some people’s bookshelves for the first time, I was so excited that I wanted to be their friend for life. On other occasions, I was so appalled I couldn’t find my way to the door fast enough!

My mother’s notion of how an upscale 1950s and 1960s suburban living room should be decorated pivoted around books as much as furniture. The number and right kind of books were not matters to be taken lightly due to the essential role they performed in shaping our status. I can only imagine that there was a “Good Housekeeping” magazine edition of that era with precise recommendations for ratios of bookshelves to total wall space, as well as a curated list of titles that should populate those shelves. For example, five books of poetry (Frost, Keats, D. Thomas, Cummings, and Sandburg), a few volumes of Shakespeare’s “greatest hits,” some Greek and European classics (“Classic,” proclaimed Mark Twain, “A book which people praise and don’t read”), and contemporary fiction that spoke to how au courant you were. “Isn’t he a Negro writer?” one of my mother’s friends inquired with a raised eyebrow as she pulled the James Baldwin novel off the shelf, while another friend would say, “Good for you! You have Ayn Rand!” The copy of Lolita carefully concealed in one dark end of a shelf always evoked a titter or two during my parents’ cocktail parties. And what modern American home would be complete without an encyclopedia—preferably the entire edition rather than just “A” through “H” which was a dead giveaway that you’re buying the entire volume “on time” (I’m convinced I would have got into a better college if “U” through “Z” had arrived before I was 17).

But what does all that say today about me when the most prominent feature of my office is a bookcase stuffed with food and farm books? There’s the anonymous warning found in an ancient Latin text that advises us to “Beware the man of one book!” When I think about today’s extremists, frothing at the mouth over the published pontifications of the latest tech guru, that quote sends chills up my spine. But should we be equally worried about the man of one kind of book? Does having a room where I’m surrounded by nothing but a small sub-genre of non-fiction—one that is as much about bread and butter as it is about how I earned my bread and butter—suggest that I’m one-dimensional?

To be honest, my living room is largely given over to books as well, though you will find nary a food or farm book there. I once tried to change that, but to ill effect. In the interest of applying an inter-disciplinary approach to interior design, I integrated many food books from my office into my living room. My thinking was that diversity of topics and perspectives would be healthy for everyone. Wrong! Soon, I heard rumblings coming from the living room late at night, even expletive-laced directives as to where to stick “your English cucumber, foodie!” I thought I was dreaming until I found books scattered across the floor the next morning. The noises grew louder and angrier night after night; the cracking of spines and ripping of pages were audible, and shredded jackets of a dozen or more books were ground into the carpet. When terrible things about Shakespeare’s mother were scrawled on the Bard’s play covers, I’d had enough. Gang warfare had erupted! I halted my experiment with genre diversity and returned my food books to the office.

Since my books have agreed to a forced armistice, I can enjoy my food and farm titles for the tales they tell, about my evolution as well as that of the food movement. Dropping back nearly 50 years, there were two books that captured my attention as a just-out-of-college kid trying to align my moral compass with the need to make a living. Food For People by Catherine Lerza and Michael Jacobson (1975), my copy now yellowed and duct-taped, was so far ahead of its time with respect to hunger, nutrition and health, and food production that we’re still trying to catch up. Radical Agriculture, edited by Richard Merrill with essays by Wendell Berry, Jim Hightower, and Michael Perelman (1976) synthesized the work of such forebearers as Robert Rodale and began the task of swinging the lumbering ship of conventional farming to the more abiding shores of organic, sustainable, and regenerative.

But as I’ve heard Jim Hightower say on several occasions, “While it may be the rooster who crows, the hen delivers the goods,” I also include Joan Dye Gussow’s and Jan Poppendieck’s books among my first influencers. Gussow’s Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce, and Agriculture (1991) became a part of the early warning system that alerted us to how food production was becoming “de-natured” and our food system was blindly falling under the spell of science and technology. Poppendieck’s Sweet Charity? (1998) pulled the bandages off the bourgeoning food banking and emergency food world to reveal that bandages weren’t enough. Together, these two volumes sharpened my analysis of the perils associated with prevailing but non-systemic solutions. The result was a renewed resolve to engage public policy and grass-roots food activism.

Apart from that first round of tomes that ignited a fire under this would-be food system reformer, there were a category of mostly 21st century pubs that either sharpened my analysis or softened my heart. Among the former of course was Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food (2008) whose distillation of his seminal food reporting and the holy bible of the food movement, Omnivore’s Dilemma, enlivened our food consciousness for a good long while. (Against my better instincts, I loaned out my copy of Omnivore’s which, of course, was never returned. Book kidnapper, you know who you are! Your soul and those of your children will never be at ease until you return my book!).

School Food Revolution (2008) by Kevin Morgan and Roberta Sonnino built a framework for the fast-emerging farm to school and good-food-in-schools movement. The book’s title is perhaps one of the more accurate in the food issues sub-genre often known for its hyperbolic titles. Given that the change over the last 20 years in school food has been nothing less than spectacular, Morgan and Sonnino nailed it.

Less granular, perhaps, but more spiritually uplifting are three books on my shelf whose author’s words touched me when and where I needed it most. The Seasons on Henry’s Farm (2009) by Terra Brockman and Food and Faith (2011) by Norman Wirzba, both gave me reasons to believe in my work when my hope was at a low ebb. Stanley Crawford, author of The Garlic Testament and Mayordomo, passed away this winter leaving the hills of Northern New Mexico and the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market grieving the loss of his gentle presence. But Stan’s books will inspire and instruct for decades to come (pictured here is The Garlic Papers (2019) since the same person who “borrowed” Omnivore’s Dilemma probably has my copies of Crawford’s other work as well. Second warning: charges against you may be upgraded to a felony).

Contrary to my mother’s thinking, having a large number of books doesn’t necessarily make you a good person. Hitler supposedly owned 16,000 books while Stalin’s collection topped out at 25,000 (The New Yorker, 2/26/24). I heard a mid-list author once say, “I own 1,000 books, but 900 of them are mine.” Apparently, his publisher offered him his unsold editions as an option to dumping them into the remainder pile. My shelves only store a modest number of my own books, which I keep in inventory pending the day when their rarity drives the price through the roof. A more likely scenario, however, is when I had to use eight copies of Stand Together or Starve Alone* to hold my office door open during a particularly hot and windy summer day. Upon seeing this, my son couldn’t help but crack, “Finally, Dad, your books are being put to good use.”

Though nothing beats the thrill of having your own book placed in print for the whole world to fondle, a close second is helping a would-be author realize their dream. That’s why writing a forward or an endorsement for another’s book, or even helping a colleague through the complicated writing and publishing process can sometimes be a joy. I say “sometimes” because the food book sub-genre, like the food system itself, has generated its share of “waste.” There are too many people who fashioned themselves as writers who, frankly, should have never strayed from their day jobs. But for those who have both the itch and the ink to pull it off, I’ve had fun playing a small midwifery role.

To that end, I pulled more than a dozen books off my shelf whose creation I’m proud to have been associated with, even if it was just as a reviewer. One in particular is Breaking Through Concrete (2012) by Edwin Marty and David Hanson (forward by Mark Winne) that speaks to the beauty and excitement of urban farming that’s taking back real estate at both the city core and urban fringe. The Color of Food (2015) by Natasha Bowens (I advised and endorsed) was an early entry into the often-overlooked field of how people of color are (and have been for a long time) staking a claim to land to make what magic they can from its soil. Like Breaking Through Concrete, it’s a story told with robust words and beautiful photographs. And an old hometown favorite is Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries (2021) by Katie Martin (I advised, coached, and connected), a former intern of mine during my days in Hartford, Connecticut. Reinventing does just that by bringing fresh ideas and new juice to an emergency food system that had become brittle and dry.

In my third book Stand Together or Starve Alone* (now in paperback and available directly from me or Amazon*) I identified the growth in published food issue books since 2005. Even I was astounded by the numbers. Limiting my search to categories like hunger and food insecurity, sustainable agriculture, and food systems (this leaves out large swathes of topics like health and nutrition, cookbooks, and garden books), the number of published titles grew four to sevenfold in ten years:

Food Systems: 2005 – 52 titles; 2015 – 372 titles

Hunger and Food Security: 2005 – 148 titles; 2015 – 929 titles;

Food Policy: 2005 – 53 titles; 2015 – 241 titles

I and other food authors have benefitted from this rising tide of attention as much as we have sometimes been diluted by the tsunami of titles. Yes, at times it does appear to be too much, especially when one sub-genre of food books would divide and sub-divide again into a reductionist pile of crumbs. But for the most part, our world’s food, health, political, social, economic, racial, and environmental knowledge has been leavened like a beautiful souffle by the onslaught of literature that sparkles with every facet of our sustenance. Our book shelves may be embarrassingly overweighted with food titles, but at least they are conversing amicably, sharing information openly, and on their best days, advancing a more unified view of the food system universe.

*If you want to purchase the paperback version of “Stand Together or Starve Alone” directly from me for $20 including shipping, send me an email at win5m@aol.com. Also available on Amazon: Amazon.com: Stand Together or Starve Alone: Unity and Chaos in the U.S. Food Movement: 9781440844478: Winne, Mark, Palmer, Anne: Books.

Israel’s War on Palestinian Olive Farmers

Palestinian Olive Oil distributed by Equal Exchange

I grew up under the sway of Zionist ideology.  Like a similar ideology that underpinned my 1950s and 1960s American history lessons, Zionism presented a virtuous cause framed by a tale of divine destiny that was forged in a cauldron of suffering and activated by a ferocious work ethic. My mother and father, who didn’t have a Jewish bone in their bodies, raised me and my three siblings in a Presbyterian-lite manner. To highlight just how vanilla our religious life was, however, my mother would regale us with tales of the Jews making the deserts of their new Israeli nation bloom. She spared no details when sharing the emerging horrors of the Holocaust, and why the “chosen people” were entitled to every last acre of what was then called Palestine. Thusly imbued, I can remember joining in a burst of 17-year-old bravado that erupted from our high school cafeteria table in June of 1967 when we learned that Israel had “kicked the Arab’s asses” in only six days.

But like our social studies textbooks that sometimes weren’t worth the glue that bound them, the stories of messianic zeal that fired Zionism and, likewise, America’s Manifest Destiny, had several pages “missing.” Those were the unwritten chapters that would have told us of the trampling, enslavement, and near erasure of those who already occupied that land, as well as those people who were forced here after being separated from their traditional lands. Indeed, one humiliation imposed by the oppressor throughout history has been denying the vanquished access to their land, its fertility, and its productions. From the salting of seized fields in the ancient Middle East— “a covenantal curse, a means of ensuring desolation”—to the near annihilation of the buffalo by America’s white settlers to today’s apartheid wall in Palestine’s West Bank, the conqueror not only cut the conquered off from their food and their livelihoods, they ensured their disappearance as a people.

Taking a page from those unwritten chapters, we see the same story unfold in the West Bank. The modern beginnings of that history goes back 75 years to when the Zionists displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their traditional lands. It continued through Israel’s seizure and occupation of the West Bank, and has now intensified since Hamas’s barbaric attacks on Israeli sites on October 7.

According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization, “October 7 was a launching pad for a campaign of incitement against Palestinians in the West Bank, focusing on farmers and on preventing the [olive] harvest…False information that Palestinian harvesters were out to attack [Israeli] settlers spread…Israelis carried out planned attacks on people whose only sin was harvesting their own olives. [O]n October 28, 2023 a settler who was also a soldier on leave fatally shot Bilal Saleh, a father of four from a-Sawiyah. Bilal was harvesting olives with his children…on his land in an area that does not require prior coordination with the military. The settler who killed Bilal was arrested and released five days later.”

Yesh Din Yesh Din – Volunteers for human rights (yesh-din.org), which is part of the non-profit New Israel Fund, has fastidiously documented the human rights violations of settlers and soldiers against Palestinians. Since October 7, 389 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s military and civilian forces in the West Bank compared to 29 Israelis killed (an additional 103 Palestinians were killed in the nine months before October 7). But a special form of intimidation was reserved for the olive harvest which was at its peak this fall. The 2023 olive harvest season were marked by 113 incidents of violence against Palestinian harvesters including soldiers and settlers physically assaulting harvesters (24 incidents), firing live ammunition at harvesters (11 incidents), and cutting down or torching 715 olive trees (29 incidents). Yesh Din concluded that the “scale of violence during the harvest was two to three times greater than in previous years.” The incident reports and personal stories of the victims are reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan’s intimidation and harassment of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, including the near total absence of prosecuting the offenders.

For Palestinians, olives are not just another crop that produces a vital stream of income, it also a national and cultural symbol. According to the Palestinian Agriculture Relief Committee (PARC), there are an estimated 13 million olive trees in Palestine, some of whose roots go back 5,000 years, and whose ownership is spread across hundreds of thousands of smallholders. PARC’s Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC) (pal-arc.org) diversified farming activities and overall respect make it the dominant Palestinian agricultural force. It oversees 41 farmer coops that, in addition to olive growers, include producers of dates, almonds, poultry, and other crops. It also operates an agricultural training program for about 1600 young people annually.

Robert Evert, a principal with the U.S.-based fair trade organization Equal Exchange, tells me how inspiring his visits to PARC’s training sites have been. “On the West Bank, people are getting beat up and shot at. In other words, there’s not a lot of hope,” he says. “But it’s very moving to see the spirit of the young people in PARC’s training program. It gives them hope and a reason to get up in the morning.” Evert also adds that the young participants are very diverse with respect to gender, about 50/50 male and female.

As important as these organizing and training programs are, it’s critical to the Palestinian economy that its agricultural products generate export revenue. That’s where PARC’s for profit partner, Al-reef comes in. They’ve developed the capacity of producers to grow high quality crops, and, with investment assistance from such groups as Oxfam, have constructed processing facilities such as a state-of-the-art olive oil bottling plant. The plant includes high quality product testing and monitoring that are required to comply with the stringent “extra virgin” designation and export conditions to North American and European markets (as a purchaser of Al-reef’s olive oil through Equal Exchange over the past three years, I can vouch for its quality and delicious flavor profile). For two months at harvest season, the olive oil presses are going 24/7. And there is no waste: olive pits are used to fuel the plant’s boiler and the spent flesh is composted.

Saleem Abu Ghazaleh is Al-reef’s general manager. As such, he oversees the farmer connections, processing, marketing, and shipping of their products. Though a successful professional who now runs one of the more substantial non-governmental enterprises in the West Bank, Saleem “enjoyed” a youthful Palestinian rite of passage by resisting the Israeli occupation and paying the price: five years in prison. Rob Evert has spent time with Saleem at his Al-reef facilities in Ramallah. This included time in his office which, according to Evert, is tiny. “Saleem told me that his office is about the same size as his prison cell, but then he said, ‘at least I now have a key!’”

In a February 11th correspondence with me and Equal Exchange, Saleem said, “the level of violence committed by Israeli settlers and Israel forces has not been slowing in the West Bank, on the contrary, they have been increasing. The leaders of those settlers who are also Ministers in this right-wing Israeli government…call for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank.” Citing the many hostile actions and restrictions on farmers as well as unusually poor growing conditions in 2023, he said the supply of Palestinian olive oil is way down. The decline in supply was also due to the loss of 3000 tons of olive oil in the Gaza strip because the war there prevented the 2023 harvest from taking place. “We had to decrease Equal Exchange’s order of olive oil because of the situation of farmers,” Saleem said. Equal Exchange normally buys about 25,000 bottles of olive oil annually, about 15 percent of Al-reef’s production. While the supply cut will be a small inconvenience for Equal Exchange’s shoppers, the lost sales is potentially devastating for Palestinians.

There is a pall of oppression hanging over the West Bank and Gaza the likes of which would never be tolerated in the United States. According to a recent New York Times Magazine article (2/4/24), the per capita income in the West Bank is $5,600 compared to $50,000 in many of the illegal Israeli settlements. Economic prospects, always bleak at best, were made worse when Israel suspended payments to the Palestinian Authority, and West Bank Palestinians could no longer go into Israel to work. This adversely affected 139,000 Palestinian workers (according to Saleem, the loss of paychecks forced some olive oil coops to sell their oil early simply to raise cash for their members’ basic living expenses). Israel routinely tears down Palestinian buildings, both residential and agricultural, including 15,000 homes in Jerusalem, supposedly because they lacked building permits. Politically, the Palestinians have never consented to be governed by Israel, yet they live under an anti-democratic, apartheid occupation. In light of these conditions, is it any wonder that there are periodic intifadas and, sadly, it is why many Palestinians regard October 7 as their liberation day, “the day when they became visible again.”

Almost a year ago, I attended a lecture by Miko Peled who wrote a book called The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine. His father was a prominent military leader in Israel’s 1948 and 1967 wars which enhances Peled’s credibility as an outspoken critic of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Speaking forcefully, he ticks off a litany of Israel’s abuses asserting that they constitute crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. He asks rhetorically “how could people who survived the Holocaust do these things?” Perhaps with my age group in mind, Peled urges us not to think of Israel’s illegal settlements as the idealized “hippie” kibbutz of our youth (to impress the Jewish woman I was dating in college, I may have even suggested joining one). These are now the large settlements of evangelical Jews, supplied with thousands of weapons by the IDF, and terrorizing West Bank Palestinians. Peled called upon the audience as American taxpayers to make a moral decision to hold our own government accountable for funding these crimes. Lastly, he warned us not to be put off by accusations of anti-Semitism, a default term that is now used to shield Israel from criticism.

All recommendations for peace, reconciliation, or the much-touted two-state solution feel hopelessly faraway in today’s climate of hate. As Mohammad Shtayyeh, the Palestinian prime minister, put it, “Israel…is behaving like a wounded bull. They’re acting in a mood of revenge, killing for the sake of killing.” Suggesting that the bull do anything other than exhaust its blood lust feels hopeless for now. Yet the taking of land, the uprooting of trees whose millenniums of witness take in Jesus, Abraham, and Muhammad; taking the harvest from the community and the fruits of labor from the farmer, these are forms of retribution reserved for those who not only deny the existence of others, but also deny their own humanity and humanity’s common bond with the earth. To thwart such blindness requires the light of hope and witness provided by Yesh Din, PARC, Al-reef, and other forward-looking, on the ground organizations willing to risk their money, their energy and sometimes their lives for a brighter future. And it requires American political leaders with real courage to end the bloodshed and forge a path to peace and prosperity.

Yuma, Arizona: The Paradox of Plenty

Arizona has a special place in my heart because it’s the only state from which I was ever banned, albeit temporarily. I had been invited to address a statewide food summit in the Spring of 2017 on the topic of food security. Having gratefully accepted the offer and purchased my airline ticket, I was told two weeks before the summit that the invite had been rescinded. Apparently, the state’s cattlemen’s and farm bureau associations had bad cases of acid reflux over something I wrote many years prior that called into question certain industrial farming practices that continue to be questioned today. My plea to use the summit as an opportunity “to reason together” was rejected Winne Banned in Arizona! | Mark Winne.

It appears as if things have changed, since I was invited to Yuma, Arizona. Perhaps the statute of limitations had run out, or maybe Yuma’s omnipresent sun had blinded the town’s citizenry to my past transgressions. Either way, I was given the opportunity to spend a couple of days with the Yuma Food Policy Council this January to help them advance their agenda of making healthy and affordable food accessible to all. But as my plane descended out of the blazingly blue sky to YUM (yes, that’s the airport’s code), the view below foreshadowed the paradox that would consume my visit. A vast expanse of rectangular vegetable and orchard fields, shimmering many shades of green, were framed by a treeless desert-brown landscape. The fields, cris-crossed by miles of irrigation aqueducts and at the peak of their winter harvest, presented an image of agricultural abundance the likes of which I had rarely witnessed. As the plane’s landing gear bounced us down the runway, I asked myself, “What’s the food access problem?”

Once on the ground, the view from Tricia Kinnell’s pickup truck didn’t provide any immediate answers. Tricia, who works for the Yuma County Public Health Services District and is part of the AZ Health Zone and SNAP-Ed programs, also coordinates the Yuma HEAL Coalition Food Policy Council (HEAL: Healthy Eating, Active Living). As we maneuvered our way through city traffic, we found ourselves sharing the road with large flatbed trucks packed high and tight with just-packed cardboard boxes of lettuce. At one intersection, an old school bus towing a small trailer with two porta-potties lashed to its bed crosses in front of us. The bus is full of seated day laborers from Mexico, who with the porta-potties, are destined for a nearby farm. In fact, as I come to learn over the next two days, the County, whose population is 200,000, has 20,000 farmworkers when the harvest is at its peak as it is now. Over 6,000 Arizona farmworkers, most of whom now working in Yuma, have H-2A agricultural work visas.

Tricia, who grew up in a military family says, “military bases [there are two] and agriculture are by far the largest segments of our local economy.” The winter time portion of that economy is considerably augmented by an infusion of cash from “snowbirds” whose ubiquitous RVs perch in trailer parks like sandhill cranes in the bosques.

Perhaps the most striking physical feature of Yuma, aside from the menacing presence of the not-so-distant desert, is the extraordinary intermix of farmland, residential, and commercial land use. Step outside of the main branch of the public library or one of the high schools and you’re likely looking at a 50-acre, just-harvested, farm field with a second crop of lettuce seedlings lined up perfectly amidst a web of irrigation lines. Drive by the largest shopping mall and across the road there will be another large agricultural tract with several harvesting tractors accompanied by 20 to 30 pickers mowing down and sorting lettuce heads. And just past a Wal Mart, right at the front plot lines of a long row of affluent homes sits 100 acres of onions and another 25 acres of date palm trees.

“So, where are the farmers’ markets, fruit and vegetable stands, or even ‘pick you own’ signs?” I asked Tricia. Here’s the rub, indeed the answer to why the food policy council wants to take on the so-called access problem: there aren’t any! Why? The vast majority of the 456 farms working some 180,000 acres of farmland in Yuma County are contract growers for Dole, Sunkist, and other corporate food packers and distributors. Sure, I could buy a head of “locally grown” broccoli or a bunch of onions at one of the county’s two Albertson’s, but first it would be picked from a nearby field, sent to one of the county’s many packing sheds and coolers, transported by truck to warehouses in Phoenix (three hours away), re-packed, reshuffled, and reshipped back to a Yuma supermarket. A few days, a few hundred miles, and a few dozen hands later, I’d be serving up a “local salad” to my family. And the rest of North America would be squeezing and caressing all that fresh produce picked only a few feet, a few blocks, or a few miles from my house.

Always in search of a work-around, I ask, “what if I want to just walk into a field and pick enough to feed my family for the night?” “Besides being illegal,” Tricia says, “that section of the field where you were doing that would be cordoned off as contaminated, and nothing near it could be harvested.” “Gleaning?” “Nope. Too many insurance issues.”

There are always rebels, of course, and in Yuma’s case he goes by the name of Tyler, the owner and operator of Lemon Grove Farm who’s a member of the food policy council (he was unable to attend the two sessions I spoke at). He’s quoted as saying, “I left Sunkist because I didn’t feel any community connection,” a void he’s trying to fill by being one of only two farmers selling weekly at an open-air market. With the goal of opening a real farmers’ market someday, Tricia and the Council’s other members are pinning their hopes on Tyler spearheading that effort.

While gleaning may be forbidden, the Yuma Food Bank is at the heart of rounding up stray produce from packers and shippers before it leaves the region for points east. Michelle Merkley, the Food Bank’s Operations Director, tells me they received five million pounds of local produce in 2023, but because their location is at the heart of Arizona’s winter growing season, they are obligated to share the bounty with the Arizona Food Bank Network which sends its all over the state. With a recent USDA grant, the Food Bank plans to start a Farm to Food Bank program. “We just made a purchase of lots of great cauliflower,” she tells me. “We’re trying to do our part to reduce the 20 billion pounds of wasted fruit and vegetables in the U.S. every year.”

The Colorado River

You don’t need a wealth of agricultural knowledge to look at these verdant fields and ask where the water comes from. The sprawling oasis of green amidst the barren Sonoran landscape took more than divine intervention to create. The answer is found in a barely visible ribbon of water that marks the Arizona and California border on a meandering journey to the Gulf of California—the Colorado River. Finding a lovely river park under what’s mysteriously called the Ocean-to-Ocean bridge, I stroll the river’s Arizona bank peering through stands of willow and swaying palm trees across a hundred feet of water into California. It’s a beautiful reach of riverfront that invites one stride to follow another even though you have no destination. I did stop, however, when I looked at my phone to discover that it’s now an hour earlier than it was five minutes ago. Unbeknownst to me, I had crossed into the Pacific time zone.

But an hour either way is of no consequence to the Colorado. While cities, states, and tribes vie for its content and fund gigantic diversion ditches to feed their ever-expanding thirsts, the Rockies’ snow keeps on melting and the river just keeps on rolling, at least for now. It feeds the present production of over 175 crops within a short distance of its banks. And centuries of flooding have deposited generous coverings of fertile topsoil long before non-indigenous humans corralled its natural tendencies with damnable dams and dikes. Since Yuma receives a little over 3 inches of rain annually, it would rapidly return to the surrounding desert without the river’s gifts. (Climate change update: on January 23, 2024, a dramatic rainstorm dumped a little over one inch of rain on the city. The previous record for a one-day rain total was 0.6 inches in 1915).

As recent policy actions indicate, Arizona’s land and water cannot be taken for granted. The state’s governor, Katie Hobbs, suspended the lease of a Saudi Arabian-owned farm that had violated its land and water lease terms. The 3,000-acre facility west of Phoenix was growing alfalfa—a water-intensive crop—for shipment to Saudi Arabia to feed its own dairy cows. Much of Arizona, legendary for its heat, has experienced extreme drought over the course of several years. The snowbirds keep flocking to the oh-so beautiful winter climes but decide to stay, along with a steady influx of retirees, putting more and more pressure on the state’s already stretched resources. When you look out across the sea of vegetables and citrus groves, which are largely untouchable and unavailable to Yumans, you have to ask if you’re colonized by forces over which you have no control; if you have lost all food sovereignty; you cannot assure that your community’s land and water are there to feed you first. To rephrase Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Food, food everywhere, but not a bite to eat.”

The Food Policy Council

One path that’s open to the people of Yuma who want to assert their food sovereignty is the food policy council. To kick off their day-long workshop, Anna Vakil, an urban planner and council member, shared local findings that made it clear what the consequences are of neglecting the community’s food system. Using one community survey, she said that 43 percent of residents were food insecure [while this survey used a more liberal definition of food insecurity than the annual USDA survey, it did identify a very large percentage of the population who periodically feel stress over not having enough to eat. Notably, using the same methods and measures, that percentage compares to 33 percent who were food insecure in 2019]. She added that the Yuma Community Food Bank distributed the equivalent of 9.2 million meals between July 2022 and June 2023. The Food Bank noted that during COVID, their demand was four times higher than it was pre-COVID but is now—post-COVID—twice as high as pre-COVID.

When it came to health and diet, the numbers were grim. According to statistics that Anna gathered, nearly 44 percent of Yuma County was obese compared to 29.5 percent of all Arizonans and 33 percent of all Americans. Partly as a result of this high level, 16.5 percent were diabetic, and an additional 10 percent were diagnosed pre-diabetic. All of this was also influenced by a higher-than-average poverty rate (14.6 percent) and the number of people without health insurance (20 percent). While firm data was not available, the county was also losing valuable farmland to development, and exposure to agricultural chemicals in the area may be linked to high cancer rates. When asked about barriers to getting healthy food, 53 percent of the respondents cited one or more problems including no car, poor public transportation (I didn’t see a single shaded bus shelter, a serious issue when you’re waiting for a bus and it’s 110 degrees), and high food prices. What did the respondents want? Between 16 and 19 percent said they wanted farmers’ markets, community gardens, and cooking classes.

Thes food access problem is the failure of a system of food production and distribution not tuned to the community’s nutrition and health needs. This violates the most basic principle of agriculture which is to provide a healthy and affordable diet to the immediate community, in other words, its own people. After that, domestic and global markets will determine the destiny of its remaining output. The reverse is true in Yuma.

As the food policy council’s members pondered Anna’s presentation, there was a bias toward practical responses that might yield modest benefits to some of the most vulnerable Yumans. Establishing a “real” farmers’ market and expanding the number of community gardens were at the top of the list as were some innovations like developing a mobile market to bring fresh food into the county’s food deserts. But perhaps it was a growing recognition that those actions, as helpful as they can be, and that even the Food Bank distributing donated local produce, were not enough. More people, more partners, and more energy were required to wring a sustainable form of community food security out of Yuma’s dominant food system. To that end, the Council’s first order of business was growing its numbers and increasing the commitment of its participants to a more democratic and healthier local food system.

The Council has a core of diverse and able people. In addition to those mentioned so far, there is Michael Clark, a professor for Nutrition and Wellness at the University of Arizona-Yuma who secured $2 million for a teaching kitchen. As a former school food service director, he brings a passionate commitment to ensuring all are fed and fed well. Entrepreneur and owner of the Prison Hill Brewery, Chris Wheeler, has a wealth of business acumen—in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors (he also makes a mean IPA). He’s well networked in both the business and political communities which should help the Council make important connections. A number of health educators with the county, a social worker with the nearby Cocopah Tribe, and a retired physician, among others, make up a deep bench of multi-skilled, community-savvy individuals. Their task, however, is a big one: feed Yuma first!

A former Governor of Iowa is quoted as once saying, “Let’s make Iowa the food capital of the world!” One of the state’s local food advocates who couldn’t find Iowa-grown food anywhere he went, responded to the Governor, “How about first making Iowa the food capital of Iowa!” Yuma’s story is similar. How can it be the nation’s “winter salad bowl” and the fertile crescent of the Southwest but have such high rates of food insecurity and diabetes? Such a dreadful disconnect should not be tolerated for long. Only the people, exercising their democratic right to an equitable and healthy food system, can fix that connection.

(With special thanks to Anna Vakil, Ph.D. for the data)

Stand Together or Starve Alone Now in Paperback

“We must hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”  Ben Franklin

When I wrote Stand Together or Starve Alone in 2018, I chose Ben Franklin’s famous admonition to his compatriots as my epigram because it stood for what I felt was both wrong and right about America’s food movement. We—all the diverse and creative alternatives to the dominant food system—had demonstrated that it was within our power to literally change the way our food is produced, distributed and consumed. Yet, in spite of enormous gains over the past couple of decades, we often squandered the opportunities, or, at the very least, fell short of our goals.

Channeling my inner Franklin, I posited that our shortcomings didn’t lie with our methods and energy, it came down to our failure to work together—the only way that something as dramatic as wholesale food system change would happen. But there were two things that my 50 years of food system experience didn’t prepare me for. The first was the pandemic which previewed what a food system Armageddon—a meltdown of global proportion—might look like. However, in spite of what the purveyors of doom pronounced from every social media pulpit, government, communities, and the people stood together in an unprecedented manner to ensure that nearly all were fed.

The second thing that my once indefatigable wisdom failed to predict was the book’s outrageous price. No matter how much I whined at my publisher about the shocking sticker price, or compared them to Scrooge, the Grinch, or Putin, I could not get them to reduce the $46 sacrifice they were asking buyers to make. I am happy to report that there is good news on both fronts: the pandemic is history though I hope its lessons are not; and the original publisher was bought by Bloomsbury which felt Stand Together was worthy of a much cheaper paperback edition.

Here’s the deal: The paperback edition of Stand Together or Starve Alone is $29.95, but purchase it before January 31, 2024, and take 20 percent off for an eminently affordable $23.96. Buy a second book (nothing says, “I love you!” like giving your favorite person a copy of Stand Together), or at least $35 worth of books, and Bloomsbury will deliver them to you free. To make your purchase go to Stand Together or Starve Alone: Unity and Chaos in the U.S. Food Movement: Mark Winne: Bloomsbury Academic, enter the secret code STAND23 at checkout. Pretty soon, the keys to food system collaboration will be sitting in your mailbox. Want to become a Stand Together evangelist? Bloomsbury will give non-profit organizations an even bigger discount for volume purchases for their conferences and large meetings (I don’t know the details at this time, but I’m happy to assist if you might be interested).

What’s at stake with Stand Together, and why should you read it? The rapid growth and diversification of the food movement since the 1970s was what first caught my eye. What had once been an easily dismissed chihuahua nipping at the heels of the conventional, capitalist food system had become a formidable pack of mixed dog breeds snarling their way across the foodscape. I documented the movement’s growth, celebrated its successes and critiqued its failures, and proposed how it could become stronger. Yet, I didn’t fully appreciate at the time—not until the pandemic and January 6th—that the tiger we have by the tail is nothing less than democracy itself.

My reasoning goes like this: There are two complementary ways to secure an equitable and sustainable food system. There’s the DIY, alternative version—the one that has sown the seeds for millions of farmers’ markets, CSAs, mobile markets, farm to school programs, fair trade organizations, locally owned food businesses, etc. Secondly, there is the public policy version that, 1) uses regulation to control the worst abuses of a food system where the only measure of success is profit; 2) subsidizes the cost of food to promote food security and healthy eating, and 3) provides public funding that nurtures those alternative seeds that enable us to “take back” at least some of our food from the dominant food system. Public policy, in other words, is effectively the only force strong enough to rebalance a capitalist-directed marketplace that treats people like no more than consumers and food as just a commodity. Good public policy—and effective local food initiatives and businesses—need active democracy which in turn requires the kind of collaboration I extoll in Stand Together.

And there is good news on all these fronts. In Stand Together I had bemoaned the fragmentation and low funding levels for USDA programs that promoted equity and local food system development. I recently attended a USDA-sponsored conference in New Orleans that brought together hundreds of grantees from three different, but similarly purposed initiatives that were receiving hundreds of millions of dollars over their funding periods. USDA is also taking steps to address the impact of food systems on climate change, a connection it had previously refused to acknowledge when addressing the nation’s dietary guidelines in 2015. Programmatically and policy wise at the community level, the number of food policy councils, food coops, and Good Food Purchasing initiatives have continued to grow.

Do these beams of light breaking through the clouds imply an era of enlightenment, derived no doubt from a deep reading of Stand Together, is upon us? I’d like to think that the book has played a role, but either way I’m confident that it still has much to offer those of us who’d rather work together toward common goals than endure a slow and miserable demise. As Angie Tagtow, a long-time food activist and the former head of the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion said about Stand Together in 2018, “This book is an essential tool in the food system toolbox, packed with critical inquiry, systems principles, and relationship-building strategies.” And better yet, it’s now a whole lot cheaper. Happy New Year!

Bonus News!

I was privileged last week to join two colleagues, Tambra Stevenson and Darriel Harris for the videotaping of a segment on Black Health Now. Titled “Food for Thoughtful Change,” the segment is a moderated discussion of how food access and racism affect the health of today’s Black communities. You can catch it on YouTube with this link: #BlackHealthNow Presents: Food for Thoughtful Change (youtube.com)

A Bar Stool with a View

(All italicized sections are conversations held with or overheard by the author at the Shed Bar between 2018 and the present)

It was just another night at The Shed’s bar. Two older women from Texas were laughing hard and belting back margaritas harder, a Black and Latina lesbian couple were smooching over their enchiladas, two guys from the U.S. Forest Service were having an animated conversation about “fire suppression crew dynamics,” and I was enthralled by a wilderness doctor’s treatment instructions for rattlesnake bite. All eight stools were fully occupied as a mix of emotions swirled about the 25-feet long bar: love and joy, an eagerness to do battle with wildfire, and a seventy-something man revved up to save humankind from a horde of attacking serpents!

For the chosen few who get a bar seat at this Santa Fe, New Mexico restaurant The Shed Restaurant. Best Burrito best Red Chile on the Santa Fe Plaza (sfshed.com), they will enjoy a worldview like no other. Not only do their neighboring eaters offer up stories worthy of the Canterbury Tales, but they may also be treated to a view of bartender Rachel’s bare back whose rippling contours invite both devotion and artistry. If your erotic flights flutter differently, you may wonder how Raphael’s black t-shirt contains his bulging biceps and swollen deltoids. Fantasy, science has found, is like the undulating flow of conversation, both elevating in direct proportion to the number of margaritas consumed.

“I typically sling 200 to 300 margaritas a night,” Raphael tells me. This remarkable output is fueled by deliveries of several cases of tequila twice a week. One drink of his high-octane concoction will make even the terminally dull interesting; two will make you the life of the party, mispronounced Spanish words and all; three will leave you searching the Santa Fe Plaza for your car until you realize you didn’t drive. Ever since I became a regular starting in 2004, there was a sign at the end of bar that read, “Customers will not be served more than three margaritas.” Not too long ago it was removed—permanently or for routine maintenance?

[Two guys in US Forest Service uniforms] If my wife can hold down the house and take care of the kids, I can go fight 3 or 4 fires a year and retire at 55…They’re burning this week in Carson [National Forest], and this guy asks me to help. But I’m not willing to drag a fucking torch for hours unless this dude is dragging one too…Crew dynamics are complex, man! Here I am trying to organize my crew in the middle of a fire when one of them tells me she’s pregnant.

The Shed is an institution in Santa Fe, at least as much as anything created in the 20th century is in this 400-year-old city. Founded by the Carswell Family in 1953 on what’s affectionately called “Burro Alley,” the Shed moved just east of the historic plaza—about the distance a healthy man can throw a corn chip—in 1960. The third generation of Carswell’s now operates the restaurant that occupies a portion of an historic building so quaintly authentic that tourists from New Jersey have been run over just staring dumbstruck at it from the middle of East Palace St. After crawling through the entryway into the Shed’s magical courtyard, they are fortunately revived by the sight of ancient wood, stone, and stucco woven together by a tapestry of trumpet vines. In the warm weather, it’s chock full of similarly dazed people eating at one of the outside tables or waiting, sometimes hours, for a table to open up. In winter, the empty outdoor space is often laced by a dream-like Northern New Mexico snow. As far as I know, heaven grants humans two glimpses into the afterlife: A view of the Manhattan skyline on a summer night from a 20-storey roof-top restaurant, and a view into the Shed’s courtyard on a snowy Santa Fe night. If the bells of nearby St. Francis of Assisi Cathedral happen to be chiming as you glance at the swirling flakes, Manhattan takes a distant second.

[A slender woman in her fifties] I was the head of Condoleezza Rice’s drug enforcement office. I was on a Colombian army helicopter going into the jungle to destroy a drug manufacturing facility. As the highest-ranking American official there, the Colombian army commander gave me the “honor” of throwing a hand grenade into a hole to blow up the drug making paraphernalia. But just after the pin was pulled, flies buzzed around my head because of my hair spray. I started waving my hand with the grenade through my hair to ward off the flies. The Colombian comandante screamed at me to throw it, which I finally did. But that was close!

Once inside its hallowed chambers, a series of cavern-like rooms unfold in labyrinthine fashion, some separated by doorways so low that the wait staff is required to tell everyone to “duck and watch your head.” I find this requirement both humbling and democratic. Not only does it require the 6’ 4” Texans to remove their hats, they have to practically get down on their knees and crawl in.

With respect to artwork, the same eclectic assortment of paintings, mostly depicting some version of Southwest scenes, have hung on the same walls forever. Their value is not measured by any artistic criteria that I’m familiar with, but simply by their association with the Shed. If, for instance, you viewed any of the “collection” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you’d say “so what.” But hanging where it does, say in the north room behind table #16, you’d gasp, “Oh my God! It’s a Shed!” even if Van Gogh’s signature was affixed to it.

New Mexico Privy Primitive Art

But as much as the décor and ebb and flow of sunlight across the beams and stucco beguile and delight, the margaritas will eventually force even the most pliable of bladders in search of the rest rooms. Gentlemen, be forewarned, this is the only restaurant in America where the line into the men’s room is longer than the women’s. I surmise that when the Shed’s 1960 architect shoe-horned what a modern restaurant needed into a multi-centuries old building, they had only an empty burro stall left for the men’s room. Effectively, this means that the restaurant has a “one-holer” available for the couple of hundred males who pass through daily. At times charming, but mostly annoying since peeing and patience aren’t really a “guy thing,” you stand in line with your brothers in a small space made more congested by their female companions who, contrary to expectations, are waiting for their men to finish rather than vice-versa.

Finding myself number 7 in line on one occasion, I thought I’d put my time to good use by sketching out a new configuration of fixtures for the men’s room on a cocktail napkin. My design, I believed, would allow two men at a time to use the space. I proudly showed it to the manager on duty who said he’d take it under advisement. It’s been several years now, and nothing has changed.

[A stylish young woman] That guy sitting next to me propositioned me after only 10 minutes! Don’t you know I’m loyal to my boyfriend, I told him!

But the main event, the reason that otherwise impatient tourists will endure humiliatingly long waits for a table, that reservations for holidays and the busy season must sometimes be made a month or more in advance, is the food, and more precisely, the chile. Of the approximately 243 times I’ve eaten there I’ve never had a mediocre meal. Granted, 90 percent of the time I have what the menu calls the “#4 Enchiladas (GF, V) Two flat blue corn enchiladas with cheddar cheese & onion, smothered in red chile, and garnished with lettuce & tomato.” I add a side of posole and substitute green chile because of its delicious smokey flavor which, I swear, tastes slightly different every time. And by different, I mean varying intensities of heat, more/less smokey, and the acceleration of pain to pleasure ratio (“AP2PR,” an indicator not yet recognized by any professional body).

Non-locals, of course, will approach the chile factor with a wide range of emotions. The white bread types from Connecticut will tip-toe up to their chile choice with a look of abject terror. A hip Bay Area techie will attempt to enhance their coolness by requesting extra heat, but only after producing the requisite doctor’s note. I must confess that I fell into the former category when I made my first visit to the Shed in 1992. Thinking that “chile” was something like a can of Chili Con Carne, I ordered a burrito “smothered in red.” Barely one bite had cleared my gullet before my toes curled and scalp sweated. “Dad, are you alright?” asked my daughter who was with me, thinking she saw vapors coming from my ears. I waived to the waiter for a second glass of ice water and 30 extra napkins which I used to sponge up the sweat now pouring from my brow. “Dad, your head is soaking wet; it looks like you just got out of the shower!” she said growing ever more concerned. Fortunately, we didn’t need to call the EMTs, but it would be ten years before I subjected myself to a repeat. Gratefully, my palate and digestive organs have gradually adapted to where most Anglos arrive: “Hello, my name is Mark. I’ve not eaten Northern New Mexico chile in 7 days.” There is no record, however, of any person even earning a 30-day chip from sustained abstinence.

[From the dessert menu] Red Hot Chile Hot Fudge Sundae

While generally understated, the Shed earns high marks for its commitment to the community and its employees. It is the probably the region’s largest restaurant buyer of local produce, especially Northern New Mexico chile, as well as tomatoes and onions. Local tortilla makers benefit from the Shed’s steady stream of purchases as does the baker responsible for the crusty slices of garlicy French bread. What’s French bread doing in an eclectic New Mexican restaurant, you ask? French fur trappers were among the early settlers of Northern New Mexico, and French-trained clerics largely took control of the Santa Fe Archdiocese starting in the 19th century. If you want to take decadence to a whole new level, celebrate your chile-smothered entrée with a slice of the French apple pie a la mode.

I’m a plastic surgeon from Waco, Texas. I come to New Mexico regularly to go fly fishing…Most of my practice is treating burn victims and cancer patients. But because of weight loss drugs like Mounjaro, I’m cutting away a lot of excess skin after they lose all that fat. I removed 19 pounds of skin from one guy the other day, then stitched up the new edges.

Like every other restaurant in America, the Shed shutdown during COVID. But when it reopened, almost all of its employees returned, unlike so many restaurants that either shuttered their doors for good, or couldn’t find enough staff to return to their previous business hours. When I asked Raphael, who I regard as the resident Shed scholar, what staff turnover is like, he said, “Of the 30 or so staff now, 12 have been here 5 years or more,” which sounds pretty good to me.

The Shed is even making a dent in global warming, though initially to my chagrin. Sitting astride the number 4 barstool whose dark polished seat was starting to assimilate itself to my fanny after years of consistent use, I noticed that my standard silver coin margarita did not have a plastic stir. Mesmerized by the way the summer light streamed through the clerestory and reflected off the glass, ice cubes, and salt crystals stuck to the rim, I initially didn’t think anything of the stir’s absence. When I delicately removed the perfectly perched lime from the rim, and squeezed it into the milky liquid, I panicked—how do I mix the lime juice into the drink? I asked Rachel if I could get a stir. “Sorry,” she said, “It’s our new environmental policy. No more plastic stirs.” Having no cutlery available, my first impulse was to use my index finger to do the job. But unable to remember the last time I washed my hands, to say nothing of how gauche that would appear to my neighboring bar flies, I backed off.

I felt both stress and indignation rise up in me. “Will my grandchildren’s lives be immeasurably altered by climate change,” I sarcastically fumed, “because their ‘papa’ used a plastic stir? After all, isn’t my happiness foremost on their minds?” Knowing the answer to my own question, I grudgingly resigned myself to this new state of affairs. But then, just as Rachel had closed one door, she opened another—my corn chips and guacamole had arrived. Biting into a super crispy triangle, I grabbed another one and immediately dipped it into my drink. Paddling among the ice cubes and lime rind, the chip shed liquid easily, didn’t go limp, and created just enough motion to achieve the perfect blend. Un peu gauche, perhaps, but I drank contentedly knowing that my sacrifice would improve the quality of life of my grandchildren.

[A young man to Rachel] I want you to make me a margarita whatever way you think I should have it.

I’m starting to have second thoughts about writing this piece. The heightened demand that I will no doubt generate will only make it harder for me to get a seat. Sure, I live here which gives me an advantage. I know the secret parking spot that everyone thinks is illegal, but if you carefully read the 4-point type, densely printed across the metal street sign, you’ll see it’s not. I know how far in advance Shed reservations are required, and tourists don’t plan for that which makes the unreserved bar seats the only option. And I know the “rules” for getting a bar seat—there are no rules. The written guidance I drafted on two sides of a cocktail napkin that I proposed be posting was greeted with the same enthusiasm as my men’s room remodel design.

But vying for an empty barstool can get ugly! On those occasions during the high season when I know I should avoid downtown, I’ll succumb to my need for chile fix. I find myself pacing in a small, agitated mob behind those 8 occupied stools watching who might be eating dessert or filling out their credit card slip. There’s no official line or numbering system for getting a seat; it’s all about body language and sharp elbows; it’s how close you can get to your targeted eater before they swat you or are intimidated into leaving. As they finally push their stool back and, in my most gentlemanly manner, assist their exit with a “May I help you, ma’am?” a guy my age comes out of nowhere, pushes me, and says, “You bastard! I’ve been waiting for that seat!” I’d been standing in the same spot for 10 minutes with no other obvious contender nearby. I reach for the now empty seat, but he pushes me again, shouting “bastard” into my face. Several things flash quickly through my mind. The Shed has no rules, therefore, appealing to the “Rule of Law” would go nowhere. Second, the prospect of two men in their sixties rolling around on the floor punching each other was rather unseemly, to say nothing of dangerous. Reasoning with this jerk was going nowhere so I walked away.  When I told the story to Raphael two weeks later, after successfully getting a stool at 8:45, he comped my entire dinner and two margaritas. Shed justice comes slowly, but it does come.

[From the Japanese American man sitting next to me] I was born in Tokyo and grew up there, but I’ve lived in California for 25 years. I work for a firm that trains supermarket sushi chefs. [Wolfing down a plate full of red chile] I never eat sushi because I’m around it all day!

My custom-designed weather app told me it was a perfect night for the Shed. I headed downtown where my years-long run of good parking karma continued. I made a mad dash from my car through a late September downpour to the Shed’s sheltering alcove. The monsoon was just enough to wash away the dust and suppress the evening tide of tourists. I ducked under the door and waved to Raphael. He came out from behind the bar to hand me my “usual” silver coin, which, of course, made me some kind of dripping wet Shed God in the eyes of the few people who saw this. He assured me it would only be a five-minute wait since the woman at number 4 was paying her bill. Once seated, the setting sun suffused the bar, its bottles, and its people in a lavender glow. While the margarita softened the sharp edges of my day, I discreetly tried to read the tattooed inscription crawling across Rachel’s bare shoulders. The night’s green chile not only had an extra kick to it, I swear I could taste juniper smoke. Pretty soon I was speculating with the young environmental lawyer next to me about harnessing the heat in chiles and the subsequent rise in human body temperatures as a new form of renewable energy. By the time I had finished my second margarita, we had filled three cocktail napkins with drawings for a presentation to a no doubt-eager Shed management team.

My wife and I are from Oklahoma. We drive all over the Southwest going to art shows. Whenever we’re near Santa Fe this is where we eat. This is the best place on earth!

New Jersey = Tomato

Yes, I’m from New Jersey. After years of therapy, I now proudly and openly embrace the place of my birth and coming of age, both for its physical attributes as well as its hard-earned state of mind. With that acceptance, of course, comes an acknowledgement of its contradictions. The much-coveted Jersey Shore and lush Pine Barrens stand in stark contrast to the refineries of Bayonne and the state’s contorted roadways, site of many of America’s most legendary traffic jams. Celebrities like Sinatra, Springsteen, and Streep inspire and move us, while Jersey’s corrupt politicians such as former U.S. Senator Harrison Williams and Camden Mayor Angelo Errichetti (the inspiration for the movie “American Hustle”) repel us. Perhaps it’s because of this history and its inconsistencies that I feel a bit nonchalant about the recent indictment of NJ’s U.S. Senator Bob Menendez on bribery charges. After all, why shouldn’t a guy be allowed to walk around with a little gold bullion in his pockets? You never know when you might need a pack of gum or to feed a parking meter.

Aside from its dubious distinction of maintaining a high occupancy rate in the “Jersey Wing” of the Federal Penitentiary, the Garden State’s most significant contribution to the world just might be the tomato. As a boy, it’s the first vegetable (I know it’s a fruit!) I fell in love with after seeing plump red clusters swaying seductively on the vines of my neighbor’s backyard garden. Due to its unique configuration of humidity, temperature, and soils, New Jersey, which is essentially a peninsula, produces the most flavorful tomatoes, aided by the tender and knowing hands of Rutgers University (the State University of New Jersey) plant scientists.

I can hear your groans after reading such a smug assertion. California, Florida, Ohio—you can strut your stuff and make all the noise you want, but I’m prepared to defend my claim with a duel, a means of settling disputes which I believe is still legal in New Jersey. With a bushel full of just-picked, peak of harvest Jersey tomatoes by my side, I’ll challenge all comers to meet me at the toll booths off exit 9A on the New Jersey Turnpike. We’ll each grab one of our respective tomatoes, and standing back-to-back, take 10 strides in the opposite direction, turn and heave it at the other. Yours may strike me directly in the chest; though knocking me back a foot or two, it will bounce off and skid harmlessly down the pavement like a tennis ball. Mine, on the other hand, should it land as intended on your forehead, will splatter luxuriously across your face leaving rich, red trails down your cheeks, flowing into your gaping and eager mouth. Your eyes will open wide, a smile will grace your lips, and New Jersey tomato nirvana will descend upon you.

The Tomato

As good as the many varieties of tomatoes grown in New Jersey are, they face the same limitation as any other fruit or vegetable grown in a temperate zone—seasonality. Whether I’m nursing them along in my New Mexico garden, or a large commercial farmer is producing them for fresh market, you’ll be lucky to get eight weeks of respectable, locally grown fresh tomatoes a year, even with the benefit of season extenders (don’t talk to me about greenhouse tomatoes or winter tomatoes shipped thousands of miles—they are only useful for batting practice). My personal “season extender” is canning, which when it comes to tomatoes is easy to do in just about any home kitchen. All you need is a large pot for boiling water and a few glass canning jars with lids and tops. I’ll produce enough surplus tomatoes from my garden, sometimes supplemented with 5 to 10 pounds of “seconds” from the farmers’ market to meet my processed tomato needs for a year.

That’s good for my basic cooking needs, but what about that essential tomato sauce for pizza, a menu item so ubiquitous that it seems to be available in every eatery I go to these days (as they say in New Jersey, pizza’s not just for pizzerias anymore!). Or what about your favorite “date night” Italian restaurant whose marinara sauce is so good you’d hurl yourself through rings of fire for. And how about those poor souls whose craving for ketchup is so powerful, that French fries and hot dogs are no more than an expedient form of transportation. Without commercially available processed tomato products, these essential food and menu items would disappear, plunging our reason for living into doubt.

But what if you could have that Jersey tomato terroir year around, grown by local producers, processed by a small, family-owned business, with taste and quality second to none, distributed at scale to retailers and restaurants within a few hundred-mile radius, and available online to the rest of us who don’t have the privilege of living in or near New Jersey? Well, the good news is that you can, and it goes by the name of “First Field” First Field (first-field.com). The inspiration and passion for this food business comes from the decidedly non-corporate couple, Theresa Viggiano and Patrick Leger. Together, they spawned a mom-and-pop start-up which transitioned into a fast-growing food processing business that stakes its reputation on the authenticity of “Jersey Grown” and their working relationship with growers and buyers.

First Field

Like many young farmers and food entrepreneurs today, Patrick and Theresa don’t have deep agricultural roots. Theresa is a “Jersey Girl” who was doing graduate work at Rutgers on aging and mental illness but always had a passion for gardening. Patrick grew up in North Carolina, earned an MBA at Vanderbilt, but was born in Quebec which, interestingly, gave the couple their only food processing cred. “We eat more ketchup in Canada per capita than anywhere in the world. We put it on everything,” he tells me. So armed with his mother’s homemade ketchup recipe and a bumper crop of tomatoes at their Jersey homestead in the summer of 2013, they made their first batch of ketchup.

You might say the rest is history. Like a garage band that got its first gig at the local VFW hall and then moved on to play stadiums, the couple started selling their backyard tomatoes and ketchup off a card table at the foot of their driveway with a cigar box for honor payments. Today, First Field’s crushed tomatoes, marinara sauce, ketchup, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin puree have elbowed their way onto the shelves of some of the region’s most prestigious retailers like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Their sauces are gracing the pies of some of the best pizza restaurants in New York City, including the Andrew Bellucci (aka “The Don of Dough”) Pizzeria in Queens. “They like our sauce because it’s rich. Pizza dough doesn’t like watery sauce!” says Patrick. And their success to date has meant that some of the country’s biggest food retailers and service companies are knocking at their door.

In spite of its modest success–annual sales are growing rapidly—First Field is not a rag to riches story, nor does it evoke the purest sentiments of the local food movement. Again, like family farms where at least one member of the household works a non-farm job, Patrick works as a full-time investment advisor, the income from which supports the family (they have two children, ages 8 and 11). Theresa directs the business on a very full-time basis while Patrick fills in with finance and operational work in the evenings and on weekends. Though they have been in business now for a few years, neither one of them takes a salary. This reflects their desire to effectively self-finance the start-up with money from family, friends, and even Equal Exchange, the worker coop and fair-trade organization that has been expanding their line of domestic products. Patrick and Theresa did take one major step forward in the direction of self-care this summer: they took their first two-week vacation since the business began.

The keeping it close to hearth and home approach is as much a rejection of the usual start up finance model that relies on venture capitalists, or even a bank with more progressive lending practices, as it is a fervent desire to keep their lives family-focused and ultimately sane. An unstated company policy is that family comes first. That’s why the first thing you see when you walk into Food First’s modest facility, located in a non-descript commercial business park in central Jersey, is a large day care space that also served as a kind of one-room schoolhouse during the Covid-19 lockdown. To the same end, Patrick and Theresa would probably acknowledge that their most important off the books’ “assets” are Theresa’s Jersey Shore parents who provide exceptional grandparenting services.

But one’s family values can still be put to the test. On the Sunday afternoon I visited their facility, Theresa was stirring a giant kettle of cranberry sauce to meet a holiday order from a customer (“Thanksgiving comes earlier every year,” she said with a sigh) while Patrick was stacking cases of pumpkin puree on a palette for shipment to a pie baker in Boston. Besides the two of them, they have three other full-time employees with a fourth expected to start that Monday. In all likelihood, Theresa’s grandparents were supervising the construction of sandcastles on one of the Shore’s waning summer days. When the harvests start cascading off the farms, and the customers say they want what they want now, you don’t pack your sunscreen and head for the beach.

Getting ahead while keeping your head may be one of the most challenging facets of any business. But staying true to your mission, i.e., a set of values that drive your business, while managing the food system’s many headwinds is both an art and a science. Like other idealistic foodies, Patrick and Theresa set off with the hope of controlling every aspect of their supply chain and staying within a well-defined organic lane. They received assistance from the Rutgers University Innovation Center to learn the food processing trade and then piloted their product development at Elijah’s Promise, a non-profit job training and community soup kitchen in New Brunswick, NJ. Elijah’s Promise gave them a chance to use a commercial kitchen after hours (“we were the night shift,” joked Theresa) to hone their production skills and earn their FDA approval.

Again, with guidance from Rutgers Cooperative Extension, they headed out into the field to find local farm product suppliers. This is where their ideals and early assumptions started to bump up against reality. Hoping to buttress their brand with a strong organic identity, they soon realized that New Jersey’s organic growers didn’t have sufficient production to meet First Field’s demand. Similarly, the growers were small and often producing different tomato varieties. When you’re canning commercially, you can’t mix ‘n match nor throw whatever’s coming off the field into your #10 can. Product performance and consistency are sacrosanct for chefs.

When they talked to conventional tomato growers who were large enough to supply them, “we realized that we were being starry-eyed greenies,” said Theresa. In other words, no farmer could get over the high bar they were setting; they were clearly at a crossroads. As Patrick put it, “We had to decide if we wanted to be organic—sure, we could have imported organic tomatoes from Mexico—or did we want to support local.” Though New Jersey’s 26 or so commercial scale tomato growers had consolidated down to 6 over the past couple of decades, there are thousands of acres of prime New Jersey farmland comprised of well-drained, sandy loam soils producing highly regarded tomatoes for both fresh slicing and canning markets. To the chagrin of the state’s organic farming community, First Field chose local commercial scale producers as the most feasible path for their business. According to Patrick, this required them to work harder to build working partnerships with organic farmers over time. This has resulted in First Field’s commitment to buying other produce like winter squash, cranberries, and blueberries from small, local farmers to supply the 25 percent of their business that is not tomato based. “Building trust with all our farmers—big and small—is the most important thing we do. We can’t just show up one year and not the next. We have to prove we’re real year after year after year,” said Patrick.

Tomato Land

The New Jersey Turnpike is essentially a northeast region tomato corridor in the middle of one-quarter of the nation’s population. The state’s farmers are growing vast quantities of tomatoes (some fields are only one hundred yards from the Turnpike), going to canneries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or elsewhere, and then onto the warehouses that serve the wholesale and retail supply chains. In choosing to support local growers and the Jersey identity that goes with it, First Field also chose the one remaining tomato cannery in New Jersey to process and pack their tomatoes. It is owned by a large food conglomerate. According to Patrick, their dream would be to one day have their own cannery and avoid the potentially volatile world of large food corporations. At the moment, their other non-tomato canning takes place at their central Jersey facility.

New Jersey may be a tomato corridor, but it’s also the most densely populated state in the country. Land values and development pressure are enormous, but even with New Jersey’s Department of Agriculture’s courageous efforts to protect farmland, the dike can only hold for so long before the rising waters of sprawling subdivisions bust it loose. As a public policy tool, farmland preservation efforts are really just an interim measure; ensuring that farmland remains working land requires that it’s not just protected from the rapacious condo kings, but that it also performs within the parameters set by the food system’s marketplace. To that end, First Field is the tip of the market innovation spear. Using the “Jersey Fresh” logo, telling the local Jersey story on their cans and jars, but perhaps most importantly, proving through the quality and performance of their products that Jersey grown is something more than advertising schmaltz. Rob Everts, a co-director of the fair-trade leader Equal Exchange put it this way: “First Field is an excellent example of a small, socially and environmentally driven business trying to rebuild the New Jersey tomato industry in a truly sustainable way.  We are so inspired by what they are doing that we have invested in their business to try to ensure its success.”

The consequences of First Field’s success or failure are enormous. Without robust regional connections between farmer, processor, buyer, and eater—ones that are geographically close, not based on cross-country or global shipping—Jersey growers may not be around in 10 years. As Patrick put it, “That would be like paving over Napa Valley. It would be an incredible shame!”

The Seed

Cut into a ripe, red tomato and let the pulp and juice pool up on your cutting board. Carefully separate out some seeds with the tip of a knife and push them to the edge for a few minutes to dry. Select just one by pressing a finger tip gently to it so that it sticks to your skin. Examine it closely and measure it. With my crude measuring instrument, I determined that a single oblong seed from one of my homegrown tomatoes was 3/32nd of an inch wide and 1/8th of an inch long. Inside that tiny hard body doesn’t necessarily rest the secrets to the universe, but it’s pretty darn close. From my 2023 Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalogue, I could choose from 103 separate tomato seed varieties, the description for each one touting their unique attributes related to size, shape, color, taste, slicing, saucing, selling, and much more, none of which you’ll detect by simply looking at the seed. The one attribute that most varieties shared, including the one stuck to my fingertip that would blow away if I exhaled too hard, is their capacity to produce a large green plant that could, if tended correctly, set 5 to 10 pounds of edible tomatoes. In spite of a passing understanding of the science behind all of this, I still regard that itsy-bitsy thing resting on my pinky as a miracle for its ability to produce a nearly infinite variety of characteristics.

At Rutgers University, miracle and science have found a happy partnership. The original Rutgers tomato, which Wal-Mart refers to as the “Legendary Jersey Tomato,” may have indeed been handed down to humankind by the Creator, but its infinite refinements and applications for multiple purposes and settings is decidedly secular. And for large tomato growers who are spending upwards of $20,000 a year on seed, getting the right variety for the right purpose at the right time is crucial.

First Field has a similar interest. If the tomato their canner turns into sauce only succeeds in creating a runny pool atop a beautifully hand-thrown pizza crust, a string of Italian, Spanish, or Haitian-Creole accented expletives will ensue. First Field’s phone number will disappear among the salami rinds. That is why they are working closely with Rutgers Professor Tom Orton whose name is spoken with hushed reverence by Patrick. Professor Orton, responsible for the “Rutgers 250” that was written up in the New York Times, is now collaborating with First Field to create the perfect sauce tomato that, in turn, will be perfectly suited for South Jersey growing conditions.

Patrick breaks it down for me this way: “A tomato that is too watery will take longer to cook down which uses more energy and robs the tomato of its flavor. We are working with growers to set aside small plots of their land for seed trials. That’s one way we’re collaborating with our producers.” Keep in mind that none of this “seed work” uses genetic engineering (no one’s crossing a San Manzano canning tomato with a bunny rabbit). Finding the right processing tomato is a glacial process requiring years of diligent lab and field work, but it is no small part of saving Jersey farmers, farmland, and a big chunk of the Northeast food system.

To make the point clear, Patrick brings out a 3-feet by 4-feet wood frame with one side covered in a fine wire mesh screen. Three separate groups of about two hundred seeds each lie on the screen. He explains to me how each group contains certain desirable traits that the wizard Professor Orton will combine to bring to fruition, that will in turn be selected for their desirable traits, and so on. I think back on that one, minute specimen perched on my fingertip. Like Henry David Thoreau, I have “a faith in the seed” that, if this whole process is handled correctly, New Jersey might play a big part in saving us from a global food system controlled by a few giant corporations.

The Taste of Liberation

Patrick is fumbling around their makeshift office kitchen for a spoon so that I can sample their sauce. With a little grunting, he opens up a #10 can of crushed tomatoes with one of those little manual butterfly can openers that your grandmother used. I scoop up a spoonful, then another, and swirl it around my palate. This may be the first time in my life I’ve eaten tomato sauce straight out of a can, but soon I’m contemplating it the way I might a good Bordeau. Do I sense something rich, earthy, even chunky though the sauce is smooth as silk? Calling upon my limited wine tasting vocabulary, I wonder if I’m savoring notes of New Jersey in this robust red pulp. I realize, in fact, that the joy prancing across my tongue isn’t just from the flavor bequeathed to the tomato by my home state’s soils, clammy summers, and the rigorous seed massaging of plant scientists. It’s a taste of liberation from a dominant food system that only wants to treat you like a semi-conscious consumer and raw food products like they are no more than commodities. First Field is what the alternative tastes like.

New Roots Community Farm: “This is the coolest place I’ve ever been!”

“To come here originally as a volunteer was like stepping into a new world…I don’t want to just grow food for myself; I want to grow for my neighbor so they can see you don’t have to settle for Walmart.”

“I’m on this planet to work with land.”

–Staff comments from the New Roots Community Farm, Fayette County, West Virginia

Some of the New Roots Community Farm Staff

The place, food, and land referenced above are the New Roots Community Farm, an 82-acre non-profit agricultural center whose fields unroll like a plush carpet across the Fayette County, West Virginia hills. The voices are some of the dozen or so young people in their twenties and thirties who dig, tend, and pick an intensively cultivated six-acre section of the site to sell, share, and deliver its produce to a surrounding community of local shoppers, senior citizens, school children, and a food bank. The occasion is a more or less spontaneous evening meal in the farm’s barn, suggested by me and orchestrated by New Roots co-founder and director, Gabe Pena. The ingredients include several smoked chickens from a nearby farm, various vegetable dishes gleaned from the nearby field, wine, beer, and homemade ice cream. The topic of discussion, selected for both its physical and metaphysical layers, is “why are you here?”

Why was I here? Having spent a couple of days talking to people in and around Mingo County at West Virginia’s southwest border with Kentucky, I was hoping to find a brighter sense of what the region’s future might look like. Were there places—potential models—with similar demographics and challenges to Mingo that were reinventing themselves, unchained from coal and its legacies of poverty, ill-health, and drug addiction? Some tipsters I had encountered along the way sent me two hours east to Fayette County where I found people building a new economy and community out of the shell of the old.

Though Fayette’s population of 41,000 is almost twice the size of Mingo’s, that number, like Mingo’s is half of what it was in 1950 (some recent growth has been reported). Otherwise, Fayette County has seen three coal mines close over the past few years, its poverty rate hovers a bit over 20 percent, and dietary health problems associated with residents’ high obesity rates make the local health care industry among the area’s top three employers. And like other rural counties, a severe case of political whiplash has shifted voters radically from the reliably blue end of the spectrum to the deep red. In Fayette County, for instance, the three county commissioner seats were held by Democrats as recently as 2015. Today, they are all Republicans.

Coming to Fayette from Texas in 2007, Gabe, now 39, didn’t get into farming for any of the sentimental reasons that often drive some young people to plunge their hands into the soil. “Economic development is a passion of mine; in fact, I can get quite wonky about it,” he tells me as he takes his car into a steep dive descending into the nearby New River Gorge, somehow straightening out one hairpin turn after another. “Food access is critical to our economy and one of the social determinants of health which are integral parts of economic development. Part of our impetus for developing New Roots was knowing that local food businesses can work hand-in-hand with our tourism industry as part of an economic diversification strategy,” he says, taking his eyes off the road just a little longer than I’d like.

When we reach the gorge’s bottom, I begin to see what he means. We are crossing the New River, which along with the cliffs rising 900 feet straight up on each side constitutes the striking natural features of what became the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve in 2020. It offers unparalleled whitewater rafting, hiking, and rock-climbing opportunities which along with more passive sightseeing uses, have attracted 1.7 million outdoor enthusiasts in less than 4 years (compare this to the estimated 20,000 tourists who come each year to Mingo County primarily for ATV trail riding).

Perhaps the Park’s most dramatic feature happens to be manmade—the New River Gorge Bridge, the longest steel span bridge in the Western Hemisphere and third highest in the United States. Gabe told me that on the 3rd weekend in October the bridge serves as a BASE jumping site (Bridge, Antennae, Span, and Earth) which sees hundreds of people hurling themselves off the bridge—parachutes attached—into the gorge below, an extreme sport I don’t see myself taking up anytime soon.

Gabe doesn’t confine his activities to just being a community food project developer and policy wonk, he’s also an active local food citizen. After working for the Fayette County planning office, he decided that local government needed younger people serving in decision-making roles, so he ran for the Fayetteville City Council and won. Taking me on a walking tour of downtown Fayetteville, Gabe makes his agenda crystal clear by pointing out the tweaks that would make the town more vital. “I want to facilitate ‘small development,’” he tells me.

Pointing to one corner restaurant, he explains how the town wouldn’t let it have an outdoor, sidewalk eating area that would bring more life to downtown. Similarly, they turned down a request for a food truck even though they’ve become ubiquitous elsewhere these days. Passing an abandoned building that had housed a micro-brew restaurant, Gabe says the town wouldn’t upgrade the sewer system which would have allowed the pub to do on-site brewing. “We have an overabundance of a protectionist mentality that impedes innovative business projects,” which is perhaps a wonky way of saying that the town doesn’t yet have a robust sense of its own potential. Gabe is working on changing that.

Though unstated, the mutually beneficial connection between local food establishments and the New Roots Farm, only two miles from downtown Fayetteville, is certainly apparent. Pies and Pints is a downtown pizza and brew joint popular with the rafter and climbing crowd. One of New Roots young farmers tells me the restaurant hosts an annual “Pies, Pints, and Pesto” festival that nearly consumes the farm’s entire basil crop. Sure, Gabe and the New Roots board of directors love the revenue stream generated by its farm to restaurant sales, but the bigger vision is what excites them. What would the economic impact on the region be if tourist demand drove restaurant business which drove demand for local produce which drove the growth in the number of new farms across the county and adjoining counties? And we’re not just talking about an outdoor recreationist-fueled, pesto-topped pizza feeding frenzy. Extend that local vision to institutional sales like schools and hospitals, connect the $800 million of federal food assistance (e.g., SNAP, school meal programs) spending in West Virginia every year to local food production, and consider large grants to food banks that could be used to buy local food to serve vulnerable families. Pretty soon you have a new economy, built on local resources big enough one day to fill the gap left by king coal which is currently on life support.

As Josh Lohnes, the West Virginia University professor I spoke to in Morgantown told me, a significant public investment is required for a self-sustaining food and farm economy to emerge. “Creating a viable small farm sector is difficult because of all the challenges required to secure land, working capital, and the necessary skills,” he told me. “To reach our potential we need a hefty, five-year support program for new farmers.” He also made it clear that food banks were not receiving enough money or donated food to meet the demand, and that they needed more support as well. And to stress the potential of connecting food assistance to the local food economy, he cited the example of the Community Food Innovation Center in Morgantown which includes a business that prepares meals for daycare centers and the Child and Adult Care Food program that receives federal meal reimbursements.

But a new economy also requires new people, especially ones that are young, entrepreneurial, and energetic. As Erik Johnson from the Huntington-based Facing Hunger Food Bank told me, there are a lack of incentives for young people to stay and come to West Virginia, especially to the core of what is known as Appalachia. “You have an oligarchy, politically and otherwise, that’s almost like a caste system that rules things here. When it comes to getting things done, it’s very much of a ‘who you know’ culture.” About the same age as Gabe, and similarly earnest about the need for social and economic change, Erik sees a “young, liberal contingent emerging [in WV] who could take on the elite,” as he likes to describe them.

One place where youth of all ages have seized control in West Virginia is its world-renowned music and dance festival scene. In addition to its natural beauty, the state excels like nowhere else when it comes to drawing pickers and stompers from across the globe. As a kind of Motown of the Mountains, numerous music and dance genres from fiddle to banjo, blue grass to traditional, clogging to square dance, storytelling to mournful ballads that ooze their own brand of Scotch-Irish soul have washed over the state for 200 years leaving unique tracks from hollows to ridgelines. The contemporary outlet for all of this comes to a head during the warm months when festivals sprout like ramps in the state’s humid forests and fields. Tents and do-it-yourself parking lots turn previously peaceful villages and grassy slopes into secular revival meetings where the worship of 24/7 revelry is the only sacrament. Bearded men and braided lasses—young, old, and in between—create a Bruegelian canvas where limber bodies prance, and instruments, sometimes “melted and warped” by the omnipresent dampness, wail day and night.  Weed and whiskey are by no means discouraged, but unlike the last music festival I attended 54 years ago—the vague memory of which certifies that I was present—the West Virginia stimulants are placed in service to a more active and participatory role for all concerned.

I know all this only because my 30-something son, Peter, has attended many West Virginia festivals. The Appalachian String Band Music Festival is one such event that takes place in early August in the tiny Fayette County town of Clifftop which, apropos of its name, sits high above the New River Gorge. “Clifftop,” the place that also serves as the festival’s unofficial name, draws over 3,000 people for five days of camping, music, dance, and an all-round celebration of America’s purist folk traditions. For a grand sum of 50 bucks, you can camp as long as you want and gain access to all the goings-on which toggle back and forth between scheduled stage acts to a spontaneous eruption of fiddle music at 4 in the morning. “There’s basically a small window between 5 and 7 AM,” Peter tells me, “When the site is pretty much quiet, but otherwise there’s always music and movement.” And just to remind my Woodstock generation what we can longer do, he says, “After hanging out with friends, playing and listening to music all day, dancing until five in the morning, and feeling a bit hungover, we might hike the steep two-mile trail down to the New River to swim and bath. Then we hike back up.” At least he’s not getting there by jumping off the bridge.

Fields of New Root Farm

Back at New Roots, I’m sipping a beer and enjoying the evening light falling across the various shades and rows of vegetable plants. The farm’s story of transition from the privately owned Whitlock Farm that ceased operation in 2005 to today’s non-profit community enterprise—the land title being held now by the national Agrarian Trust in cooperation with the Agrarian Commons—is one that demonstrates unusual public foresight. West Virginia counties have the option of establishing farmland boards and assessing a small property transaction fee to fund the purchase of farmland in fee or as a conservation easement. It was through such a fund that Fayette County bought the Whitlock property (Gabe and the Farm’s production manager, Susan Wheeler, were both working for the County at the time the deal went done) and, while other uses for the site such as a school were considered, it was determined in 2016 that the land should be preserved and used as a farm. With the formation of the non-profit New Roots Community Farm, the land was dedicated to agricultural use, community service, and education.

Perhaps, because of the generous impulse of the County and community it serves, the public benefit to which the land was directed, or the way a lovingly tended farm settles even the most rambunctious of hearts, that one New Roots farmer said, “this is the coolest place I’ve ever been!” Similar sentiments were echoed as we broke bread and gnawed chicken wings together in the farm’s barn on a warm summer night. Almost all of the young staff are from out of state; they initially came to test their mettle against category 5 whitewater rapids and formidable rock faces, and most of them are women.

But because people can’t live by adventure alone, they showed a more tender and other-directed side as well when speaking of why they were drawn to the farm as a place to work. One young man shared his story of being a para-medic during the height of Covid-19 and losing part of his hearing due to the extreme physical conditions he was forced to work under. For him, New Roots was first a place of refuge, followed by healing, and now a place that is setting a stage for a career in farming. A woman said she “thinks a lot about community and class—who gets to eat what and why; that’s what gets me fired up. Feed the people! Food is a human right!” Another young woman said, “The smallest crack in the door that exposes you to farming is one of the great joys of being alive. I want to be that crack in the door for those who haven’t experienced the wonder and joys and the bodily euphoria of having that experience.”

A modest note of defiance also reverberated around the table, as if there was a felt need to justify their choice of farming as a serious occupation. “I may not care if society doesn’t regard what we do [here] as viable within a capitalistic framework,” said one woman, adding ironically, “I’m so glad I don’t have a real job!” Another woman echoed that statement with a rhetorical question, “What’s the standard of success in this country? Make money. Work for the right company. In other words, society’s definition of rewards is not consistent with farming’s.” A young man added, “Farming is connected to my quality of life. Food self-reliance, small trading groups, and a sense of community are my standards of success.”

By the force of its mission, accompanied by its inspiring surroundings, New Roots has managed to attract an impressive vanguard of new farmers committed to building a sustainable future on the ground of a withering past. They are clear-eyed young people who are braced by strong values that uphold their own independence. Yet, at the same time, they embrace a sense of solidarity with each other that is collectively motivated by a shared goal to serve a community.  Comfortable with the irony of serving themselves at the same time they serve others, they find a special kinship with New Roots, itself a hybrid non-profit, for-profit model of how you organize yourself in a world that’s not tolerant of too much deviation. They are informed by a belief that you must take care of yourself, pay attention to your passions, don’t accept the status quo when it ceases to be useful, but hold on to that moral compass which will guide you to a higher good.

Bringing younger generations to Fayette and Mingo Counties, as well as the entire state of West Virginia, is required for the state to survive and eventually thrive. The kind of innovation that I saw from young-ish leaders like Gabe Pena and Facing Hunger’s Erik Johnson and Cyndi Kirkhart, supported by engaged and visionary academics like Joshua Lohnes, are the essential play makers for change. But their efforts won’t be worth a bushel of ramps without a robust, forward-looking public sector investment. “Feed the people!” is more than a fist-raised-high slogan, it’s sound economic policy that serves multiple bottom lines: it promotes food security and healthy diets, puts land into production for the people who make up the states hundreds of mostly rural communities, attracts smart, hard working young people like those at New Roots, and diversifies an economy that has relied on extractive industries that were never more than a bad deal with the devil.

Besides the models and energy that I was witness to, there are other building blocks already in place. West Virginia’s festival scene raises up local economies as well as a cultural heritage that is second to none. Tourism captures the imagination of active outdoors people as well as those who want to quietly enjoy that state’s beauty. Interestingly, existing Federal food assistance commitments can be creatively deployed to feed, nourish, and plant a new food economy rather than simply flood the coffers of Walmart and Kroger. As one young New Roots farmer told us, “I want to connect over food.” West Virginia’s food system offers connections galore!