Strawberry Fields…Forever?

According to my Word Press counter, “Strawberry Fields Forever?” is my 200th blog post since I began markwinne.com in 2007! I don’t honestly know what to do about that other than to simply make my readers aware of what I guess is a milestone. I thought about honoring the occasion by sending out refrigerator magnets or meme coins, but my marketing staff said we don’t have the budget for it. I guess we’ll just have to celebrate by offering these posts for free. They are free already, you say? Well, now they’re even freer! Happy 200th!

Driving north from Dulles International Airport, you soon leave behind the roar of jets bound for London or Rome and cross the waters of the historic Potomac. It’s somewhere in that passage from northern Virginia into Frederick County Maryland that the scenery makes a radical shift. Highways with enough lanes to land a bomber squadron give way to meandering state roads, while Disneyesque shopping centers and office complexes recede to rolling farm fields. Transitioning from the bombastic to the bucolic, you feel the day’s travel tensions drain from your shoulders. You’re refreshed by green landscapes dotted with historic houses, some of which may have once boarded Generals Lee and Grant, though probably not at the same time.                                                                                                                                                                                                    What’s notable about this open landscape is its proximity to the bourgeoning metropolis of northern Virginia and Washington, DC, which are not much more than a cannon ball shot away. But beauty and its preservation in such places are no longer the sole province of nature. They are, in fact, the product of two competing impulses. The first is to protect as much open space as possible for multiples of reasons including aesthetics, privacy, investment, ostentatious displays of wealth, food security, environmental benefits, recreational, and the sheer comfort of knowing that the world’s teeming masses are not breathing down your neck.                                                                                                                                                                          The second, nearly diametrically and dialectically opposing impulses, is the need for housing, preferably affordable, and development that provides for businesses that create well-paying jobs as well as amenities (e.g., supermarkets) that offer necessary goods and services. While the tension between growth and no-growth often pits people with diametrically opposing viewpoints and interests against each other, the resolution of that tension is a dialectical one often stretching out over decades and generations, especially as both public and private interests clash in the marketplace.                                                                                                                                   “About 47 percent of Frederick County is agricultural land,” said Michelle Caruso who is the Chair of the Frederick County Food Council (FCFC), an all-volunteer organization that promotes a strong local food system and food security. While Frederick and Maryland are national leaders in land conservation—the state has already protected 30 percent of its land area for agricultural, conservation, and recreational purposes How Maryland Hit Its 30×30 Goal – The New York Times—the development pressure remains immense. “Frederick is the state’s fastest growing county,” Michelle tells me. “But the pressure isn’t just from people moving here, it’s also from giant data centers in Loudon County, Virginia that want to locate here. It’s also from overhead power lines that reduce both farmland and the overall aesthetics.”                                                                                                                                                                                                            In all respects, Frederick County is at the cutting edge of the push and pull between conservation/preservation and what constitutes smart growth. How that struggle plays out over the next couple of decades will also have food security consequences for the county’s 300,000 people. That’s why, as Michelle sees it, “There’s an opportunity for us [the FCFC] to be a leader in the smart growth arena.”                                                                                                                                                                                                              Part of that belief stems from the area’s richly diverse and unique qualities, including a supremely robust food and farm scene that draws people to both the county and the city of Frederick. “People who live here love it,” says Michelle, “we have an adorable historic downtown, wonderful restaurants, and an inclusive community which is part of the reason we have the biggest gay rights festival in the state. And people really care a lot about farmland!” For those reasons and more, there are literally scores of organizations—private, public, for profit, non-profit—engaged in various facets of food system work, from volunteer, faith-based food pantries, to commercial composting operations, to an Office of Agriculture housed within Frederick County government.                                                                                                                                                                                                          A big part of how the Food Council sees its job is coordinating the efforts of food system actors and promoting better communication among them and the larger community. But that is a formidable task when you have as many cats to herd as you do in Frederick. Looking over the abundant landscape of the county’s food system playing field, it would be easy for a food activist from Mars to become envious. Take just the Common Market (retail food) Coop (a FCFC member, Alison Wexler, is the Coop’s board president), for example. It started out in the usual hippie-dippy way in the early 1970s and has blossomed into two large store locations serving 10,000 member/owners and thousands of non-members. To have two attractive, well-merchandised locations in the city of Frederick, population 85,000, is a comparatively substantial feat for a food coop. The opening line of its mission statement not only anchors the coop in the most fundamental values of the food movement, it tends to speak for most of the food and farm groups I’ve met in the area: The Common Market exists in order to achieve…[a] just, prosperous, and vibrant local food economy that connects local consumers with local food sources.                                                                                                                                                                                                  Moon Valley Farm and its dynamic owner, Emma Jagoz, are the tip of the entrepreneurial farm spear, one adorned, albeit, with the ribbons of social justice and community engagement. Emma, a single mother of two young children and first-generation farmer runs a variety of production, distribution, and educational activities from her 70-acre farm in Woodsboro, MD. I attended a bustling Moon Valley strawberry festival one beautiful day in May that saw people pawing through fields of strawberries, their children’s faces flushing from pale to pink to rosy-red as they chomped their way through fistfuls of berries. Besides operating their own CSA, Moon Valley serves as a food hub for other farms doing a brisk trade with school cafeterias throughout the region (as of this writing, Trump’s cuts in some USDA programs have curtailed Emma’s food hub distributions). The vagaries of federal funding aside, a partnership between Moon Valley and the Judy Center (a comprehensive, early childhood intervention based in Maryland’s public schools) in Frederick is bringing the benefits of local produce to the Center’s participating families.                                                                                                                                                      It seemed like everywhere I turned in Frederick, people and programs were taking an inclusive approach to food and farm initiatives. Marcy Taylor and Kirk Druey are also members of the FCFC and volunteer with “Farm to School,” a project that uses local food to fill over 1000 back packs weekly for lower income Frederick school children. Kirk said the service is based on the fact that about 20 percent of the public-school children are food insecure. Marcy told me that “when you get good food into the hands of people who really appreciate its health value, you know you’re making a difference.”                                                                                                                                                                  In a somewhat different form of inclusivity, both the City and County of Frederick have made food and agriculture core government functions. The City’s Office of Sustainability runs a curbside compost collection program (2024 IMPACT REPORT BROCHURE) while the County’s newly established Office of Agriculture integrates food and agriculture into the county’s overall economic development and tourism promotion efforts. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that the county has 188,000 acres of farmland and 1300 farms, but it amplifies those gifts by noting a wide diversity of food, beverage, and farm opportunities for consumers to take advantage of, including 13 farmers’ markets and 13 CSAs within the county limits. The Ag Office website paints a community food system canvas the likes of which I’ve never seen from a local government agency From Idea to Impact: Celebrating One Year of the Frederick County Office of Agriculture – Homegrown Frederick.                                                                                                                                                                                          As the Frederick County Food Council sees it—and as I have experienced it nationwide—the sheer number and diversity of food and farm projects in a given area may look like a rich banquet upon which we all can feed but in reality, is not enough to end food insecurity.  Several indicators, including results from recent surveys support the Council’s concern. One of them is a Frederick County United Way Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE) study that found 32 percent of Frederick’s residents don’t earn enough to meet their basic needs, including housing, food, and health care costs (2024 ALICE Report | United Way of Frederick County).                                                                                                                      While federal nutrition assistance programs like SNAP can help meet basic food needs, the Council’s Michelle Caruso said there is a potentially large, so-called “SNAP gap” in Frederick whereby people earn just enough to not qualify for SNAP but not enough to meet their household’s basic needs. And with the Trump administration and Republican Congress wreaking havoc with various federal assistance programs cuts, that gap could balloon.                                                                                                                                                      Perhaps the Council’s best piece of evidence that all the county’s food cats aren’t well connected is their 2024 Food Insecurity and Food Pantries in Frederick County Study (b7daa0_ed595aaf090b442bb0d1b9e78b5481e6.pdf). In brief, the study found that there was insufficient client outreach and information about the pantries’ locations and hours of operation. In fact, the numbers suggest that only 12 percent of those who fall within the ALICE category utilize the county’s 18 or so food pantries. As Marcy Taylor said, “When we asked pantries how they get the word out, they told us they put up a poster in a church. That’s not enough.” The results also seemed to indicate that there is very little peer-to-peer communication between managers of the different pantries.                                                                                                                            This kind of siloing among not just emergency food providers, but from many community food system actors, both the public and private sectors, is all too common. We pursue and sometimes compete for the same funding; we build our own brand and seek community-wide recognition and praise; and we focus on our organization’s mission without taking time to embrace a larger vision for our wider community. It’s the Council’s hope, indeed their mission, to become a hub of sorts for this sprawling food system network that is working toward one shared vision. As Michelle said, “I think there is a huge opportunity, if we do it right, for our council to become a legitimate place to solve some of these problems because nobody else is doing it.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                          To both verify these assumptions as well as more accurately target the county’s food needs, the Council is putting the finishing touches on a Community and Agriculture Resilience Audit Tool (CARAT). This is an assessment device now being applied in dozens of communities across the country that uses a carefully selected set of questions to gather and analyze information from actors across the entire local food system. By interviewing dozens of such stakeholders, the Council is getting a grounds-eye view of local strengths and weaknesses. A secondary benefit is the chance to engage people and organizations along the way who may become a part of their growing network.                                                                                                                                                                                                                If I was to draw one conclusion from my review of Frederick’s food and farm work, it would be this: Everybody’s doing the right thing, they just aren’t doing it together. Granted, working together—true collaboration—is hard work. In the case of Frederick, it’s also possible that their robust food and farm scene—many farms and lots of protected farmland, a bustling and beautiful historic downtown, an engaged public sector, and numerous food organizations and businesses—suggests a food system oasis which may breed a kind of collective complacency. Beyond Frederick County, it should also be noted that the State of Maryland has a history of progressive social and economic actions that, among other things, led to the creation of the Maryland Food System Resiliency Council, effectively a state food policy council. And partially as a result of the State’s interest in food security, Maryland now has 11 county-level food councils, proportionally one of highest number in the nation.                                                                                                                                              In light of this organizational and policy abundance, the question then becomes: Is all of this enough to cope with Frederick County’s multitude of internal and external hungers? As the Council’s members made clear, local food insecurity is real and the combined costs of food, housing, and health care often put those items out of reach for many residents; the county’s lower population density, open land, and affordability, at least relative to Washington’s and Baltimore’s close-in suburbs, make it very attractive to those looking for more for less; and like Sesame Street’s cookie-craving Monster, businesses, data centers, warehouses, solar farms, and so on have an unquenchable appetite for land, land, land! And speaking of Sesame Street (PBS), food system planners and advocates must now take into account the Axer-in-Chief sitting only 50 miles away, his only likely legacy 10 million acres of new golf courses and at least an equal number of hungry people.                                                                                                                                                                                                      If this is the reality facing the people and place you care about, you want to have the best team, that is well-coached, drawing on a deep bench of talented players, going to bat for you. That is why I continue to argue for strong, community-based food policy councils as the most likely hub for collective action.                                                                                                                                                                            My Moment of Zen                                                                                                                                                                                                  I was contemplating the opportunities and challenges facing Frederick at the same time I was wiping the juice of my 10th, maybe 20th Moon Valley Farm strawberry from my chin. The pleasure was intense and the beauty surrounding me seductive. Yet the thought that thousands might be denied such joys by the socio and economic forces acting upon them, or that this God-given land and its irreplaceable soil might be trashed by a new datacenter infuriated me. At times like these when pain and pleasure collide in my mind, I sometimes find myself meditating on the Zen koan about a woman being chased by a tiger. Trapped at the edge of a cliff with nowhere else to run, she lunges for a branch sticking out of the cliff’s side. She clutches it desperately as the tiger looms above while hungry tigers circle below. Considering her predicament, she sees a beautiful ripe strawberry dangling within arm’s reach. She picks it, eats it, and decides that it is very good.  The end.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  I would like to thank Theresa Yosuico Stahl and Michelle Caruso for their assistance in researching this article.