December 2005 | Naturally Tasty
Thought for Food
A Fork in the Road
by Andrea Blum
Years ago, in the south of France, I cried over a bowl of cherries. It was a simple yet stunning dessert of perfect red gems slit open with their pits exposed. With one taste, I knew they came from a cherry-laden tree nearby, and it seemed like the chef who served them revered the fruit as much as I. At the Bioneers Conference in October, a simple potato and an articulate farmer made me weep again.
I’m not an overly emotional person, but when Michael Ableman (a farmer and writer living in British Columbia and founder of the Center of Urban Agriculture in Fairview, California) told the story of Gene Theil and other farmers who reap what they sow, tears flowed. Theil had deep lines in his face and cradled a beautiful two-pound tuber in his earthy hands. The man had produced this masterpiece by following in the footsteps of five generations before him.
Several years ago, Ableman and his 22-year-old son left their own farm to make a pilgrimage through North America visiting those who bring us our food. With today’s chefs reaching rock-star status, Ableman set out to highlight those who do the unsung work. In Ableman’s eyes, it is the laborers and farmers who are laying the foundation for profound social and ecological change.
This outside-the-icebox thinking was a grand theme at Bioneers. Maybe I was just one in the choir, humming the tune, but more than ever, the goal of changing how and what our country eats (and how it’s produced) seemed possible. As Nina Simons, Bioneers’ executive director said, there is a literal fork in the road when it comes to agriculture. Whether it’s the farmer’s pitchfork or the one on your kitchen table, it’s the link that binds us to the land. More people are getting their food locally and meeting the people who grow it. Nearly one quarter of US shoppers now buy organic products and, since 1994, the number of farmers markets has doubled to 3,500. The number of community supported agriculture programs (CSA’s), where consumers buy directly from local farms, has blossomed from one in 1985 to more than 1,000 today. Food justice movements have engaged urban farms to serve the needs of inner city, low-income communities, pushing fresh produce onto the shelves of liquor stores. They are promoting cooking courses in jail. There’s an emerging “food genre” in film, and more than 700 US school districts offer farming programs like Berkeley’s “Edible Schoolyard” that encourage students to grow and cook their own food and turn cafeterias into classrooms.
Wil Bullock, a 24-year old African American from Boston’s inner city grew up eating KFC and preferred Wendy’s over McDonalds. He told the Bioneers’ audience how his life changed at 15 when he found a job at a 31-acre farm outside of Boston. He now helps run “The Food Project,” a nonprofit that grows a quarter of a million pounds of organic food a year so inner city kids and families can have access to healthier food. He also received a W.K Kellogg Food and Society fellowship to help change government policy and to promote sustainable agriculture and social change. He’s one of the trailblazers who are cutting paths into the food deserts of the inner city. LaDonna Redmond, president and CEO of the Institute for Community Resource Development in Chicago, and a W.K Kellogg Fellow herself, does a similar thing. She’s turning vacant lots into urban farms and building a community-owned grocery store in an area where no grocery stores exist. It’s funny how the Kellogg Company sells cornflakes to pay people to educate other people not to eat their genetically engineered corn flakes.
The Glue of Life
Even food science has its place. Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, noted that food is not just for eating. She talked about mimicking the super-glue a mussel produces to attach itself to rocks. So what’s the recipe? Oregon State Professor Kaichang Li asked that question while walking on a beach. In the lab, he found the answer and developed a soy-based recipe with the same amino-acid structure found in mussel secretions. Li’s discovery has replaced the cancer-causing formaldehyde-based glues previously used in the plywood industry. After a phone call, I confirmed that, indeed, Columbia Forest Products has successfully adopted the environmentally friendly glue inspired by a walk and a mussel.
As I left Bioneers, I met 16-year old Charletta Harris, student president of Oakland Technical High School, who, with a couple of friends, raised $500 in quarters for victims of Hurricane Katrina victims. She explained how she’s teaching people to grow their own food. She’s opening a healthy snack bar at the local YMCA, and teaching kids how to make their own lunch. “I’m empowering youth to join the food justice movement,” she said. “We are the new revolutionaries, teachers and doctors. We are the future, you know.”
So that’s the fork in the road that this column hopes to pitch. If people are digging their fingers in the dirt — metaphorically or literally — I want to know about it. Perhaps Michael Ableman said it best, “Let’s make the farmers the heroes and hold them out for the world to see.”
Andrea Blum is the food writer for CG.
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