Even though Grand Rapids is a mid-size city, it does have a small-town feel — once you’ve been here a while you start to realize everybody pretty much knows everybody else. When I first moved here and asked people who I should talk to about the food system, I heard two names over and over: Tom Cary and Gail Philbin.

Tom is a lifelong resident of Grand Rapids, and Gail has also lived here for many years, although I recently learned that we’ll be losing her to Chicago very soon. Tom was instrumental in starting the Greater Grand Rapids Food Systems Council in 2001, when there were just a couple CSAs and three or four farmers markets in the area. Today there are at least 12 CSAs and a profusion of farmers markets. The council has been involved in myriad food projects in the region, from working in some of Grand Rapids’ more distressed neighborhoods to build access to healthy food, to launching the Beginning Farmers Training Program that helps connect the know-how of people who’ve been farming for a while to young upstarts who want to learn.

And Gail started Farms Without Harm in 2005, a local nonprofit that opposes factory farming and has brought together farmers with interested people and organizations to raise the profile of sustainable agriculture in the region, through activities such as farm tours and public presentations. She was also a board member for a time of the Food Systems Council.

When I spoke to Tom and Gail, they both agreed that since the early 2000s, there has been an explosion of interest in local food in the area. Betting that interest would only increase and looking to find a way to supply people with locally grown food in the winter when the farmers markets close, in October 2006 the Food Systems Council, Farms Without Harm, and other partners created the West Michigan Coop, an online cooperative that members order from once a month.

It launched with 35 families, and about a year and half later has 255 members supplied by 28 vendors and growing. Tom’s vision for the Coop is to have 5,000 members in five years; he wonders if the management can take the Coop beyond breaking even, to become a capital source for new farmers or food entrepreneurs. One thing there’s no shortage of in West Michigan are great ideas for the future.

And now for a “but”… like Bonnie and Elanor, I too was at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Food and Society conference last week in Arizona. My nagging concern after returning is this: What will happen to the big dreams for small-scale, local and regional efforts in this city and others like it across the country?

During one reporting session, participants questioned what it meant to grow the food movement; as one person put it, should this movement be about scaling up, or spreading out? It seems like many of the sustainable-food goals for which advocates have been fighting for the last decade or so are starting to take root, and with that mainstreaming of the idea comes the urge to “take things to scale.” I just hope that we don’t lose sight of the promise that small-scale, diversified efforts will make good on if they’re given the chance. I hope sustainable food actors in Grand Rapids and other areas don’t get left behind in a new wave of “get big or get out” — ironically, the same mentality that has delivered to us this monolithic, runaway food system in the first place.

Guest contributor Stephanie Pierce lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she writes, dreams, and plans at Fourth Sector Consulting, a for-benefit company that works only with mission-driven organizations. Her unofficial title is Practical Wonderer. A native of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Stephanie can tell you why Lake Superior is better than Lake Michigan and how to correctly pronounce “sauna.”

My former boss in DC once said that if she ever found herself on the same side of an issue as the Bush Administration, it was time to go back and look more closely: there must be a hidden agenda. That was the thought that struck me as I contemplated the administration’s Farm Bill veto threat on Friday.

I understand the calls from some in the sustainable-ag community to veto the Farm Bill (and thank Tom Philpott and the comment crew over at Gristmill for outlining them). The argument appears to be that, while there were important wins, this Farm Bill does not include most of the bigger reforms we want, and the community would do better to support a veto and try again anew. I don’t happen to agree; some of the reasons why are also outlined in Tom’s post and the comments. But I respect the sustainable ag organizations that take this position.

It all gets more complicated, though, when these groups find themselves on the same side of the veto issue as the Bush Administration, which is not known for caring much about sustainability in any sense of the word. It gets extra-complicated when the phrase “subsidy reform” passes the lips of spokespeople from both the farmers-market complex and the agribusiness-industrial complex. This strange coalition of convenience was highlighted recently in a San Francisco Chronicle article by Carolyn Lochhead: “It is the rarest of moments: President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are on a collision course over a giant farm bill, but it is Bush who is broadly aligned with liberal Bay Area activists pushing for reform, while the San Francisco Democrat is protecting billions of dollars in subsidies….”

Yesterday on Mulch, the Environmental Working Group’s Ken Cook lamented how hard it will be to whip Republican members of Congress to sustain a Bush veto. That has to be a historic first — a progressive enviro group pushing for Republicans to agree with their own administration.

I have a lot of thoughts about the subsidy issue generally, which I happen to think distracts us from the root causes of our current food-system disaster. I’ll leave those for another day, though (or you can read Tom’s Victual Reality column on it, which says it much better than I could). For now: Even if you believe that subsidy reform would bring about substantial change in the food system, Bush’s support for the veto has nothing to do with this goal. As my former boss might put it, he’s got darker aspirations.

And for that reason alone, if not for the many others outlined on Gristmill, I am terrified of any veto with his name on it. Passing this Farm Bill, in my opinion, is cutting our losses while we can.

Distract locally, deregulate globally (more…)

Friday, May 9, was the second anniversary of the first post on the Ethicurean … and we forgot to celebrate. It’s always slightly cringe-inducing to look back at the humble beginnings of something (Exhibit A: our original badly Photoshopped pig), but I am proud of what we’ve created here: a network of intelligent, passionate writers, readers, and commenters who believe not only that food is more than fuel, but that good food depends on healthy soils, fair labor practices, ethical animal treatment, and strong local communities — and policies that nourish all those roots.

The five people who started this blog with me are still chewing the right thing, just too busy writing novels and raising babies to blog about it, darn them. But in the past year, my cohorts Marc, Elanor, Janet, Charlotte, Jennifer, Peter, Jenni, Amanda, and Ali have come aboard, and they along with many guest contributors are the lifeblood of the Ethicurean — they inspire and educate me with every post, as I hope they do you, too.

Mainly we want to thank Ethicurean readers old and new for continuing to visit us. Your comments, and the debates that sometimes break out in the comments section, are why we do this. (It’s certainly not the money — 1,343 posts and counting, and we have yet to earn a dime :-), but I am not complaining.) You’re really a thoughtful, uncommonly courteous, and diverse bunch, ranging from organic (and a few conventional) farmers to policy wonks, nutritionists, students, eco-moms, and just plain fed-up eaters. We love hearing what you think, and being challenged by you.

Thank you all for eating like you give a damn.

Apologies to all who have sent Digest items — I am camped out here at Ethicurean headquarters in a bit of a mental bunker, completely out of bandwidth given multiple projects with looming deadlines and furiously squeaking clients. I’m sorry that we’re so behind on the news.

However I just have to take 5 minutes to point to a post Friend o’Ethicurean Tom Philpott has up on Gristmill today, about the final proposal Congress has finally cobbled together for the 2007 Farm Bill, months late. The USDA chair reports President Bush will veto it because of its lack of subsidy reform. In clear and neutral language, Tom lays out why many sustainable-agriculture advocates are willing to hold their noses and support a Bush veto, which would force Congress to extend the 2002 Farm Bill another two years and go back to the drawing board on its subsequent budget and contents, and why other groups are opposing throwing out this Frankensteinian baby with the bathwater.

An intelligent debate has been launched in the comments section, which I wish I had the time (and brain cells) to add to. There’s also a poll. So head on over there and put in your two cents — veto or no? Why not? You do have to register with Grist to post a comment, but it only takes 5 seconds.

I have an embarrassing confession: I am terrified of flying. I’ve tried everything I can think of to get over it (deep breathing, Dramamine, and even, yes, a self-help book called “Fly Without Fear”), yet I still end up locking the armrest in a death grip on every flight. It was after my last trip, when the nice woman from Wyoming sitting next to me became so concerned that she offered to hold my hand during takeoff, that I decided I really needed to grow up and get over it. And lo and behold, the Food and Society conference in Phoenix provided me with an opportunity to test out a new tactic.

I grew up listening to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion with my parents each and every Saturday night. To my youthful ears, Keillor’s voice sounded a lot like my dad’s; perhaps as a result, things associated with the state of Minnesota have always felt warmly familiar. I’d been meaning to check out a recently-launched podcast from the Twin Cities-based Land Stewardship Project and figured that if anything could take on my high-altitude demon and win, it would be a whopping dose of Minnesota Nice. So I loaded up a ‘pod-full of LSP’s Ear to the Ground podcasts before leaving home.

Once in flight, I put the Minnesota magic to work — only, of course, after we’d passed 10,000 feet, and only after reading the emergency procedures card in my seatback pocket very, very carefully. Episode #41 was a conversation with two young farmers about the challenges and opportunities of farming on the urban fringe. #47 was a re-broadcast of an incredible talk by the economic development director for Woodbury County, IA, a community that has used policy tools to build a new food system around organic production and local processing. (Grist’s Tom Philpott, perennially ahead of the curve, wrote about it in this 2006 post.) #42 featured UC Berkeley’s Tyrone Hayes and his groundbreaking research on the impacts of Atrazine, a pesticide used on corn throughout the Midwest. (He’s found that it turns testosterone to estrogen in frogs.) And the chirping crickets audible throughout #45 had me feeling closer to heaven than I’d ever been at 38,000 feet. I even relaxed my grip on the armrest.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how small non-profits can use new media tools to more effectively amplify their messages and the voices of their constituents. Ear to the Ground is one example of what’s possible. High-end it’s definitely not: most of the casts are minimally-edited conversations between LSP’s Brian DeVore and local farmers and researchers. But I found their stories of building sustainable local food systems in the Midwest both informative and inspiring.

The Nebraska-based Center for Rural Affairs’ Video Wall is another example (if a slightly less portable one, at least under my current technological limitations). There are also a growing number of farmers who use new media to tell their own stories directly; I’m excited about Friend o’ Ethicurean Zoe Bradbury’s blog Diary of a Young Farmer.

If you have suggestions for other ag-related sources of in-flight distraction, please pass them along in the comments section. I have a nightmarish cross-country flight with three stops (can you say budget?) coming up next month, so I’d best start preparing now.

Photo: iStock photo

A little over a year ago, many of us took on the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge and found ways to minimize our food spending for one week. When I started the challenge, I felt pretty confident that I could stick to the spending limit since I still had an ample supply of frozen and canned local foods as well as local grains and potatoes. By the end of the week, I learned that the other necessary ingredients for frugal local eating were a willingness to cook more simply and to avoid waste wherever possible, “recycling” ingredients from one dish to the next.

Now, as anyone who has seen me shop at the farmers market or my favorite local grocery stores can attest, I’m usually oblivious to frugality in buying food. I’ve been able to make food the second largest portion of my monthly budget, and if I want to eat satisfying meals and share them with others, I tend to approach Bonnie’s “pound-foolish” philosophy and purchase quality ingredients with little concern about expense. I’m far from wealthy (by American standards), but I do make good food a priority.

Lately, though, even my blissful disregard for price labels has taken a few blows from the rising cost of food. Local eggs, formerly around $1.65/dozen, now cost over $2/dozen. The price of lemons and limes (two of my few fruit purchases in the winter) has nearly doubled, while broccoli (one of the non-local vegetables I can’t do without) has seen almost a 50% price hike. And in what may be the cruelest blow to someone who loves to bake and often makes her own pasta, the price of unbleached flour (organic, bought in bulk at the local co-op) has steadily crept up by almost a third. These increases have taken effect gradually over the past six months, and if I’m just now noticing them, I can well imagine that other people with tighter food budgets have been hurting for some time.

For that reason, I feel fortunate and very thankful that I spent so much time last summer and fall filling my pantry and freezer. While I didn’t compile an exact inventory of how much of each fruit, vegetable, and preserve I put away, I’ve had to buy very little added produce over the winter and spring — and I still have ample stores left to get me into this year’s harvest. Still, the specter of higher costs at the market have caused me to approach my pantry more thoughtfully this year, causing me to revive those Penny-Wise lessons of simplicity and frugality in how I cook.

A jarring realization (more…)

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is currently hosting a witty installation by Beijing-based artist Zhan Wang. It’s a sculpture of San Francisco made entirely of kitchenware — tongs, graters, pots, serving dishes, tea kettles, and so on. Naturally, each piece is made in China.

The photo above shows the Financial District as viewed from the south — the Ferry Building and terminal are about halfway up the photo, on the right. This is not the first time an artist has sculpted San Francisco. A few years ago, Liz Hickok made a stunning sculpture of the city out of Jello. Jello, unfortunately, has rather short lifespan, and so the sculptures were only displayed for a few days. (I never saw them in person.) Stainless steel is much more durable, and so the sculpture has been on view for several months; its run ends on May 25th.

San Francisco and China have a special connection. In the mid-19th century, thousands of Chinese sailed across the Pacific Ocean seeking their fortune in the newly discovered gold fields of California. Because of this, the city’s name in one of the Chinese dialects translates as “Old Gold Mountain.” A few decades later, Chinese immigrants made important contributions to the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, especially the very dangerous tunneling through mountains in the Sierra Nevada. Many of those who stayed after working in the gold fields or on the railroad ended up working in the service industry, which gives the sculpture’s choice of kitchenware symbolic value.

A few of my photos from the exhibition follow below. (more…)

I am sitting in a swanky conference center on the outskirts of Phoenix, a city that may be one of our country’s least sustainable, where the water is as scarce as the SUVs and air conditioners are numerous. But for all the shortcomings of developers who thought it would be a great idea to build a sprawling concrete population center in the middle of the desert, there’s one thing I can say for them: at least they didn’t bring in a bunch of CAFOs.

Arizona has one of the smallest livestock populations of any state in the nation, according to the USDA. With the release of the Pew Center’s long-awaited report [PDF] on the impacts of CAFO production, I have to say that I’m very glad for that. Other states, however, are not so lucky: Iowa houses nearly 19 million hogs, while North Carolina houses nearly 11 million. California has 1.9 million dairy cows, and Wisconsin has 1.2 million. Chickens in Georgia laid 1.8 billion eggs last year, a number that absolutely boggles the mind.

The Pew report maps the development of the industrial livestock production system, a system that’s taken hold almost as quickly as the internet — but spam and those terrible porn pop-up windows are nothing compared to the impacts of CAFOs. The authors of the report were apparently under immense pressure from agribusiness interests to water down their message, but it looks like they turned their cheeks and kept the message pretty strong. They find that antibiotic use in CAFOs is driving growth in antibiotic-resistant human illnesses; that E.coli and other pathogens spread quickly among animals when they’re packed tightly together, and that their susceptibility to illness is amplified by the fact that they’re being fed stuff that they wouldn’t naturally eat; and that workers and rural communities are on the front lines when it comes to illness from air and water contamination and odor.

The report doesn’t shirk on the corporate-power angle either (though it does fail to call out specific companies — unfortunate, but I suppose not unexpected). The preface draws a parallel between the military industrial complex and a new agri-industrial complex that has lobbied for huge direct and indirect subsidies (which are explored in the UCS report that came out last week) to keep themselves afloat. The complex drives rural poverty by siphoning off profits and leaving communities to clean up the mess. The report concludes that “the social and economic well-being of rural communities benefits from larger numbers of farmers rather than fewer farms that produce increased volumes” (or as someone at the conference put more bluntly, “How could anyone believe you could get economic development through a system whose entire purpose is to reduce the number of jobs in the industry?”).

Local ownership of smaller livestock operations holds the promise of real economic development. A contract from an agribusiness giant does not. Strong anti-trust regulations, contract reform, and other competition policies are two of the recommendations of the commission, but protection of the right to organize was conspicuously absent — a huge shame given Smithfield’s record.

There are a lot of other recommendations I won’t cover here. I’d suggest reading the report and taking a look at the coverage in the Washington Post. My takehome from the one-two punch of the UCS and Pew reports was simply this: the political power of agribusinesses is what got us here. It will take policy change — and a whole lot of grassroots power-building — to get us out. We’ll see next week how well the livestock provisions fared in the Farm Bill. Meanwhile, state and local arenas are great places to start building alternatives, as we’ve seen in Woodbury county, Iowa and elsewhere around the nation. What’s happening policy-wise in your community?

Photo courtesy of factoryfarm.org

Maybe a collective spring fever is making its way around the Internet, but I’ve seen and read more about gardens lately than I have in a long time.

If you somehow missed the hubbub this past week, Michael Pollan published a piece in last Sunday’s New York Times titled “Why Bother?” Addressing the issues of climate change, he acknowledged the enormity of the problem and the overwhelming impact it can have on individual action, and in following the lead of one of his (and my) heroes, Wendell Berry, he encouraged readers (among other things) to take the enriching step of planting a garden and raising their own food.

Pollan’s comments echoed a couple of recent articles at Grist (by Bill Duesing and perennial Ethicurean favorite Tom Philpott) and generated further commentary and discussion over the week. For those who haven’t ever grown their own fruits and vegetables at home, the simplified suggestion that we can save the world by growing produce might seem naive or ludicrous, However, I suspect that many gardeners would agree with some of the Grist comments and explain that by participating more directly in the food cycle, we gain a clearer perspective on our role in nature and become more aware of other changes we can make in order to reduce our carbon footprint — or at the very least, our “foodprint.”

Extolling the benefits of producing food at home in the face of a national or international crisis is hardly new (though Kat’s tongue-in-cheek talk of a “terroirist plot” over at Eating Liberally is hilariously modern). Although war or victory gardens had a limited lifespan during both World Wars and for a brief period thereafter, the purposes behind them — to reduce dependence on industry, to save money, to reduce waste, to feed those less fortunate, to teach basic skills and self-reliance — remain relevant today.

We on the Ethicurean team may not always keep all these purposes in mind when we garden. In fact, probably most of us approach the garden with a mixture of the dread facing work that must be done and the hope of enjoying the peace of a little plot of earth that will produce good food with a seasoning of joy. But as we continue to prepare the garden beds and start sowing seeds, we’re doing something more. In the words of Pattie over at FoodShed Planet (where this year’s Victory Garden Drive got started), we’re declaring victory over our food supply — at a time when that food supply is looking more and more shaky.

What’s growing on?

(more…)

Greetings from smoldering-hot Phoenix. (But it’s a dry heat! Right… somehow when it’s a million degrees, that caveat becomes less convincing.) It’s been a full, exhausting day. One highlight for me was playing fly on the wall during a coming-together of folks who participated in the Farm and Food Policy Project, a Kellogg-funded initiative that brought some of the major players in Farm Bill organizing to the same table in 2005 to develop a unified platform for the 2007 (now 2008) Farm Bill.

This is no small task. Traditionally, the structure of the Farm Bill has pitted interest groups that might otherwise collaborate against each other. The bill is divided into sections (called titles) that fund nutrition programs, conservation programs, commodity programs, research… it’s easy to see how the siloed structure of the bill could lead to some pretty hairy dynamics as groups fight for their piece of the pie. So despite how many organizations are working to improve some aspect of food and agriculture policy, cross-sector NGO organizing has not been the MO as far as the Farm Bill is concerned. The FFPP, as it’s called, was an attempt to change that.

The session that I attended was a chance for those involved in the FFPP to take stock of how it has gone and what lessons could be taken and applied to future coalition work. Members of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, American Farmland Trust, the Northeast Midwest Institute, the Community Food Security Coalition, and the Rural Coalition gave an overview of their involvement and some of the major lessons learned. It was fascinating to hear what they’d taken out of it.

One major theme was the benefit of relationship-building: these groups needed to sit down together and stare each other in the face for a while, and more of that needs to happen if we have any hope of building a powerful, trust-based campaign. Another theme was frustration that so much money is going towards coalition-building but very little specifically targets grassroots organizing, a key element to building a cross-cutting movement for systemic policy change. An additional layer to the movement-building challenge is the challenge of communicating farm policy progress — which by its nature is extremely incremental — to a grassroots that wants something more sweeping. How do we learn to celebrate the small victories when we’re frustrated that change is so slow?

For me, one of the highlights of seeing this session was hearing that the coalition-building process itself was important, even if it didn’t result in the broad policy changes that we might want. There is huge value in a process that helped break down some of the barriers between interest groups and brought conservation, food security/anti-hunger, and family farm organizations to the same table. There are numerous untapped opportunities for broadening the coalition; the public health community and youth organizations like Rooted in Community were two that were mentioned. We’ll need to develop new communications strategies to reach out to and bring in these diverse constituencies. There will be numerous opportunities to do so: food-related policy is being made constantly on local and state levels, this Farm Bill will need to be implemented (and other federal policies passed), and the big Kahuna, the 2012 Farm Bill, will require years of preparatory work.

But the other important lesson was that this Farm Bill has not been a failure. No, it’s not sweeping change; but as one attendee asserted, there are huge gains written in for many communities, and while they might seem small in comparison to, say, the subsidy program, they mean an immense amount to the communities they affect. That includes an estimated $30 million for the Farmers Market Promotion Program, $22 million to help farmers pay the costs of organic certification, $50 million to encourage farmers to rent land at affordable rates to beginning or minority farmers, and $1.1 billion for the Conservation Security Program, which helps farmers implement conservation programs on working lands. The final numbers will be hammered out by the House-Senate conference committee this week.

Going forward, the discussion today made it clear that these groups (and the rest of us who consider ourselves part of this nascent movement) have hefty missions. The most visible leaders are still largely white, and communities and leaders of color need to be at the table from the very beginning. And we’ll need to figure out how to work effectively in coalitions where groups don’t always agree — and sometimes disagree vehemently, as on the farm subsidy issue — to identify areas of common ground. Lots of challenges ahead. We won’t solve it tomorrow, but I’ll be back with more updates.

Prepare yourself for Food and Society Conference overload — Elanor and I are here in Chandler, AZ, at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s annual food-movement meeting and thanks to an angel named Nicole de Beaufort, there is practically an army of bloggers this time. Basically, I’m hanging out with half our blog roll at left: Tom Philpott of Grist; Sam Fromartz of Chews Wise; Brian Depew of the Blog for Rural America; Curt Ellis of King Corn; Kerry Trueman from Eating Liberally, who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and (mind-melding with) for the first time; and somewhere around here is Parke Wilde of U.S. Food Policy.

I’ll be posting (hopefully) brief snippets for the next few days. The conference has just begun and already I have five things I want to blog. Sam and Kerry have their laptops out too, earning us disapproving looks from those around us, but hey, it’s why we were invited.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s motto for this conference is “Making Food Healthy, Green, Fair and Affordable,” which is not unlike last year’s. But the foundation itself has recently “restated” its mission to define it as supporting “children, families, and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society.” I read that in the conference program last night and yawned, and not only at the obfuscating verbiage. Do we really need one more “save the children” nonprofit?

Today, however, we learned how that translates into the food movement: it’s a focus on the children of migrant workers, particularly undocumented immigrants. This is a social-justice topic even jaded moi can really get behind.

Norma Flores, the daughter of migrant workers who herself worked in the fields growing up, spoke about the enormity of the situation. Here in the United States alone, more than 170,000 children aged 12-17 — and that’s the legally hired number, estimates of the real number put it closer to 430,000 if I can read the notes I scrawled in the dark — are exempt from federal protective child-labor laws. That means they can work in 100-degree fields for six to seven days a week, 10 hours a day, for far less than minimum wage. They do so to help their families survive. In Minnesota beet fields, the going rate for picking is $22 per acre. Period. No matter how many people it takes to clear it. So the more hands in one family who are picking, the more of that pittance they can keep.

More to come.

Update: So much for real-time blogging. A later session devoted entirely to Kellogg’s changing agenda clarified that while the new mission definitely encompasses a social justice agenda, it’s not confined to farm-worker children, but to all “vulnerable” young Americans, “working on the systematic barriers to opportunity.” It is therefore once again a little mysterious to me whether Kellogg will continue its enormously influential work supporting sustainable agriculture and food systems, and whether this will be the last Food and Society Conference. Guess we food-pol nerds will just have to make the most of this one.

Please welcome guest contributor and frequent Ethicurean commenter Emily Horton.

Emily writes about food, culture and sustainability issues in Washington, D.C., where she’s lived since last September. Before that, she lived in Atlanta and Chapel Hill, N.C., where she lost her accent for the first time and met people who wanted to know what a grit was. When she’s not writing, thinking about what to cook next or worshiping vegetables, she tries to sneak in some quiet time with Tin House.

Last week, it reached 82 degrees in Washington, D.C., and I pitched my first tantrum of the season. You see, from July until September, D.C. is a remarkably disagreeable place to live, and if that 80-plus-degree day was any indication, it’s turning ugly early this year. You would think, that having grown up in Georgia, the pit of the South, I would be prepared for living in a swamp. But, no. A D.C. summer is its own special sort of sticky purgatory.

So I console myself with gelato. Admittedly, I’m not one to need an excuse to eat gelato, and will happily eat it in the snow (and do). But when I feel like a cranky wench, gelato soothes me. I couldn’t do much better than Dolcezza, our town’s own Argentine-style gelateria, which just happens to rely on local and sustainable produce and dairy for most of its ingredients.

Dolcezza takes up a cute little corner spot at the intersection of Q Street and Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, an area perhaps better known for its shopping than for the university just a little father west. It’s the primary reason to visit Georgetown, as far as I’m concerned. A few café tables line the storefront’s bay window, inside and out; on a weekend night, there’s never enough seating, and the line usually spills out the door onto the sidewalk as everyone plays the maddening game of Decision (maddening because you can only fit so many of the over two dozen flavors into one little gelato cup).

The gelato here is made in the Argentine style, meaning it contains no eggs but more cream (more cream!) than Italian gelato. It is, quite simply, some of the finest I’ve ever tasted — among the ranks of Capogiro in Philadelphia or the Bent Spoon in Princeton.

Better gelato than never
(more…)

The husband and I are in Scottsdale, AZ, visiting his family for a few days before the W.K. Kellogg Food and Society Conference starts in nearby Chandler. (See last year’s recap.) The Ethicurean’s Elanor is going too; we’re excited to hang out with our buddies Tom Philpott and Sam Fromartz, among the many food-movement people who’ll be there, and we’ll be hopefully doing a lot of blogging this week.

Bart and I needed some things and went to Scottsdale Fashion Square mall, which as usual made me feel like Laura Ingalls coming to “town” for supplies. All I was missing was the gingham bonnet. I mean, Berkeley is a city and all, but we don’t have many big-box stores, let alone malls — they don’t let me across the bridge into San Francisco often — and none on this gargantuan scale. Fashion Square feels as big as a space station. And just as I imagine I would be in zero gravity, I felt slightly nauseated by all the things. truth is, I only like shopping for food. We lasted less than two hours and succeeded only in buying new running shoes for me

On the way out we passed a kiosk devoted entirely to Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet (TM), “which controls your hunger so you can stick to your diet!” (TM).

The website says: “Are Dr. Siegal’s cookies delicious? Are they magical? Do they perform miracles? No. They taste good but we wouldn’t call them delicious. Delicious cookies make people fat. As for magic and miracles… well… you probably know the answer.”

Egad. To me the Cookie Diet just about sums up America’s neurotic, dysfunctional relationship with food. Thankfully, only two more days until Kellogg’s “Gathering for Good Food.”

Could native foods be the next big thing in eating? Some people, Gary Nabhan in particular, are working to push things in that direction.

Nabhan, a noted conservation scientist at the Northern Arizona University, is a founder of the Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) Alliance and may be the original locavore, having published “Coming Home to Eat,” a memoir of his 200-mile diet in 2002 — five years before the much more widely known 100-Mile Diet and others. (The concept predates Nahban’s memoir, with “Coming Into the Foodshed” by Jack Kloppenburg, Jr., John Hendrickson, and G. W. Stevenson at the University of Wisconsin providing a powerful explanation.)

Nabhan, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient who spoke this week in Lawrence, Kansas, thinks we are at a critical moment where both knowledge of native foodstuffs and losses of those species are high. He and others assert that taking advantage of those foods would address numerous ills, from the reliance of petroleum-based agriculture to the explosion of diabetes among Americans, particularly those of color, to loss of cultural identities.

The question, of course, is how to put native foods back in people’s diets, including into the diets of people for whom those native foods are, well … foreign. To boost people’s understanding of food regions, RAFT and its supporters have assembled maps that divide the United States (spilling into Mexico and Canada) into food “nations,” named for iconic native foods. Nabhan emphasizes that the maps are fluid, and different people might define those food regions differently. The map on the RAFT (PDF) website, for instance (above), departs from the one Nabhan showed the other evening. Among the several differences, the map Nabhan showed took Cornbread Nation (without the barbecue) all the way to the Atlantic Coast (leaving out Chestnut and Crabcake nations), and his map called the area along the California coast Abalone rather than Acorn. Bison Nation, my own, corresponds with the Great Plains and is the same on both maps; I have a post on Foodperson.com about how we Bison Nation residents might eat within our foodshed.

Regardless of how the regions are defined, the next steps are to identify the native and heritage food plants and animals of the region, work to recover seeds and restore habitat, renew cultural associations with those foods, and then develop niche markets for the foods through progressive chefs, farmers markets, and other “early adopters.” The hope is that those foods’ role in the landscape and on the table would be revived on a broader scale. He also favors “denomination of origin” such as those used in other countries to signify Bordeaux wines, for instance, as distinct from California Cabernet Sauvignon.

A new book edited by Nabhan, “Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods,” identifies some 1,100 species that are at risk, from wild plums to the Sibley squash. According to promotional materials, the book “builds a persuasive argument for eater-based conservation,” an idea that Ethicureans can get behind.

Will any of it happen? My gut feeling is yes, at least on some limited scale. The broader population already has become aware, even if not actively involved, of the local foods movement. Add soaring oil costs and the numerous food recalls and illnesses resulting from problems in the industrial food system, and people have lots of reasons to seek local and, yes, native, foods.

In September 2006 I complained to then-San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carol Ness that there were plenty of veggie Community Supported Agriculture programs in the Bay Area, but none that would give you a selection of chicken, beef, pork, and eggs every month. She quoted me as saying I thought someone should start a meat-centric CSA. Strangers started emailing me at the blog that very morning expressing interest in joining one if I found any. (On a sad note for her food-pol fans, Carol left the Chronicle last month, and now works for my former employer, UC Berkeley’s Public Affairs office.)

I decided that day, more or less on a whim, What the hell, I’ll just start one myself. I put out a call. Thus began the Bay Area Meat CSA — clunkily known as Bam-skuh.

For me it was a crash course in just exactly how complicated it is to get pastured meat from small farms and into the hands of Bay Area families. The USDA slaughterhouses are few and far between here, except for a small beef processor in Petaluma that’s about to close. Most farmers around here thus harvest and process their own chickens on farm (very labor intensive), and prefer to sell pork as whole or half hogs, which the USDA allows a harvester to slaughter on the farm as a courtesy to the buyer. But then the buyer has to pay the harvester’s fee, and tell the butcher how you want it cut and wrapped … and then pick up hundreds of pounds of frozen meat and drive it 90 minutes home in your husband’s photography-business minivan. (Helloooo, food safety officials!)

So many times along the way I found myself thinking, Why didn’t I realize that if this were easy, someone would have done it already?

Did I mention I am a former vegetarian who had only been eating flesh for less than four years, mostly in (sustainable-meat-serving) restaurants? I couldn’t tell a beef tenderloin from a tri-tip roast. I had no idea what a “fresh ham” was. Which turns out to be rather important when you are giving instructions to butchers — “How many ribs do you want per package?” … “Um, how many ribs do people normally eat?” — and attempting to divide up cuts fairly among 40 or so bags in the back of your live/work warehouse.

A brief history of BAMCSA

BAMCSA’s first delivery was Operation Beef, completed in December 2006. You can read about it here. We did a bulk order from Marin Sun Farms just over the bridge, because rancher David Evans made it super easy for me by giving me an order form and delivering. It was mainly a test run, and me and several Beef Elves had fun. We learned the first rule of Meat Club: Something will ALWAYS go wrong. (That time it was tongues frozen two to a package.) (more…)