clean and dirty

I think a lot about my food, where it comes from, and what the quality is like. So when the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released their most recent "Dirty Dozen" and "Clean Fifteen" (a list of produce with the highest and lowest levels of pesticide residues, respectively), I scribbled it down in the little green notebook I carry everywhere, between the grocery lists and subway directions. Make sure to buy organic when getting apples, celery and strawberries. Conventional is okay for onions, sweet corn and pineapples. Got it.

Except it's not quite that simple. Because often the produce with the least chemical residues (and therefore the least risk to the consumer) is the most dangerous for the farmworkers doing the planting, tending, and harvesting. Tom Philpott, who writes about food and agriculture issues for Grist and Mother Jones, explains that demand from consumers for less pesticides left on fruits and veggies when they get to the store has pushed growers to rely increasingly on fumigants. Prior to planting, the beds are covered with plastic and pumped full of poisons that kill everything (good and bad) living in the soil. Because fumigants are volatile and highly reactive, they break down quickly and don't show up on produce. But they are also very dangerous for the farmworkers who handle them, and have been linked to central nervous system disorders, lung and kidney problems, and birth defects. After all, what do you expect from pesticides originally designed as chemical weapons?

So is buying organics the answer?

Yes and no. Yes, because organic farmers are prohibited from using non-natural pesticides and herbicides, so no one has to handle these chemicals, and the soil and surrounding environment are able to maintain healthy biodiversity. I had the pleasure of witnessing this even on our little five acres in Oxnard. And no, because organic certification has nothing to do with the actual levels of pesticides found on produce. At the farm I worked on last year, a single lane dirt track was the only "buffer zone" separating our organic field from the neighboring conventional one. The Santa Ana winds would regularly blow dust for miles across the Oxnard plain, carrying with it everything that had been applied to other fields. Buying organics is a start, but it doesn't do much for farmworkers, most of whom have very little choice about where to work. They may be washing organic celery in the morning and picking conventional strawberries in the afternoon.

In the end? It may not solve everything, but I always feel better when I can talk to the person who grew it.

farmer

There's a lot of hand-wringing in the sustainable agriculture/food systems/foodie movement(s) about the US's declining numbers of farmers. While most of our grandparents or great-grandparents had at least a backyard garden, the percentage of Americans with farming as occupation is now less than the percentage of the population in prison (which, of course, also says something about our criminal justice system). However, the decline in the number of farmers has seen a corresponding rise in employment in other areas of the food system, from the farmworkers who pick the tomatoes to the servers who put the bowl of gazpacho in front of you in the restaurant. (Full disclosure: a lot of this post is information gathered from Anna Lappe's presentation at the panel I attended this evening.)

But in the foodie world, it's all about the farmers. It appears that (for those with the education and means to be "foodies" in the first place) once you've made peace with your farmer (buying your produce from local, sustainable small-scale operations) you're off the hook. Cutting out all those involved in the industrial food system from planting to plate renders those millions just as invisible to those who profess a deep interest in food and agriculture as they are to those who never think twice when reaching for the Cheetos.

Social justice concerns were my entree into this whole "food" thing, so it's frustrating to see issues like pesticide protection, farmworker housing, safety in food processing plants, and compensation rates for farmworkers and servers (the two occupations not subject to minimum wage laws) given so little attention.

At a panel on local food this evening I asked the participants (a chef, community garden organizer, and author) what they thought were some of the most important worker justice concerns overlooked by the food movement. They mentioned the need for basic awareness of what these jobs involve (recommending the book Working in the Shadows: A year of doing the jobs (most) Americans won't do by Gabriel Thompson) and support for the campaigns of groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Restaurant Opportunities Center (and I would add the genius UFW campaign, Take Our Jobs). But my favorite suggestion was to work on broadening/shifting our definition of "farmer".

One of the most memorable dinner-table conversations of the year on the farm (significant not just because it was our first meal cooked by a certain five-star chef, although that didn't hurt) concerned what we, the interns, would actually call ourselves. The farm website, ATFP brochures etc. labeled us farmers, and yet an honest inventory of the work we did (weeding, harvesting, washing, packing and delivering produce) had us feeling much more like the farmworkers picking strawberries and weeding celery in the fields around us. By the end of the the mushroom-asparagus risotto (pictured here just because it was so delicious that I have a picture) we had resolved to call ourselves farmworkers.
Tonight, one of the panelists suggested the opposite. Why don't we use the term "farmer" to describe those who work the land. Simply owning or managing a piece of agricultural property does not make one a farmer. The decline in the number of farmers would certainly be less precipitous if we included those who spend the most time growing our food.

There's another possibility here too -- that producing food industrially has come close to eliminating the farmer. In Oxnard I noticed how infrequently the word "farmer" was actually used to describe anyone involved in agriculture. There were growers (landowners and/or managers) and farmworkers (those who planted, tended, and harvested the crops), but very few farmers. There were only a handful of men (and even fewer women) who either (in the case of the growers) took the time to know and work the land or were given the luxury (in the case of the farmworkers) of developing a sustained relationship with a particular place.

now

(Warning - I also just posted this same piece on the Abundant Table blog)

Pulling on baggy work pants and rain boots this evening to take out the trash, I got hit by an extra-strong wave of farm nostalgia. My spaghetti sauce could use some fresh basil, my body could use a few hours of field work, and my spirit misses the company of my four sisterfriends.

Having boots on my feet also reminds me of a promise to update the Abundant Table community on my whereabouts post cross-continent move. After a roadtripping through some of the most beautiful parts of the US (you should have seen the look on the face of the woman selling tomatoes and cucumbers at the farmers market in Casper, Wyoming when I asked if I could pay for my selection in fresh California lemons and avocados!) and spending a few weeks resting and catching up with my parents at my aunt and uncle’s dairy farm in Lancaster, PA, I finally ended up in New York City a little less than a month ago. I just started my fourth week of working on the transition from the farm to the office, from the comfy world of flannel and rubber boots to the ambiguities of “business casual”, from “whenever we’re up til whenever it’s done” to a 9-5.

I’m doing a one-year AmeriCorps position with a community-based organization in North Brooklyn. For the first and final four months, my job is screening our clients (mostly low-income job seekers) for eligibility for public benefits (mostly food stamps and Medicaid). It’s a little like case work – talking to folks to find out what their situation is, helping them fill out applications, letting them know what offices to go to, and following up to see how things went. While the work itself is worlds different from the farm, I find myself continuing to wrestle with one of the fundamental questions posed at the Abundant Table: how to ensure that everyone has access to healthy food.

January-April things will look very different. My co-workers and I will be running a VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assessment) center, helping our clients file their taxes for free and making sure they get all the credits and refunds they qualify for. I’m enjoying my supervisor and co-workers, my interaction with clients, and (ever the nerd) the challenge of learning the endlessly complicated (and dysfunctional) system of public benefits in the U.S.

But as I couldn’t quite handle a complete break with the world of farming and sustainable food systems (and in order to supplement the AmeriCorps stipend that leaves me eligible for many of the benefits I recommend for my clients), I found work once a week as a Market Hand at the New Amsterdam Market. The market is an exciting effort to re-introduce a public market (much like a farmers market, only with more of an emphasis on regionally-sourced prepared foods like cheeses and pies) to New York’s market district in the south seaport area of Manhattan. It’s also an exciting chance for me to interact with vendors, customers, and the odd farm apprentice, and occasionally talk my way into a free loaf of fresh bread or half a bottle of good NY wine.

My free time includes a shameful amount of getting lost, a (thus far fruitless) search for a permanent place to live, a good library, a church community like the Abundant Table, and an affordable place to practice yoga, and vicariously getting my Masters in Food Studies through Mark. I’m enjoying an incredible array of apples, slowly finding new friends, and the ever-fascinating diversity of New Yorkers (my walk 1.5 mile walk to work, for example, takes me from hipster-art-school land through a Hasidic Jewish community and past the projects).

This time tomorrow I’ll also be enjoying the company of a certain Katerina, which reminds me that though my room may be 7x9 (and yes, that measurement is in feet), I always love friendly faces from out of town. It helps with the nostalgia, you know…

domestic

Femivore. I can see my brother rolling his eyes. Here it comes, some cross between two of the things he understands least about me - my distaste for meat and my tendency to pontificate on gender issues in the name of feminism.

Close, but not quite. I ran into "femivorism" in a recent NY Times article describing women pursuing "self-sufficiency, autonomy, and personal fulfillment" in orienting their lives around being as involved in their family's food sources as possible (backyard gardening, composting, raising chickens, urban beekeeping etc.) These "tomato-canning feminists" are about more than just tasty, healthy food - their commitment is to reducing their impact on the environment and counteracting materialism as well, to making their homes places of production not just consumption.


It probably goes without saying that I resonate with that vision. When I'm honest with myself, I recognize that some of my moments of greatest contentment and joy have been hanging my laundry in the backyard wearing muddy work boots and an apron over my yoga clothes, taking a break from cooking a meal with ingredients I mostly either grew myself or bartered for at a farmers' market and trying to keep my curious hens out of the laundry basket. I love all the things I'm learning - how to maintain a compost pile, harvest onions, make cheese, cook with turnips and yes, even kill a chicken.


To back-pedal a little bit - I still love books and ideas. I will go to grad school (eventually). I confess that I often use a couple of hours of my day off to go to the library and read the Economist, and that one of the biggest thrills of the last few months was attending a local city council meeting. But it's also hard to picture myself being satisfied in the world of journal articles and computer screens and academic conferences without an equal measure of fresh air and growing things and recipes modified and embellished until they're unrecognizable. I want to honor the education I'm getting right now, and the skills of my mother and aunts and grandmother, all of whom were raised with some experience of feeding and clothing themselves and their families.


Wendell Berry writes

The callings and disciplines of the...domestic arts are stationed all along the way from the farm to the prepared dinner, from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of the land to hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts are as demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing as the so-called fine arts. To learn them, to practice them, to honor and reward them is, I believe, our profoundest calling. Our reward is that they will enrich our lives and make us glad.

So here I am, an equally avid student of the domestic arts as I was of the liberal ones. Living in Cambodia taught me that as a member of the most affluent, materialist society ever, one of the most important things I can do with my life is pay close attention to what I consume - to start living simply and maybe help others like me do the same. And I'm finding Berry's words to be true - not only is this a profound calling, it has enriched my life and made me glad.



Thanks to Sarah and Amy for doing photographic justice to life on the Farm!

thesis

Thesis statements rarely come to me while I'm sedentary. I'll admit that, in a near complete reversal of the correct order, I usually write my papers and then figure out what I've argued and stick in a thesis sentence just before I hit "print", but the few times I have done it the right way, the sentence that ties the whole thing together has come not while seated in front of a computer or with pen and paper in hand, but while I was on a run or walking to class or at some other inopportune moment.

So, naturally, one of the basic ideas that unifies the last year of my life came while I was pedaling around Phnom Penh one day in August. I remember repeating it over and over under my breath so I wouldn't lose it as I sweated my way to my favorite cafe:

Know where your stuff comes from, and know where it goes when you're done with it.

Things were starting to make sense to me last August. I wrote:

Most Westerners do not perceive affluence as a problem because we have successfully mentally dissociated it from the oppression and injustice it causes and perpetuates. What we need first is to start to see these relationships. Living in my neighborhood on HNGR has been an exercise in that regard. Many of the linkages and relationships that are obscured by distance in the West are in plain view in my community. The woman who sews the underwear I buy in the US lives in my house. My trash goes in a bag that is tied up and thrown across the street into the pond in the middle of the community, and as the flood season progresses, we’ll all be walking in that water. I think really knowing where we are ought to be a fundamental Christian discipline – knowing where our tomatoes come from and where what put in the trash can ends up, knowing the local growing seasons and where our shower water goes. What we learn, and perhaps more significantly what our affluent insulation makes it impossible for us to find out, should raise questions about our lifestyles.

Distilled: Know where your stuff comes from, and know where it goes when you're done with it.

I was reminded of that little mantra this morning while in a Sunday school of sorts - a multi-generational congregational discussion of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" over a feast of local origins. An older farmer from the area talked about how the book had inspired him to start asking where his food came from - approaching managers in butcheries or grocery stores to inquire about the origins of their products, getting answers like "Peru", "somewhere in the U.S." and most commonly: "I don't know".

There have been a lot of moments in the past month that have captured what we're doing here. One of them was a recent farm staff meeting over brunch, where we went around the table describing where the food we were eating came from - friends' gardens, farmers markets, our own land...

There was also a lot of Trader Joe's in there. We've made no Barbara Kingsolver-style goal of perfection, but its a start.

Know where your stuff comes from, and know where it goes when you're done with it.

green moment

One thing that I love about my new home and housemates (and come to think of it, pretty much everyone I've lived with in the last three years, but hey, I've heard there are people who don't live like this) is our collective efforts to live a bit greener/lighter/more sustainably. Part of our vision for this farmhouse is for it and how we live in it to encourage other people to make some green lifestyle changes of their own. To this end, we've been making a lot of signs lately...

We have a sign about recycling:


We have a sign about composting:


We have a sign telling you what vegetable scraps to save so I can make soup stock with them before composting them:


We have a chore wheel (nothing particularly eco-friendly about it, I just made it this evening and thought it was cute):


And then there's this one:


This afternoon I overheard a funny interaction around this particular instruction. Julie, the ATFP collective spiritual director, and her family have been around the house a bunch in the last few days getting the house ready for the first Sunday evening worship service. On the way to the bathroom, Julie's four-year-old daughter anxiously asked, "Is there going to be pee in the potty already? I don't want to go!"

Thinking about it, "if it's yellow let it mellow..." is really quite a paradigm shift for anyone recently potty trained. Conserving resources means re-thinking some of the cleanliness rules of childhood for me too...fewer showers, anyone?

so I thought I'd be spending a year in D.C....

[Note: This post is identical to one I just did on the Abundant Table Farm Project blog which is where you can meet my four wonderful housemates/sisters/friends, and where we plan to document our farming adventure!]

While I won’t start the story of what brought me to the Abundant Table centuries ago, it does begin on the other side of the world. After growing up in Nairobi, Kenya and three years at Wheaton College outside of Chicago I chose to spend six months doing interning in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as part of my major in International Relations. Though the focus of my work was on land rights and non-violent resistance to forced evictions, I found situations closer to home captured my attention as I began to understand the dynamics of the Cambodian community I lived in. My host family were garment factory workers in a poorer neighborhood sandwiched between two sweatshops. Systems of production and consumption and the infrastructure that supports them that had been largely invisible to me growing up in more affluent neighborhoods became very obvious. I started to think much more about where things came from (did I really want to eat the morning glory picked in the contaminated marsh behind our neighborhood?) and where they went (what would I throw away when I knew the trash bag was tied up and thrown in the pond in the center of the community?) My new neighbors and I dealt daily with the consequences of not only these local systems, but also a supply chain that stretched thousands of miles – back to my neighborhood in Chicago and countless other U.S. communities. The factories that the women I lived with worked in were producing clothing for stores in the U.S. like Gap and Old Navy where I had once shopped.

While the factories did provide jobs with relatively decent conditions and brought economic growth, it came at a significant price. The chemicals emitted from the factory behind my house were eating through our metal roof, and many of my friends and neighbors began experiencing unemployment as soon as the U.S. recession again. As I returned to the U.S. for my final semester at Wheaton, awareness of the unsustainable relationships between producer communities such as the one Cambodia and consumers in my Chicago suburb guided the lifestyle choices I hoped to make after graduation, but had little impact on my post-graduation job search initially. Trying to eat locally/seasonally, fostering face-to-face relationships between producers and consumers, living mindfully of my environmental impact, and being a part of a spiritual community committed to social justice were things I hoped to fit around work in research or advocacy in Washington, D.C. When the Abundant Table Farm Project description came my way, I was caught off-guard by the opportunity to take 11 months to focus on those themes. At first, spending a year working on an organic farm/CSA in southern California was so different from what I expected to be doing that I couldn’t even bring myself to read the entire internship description. It sounded too good to be true, a possibility that would distract me from my job search. Obviously my self-restraint was less than absolute – I did allow myself to open that email again, and five or six months later, I’m enjoying the beginning of many good things, starting my post-college life on the opposite side of the country than I expected to be and in an occupation I never would have predicted for myself, yet somehow in just the right place.

the vegetannual

Last December as I lay waiting for my legs to return to their usual color and my hair to fall out (thank you, dengue fever), I broke up long hours reading Harry Potter and watching West Wing with forays into Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (a singularly frustrating read in Chicago in the dead of winter). Kingsolver documents a year of her family's experience eating locally - only food that had been grown and produced either on their own farm or within 100 miles. One of the recurring images in the book is the vegetannual, "an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest".



I remember thinking that this would only be an enjoyable experience year-round if one happened to live in southern California, where most things can grow most of the time, and the seasonal restrictions in more temperate climates would not apply. And sure enough - here is the list of what is currently being planted on a corner of the 10 organic acres I'll start working on next week: yellow, green and burgundy beans; ruby, romaine and butter lettuce; arugula, spinach, basil, cilantro and parsley; cucumbers; 8 ball, geode and crookneck squash; gold, red and candy striped beets; fennel, zucchini and edible flowers. A lot of the conventional farms around here are currently planting strawberries.

All this is a testament to two things:

1. The gorgeous Mediterranean climate. Most days (all year, or so I've heard) temperatures are in the 60s and 70s, kept in check by the ocean. It actually reminds me of Nairobi - eucalyptus, jacaranda and mimosa trees, bougainvillea, hibiscus plants...A local told me yesterday that this is God's country, and I believe it.

2. Some of the most fertile soil in the world. According to the farmer (Paul), whose family has worked on this land for just over a century, the soil is sandy loam, a combination of sand, silt and clay that traps organic material while allowing water to run through. This area wasn't always the best agricultural land - it was once too salty and alkaline to grow anything but sugar beets, but artificial drainage has pulled the water table down and made the Oxnard plain ideal for farming.

So much for the vegetannual...

first thoughts on the farm

I know that I have successfully moved to California now that not only my own mail, but also my father's have followed me to the little mailbox on an obscure rural road by an avocado orchard. Since arriving at the Abundant Table Farm Project I have (among other things):

- Biked to and along the pacific coast highway to try and find the beach and meet the Pacific Ocean. It's unfortunately farther away than I had been told. There is the small matter of a US Navy base between the farm and the beach (they, however provide lots of low flying aircraft and strange pulsating lights for our entertainment). I did eventually get to the beach.

- Experienced my first farming "injury"...a bee sting in the avocado orchard, which turned into Katerina's first opportunity to use her extensive first aid training. Remedy: flick stinger out with a credit card, thus the middle finger of my left hand was saved.

- Cooked zucchini at most meals. We have more than our household of 5 can handle, and we don't even start farming until next week.

- Received the strong impression that this is internship is not a particularly realistic introduction to life in the real world of adulthood. The five of us interns have received ample quantities of hugs, affirming words, and homemade soaps and have been practically tripping over people wanting to give us food, furniture, and office supplies. The house has a hammock, an awesome little dog, and we were told today by our landlord that if, like the previous tenants, we feel inclined to ride our skateboards through the glass doors, we may do so!

All in all, good things to come!