When I was volunteering at Yours Market, I planted a garden behind our duplex. I spent $40 on the box. My best friend helped me set it up and I planted way too many vegetables. And I would have my son nearby in his little baby seat. I would be growing food, and he would be eating grass! So, he’s been growing with me the whole time.

St. Louis City is made up of different neighborhoods—28 wards or so. Everybody North of Delmar Boulevard is predominantly Black, and all the health and economic disparities exist there. And then South St. Louis—south of Delmar—is predominantly white with some people of color. Honestly, all the areas that have been gentrified that were once South City, mixed neighborhoods, are predominantly white and thriving.

I can count on one hand how many grocery stores we have in North City [a suburban area 15 miles outside of St. Louis]. Maybe five—and North City isn’t small.

In 2015, my family invited me out to their land in North County to farm on it. I didn’t have a vehicle, and I thought, “I’m not coming out there.” But then they invited my whole family for the Fourth of July. When I saw that it was three acres of green land, I said, “I’ll be out here next week.”

From 2013 to 2018, I was growing solo on a quarter of an acre of my family’s land, and also growing in the city. I am currently only growing on that land and planning to do food boxes for the elderly.

In 2015, I collaborated with New Roots Urban Farm. I was working at Gateway 180, a homeless shelter, and once a week, I’d take the children to the farm so they could learn about food. They had never been to a farm. With children, healthy habits start young. I taught them that just because you are [experiencing homelessness] doesn’t mean you can’t practice healthy habits.

I started working as a food justice organizer at MCE in 2018. I didn’t know anything about policy or advocacy. But when I saw the words, “food justice organizer,” I was like, “This is everything I’ve been doing in the community.” Food justice is my purpose. It fulfills me.

But the reality is that MCE didn’t give me any resources for the position. They didn’t give me funding and they would discourage me from taking on certain projects. People in St. Louis don’t know what food justice is. It’s not food banks. You can’t swap out the corner store for a food pantry [laughs]. You don’t have anyone from these communities at the table. You’re talking to yourselves, and you’re making all the decisions.

I was the only Black person there and I was one of three non-white people there—so getting change to happen was hard.

MCE was working with 200 farmers and not one of them was Black. There are Black farmers here! And I want to focus on them.

If it wasn’t for social media [and connecting to like-minded folks in other places], I would’ve lost hope a long time ago. There is a hopelessness here, because it’s problem on top of problem, and it never looks like a solution. That’s the thing about the mindset here: We only see local—we don’t see anything outside of St. Louis. And I’m like, “The world is so big. There’s so much happening, and we aren’t connected?”

Then Pandora Thomas came to St. Louis. She’s a permaculture expert from California. She said something that changed my life. She’s from Marin County—one of the richest counties in the country. But Marin City is poor—and it’s got a large Black population. The county had a flooding issue, and they hired her. She took what she had been paid and passed it along to the community to come up with their own solution. It blew my mind. And that is one of the most revolutionary things that you can do: Show love for your people.

Then, in 2019, I went to a Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA) program at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in California. It was one of the best experiences of my life. But it also showed me although white people in St. Louis really thought that they were doing equity work, they really weren’t. The Earth Alliance let us mingle with their funders. The nonprofits in St. Louis wouldn’t dare allow us to speak with funders. I ended up getting a grant from WEA and Sierra Club to engage people in North St. Louis around a community-owned grocery store.

That same week, I went to New York City to the Black Urban Growers conference. I met other people who felt like me, understood me, who were ready to build.

I met Randolph Carr at the National Black Food & Justice Alliance. He connected me with Baba Malik [Malik Yakini of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Alliance]. They really challenged me: “Go back to St. Louis and bring back people next year,” they said. I couldn’t wait! But I had to wait, because COVID happened.

At EVOLVE, we’re going beyond food access to food justice. We are helping communities empower themselves. One of our prominent local grocery stores, Schnucks, moved out of the North City. The community was begging them to come back, but they didn’t. My only response was: “What if the community owned its own grocery store?”

So, that’s what we’ve been working on—starting a community-owned grocery store—in addition to connecting Black farmers to national organizations for support.

Black farmers don’t ever get access to grants. When COVID happened and the community-owned grocery store was put on hold, we turned a grant I’d received for that into $400 grants for farmers in North City, North County, and the Metro East. We [kept raising more and soon] had a total of $5,200 to give to farmers.

We also help Black farmers get the resources they need to scale up and be successful, such as working with them to share tools, connecting them to business resources, and helping them find ways to sell their produce and value-added products. It could be CSAs if they want or farmers’ markets. We are collaborating with a local woman, Fatimah Muhammad, who is starting a farmers’ market in North City. We will help cover the cost of the farmers’ market and marketing materials. We also are working with them to make farm boxes for the elderly.

We’re still in the fundraising stages for the grocery store. First, we’re trying to buy the land. The city owns about 12,000 vacant properties. We’re hoping to raise $200,000 for the actual store, but we don’t know yet how much the land will cost.

At EVOLVE, we’re working with 12 urban farmers and two rural farmers. Eventually we want to do a training program for Black rural farmers. A lot of times the extension programs have classes that are in sundown towns [where Black people and other non-white racial groups were excluded from after sundown]. I wouldn’t dare take my Black farmers there. The outreach to Black farmers is not happening in the rural areas. I always say it was a deliberate effort to keep us away from each other. But ha! I drove down and found ‘em!

Photos courtesy of Tosha Phonix.

The post In St. Louis, Tosha Phonix is Growing Food Justice appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2020/12/10/the-quapaw-nations-casino-farms-its-own-food/ https://civileats.com/2020/12/10/the-quapaw-nations-casino-farms-its-own-food/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2020 09:00:23 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=39380 This article originally appeared in Reasons to Be Cheerful, and is reprinted with permission. On the surface, Oklahoma’s Downstream Casino Resort looks like any other: lines of brightly lit slot machines snake past entrances to steakhouses and sports bars, while cocktail waitresses shuttle trays to craps and blackjack tables. A takeaway café serves gourmet coffee, […]

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]]> This article originally appeared in Reasons to Be Cheerful, and is reprinted with permission.

On the surface, Oklahoma’s Downstream Casino Resort looks like any other: lines of brightly lit slot machines snake past entrances to steakhouses and sports bars, while cocktail waitresses shuttle trays to craps and blackjack tables. A takeaway café serves gourmet coffee, and an all-you-can-eat buffet is stacked with prime rib on Saturday nights.

But beneath this familiar facade is a very different kind of system—one that applies traditional Indigenous food and farming principles to modern hotel operations. The Quapaw tribe, which runs the Downstream Casino Resort, operates seven greenhouses and two sprawling gardens that provide the hotel with 20 varieties of vegetables and herbs. The tribe also has an apiary with 80 beehives, as well as a craft brewery and a coffee roaster that supplies the hotel and casino.

The Quapaw is also the only tribe in the United States with its own USDA-certified meat packing and processing plant, where it processes bison and cattle that it raises on open pastures, selling the bulk of it to the casino’s five restaurants. The rest is provided to the two tribal-run daycares, the Quapaw Farmers Market, the Quapaw Mercantile, and a few other tribally-run shops.

Cattle grazing on pastureland behind the Downstream Casino Resort. (Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort)

With all these businesses—plus a construction firm—the Quapaw Nation is one of the largest employers in this part of Oklahoma, employing 2,000 tribal and non-tribal workers, while paying above-average wages and offering a full benefits package to all full-time employees. It’s a business model that preserves cultural heritage while providing a profit.

Lucus Setterfield, director of food and beverage at Downstream, says 50 percent of the food served at the resort’s Red Oak Steakhouse comes from the Quapaw land. Even the mint in the restaurant’s mojitos is grown in the greenhouses.

“The Quapaw are one of the most innovative tribes in the country when it comes to food sovereignty,” says Maria Givens, the communications director of the Native American Agricultural Fund (NAAF).

Innovative as it may be, the Quapaw are essentially resurrecting a way of life—living off the land that sustained them before they were driven off of it by settlers. Colonization—and the policies that created Indian reservations—deprived them of their traditional foodways of foraging, fishing, and hunting and disrupted their long-established patterns of intense physical activity. Public health experts believe that these are two of the reasons Indigenous people have some of the highest rates of diabetes in the U.S. According to the CDC, Native American adults are three times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than white adults, and 1.6 times more likely to be obese.

With seven greenhouses and two gardens, the Quapaw gardeners harvest about 6,000 pounds of food per year. Each morning, the resort’s chefs stop by and place their orders. (Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort)

By retrofitting a modern resort with a system of locally sourced, sustainably raised food, the Quapaw are reclaiming their food sovereignty and, at the same time, benefitting every guest who visits their resort, whether those guests know it or not.

Bringing Bison Back

It all started in 2010 when then tribe chairman John Berrey, a fifth-generation cattle rancher, had a vision to reintroduce bison to this part of Oklahoma. The bison is the state mammal, but it’s also a traditional food for the Quapaw people, who lived in Northeastern Arkansas and then western Missouri before eventually moving to Oklahoma.

That year, the tribe was given eight bison from Yellowstone National Park via the InterTribal Buffalo Council. Now, 10 years later, the tribe has a bison herd of close to 200 as well as a herd of 385 Black Angus cattle. (The bison have been breeding, but the tribe has also gotten additional bison from other national parks.) Both are pastured on fields of native grasses and the ones that are headed for slaughter are finished on grains and mushrooms. The tribe processes only five to 15 bison per year and doesn’t slaughter until they’ve sold out of every type of meat: steaks, ground bison, chuck roast and bison jerky.

“We use the whole animal,” explains Quapaw Nation grants coordinator Shelby Crum—even the hides, which a Quapaw artist decorates with tribal paintings and sells at the farmers’ market.

The 25,000-square-foot meatpacking plant, which opened in 2017, was designed to conform to renowned animal scientist Dr. Temple Grandin’s blueprint for humane animal handling. The Quapaw built the processing plant adjacent to the feeding facility to avoid the need for transport, which makes animals nervous. It also uses Grandin’s designs for curved chutes with high walls, which minimizes stressors, and the holding pens include extra crowd gates and bright colors. In addition to processing its own animals, the plant processes 50 to 60 head of cattle per week for nearby ranchers from Oklahoma and Missouri.

A worker processes honey from one of the resort’s 80 beehives. (Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort)

The meat is broken apart into different cuts, smoked, flavored, and packaged right there at the facility, which also has freezers and coolers for storage. Most is sold at a discounted price at tribally-owned retail outlets like the Quapaw Mercantile, the farmers’ market, the Quapaw C-Store, and the Downstream Q-Store. “The whole goal is to make it affordable,” Crum says. That said, anyone from any state can order the meat via the Quapaw Cattle Company’s online store.

Harvesting vegetables on site

The first greenhouse went up in 2013. Today, with seven greenhouses and two gardens, the Quapaw gardeners harvest about 6,000 pounds of food per year. Each morning, the resort’s chefs stop by and place their orders.

Setterfield, who has worked at Downstream since it opened in 2008, says the greenhouses have provided cost savings, but the biggest benefit is the freshness. “It’s great for things that might not travel well—micro-greens and herbs. Herbs, especially, are 10 times better the day you pick them,” he says.

Some produce is also sold at the Quapaw farmers’ market, held on the first and third Friday of the month. An additional 10 to 15 vendors from the surrounding community sell their produce, eggs, honey, and meat at the market. The farmers’ market also accepts SNAP, which makes it easier for Quapaw members—and non-tribal residents—to access fresh, affordable, locally grown produce.

“There’s no grocery store in Quapaw,” says Crum. “You can drive six miles away to Miami, [Oklahoma], which has a Walmart, but if you’re sharing a car with your spouse or you have no vehicle, six miles can be a huge barrier.”

“We want the focus to be on growing edible foods. Growing foods for your family, for your tribes—medicinal foods and medicinal plants. That’s our goal,” says the tribe’s grants coordinator. (Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort)

The farmers’ market also runs a food preservation program, funded by a $50,000 grant from the Native American Agricultural Fund, where for $25, shoppers can rent out equipment like a pressure canning kit, a fermenter, a vacuum sealer, or a dehydrator. In conjunction, the Quapaw tribe runs food preservation workshops on everything from how to can pickles and sweet corn to how to make dehydrated zucchini chips. “It’s just another way we’re encouraging that people make their produce last throughout the year,” says Crum.

Beverage Service

Like most casinos, Downstream offers guests and staff unlimited free coffee—an expensive perk. “We were spending half a million dollars on coffee per year!” says Crum. Berrey, always interested in cutting out the middleman, saw another opportunity. Instead of ordering the coffee from non-native producers, why not roast it on site?

In 2016, Josemiguel Gomez helped found the coffee roasting program, called O-Gah-Pah. Gomez is not a member of the Quapaw tribe; he’s from Puerto Rico, where he owned three coffee shops of his own. “We fulfill all the needs of the casino, plus all the Quapaw schools, the EMT, the fire station and the gas stations,” says Gomez. The roasting facility also provides all the coffee for Saracen, the tribe’s new casino in Arkansas. Select coffee shops in Oregon, Kansas City and Florida source O-Gah-Pah beans, too. “We are very proud of our product,” Gomez says. “It’s very well represented.”

The Quapaw brewery came out of Setterfield’s chance encounter with a “beautiful tank” at a gaming show in Las Vegas. At the time, he was in the process of expanding Legends, the casino’s sports bar. Today, Legends has four tanks, which brewer Mike Williams rotates five beers through: a Honey Brown Balmer, a Flat Rock Red, a pilsner, a kolsch, and an IPA. The honey brown, the most popular, is unusual in that the flavor changes throughout the year, because the bees the resort keeps are attracted to different blossoming flowers in each season.

“At one point, there was a question of, ‘Should we only use the spring honey?’” recalls Setterfield. “But then we thought it would be kind of cool to not be consistent—to use the product we have available.” Discerning drinkers of the Honey Brown Balmer will notice it is sometimes more amber, slightly sweeter, or extra floral depending on the time of year.

Banking on Seeds

Last year, the NAAF also awarded the Quapaw tribe $50,000 to develop a seed bank. The seed-saving program, which launches this month, is a big deal. Not only are Quapaw farmers creating a library for seeds from all the different herbs and produce they grow, they will also be starting a nationwide seed distribution program. “What we’re hoping to do is to get donations from other tribes and seed banks so that we can support this nationwide,” says Crum. Eventually, the idea is for other Indigenous farmers to save their seeds and send them back to the Quapaw tribe.

“We want the focus to be on growing edible foods. Growing foods for your family, for your tribes—medicinal foods and medicinal plants. That’s our goal,” says Crum.

The tribe has done two food sovereignty surveys of its members—one in 2018 and one in 2019, at the end of the first farmers’ market season. In the first survey, they asked if the members had high blood pressure or diabetes and how many servings of fruits and vegetables they ate. The second survey asked if they ate more fruits and vegetables because of the farmers market, and the answer was a resounding yes. “And they thought it made tribally-produced meat more affordable,” says Crum.

Though it’s too soon to tell if the expanded access to fresh produce and herbs—not to mention food preservation techniques—has helped tribal members reduce high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity, Crum, who is getting her masters in public health at Oklahoma University, says she will ask those questions in a few years. “That’s more like a five-year question,” Crum says, “once they’ve had enough time to make a change.”

This story is part of the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/12/10/the-quapaw-nations-casino-farms-its-own-food/feed/ 3 https://civileats.com/2020/10/21/black-grandmothers-feed-their-communities-and-pass-on-food-traditions-online/ https://civileats.com/2020/10/21/black-grandmothers-feed-their-communities-and-pass-on-food-traditions-online/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2020 09:00:39 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=38722 On a recent Saturday night in September, Mildred Braxton did something she never thought she’d do: she taught 20 or so others how to make succotash and steamed collard greens over Zoom. With the confidence of a Food Network chef, Braxton, a parent of five and grandmother of three, put a skillet on the burner, […]

The post Black Grandmothers Feed their Communities, and Pass on Food Traditions—Online appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> On a recent Saturday night in September, Mildred Braxton did something she never thought she’d do: she taught 20 or so others how to make succotash and steamed collard greens over Zoom.

With the confidence of a Food Network chef, Braxton, a parent of five and grandmother of three, put a skillet on the burner, poured some oil into the pan, and let it heat up before throwing in some chopped onion, frozen corn, frozen lima beans (called butter beans in the South), and black-eyed peas, narrating all the while. After covering the pan and letting it all heat up, she added stewed tomatoes, okra, and seasonings.

“Okra is the last vegetable I put in because it’s easy for it to fall apart,” said Braxton, who hails from Mississippi. “Okra has a bad rap. I’m standing up for okra!”

This virtual dinner party is part of a Portland, Oregon-based program called Grandma’s Hands, a platform for Black grandmothers to share family recipes and food traditions with future generations. So far, the 12 grandmothers involved have prepared four monthly meals for 30 to 40 participants at a time. In addition to delivering the food they make along with a bag of fresh produce grown by farmers of color to the participants throughout the community, the program brings everyone together virtually to partake of the food while sharing recipes and tips.

Though the focus of Grandma’s Hands is to facilitate community engagement and reconnect community members with culturally grounded natural foods and agricultural practices, the program may also help reduce food insecurity by teaching the younger generation the economic benefits of cooking at home for their families.

“Our [modern] life is not conducive to being healthy,” says Chuck Smith, co-founder of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition (BFSC), which helps run the program. “Cooking as a regular family activity has been squeezed out of people’s schedules.” And yet, he stressed the fact that connection with food is a pathway to stronger identity in the Black community.  “When your [diet] is consciously connected to your cultural identity, then you can be more intentional in selecting what you eat and how you prepare it,” adds Smith.  

The idea for the series grew out of freewheeling conversations about sustainable food and food access that Willie Chambers and Lynn Ketch from the Rockwood Community Development Corporation (CDC) had with Lisa Cline and Katrina Ratzlaff, the CEO and advancement director at Wallace, a community health clinic.

Cline and Ratzlaff were eager to find out more about food access in Rockwood, a diverse neighborhood of the Portland suburb of Gresham, because many of their patients at Wallace are food insecure. Rockwood, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Multnomah County, has many fast food outlets but only one grocery store. And that lack of access to nutritious food has alarming health consequences for residents, who suffer from diet-related illness at a higher rate than residents of any other part of Oregon. According to Brad Ketch, president of the Rockwood CDC, life expectancy there is a full decade shorter than it is in the rest of Multnomah County.

At the meeting, Cline and Ratzlaff began reminiscing about their own food traditions. “I said something like, ‘My memories of cooking and sharing food were standing by my grandma at the kitchen counter,’” Ratzlaff said. “‘I think a lot of folks are like that. Grandmas are the anchor. In many communities, they take care of the kids and do the cooking.’” Chambers, in turn, reminisced about his wife, Vanessa, a grandmother of eight who loves being in the kitchen with their grandchildren. “She’d give them aprons, and they’d all have a tool,” he said. “And they enjoy it!”

Chambers was reminded of the Bill Withers’ song Grandma’s Hands, and before he’d even nailed down the concept, they had the perfect name. The idea for the dinners took shape quickly.

Connecting Over Food

Grandma’s Hands started in June and takes place on the third Saturday of every month. It’s funded by a specialty crop grant from the Oregon Department of Agriculture and run by the Rockwood CDC and BFSC. Originally, the plan had involved in-person dinner parties at Rockwood’s Sunrise Center, which has a spacious commercial kitchen, but COVID-19 toppled that idea and they moved the gatherings online.

Every month, a group of six to 10 grandmothers, recruited through word of mouth, gets together in person at the Sunrise Center, dons masks, and cooks up meals for the participants. One grandma takes charge of each month’s meal and also offers to answer questions about the recipe or culinary tradition. Some participants pick up their meals at the center, while others have volunteers deliver them. 

“People really enjoy the interactions,” says Vanessa Chambers, Willie’s wife, and the lead chef for the June dinner, where she cooked sautéed cabbage, corn bread, black beans, and spare ribs. “It’s a good connection with other family members and other grandmas. We sit and eat together.”

Although eating with others on a Zoom call is stretching the definition of the word “together,” there is a community spirit to these virtual dinner parties. The event is deftly emceed by Smith.

After initial introductions, Smith shows a short video of the featured grandma preparing her meal. If the chef is on the Zoom call, as Braxton was the night she made succotash, she will answer questions about the meal.

“How else do you like to prepare okra?” Shantae Johnson, one of the owners of the nearby organic farm Mudbone Grown, asked Braxton during her lesson. She responded with a time-tested tip: “I like to cut it up into little pieces, coat it with flour or cornmeal, and fry it.”

Because the recipes are posted on the Grandma’s Hands’ website ahead of time, participants can prepare the meals themselves—or just enjoy the food the grandmas have cooked and attempt to replicate it at another point.

Later in the evening, during breakout sessions of four to five families each, participants discuss the food. “What did you think about the meal?” Smith will ask, to get things started. Or, “How did you learn to cook?”

Terry Wattley, a Gresham resident who attended the September event, says he has been doing more cooking since he and his wife had their second son. He has found that the dinners provide an excellent way to get his four-year-old interested with cooking. “It’s a great family thing for us,” Wattley said. “It’s really easy to do as an activity.” He also appreciates the breakout session, where he quizzes others for recipe ideas so he can expand his culinary repertoire.

A young woman named Jassmine, who said she’d recently moved to Beaverton from San Diego, heard about the dinners from community development corporation Beyond Black’s Facebook group. “I don’t know how to cook, so I thought this would be a good place to learn,” she said.

Fresh Produce and an Emphasis on Nutrition

One of the best parts of the Oregon Department of Agriculture grant is that it allows the Rockwood CDC to purchase produce for the meals from Black- and Indigenous-run farms in the Portland area, including Mudbone Grown and the Black Futures Farm. In addition to the prepared meal, the money helps provide all participants with a bag of produce from these and other farms—much like a mini community supported agriculture (CSA) subscription would. Each bag of produce also includes a flyer that lists all the BIPOC farmers in the Portland area, so participants know how to support these farms in the future. 

Chuck Smith with Laurie Palmer preparing for a Grandma’s Hands class.

“We try to [provide] the ingredients that are in the featured recipe,” Smith said. When that’s not possible, however, the BFSC will turn to other organic farms in the area for the necessary produce.

Though modern soul food can involve a lot of fried foods, the Portland grandmas are placing an emphasis on nutrition in their recipes. For instance, Braxton’s menu included fried chicken, but the other three parts—succotash, collard greens, and candied yams—were all cooked with minimal fat and salt.

“Even though we’re passing down our culture, we want to be sure we prepare it with a healthy twist,” said Vanessa Chambers. “We want people to stay healthy and live long.” 

To that end, the meals have helped some adult participants learn to appreciate vegetables that they’d spent a lifetime avoiding. Chambers, for instance, would have sworn she didn’t like Brussels sprouts. But then, she tried grandmother Rhonda Combs’ Brussels sprouts at the July dinner.

“She caramelized them with balsamic vinegar and served them with red peppers, onions, and avocado oil,” said Chambers. The result was transformational. “It was like, ‘Wow! I would probably fix this myself.’”

Top photo: Laurie Palmer (left) and Vanessa Chambers. All photos by Robin Franzen Parker.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/10/21/black-grandmothers-feed-their-communities-and-pass-on-food-traditions-online/feed/ 5 https://civileats.com/2020/09/18/deepa-iyer-is-farming-for-social-justice/ https://civileats.com/2020/09/18/deepa-iyer-is-farming-for-social-justice/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2020 09:00:39 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=38295 In Ghana, when a person passes a farmer in the field, they call out, “Ayekoo,” which loosely means “I see you” or “I acknowledge you farming the land.” In response, the farmer says, “Aye,” to thank the passerby for the acknowledgement. When naming their new farm in rural Washington, Deepa Iyer, the daughter of Indian […]

The post Deepa Iyer Is Farming for Social Justice appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> In Ghana, when a person passes a farmer in the field, they call out, “Ayekoo,” which loosely means “I see you” or “I acknowledge you farming the land.” In response, the farmer says, “Aye,” to thank the passerby for the acknowledgement.

When naming their new farm in rural Washington, Deepa Iyer, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and her partner Victor Anagli, who grew up in the Volta region of Ghana, wanted to honor this call and response tradition, so they christened their 21-acre property Ayeko. Located in the town of Enumclaw, Washington—40 miles southeast of Seattle—Ayeko is covered with fruit trees and raspberry and blueberry bushes and bisected by a creek.

“It’s magical,” says Iyer, who grew up in New Jersey.

The couple—who between them have two children and one full-time, off-farm job—are currently growing organic vegetables on one acre and have started a U-Pick for the berries. But in the future, they hope to invite other farmers and families who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to join them.

“We want to share this land with other people,” Iyer says. “Our vision is village-style, everyone growing food—a life where kids can run out the door and don’t have to make an appointment to have a play date.”

As of today, however, Iyer and her family and community—along with others across Washington state and along the entire West Coast—are largely sequestered indoors as a result of the wildfires that are burning around the state and region. “We are concerned because there are fires very close to here . . . we are surrounded by dry grass and anything could happen,” Iyer told Civil Eats in an email. “Crops are looking affected by smoke; nothing has been lost to fire, but it feels like the season is over in many ways.”

A group of people work in the fields at Ayeko Farm. (Photo by Sharon Chang, courtesy of Ayeko Farm)

Before the fires, Iyer found out she’d been chosen as one of 12 recipients of the Castanea Fellowship, a two-year program that helps support a racially just food system. The fellowship comes with a $40,000 grant and a connection to a network of experienced farmers who get together for six “learning immersion journeys.”

Farzana Serang, executive director at the Castanea Fellowship, says Iyer is a valuable part of the cohort. “What’s incredible about Deepa,” Serang says, “is she’s been farming for 20 years, making culturally relevant food more accessible, and still considers herself new to the work.”

Discovering a Love of Farming

Iyer fell in love with farming the year after college, when she took a six-month soul-searching trip to India. While there, she visited botanical sanctuaries and worked on intentional farming projects. When she returned home, she found an internship with a watershed organization, Stony Brook-Millstone (now the Watershed Institute), which also had an organic farm.

It was there that she discovered environmental education. She would take school children to the pond and collect water samples that were full of tadpoles and dragonfly nymphs. “I didn’t even know that this type of work existed,” Iyer says. “You can be out in nature with kids as they discover their love of nature?!”

She also got hooked on organic farming. “I would stand on the truck and the guys would come in with the harvest and throw pumpkins at me,” says Iyer, who describes herself as “a tomboy to the death.” She caught all the pumpkins.

Now, at 42, Iyer still relishes manual labor. “Bending over and pulling weeds all day? I love that!” she says.

Iyer also spent a year as a teacher-in-residence at Slide Ranch, an educational farm on the coast north of San Francisco that connects children to nature. That experience put Iyer more firmly on the path of food systems education and led her to launch an urban farm collective in Oakland called (SOL), which she ran for six years before heading to Michigan State University to study the intersection of social justice and the ecological impact of our food and farming systems.

Anagli, who she met in Michigan, comes from a long line of farmers in Ghana. One of the first questions he asked her was, “How do you want to change the world?”  

“I’d never been asked that before,” Iyer says.

Eventually, the couple moved to Oakland with their young son and began the hunt for a plot of fertile land.

Twenty-One Acres in Enumclaw

They started searching for land with some friends, but everything they found within a two-hour drive from Oakland was out of their price range. Iyer, who has family in Seattle, shifted the search to Washington and in early 2018, she found the property in Enumclaw.

Sunflowers in the fields at Ayeko Farm. (Photo by Sharon Chang, courtesy of Ayeko Farm)

Iyer also landed a full-time job at the International Rescue Committee in Tukwila, where she heads up a community agriculture and food security program with refugees from Burma, Bhutan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through this, she runs four community gardens in South King County, as well as two market garden production sites, and she co-runs the Tukwila Village Farmers Market.

At Ayeko, the couple farms using organic methods—like composting and minimal tillage—though they’re not certified organic. They grow the usual suspects—beets, carrots, kale, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, and tomatoes—as well as foods that have roots in Iyer’s family food traditions, such as bottle gourds, which are light-green, smooth-skinned and so neutral tasting they’re “almost bland,” says Iyer. They’re also growing amaranth greens, or callaloo, as well as long beans, fenugreek leaves, and peanuts.

This kind of “cultural rescue” is very important to Iyer, who earned her master’s degree studying the food and farming practices of elder women in the Himalayas. “If we lose a vegetable type or variety, then we lose all the things that go with it—words, celebrations, colors, stories—so much richness,” Iyer says.

Not long ago, Iyer invited a group of her mom’s friends to Ayeko and one Indian-American woman in her 70s saw the long beans in the fields and grew animated. “All these conversations started happening about these recipes,” says Iyer. “‘Oh, my grandma used to make those!’ she said. Those are my dream-come-true moments.”

Because theirs is such a bare-bones operation—the crew is just Iyer and Anagli, and Iyer maintains a full-time off-farm job—they don’t yet have a booth at the farmers’ market or even a community supported agriculture (CSA) program.

So for now, their method of selling produce is very casual: they send e-mails to their community inviting them to come to the farm and get it or to access it at one of a few drop-off points in and around Seattle. They also started a U-Pick earlier this summer for their 400 raspberry bushes and hope to add blueberries soon. They have a number of fruit and nut trees as well, but those aren’t producing fruit yet.

Navigating Racism with a Dream of Bringing People Together

The Castanea Fellowship has been a boon, she says—both financially and emotionally. The grant will help with basic support operations like fixing the well and purchasing supplies and equipment, like a tractor. Iyer also hopes it will help launch some of their more ambitious projects, like creating an outdoor school for BIPOC kids or a co-op venture with other farmers.

Additionally, the Fellowship’s learning immersion journeys, which, for the foreseeable future, are all being conducted on Zoom, have been incredible, says Iyer. “It’s been super inspiring,” she says. “These are people who have been through so much and doing so much amazing work.”

The 2020 Castanea fellows, who include farmers, chefs, community organizers, and more, have been a source of inspiration for Iyer. Some, for instance “have been able to take [challenging life] experiences and build themselves into strong, positive people with a deep critique of our system and strong analysis of systemic racism and how it manifests in the food system.”

(Photo by Sharon Chang, courtesy of Ayeko Farm)

And although the work of running a farm in rural Washington has been deeply satisfying, living in a rural area as people of color has its challenges. “There are very, very few Black folks out here,” Iyer says. When they moved to Enumclaw, she jokes, Anagli and their kids doubled the town’s Black population. “All Lives Matter” signage abounds.

Two months after moving to the farm, Anagli was walking home from the bus stop when a white woman harassed him and threatened to call 911 because she didn’t think he lived there. The family also had their house robbed on the same day. “We went into a deep state of fear, and I just started feeling guilt, regret, and doubt,” Iyer says.

And yet, she holds out hope for reconciliation and healing within their community. “I keep thinking we can build community anywhere. If somebody is racist, it doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. We’re in a society that’s committed to systemic racism—it’s everywhere.”

Iyer is hopeful that the land and the food it brings forth can draw folks together. Before pandemic-times, the couple hosted the first of what they’d hoped would become an annual cooking and capoeira event called Grounded in Freedom. Though they cancelled the event this summer, they hope it’s safe to host it again next summer. In the meantime, Iyer hopes to connect with the Muckleshoot Tribe, which has a reservation nearby. “There’s a lot of opportunity to build community,” she says.

Lately, Iyer’s vision of subdividing the property and inviting other families to live there in a cooperative farming village is also much on her mind. She imagines there would be a shared meal once a week. Except for the indigenous folks, Iyer says, “The reality is that everyone’s grandma or great grandma is from somewhere else—we can all share those stories of our grandmother’s recipes.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/09/18/deepa-iyer-is-farming-for-social-justice/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2020/06/19/one-fair-wage-wants-to-help-reopen-restaurants-and-change-how-they-pay-workers/ Fri, 19 Jun 2020 09:00:42 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=37175 When the coronavirus pandemic hit New York City in mid-March, the city’s restaurant industry was among the first to feel the shock. With so many restaurants shuttered since then, restaurant workers are reeling. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 200,000 restaurant and bar staffers lost their jobs between March and April, a 68.1 […]

The post One Fair Wage Wants to Help Reopen Restaurants—and Change How They Pay Workers appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> When the coronavirus pandemic hit New York City in mid-March, the city’s restaurant industry was among the first to feel the shock. With so many restaurants shuttered since then, restaurant workers are reeling. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 200,000 restaurant and bar staffers lost their jobs between March and April, a 68.1 percent reduction.

As part of an effort to lay the foundation for reopening, last week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $3 million Restaurant Revitalization Program, which will provide funding to 100 family-run restaurants forced to close due to COVID-19.

The project is part of a collaboration with One Fair Wage, a national organization dedicated to raising wages and increasing equity for service workers. Restaurants are eligible for a $30,000 grant from New York City and a $5,000 grant from One Fair Wage. Restaurants that don’t land $30,000 from the city, but commit to One Fair Wage’s equity program, also have the opportunity to apply to get the entire $35,000 from One Fair Wage. The group launched a version of this initiative, which they call High Roads Kitchens, in California in May.

In line with One Fair Wage’s mission, the funding comes with a few stipulations: Restaurant owners must pay $20 an hour (before tips) to each worker for six weeks, and then must commit to paying $15 an hour for all workers—including tipped workers—within five years. The requirement is an effort to end a practice still in use in 43 states that allows workers who receive at least $30 per month in tips to be paid just $2.13 per hour.

Restaurants must also provide 500 free meals per week to low-wage workers, health care workers, or others who are struggling as a result of the pandemic. Priority will also be given to restaurants in neighborhoods hardest hit economically by the pandemic, especially in low-income communities of color.

“Having 100 restaurants commit . . . will go a long way toward moving to one fair wage at the state level,” says Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, co-founder of Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United, and the director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The idea that tips can count against wages is a direct legacy of slavery, [and] we were seeing it spread to other tipped workers, even gig workers,” she added. “So what we really needed to be fighting for is the notion of ‘no worker left behind.’ Nobody in America who works—tipped, not tipped, incarcerated, disabled—nobody should get less than a full minimum wage when they work.”

Civil Eats spoke with Jayaraman after the Restaurant Revitalization Program was unveiled about the program and what it means for restaurants—and food service workers—in New York City and nationwide.

This project takes aim at the sub-minimum tipped wage. How has the pandemic highlighted why this is a terrible idea?

Saru Jayaraman.

On Friday, March 13, 10 million restaurant and other service workers lost their jobs. We started an emergency fund for workers on March 16. We raised $23 million, we got almost 180,000 applicants from around the country, and we’ve been handing out cash payments. We have a legal clinic, financial counseling for these workers, and a tax prep program for them.

But most importantly, we’ve been organizing them at large tele-town halls with U.S. senators, governors, and state legislators. And what they are saying in vast numbers is that they are not able access unemployment insurance largely because of the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. Many states are being told that the wage plus tips is too low to meet the minimum threshold to qualify for benefits.

Or they’re being told, “Your boss never reported your tips, so you either don’t qualify or you’re gonna earn a lot less than you should have.” And it’s worse for workers of color, because they tend to work in more casual restaurants where there are cash tips, as opposed to fine dining, where tips are typically on credit cards.

What’s it like right now for restaurant employees in the seven states that have committed to paying a minimum wage for all workers?

Workers in California, Washington, Nevada, and the four other states that [pay all restaurant workers a fair wage] are all getting unemployment insurance measured on a $15 an hour minimum wage plus tips. They’re in the same occupation, it’s just that they happen to live in a different state. So maybe they’ll be able to survive while you’ve got these millions of people—mostly women of color—in other states not able to survive. The people who are applying to the fund are telling us that they have money for less than two weeks of groceries for their kids. It’s a dire situation.

“Workers are really up in arms about all across the country is being forced to go back to a sub-minimum wage job when tips are down nationally.”

But the other thing that workers are really up in arms about all across the country is being forced to go back to a sub-minimum wage job when tips are down nationally. We estimate [they’re down] by about 80 percent, because people don’t tip as much for takeout and delivery. Even when restaurants re-open, they’ll be at half capacity. Workers are saying, “How could you make me go back for $2 or $3 an hour, and there are no tips?” So all of this is has led to employers who had fought us in the past on this issue now saying that they want to work with us to move their own restaurants to one fair wage.

What do restaurants pay before tips in New York City?

It’s 66 percent of the overall minimum wage, which is now $15. So it’s $10. But outside of the city it’s $7. It doesn’t have as far to go: New York could do this—it’s only a $5 [difference]!—they could make this change, and when they do, it will have a significant reverberating impact on other blue states in the region.

And here’s the biggest thing: There are a number of industry leaders, who fought us in the past or who didn’t want to talk to us, who are now going to one fair wage or who are saying, “I’ll be vocal and fight!”

It looks like there are two ways to apply for this grant—through One Fair Wage and through the city. Which way should a restaurant apply?

I think it’s easier for people if they go through us, because we can help them through the process. And also, if they’re chosen by us, they [are more likely to get chosen] through the city. And the reason is that people who work with us go through our Equity Toolkit and Training Program.

Where does One Fair Wage get the funding for this program?

There were a lot of funders who wanted to support our relief efforts. Some gave to the Emergency Fund, some were very interested in the High Road Kitchens program, because it accomplishes many things at once. It hires people, it feeds people. But more importantly, it shapes the industry to be more resilient and equitable going forward. We also got a significant grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to support the effort in New York.

Is $35,000 going to be enough to help a restaurant re-open?

We did less in California—between $15,000 and $25,000—and it allowed restaurants to re-open. They’re not using the money to pay all their rent and pay off their debt. They’re using it to get inventory, bring back some workers, and re-open with takeout and delivery in a way that allows them to re-engage with their customers and get back on their feet.

Once the restaurants are all signed up, we’ll be doing events and promoting the hell out of them. Given the moment, there’s so much desire among consumers to support restaurants that are committed to racial equity, so I have no doubt that the restaurants participating will get a lot of extra business.

How will One Fair Wage and/or the Mayor’s office know whether these restaurants actually pay $20 an hour now and $15 an hour in the future?

In California, we do regular audits of the restaurants asking for reports on their payroll and their wages, and also talking to workers. We’ll be doing that every month for five years to make sure everybody goes to one fair wage. And if the restaurants don’t comply they won’t be eligible to apply for any future city programs.

Obviously, 100 is just a small fraction of New York City’s 26,000 restaurants. Is the hope that this program will inspire good practices throughout the industry?

Yes, exactly. The leader of an independent restaurant association is planning to move to one fair wage without the [grant] money. And there are other restaurants that are planning to do the same thing. We just have to fix this tip-sharing rule at the state level to allow everybody to … create some equity between front and back of the house as well. With some strict prohibitions against employers taking any portion of that.

Critics say that restaurants can’t afford to pay $20 an hour, especially now when so many have fallen into debt due to the coronavirus. What do you say to that?

We’ve had 31 restaurants sign up through us. So the idea that people don’t want to do this is factually incorrect. This money helps people get back on their feet! So I would turn the question back on them: How could these groups [the New York State Restaurant Association and the New York City Hospitality Alliance] look down on free cash grants to restaurants? The only reason they are condemning it is because they know as well as we do that this is the first step toward winning this as policy in New York state. I think it’s important for everybody to raise the question: If these people really represent small business, how could they condemn a free cash grant program?

One of our High Road restaurant owners—when she saw this response from Hospitality Alliance—she forwarded me a quote [from the statement Mississippi issued when it seceded from the Union before the Civil War]: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. . . . These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.” This is how they’ve responded for 200 years when change is imminent: They claim there is no way we can make change.

And my God, if there’s any moment to think about change, it’s now. Even I was skeptical that we could do anything in this moment. It was restaurant owners who were like, “No Saru, this is exactly the right the time—we’re all closed, we’re all rethinking everything. This is the right time.”

This article was updated to correct Saru Jayaraman’s title as president of One Fair Wage, not executive director.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/04/03/their-restaurants-closed-chefs-take-to-instagram-to-help-you-cook-at-home/ Fri, 03 Apr 2020 09:00:34 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=35830 It’s Friday at 6 p.m. and Gabe Rucker, chef at Le Pigeon and Canard in Portland, Oregon, is in his home kitchen demonstrating how to make a radicchio salad with Caesar dressing. To Rucker’s left is his three-year-old son, Freddy, who has his own chef’s station with a cutting board. Perched on a stool to […]

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Chef Gabriel Rucker and his family.

It’s Friday at 6 p.m. and Gabe Rucker, chef at Le Pigeon and Canard in Portland, Oregon, is in his home kitchen demonstrating how to make a radicchio salad with Caesar dressing. To Rucker’s left is his three-year-old son, Freddy, who has his own chef’s station with a cutting board. Perched on a stool to his right is his six-year-old daughter, Babette, who has become her dad’s de facto sous chef. Roughly 230 fans, all hunkering down in their own homes, are watching this cooking lesson on Instagram Live.

Like many chefs, Rucker made the difficult decision to shutter his restaurants in mid-March in response to the coronavirus pandemic. While his business partner orchestrated an online wine sale and made sure all their employees were signed up for COBRA health insurance, Rucker decided to do what he does best: cook delicious food and share it with his customers and fans.

Last week, Rucker launched live cooking demos on Instagram at @RuckerGabriel, which he plans to host three days a week, every week, for the foreseeable future.

Rucker says the online cooking lessons have brought some levity amidst the challenges of staying at home. “And it’s a way to bring the family together, too. The kids love cooking, so, it’s connective for us.” But it also helps Rucker and his wife Hana—accustomed to throwing dinner parties—connect with people other than their three kids. (Gus, age 8, is more camera shy than Babette and Freddy.)

Hana, a metal artist, has taken on the role of videographer, and also funnels questions that pop up on the screen to Rucker while he’s cooking. “What cut of pork chop?” she relayed to Rucker last Friday during the class covering pork chops, radicchio salad, and steamed asparagus.

“Not the center cut,” said Rucker, wearing a “We Put the Pro in Profiterole” T-shirt. “The center cut is lean. What you really want is up toward the shoulder. It’s gonna have more marbling.”

As much of the country isolates at home, a handful of chefs are bringing solace to their fans and followers by showing them how to cook nourishing food. Many are also plugging local farms, ranches, and purveyors that risk going out of business now that restaurants have closed.

In this time of deep uncertainty and worry—nearly 10 million Americans are newly out of work, according to the latest bleak statistics from the Labor Department—many people have suddenly lost some or all of their income. As a result, many don’t have the ability to buy pork chops right now, or the mental energy to watch a cooking lesson about how to prepare them. (Even though out-of-work Americans are eligible for unemployment benefits and SNAP, many states have a backlog of claims, which can mean weeks-long delays.)

But with restaurants closed virtually everywhere, more people are forced to cook at home than ever before, and they’re seeking inspiration. And many chefs, including Rucker, are focusing on adaptable, budget-friendly comfort-food dishes like rice bowls, soups, vegetarian pastas, and hearty salads.

Chris Cosentino making cavatelli & spring green pesto.

Chris Cosentino, chef at San Fransisco’s Cockscomb (as well as Jackrabbit in Portland, Rosalie in Houston, and Acacia House in St. Helena, California) started a #recipesforthepeople series on Instagram that includes a spring greens pesto on cavatelli—“a great way to use up greens in the house,” he says. In his videos, which he posts at @chefchriscosentino, Cosentino plugs local farms like Santa Cruz County’s Dirty Girl Produce, which launched a pre-packed veggie box service when the crisis began, and Liberty Ducks in Petaluma.

In Cleveland, Chef Michael Symon of Lola Bistro, Mabel’s BBQ, and B Spot Burgers, is posting short videos on Instagram at @ChefSymon, showing how to make comforting favorites like grilled cheese and tomato soup; pasta with garbanzo beans; crispy lunchmeat, spinach, and garlic; and root vegetable stew. He weaves in quotidian details about his day before launching into cooking.

“For those of you concerned yesterday, Norman is out of his time out, and wandering around my feet,” he says of his dog. “I’m in full pajamas today, with slippers,” he adds.

Over in Australia, Chef Jason Roberts of the Bistro at Manly Pavilion is posting recipes on Instagram at @ChefJasonRoberts for budget-friendly dishes like vegetarian lasagna and savory porridges. In Portland, Oregon, Vitaly Paley (of Paley’s Place, Headwaters, Imperial, and Rosa Rosa), is streaming on Instagram Live at @vit0bike every Friday at 5 p.m. pacific time, where he makes quick, user-friendly dishes like tuna tonnato and a Niçoise-style tapenade with crudités from the farmers’ market.

Local food champion and cook Katherine Deumling of Cook With What you Have, also based in Portland, has also been posting short videos on Instagram at @cookwithwhatyouhave, with an emphasis on local ranchers and farmers. In a recent post about vegetables, she urges followers to shop at farmers’ markets. “If they’re still open, please patronize them,” she says. “The best produce you can imagine will be there, which will help you stay strong and help support our local farmers.”

In her video for fried rice with strip steak and veggies, she mentions the beef comes from Carman Ranch, which now has a direct delivery service to Portland. (Deumling posts recipes and additional videos on her site; you can get a month of free access using the code Foodislove.)

Back in Rucker’s kitchen, he whisks egg yolks with Dijon mustard and garlic as he slowly, steadily drizzles oil into the metal bowl. “See how there’s a thin steady stream of oil going in there, right in the middle?” he asks his invisible audience.

He shakes in some Tabasco sauce and a dash of Worcestershire. “The recipe calls for red wine vinegar, but I don’t have that, so I’m gonna use malt vinegar,” he says. “You have to adapt.” He throws a bowl of pre-grated Parmesan into the dressing and a “pinch” of salt (though it’s more like a generous shake, from a squeeze tube bottle).

“What’s with the squeeze tube of salt?” Hana asks on behalf of an Instagram follower. “We cook a lot, and I’m using salt all the time, and I don’t want to put my fingers in the salt,” Rucker explains.

Rucker pauses to patiently slice a mandarin orange in half for Freddy. Later, Babette, now slicing kumquats, does bunny ears behind her dad’s head. “This is Gabe. He loves cooking. He loves doing videos,” Hana says.

“Babette is cutting up kumkquats,” Rucker says. “That citrus element on the pork will cut through the fattiness and richness. And also tie into the orange flavor of the Caesar salad.”

Rucker’s favorite source for pork chops, he divulges in response to an Instagram audience question, is Nicky USA, a Portland-based wholesaler of wild specialty meat, much of it from Northwest ranchers and farms. (During the pandemic, Nicky USA is selling direct-to-consumer by pick-up or delivery.) Later, he offers a hat tip to the produce market Rubinette Produce. “They source their produce from all of farms at the farmers’ market,” he says. He also praises Portland butcher shop Tails & Trotters, and the specialty food shop Real Good Food. All are currently offering curbside pickup or delivery, or both.

Rucker posts his recipes on Instagram ahead of time so followers can pre-shop and follow along at home. His first meal was miso black cod rice bowls; he’s also done steam burgers (a favorite from the Canard menu), and Cobb salad. Upcoming demos will cover braised chicken with mashed potatoes and roasted broccoli, and the Canard omelette.

The response has been larger than Rucker anticipated, and he’s gained 5,000 new followers over the past week alone. “People are saying it’s a real bright spot for them and that they love doing it,” he says. “Right now, it’s what we need.”

The post Their Restaurants Closed, Chefs Take to Instagram to Help You Cook at Home appeared first on Civil Eats.

This is just one of the many classes offered by Feed the Mass (FTM). Valentine, 31, founded the nonprofit cooking school four years ago because he saw a need for affordable culinary education in his hometown of Portland, Oregon.

At the time, there were plenty of cooking classes in food-focused Portland, but they all cost $60 to $100 to attend. Valentine, who was managing the local chain Killer Burger at the time, wanted to offer classes that were accessible to everyone, especially low-income folks.

Feed the Mass’ curriculum is focused on whole foods made from scratch. Valentine usually offers a vegetarian option, and also tries to accommodate those who are dairy-free or gluten-free. The classes cover everything from tamales and dumplings to vegetable soups and Mexican mole, and range from $20 for “Little Chefs” (for kids ages 4-10 and a parent or guardian) or Family Night classes to $30 for the community classes. Ambitious chefs-to-be can also buy a three-class pass for $75. The price includes all ingredients—and the students get to eat what they make, of course.

And for those who can’t afford the fees, Valentine offers full scholarships. “You have to have under $30,000 household income and write a short little essay [explaining] why you want [to attend],” he said. Nearly 50 people received scholarships last year out of 1,200 total students. The scholarships are funded through the class passes and two annual fundraisers—one in June and another in December.

Diet-related diseases are at an all-time high in America, increasing the risk of chronic illness and premature death. And although Oregon is a coastal state often associated with the farm-to-fork movement diabetes affects around 1 in 8 adults.

There’s a consensus among public health experts, doctors, and educators that any long-term solution to the epidemic of diet-related illness will have to include instruction in basic food preparation and meal planning skills.

“Research suggests that frequent consumption of restaurant food, take-out food, and prepared snacks lowers dietary quality, and that food preparation by adolescents and young adults may have the opposite effect by displacing poor choices made outside the home,” wrote two Tufts University nutrition scientists in a 2010 paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The paper argued that any long-term solution to the pediatric obesity epidemic will need to include a modern-day home economics curriculum in public high schools—”a version of hunting and gathering for the 21st century.” Though this hasn’t happened en masse over the past decade, affordable or free cooking classes like the ones at Feed the Mass are trying to fill the gap.

Maria and her son make dough during a Feed the Mass class.

Valentine chose the name Feed the Mass as a nod to the Biblical story from Mark 8. In it, Jesus feeds a crowd of 4,000 people with seven loaves of bread and a few small fish.

“It teaches us that if we share what we have, there will always be enough,” Valentine said. He grew up attending non-denominational Christian churches in Hawaii and Portland and currently attends Grace City Portland.

In most classes—even the ones that include kids—Valentine and his staff teach basic knife skills. Nekicia Luckett, a regular FTM volunteer, recalls working with an eight-year-old who had “great knife skills.”

In the tamale-making class, Valentine demonstrated how to chop an onion and then took out some pre-peeled garlic cloves. “Garlic, you devious bugger!” he said, eliciting some laughs from his students. He sliced the garlic into thin slivers, and said, “A garlic press is fine—but you don’t need all these fancy implements!”

Valentine often stresses that having a well-equipped kitchen doesn’t cost much—you can get all the basic pots, pans, knives, and cutting boards for $100. He’s begun selling chef’s knives for $15 because he realized many people who come to his classes don’t have this essential cooking tool.

The students chatted as they sliced up heaps of mushrooms, garlic, onions, and jalapeños for the black bean vegetarian tamales, or shredded roasted chicken for the chicken and cheese tamales. After methodically filling their tamales, and while they were steaming in an 8-quart Instant Pot, Valentine told the class that all the ingredients (including the corn husks) came to a total of $40. “That’s enough tamales for four to six families,” he said. “And we’ll have plenty for you to all take some home.”

Some of the students at that night’s class were regulars, but for many it was their first time at Feed the Mass. Kelcy Adamec, a first-timer, stumbled across the school while hunting for a class she could take with her husband, David; she was learning to make tamales on the first of three classes she would attend through her class pass.

“I was looking up cooking classes in the area and I loved that it was mission-driven,” said Adamec.

A man named Neil said his son-in-law had given him a gift certificate for Christmas. “I love to cook—and one of my goals this year is to start eating healthier,” Neil said. “Taking this class is better than a cookbook!”

Even though none of the students at the tamale-making class were attending on a scholarship, by paying full price for the class they were helping to fund the scholarship program.

Feed the Mass has had three different homes since it was founded in 2016, but it recently found what Valentine hopes will be a permanent location at the Faubion School in Northeast Portland. The K-8 charter school has partnered with Concordia University on a holistic, nutrition- and health-focused education initiative called 3-to-PhD. The school is also home to a Kaiser Permanente wellness center, a food pantry, and a Basics Market, a new affordable grocery store chain founded by former Pacific Foods CEO Chuck Eggert.

Starting in April, Valentine and his staff will also teach after-school cooking classes to Faubion students. In a recent survey taken at the Title 1 school, 60 percent of the students identified themselves as the primary cooks in their families.

Free and affordable cooking classes are rare across the nation, but the number of them appears to be growing—at least on the West Coast. In Portland, the Oregon Food Bank hosts Cooking Matters, a free six-week class that teaches beginning home cooks how to make healthy meals on a budget.

Created by Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Share our Strength, Cooking Matters operates in most U.S. cities. Food Hero, an initiative funded by the Oregon’s SNAP-Ed program and developed by Oregon State University Extension agents, includes nutrition education and food preparation at 18 Portland area schools. (It also has a wealth of free resources on its web site, including kid-approved recipes, activity sheets, videos, and even food-related jokes.) In San Francisco, nonprofit cooking school 18 Reasons helps train volunteer “Health Promoters” to teach Cooking Matters classes.

Jacobsen Valentine and a student make fresh pasta.

Basics Market, which now has two, and soon will have three locations in Oregon, offers 20 to 30 free cooking classes per week. Nonetheless, founder Eggert says there’s still a real need for more culinary education in this country.

“Most people my age, grew up going to home ec. People cooked!” Not so anymore, he says. Eggert collects old home ec. text books from the 1920s and says they’re full of advice about things like keeping the water you cook potatoes in and eating carrots with the peels intact as a way to get the most vitamins. “It’s those kinds of thing, as a society, we’ve gotten away from teaching to kids,” he said.

Joanne Lyford, who is the SNAP-Ed program manager in Portland, is confident that programs like Food Hero and Feed the Mass can help contribute to lifelong healthy habits, reducing and preventing obesity. “There is evidence that shows when children are exposed to fruits and vegetables, over time that will increase the likelihood that they will choose those foods over sugary beverages and foods with lots of added sugar,” Lyford said.

Valentine, who learned to cook from his mother and grandmother, is passionate about passing what he knows on to the next generation. He also teaches cooking at an alternative school where he’s advising nine high-schoolers on how to start a pop-up restaurant.

Feed the Mass does offer some less health-focused classes, like the ones that teach students how to make gingerbread and baked doughnuts, but Valentine tends to subscribe to Michael Pollan’s 39th “Food Rule”: You can eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

And as he and his class sit down and feast on their homemade tamales, dumplings, and tikka masala, his students inevitably end up talking to one another, creating connections around food.

“We give people the opportunity to become part of our community, whether they’re wealthy or poor,” Valentine said. “Everybody has to eat.”

Photos courtesy of Feed the Mass.

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“They tasted bad and they digested worse,” Tibbott recalls. But while browsing the literature at The Farm, he learned about a fermented soybean product called tempeh. “So when I read that tempeh was this really digestible and fairly easy-to-make-thing, I was really intrigued.” At the time, he was working for the Youth Conservation Corps at Kinser Park. So he ordered some tempeh starter from The Farm and, a week later, he set about making his first batch.

“I got some soybeans and hand-hulled them, put the magic starter on them, put them out in the field.” For tempeh to ferment properly, you ideally need temperatures of 88 degrees, and Tennessee’s hot weather was perfect. “The next day, there was this beautiful white cake on the soybeans,” he recalls.  Tibbot later learned that when he brought his first tempeh back to his co-workers, they thought it might poison them. But they tried it anyway, and several went on to become early customers of his first commercial tempeh.

Seth Tibbott in front of his first tempeh incubator, in 1980. (Photo courtesy of Seth Tibbott)

In 1980, in Oregon, Tibbot launched Turtle Island Soy Dairy, the company now known as Tofurky. But what few people know is that Tofurky—famous for its alternative holiday roast—began with this lesser-known soy product. Fermented with Rhizopus mold, tempeh is originally from Indonesia, and it can be made with any beans, seeds, or even noodles. For the first 15 years, the company barely broke even. Today, Tofurky has estimated sales of $40 million a year, and Tibbott says tempeh is one of the company’s fastest-growing product lines, increasing 17 percent from 2017 to 2018.

Tibbott was 40 years ahead of the curve. With the popularity of plant-based burgers and fermented foods on the rise, tempeh is having a moment. It has a nutty flavor, a meaty texture, and it fries up nicely for stir-fry, tacos, or in place of a burger. Unlike the Impossible Burger (which relies on GMO soy, and, as a result, the use of glyphosate) and other ultra-processed plant-based meat substitutes, tempeh has only two ingredients: beans and culture. It’s also a nutritional powerhouse, containing almost as much protein as beef (without the saturated fat or cholesterol), all eight essential amino acids, calcium, iron, and zinc.

Though tempeh sales are still a fraction of all plant-based protein sales, there are dozens of new artisanal tempeh companies sprouting up around the country—from Squirrel and Crow in Portland, Oregon and Tempeh Tantrum in Minneapolis to Barry’s Tempeh in Brooklyn. And it’s not just popular at food co-ops—it’s on the menu at pizza franchise Mellow Mushroom’s 150 locations across the Southeast, Native Foods’ nine restaurants, and at high-end restaurants like Cafe Sunflower in Atlanta and Farm Spirit in Portland. You can even get a tempeh bowl at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. “Tempeh is like the OG fermented food,” Tibbott says.

Tempeh even has its own organization, the Indonesian Tempe Movement (without the “h” on the end), dedicated to increasing international awareness of tempeh and teaching everyone from hipsters to the incarcerated how to make it. Last winter, two food entrepreneurs in Portland, Oregon, Mike Hillis and Willie Chambers, formed a U.S. offshoot called the Tempeh Movement. They see themselves as ambassadors, spreading the good news of this often under-appreciated food.

Tempeh’s most tireless champion may be 27-year-old Amadeus Driando (“Ando”) Ahnan, the co-founder, with his mother and grandfather, of the Indonesian Tempe Movement. Ahnan, who grew up in Jakarta and now lives in western Massachusetts, jokes that he was weaned on tempeh. But his real conversion came later, when he was seeking a protein source that would help him bulk up for weightlifting as an adult. He realized that the food he had grown up eating every day left him feeling less bloated than beef. “I thought, ‘This is amazing! How could something that cheap have the same quantity of protein as beef?’” says Ahnan.

Around the same time, his mom, Wida Winarno, had taken a fermented foods class wherein she learned about the importance of tempeh in promoting gut health, and his grandfather, the respected Indonesian food scientist, F.G. Winarno, returned from a colleague’s seminar on the health benefits of tempeh. The serendipity was too much to ignore.

Squirrel and Crow’s tempeh flavors.

“I thought, ‘We should make an international conference on tempeh,’” recalls Ahnan. In 2015, the trio founded the Tempe Movement, starting with an online campaign. In Indonesia, as in other developing countries, eating meat is a sign of status and wealth. Vegetarian food, Ahnan says, is often seen as a sign of poverty. He and his family wanted to flip the script. “We made cartoons and videos saying ‘Hey, don’t be ashamed if you like tempeh!’” says Ahan.

Today, Ahnan is getting his Ph.D. in food science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (focusing is on tempeh’s potential anti-cancer properties.) In his spare time, he’s designed the prototype for a machine called Tempeasy, which allows people to make tempeh at home as easily as they make bread or yogurt. He’s also the co-founder of Better Nature Foods. The company will launch in the United Kingdom in January with six products, including tempeh rashers (i.e., bacon), tempeh mince, and smoked soy tempeh.

Last March, Ahnan organized an “eco-tempeh tour” across the island of Java for entrepreneurs from the U.S. and England, including Tibbott, Hillis, and Chambers.

Hillis discovered tempeh at a Grateful Dead concert in 1988 and then again through his wife, Priska, who is Indonesian. (At their wedding in Bali, his wife’s great-grandmother from Java watched him scarf down fried strips of tempeh and said to Priska, “You’re in good hands. He’ll eat your cooking!”) A few years ago, he introduced tempeh to Chambers, a former butcher who now works as a chef at the Sunrise Community Center in Portland’s Rockwood neighborhood.

On the tempeh tour of Indonesia. (Photo courtesy of Better Nature Foods)

The fact that Tempeh is fermented won Chambers over, he says. He thinks tempeh is where kombucha was 10 years ago—on the cusp of ubiquity. “Now you can buy kombucha in gas stations!” he says.

The trip to Java allowed Hillis and Chambers to learn traditional tempeh-making practices from Indonesian women who have been doing it their whole lives. This fall, they hosted a tempeh event at Wajan, a new Indonesian restaurant in Portland where Tibbott spoke and guests got to sample several tempeh dishes.

The pair have big plans for the future, including community tempeh-making classes and work to get tempeh into institutional settings such as prisons and hospitals. “We want to introduce it to a much wider demographic,” says Hillis. They believe tempeh has the potential to bridge the urban-rural divide. “How many soybean farmers live 50 miles away from economically distressed urban centers where people don’t have enough food to eat? Tempeh can be a very powerful diplomatic tool,” he says.

Traditional tempe-makers in Indonesia. (Photo courtesy of Better Nature Foods)

To get there, though, tempeh has a number of obstacles to surmount—most notably an unfair reputation as a strange dish for hippies, but also, Tibbott thinks, a lack of value-added products on the market. (Mike Hillis is working on a savory tempeh snack called Tempeh Manis that tastes a bit like Chex Mix.) But the main key to the food’s ascendence may be the startling difference between fresh and pasteurized tempeh.

In Indonesia, where every small town has a tempeh-maker, tempeh is still fermented in banana leaves. It’s also rarely pasteurized. “Even in the big grocery stores, most of the tempeh they make is in banana leaves,” says Tibbott.

All the major tempeh brands in the U.S.—Surata, Tofurky, and LightLife—pasteurize their tempeh to give it a longer shelf life. Fresh tempeh will keep fermenting at room temperature—and even in the fridge. Most of the smaller tempeh startups in the U.S. are selling unpasteurized tempeh.

John Westdahl, co-founder of Squirrel and Crow in Portland, makes a variety of fresh tempeh products: chickpeas with quinoa, black bean with sunflower seeds, even one version with nixtamalized corn, pumpkin seeds, and beans. He doesn’t make a soy tempeh mostly because there are already two large companies in Oregon that do it well. “It was more or less a business decision to stand out,” he says.

This choice worked well for the many health-conscious Portlanders who are trying to limit their soy intake because of its estrogen-mimicking effects or because it’s a common allergen. Despite rumors, dietary soy has not been linked with an increased risk of any cancer.

Fresh tempeh, Westdahl says, “just tastes better. When it’s pasteurized, you don’t taste the fungus in it—which is quite nice and complex.”

Squirrel and Crow’s glazed tempeh.

Ahnan agrees, saying there’s also a texture change. “When it’s pasteurized, it loses its fluffiness,” he says. It’s best to eat fresh tempeh within three days—unless you’re curious to try the “overripe” version, known as tempe bosok, a delicacy in Indonesia. “Over-fermented tempeh produces a lot of umami compounds,” says Ahnan. He likes it in a coconut-based curry called sambal tumpang.

Despite tempeh’s new-found popularity, home cooks are still a bit clueless when it comes to preparing it, says Westdahl. At the farmers’ markets where he’s a vendor, he offers tips. “I try to read them to find out what their skill-set is. It can be put into any recipe—it’s almost too versatile,” he says. “So I ask, ‘Are you a burger person? Do you like stir-fry?’” His favorite way to prepare it is a traditional Indonesian dish called orek, which is a sticky, glazed deep-fried dish heavy on ginger and garlic. “It’s like heaven on earth,” he says.

Many eaters are just starting to experiment with tempeh. But Westdahl, Ahnan, Tibbott and many other evangelists believe that once they try it—whether at a high-end restaurant or in their own kitchens—they’ll be converts.

The post Tempeh, the ‘OG of Fermented Foods,’ Is Having a Moment appeared first on Civil Eats.

“I was like, ‘What the heck! Why is there something from the White House in our mailbox?’” recalled Abbruzzese, who is now 14 and a freshman at Grant Park High School in Portland.

Obama’s recipe—for White House Kitchen Garden Cucumber Soup—joins recipes from Michael Pollan, and chefs Thomas Keller and Ina Garten, and many other luminaries in Saving Pan, a new cookbook created by Abbruzzese and 13 other Portland teens. The cookbook benefits the work of the Jane Goodall Institute’s Tchimpounga Sanctuary in the Republic of the Congo.

“In sixth grade, I was really into the environment, and I wanted to help give back,” said Abbruzzese, who admits to an obsession with Goodall. She met a primatologist friend of her father’s who told her about Roots & Shoots, the Goodall Institute’s youth-led community action program. Abbruzzese was inspired to form a chapter in her own community, drawing mostly from her classmates at Portland’s Beverly Cleary School. After researching why chimpanzees are endangered, the girls decided to focus on raising awareness of the illegal bushmeat trade, which is one of the biggest threats to chimp populations in Africa.

“I got a group of people together and we brainstormed, and that’s kind of how the cookbook came about,” said Abbruzzese. Saving Pan is a collection of vegetarian recipes that Abbruzzese and her classmates created over the course of three years. The title refers to the genus name for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), but also to that most important cooking tool (the cover photo is a blackberry cobbler cooked in a cast-iron pan).

And then there’s Peter Pan, the classic children’s book. As the group explains in their introduction, “Think of it this way: Peter Pan was an orphaned child, similar to the orphaned chimps in Africa. It’s our biggest hope that they can go on to thrive as well as he did.”

The cookbook was published in December and has already sold 800 copies—not bad for a self-published cookbook that so far has only been sold in Portland. The students have been featured in local news reports, and their U.S. Representative, Earl Blumenauer, recognized their achievement during a congressional session in December. And Saving Pan has already raised $8,000 to protect chimpanzees in Africa.

And the great apes need as much help as they can get. At the end of the 19th century, chimpanzees numbered as many as 1 million. Today, because of deforestation and illegal hunting, they are endangered. They have already disappeared from four African countries and are nearing extinction in many others. In fact, according to the World Wildlife Federation there are fewer than 250,000 chimps left in the wild.

Each Roots & Shoots project is supposed to be rooted in the chapter’s community, so the students—knowing Portland is recognized for its culinary scene—decided to engage local chefs. (The cookbook eventually grew to include chefs from all over the country—and even Canada, France, and Spain.) They thought a vegetarian cookbook would be a great way to educate others about the bushmeat trade in Africa and its effects on remaining chimpanzee populations.

“Because we’re trying to stop the hunting of animals, we thought that promoting vegetarianism would be a really good way to do that,” Abbruzzese said. Putting a vegetarian cookbook together involved writing to food-world leaders like Michelle Obama as well as the chefs at nationally known veg-centric restaurants like Angelica’s Kitchen in New York City (which has since closed), Greens in San Francisco, and the Green Door in Ottawa. The students went door-to-door in Portland, asking celebrated local chefs including Jenn Louis, Kelly Myers, Sarah Pliner, and Jaco Smith for recipes. And the book also contains favorite recipes from the girls’ families: Aunt Debbie’s Artichoke Lasagna, Grandma Eastman’s Macaroni & Cheese, and the blackberry-blueberry cobbler shown on the cover.

A Jane Goodall collage, from Saving Pan.

Over the course of three years, the students gathered to test recipes on Friday nights. “The Friday I joined, they were doing the Michelle Obama recipe. So, I was like, ‘This is even cooler than I thought,’” said Emma Francioch, 14.

To avoid the chaos of too many cooks in the kitchen, half of them cooked, while the other half worked on the collages of the chefs that illustrate each recipe. They learned basic cooking skills from each other, through trial and error, and from the hosting parents. “They even had to clean up their own mess!” said Shanta Abbruzzese, Brooke’s mom.

“I was a little bit interested in cooking prior to doing this cookbook, but I didn’t have a lot of skills,” said Willa Gagnon, 15. “And now I feel like I can go into the kitchen and look at a recipe—or not—and I can make food that my whole family wants to eat.”

The girls had some surprise favorites, including lime-tofu wraps, Moroccan chickpea soup, “Soba Sensation,” and Michael Pollan’s “Any-Veggie Frittata.” Stokes, who usually doesn’t like coconut, was surprised by how yummy the roasted cauliflower in a creamy coconut fennel sauce was. (Chef Roy Farmer at the Green Door in Ottawa contributed the recipe.) “I need to make that again. I just love this recipe!” she said.

The cauliflower recipe was a touchstone for the students, teaching them that even when they think they don’t like an ingredient they should try it in a new iteration. “A lot of people in the group were like, ‘Noooo! I don’t want to eat it—I don’t like cauliflower!’” said Abbruzzese. “But then, everybody’s like: ‘You have to try it!’ And I don’t think there was a single person who wouldn’t eat it.”

Many of the girls became vegetarians on and off throughout the project; Abbruzzese became a vegetarian because of the cookbook—and remains one today. “I fly fish and she’s prohibited me from keeping what I catch. I have to throw it back,” says Brooke’s father, Chris Abbruzzese.

Working on a project that took three years to see through was tough. “There were definitely times where I was like, ‘Is this really gonna happen?’” said Stokes.

Ultimately the project taught them not only how to cook and work effectively in a large group but the value of persistence and dedication.

That said, they think their next project for the Grant Park Chapter of Roots & Shoots won’t be quite as ambitious. “We’re starting to get busier, and we’re starting to get, like, more homework,” said Stokes. “Before the book came out, we didn’t even know what finals week was!”

Saving Pan is available for purchase online at SavingPan.com, or at A Children’s Place Bookstore in Portland.

The post Portland Teens Create Cookbook to Save Orphaned Chimps appeared first on Civil Eats.

Earlier this year, she released “Look and See,” an unconventional documentary about Berry’s life. In the film, Berry himself is elusive, never actually appearing on camera in the present day. Instead, the film is filled with still images of Berry on his farm in the early years, television footage from the 1970s of him opining about changes to agriculture, and his resonant voice floating over gorgeously shot images of Kentucky farmland.

Dunn knew early on that Berry would not agree to be filmed. But rather than abandon the project entirely, she took this as a creative challenge. As a result, “Look and See” offers a view of the world from Berry’s eyes instead. Over the course of the film, you meet Berry’s daughter, Mary; his wife, Tanya; and numerous Kentucky farmers whose struggle to stay on the land in the face of consolidation is the subject of much of Berry’s work.

The film also captures Berry’s debate with Earl Butz, the now famous U.S. secretary of agriculture under Nixon and Ford, and a major proponent of industrialization of agriculture. In his rebuttal, Berry pays homage to the “traditional farmer” who “first fed himself off his farm and then fed other people; who farmed with his family, and passed the land on to people who knew it and had the best reason to take care of it. That farmer stood at the convergence of traditional values. Our values. Independence, thrift, stewardship, private property, political liberty, family, marriage, parenthood, neighborhood. Values that declined as that farmer is replaced by technologies whose only standard is profit.”

“Look and See,” which has been screened in communities across the country through TUGG (a theatrical booking site for indie films), debuted on Netflix in October. Civil Eats spoke to Dunn about telling the story of Berry’s life, her unconventional filmmaking methods, and why she sees Berry’s novels as the heart of his oeuvre.

When did you first read Wendell Berry’s writing and what imprinted itself upon you?

I read The Unsettling of America in high school. My mom is a [corn] geneticist—and very much an environmentalist, an agricultural person. Because of that, I was interested in these ideas. And then I read more of his stuff in college; he was a writer I really loved. But when I was working on my first feature, “The Unforeseen,” [executive producer] Terrence Malik wanted me to find some voices to include in the film … So I delved deeply into his work—mostly his poetry. And then I reread The Unsettling. And I really fell in love with his poetry and his work again.

And why did you decide to make this film, so many years later?

When we toured “The Unforeseen,” I was really surprised by how few people knew who Wendell Berry was. I feel like more people should be familiar with Berry’s work.

Can you talk about what it was like to make a film about Berry without including him in it? And I take it that wasn’t your choice?

It was the constraint he put on me. He is really anti-screen: no computers, T.V., or movies. He thinks it contributes to the decline of literacy and the deterioration of imagination. And I knew that, so I knew this would be a challenge.

He didn’t want to be filmed—it makes him feel so inauthentic. So, in those early conversations, I said to him, “I understand. I actually think that’s very insightful information about you. If we could just do audio interviews, that would be interesting. I want you to point me to what we should see.” So I accepted that constraint. And it was his wife Tanya who would say, “This is who you should talk to.”

Can you say anything about the black-and-white still photos at the heart of the film?

James Baker Hall, one of Wendell’s dearest friends, passed away in 2009. He was a writer and professor at the University of Kentucky, and he took all these gorgeous black-and-white photos. His widow had boxes and boxes of never-before-seen negatives and when we found them, I thought, “There’s a film here that we could piece together.” It’s sort of impressionist-style.

Photo by James Baker Hall.

Who are the farmers you interview throughout, and why do you choose not to name them in the course of the film?

Everyone in the film is a friend or a neighbor of Berry’s. Sometimes I watch the film and think, “Maybe I should have named them.” Form is something I’m constantly experimenting with. There are standard things you’re supposed to do in a documentary. I had it with their names for a long time. Then I thought, “It becomes so literal-minded.” I want people to feel something. We live in such an information age. I don’t want more data. I want something that’s going to transport me to a place. I’m making the film I want to see.

Can you speak about the beautiful wood engravings that start each chapter of the film?

Wesley Bates has illustrated a lot of Wendell’s books. [Co-director/producer] Jef Sewell, my husband, did the visual design. I wanted it to be chapters like in a book. So he said, “We have to find Wesley Bates.” He’s an amazing, vibrant artist in his 60s, who lives in Toronto. They’d have conversations over the phone and then he’d sketch something and then we’d give him feedback.

Throughout the film, we hear Berry reading his poems. How did you choose which poems to include?

It was really tough. “The Window Poem” was something I had read many years ago and that was really in mind when we started the film. It’s about the tension between the grit of our world and the patterns. My approach was to go to Henry County and do a portrait of this place. We’d go and I’d spend a few weeks, find what stories were compelling. We’d shoot all the footage and then you edit it and you find narratives—poems to frame things. This illustrates this idea, or that idea.

I was familiar with his essays and poetry, but I didn’t know that he also wrote novels. Can you say a little about them?

I honestly think his novels are the heart of his work. Basically, every single novel is told through the eyes of a different character in a small town in Kentucky. The more you read, the more complete a picture you get.

Berry is hard to categorize, and you get at that in the film where his wife Tanya says, “Some people would think he’s a novelist and some think he’s an essayist and some think he’s a poet…” How do you see him?

I see him as an artist. I think his nonfiction writing is infused with poetics all over the place. He sees segmentation or categorization as a function of the industrial mind. He very much believes in interdisciplinary thought. So I think he’s deliberately defying … category. He doesn’t want to be limited.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. “Look and See” is available on Netflix; the trailer is below.

The post Wendell Berry is the Quiet Narrator of this New Documentary appeared first on Civil Eats.

Ricardo Salvador, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and director of its Food and Environment Program, has spent a lifetime writing and talking about what an equitable food system might look like. On a recent, unseasonably sunny October evening at The Redd on Salmon in Portland, Oregon, he offered 800 food system innovators a reminder about the size and scope of institutional racism in our current food system, underlined the urgency of food justice work, and offered concrete actions we can all take to create positive change.

“We live in a very unjust, inequitable society,” began Salvador. “And the brunt of the inequity is felt through the food system.” Salvador detailed how we got here through the dark history of colonization—from the genocide of the myriad Native American tribes, whose land we stole, to the African citizens who were abducted and enslaved by the English and then the Americans.

“From the standpoint of an economist, the way you generate wealth is that you have access to at least one of the factors of production: land, labor, rent,” Salvador said. From the 1830s until the 1880s, he noted, we drove the original inhabitants of this continent off their land, quite literally depriving them of their food as well as their food culture.

“If you want to find some of the most immiserated human beings on the planet—not just in the United States—you would go to the concentration camps that we call the reservations,” Salvador said. “Here is where you will find people whose land was taken from them, and therefore their foodways, their ways of accessing the natural resources upon which they based their entire cultures and they way that they nourished themselves.”

Similarly, the Africans who were taken from their homeland and brought to the U.S. by the slave trade were driven against their will from their land and were forced to be the unpaid labor to allow white Americans to profit. “What those people were enslaved to do was actually to drive the beginning of what today we call Big Ag,” Salvador said.

Tragically, slavery has not disappeared. To this day, exploited farm labor is what keeps the cost of food so cheap in this country. “Farm labor is the most essential, the most important part of our food system, and the most undervalued,” Salvador said.

“We spend as little as 6 to 12 percent of our disposable income on food. That is usually quoted as something that we should be very proud of. But it should be a national shame,” he said. “It’s as if the workers involved in the food industry and nature that is required to produce the food were costs to be minimized…We need to find a way in which we actually value all of those resources—the land and the people that are involved.”

One of the long-simmering questions facing those striving for better food for all is how to go beyond voting with your fork? Is it possible to create a new food system that does not rely on exploitation?

Salvador made a case for profound system shifts like reparations, loan forgiveness programs, and immigration reform. He urged people to work independently and collectively to support these goals and the great food-system reform work that’s already afoot in our communities around this country. Among his suggestions:

• Support Reparations to the descendants of enslaved peoples. One place to start is to urge your members of Congress to support Rep. John Conyers’ (D–MI) bill, HR 40: Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.

• Reverse Black land loss through loan forgiveness initiatives that right historical systematic discrimination

• Support immigration and labor reforms that value labor and provide for dignified livelihood. For example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, and realistic transition initiatives such as the proposed “Blue Card” program.

• Get your elected officials to support U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree’s Local Food and Regional Market Supply FARMS bill, which will create local jobs, boost midsize farms’ sales, and increase access to healthy food.

• Get your elected officials to read and support Oregon senator Earl Blumenauer’s roadmap for an alternative Farm Bill “Growing Opportunities.”

• Get your local school district to sign onto the Good Food Purchasing program, a metric-based framework that encourages institutions to direct their buying power toward local economies, environmental sustainability, a valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition. (L.A. Unified School District, San Francisco Unified, Oakland Unified, and Chicago Public Schools have all already signed on.)

• Join the Health, Environment, Agriculture, and Labor (HEAL) Alliance, a coalition of organizations that are working on food justice, health, and sustainability in our food system.

In closing his presentation at the Redd, Salvador came back to his original question.

“Do we know enough to create a food system that does not rely on exploitation?” he asked. “Yes, we know enough to produce our food without exploiting nature, and we definitely know enough to produce our food without exploiting people…. Let me just put a very sharp point on it for you: The question is not really: ‘Do we know enough to be better?’ The question is: ‘Will we?’”

The post Race and Food are Intertwined. Here’s How We Can Do Better. appeared first on Civil Eats.

Farming in and of itself is a risky profession. “Gaining Ground” tells the stories of three farmers—two from rural Oregon and one from Richmond, California—who take additional risks to transition away from conventional, commodity farming to grow organic food. In the case of Doria Robinson, who returned to her hometown of Richmond to work at Urban Tilth, the mere act of growing sustainably farmed food in a food desert is a deeply courageous act. As she says in the film, “This is the front line, and somebody has to hold it.”

Filmmaker Elaine Velazquez and her wife, the producer and radio documentarian Barbara Bernstein, took five years to shoot and edit the film, which turned out to be a good thing. Just as they were about to wrap the shoot, two issues that had been looming in the background of their farmers’ lives—and their documentary—came front and center: The Chevron refinery in Richmond exploded and genetically modified wheat was found in an Oregon field.

The couple has been showing the film at events around Oregon and at film festivals across the country; it will have its Bay Area theatrical debut this weekend at the Food & Farm Film Festival in San Francisco. (The film will be shown on October 1 at 4 p.m.) Civil Eats spoke to Velazquez and Bernstein about the importance of forging rural-urban connections in the age of Trump, Richmond’s long tradition of farming, and why the next generation sees a future in organic farming.

What was the inspiration for making this film?

Elaine Velazquez: We wanted to do a project together. Barbara, who has done a lot of audio documentaries on the environment, came up with this thing about food and farmers. I’m from New York City, and I was like, “Who would want to be a farmer?”

Barbara Bernstein: And I persisted.

EV: Barbara, as producer, started finding people for me. We went to a couple events, including a food justice conference at the University of Oregon, which gave us some context. That’s where we met Harry MacCormack [the founder of Oregon Tilth, who plays a pivotal role in this film].

BB: Then we connected with farmer Vicki Hertel at Friends of Family Farmers’ annual lobby day in the state capitol. Vicki is so incredible.

EV: Vicki is just like she seems in the film: a plain talker.

Willow Coberly & Harry Stalford, Stalford Seed Farms.

You tell the story of these two rural Oregon farmers—the Hertels of Sun Gold Farm and the Coberly/Stalford family, who run Greenwillow Grains. But you also deftly interweave the story of Doria Robinson and her work at Urban Tilth in Richmond, California. How did you find Doria?

BB: We met her indirectly courtesy of our friend Steve Cohen, who I call the “food czar of Portland.” He had sent me a bunch of links to stories about urban agriculture. I was reading these articles and I got to this incredible quote by Doria Robinson. She was talking about food justice and the importance of teaching young people to grow food. So I tracked her down and we had an amazing conversation. It was so clear she was the person we were looking for.

From left: Jamie Le Jeune (S.F. Cameraman, color correction & mastering), Elaine Velazquez (Director), Doria Robinson (Urban Tilth Executive Director).

Contamination is a central theme of the movie and poses threats to both Urban Tilth and to Greenwillow Grains, who can’t sell to Asian markets for a while. [Japan barred all imports of Northwest wheat for four months.] Did these unanticipated events pose challenges for the film? And how do the farmers protect themselves from contamination to this day?

BB: They had destroy all their crops that summer. And before they felt confident selling their food to the community again, they needed to test their soil for heavy metals—a complicated and expensive test. It took over year to find the money to pay for the test. This process put all their garden activities on hold for a year.

EV: Doria talks about how the Chevon refinery fire was a real testament to regenerative agriculture. That doing these things to the soil—cover cropping, using lots of compost—actually does clean the soil. As far as protecting yourself from GMOs, I think testing the crops is the only way you can be sure. The whole GMO contamination incident made me really cynical.

There are several examples in the film of children returning to their family’s farming roots. For instance, Chris and Stefanie, Vicki’s children, both came back to work on the farm. You don’t see many instances where the younger generation wants to get into farming.

EV: Chris and Stefanie didn’t leave because they didn’t want to farm, but because it was so unprofitable. There was a theme in the film of coming back. Doria coming back to Richmond. Chris and Stefanie returning to Sun Gold. Harry and Willow—their kids are interested in farming, too.

Harry Stalford, the most conventional of farmers, radically changes course. What’s the takeaway for people who are trying to get through to Big Ag? Be persistent?

BB: It takes passion, courage, and persistence to make meaningful change and the challenge is huge. When we first interviewed Willow [his wife], the conventionals were subsidizing the organics, and when we finished the film, organic was really leading the farm.

Watch the trailer for “Gaining Ground” below:

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Top photo: Vicki and Charlie Hertel picking Strawberries at Sun Gold Farm.

The post How Organic Farmers are ‘Gaining Ground’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

“I’d leave the farm, drive 100 miles to the processor, pack the order myself, do the invoices by hand in the truck, and then go make 20-25 deliveries at restaurants around Portland,” said Neumeister, who will turn 70 next month. He would crash at a friend’s house in Portland, then do more deliveries the next day, on the way back home.

These 15-hour-days took their toll, but they also didn’t allow Neumeister, who has been raising pastured lamb since he took over his family’s flock in high school, any time to drum up new business or work on long-term sales strategy. And if he got a last-minute order from a Portland restaurant who suddenly ran out of lamb mid-week there was little he could do about it.

John Neumeister of Cattail Creek Lamb. (Photo © American Lamb Board)

“If a chef called me on Thursday, I might say ‘You know, I can see if UPS can deliver it,’” Neumeister said. Which meant trying—sometimes in vain—to stalk his local UPS driver, whose delivery route he knew by heart. If he couldn’t locate the UPS truck, Neumeister was out of luck.

“And then the restaurant would end up buying from one of my competitors.”

Now, thanks to the Redd on Salmon, a Portland food hub created by the environmental nonprofit Ecotrust, Neumeister not only has freezer storage space for up to 3,600 pounds of lamb in Central Eastside Portland, he’s got a stall for staging orders, an office space, and built-in distribution via B-Line trikes to Portland area restaurants.

Best of all, there’s no need to chase down UPS drivers. When a restaurant needs a special order of pastured lamb, as happened earlier this month with chef Joshua McFadden’s Tusk, all Neumeister needs to do is call B-line, who also does fulfillment for Cattail Creek.

“And I’m still sitting at my desk in my pajamas,” Neumeister explained by phone from his ranch. “I’m a very small company with no employees and I’m able to do a 7-days-a-week service.”

Since it opened last fall, the Redd has been a game-changer for Oregon’s small and mid-size farmers, ranchers, fishers, and food producers. That’s by design: Ecotrust conceived of the Redd as a way to help create a thriving local-food economy that supports what food systems experts call “the agriculture of the middle.”

B-Line trike leaving the Redd

Ag of the middle producers “carry local values,” said Amanda Oborne, Ecotrust’s vice president of food and farms, including the use of regenerative production practices, community engagement, and a commitment to serving local markets. And with support from the Redd, those producers will be able to operate at a scale that allows them to serve bigger outlets like schools, hospitals, grocery stores, and corporate cafeterias.

“In other words,” Oborne said, “They’ve got both the mindset and the capacity to help shift the whole food system.”

The Challenges in the Middle

Ag of the middle food producers, like Neumeister, need help. Too small to get distribution from mainline distributors like Sysco or Food Services of America, they badly need distribution and other infrastructure like cold storage (freezer and refrigeration); “dry storage” space to stash boxes, bubble wrap, and products; an affordable kitchen space where they can make their product; and offices where they can do paperwork.

The Redd is designed to meet all those needs, and it has already signed up five primary tenants—B-Line, FoodCorps, New Foods Market, SoupCycle, Wilder Land & Sea—and 75 subtenants. All 2,000 feet of cold storage—half freezer space and half refrigeration—is at capacity; dry storage space is at 80 percent capacity and office space is at 50 percent capacity.

For Neumeister, storing his lamb in the Redd’s freezer was a no-brainer, since 80 percent of his business is still in Portland. Though the price tag may seem steep to ranchers used to paying for industrial cold storage in Clackamas or further afield, Neumeister says he encourages these ranchers to look at the myriad other benefits of being stationed at the Redd.

“It’s hard to put a dollar value on the synergy between you and all the other members here,” Neumeister said. Since he’s been in the facility, Neumeister has generated new business without even trying. Wilder Land & Sea—a primary tenant at the Redd—is a distributor of regionally sourced seafood, grass-fed beef, pork, and pastured chicken who has existing relationships with Portland restaurants like St. Jack.

Wilder Land & Sea’s Nate Rispler (left) and Kyle Swanson.

Since chef de cuisine Jacob Harth was already ordering seafood from Wilder Land & Sea, it was easy for him to add on a standing order from Cattail Creek Lamb. “So [now] I sell to Wilder and Wilder sells to them,” Neumeister said. (Wilder also delivers Cattail Creek Lamb to restaurants that fall outside B-line’s 3-mile radius.)

Eike Ten Kley of community supported fishery Iliamna stages the family’s salmon share pick ups at the Redd, and Wilder has been instrumental in helping the Kleys get their wild salmon into brew pubs like Bridgeport, Ten Barrels, and Woodmere.

Carman Ranch, a cattle ranch in eastern Oregon owned by Cory Carman and David Flynn, also rents freezer space at the Redd. Because Neumeister and Carman’s products—grass-fed beef and pastured lamb—sit side-by-side on the freezer shelf, it makes sense to deliver both together. Both Neumeister and Carman have long-standing relationships with Portland restaurants, including Higgins (Carman) and Nostrana (Neumeister).

“If I can convince my customers to buy Carman Ranch beef, they do,” said Neumeister. So far, at Neumeister’s recommendation, both Coquine and Tusk have begun ordering Carman Ranch beef. Because Strother Hill, who does wholesale sales for Carman Ranch, works from the Redd, he met the guys behind Marukin Ramen (who make their broth in the SoupCycle kitchen) and hopes they’ll soon order pork neck bones (Carman Ranch also sells limited amounts of sustainably raised pork).

Growing the Local Food Community

This kind of synergy is what puts the Redd beyond the USDA’s definition of a traditional food hub: it’s an incubator for micro-businesses. There are over 350 food hubs around the country—in places as diverse as Durham, North Carolina, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. A traditional food hub is a central facility that does aggregation, marketing, and often distribution of agricultural products. But the Redd takes it a step further by offering all these other elements like storage for other locally made food products, food production areas, and office space. Jim Barham, an agricultural economist at the USDA, calls the Redd a food hub on steroids or—better yet—a “food innovation cluster.” (Another example of a food hub on steroids would be the hotly anticipated Hunt’s Point food hub, in the Bronx, slated to open in fall 2019.)

“The term ‘innovation clusters’ is typically associated with the tech industry,” Barham said. “But in the case of the Redd, it’s not just business-to-business but business-to-other service providers. So Ecotrust, as a nonprofit, can offer a lot of other services: connections to others who have experience with food safety, branding, developing new markets for your product.” Barham was so impressed with the Redd’s model that he recently flew 13 “value chain coordinators” from around the country (part of a USDA Rural Development initiative called Food LINC) to Portland so they could tour the Redd and see the innovations at work in the community.

At the Redd, sharing space—whether in a kitchen or the “dry storage area”—encourages a lot of cross-pollination. This synergy is part of why the 20-something owners of Ground Up PDX chose it as their production headquarters. A nut butter company that employs and mentors disadvantaged women, Ground Up PDX leases kitchen space from New Foods Market. This means that co-owners Carolyn Cesario and Julia Sullivan (and the women they employ) often rub elbows with Kristen Honey at Eat Fancy Plants, a vegan catering company that also leases kitchen space there.

Inside the Redd

“She’s always offering us tastes of her food!” Cesario said. “And she wants to use our nut butters. She’s developing a recipe right now.”

They also love running into Betsy Langton from Betsy’s Best Bar None, whose dry storage space is next to theirs. Betsy has given them advice on everything from distribution strategy to how to scale up production.

“That kind of advice is very valuable to us. If we were working in a silo, it would’ve taken us longer to figure these things out,” said Cesario.

Neumeister also makes the most of this proximity to other businesses. “If I have an issue that’s challenging me, I might say, ‘Have you encountered this—and how are you handling it?’” he said. “And so for me, that easy access has been valuable. We’re developing collegial relationships that are very real.”

In addition, this November, Ecotrust will pilot a new “Ag of the Middle Accelerator” to provide five food producers from economically distressed Oregon counties with business development support. The two-year project, which is funded by a rural business development grant, will help ranchers, farmers, and other food producers learn about business structure, tax accounting, sales and marketing, and food safety. Ecotrust will also help these producers apply for USDA’s value added producer grants.

Some of these producers—whose names will become public in November—already use the Redd; some have never set foot in it. “We’re basically developing an ecosystem of mid-scale producers that are really poised for growth,” Amanda Oborne said. Some tenants will be at the Redd forever—others may use it as a stepping stone on their ascent to world—or at least regional—domination.

In the grand scheme of things, Oborne sees the Redd as more than an incubator for small- and mid-sized food companies. “I don’t think of the Redd as confined inside those walls. What we’re really talking about is a thriving food economy.”

Civil Eats is a media partner for the Light up the Redd benefit, taking place October 5 in Portland; use the code “civileats” when you buy tickets to save $25 off the ticket price.

This article has been updated to include comments from the USDA.

The post Building Portland’s Local Food Economy at the Redd appeared first on Civil Eats.

The residents of Cantua Creek had just been hit with three-fold water rate hikes, which would mean paying close to $300 a month for water the local health department had found to be contaminated with high levels of disinfection byproducts, leaving it undrinkable. And residents had just been told that their water would be shut off if they couldn’t pay the new rates. Jagannath, who was then working for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), was outraged.

“In California, water is the epitome of privilege,” Jagannath explained by  e-mail. “At no point in this state’s history have rural residents—the people who do the work of growing, picking, and packing our agricultural commodities—had a say in where clean water should be directed. The odds have been stacked against small, local vegetable producers—and moreover against the health and safety of farmworkers—for the majority of California history.”

Standing around the local basketball court with colleagues from other farmworker advocacy organizations and environmental justice nonprofits, Jagannath realized an urgent need for these groups to come together strategically if they were to succeed in fighting the myriad injustices facing low-income farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley.

She got her wish. A year later, at just 26, Jagannath was hired to be the first coordinator of the San Joaquin Valley Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which she soon renamed the Community Alliance for Agroecology (CAFA). Now 28, Jagannath is known as a powerful advocate for farmworker rights, environmental justice, and political organizing in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

CAFA is a coalition of six environmental justice nonprofits—the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment; Californians for Pesticide Reform; Community Water Center; Cultiva la Salud; El Quinto Sol de America; and the Leadership Council for Justice & Accountability—all working to advance agricultural and natural resource policies in the San Joaquin Valley that heal the ecological system and build political power in rural communities.

“Jagannath took the Alliance to a different level,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, and one of the Alliance’s founders. “Her focus became ‘How do we work with small farmers of color in the valley? How do we build a good agricultural system from the ground up?’”

For two years at California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), Jagannath had worked one-on-one with farmworkers who had experienced pesticide exposure, harassment in the fields, and wage theft. She also worked on some larger environmental justice cases—like the episode in Cantua Creek—that were focused on communities’ access to fresh water.

In Cantua Creek, Jagannath worked alongside residents to secure subsidy funding from the state to defray their water bills, and arranged for state-funded bottled water to be delivered to each home (which is still happening to this day). Situations like the ones at Cantua Creek are symptoms of a larger illness, of course. Members of CAFA get farmworkers involved in building environmental justice solutions. For example, CAFA is currently advocating for legislation known as the Farmer Equity Act (AB 1348), which would give socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers increased access to environmental stewardship funds.

Formative Experiences in Farming

Jagannath’s parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from South India, settling in Mobile, Alabama, where Jagannath was born. Her dad worked at paper mills in the South, and Jagannath’s childhood was punctuated by moves from one rural mill town to another. Her parents divorced when she was five, and eventually her mom moved to Southern California, where she raised Jagannath and her brother.

“I fell in love with agriculture there,” Jagannath said. “I grew up wanting to farm.”

Jagannath may have been destined for a career in farming—after all, Janaki is the Hindu goddess of agriculture. “Overall, she is a central character in Hindu faith representing the ecological cycles of the planet upon which agriculture, and all of life on earth, depend,” said Jagannath. But during college at the University of California, Davis, Jagannath spent her summers working at Chino Nojo, a diversified fruit and vegetable farm in Rancho Santa Fe, California. She harvested crops—from carrots to strawberries—alongside the field crew and also worked at the farm’s vegetable shop.

She remembers picking the season’s finest heirloom tomatoes and then slicing them for Alice Waters at the back of the shed so she could taste them before loading up crates for Chez Panisse. She also recalls picking golden raspberries in late summer for Wolfgang Puck, who would drive all the way to the farm from Spago in Los Angeles.

Working at Chino Nojo opened her eyes to the need for more farms like it—those that provide long-term, stable work for farmworkers, and employers who see farming as a dignified occupation.

“I learned a lot of what I know about farming from one farmworker there, Rene Herrera, who has worked there for most of his life, and his father before him,” Jagannath said. “Those kinds of jobs are rare as a farmworker—because farms like the Chino family’s are equally rare and precious places.”

At UC Davis, Jagannath “got politicized,” she said. She discovered the vocabulary with which to explain the environmental downside of her dad’s jobs working at paper mills throughout the South—and learned about the concept of environmental justice.

By the time she graduated in 2011—with a B.S. in International Agricultural Development—Jagannath had worked with faculty to build the University’s Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems degree, which is considered a paradigm-shifting step for agricultural education in California. She went on to get a certificate in ecological horticulture from UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.

Fighting for Policy and System Change

At the Community Alliance for Agroecology, there are three main areas of work: policy advocacy (as with the Farmer Equity Act, or trying to establish a drinking water fund for rural residents paid for by Big Ag polluters), local agroecology organizing (such as holding farmer-to-farmer exchanges on agroecology and market enhancement), and building political power for systems change (they host trainings in the areas of food systems history, campaign planning, communications, policy advocacy and organizing). Right now, the organization’s biggest policy push is on the Farmer Equity Act, though the group has also been actively trying to get the state to channel some of the subsidies it grants to large dairies with methane digesters to “alternative manure-management strategies” like pasture-based dairies.

Promoting soil health is another major area of the Alliance’s focus. “Janaki knows all this information about soil health,” said Genoveva Islas, Program Director at Cultiva La Salud. “It really does help to highlight our connection back to the earth, and why it’s so important to preserve it.”

In addition to composting and manure management, CAFA is championing a practice known as orchard recycling. “Rather than growing an almond tree for 25 years and pulling it out and burning it in field, you take that material and blend it back into the soil,” explained Janaki. “We’re essentially trying to close the loop.”

But probably the most exciting part of CAFA’s work right now—especially in the Trump era—lies in developing a so-called “organizer academy” led by two United Farm Workers-trained organizers that will teach community members and farmworkers about food-systems history, campaign planning, communications, policy advocacy, and organizing. “The curriculum is taught in a way that’s evocative of the 1960s and 70s organizing strategies that were successful in winning some of the major battles for equity for farmworkers,” said Jagannath. So far, the pilot project has been for CAFA staff only, but Janaki envisions trainings for farmworkers in the near future.

“We can’t just advocate for reform and regulation,” Jagannath said. “Instead, we’re working on how to build political power amongst farmworker communities, to ensure our local and state elections have representation for communities of color who have been paying taxes but not receiving any of the benefits.”

Update: Jagannath will be attending UC Davis law school in the fall to study Environmental Law with a focus on agriculture and land use. CAFA is currently seeking a new coordinator.

The post Janaki Jagannath: Championing Farmworker Justice in the Central Valley appeared first on Civil Eats.

So in early January, members of ROC United’s national restaurant employer association, RAISE, wrote a letter to President-elect Trump asking for a pathway to citizenship. Inspired by their members’ courage, and their willingness to use their collective voice, ROC’s leadership banded together with Presente.org, the nation’s largest Latino online organizing group, and launched the Sanctuary Restaurant campaign.

In just two weeks—and without publicizing the campaign—65 restaurants across the country signed on to become Sanctuary Restaurants, prominently displaying window signs that they are a safe place for undocumented immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, and the LGBTQ community. Restaurants span the country and include Coi in San Francisco, Lil’s in Kittery, Maine, Honey Butter Fried Chicken in Chicago, and ROC United’s own restaurant, Colors, in Detroit and New York City.

In addition to publicly committing to a zero-tolerance policy for racism, sexism, and xenophobia, these restaurants are part of a rapid response network that will offer strategies for protecting targeted workers and informational trainings on legal rights. They have also created a number employees can text if they’re experiencing harassment or injustice: text TABLE to 225568.

ROC United’s effort is just one of many like it. As Trump is sworn is as the 45th president of the United States, the restaurant industry is understandably on the front lines: Trump made it crystal clear during the campaign that he wants to deport all undocumented immigrants and build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. This is serious news for restaurant workers, as the Pew Research Center estimates that at least 1.2 million in the U.S. are undocumented.

Chefs Take Action

In addition to longer-term planning to protect vulnerable communities from the Trump agenda, chefs across the country have taken the inauguration as an opportunity to do good in their own communities, by either welcoming them into their restaurants or hosting pop-up fundraisers for progressive causes.

Renee Erickson, the James Beard Award-winning chef from Seattle’s Walrus and the Carpenter and Whale Wins, is hosting a fundraiser at her Capitol Hill hotspot, Bar Melusine, on January 20. Funds will go to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry.

In Portland, Oregon, Le Pigeon and Little Bird will donate 5 percent of sales on Inauguration Day to three organizations that provide legal services for new immigrants. The same day, Chez Panisse, Mission Chinese, Zuni Café, and 21 other celebrated Bay Area restaurants will each serve a dish using manoomin, the wild rice cultivated by the Ojibwe people. Proceeds from that dish will go to Honor the Earth, a nonprofit that works to revive indigenous food traditions and has been deeply involved in the resistance at Standing Rock. The fundraiser, called #FoodStand, will extend to the Good Food Awards, which take place in San Francisco over inauguration weekend.

Cookie Grab & Other Fundraising Efforts

Other actions are already underway. In Portland, Oregon, 21 female bakers and chefs participated in a “Cookie Grab”  that raised $27,500 for Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette. The pink boxes, costing $50 and containing 21 cookies, sold out within 24 hours.

“It was a truly amazing response that we did not expect,” said Sarah Minnick, owner of Portland’s Lovely’s Fifty-Fifty and co-organizer of the Cookie Grab. “When the donation coordinator for Planned Parenthood called to see how she could help us promote the fundraiser, I told her we were already sold out and she cried.”

Now, Minnick and co-organizer Kristen Murray, the chef and owner of Portland luncheonette Maurice, plan to do the Cookie Grab two times a year to generate money and excitement for Planned Parenthood. In Bellingham, Washington a group of bakers and chefs organized their own Cookie Grab in early January, selling all 75 boxes of cookies for $40 each in 24 hours, earning $3,000 for Mt. Baker Planned Parenthood Healthcare Center.

Organizer Cara Piscitello of Acme Farms + Kitchen says they already have plans in the works for a second fundraiser to mark Trump’s 100th day in office. “Should any other crisis or extreme injustice arise before then, we are ready to take action and pitch in where we can,” said Piscitello.

“A lot of people we love and support—our family and friends—are in groups that are potentially going to be ignored or treated poorly, based on the new administration,” said Erickson. She chose the ADL as her charity for its longstanding commitment to protecting civil rights for all. The group’s efforts cover a broad range, including cyberbullying prevention workshops in schools across the country.

“There are so many issues and this one covered the most bases,” said Erickson. The ADL looks out for all people who might experience discrimination or hate.” She added that the fundraiser at Bar Melusine is an open house party—there is no exclusive invite list or $200 per plate fee. “This way we can invite people from all parts of our lives—some that will give lots of money and some who will give nothing at all, but who will be supportive.”

In addition to asking guests for donations, Erickson and her staff will auction off works by prominent Seattle artists Curtis Steiner and Jeffry Mitchell. Erickson’s main suppliers—Hama Hama Oyster Co., Willowood Farms, and Sea Wolf Bakers—are all donating food to the event; cases of wine and liquor will also be donated.

In Washington, D.C., an all-volunteer initiative called All in Service has recruited 124 restaurants and retailers to donate a percentage of their profits from inauguration weekend to local charities. Establishments include places like Tryst, Momofuku CCDC, and Glen’s Garden Market; charities will range from those that support the local migrant community to LGBTQ issues and homelessness.

Also in D.C., on January 19 and 20, Italian café and food emporium Via Umbria in Georgetown will host a $25 cocktail class, “Cheers to Powerful Women,” that will feature classic American cocktails inspired by powerful American women. All profits from the classes will go to Planned Parenthood. Pizzeria Paradiso’s Dupont Circle location will be serving pints from women-owned Denizens Brewing Company; 100 percent of all proceeds will go to the League of Women Voters.

Instead of fundraising, Seattle chef Josh Henderson is opening up two of his restaurants on inauguration day to feed the houseless or any Seattleite who needs a free hearty meal. “Trump represents disunity. I just want to show that there are people who represent the opposite of that. That there’s love and hope,” said Henderson. The restaurants, Quality Athletics in Pioneer Square and Canteen in South Lake Union, will serve spaghetti and meatballs, Caesar salad, garlic bread, and apple pie on Friday afternoon.

Most chefs are quick to say that doing good is not a partisan issue—or shouldn’t be. “No matter what our guests’ political beliefs are, they are welcome in our restaurants,” said Le Pigeon co-owners Gabriel Rucker and Andy Fortgang in a statement explaining their choice to donate to local immigrant rights groups. Yet, the statement continues, the climate for immigrants could be more hostile with the incoming administration. “The restaurant business has always been a major employer of immigrants and it is a group we care deeply about. Helping others is not a protest—it’s what we feel is the right thing to do.”

Even so, there’s bound to be pushback—customers who will insist they don’t go to restaurants for political reasons. But Katherine Miller, executive director of the Chef Action Network and senior director of food policy advocacy at the James Beard Foundation, thinks it’s wonderful that so many restaurants are finding creative ways to be there for their employees and all customers during a time of fear and tension.

“Restaurants are your communities these days. These chefs are leaders in their communities,” said Miller. “They’re really showing their support for American values—the things that make us great as a country.”

Photo CC-licensed by Jens Schott Knudsen.

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