Local Food and Really, Really Local Food (By Ian Santino, Summer 2012)

Local Food and Really, Really Local Food  (By Ian Santino, Summer 2012. Environmental Sustainability Consultant to the Center for Food and Culture. MS, Landscape Architecture/Ecological Restoration, University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Local food sure has been getting lots of attention recently, and for good reason.  Transporting food all over the place uses barrels and barrels of oil, which releases lots of that obstreperous little molecule we’ve heard so much about. Next these guys get into our atmosphere and keep radiation from escaping the earth, warming us up, causing what is inarguably the greatest current threat to human civilizations.

Additionally, food that is grown close to where it is eaten requires less processing and energy to ensure it will keep in shipping. Less processing means less food wasted and more nutrients retained; less freeze drying and refrigerated food trucking mean less energy spent and pollution released. That equals fresher, healthier food, and a cleaner, more resourceful environment.

Still the reasons for preferring a local food system continue. Because food is what we spend so much of our time and resources acquiring, when you introduce a local food economy into a community you create wealth. It’s for this reason that producing food locally “enhance[s] social equity and democracy for all members of the community.”^[1] When people have access to decentralized food systems, they become more self-sustainable, taking care of themselves rather than paying another to bring them what they need  – an empowering situation. Clearly local food is a rational response.

Eating locally is part of a slow realization our culture is having that wealth and sustenance aren’t just commodities that appear in the shelf of a store, but are sinuously tied to environmental conditions. When one environment can no longer sustain us, we import an environment from further away. This is precisely the case in American cities ­– we can no longer produce our food, clothing, and materials from where we live, so we ship them in from places where the land is still producing. However, such centralization of functioning ecosystems poses a dire problem. What happens when our dependency on imports leaves us without the skills to produce for ourselves, and we ­can not for whatever reason?

When I took a Permaculture Design Certification Course in 2008, I knew it was the solution.^[2]But I was a little uneasy with the over-reliance on domesticated animals and some over-used models for food. The first criticism is beyond the scope of today, and I will cover in later posts. The second is opposite.^[3] The apple guild and ‘chook’ (chicken) tractors were among the first designs given for most situations. These aren’t bad designs, but they do impose non-native species, and not a great variety of species, at the expense of the local environment in a sort of ecological imperialism. And when they are used extensively in each case and on a large scale, you end up replacing local, microenvironments with one singular system. What would the world look like if in South Carolina we had the same plant and animal communities as Maine?

So what’s really, really local food?  It is not only eating food that was produced locally, but food that is from local, native species. These local species evolved to the geography and chemistry of the surrounding environment.  They offer unique, interesting local flavors, and connect people to the history of the land they live on in a stronger way than wheat and pigs do.

And what happens when local agriculture uses more local species? Biodiversity increases, not only on a genetic or species level, but also on the level of ecosystems. Biodiversity is important because it offers more options and more back-up systems should one fail. Biodiversity is spreading your eggs out between multiple baskets.

Now, it’s not like we can all go out and start foraging, and the functioning ecosystems we have left wouldn’t be able to support such a large influx of consumers.  We won’t be able to stop using wheat, corn, oats, and soybeans either, but we can use them in conjunction with native fruits and vegetables to create a reliable but still locally unique agriculture, where local, edible species are planted in garden areas. This type of food culture gives different locales – literally – unique flavors. Visiting a new place becomes an immersive experience into the art of plant communities that nature has been painting for the past 2.5 billion years. Culinary Tourism^[4] becomes a way of sampling different bioregions and becoming intimate with particular ecosystems.

The implications of eating more native species are far more complicated than most other dieting fads. If you live in Ohio, you can’t just go to your local supermarket and buy paw-paws, serviceberries, elderberries, American hazelnuts and groundnuts. And it’s also a no-no to go into the wild and take all you can. Our ecosystems unfortunately can’t handle that right now. However, you can plant native, edible species on your property. I am currently working on a website to help people do just that – along the lines of vegan permaculture – which I will hopefully have up within the year. But for now? Plant a native fruit tree. And then share the produce with your neighbors.

To wrap up, adopting local agriculture is an important step for our cultures in order to mitigate environmental collapse and empower communities to sustain themselves. But rather than rely on a bland model of food production that relies on the handful of plant species that we are currently culinarily accustomed to, we can start eating local species. Attempting to do so will be a learning experience, as one can’t just plant and harvest trout lilies the way they do tomatoes, and it isn’t feasible to ship them across the country to new markets. But the experience of working with the trout lilly is fundamentally different than growing a tomato. You see its connections; not just tomato-honeybee-humans-pests connections but the trout lilly-bumble bee-crested honey creeper- orhid bee-sphecid wasp-eastern swallowtail-sphinxmoth-human connections. The trout lilly gives a new meaning to the word ‘home.’ It broadens the term to mean not just where we live, but where we eat and harvest, and we are connected to the environmental history of where we live. It’s like getting in touch with your grandfather; only it’s not your grandfather but your ecosystem’s great-great-great grandfathers.

(Photograph of Ian Santino, Thanksgiving 2016. With a bowl of Brussel sprouts.)

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^[1] Feenstra, Gail. “Local Food Systems and Sustainable Communities.” American Journal of Alternative Agriculture 12 (1997): 28-36.

^[2] Permaculture, in a rudimentary explanation, is a design method applied to agriculture that maximizes connections between elements and the uses of each cog in the blueprint.

^[3] To be fair, it was and is only some permaculturists that were guilty of this criticism. Permaculture does entirely support adapting agriculture to local conditions.

^[4] Thanks to Lucy Long, director of the Center for Food Studies and my life 1986 – present.

Apples and Sustenance--Johnston Fruit Farms

Apples and Sustenance--Johnston Fruit Farms

There are some people in the food industry who see their work as more than a business. They see it instead as a way to give hope, to create community, and to contribute to making the world a better place. Martha and Fernando Mora of Johnston Fruit Farms in Swanton, Ohio are some of those people. Producing food--and it’s food, not “product”— that’s natural and local is their passion and their life’s work. Martha grew up on these farms, assisting in the daily operations, and learning how hard and sometimes tedious the work can be. As an adult, she ran the strawberry part of the farm, and later gave up a job with reasonable hours, benefits, and a stable salary, to assist her father. She and her husband now run the farm, focusing on a diversity of fruits and vegetables. The apple orchard is the most prominent aspect of the farm, and they specialize in varieties that are not likely to be found in

supermarkets. That includes both heritage apples and newer ones that are being developed locally in partnership with the Midwest Apple Improvement Association, including one of their own. Their list of varieties is too long to include here, but is on their website (ww.johnstonfruitfarms.com/Apple-Varieties.html). While I was visiting in early July, they were selling a summer apple, Lodi, that is sour but good for applesauce.

They also have a pumpkin patch and blueberries for those who want to pick their own. A petting zoo behind their house is an added attraction for the school groups and families (and some adults, like myself….), and several festive events during the year make Johnston Fruit Farms an understated culinary tourist destination. One of their events brought Johnston’s Fruit Farms to my attention several years ago. Every September, they host a Fall Festival—“Apples for Everyone”—in which they team up with local food banks to raise funds and pick apples. Since 2009, they have donated over 140,000 pounds of apples to the cause. During the event, they also sell more varieties of squash than I have ever seen. Also, apple cider that they press themselves. The seven ciders they sell come from their own apples and are their own blends. These are only available there at the farm. They used to sell through local groceries, but a 2004 law required that commercially-sold cider needed to be pasteurized. They try to keep everything natural and small-scale, so had to make some hard choices.

This isn’t meant to be an advertisement for Johnston Fruit Farms, although I don’t mind if it does bring them some recognition. In my years of research and scholarship on food, I have visited numerous farms, orchards, restaurants, and groceries. I rarely come away so heartened that there is hope in the world, that there are still good people out there doing good things. Martha and Fernando are some of those people. Their farm offers sustenance—both literal and figurative—and really, really delicious apples.

(Johnston Fruit Farms   419-826-1453    Airport Highway, 1 mile west of Swanton    

http://www.johnstonfruitfarms.com)

Food on the Fourth of July

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Food on the 4^th of July.(July 13, 2018)

The 4^th of July is not usually thought of as a food holiday. Officially commemorating the founding of the nation, it is, however, usually celebrated with food. Those foods signify summer as much as they do American-ness—hot dogs and hamburgers, ice cream, watermelon (I know that can signify racism also, but for many, it primarily marks the summer season), maybe sides like corn on the cob, baked beans, coleslaw and potato salad. Sharing those foods with others in festive meals on this holiday can give us a sense of togetherness and belonging to a larger community, the nation (to borrow from Benedict Anderson’s concept of nations as “imagined communities.”).

I’ve been reading a lot recently about culinary nationalism, the use of food in creating a national identity (See Priscilla Ferguson and Michaela DeSoucey). Food offers practices that can be shared, giving a commonality to a diverse group of people. That food can also be used to project particular images of the nation (called gastrodiplomacy when that is done officially by a government).

 

These concepts were in the back of my mind as I celebrated this past 4^th of July with friends, food, and fireworks in small towns in the eastern Midwest (Ohio). As the nation is awash with rhetoric about the dangers of “foreigners” and immigrants—as well as the very real impacts of that rhetoric on families being torn apart--the food that we were eating speaks a different story. It reflects the immigrant character of the nation and celebrates it. The two images here sum that up. Playing with red, white, and blue colors in food automatically points to the American flag and says patriotism. If we look more closely at the foods in those colors, though, we see the diversity that has always been both the reality and the strength of our nation.

The first one is made of fruit and white chocolate covered pretzels. Blueberries are indigenous, but cherries originated in Europe (eastern and southern) and western Asia, while red raspberries were brought to N America from eastern Asia by prehistoric peoples (wild black raspberries are indigenous). Strawberries in their wild form are indigenous to the Americas, but the kind we eat today were created in the 1750s in France (Brittany) from wild fruits brought from the European colonies in North America and Chile. Pretzels are said to have originated with an Italian monk in 610AD who made them for Lent of unleavened dough to resemble a child’s arms in prayer. Now claimed to be the oldest known snack foods (in the west, that is!), pretzels’ religious meanings are forgotten, and they are touted as one of the healthier snacks. The chocolate covering them? Originated in central America and “given” to the world by Christopher Columbus (in what’s referred to as the “Columbian Exchange.”). Assembled together into a flag shape, these foods suggest a more accurate account of American national identity than what is promoted by certain politicians and media manipulators today.

A similar dish suggests an even more obvious statement of the actual diversity of American identity. Again a flag shape, the layered bean dip is a popular staple for parties and gatherings. It consists of refried beans (mashed, cooked pinto beans), tomatoes, shredded cheese, sour cream, maybe chopped onions and jalapeno peppers, and is served with tortilla chips. Most Americans would immediately recognize this dish and associate it with popularized adaptations of Mexican food. While we could definitely talk about cultural appropriation here, we can also see this dish as representing the Hispanic contributions, not only to American food culture, but to American society in general. That it is part of the celebration of the nation says something about who belongs to the nation. We all do. This kind of “banal nationalism,” as Michael Billig calls it, demonstrates that on an everyday basis, the American people draw from the rich resources offered by the diversity of cultures that live here. Now if we can extend that appreciation and respect to the people associated with these dishes, we will truly be able to celebrate.

(I don’t usually include references on blog entries, but if you want to read more about the ideas I mentioned, here are the sources. There are lots more…..)

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, UK: Verso.

Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London, UK: Sage.

DeSoucey, Michaela. 2010. Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union. American Sociological Review 75(3): 432-455. 

Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. 2010. Culinary Nationalism. Gastronomica 10(1):102-109.