Thus far, all of these wise, talented and dedicated people have been navigating by the stars in an endless sea of industrialization and fake food.  Despite hundreds, perhaps thousands of books and essays and dissertations and lectures on the subject, there has been no guidebook, no specific “set of instructions” on how to fix our broken system.  To the rescue comes Phillip Ackerman-Leist, a professor at Green Mountain College in Vermont, with Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable Food Systems, a part of a series sponsored by the Post Carbon Institute called “The Community Resilience Guide Series.”  Other books include one on locally-targeted financial investing and another on creating local energy projects.

A dense and scholarly work, Rebuilding the Foodshed is no end-table reader.  This is a serious instruction manual that lays out in detail where we are, how we got into this food mess, and what we need to do to fix it.  Ackerman-Leist analyzes the problem in depth, dividing it into three parts: first laying out the dilemmas; then scrutinizing the “Drivers for Rebuilding the Local Food Systems” such as energy, environment, food justice, biodiversity and more; then offering “New Directions,” including a very important section on “Bridging the Divides,” because surely no progress is going to be made until the animosity between urban and rural, between small scale and large scale, between all or nothing.

The destination is one we all understand, even if we can’t quite see it.  It’s a place where, as Slow Food likes to say, our food system is “Good, Clean, and Fair.”  By “good,” we mean that the food is good tasting, good for you, and good for the environment.  “Clean” means there is nothing the food that isn’t food (and if it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it isn’t food now).  And by “Fair” is the idea that that the people who produce the food are to be justly compensated for their efforts while the prices at the market are still approachable.  While nearly every organization and prominent individual in the global effort to rejuvenate our food system gets at least passing mention, the author singles out Slow Food’s Terra Madre gatherings for special attention:

Slow Food International has probably set the bar for the most creative and celebratory integration of “grassroots” and “global” through its biannual gathering of food communities and producers.  Dubbed “Terra Madre,” this enormous gathering highlights, celebrates, and fortifies the cultural centerpieces of community based food systems around the globe.  Slow Food’s dual emphasis on local economy and global exchange is exemplary in a polarized era of local versus global.

That polarization is perhaps the biggest obstacle to overcome, mostly because while the forces on the side of “local” have the passion, it’s the globalized food industrial complex that has the power.  Still these are ideas that bridge virtually every political, societal or religious boundary.  They are ideas of ownership, of responsibility, of caring for each other and the land.

One of the solutions Ackerman-Leist says is vital is the understanding that a healthy Foodshed is not an all/nothing, either/or proposition.  Too often we get so caught up in our belief systems, our views on how something must be, that we tend to vilify any obstacle as deliberate blockade put in place by adversaries (Surely I am as guilty of this as anyone).  He quotes geographer Nathan McClintock:

“Ultimately, it has to be a ‘both/and’ resolution.  The concept of food miles is breaking down. Fetishizing local for some for some spatial consideration is problematic.  It’s a naïve way of understanding the food system….  Let’s reframe it in terms of supporting local economies, creating jobs [and] educating about food, health and nutrition.  There is something important to the resilience concept in this regard – we diversify our financial portfolios, so why not diversify the food system?”

The key idea here is indeed resilience, the capacity to survive change.  How do we adapt our culinary traditions and our cultures to deal with the fluctuations that come with massive population, food insecurity and justice, and global climate change without compromising identity and authenticity?   Using Rebuilding the Foodshed as a text book, we can at least chart a course.

This post originally appeared on the author’s blog.

This is how I feel about Elissa Altman.

I am far from the first to say so.  Altman was once described as “The illegitimate love child of David Sedaris and MFK Fisher,” which is also quite fitting, since she approaches her craft the way she does her life, with humor and love, and not without some occasional sarcasm.

She wields a sharp wit and an even sharper eye for detail in her new memoir, Poor Man’s Feast – A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking (Chronicle, 2013).  Based on her James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name, which by the way is a must read for anyone who is serious about food, the book takes us on a meandering journey through the last couple of decades of Altman’s food-obsessed life, centered on discovering love and rediscovering simplicity.

It’s not that the stories she relates are new or particularly revelatory.  It’s in how she tells the tales – the instantly relatable language that draws a reader in and makes her your best friend.  Altman’s prose transports you through time ands space and makes you immediately familiar with times and places and dishes you may never have seen.

The reader does not need to know firsthand the SoHo neighborhood of New York to be instantly transported there in the 1980s, “Each street decorated with art illegally painted on city property in the middle of the night, showcasing a frustrated, apoplectic Reagan under the words ‘Silence=Death.’”  One needs never to have set foot in a Dean and DeLuca store to feel the vibe of Altman’s former place of employment, at once alive with a passion for great food and awash in the era’s yuppie snobbishness, and still blissfully unaware that within five years AIDS would take half their male employees.

Far more joyous though is the love story she intertwines with occasional recipes and reminiscences of their origins.  We learn how she found the love of her life, Susan, on an internet dating site, and how one would take the train to visit the other every Sunday as their romance blossomed.  They share a passion for good food, but Susan’s Spartan sensibilities would eventually tame Altman’s lust for flashy, complicated “tall food.”

What Altman knows, and too many food writers forget, is that life is not all soufflés and cinnamon, and too often John Lennon’s lesson that “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans” can be brought startlingly back to the forefront of conscience.  When her war-hero father was broadsided by some uninsured teenagers one sunny afternoon, she remembered a trip with him through the terminal at Grand Central Station.  Pointing at the ceiling, the former navy pilot showed his teenage daughter that the designers had messed up – they painted the constellations of the stars backwards.

“‘Does that mean the world is upside down?’ I asked.

“He looked at me hard and put his hand on my shoulder.  ‘Isn’t it?’”

As an aside, it’s bears noting that Altman lives in Newtown, CT, and she was terribly shaken, as were we all, by the tragedy there last winter. In her personal take on the aftermath, an essay she titled “Getting Back into the Kitchen,” she told of watching the customers come and go in her favorite butcher shop, Butcher’s Best, in downtown Newtown. Enthralled by the human capacity to carry on in the wake of unspeakable heartbreak, she watched as even the parents of victims would come to order their holiday roasts and would be given a comforting hand from the owner, Steve Ford.  “I realized what I already knew:” writes Altman, “That feeding people through joy and withering sadness and celebration and despair is the business of life. It defines us. It’s the way we move forward, and the way we mark our days. It’s the way we nourish ourselves, and our hearts, and the hearts of those we love.”

Originally published on Real Food for All

As a child in England, Bloomfield wanted to be a Policewoman, but circumstances conspired as they so often do and she followed her sister into cooking school.  Unlike her sister, though, Bloomfield found her way into the profession and on to New York, where her no-nonsense take on real food has won her accolades piled upon accolades.

This is not to say that her recipes are plain, nor are they always simple.  In fact she refers to many of them as her “fussy recipes,” ones that need to be followed to the letter (which I admit has always been difficult for me).  She is very particular about a certain set of ingredients, notably extra virgin olive oil and Maldon salt, a particular brand harvested by a 200-year-old company from the Blackwater river estuary in Essex, in the south of England.  Somewhat similar to the now-commonly available Fleur de Sel, its light, crunchy flakes impart a cleaner seasoning than typical table salt.

Somewhat counterintuitively, considering her heritage, Bloomfield loves chiles (which of course endears her to me all the more) and frets in her introduction that she may have included them in every recipe.  She didn’t, but did include them in many and uses them with abandon.  In one, a variation on a traditional Thai beef salad, she includes “2 large Dutch or other spicy long red chiles, thinly sliced (including seeds)” to enliven her “Skirt Steak with Watercress and Chiles.”  In her seafood salad, she adds a particular favorite, “2-5 dried pequin chiles,” very small peppers that carry a deceptive fire.

What Bloomfield has become particularly well known for though is her passion for what has come to be called “nose to tail” cooking – utilizing every possible part of the animal and leaving nothing to waste.  Many Americans still wince at the idea of lambs head, pig’s snout and beef tongue, and that has always puzzled me.  How is it, for example, that most people in this country never have and never would try, say, beef tongue, but that same cow’s groin muscle is practically a delicacy?

It’s all upbringing, I suppose.  We eat what we’re used to eating and follow Lin Yutang’s axiom that patriotism is the love of food we ate as children.  So perhaps it’s Bloomfield’s working-class ethos that forces her to make a silk purse of a sow’s ear (or more accurately, a fried pig’s ear salad).  A protégé of legendary London chef Fergus Henderson, she notes that she loves his ability to create food that “makes you wonder.”  Not about what strange piece of offal might be on your plate – they’d both tell you that straight out – but about what that one puzzling flavor is, that one lingering aroma that’s familiar enough that you could identify it if it weren’t on the tip of your tongue.

A side note about the design of the book, which despite having friends who make their living at it I must confess I rarely pay attention to, but this one really caught my eye.  Sure there are the requisite food-porn photos complete with zero depth-of-field and vibrant color that makes you almost smell the dish, but there are also clever, simple drawings that give the impression you’re not just reading a cookbook, you’re taking a peek inside a personal journal, one with plenty of secrets.

French food writer Maurice Sailland (a.k.a “Curnonsky”) assured us that “Cuisine is when things taste like themselves,” and that being so he’d have loved April Bloomfield, whose culinary sensibilities are as old-school as the masters themselves, but her modern approach makes even the complex attainable.

This post originally appeared on the author’s blog.

We have our pantheon of deities in the Food Movement–the people and organizations who have had the most impact on our culinary landscape. We have discernible cuisines in this country, certainly more so than a century ago, thanks to James Beard, Julia Child, and Alice Waters. Carlo Petrini and Slow Food have helped us understand that food and pleasure must be connected to awareness and responsibility. Eric Schlosser showed us the dangers of our “fast food nation” and Michael Pollan illuminated “the omnivore’s dilemma.”

All these and very many more have helped us to start remaking the food system writ large, and while there remains much to do, perhaps none in this Hall of Heroes has had more direct, hands-on, person-to-person impact on the food decisions of individual people than Will Allen. His new book, The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People and Communities, tells the story of how a sharecropper’s son–once a professional basketball player and the first African American to play the game for the University of Miami Hurricanes–found his way back to the land in Wisconsin. Once there, he shaped–and in a very real way–saved the lives of a generation of Milwaukee’s youth.

Before he could do that though, he first had to improve the land in the 2-acre plot he bought in a blighted section of Milwaukee’s north side. “At my farm market,” Allen tells us, “worms soon became the largest part of my workforce. To create food on damaged city land, I needed first to heal the soil.”

When his mother left their sharecropping land in South Carolina, there were 900,000 farms in the U.S. operated by African Americans. Now here he was, about to become one of the 18,000 that do so today.  That 98 percent drop, he seems to have concluded, might be a part of the reason that the urban landscapes are so blighted, that wholesome food is so scarce in these food deserts, that one in two African American kids born after the year 2000 will develop type II diabetes, and that 40 percent of African Americans over 20 years old already have high blood pressure.

His farm market became a magnet–a community center–where Allen had designed a program for the area youth to find employment and training through repairing and maintaining his greenhouses. From that seed of an idea grew what they’ve come to call an “Idea Factory,” and the food and farm-related programs that blossomed include: acid-digestion, anaerobic digestion for food waste, bio-phyto remediation and soil health, aquaculture closed-loop systems, vermiculture, small and large scale composting, urban agriculture, permaculture, food distribution, marketing, value-added product development, youth education, community engagement, participatory leadership development, and project planning.

The secret to Allen’s success, and the success of his mission, is something he calls “A World Without Fences.” When people told him he needed to erect fences to protect the center’s garden, he said: “No, you don’t. You have to do the harder work of engaging the community. You’ve got to make sure the neighbors know that the garden is their own, not yours.” When neighborhood kids threw rocks at his greenhouses, he didn’t chase them off–he invited them in.

It’s this kind of thinking that garnered Will Allen a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship three years ago, and just perhaps, it’s this kind of thinking that will quite literally save the world. Imagine if it were to spread far and wide–if we were all to say to each other, “Look, I’ve planted a garden here, and you’re welcome to share in the bounty. Meanwhile, how can I help you with what you’re doing?”

Idealistic?  Sure. But when Margaret Mead taught us that a few hardworking individuals can change the world, and that was really the only thing that ever had, she meant that lazy and pessimistic people never improve anything. Idealism does not mean doing the impossible, it means striving for better. With the planting of a single seed, Will Allen sent us all a message: Make things grow, teach what you know, learn what you don’t, and share everything.

When I was an intern in Santa Fe, New Mexico a thousand years ago, my mother sent me a three-page letter (yes, a letter. It was that long ago).  Worried that her underpaid intern son might be starving in the desert, she wanted to pass along her wisdom on how to cook and eat on the cheap.  It was called “Good Old Mom’s Three Days on One Chicken and Other Depression Folklore.”  It kept me fed that long hot summer and later became a family treasure.

I was reminded of it recently when I had the opportunity to read An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler.  Ms. Adler has certainly made her bones as a cook, having worked in such legendary establishments as Chez Panisse in Berkeley and at Prune in New York.  It may have been there, under James Beard award-winning chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton that she found her voice as a writer.  Hamilton after all is not only among the most talented chefs in New York, but is also the author of the widely acclaimed memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter–a must-read itself.

An Everlasting Meal is part memoir, part cookbook, and part self-help manual for all who wish to cook better with less; and these days, who is not among that group?  She points out, for example, that “Minestrone is the perfect food. I advise eating it for as many meals as you can bear, or that number plus one.”

The book is full of that kind of clever phrasing. Adler clearly shares my fondness for MFK Fisher, and can channel her at will, it seems.  Her writing is never pedantic, never preachy, always smart, descriptive, and leisurely.  It is as practical as the recipes she includes.

Her recipe for the classic Italian peasant soup is simple and uses lots of ends and bits, like Parmesan rind and the end of a good piece of hard salami.  These and many other ingredients are simmered “45 to 60 minutes, until everything has agreed to become minestrone.”

Adler reminds us that “Some vegetables are persistently underrated.”  Here I’d have listed turnips, but she looks toward ones we take for granted, like onions and celery, and finds both comfort food–onion soup–and less common dishes like celery poached with lemon and topped with a handful of breadcrumbs.

There is good food to be had in the barest of pantries, Adler assures us, if we are resourceful enough and know the basics of how to cook.  In a chapter entitled “How to Weather a Storm,” we find recipes for chickpeas with pasta, spicy green beans, and fish cakes made from canned salmon or mackerel.  There’s even one called Salad for a Natural Disaster, made of ingredients she found in a chef’s earthquake kit, presumably while in the Bay Area.

Perhaps most helpful for the frugal but passionate cook is the inclusion of an appendix subtitled “Further Fixes,” where we learn two dozen or so suggestions for what to do when things have gone wrong.  Meat a little dried out?  Make crispy lardons.  Chicken undercooked?  Remove it from the bones, simmer in butter and chicken stock and toss with egg noodles.  Curry too spicy?  Eggplant too salty? Rice or lentils overcooked?  Adler includes fixes for them all.

In a time when we can all appreciate the value of frugality in the kitchen, when each of us can ring a wry smile from the Tuscan proverb she quotes: Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio (“We were better off when things were worse”), it is refreshing to know that with just a little effort, and a lot of love, delicious healthy meals are waiting to be awakened from their slumber in the back of the pantry.

Very few people in Iowa have had a greater impact on the movement to protect real food than Diane Ott Whealy. Co-founder of Decorah’s Seed Savers Exchange, she is the author of a new memoir detailing a life obsessed with seeds and soil, farm and family.

In Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver, Ott Whealy takes the reader gently by the hand and retraces a journey that began when her great-grandparents emigrated from Deuschendorf, Germany, and settled outside the tiny immigrant enclave of St. Lucas, in northeast Iowa.  Two seeds that they carried with them on that journey became the motivation for a life’s work in preserving and protecting heirloom seed varieties.  They were what became known as the German Pink Tomato, and Grandpa Ott’s Morning Glories.

Those morning glories are grown every year along the south face of the historic, well-preserved post-and-beam barn that is the center of Heritage Farm; the 890-acre spread a few miles north of Decorah that Seed Savers Exchange now calls home.  They are not alone there though, for on that spread they now grow out 10 percent of their massive seed inventory each year to protect and replenish the stock of many thousands of heirloom varieties.  The farm is also home to the historic orchard of over 700 apple varieties and 100 grapes, as well as a small-but-growing herd of endangered Ancient White Park cattle.

Ott Whealy’s pride and joy there, though, is the Preservation Garden for which Grandpa Ott’s Morning Glories are the backdrop.  Her “little slice of heaven” displays many of the organization’s most popular varieties of herbs, vegetables and flowers, but more importantly it stands as a testament to her lifelong commitment to a cause.

That cause is important, as Monsanto and other global conglomerates work feverishly to patent various forms of seeds, not with “plant patents” as has been done for centuries, but with “utility patents,” the same kind used, for example, for Microsoft Windows.  This gives them ownership not just of the seed but of all its progeny, thus making the ancient art/science of seed saving illegal.  To the degree that they accomplish this, we all become serfs in a land baron’s fiefdom.

Gathering introduces us to how Seed Savers started as a dream on a small farm in Missouri, shows us how it went from there back to the author’s ancestral home in the driftless region of Iowa, and how it has spread across the world through a contributing membership that numbers in the thousands.

First let’s get one persistent canard out of the way. Yes, the tomato is technically a fruit, not a vegetable, but for purposes of economics the USDA classifies it as a vegetable, and as such it is the second most popular vegetable in the nation after that other burger staple, lettuce. This is surprising in only one respect: A vast majority of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. every year ($5 billion worth), are devoid of the flavor and nutritive value they once had.

Sure, that plant your neighbor gave you that’s just beginning to enjoy the summer heat will produce lots of delicious, succulent tomatoes come August or September. But in his new book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit, two-time James Beard Award-winning journalist Barry Estabrook tells us why the modern factory-farmed tomato in most grocery stores is a poster child for nearly everything that is wrong with industrial agriculture.  A recent USDA study, he points out, says that the average tomato of today, the kind on your Whopper or Taco Bell taco, has “30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s.  But that modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one respect: It contains 14 times as much sodium.”

This is because the tomatoes grown in the fields in and around Immokalee, Florida, where nearly one third of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. are grown, are bred for one thing and one thing only. And it’s not flavor, and it’s not nutrition. It’s shipability, period. To qualify as grade A in that department, it needs to be a specific size, and a specific shape, and it needs to be picked while still green and rock hard. In fact, Estabrook relays a story of nearly losing control of his car as it was pelted with the tough green orbs bouncing off the back of a tractor-trailer on a Florida highway. The fruits hit the pavement at 60 mph and rolled to the gravel shoulder unscathed.

That truck was likely headed to one of the many enormous warehouses in the area, which “force-ripen” the fruit by smothering them with ethylene gas. This process does make them red, but it does not truly ripen them. Thus the sugars are nowhere near as developed as the ones in your back yard will be and the result is the mealy pink baseballs in your grocer’s produce section right now.

Our enormous appetite for having pretty much any food available to us at anytime of year has led to a system where yes, you can have a tomato in February, but the cost is a lot more than the $1.25/lb you’re likely to pay at your local Wal-Mart.  It comes at the cost of enormous environmental damage and shocking worker abuse. It utilizes thousands of migrant workers, some of whom are undocumented, and many of whom live and work in literal slave conditions. And since the muggy lowlands of Florida are not native habitat, a tomato plant there can fall victim to as many as 27 separate insect species and 29 different diseases, necessitating a plethora of chemicals that are as hard on the workers and the land as they are on the pests. Then there’s the 31 different fungicides in use. The list goes on.

Tomatoland is based on Estabrook’s James Beard Award-winning 2010 article “The Price of Tomatoes,” and is an in-depth investigation of what’s wrong with the modern tomato (and by extension, modern agriculture).  It is vital information that every conscientious eater–and parents of eaters–ought to know.  Hopefully, as more people read the book, they will begin to look beyond price, and start considering cost.

Food and politics often come together in peculiar ways.  It’s not that their coming together at all is unusual – far from it.  Civilization and politics are both a direct result of agriculture.  But these days food’s impact on political discourse can lead to some odd sights, such as free pizza being delivered to protesters in Madison, paid for by sympathetic activists in Egypt.

In a story first broken by Meredith Shiner at Politico, Madison landmark Ian’s Pizza got a call from a person in Egypt ordering pizza for the protesters in the capitol building around the corner.  Ian’s put out a tweet about it, and since then according to the article the little pizza place has delivered over 300 pies and given away over 1000 slices thanks to the support of people in 48 countries (last count) and all 50 states.  So shines a good deed in a weary world.

All this was begun by a single concerned Egyptian, who had just played a part in toppling a decades-old regime via protests that centered on–among other things–food prices.  Similar complaints led to similar results in Tunisia, and are now boiling over in Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya.  Here in the US the protests are about labor rights, but they too are beginning to spread, notably to Indiana where a (now former) Assistant AG called for the use of deadly force against the protesters.  There have been similar protests–though admittedly not as big yet–here in my home state of Iowa and in other states.

Not that the protests in Madison and elsewhere are about food supplies, but in so much as the Governor there is chipping away at the collective bargaining rights of the state workers, so he is doing it to all unions, and thus all workers.  Those who oppose the unions do not see this.  Witness the tea party counter-protester in Madison last Saturday who told the press he hadn’t been there earlier in the week because “unlike the union people” he couldn’t just blow off work and had to wait until the weekend–a weekend he has thanks to the very union he had just come to counter-protest.

Labor rights have a direct connection to food supplies and always have.  From farm workers to slaughterhouses to transportation to building those trucks and tractors, America’s thirst for cheap food has come at the expense of those who provide it and the enrichment of a relative handful of wealthy executives.  Farm employment in my part of the country has dwindled as farms have enlarged, and even those farms that do require large amounts of human resources are getting those hands from often underpayed, undocumented workers.

There have been a few success stories (witness the Coalition of Immokalee Workers), but for the most part our drive to lower the percent of our GDP spent on food, even while we triple the percent spent on health care,* has given us a nation where one in three children born after 2000 will develop diabetes.  One in two among minorities.  Cheap calories make unhealthy people.  There has to be a better way.

Ian’s Pizza may have inadvertently taken a small step towards that better way.  Granted they are indeed capitalizing on this circumstance, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.  And granted, pizza cannot often be construed as a healthful food (though sometimes it can).  But rather than constantly putting our national efforts into making food cheap enough for all our poor to be able to eat, why not expend at least a little of our efforts in making it possible for people to have the financial strength to buy good food?  Unions help make that possible.

They are no panacea, of course, but when you put your feet up or go out to your garden or out for pizza this weekend, thank the unions.  The employer-based health care system that the tea party fought so hard to protect?  Unions began that.  Social Security and Medicare?  Unions again.  Child labor laws?  Unions.  It’s not so hard to believe maybe unions would have a role to play in making our food system Good, Clean, and Fair.

* In 1960 the percent of US GDP spent on food was 17.5 %, and on healthcare it was 5.2%.  By 2008, those numbers had almost precisely reversed: food was 9.6% and healthcare 16.2%

Photo: Vince_Lamb viz Flickr

When I first started in the food business there were no rock star chefs. The late 80’s and early 90’s began a trend that created hundreds of almost-literal flash-in-the-pan celebrities and a handful of rightfully idolized geniuses. Today there remains a cult of personality around some chefs and TV cooks, but the attention is finally turning (and rightfully so) toward the farmers, without whom we chefs would be pointlessly clanking a lot of empty pans.

Enter Farm Together Now: A Portrait of People, Places, and Ideas for a New Food Movement (by Amy Franceschini & Daniel Tucker, Chronicle Books 2010). Here we find not rock stars but real people, true agrarians in the old sense of the word who understand that food, farms and fertility actually matter in a post-industrialized world. Twenty in-depth interviews with farmers of all types from across the country, accompanied by the illuminating and personal photography of Anne Hammersky, make for a revealing set of portraits–an album of the evolving American farm.

These are not all retro-hippie back-to-the-landers either, though there are a couple of those. In fact the first farm we visit is that of the Knopik family near Fullerton, Nebraska. Even if you’ve never met one, that image you may have in your minds eye of what a Nebraska farm family would look and sound like is brought to life vivdly as we learn how this family went from pre-chemical farming through the get-big-or-get-out boom and bust cycles to finally arriving on a path toward sustainability.

It has often been said that a good way to make a small fortune in farming is to start with a large fortune. President Kennedy called farming the only business where you buy at retail, sell at wholesale, and pay freight both ways. Yet Franceschini and Tucker bring us many examples of farming that raises people’s income, and their hopes.

The Georgia Citizens Coalition on Hunger, born of community organizing in the mid 70′s, it focuses on urban farms and farmers markets in underserved areas commonly referred to these days as “food deserts.” They built markets in public housing projects in Atlanta in the 90′s that focused on food that was not just locally grown, but economically and culturally appropriate too. Meanwhile Nuestras Raíces, started in 1992, is a coalition of youth groups, churches, probation departments, corporations and more that has built 10 community gardens, a 30-acre farm, and a café in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

In much the same way chefs would be nothing without farmers, farmers would be nothing without seeds, as they are the source of all bounty. In a world where corporate multinationals are succeeding at patenting life forms, Native Seeds/SEARCH is protecting heirloom seeds while supporting the native people of the high desert lands in Arizona and northern Mexico. In Farm Together Now we meet conservation director Suzanne Nelson and learn why protecting the seeds is so vital to life there, and everywhere.

These stories provide a convincing argument for the proposition that there is indeed life beyond chemical and confinement farming, and that the solution to the problems of agriculture lies in many strong hands working together to bring food to their neighbors.

Originally published on Real Food For All

You would never participate in slavery, right?

I know, it seems like a bizarre question in this day and age–of course no sane, civilized member of a modern society would take part in the indentured servitude of others. Lincoln ended all that 150 years ago, didn’t he? And of course you and I would never have anything to do with slavery in 2010.

The dirty little secret though is that millions of Americans are contributing to it each week and they don’t even know it. When you buy tomatoes at the local Publix, Ahold, Kroger, or Walmart, you become the last link in a chain that is attached to shackles in south Florida. We all know Walmart especially is well known for their tireless efforts to force suppliers to keep costs down for everything they buy. One of the results of this kind of business practice is that the wage that pickers are paid for those tomatoes has not gone up for more than 30 years. That wage is $0.45 per bucket of picked green tomatoes, or $0.0145 per pound. And that’s for the ones who actually do get paid.

Since 1993 the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been working unstintingly to improve these situations, with much success (such as seven convictions for slavery in the last 13 years), but there is still a long way to go. Following on the heels of their victorious boycotts of Yum! Brands’ Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Subway, they also concluded successful negotiations with Whole Foods and BAMCO. Eric Schlosser called their talks with Compass Group “the greatest victory for farmworkers since Cesar Chavez in the 1970′s.” But the work is nowhere near complete.

Earlier this year the CIW launched the Florida Modern Day Slavery Museum, an exhibit mounted on the back of a cargo truck like the one used to imprison farmworkers in the 2008 US v. Navarette slavery conviction. It has been touring the country, and will be touring parts of the Florida, Georgia, and Alabama later this month.

Now the CIW is turning its attention to those big grocery chains in an effort to get them, like the fast food chains before them, to commit to paying an additional penny per pound for the tomatoes they sell and to verify that the extra cent goes directly to the pickers. To help spread the word about this campaign, IATP Food and Society Fellows Shalini Kantayya and Sean Sellers have collaborated on a video that sums up the situation nicely.

The migrant labor issue is the vital subtext of America’s ongoing immigration debate. You may have seen the recent attention paid to it by Stephen Colbert and the “Take our Jobs” campaign.  Some of the workers in and around Immokalee are undocumented, most are here legally. Either way though, surely we can agree that they are all deserving of basic human rights while Washington works (or not) on the larger immigration reform debate. You can play your part by spreading the word, and by telling the management of your local grocery that you’ll no longer be a party to slavery, and you hope they won’t either.