Highland Hills is one of those down-and-out communities that’s allowed a glimpse of prosperity but never gets to taste it. The Dallas skyline looms large across the hazy north Texas horizon and is linked to this poverty-plagued neighborhood by a seven-mile ribbon of light-rail steel. Ledbetter Avenue crosses the train line passing vacant buildings, empty parking lots, and a dizzying array of “For Sale” and “For Jesus” signs. Named for the renowned guitar picker Lead Belly who did time in these parts–both in and out of prison–the Avenue speaks little in the way of promise, but wails the blues of poverty loud and clear.

Like cockroaches in a post-nuclear winter, the only commercial survivors appear to be pawn shops, Dollar stores, and fast-food joints. One supermarket, a Minyard whose cinder-blocked and windowless façade is about as inviting as the entrance to Stalag 13, is the only retail food source in the surrounding miles of food desert. But a lifeline from an unlikely source has arrived via a group of innovative academics. Paul Quinn College, a historically black college that sits at the neighborhood’s eastern edge is committed to lifting the Highland Hills’ physical and economic health with a combination of food, farming, and servant leadership.

To drive by the campus is to, well, keep on driving. There are no signature ivy-clad buildings or tree-shaded quads, in fact the first roadside buildings you see are in various states of demolition. Student enrollment plunged from 600 to 200 and the school has experienced on-going accreditation problems. At first glance anyway, and like the adjoining neighborhood it wants to help, Paul Quinn appears to be hanging on by no more than a pea tendril.

But first glances are deceiving, and pea tendrils are stronger than they look. And when your back’s to the wall and nobody, even your own government, will help you, you fight like hell, you do the unexpected. You take risks.

In this case not only did the college take risks, it committed a grievous sin, at least by Texas standards–they terminated their football program and turned their field into an organic farm. Yes, in the shadow of the Super Bowl, with the specter of Tom Landry looking down, and the holy glare of Friday night lights forever dimmed, they ripped up sacred turf and planted–goalpost to goalpost–peas, lettuce, carrots, strawberries, and more, lots more.

While the roar from the stands may have subsided, the field has not fallen silent. When farm manager Andrea Bithell announced to student and staff volunteers that the kohlrabi had gone in last week, everyone cheered. Showing a group of farm visitors where the corn would be planted later this spring evoked a round of applause from students who proclaimed their love of its sweet kernels. The competitive spirit and enthusiasm so much a part of college athletics is hardly lacking at “Food for Good Farm,” the name chosen to denote it’s larger mission of education, community service, and healthy food for all. Sounding more like a coach than a farmer, Bithell uses words like hustle to describe her student crew’s effort to plant and seed the two-acre field. When the volunteers complained about working in the cold and the rain, she reminded them that football games are played in all kinds of weather. Even the plants are forced to compete in a set of 12 trial beds located in the south end zone. Here students test different growing methods and evaluate their potential financial rate of return.

Elizabeth Wattley, Director of Service Learning, said with pride that the farm’s tomatoes were better than anything she’d ever bought in a grocery store. Biology major Symphonie Dawson giggled when she described the farm’s mascot that they temporarily borrowed from Delta State University. “It’s the ‘Fighting Okra,’ an image of the vegetable wearing boxing gloves. We borrowed it because last year’s okra crop seemed to go on forever.” The “Rah-rah, Go Team, Go!” energy previously reserved for football games is now channeled into the planting of 1500 strawberry plants, 6600 onions, a new asparagus bed, and dozens of vegetable varieties. “The farm is the light of the college,” said Wattley.

Once on the ropes, Paul Quinn has gained a reprieve by discovering the multiple benefits of farming while also turning attention outward to the community. One major need the farm addresses is healthy living and eating, no small concern on today’s college campuses, especially one surrounded by a food desert. “Before their work on the farm, students wouldn’t eat carrots unless they were smothered in ranch dressing,” said Bithell. But by getting their hands in the dirt–a task that usually took two or three visits to get past the “yuck” declaration–students started eating carrots right out of the ground, dirt and all. “They actually taste,” said Wattley, pausing for a moment to find the right adjective, “carrot-tee.”

By engaging students in the school’s biology and social entrepreneurship courses, the farm gives young people a chance to get hands-on laboratory experience while getting their hands in the dirt. Even the students who don’t care to venture into the world of bugs and compost get a taste of the farm’s output. The cafeteria now offers a monthly dish to showcase the farm’s harvest and introduce students to food that is healthy, tasty, and very local. Jasmine Wynn, a freshman legal studies major, summed up the farm’s health benefits best. “I’m a city girl from Dallas, and for me the farm was something new. I liked being out there. I also started getting serious about my diet and decided that organic food is better for you. It’s just part of a healthier lifestyle, and I want to stick around for a long time.”

The lack of farming experience or a farm background has not been a deterrent to anyone’s participation, including school President Michael J. Sorrell. With public policy and law degrees from Duke University, his stellar resume shows he has represented American Airlines and Morgan Stanley, served on numerous commissions including an assignment at the White House, and was selected in 2009 as one of the 10 Best Historically Black College and University presidents. However, lacking from Dr. Sorrell’s career synopsis, which also includes representing top-flight athletes like Utah Jazz’s Deron Williams, are any agricultural credentials. So why did he eliminate the football program and have the audacity to make the field into a farm?

A big part of the answer lies in his commitment to servant leadership, which, like the farm, is a concept he brought to Paul Quinn. With such simple but difficult to live by ideas like putting others before self, leaving the world a better place than you found it, and maintaining spiritual faithfulness, Dr. Sorrell not only preaches what he practices (he teaches a freshman course in servant leadership), he practices what he preaches. The farm is the center of that practice.

Isaiah 58: 9-12 gets prominent mention on the College’s website which also touts the school’s Christian underpinnings. The scripture admonishes us “to pour yourself out for the hungry…then shall your light rise in the darkness…and you shall be like a watered garden.” The Food for Good Farm is set on serving the hardscrabble community that surrounds it and though a share of the harvest goes to the cafeteria, 10 percent is donated to a local food pantry, a sizeable share is sold on a weekly basis to the community from the field’s former hot dog stand, and just to preserve some historical symmetry, the Dallas Cowboys buy a small share of the farm’s organic veggies.

The “adaptive re-use” of the field has been impressive under Bithell and Wattley’s leadership. The hash stripes are gone as well as the top four inches of sod and dirt that they replaced by dump truck loads of pure organic matter. Reflecting the program’s absolute commitment to organic farming, there was simply too much distrust of the chemical residues from years of a perfectly green gridiron. The goalposts remain as do the blocking sled, scoreboard and the bleachers running the length of both sides of the field. The former press box will be turned into a chicken coop and Wattley retains some hope that the bleachers can be repurposed as a greenhouse. Acres of adjoining land are being eyed for farm expansion, especially if a federal grant comes through.

None of this extraordinary progress has come cheaply. The school has made significant capital expenditures to accomplish this conversion and the on-going operating costs, which are only marginally offset by farm sales. An April fundraiser featuring Will Allen hopes to swell the coffers to enable the farm to buy its own tractor.

The rapid development of the farm, and the rising fortunes of Paul Quinn College have come with a price, however. The Food for Good Farm is the result of a 50/50 partnership with PepsiCo’s Food for Good Initiative. The college makes it clear that this is an equal partnership and that PepsiCo has not placed any strings on their giving. Other than cleaning up its tarnished image, one cannot detect any sinister covert or overt motives in the cola giant’s support. Yet the contradictions can’t be ignored. After all, Pepsi and other soda makers have contributed more than their fair share of calories to America’s obesity crisis.

In the meantime, it’s hard to argue with the outcome of the partnership. Texas has one less football field and one more organic farm, clearly a net gain for humanity.

Just as we were comfortably settling in with the knowledge that local is in–and Monsanto, out—a flock of tenacious academics taunt us to move past such simplistic thinking. The answers can’t ever be so easy, can they. But for those eager to be shaken from a locavore-worshiping stupor, last week’s Tasting Histories conference celebrating the opening of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science at the University of California, Davis was a venerable weekend-long cocktail party of well-established and rising scholars from across the country dedicated to the study of food—many of whom unabashedly invoked the theme of the local within our eating practices, both contemporary and historical.

With few universities granting official status to food studies or food science departments (UC Davis is one exception), on whose shoulders does it fall to define the boundaries of the contemporary study of food? Who can we expect to engage the big questions, particularly as they pertain to localizing agriculture? It’s a necessarily inter-disciplinary subject and also one that has been marked territory of late by many notable non-academics speaking to a broad audience hungry for knowledge about our food systems. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists… have they all been remiss? Au contraire. Academics rarely are, and the convening of Tasting Histories was a brief but powerful assertion that those researching food have much to say. On obesity and GMO’s, bread lines and milk and wine, scholars pushed us to think thematically about food in shifting and complex ways. Many of those speaking at this event threw light on the messy spaces where capitalism, culture, and science collide to show us that our cozy categories of benevolent local and hegemonic global are often romantic, sometimes ignorant, and have antecedents that can’t be ignored.

Susanne Friedberg, Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College and author of the forthcoming book Fresh: A Perishable History, challenged us to think about the contemporary contradictions inherent in our local food logic during her keynote address, aptly titled “After Taste.” For much of the 20th century, food miles were a status symbol, worn proudly by highly perishable foods desired by privileged eaters who could afford the costs that traveling refrigeration incurred. Consumers in general, especially the rising American middle class in the first half of the 1900’s, were trained to appreciate and buy the ephemeral, and thus perishable, items in the marketplace. These foods have always been marketed as having more “taste,” in both the little t and capital T sense. The new food authorities tell us that foods that are cheap and also global have no taste, Friedberg said, and we must instead eat the food grown closer to home. But as she also noted, Friedberg herself a long-time farmer’s market devotee, so many people in the world are on the wrong side of this enlightened 21st century eating practice. The farmers she bought vegetables from in Burkina Faso, which she also called home for a year, so desperately wanted to sell their fresh beans to the markets of Europe rather than distribute them locally for pittance, which they were forced to do when the beans were declined by Europe for not being “fresh” enough.

Darra Goldstein, Professor of Russian at Williams College and Editor of Gastronomica, struck a similar but slightly optimistic tone in her commentary on talks given by graduate students on seeing world history through food. How do we complicate globalization, she asked, how do we find the “positive potential within the global marketplace?” Goldstein acknowledged the existing tensions between the global and the local, as did her panelists’ comments on indigenous Australian food products being marketed worldwide and the historical creation of a New World culinary heritage in the English colonial Atlantic as it intersected with Creolization. These distinctive foodways are inherently situated within macro-scale social and economic processes, as are many of the ‘local’ foods that we’ve come to exalt at our markets today. Goldstein proposed that we should perhaps find ways to remain global within our local economies—is it possible that the world could be entirely de-globalized, she asked? Is this even desirable?

Charlotte Biltekoff, Professor of American Studies and Food Science at University of California, Davis, suggested in her commentary that we shift our attention from the sole significance of our daily routines and towards the broader systems and structures in which they are embedded. On a talk given by Richard Alvarez of University of California, San Diego on the history of plant transfers by the USDA, Biltekoff asked: what happens when we stop ignoring the historical origins of our agricultural practices and the power dynamics that have created the current landscape of what we consider to be ‘local’ food? Can re-inserting history into our conceptions of current food systems “shift our thinking away from the behavior of consumers, toward the larger systems and structures of power that a focus on ethical consumption obscures?” she asked.

Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, et al. may still be carrying the torch for many now-enlightened eaters but some of us have moved on. Or perhaps we were just never completely satisfied with the Omnivore’s Dilemma narrative in the first place. This is not to say that Pollan, and the ever-widening crowd of writers and speakers who have taken up the locavore chant, don’t speak eloquently, even passionately, about the need for alternatives to our industrialized, unjust food system. Indeed, credit is due here for grabbing the attention of many who might have never thought about the phrase “industrial food system” at all. Nor is this to say we should surrender the last of our winter root vegetables and stock up on canned food from China.

The point is really that that the food narrative circulating now, and the daily work of civic participation in the food system, doesn’t come to a rest with us eaters simply knowing where our food comes from. In fact, that’s only one beginning to a multiplicity of narratives that seek to ensure the well-being of our planet and our bodies. There are more complicated and ultimately more compelling stories unraveling out there than the one that pits the local against the global, that imagines a neat and bridgeable gulf between producers and consumers. We must understand globalization not only as an oppressive abstraction but also as a cross-cultural dialogue between people the world over who need to eat. These fresh ways of thinking about foodways also highlight challenging class, race, and even gender politics that have been largely neglected for too long. May a forward-thinking and historically-attuned body of food scholarship continue to help us all see that messy complexity, to think beyond the categories we’ve created… and to ask the hard questions.

Photo: Mikaela Martin