In these jobs, he meets people who have no other options, but also people who are grateful for the economic stability work offers them, people who take great pride in their skills with lettuce, and people who can’t tell if it’s their fingers or their minds that are more numb while tearing apart chicken breasts on an icy assembly line.

Salon spoke with Thompson about the relations of immigrants and locals in these industries, how he managed to not realize he was writing a book on food, and about how breaking your back while harvesting lettuce can be kind of … fun.

The part of the book on working in Yuma, Ariz., lettuce fields is called “Salad Days.” At first that just sounds like an ironic joke, but that time does seem to be the most positive experience in your project.

Yeah, there was something very lighthearted in it. The work itself was the most physically demanding, and I contemplated walking away from it more than the others because of the pain in my hands and back. But there were things that made it more pleasurable.

One, people, our crew, was always looking out for me. And not just me — people would jump in and help each other out. No one used the word “solidarity,” but there was a sense of worker solidarity, that we’re all in this together. My crew was at first concerned that I was some kind of undercover agent, but then later was just worried that I had some sweating problem I should have checked out. For my last day, they put together a huge meal for me, and the foreman gave us twice as long as normal for lunch, a full hour.

Two, there’s something about working outside versus in a depressing plant that just feels psychologically healthier, even though in two months in the fields, I never saw a single insect. They had that much fumigation going on.

And three, there was a sense of pride in the workers in their abilities. “We want you to tell your friends what it’s like out here, how their salad got there,” they told me.”It’s the toughest work around, and we’re good at it.” It helps a lot if you have pride in what you do. If you believe it’s important and not many people can do it, you can put up with a lot of crap.

Can you talk about that pride? What are lettuce skills?

Well, first, you don’t pick lettuce, you cut it. So you have to bend down and stab it to separate it from the ground, then trim the outer leaves off before it starts to look like something you’d recognize. It would sometimes take me 30 seconds, and others would have it cut and bagged in just a few seconds. In low points, dribbling sweat all over the stuff, I would just slice the heads up and crush them like they were defective. At one point my co-worker called me the “Lettuce Assassin.”

I thought it was just going to be backbreaking work. Well, after a while, my endurance was increasing, and yet my maximum speed for cutting one row was like everyone else’s relaxed pace for cutting two. So what I thought was an “unskilled” job is in fact very skilled. With every new head of lettuce cut I learned something new, so the chance to constantly try new theories, like different movements, made it interesting.

Towards the end I was getting a little nostalgic, but the last two days we harvested more than 40 tons of lettuce, and that beat the nostalgia right out of me.

Did work in the chicken plant ever seem challenging in that good way?

In the poultry plant — and this is purposeful — all the jobs have been deskilled to the point where anyone can be bored within five seconds; it’s something a monkey can do. The turnover is so high, they don’t want to train anyone new. One week I was there, they had rehired 10 percent of the entire workforce. You’d think it was easy, but it’s much more difficult, because you go a little crazy. You’re just grabbing a chicken breast and tearing it in half 7,000 times a day. You can’t have conversation because you’ve got headphones on from the machine noises. You have to stand still. Half of my orientation class left within one week.

One day, I had a revelation: that chicken breasts look like the butts of white babies. And that was probably my single thought in that five-hour session.

Was there much of a sense among the people you worked with that they had other economic options?

What was most shocking of all to me was rural poverty for Americans. Russellville is where people bounce between two jobs — Walmart or the poultry plants. You just can’t work in the poultry plant very long before you have health problems. It’s just designed very clearly without the health of workers in mind. Lots of repetitive stress injuries in this push for everything being cheap: Who can get the cheapest chicken to McDonald’s?

There had been a KKK march before I showed up, so I expected lots of animosity between locals and immigrants. But the Guatemalans were treated almost like foreign exchange students, more with curiosity than animosity. And it turns out that no one believed that immigrants were taking jobs away from Americans. People didn’t have the jobs because they couldn’t stand them.

One night, we were tearing breasts in half, and the supervisor comes over and says, “You have to work as hard as possible, this is really important!”

And Kyle said, “What is this, national security?” There was this sense that this stuff is cheap and we are treated like we are cheap.

You wrote a book about life in lettuce fields, working in a chicken plant, and being a restaurant delivery boy. So how is it that you didn’t set out to write a book about food?

Well, my general take on food was always: “Where is it, and can I have some?” So, honestly, it wasn’t until groups like Slow Food started asking to talk with me that I thought that maybe this book can help people in the food movement go beyond “Is this food safe for my kids?”

For me, it’s as much about the woman who couldn’t stay awake, falling asleep while standing because she worked the night shift and took care of her kid during the day. I wrote this, to the best of my ability, as a portrait of immigrant work, which is the subject of lots of loud, abrasive conversation, but which people have so little sense of in their everyday lives. I just hope that the book will let people pause for a minute and think about the work they do that supports us.

Before I got to Arizona, to get ready, I was doing push-ups and I bought a biography of John Steinbeck. I read about him talking about wanting to write, supporting himself through hard manual labor, like digging ditches. And what he realized after not too long was that he didn’t have any creative energy at the end of the day to write. That was one of the lessons to me early on, how privileged I am. In Yuma, I was in bed, exhausted, every night by 8. Creative work can be angst-filled, but it’s a privilege to have the energy to even think of doing it. 

Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos, transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated tribe of farmers into mercenaries — a failed secret war against the Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.

I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of poverty, illness and suicide. These were clan leaders who once commanded the respect of entire villages, tough guerrilla soldiers trained by the CIA — like my father — and proud providers who had, without writing, committed to memory centuries of the best farming practices. And they were humbled, receiving welfare and food stamps because there was no opportunity then in urban America for their main skill. Still, they farmed in the city for two necessities: food and a wistful connection to the old way of life.

We grew crops in every plot of soil that hinted of fertility — parking lots, front lawns, even inside discarded paint buckets, which made terrific homes for lemongrass and chili peppers. When I was in elementary school, the families in our apartment building worked a farm just outside of Sacramento. Every person, every age, had a job. Meals were planned around what we gathered: We scraped fresh cucumbers, serving them with sugar over ice on hot summer days; we pounded the signature Hmong mix of hand-picked peppers, cilantro, green onions and lime in a mortar and served it as a dip for meat and sticky rice. I remember loving our imperfectly shaped cucumbers because I got to watch each one grow into its own unique shape and thought they all had more character than the “beautiful” ones wrapped in plastic at the grocery store. And I loved mustard greens, which grew in abundance once a year but could be pickled for year-round consumption.

We bartered with each other. We raised chickens in the backyard, letting them out to roam and feeding them by hand. We didn’t have a label for this back then, though now I suppose people call it “free-range,” and it costs more. We slaughtered our own hens, sometimes with rituals honoring the sacrifice of the animal’s life.

With the costs of vegetables offset by our gardens, all the families pitched in to buy a pig or cow from the closest farmer, dividing the meat. This way, we could also afford to buy rice.

But we had to keep our locavore tendencies secret. America’s food rules, which seemed to us to go against nature, left us fearful of punishment. At the time, exactly one person from our clan had attended an American college and became our cultural broker, translating to shamans the world of Western medicine, and to lifelong hunters and fishermen the rules of hunting and fishing. What license was needed for what, how many of what thing could be caught during which season, if you could take fruit from a tree depending on which side of a fence it hung. All of it was too complicated to keep straight, and so it felt safer to keep our food producing regimens to ourselves. I can’t remember how many times my father built, tore down and rebuilt the chicken coop, afraid that neighbors who heard crowing would report us.

“Don’t tell the Americans,” my mother would always say, and, eventually, as I grew into adolescence, I couldn’t agree more. I was afraid of being judged.

My mother sprinkled only fresh-cut grass in her garden, swearing by its ability to grow bigger and tastier vegetables. She often crossed dangerous lanes of traffic to get to a pile of lawn clippings. My sisters and I would jump out of the car to bag the grass, and we did it with the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, terrified of being seen by friends.

The parking lot of our neighborhood Kmart was a regular pickup spot for lawn clippings. In my teens, when merely being accused of shopping at Kmart was an epic embarrassment, you can imagine the horror I felt about being spotted stealing grass from its parking lot. “If anyone sees me, MY LIFE IS OVER!” I’d say. Unfortunately, dramatic teenage declarations of “life being over” didn’t fly in Hmong households, not when there would always be someone around to remind you of the time he narrowly escaped the death camps.

As the adolescent me tried to find her groove, navigating deeper into the treacherous social maze of an American high school, I tried to talk my mother out of picking cilantro and scallions from her garden, cleaning and separating and selling them for 50 cents a bunch at a local Hmong store. It never made her more than $20 a week, but she didn’t care. She was obsessed with the idea of doing something she knew how to do, something that could earn money.

My family searched for new places to grow food while I became increasingly afraid that outsiders would find out we lived in a replica Hmong village, built to resemble what the older generation knew as “home.” Then one day, I was outed by a classmate as a food stamp user as I stood in the collection line to count money for my mother. That was the day that I decided I hated everything about the way we got food — from the paint-bucket chili peppers to the communal pig, cut up in pieces, ready to be bagged and shared. I wanted to run away from this mess. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I would feed myself like they do.

Now, as an adult, I don’t have a garden. Years after I finished college and was well into the working world, long after credit cards made checks obsolete at the grocery store, I still insisted on writing checks to pay for my brand-name groceries. The defiant child food stamp user in me still needs the validation that comes from putting pen to paper and declaring, in writing, that I earned the right to take this food home.

But who’d know that, just as I finally shed a former life of organic necessity, my mother would be the hip one? Now I go to the market and hear people boasting about the eggs in their backyards, or how much their garden looks like the one on the White House lawn. My best friend, also a former Hmong child gardener, laughs with me about collecting lawn clippings. If only we had had cool recyclable cloth bags with eco-friendly slogans, we joke. If only we could be heroic, claiming to be launching a food revolution. But for us, there was no room to think about glamour. That life just felt backward.

I imagine now how many “I told you so’s” my mother would impart on me if she could grasp the enormousness of today’s food movement: Pesticide-free produce, hand-fed chickens, cuisines boasting minimal ingredients all represent billions of dollars to be made. And, irony of ironies, now people’s food stamps can’t even cover the costs of organic and local produce at our markets.

But I stood recently at a popular farmers’ market in San Francisco, where I now live and where my relatives have a vegetable stall. Surrounded by a flurry of patrons enthusiastic about locally grown food, I felt … proud. Proud that Hmong farmers owned their own stalls, their tradition of necessity now trendy and profitable. That day, my uncle gave me a bag of cucumbers and tomatoes from his stall. He said he had heard all about my schooling and my travels, and that he was proud I had made it. But as I looked at my bag and at all the customers flocking to his stall, I couldn’t help thinking he was making it in his own right.

Pha Lo is a freelance writer/nutrition educator and teaches food budgeting skills to low-income parents.

I’d like to share those stories with you here. If you’d rather not listen to me yap, below the video is one of these stories in written form, on Mr. Leroy Duvall, a retired shrimper and the president of a Cajun social club. And if you’d like to read more of the oral histories I collected in this part of the world, please visit the Southern Foodways Alliance’s website.

SFA 2010: “Cajuns, Croats, Vietnamese: On Land and Sea in Biloxi” presented by Francis Lam from UM Media Documentary Projects on Vimeo. 

Mr. Leroy and the French Club

This story originally appeared on Gourmet.com.

I just watched a table the size of a twin bed get piled with crawfish. Twice. So this is how they roll at the French Club. Outside, in the parking lot, half a dozen beer-fueled men watched propane-fueled pots, sending an eventual 1,500 pounds of crawfish to their hot and spicy ends.

I have to confess that I wasn’t thrilled at first about showing up at the Fleur de Lis Society. This was months ago, and I was looking for stories of Cajun fishermen, but clubs kind of weird me out, with their odd little exclusivities and mutated social hierarchies. On my way over, I imagined arcane secret-society stuff: handshakes and passwords and rituals in funny hats with the window shades down. Who knows what these people are all about? I’ve seen movies. I don’t want to end up at the bottom of the Gulf, strapped to a sack of crawfish heads.

I pulled up to their imposing meeting hall, a dead ringer for an airplane hangar, with nerves firing, and walked in to find … a couple of guys watching SportsCenter at a bar. I met Mr. Leon, Mr. Ben, Mr. Tee, friendly men in Hawaiian shirts and pleated jeans who pulled up a chair for me and chatted the way uncles do. Leroy Duvall, the club’s president, came over and shook my hand, a slight, taut man with a head of white and skin that’s been in the sun his whole life. He apologized for the ruckus as I set up the recording gear. It was a big day. Three years after Katrina took their home they’d just gotten into their new building, and the first thing he did was call in a beer order, now clanging in on hand trucks and dollies.

Seventy-five years ago, Cajun fishermen looking for work moved into Biloxi from Louisiana. In a strange town far from home, they settled into a tight-knit community in East Biloxi. They founded the French Club, as everyone called it, as a place to have dinners and dances together, and occasionally raise some money for members in bad shape.

I asked whether the Club tries to preserve French culture. Mr. Leroy nodded, talking about the dances they put on, but then said, “I don’t really speak very much French. I wish I did but I don’t, and a lot of us don’t … the younger people, you know.” There wasn’t a trace of irony in his voice when he referred to himself as one of the younger people, despite his 64 years.

Mr. Leroy worked on shrimp boats for most of his life. He misses it. “No traffic jams,” he said to me. “No 9 to 5. You just worked. But it was just the pleasure of being out there; the freedom and the good fresh air.” It’s demanding work, physical work, but I imagine of the kind that makes your body still feel young at 64 if it didn’t make you feel old at 32.

But the realities of age still stand. I asked him why the club only has 300 members now, instead of the 600 it used to have. “The older people got older,” he said. “East Biloxi started dying away. And then Katrina finished it off by taking everything out. A lot of the older people are too old to try to come back down here and start over.”

I asked if he keeps in touch with his displaced members. “That’s one reason we put the club back down here,” he said. “After Katrina took our building away there was no consideration about going anyplace else. Our people — no matter where they’re at — they know whenever they come back, the French Club is still here. A lot of our members passed away; we have a lot of older people. Every day we see them they ask when we’re going to open. They want to come back and we’re trying to get it back. For the people.”

Behind us, men loaded the new coolers with beers and Cokes and Barq’s Root Beer.

I’ve come back a few times since hoping to catch the club in action, but every time I drive by, it’s just Mr. Leroy’s old pickup in the parking lot. I poke my head in the dark hall. It’s an awfully big room for one man to be in. I say hello, he smiles warmly, counting change or taking out the trash. He tells me, every time, that I just missed everyone, that I should come by for dinner. We chat, I thank him, and leave him to his chores.

But today, I walk into the French Club and my eyes need a few minutes to adjust to the darkness from the Mississippi sun. When I can see again, the tables are crowded with people piling high the spent bodies of crawfish. The aisles are crowded with couples dancing to Cajun music played by a man with a Croatian name. I can barely make my way through the crowd, taking pictures to go with my interview, and looking for Mr. Leroy. When I finally find him, my photos all taken, he asks, “Did you get any crawfish?” I regretted saying that I had to go. “Well,” he says. “You’re welcome here anytime. You know that, don’t you?”

I smiled back at him. “Yes, I do, Mr. Leroy. Yes, I do.” 

Bristol Bay, Alaska, is home to the largest wild salmon run in the world. Every summer, up to 50 million sockeye come pounding through the bay, turning it silver. The salmon run is what brings life back to this place. It defines it. “It’s incredibly moving to see the first fish surge,” Kate Taylor, a wilderness guide, said to me. “That’s when everything starts. You see the bald eagles come out, the osprey, the wolves, the bears. Soon, you see trout up the river feeding on the salmon eggs. All this life starts to come out of this barren landscape.” And then there are the people: the fishermen gearing up for the season. The natives who have subsisted on this fish for nearly 10,000 years. The thousands of workers who come here, swelling these villages to 20 times their off-season size.

But what if the salmon don’t come? The future is unclear, as Bristol Bay also happens to be an enormous copper deposit, and Canadian and British energy corporations are planning a massive mine at the headwaters of the bay. Considering that the Pebble Mine is in a seismic zone and will require what is essentially the world’s largest earthen dam to hold back the lake of sulfuric acid it will produce, many are fearful that, whether catastrophically or just through seepage, the mine will destroy this nearly untouched wild habitat, where the air smells all the time of tundra, a perfume of herbs and flowers and moss. But for now, as I looked out to the water, waiting for a tug on my fishing line, I thought what an incredible privilege it was to be here, at the very cusp of watching a whole world come awake, and to meet some of the people who live among the salmon.

The fisherman

David McRae has fished for sockeye salmon in these waters, under this enormous sky, for 30 years. A handsome man in the Eastwood vein, his face is strong, rectangular. His hair is short and gray, his skin weathered to a toughness, and yet he smiles easily, almost beatifically, which was a relief when I hopped clumsily into his boat, nearly tripping on the nets piled on the floor. I tried to find a spot to stand, suddenly conscious of how goofy I am in my too-big borrowed rubber jacket.

His nephew Jay was also on the boat, solidly built and quiet in that way that may mean that he’s shy, or that may mean that he’s there to fish, not make friends with people with cameras and notepads. As David motored us toward their site, I could see in the distance the decaying remains of an old cannery, a reminder of how long people have been fishing here. The permit for this site has been in their family for generations. When his watch ticked to the official opening of the day, David and Jay launched into a flurry, unfurling their net into the bay.

Later we worked the gear, which means we took the skiff to one end of the net and, with our arms and backs as the motors, tug our way to the other side, picking salmon out of the webbing. The boat felt light and I pulled with excitement, but 15 minutes into it, my back announced some displeasure. I imagined what it would be like to pull a boat sagging with 1,200 pounds of fish back and forth across the gear, all day long, for the entire season.

We pulled up an occasional salmon. The easy ones fall out of the net with a gentle tip. But others come up tangled, the fish suspended in a thin, wiry web that would have M.C. Escher gnashing his teeth. Fish after fish, Jay directed me: “Give that one a good hard shake. Flip the net around. Pull that one up and over.” I had no idea what he was looking at, how he could see a path for the fish out of the gear, and he took over. Plunk, plunk — the salmon fell to the deck. At peak season, they catch a dozen fish for every couple feet of net. “Throw in a 30-knot wind at night in the rain with headlamps and the boat rolling,” David laughed. “Like trying to figure out puzzles in a washing machine.” While playing a 12-hour game of tug of war, my back reminded me.

He mentioned proudly that despite its small size, his boat consistently comes in over the catch average — even against the big boats drifting out on the horizon, their bows a dozen feet off the water, mechanical winch nets hauling fish up through the air like they were climbing Jacob’s Ladder.

“How’d you get into this?” I asked him, and he talked about family and heritage — fishing with grandparents; an aunt and uncle who took him onto their boat when he was in high school. He spoke in years by the dozens, but then said something that surprised me: “I’ve never really identified with being a fisherman.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s something I really enjoy, but you can go to school, be creative, do art, do architecture, or fly airplanes: all these other things I love to do. But my roots here are very tangible. I’ve seen the same family names on those set net sites for decades. It’s a community.”

He’d retired from fishing entirely to fly planes, but he decided to come back when Jay asked him to. “Jay’s mom and I used to work that site, just the two of us. He started helping us out when he was 14. I don’t want to make it too flowery and romanticized, but there’s a feeling of wanting to pass on the ways,” David said.

The home pack

“Welcome to our crazy little fish plant,” Izetta Chambers said when we arrived at Naknek Family Fisheries. It’s a new-looking facility of gleaming stainless steel … in what is not much larger than a shack. She giggled when she picked up a broom to bang a light on and then introduced us to her grandmother, Violet.

A bright-eyed woman with a round face and rounder curls, maybe 5 feet tall if you give her a shoebox to stand on, Violet is the kind of person you want to hug immediately. Her hands were covered in blood and wielding 12 inches of sharpened steel. I didn’t want to hug her that badly.

She was cutting fish for smoking, part of the family’s “home pack” — the catch you keep for yourselves.

Bristol Bay has an unemployment rate at times nearly double statewide figures. It’s a real problem — one Pebble Mine proponents point to constantly — but the numbers may be misleading, because they count off-season fishermen among the unemployed, and because out here, there is a real subsistence economy, which is a planner’s dead-dull way of saying that most people here hunt and fish for a lot of their food. For many native families, nearly 80 percent of their calories can come from the land, starting with the salmon they catch and preserve for the rest of the year.

“Do you sell your smoked salmon?” I asked Violet.

“No,” she said with great seriousness. “We take care of ourselves first.”

“Do you trade it for anything?” Subsistence fishing permits don’t allow you to sell your catch, but do allow for barter.

“Yeah, cash!” she laughed.

Violet laid her fillets on a board her husband made for her, with slits in it to guide her knife, cutting it into even strips like she learned to do 70 years ago. I asked for her brine recipe. “Oh, the brine,” she said. “I put a potato in the brine to see if it’s right — it floats when there’s enough salt.” I nodded excitedly, getting ready to write down a recipe. “But I didn’t have a potato today, so I’m just guessin’,” she laughed. I put my notebook away.

We chatted lightly as she kept cutting. When I mentioned the Pebble Mine, though, her head jerked up. “Ah!” she exclaimed, putting down the salmon in her hands. “We cannot have Pebble come. We cannot have Pebble come,” she said. She looked down at her brine. “Sometimes I try to imagine what life would be without fish,” she continued, saying that last word as the locals do, with a long, soft tailing off: fisssssshh. “And I can’t imagine it.”

Once Violet hung the strips of salmon like red icicles on rods to go into the smokehouse, Izetta led us to the smokehouse out back.

In her 30s, Izetta started fishing at 9. She moved away, to Arizona, where she went to college and eventually law school before coming back home to open this little plant, where she cleans, cuts and markets fish caught by the fishermen in her family.

“You have to really love it,” she said. “It wrecks your clothes, you get fish blood all over you.”

“So do you love it?” I asked.

“Sometimes, I have to get torn out of that plant. I work in education, where you’re trying to change attitudes and beliefs, but it’s so ethereal. But in the plant, I can count what I’m doing, how many meals I’m going to provide.”

We got to the smokehouse, which really is a shed. She lit a fire and started chuckling. “My daddy came up from North Dakota, wanted to find a native lady, have her put up a bunch of salmon and treat her like a ‘squaw.’ My mom was like, ‘You’ll have to go farther away for that!’” And Izetta began putting up the salmon.

The processor

Leader Creek Fisheries is hundreds of times the size of Izetta’s little fish plant, but it might be just as crazy. For years, its strategy has been to actively decrease the number of fish it handles and sells. Izetta told me about treating the fish as other than a commodity — not in a touchy-feely spiritual sense, but in the “canned goods commodity food” sense. Better handling, higher quality is what distinguishes her product, and Norm Van Vactor, Leader Creek’s manager and three decades removed from when he was on the cutting floor himself, was showing how that idea plays out at scale.

As we toured, Norm explained how each step in his process preserved the quality of the fish. Standing at a conveyor where the salmon are pumped out of the boats was like a “Daily Show” “Moment of Zen,” watching fish fall through the air into a pool frothy with other fish. “The water keeps them from getting bruised; they’re not all banging into one another,” Norm said.

We walked through the line, past all the heading, the gutting, the trimming, and, well, in an objective sense, it wasn’t pretty. But for an operation of this scale, it was strikingly clean, orderly, panic-free and efficient.

“Too little time, too much volume is all you used to hear people say when they talked about Bristol Bay salmon,” he said to me. But Leader Creek is happy to buy fewer fish for more money — offering fishermen nearly a quarter more per pound, for fish that’s harvested slowly and treated with more care.

The remaking of this commodity into a high-quality product is, to Norm, a form of activism. Higher quality can command higher prices and a higher profile … and more of an economic argument to protect this place.

“I only live here during the season,” he said, calling himself a “Gussick,” a native term for an outsider. “But in many ways, this is really my home. Up here, everybody is so interconnected, and all my best friends live in these villages. I could become destitute tomorrow and know that I would never go hungry. Someone would offer a roof over my head. It’s just the way these folks are.”

He grew up the child of travelers, and he first came to Alaska in college to make money during summer. As he spoke, I thought of how growing up constantly on the move might compel you to fall in love with a place where people live where their ancestors did.

Norm is a fierce anti-Pebble Mine activist, but not when he first heard about it eight years ago. “Back then, the seafood industry wasn’t doing well. If there was a better place for my employees to be, I wanted to help them get there. I come from South Dakota gold miners; I’m not anti-mining.” He invited the Pebble Partnership to come by. It was early then, before lines were drawn, and the discussion was candid: A marine biologist the miners hired said he doubted the mine could keep its toxins out of the water. “I couldn’t sleep after hearing that,” he said, so the next day he flew his plane over the Pebble site, looking down at the mesh of land and water, and said, “That’s the heart of Bristol Bay. It’s where it all comes together.”

“Still, who was I, a Gussick, to come and tell people, ‘You gotta keep this industry outta here’?” he said. “But I heard villagers say, ‘What we have is more important. This is short-term pay for some, and we have a way of life that’s been here for 10,000 years.’” And so he’s been fighting the mine since. He told me about a package he happened to receive the day before, trinkets from an airport gift shop. They were from an elderly native woman, with a note: “I want you to have souvenirs of Alaska always, because of what you’ve done for my community.”

We walked out of the plant through the roe room, where workers separated sacs of fish eggs according to size. There was bright orange oil and slime coating their hands, but the eggs sat, bright and bubbly, like jewels. “Isn’t that beautiful?” Norm asked.

We piled into our van and shut the door, but Norm trotted out and stuck his head in. “Hey, I’m sorry, I should’ve said this at the beginning,” he started. “But … thank you. Thanks so much for coming this far away to see what we’re all about up here.” He paused. “Thank you for coming to see this place.” He closed the door and turned to go back to the fish. He was crying.

View the slide show 

View the slide show

Yes. 1-0-0-0.

The benefit, called “The Art of Farming,” promises to provide a platform for “local farmers” and “high-profile New Yorkers” alike over the “shared interest in the vitality of the Greenmarket.” The event, for which tickets are priced at $250, will feature a silent auction of heirloom vegetables, along with a request for a donation of $1,000 so that a crate of the vegetables can be given to a local food bank. The money earned through the event will go to GrowNYC, a charity that helps immigrants become farmers, and to the Sylvia Center, which teaches children to eat better. The idea, of course, is to promote non-mass-produced vegetables and local farming.

To be sure, it’s an event that has its heart in the right place. The proceeds will go to charities, and local farmers will be recognized for the hard work that goes into growing even a single plump, full-bodied tomato.

Unfortunately, it’s also the kind of event (it was conceived by Dr. Brent Ridge, one-half of Discovery’s “The Fabulous Beekman Boys”) that furthers the notion that eating well is an exclusive preserve of the rich. Putting an astronomical price tag on a box of vegetables only exacerbates the ever-widening cultural gulf between the Whole Foods-ers and those who have to make do.

But the problem may be about more than just bad publicity. The event purportedly holds up heirloom vegetables as a symbol of everything that is wrong with agribusiness today. But some of these vegetables became heirlooms precisely because they didn’t grow as well, or perhaps because they were harder to tend to, regardless of whether they tasted better. The simple economic principle is that anything that is rare or harder to grow will inherently be more expensive, and as a result, out of reach for millions of shoppers.

“People are drawn to these seeds more as a result of ideological disposition than actual agricultural knowledge,” says James McWilliams, an environmental historian at Texas State University. So what’s at stake here is the idea that we like these vegetables because we see them as a way to thumb our noses at big business. But will they help bring sustainable agriculture to the poor or address larger questions about food security?

McWilliams doesn’t think so. “If we were to actually bring these vegetables back in a big way, we’d need a lot more land to grow them because they’re so low-yielding. So we’d have to clear out more forests, which is actually a lot less sustainable,” says McWilliams. In fact, he says, we’re already seeing this play out in Brazil and Argentina where farmers are clearing rain forest to create grazing areas for grass-fed beef.

The Sotheby’s event will certainly do what it set out to: create awareness about the “art form” that is heirloom farming.  But along the way, it may also end up furthering the misconceptions that plague the food world today.

Idealistic market gardeners came first, but of course large corporations have dominated the U.S. supply of organic food for years. The federal government’s much-negotiated definition of “organic,” when it came into force in 2002, was strong evidence of the big money to be made. At first, the small-scale growers were worried that it would be hard to compete.

Eliot Coleman, the fine market gardener who lives on the coast of Maine, has no doubt that well-raised organic food is superior to conventional, but after the government defined “organic,” he concluded it was “dead as a meaningful synonym for the highest quality food.” He cares equally about benign agricultural methods, the healthfulness of food, and the way it tastes, and part of what he found missing from the definition was a concern for freshness and ripeness. Coleman thinks a good grower not only makes such obvious choices as avoiding the use of poisonous chemicals but does a host of small things that are impossible to capture in a set of rules. Those things include choosing the exact kinds and amounts of fertilizer, the amount and timing of water (if any), the particular cultivar of fruit or vegetable, and the timing of harvest. The kind of individual grower Coleman believes in is motivated by the satisfactions of producing high quality and doing good as well as by the desire for profit.

Such market gardeners are sometimes criticized for being expensive boutique growers, for sounding morally superior, and for being unrealistic about how much money, time, and energy most people can afford to devote to shopping for food. (Of course, what it really costs to produce reasonably good food is a lot more than we typically pay for food, if you factor in agricultural subsidies, soil erosion, air and water pollution, the environmental cost of using so much petroleum-based fertilizer, the health problems of those who work in certain farm environments, and more.) Most American farmers, whatever they might prefer to do, now compete to produce as cheaply as possible in order simply to stay in business. How good can food be if the main goal is to reduce the cost of production?

To promote better food, in an article that appeared some years ago in Mother Earth News, Coleman proposed an attractive, romantic new post-”organic” term based on the Greek word authentes — “one who does things for him or herself.” To have an “authentic” label, food would have to be sold directly by the person or family who grew it — no middleman. (Of course, many farmers don’t have the time or desire to do their own retail selling. But if they did, customers could give useful feedback on varieties, ripeness, and taste.) “Fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, eggs, and meat [would be] produced within a 50-mile radius of their place of final sale,” Coleman wrote, suggesting possible standards. “The seed and storage crops (grains, beans, nuts, potatoes, etc.) [would be] produced within a 300-mile radius.” Only “traditional processed foods” — cheese, bread, wine — could claim to be “made with authentic ingredients.” Growers wouldn’t cease to be organic. But rather than focus on ways to combat pests and diseases, they would focus on creating healthy plants as well as animals, which would be raised on pasture as much as possible. Coleman especially likes the definition of “authentic” as “local, seller-grown, and fresh” because that meaning couldn’t be taken over by national and international producers. “Authentic” food would be a worthwhile point of reference. The idea is as timely now as when he first proposed it.

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