Salon.com > Growers and Producers

When eating organic was totally uncool

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 02:01:00 +0000

To me, the organic food movement has become dizzyingly, surreally chic. Farmers have become rock stars; the most exclusive restaurants name-check them so much you can almost see dirt on the menu. But before organic produce exploded into a $25 billion industry, before city gardening became cool, I grew up in a Hmong refugee community, living the urban organic lifestyle not because it was fashionable, but because we were poor. I couldn't wait to leave it behind.

I grew up in Del Paso Heights, a mixed-race inner city of Sacramento, Calif. -- the kind of neighborhood that had just two grocery stores between endless fast-food and liquor shops, and where we all paid for our groceries with food stamps. It was where we grew organic food and raised chickens in our backyards to survive. And where we did it in secrecy.

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.

Francis Lam’s tales of the multicultural South

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 02:01:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of addressing the august Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium, which would be the finest food conference in the country even if it didn't dedicate a least one entire evening to various forms of fried catfish and booze.

The subject of my talk was the global influence on the South, as shown in the diverse people of Biloxi, Miss. -- shrimpers and the children of shrimpers, bakers and market tenders. It's a subject -- and these are people -- dear to my heart, and I found myself unexpectedly emotional as I told their rich stories: of FoFo Gilich who grew up working in a cannery and was nearly mayor of Biloxi; of Richard Gollott, who is the man literally responsible for the establishment of a vibrant Vietnamese community in this town; of Sue Nguyen, whose "Vietnamese bakery" became, over time, simply Biloxi's bakery; and more.

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.

The end of the greatest American fishery?

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 17:45:00 +0000

If fish can be heroes, salmon have a heroic story -- returning after years out in the world, they fight their way upriver back to where they were born, slipping past eagles and dodging bears to find a place for their children. But the natural order is both grislier and more beautiful than that. Those eagles and bears will stave off their hunger and snatch their fill of fish from the water. And the salmon that survive will spawn, wither and then die, their bodies nourishing the ecology with nutrients collected from the ocean.

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.

Heirloom vegetables: $1,000

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:20:00 +0000

For some of us, shopping at Whole Foods, despite its inherent promise of establishing you as an esteemed member of the socially conscious, politically correct, seriously foodie upper middle class, can be a wholly unwholesome experience. You have to battle the snaking lines, the overly cutesy labels, and the overwhelming mass of organic-heirloom-tomato-toting liberals. Entirely too plebeian.

So, come Sept. 23, you can trade your brown-and-green paper bag for a designer gown and head over to Sotheby's for a vegetable auction. You can also trade your rather ordinary orange pumpkin for one that almost sounds like a strip club -- the pink banana pumpkin. Also on the auctioning block will be the Turkish orange eggplant, the Black Sea man tomato and the ridiculously diva-like Lady Godiva squash. The price of a crateful of these charmingly named veggies? A thousand bucks.

Yes. 1-0-0-0.

A call for a new term beyond organic: “Authentic”

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:01:00 +0000

Some things -- asparagus, summer turnips, green beans, peas, lettuce, plums, certain apples -- taste obviously different when they are taken directly from the tree or soil rather than purchased in a supermarket. Yet very few of us know that from harvesting our own plants and trees. The closest we come is buying such produce at a farm stand or farmer's market. The supporters of small-scale growers and farmers' markets, which were once few and cheap and are now so much more plentiful and expensive, are sometimes accused of impracticality and elitism. But there's no reason to deprive anyone of a choice between higher and lower quality. And small-scale producers sometimes show the way for mass-producers, as they did and continue do in the case of organic production.

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.

Why Gulf oysters matter, why they’re a way of life

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:30:00 +0000

Look, I'm not from the Gulf Coast. My family doesn't work in seafood, and to be completely honest with you, Gulf oysters are not even my favorites. But the news yesterday of the oil spill shutting down New Orleans' -- and the nation's -- oldest shucker, the P & J Oyster Co., broke my heart. In the newsroom, all day long, I hear numbers -- this many gallons, no, that many gallons. But what do these numbers mean, really? How do you really know the difference between an ass-ton of oil and a shit-ton of oil? And so, for all the projections and graphics, it's news like this, that can't be found in a water sample, that really crystallizes what this disaster means. And this news, too, made me realize that for every BP CEO whining that he wants his life back, there are millions of people who similarly don't think this spill matters all that much.

The bold new faces of urban farming

Mon, 17 May 2010 17:20:00 +0000

Urban farmers are coming to the rescue in dozens of city neighborhoods where you're about as likely to find a fresh tomato as you are to find a unicorn on the sidewalk. But if "urban farmer" calls up visions of an old hippie hoeing a quaint little patch of sunflowers in the shadow of high-rises, think again. Modern urban farming is about block parties with DJs and cooking lessons. It's raising fish in indoor tanks and getting outdoor education in city schools. It creates meaningful jobs for inner city youth who learn to plan food systems and cultivate crops. But most of all, it's about ingenuity. Urban agriculturists see potential where others sees blight, seeking out vacant lots and neglected open spaces, looking at what they have within arm's reach rather than thinking about what's missing.

This slide show is a tour of some of the country's most innovative approaches to urban agriculture. These are farms and gardens created in the service of education and activism. Whether they're training entrepreneurs, teaching kids to grow organic kale, or producing food from plots no bigger than your living room, the urban approach to farming is about feeding, not being fed.

View the slide show

Should you avoid Gulf seafood?

Wed, 05 May 2010 12:01:00 +0000

From certain angles, the Gulf oil spill is making it look like boom times for shrimp fishermen along the Gulf Coast. Barely hour after opening the Crescent City Farmer's Market in New Orleans yesterday, vendors were nearly sold out. Todd Rosetti, owner of Quality Poultry and Seafood in Biloxi, MS, tells me he can't keep enough stock in his warehouse. But when I called him, he answered my greeting of "How's it going?" with a terse "For shit." I met Todd a couple of years ago, when I did a series of oral histories on shrimping culture in Biloxi, and he usually talks with a measured, polite calm, but his voice betrayed his stress. He's not sure how long he'll be able to get shrimp to sell, and how long people are going to want it.

Organic farm volunteers: the new beat generation?

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:01:00 +0000

The morning sun lights up blue lupin and magenta owl's clover as Erik Ramfjord and Andrew Riddle scoop soured milk into a trough, drawing delighted squeals from a dozen free-range pigs.

A month ago, Ramfjord was an unmotivated biology major in Oregon, and Riddle didn't know what he wanted from Humboldt State University in northern California. Now they are energized, toiling from sun up to sun down for meals and a bunk on an organic ranch in central California, hundreds of miles from home.

"I consider myself extremely lucky to have stumbled upon this," says Ramfjord, 20.

Ramfjord and Riddle each paid $20 to become part of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms USA, a group with 9,000 members known by a variation of its acronym, woofers. It's kind of a new millennium version of the traveling hobo willing to work for a meal.

The website allows willing workers to negotiate a non-paid work stint with nearly 1,200 U.S. farmers and ranchers. Every farm could use an extra hand, but the hosts also benefit from the parade of characters who become a part of their lives, if only temporarily.

Will the USDA doom locally produced meat?

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:27:00 +0000

That wailing you hear in the distance is the sound of small meat processors begging the USDA for mercy. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety Inspection Service recently proposed a set of new regulations that will require all meat processors to submit their products to a new series of tests, a procedure that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for even a modestly scaled operation, enough to cripple many small processors.

What worries fans of small farms and locally produced food is that the closing of small processors will mean the closing of small farms. Slaughter and processing is the biggest challenge for small-scale meat; they're operations simply too costly and complex for farms to handle themselves. As it is, farmers have few options for meat processing without selling their animals to massive feedlot-meat operations, and without that piece of the puzzle, many farmers may quit. Why is the USDA considering the new testing regime? Some producers wonder if the machinations of Big Food are in play.

The Pigford case: Justice for black farmers on hold

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:01:00 +0000

Virginia farmer John Boyd describes a scene from a painful past: a white U.S. Department of Agriculture loan officer only allows black farmers to apply for loans one day a week. "Black Wednesday," the farmers call it, and they line up outside the USDA office in Richmond, Va. The loan officer, James Garnett, leaves the door to his office open so that all the farmers in the hallway can hear the loan requests of their colleagues be summarily, and vehemently, denied.

But Black Wednesday was not an artifact of the '50s. This was the America of the '80s and '90s, and in 1994, the USDA itself commissioned a review of the treatment of minorities in its Farm Service Agency programs. The commission's study found that "minorities received less than their fair share of USDA money for crop payments, disaster payments, and loans."

The result was a massive class-action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, which the USDA settled out of court in 1999, admitting to widespread racial discrimination against black farmers in its loan programs between 1981 and 1996. About 15,000 farmers were paid a total of more than $900 million in the settlement. But tens of thousands of farmers filed claims after the deadline, and many charged that the government's outreach had been insufficient, causing them to miss their opportunity.

“Working in the Shadows”: America’s dirty food jobs

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:45:00 +0000

It's great that, in the age of locavorism, more people are asking where their food comes from, but Gabriel Thompson asked a different question: Who does your food come from? Cute little farmers' markets aside, the vast majority of us still eat lettuce harvested by immigrant labor, packed in Arizona, and shipped to our supermarkets all over the country. And it’s the stories of those often invisible workers in lettuce fields, in chicken plants, on delivery bikes, that Thompson finds while living and working with them for months at a time in his new book,

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.

Growing more than food in a desert garden

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:01:00 +0000

There are great organizations planting gardens in urban schools -- Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard is the most famous example -- but we asked a young middle school teacher about a grass-roots effort planting one in rural Arizona, inspired by the book "Seedfolks." This is her report.

There is something about 6th graders and dirt that just makes sense. They can't resist it; can't wait to move it and pile it and throw it in each other's faces. But when you're a 6th grader in the desert, "outside" is a different kind of beast. As I watched my students in rural Arizona pull cactus needles out of their rear ends and kick up dust, I thought about the uses of this barren land we call home -- and we don't use much.

Food giant’s power tactics

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:01:00 +0000

Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.'s business practices reveal how the world's biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

With Monsanto's patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.

Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price hikes that ripple out to every family's dinner table. That's because the corn flakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you ate for dinner likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto's patented genes.