Around the table in Ottawa: A report from the Working Group on Public History and the Local Food Movement

The Working Group at Ottawa's Experimental Farm, April 18, 2013

The series of posts that appeared here in the first few months of the year were written by members of the "Public Historians and the Local Food Movement" Working Group that was convened for the 2013 National Council on Public History conference, held last month in Ottawa.  The group held its face-to-face meeting at Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm, a visit that enriched our thinking about some of the ways that public historians do and might intersect with both agricultural practices and public interest in food and farming.

Participants came to the table with a very wide range of backgrounds in interpretation, training, research, advocacy, and community organizing. Some key ideas that emerged from our discussions included:

• the importance of challenging the class distinction between manual and intellectual labor
• how to use tangible/physical experiences of growing and cooking food as a way to develop stronger questions that can inform our work as historians
• the need for long-term commitment to food- and farm-related projects
• how to educate ourselves and others about the complex realities of farming, agricultural policy, and marketing food
• ways to use public historical spaces and legitimacy to create new forums where people can connect across various class, political, and occupational boundaries.

The Working Group has a working lunch

One of the most stimulating parts of the meeting for me was the discussion of how our work as public historians can best relate to advocacy and activism.  Most of the people around the table were involved in some kind of food and farm education and interpretation, usually in ways that intersected with "the food movement" (broadly defined).  We recognized that our own values, tastes, and politics underpinned our interest in pursuing food-related projects, so we certainly weren't arguing that public historians should seek some kind of purely neutral or disinterested stance.

But at the same time, we found ourselves agreeing that historians’ essential neutrality (that is, our core commitment to critical, contextualized inquiry) is a gift that can help us to raise more nuanced questions and create useable spaces for discussion within a politicized and complex field. So while we generally saw ourselves as advocates and allies for those working to relocalize food systems and challenge the dominance of big, industrialized agriculture, part of what we wanted to advocate for is a balanced conversation that doesn't demonize "big ag" or romanticize "the local."

Another working group: the Experimental Farm's dairy herd

That's a stance that many museums and public history sites have adopted in an era of "civic engagement, so it's not as though we came up with anything entirely new here!  What is new about linking this approach to food and farming related issues, I think, is the way our own actions and identities become immediately much more salient than is usually the case.  We talked about the importance of being willing to get our hands dirty--in the field and in the kitchen--as a way to build credibility and accountability with partners.  We touched on the potentially uncomfortable ways that our own class positions come into play in relation to food and farming (for example, in the way that the mostly-white, mostly-middle-class demography of public history replicates that of the food movement in general, something I wrote about in a blog post last year).  Because food is such an intimate and everyday thing, as well as creating such a powerful cultural and political field, that balancing act between advocacy and neutrality becomes both trickier and more essential. 

For my co-facilitator Michelle Moon and I, the next steps after the meeting in Ottawa involve the book project that we've been developing around these questions.  I'm hoping others in our Working Group will share a few thoughts here about where they see their food-and-farm-related work headed now.  What next after Ottawa?

~ Cathy Stanton 

Tyler French: Attending to other tables as well as our own

I have just finished writing the copy for Nourish SC, a traveling exhibit of eight panels addressing community food security in my home state of South Carolina. I hope for the exhibit to become a rallying call for members of the local food movement to expand their efforts on the social equity front, which has been ignored in favor of the environmental and economic fronts of the movement. In creating the content for the exhibit, I interviewed 13 individuals involved in either the local food movement or increasing food security, including a local farmer, a USDA official, a food bank COO, social work and public health professors, and a board member of United Way of the Midlands.

I immediately encountered tension between the spoken and the actualized goals of the local food movement.

Rebecca Bush: Farm families beyond “Farmer Bob”

Picture an American farmer.  Strong, independent, face well-worn with creases caused by worries about weather and money and the future - the image isn't too hard to conjure.  Dodge used this familiarity to great effect with its 2013 Super Bowl commercial, one of the most talked-about ads of the game:

So based on the majority of that lengthy ode to farmers of America, what demographic boxes can we check off?  Almost always, our imaginary farmer is a native-born white man over the age of 40, probably living in the Midwest, Great Plains, or certain areas of the South.  This may be an easy and effective advertising trope, but it doesn't begin to capture the complete story of agriculture and food production in the United States, either historically or today.

In the American South in particular, agriculture and food is wrapped up in a messy racial relations stew, one that touches on the history of 300 years of unequal labor and land ownership determined by skin color.

Anna Duhon: Windows onto the farmscape: Becoming part of the story

FEP researchers Anna Duhon, Conrad Vispo, Claudia Knab-Vispo

How do we help facilitate people’s connection to the land? This is the central question that drives our work at the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program, a small, community-based research and outreach initiative on a working educational farm in the mid-Hudson Valley.

Our trio of researchers includes a botanist, a wildlife ecologist and a social scientist. Together we strive to open different windows of knowledge onto our county’s ‘farmscape’--the term we use to describe a landscape that even in its most out-of-the way corners has been shaped by a long history of agricultural land use and for which agriculture continues to be a defining factor.

The windows we open are often very different--a look into the native butterflies and the fields they thrive in, or the industrial history as it impacted land use, or the new farmers that are just marrying their visions to a piece of land. With the landscape as the connecting core of our research, we are always striving to mesh our different disciplines into a more holistic picture. This involves bridging areas of research that are often separate or even at odds, such as the cultural and the ecological, or agronomic and conservation sciences. By opening such different windows, we hope not only to deepen our own perspectives, but also to invite further exploration and engagement with the land from a broad base of interests; creating entry points that might draw in farmers alongside history buffs, or wildflower enthusiasts alongside local food lovers.

Angi Fuller Wildt: Communicating the virtues of local foods

Olives grow in the U.S. too!

As both a co-owner of a small-scale sustainable agricultural business and a public historian, the work that I do synthesizes public history with actively producing and marketing locally and regionally produced foods. In addition to cultivating, growing and selling mushrooms, herbs and produce to local restaurants and at our Columbia, South Carolina All-Local Farmers' Market, our business sells olive oil made from olives grown in southeast Georgia. One aspect of our marketing entails informing our customers about the 18th and 19th century exportation of olive oil as a commodity from coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Most people are quite surprised that olives can be cultivated in the southeast United States. Sharing the history allows them to have a sense of connection to the roots of the region. Many customers appreciate that the product isn’t shipped across the country or an ocean and that it supports economies close to home.

Another educational opportunity takes us into university classrooms and local venues to engage in dialogues about the ecological and economic benefits of growing and consuming heritage varieties of produce and other foods grown organically and locally.

Will Walker: Oral history as a way in to complex discussions

Farmland, upper Delaware River, New York state, 1943 (Library of Congress)

Interviewer: Do you feel you have a different attitude towards food than someone from a more urban area?

Narrator: Well, I think something that a lot of people don’t realize and I think that they should start thinking about it more is our water supply. A good water supply, we’re losing it, for drinking water. Now my house, my farm is all on spring water. The farm up there, that’s gravity feed, we don’t even have a pump on it. The water runs freely to the three houses, the barn, and the cows. It’s self-flowed, runs right to the barn. Up on my house where I live in Pierstown, that’s all spring. The farm when we had it up there was all spring. I think that with this drilling and spoiling the water with doing things, building houses and stuff, we’re losing a lot of our good water supply and I think that we should be thinking about it.

This past fall, several of my students and I used oral history selections like the one above as the starting point for dialogue sessions on issues related to farming and the environment.  These narrative pieces offered a way into complex discussions of land use, natural resources, and agriculture.  Such conversations are urgently necessary in the area in which I live and work—upstate New York—as the natural gas industry presses for authorization to drill using the controversial technique known as hydrofracking.  Fracking was not, however, the only topic of discussion at the four dialogue sessions we convened in the fall.  Longer-term questions of agricultural and environmental change were also consistently part of our conversations.

A New Year's Toast: Let Us Begin

Greetings all, and thanks to Cathy, our host at History at the Table. I'm delighted to be the first guest blogger in our discussion of public history and the local food movement, which will of course culminate in our Working Group meeting at the NCPH 2013 meeting in April. This will be the first of many posts on this intersection in coming weeks, as each member of the Working Group takes a turn offering insights and questions. Knowing that the conversation to follow will be lively and provocative, I raise a metaphorical glass to all present and say "Let us begin."

I'll be speaking from personal experience first, describing how my work at one museum led me into the local food movement, and then making the case more generally for a strategic re-evaluation of food interpretation in museums.

How One Museum Got Slower

In 2004 I became education director at a historic site and museum called Strawbery Banke,  a preserved urban neighborhood in Portsmouth, NH. Its more than 20 restored houses (with associated period landscapes) feature a mix of traditional interpretive strategies - first person roleplaying, didactic displays, period rooms, guided programs. 

Like many such sites, we faced the challenge of maintaining audience attendance in a time of widespread decline. With tongue only partly in cheek, Cary Carson, chief researcher at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, predicted "the end of history museums" in 2008, noting that attendance has been sinking for three straight decades . Reach Advisers found that history museums, compared with 7 other museum genres, ranked lowest in popularity with all demographic groups. Only 31% of family museum visitors even venture to historic sites.

What could we do to forge new connections with potential participants? We didn't have to look far for inspiration. The local food movement was blossoming around us.

"Bloody Mary" and back-to-the-land: Letting Polish farmers complicate the big story

We're closing in on the end of the year, the end of my discussion of my Ethnographic Landscape Report chapters, and the end of this phase of "History at the Table."  I have four chapters left to talk about, which I'm going to attempt to do in the next four days, and then the blog will enter a new mode for a while, which I'll say more about shortly.

How historical research looks in the movies

In movies and TV, people who are uncovering secrets from the past always stumble on some intriguing initial clue that leads them to a usually-linear series of discoveries culminating in a clear epiphany.  Historians know that this seldom happens, and that real archival and ethnohistorical research more often involves finding tiny snippets of information that get pieced together to make more provisional interpretations.  That's one thing we can learn from the process of doing rigorous historical investigations.  But another lesson is that occasionally things actually do follow that clue-discovery-epiphany model, and when it does, it's tremendous fun.  That was the case with Chapter 6, which covered years between Van Buren's death in 1862 and the First World War.

This was a time of sweeping transition in the American farm sector, with the continued ascendancy of commercialized markets, ever-more mechanized agriculture, and increasing attempts to bolster farmers' profitability through a range of policy measures, cooperative organizations, and technological innovations.  The big story arc of farm history in the old northeastern states in this period can be described as "dwindling," with far more people leaving the agricultural economy than entering it.  And yet...

In real life:  misspelled Polish names in old Census records!

I found an intriguing little clue in Martin Van Buren's Kinderhook neighborhood that suggested there were people getting into farming in Columbia County even as many of the older farm families were getting out.  I wouldn't have noticed it except that I'd just completed a previous National Park Service ethnography study that focused on Polish-Americans.  Because I was attuned to looking for Polish surnames, they jumped out at me from the U.S. Census records around the turn of the 20th century.  Once I started looking more closely, I found a sizeable number of Polish immigrants in the immediate area, clearly part of the large wave of migration from occupied Poland in this period.

The majority of Polish immigrants in the U.S. settled either in industrial cities or regions that serviced industry, like the coal-mining areas of Pennsylvania.  Few were able to follow up on the widely-shared dream of becoming small independent farmers, but I knew from my earlier research that a minority had done so, often taking over the older farms of New Englanders and other northeasterners and sometimes making them highly productive again.  (This was particularly the case in parts of the mid-Connecticut River Valley, where Polish family farms remain an important part of the local agricultural economy.)  It became clear that Columbia County's Poles had followed that anomalous path, with sons and daughters often working in the county's small factories but with many family members--particularly the  men--listed in the census as "farmer" or "farm laborer."[1]  Like many Dutch- and English-Americans of earlier generations, they combined waged labor for other farmers with subsistence and small-scale market farming on land that they bought or leased.

This neighboring farm (c. 1890) regularly hired Polish workers

Some Internet searching and asking around about family names from the old Censuses helped me to track down some descendants of the immigrant generation, and this new data helped me "read into" some of my earlier interviews and sources in a richer way.  For example, a charming memoir by the daughter of a neighboring farm family provided some tantalizing glimpses of the tensions between the Polish farmers and well-to-do Dutch-American farmers whom the immigrants probably saw as analogous to the landed gentry of Polish rural areas:  country squires and landlords who sometimes needed reminding of their responsibilities to the less well-off.[2]  The memoir recounts stories about a Polish woman that the family called "Bloody Mary" because she was the one who caught the pigs' blood in a pan during butchering.  After one day of harvesting potatoes, she was found to have stacked one bushel inside another to hide some potatoes she had taken for her own use, but like others who were caught pilfering feed grain, lumber, and other supplies, she seems to have been hired again the next year.  Perhaps "Bloody Mary" viewed her purloined potatoes as an informal benefit for her hard work and a way to remind her employer of his more-than-merely-financial responsibilities to those who labored in his fields.

The discussion of Kinderhook's Polish farmers in Chapters 6 and 7 let me trace both the opportunities seized by these hard-working immigrant families and the growing challenges faced by small farmers as the 20th century went on.  By the time of the Second World War, the sons and daughters of the newcomers had almost all moved on to other kinds of work;  the few who stayed in farming had embraced the new mechanization, chemicals, and mono-cropping that have come to characterize industrial agriculture.

Not just a Sixties thing

So the discovery of this nearly-invisible farm population doesn't change the big story arc.  But it complicates it in useful ways by showing that "decline" can sometimes be accompanied by renewal and reinvention, and that going "back to the land" was by no means confined to the 1960s and 70s.  Recognizing that helped me to see other examples of it from the 1930s and the 1950s (a fascinating history that Dona Brown has recently traced in her 2011 book Back to the Land:  The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America).  It also provided a kind of sideways connection with the farmers who, in 1924, invited philosopher Rudolph Steiner to give a series of lectures in German-occupied Poland to address their concerns about the decline in their soil and livestock fertility after the use of chemical fertilizers.  Steiner's lectures laid out the principles of what became biodynamic agriculture, which was transplanted to the U.S.--specifically, to the Hudson Valley region--a decade later and which is practiced by the farmers who currently cultivate Martin Van Buren's old farm.  All these "alternatives" and hidden histories give us a picture of how ideas about farming have historically circulated in surprisingly cosmopolitan and far-flung networks.

So this wasn't a quest on the scale of the DaVinci Code, but it was an example of how pursuing a seemingly random snippet of information can throw a new light on some of what was happening around the edges of the big, taken-for-granted story of agriculture in a given period.

Next:  Sometimes history helps us see how short-term a trend actually may be.


[1]  For more on Polish farmers in America, see Dennis Kolinski, "Polish Rural Settlement in America" in Polish American Studies 52:2 (Autumn 1995), pp. 21-55.
[2]  Elisabeth Van Alstyne Wilson.  Children of Sunnyside.  Self-published, 1965.  Columbia County Historical Society.  The 1890 image of the Sunnyside barns above is from the book.

Hacking the yack: A farm/history thought experiment

Two events a couple of weeks apart have helped me think more clearly about the food/farm/history intersection that I've been working on for a while now, and particularly about the tension between two approaches to knowledge about the agricultural past:  (1) putting it to immediate, practical use, and (2) using it to build more complex, informed analyses of the development of the food systems we're attempting to change.  Farmers tend toward the first, historians toward the latter, and the difference between them is the one that's sometimes characterized as "hack vs. yack--people who build and do things versus people who mostly talk and analyze.  I've been pondering ways to nudge the two into a more active dialogue with each other, on the theory that we desperately need both.  But these two events, and a little thought experiment that I've been playing around with, have made me realize that there's still a long way to go, mostly because of the hierarchies and distinctions embedded in these two ways of knowing about the past.

Dean Koyanagi of Tree Gate Farm in Ithaca with new-old electric tractor

The first event was FarmHack Ithaca, which I wrote a bit about in my most recent post.  Farm Hack was created to bring IT folks and young farmers together to design and build  things, ranging from electric tractors (like the one at left, a repurposed 1949 Grand Haven) to digital spaces for expanding and strengthening the local/sustainable food movement (like FarmHack's online forums).

As with other projects that embody the DIY/hacker/maker ethos, FarmHack is active, experimental, and radically collaborative.  When it comes to how they're approaching history, though, that DIY mindset leads them to see the historical record mainly as a transparent source of usable, practical information--plans for forgotten tools and methods, data about what was grown and marketed in particular places, inspiring statements from earlier farm activists.  Their tool kit for thinking about history doesn't include the kind of assessment of sources and contextualizing of different kinds of data that historians see as crucial to putting together a bigger, more balanced picture.  It also doesn't include an awareness of the lens  of "doing history" itself--that is, the selectivity, motive, and interpretation involved not only in approaching the historical record but also in making the materials we're examining in the present. 

During the discussion in Ithaca about putting historical materials and collections to use in the young-farmer movement, I found myself in the unusual (for me) position of being the most cautious and conservative voice in the room, urging that it might be smarter to slow down and try to connect with people and institutions who are already collecting, curating, and interpreting farm-related materials rather than jumping feet-first  into the history business themselves.  But I also appreciated the sense of politicized urgency driving the FarmHackers.  And I loved the way the structure of the entire event reflected the less-hierarchical society these farmers and activists would like to see.

Lunch prep at FarmHack Ithaca (Photo:  The Greenhorns)

That challenge to hierarchy was clearest at lunch.  Like just about every other food-movement gathering I've ever attended, this one included a communal meal, in this case prepared on the spot using food grown by local farmers.  (That's me in the middle, attempting to slice very large beets with a very dull knife;  my friend Anna Duhon of the Farmscape Ecology Program is on the right.)  We all pitched in;  we had a great healthy meal;  we all washed our own dishes.  The leveling effects of this are profound:  sleeves get rolled up, skills get shared, and everyone participates in "menial" tasks and services that are revalued here as an essential aspect of participation.

And here's my thought experiment:  I've been asking myself whether the same kind of leveling is possible within the "yack" side of the equation where I spend most of my professional time.  Can we envision public historians and other knowledge workers at a professional gathering sharing the labor of making a communal lunch and cleaning up afterward?  An event I attended at the University of Massachusetts Boston campus on Friday gave me a chance to picture that, and I have to say I couldn't quite do it.

Read or download the full report here

The event was a "Critical Conversation" about the recent "State of History in the National Park Service" report from the Organization of American Historians.  A standing-room-only crowd gathered for the afternoon to discuss some of the findings and implications of the study, which calls on the NPS to devote far more attention and resources to supporting and disseminating high-caliber historical scholarship at its sites. One point that recurred throughout the discussion (as it tends to do at public history events) is that historians, by and large, really haven't done a very good job of convincing the public of the value of the kinds of careful, provisional, critical knowledge they produce. A list of general recommendations did emerge from the conversation, but these weren't tied to any definite, consequential next steps or any specific forum for effecting change, and I left with a strong sense that while the discussions had been terrific, the immediate future would hold a lot more words than actions.

Beyond that, I was struck by how faithfully this gathering--like virtually every academic conference or symposium--reproduced the kind of intellectual politics represented by the hack/yack divide.  Purely talk-oriented forums delegate everything having to do with hands-on skills (making food, setting up and running AV equipment, and the like) and expect participants to show up dressed in ways that don't really enable us to do anything but talk, even if we were to want to do something as startling as helping out with the more menial side of the event.  The hierarchical implications of this are subtle but profound:  we are the ones who have risen above the hands-on tasks, whose time and ideas are important enough that we have other people take care of those more material needs for us.  Most of us don't believe those things consciously, but our patterns of gathering and working reinforce them on every level.

It was particularly striking at this event because one of the things we were discussing was whether front-line historical interpreters at national parks could give enough attention to upgrading their historical skills if they were also expected to perform jobs like checking on the toilet paper supply in the bathrooms.  The sense of the gathering, needless to say, was that the historical skills should take precedence.  In other words, we were talking about how to extend the hack/yack divide rather than challenge or undo it.

This isn't entirely illogical.  IT hackers make things with code and farmers grow food, but historians' "making" is inherently less tangible in many ways. But the higher status that has historically become attached to professional "hands-off" labor means that this is the logic of the compartmentalized, hierarchical society that has created such vast distances between farmers and eaters, between service work and knowledge work, and between embodied place-knowledge and more abstracted ways of learning about the world.  Those distances, I think, help to account for the strange absence in much of the yacker realm of the sense of urgency that motivates young farmers and food activists.  Even in the wake of this week's "superstorm" (which kept a number of would-be NPS participants in their own parks dealing with Hurricane Sandy's aftermath), only one speaker--Rolf Diamant, the recently-retired superintendent of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park--connected those dots, arguing that climate change has pushed its way to the top of the agenda for all national parks.  "If you're not talking about the issues of the day and connecting them to the place that you're at," he said, "you're not preparing the American people for the issues that they're going to face."

When I started this post, it was going to be a high-falutin piece about the essential contributions that professional historical skills can make to rethinking our current food systems.  But I've really said most of that elsewhere (for example, this previous post).  And as I ponder these two gatherings more deeply, I'm left feeling that historians need to find ways to sit down at actual, literal dinner tables with farmers and foodies, as an essential first step toward making the case for the importance of the more abstracted kinds of knowledge we can bring to the metaphorical table.  The young farmers are ahead of the historians on this, and if we're going to bring these two together, maybe those of us in the yacking sector need to be prepared to roll up our sleeves a little more often.

Tourists, femivores, and panhandlers: The urban market blend

I've fallen off the one-post-a-week wagon again, mainly because I ended up unexpectedly teaching a summer class and my time has filled up with prepping and grading again.  It's actually been quite a lot of fun, and one of the things I've been enjoying is that the class is fairly small and the time block is long, so we've had a chance to go on some field trips around Boston.  Yesterday we went to the Copley Square farmers market as part of our discussion of economic systems and exchange relationships, and I found it a useful check-in for thinking about where the new food movement fits in the trajectory of economic redevelopment in this particularly successful postindustrial city.

I moved out of Boston in the late 1980s, just at the time when Copley Square was being redesigned from a sterile, high-modernist kind of open plaza to a greener and more inviting urban space.  The market was launched in 1990, just after the landscape re-set was finished.  I haven't really been in that part of the city much since then, so it was interesting to hang around for a couple of hours watching the mix of people and activities that overlap with and are enabled by the market.  Some highlights, of relevance to this blog's focus on history/heritage and the local food movement:

• The market fits seamlessly into the effort to create what Bella Dicks has called "visitability" and what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has termed "hereness" for Copley Square and for Boston as a whole.  Although the sellers--particularly the farmers, as opposed to the more locally-based bakers and other specialty vendors--were mostly from central and even western Massachusetts, the presence of the market itself conveys a sense of being rooted in a specific place, which goes along with the iconic architecture (especially Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library, which anchor the square on two sides) and links with various pieces of local lore (especially the Boston Marathon, which finishes here and which is referenced in Nancy Schön's 1995 "Tortoise and Hare" sculpture, much photographed by tourists).  
• The market itself is a tourist attraction of sorts, with an interesting relationship to visitors from both far away and within the city.  The market manager, Ben Sommer, told me that the customer base includes a lot of people who work in the surrounding downtown buildings, but also many international tourists who happen to be in the square and many people from elsewhere in Boston who come downtown to do some of their food shopping (and, presumably, to run other errands or see other sights--an important part of the argument that organizers of farmers markets often make for their power of attraction and their economic "multiplier" effect).  
• Overlapping with the nearby workers, tourists, and day-trippers were many people from the core demographic of farmers market shoppers: the well-educated, professional, mostly female, mostly white, mostly 30-to-50-year-old, leftist/progressive/environmentalist shoppers whom Peggy Orenstein has labeled "femivores" (see "The Femivore's Dilemma" in the New York Times Magazine, March 14, 2010) and who embrace the chance to shorten the food chain as a pragmatic expression of their political and social values.  My students were struck by the way that two groups of market "extras" were working the particular sensibilities of this crowd:  panhandlers and petition-pushers were equally active in approaching market shoppers, both clearly seeing opportunities to mobilize uneasy liberal consciences or righteous liberal indignation.

One of the benefits of teaching is that it pushes you to stay at least somewhat current with the academic literature, and my thinking about the Copley market was enriched by a couple of good recent articles that I assigned as readings for this class trip:

• Kathleen Bubinas, "Farmers Markets in the Post-Industrial City," City & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 154–172 (2011)
• Nana Okura Gagné, "Eating local in a U.S. city: Reconstructing 'community'—a third place—in a global neoliberal economy," American Ethnologist, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 281–293 (2011)

Both Bubinas and Gagné point to the ways that farmers markets and postindustrial urban redevelopment can complement one another, for better and worse--creating a potentially politicized alternative to purely commoditized food exchange, on the one hand, or playing into purely consumption-oriented revisioning of urban spaces, on the other.  I've spent a fair bit of my own time critiquing the latter, but like others who are now focusing ethnographically on new food activism, I'm heartened by the sense that the potential for real change exists even within touristic or consumerist market projects.

Maybe it was just the exemplary gluten-free brownie that I scored at one of the booths, or the beautiful weather yesterday, but I left the place mentally agreeing with Rachel Slocum, whose 2006 article "Whiteness, space and alternative food practice" (Geoforum 38[3]:520-533) I also assigned as a reading for this class, that these markets may be spaces where the exclusionary can coexist with the transformative, and where we as scholars might lodge critiques that are sharp without being unproductively harsh. 

Re-occupying the land-grant ideal

In addition to the national birthdays on both side of the U.S./Canada border this past week, another big birthday just happened:  the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the USDA and land-grant colleges in the U.S.

1862 was a banner year for federal support of agricultural initiatives in the U.S., despite the government's preoccupation with the Civil War--or, according to some, because of it, since the secession of the Southern states removed many sectional objections to greater government involvement in agriculture [1].  Several foundational pieces of legislation were passed that year that continue to shape the farm sector today, including the establishment of a federal Department of Agriculture (which has been celebrating its sesquicentennial this year in a variety of ways) and the Morrill Land-Grant College Act.

Maybe most Americans know how this worked, but it's something that has always been a bit mysterious to this Canadian girl.  The idea of federally-supported agricultural colleges had been promoted--particularly by New Englanders--for several decades, and it seems as though the Morrill Act was a way to make it happen without direct cost to the taxpayers.  The government granted 30,000 acres of federal land to each state, with instructions to turn it into a college by one means or another.  Some states built a school on the land they were given, while others sold the real estate or its resources and used the money to fund a new or existing school.  The land-grant colleges provided much of the infrastructure for public higher education in the U.S., and their legacy is part of what's being celebrated at this year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival, wrapping up today. 

"Mass Aggie" in 1867 (UMass Special Collections and University Archives)

All of this seems to have been intersecting in some interesting ways with contemporary food politics, a hot topic on many college campuses.  University of Massachusetts Sustainable Agriculture Professor John Gerber reported in a May blog post on UMass's recent invocation and reinvigoration of its own land-grant roots with the establishment of a new School of Agriculture.  Gerber believes "The time is right for the re-emergence of 'Mass Aggie,'" as the school was once known, and he comments on the appeal that farming increasingly has for college students, something I'm also seeing among many of my students at Tufts.  There's a long-standing tension in American higher education between vocational and intellectual training, reflected in the "second tier" status that many public universities have worked hard to leave behind.  The best and the brightest have chosen white-collar professions over farming for a long time now, but agriculture seems to be regaining some of the status it slowly lost over the 19th and 20th centuries, at least for a sub-set of young Americans. 

Meanwhile, on the left coast, another set of students has been invoking a university's agricultural history in a much more militant way.  On Earth Day in April, a group under the banner of Occupy the Farm moved onto a five-acre tract of farmland owned by the University of California/Berkeley--the last open arable land in the area, and a parcel that the students and their allies want to see turned into a community farm (UC has used it for agricultural research for many years, but has also proposed that it be developed as student and faculty housing).  For three weeks, before being driven out and arrested by riot police, the students farmed the land, planting vegetables and tending chickens they had brought with them.

Just this weekend, the occupiers returned, continuing a decades-long local effort to keep the land in cultivation.  As the USDA and the land-grant colleges observe their birthdays in officially-sanctioned ways, the more radical qualities of agrarian revolt also seem to be alive and well, something that seems worth celebrating too!

[1]  Douglas Hurt, 1994. American Agriculture: A Brief History. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press (pp. 187-92)

Among the machines

The Central Mass. Steam, Gas, and Machinery Association held its annual engine show at the Orange Airport last weekend, and Fred and I made our annual pilgrimage there.  Fred goes because he finds useful parts for things there and because he really likes the old machines.  I really like the machines, too, but mostly I enjoy watching and thinking about the people.  (Anthropologist.  Sue me.)

I had a brief interesting chat with the guys at the International Harvester Collector Club table--the same group I wrote about in an earlier post this spring.  They had a row of beautiful Farmall tractors set up, and I asked them if anybody in the club actually used these for "real" farming.  Not really, they said--aside from an occasional Plow Day event when they help out a farmer in exchange for a place to run the machines around, the point is more the collection and restoration of the tractors, not their everyday use.

They did mention that a handful of club members found the older tractors useful for working small patches of land or doing specialized jobs.  But by and large, these collectors aren't farmers.  When I asked about that--i.e. how many members of the club had ever worked as active farmers--the answer was one that I could have predicted:  "Well, a lot of us had grandparents who farmed, but we do other things."

It's a very familiar answer when you talk to people in preservation, public history, reenactment, and related circles, and it confirms my sense that for a lot of those involved in preserving and commemorating elements of the past, it's more about reconnecting with a lost piece of family background rather than discovering something that might be put to use in the present.  And anyone actually using these machines to cultivate fields isn't going to spend a weekend sitting at the engine show--they're out growing things at this time of year.

So the aura of "pastness" is always pretty intense at the engine show.  But it's still fun to walk around and look at the often bizarre and beautiful machines, and to realize what an extensive community exists around them.  Like public historians, these people are engaged in saving and showing how to use aspects of small-scale farming that can't be relearned overnight, and even if they're not using that knowledge directly themselves, that's not to say that what they're doing isn't important and potentially useful to others.

Three Tough Questions, Part 3: How Political is Your Palate?

A while back, I wrote a blog post elsewhere about how the presence of an organic food company's family history display on the side of a delivery truck turned an urban space into a kind of pop-up theme park. I was thinking about that the other morning when I focused my eyes clearly enough to read the text on the side of my Cabot yogurt container, which told me that I would enjoy my yogurt more knowing that the company was fully owned by family farmers.  "Others may dazzle you with pictures of farms," the text went on, "but do you know if their farmers own stock or get their fair share?"

This struck me as pretty hard-hitting, especially at 7 a.m.  "Dazzle you with pictures of farms" was a direct jab at what Michael Pollan has called "supermarket pastoral'--the evocation of small-scale and artisanal food production in ways that may be at odds with how the food was actually grown or how it's being sold (most notably in an upscale healthfood supermarket chain whose name hardly needs mentioning).  That's what I was seeing on the side of the delivery truck, and what increasingly turns up in marketing materials for products from apples to eggs to wine.  This strategy aims to make us feel good about our food by knowing something about where it came from, but what the Cabot container was telling me was that we shouldn't accept those claims at face value.  It was asking me to be both critical and political first thing in the morning.

I happen to be that way at all times of the day, to the occasional annoyance of my husband and others who have to listen to me.  But I do have to wonder about what the most workable balance is between "feel-good" and "feel-bad" approaches to knowing about our food (or all the other things we consume).

I was particularly thinking about that this week when Lisa Gross, founder of the Boston Tree Party, came to speak to one of my Tufts classes.  Lisa is a conceptual artist who conceived of this apple-tree-planting project--what she calls a "decentralized public urban orchard"--in 2010 as a combined greening, re-skilling, community-building, public art, and civic engagement effort.  Lisa is terrific--warm, articulate, and very savvy about the layers of social, metaphorical, and environmental meanings that she and others have seen in the Tree Party.  But while acknowledging that the name itself was a "cheeky" reference to a certain political movement with a similar moniker, she made it quite clear that the project is essentially apolitical.

Her rationale echoed something I've frequently heard from other younger farmers and foodies:  they're looking for ways to bring people together and make them feel better, not subject them to angst about everything that's wrong with the food system.  Lisa credits this positive approach with at least part of the unexpected success of the Tree Party--expecting a handful of groups to sign up, she's been amazed to find dozens and dozens of "delegations" planting and pledging to care for a pair of trees.  And the list of participants is an impressively diverse slice of Boston-area civil society, suggesting that the apolitical character of the project may indeed make it more appealing for a wide range of people to sign on.

It sometimes strikes me that younger activists like Lisa have grown up hearing so much doom and gloom about the melting, imploding, messed-up planet that they've consciously shifted away from fighting one exhausting battle after another.  It's something I hear frequently from my students:  they understand the critiques they're learning in school about everything that's wrong with the world, but they feel that just being critical doesn't leave them much of a platform for doing something with their lives.  They make me wonder whether my own tendency to default to the political argument is kind of an old-leftie reflex (even though I'm a tad too young to be a card-carrying old leftie) and whether, in a food system where there are few choices that don't feel insufficient or compromised in some way, there's a certain wisdom in just letting go of the cynicism every now and again.  I've been arguing for the importance of injecting a more critical/historical sensibility into the new food movement, but maybe it's just as crucial to know when to stop talking and just go plant something.

What do you think?  How political should we try to get over breakfast?  How do you balance the "feel-good" and the "feel-bad" sides of thinking about food?

Three Tough Questions, Part I: Race

There's an awful moment in any writing project when you realize that you haven't thought through your own big questions as thoroughly as you might have, leaving your argument-in-progress suddenly hanging in mid-air with its feet kicking.  I'm in that moment now as I try to use my Spring Break to finish writing a piece about public history and the local food movement.

I want this piece to show how and why local food activism represents a richly compatible and exciting partner field for public history in a time of shrinking funding and heightened concern about the kinds of social and environmental questions that have long motivated new and experienced public historians.  All good so far, but the hole I just fell into was this:  I realized that the local food movement, at least in its most high-profile dimensions, too often reproduces almost exactly the same demographics and dynamics that characterize public history itself--it's the same white, liberal, professional world all over again, with people of color and/or working class people tending to appear as interesting but usually marginal Others with experiences and practices that public historians love to collect and represent but generally do not share.  So while I do genuinely believe that allying public history with local food efforts is an exciting opportunity to make our work more useable within a set of urgent questions, I also have to wonder what would keep the same old demographics (which have bedeviled liberal social movements from settlement houses to feminism to Occupy Wall Street) from reproducing themselves yet again.

One simple answer to this is that public historians should make themselves aware of the many vibrant local food projects that directly engage issues of race and diversity.  Many of these have emerged within the movement toward urban agriculture, particularly in "shrinking cities" like Detroit--for example, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which runs the D-Town Farm and focuses on issues of food security (sociologist Monica White has written about them).  Earthworks Urban Farm, another Detroit project, connects the dots between racism and multiple forms of injustice and insecurity;  see their page on Food Justice issues for a good articulation of these connections.  Growing Food and Justice for All also has a good page on Race and the Food System.  New-York-based BUGS (Black Urban Gardeners) has convened a wide-ranging annual conference in the past couple of years that centers around issues of race and equity (here's the 2011 schedule);  this group particularly caught my eye because it's supported in part by the Open Space Institute, which has been instrumental in preserving the farmland around Martin Van Buren National Historic Site, which I've been studying recently.  Another New-York-area work in progress is the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, which preserves and interprets a mid-19th century African American neighborhood and incorporates a farmer's market and farming/gardening activities into its programming.

So there's lots of great stuff going on.   And there's much here for public historians to contribute to in terms of tracing the histories of migration and labor (as the exemplary Bracero Archive project does), the politics of land tenure, changing urban and rural demographies, and so on.  Still, the stubborn reproduction of whiteness and middle class tastes and values in so many areas of cultural and knowledge production does give me pause (or maybe the pause is just from avoiding getting back to work on my article!).

La Finca/Land of Providence farmland in Holyoke, Mass.

A case in point that seems to show the still-existing disconnect between food projects focusing on social justice and those focusing on history and preservation is the land farmed by Nuestras Raices in Holyoke, Mass.  Nuestras Raices has been doing great work in community organizing and local food production with mostly Puerto Rican urban farmers for twenty years now, cultivating land formerly owned by the social-service-oriented Sisters of Providence Catholic nuns.  When the Sisters donated 25 acres of fertile Connecticut River bottomland to the Trustees of Reservations in 2009, Nuestras Raices continued to farm it, a fact that is noted on the Trustees' web page for the property.  On Nuestra Raices' website, though, the farm is simply La Finca, and there's no mention of the Trustees or the history of the site. 

The relationship is a recent one and I'm assuming there may be more going on socially than is turning up on these two web pages.  But at a glance, my sense is that the focus on the politics of food and migration isn't yet being integrated with the production of knowledge about the various histories connected with this site and the people associated with it over time.  That's where there's work for public historians to do--and I hope we find ways to do it that don't just put these cultural and occupational "Others" on display, but create working partnerships around the production of both food and knowledge.  Given that people on both sides of the equation are usually strapped for time and money, how can we foster this additional layer of engagement and push beyond our existing networks of social service and farming, on the one hand, and preservation and research, on the other?

This isn't the only quandary I'm in at the moment--stay tuned for more of the tough questions in the next couple of posts.  In the meantime, if you want to look more deeply into issues of race and food justice, geographer Rachel Slocum has written well on the topic, and here's another good roundup of posts, ideas, and articles relating to white privilege and the local food movement.

An Open Letter to New Farmers, Part I

Blue dots show an increase in number of farms, 2002-2007.

Happy New Year to all, and especially to the new farmers who have recently begun to reverse the very long decline in the number of farms and farmers in parts of the U.S., while also starting to counter the continually rising median age of farmers (a sobering 57 nation-wide in the last agricultural census).  The growth of organizations like the Greenhorns and programs like CRAFT and countless other formal and informal mentoring and apprenticeship projects reflect the numbers of newer, younger farmers in heartening ways. You’re smart, you’re strong, you like good food, and you give me hope that we might actually be building real networks that can help us collectively to withstand the various environmental and economic shocks that continue to come our way.

While I’m in this New Year’s mood, I thought I would frame my next two blog posts as an open letter to the new farmers of the past decade or so, to ask (with apologies to John F. Kennedy) both what historic sites might do for you and what you might do for historic sites. Let me start with the first of those.

• The first thing to know about historic sites is that many of them have land—maybe not much, but it’s often land that was farmed and/or gardened in an earlier incarnation, and that might be farmed and/or gardened again, if it isn’t already being cultivated. My Links page includes examples of the growing number of historic sites that already partner with working farmers, but I know there are lots more out there that could try the experiment.  Usually, historical organizations have all they can do to raise enough money to keep their facilities open and their (often minimal) staffs paid. Don’t tell them I told you, but most of them are, in fact, as financially strapped as you are. They don’t generally have the time, personnel, or expertise to cultivate fields and gardens as well. So think about whether there are sites near you that might welcome a proposal to revitalize a big kitchen garden or pasture some livestock. There are legal and logistical issues to be worked out, but also synergies to be discovered.

• Some of those synergies have to do with the collections that are stored and the historical knowledge that’s produced at historic sites. Particularly if the site in question focuses on pre-20th century history (and most historic sites do), there’s a strong likelihood that its history includes some connection with farming somewhere along the line, even if that’s not its main reason for being preserved. A lot of historic sites work hard to show that they’re relevant on more than a purely local scale, but really, they’re all about localness as well.  They can tell you a lot about who farmed what here, when, and how. You might have to get them started with some specific questions that are of interest and use to you, and you might end up helping to dig for the answers yourself in the slow season (warning: this can be surprisingly addictive). The payback: you deepen your own sense of what’s possible on the land you’re farming and what kinds of networks of exchange that farmland has been part of over time.

• And finally, there’s another way that I’d love to see you using the kind of historical knowledge stored at historic sites. I admire and applaud you, new farmers, but I also worry about you, because we’ve been here before, and the combined creative energies of agricultural reformers and back-to-the-landers in the 1970s, and the 1910s, and the 1820s, for that matter, weren’t enough to withstand the juggernaut that is industrial capitalism. I want the good demographic news about the growth in new farms from the 2007 agricultural census to show up in the 2012 data as more than just a blip, and to keep getting stronger in 2017 and 2022 and so on. And I think that if that’s going to happen, you’re going to need to know about the successes and—more importantly—the failures of earlier attempts to keep rural places vital and small-scale farms afloat.

So if and when you start talking with local historic sites and perhaps even cultivating some of their land, make sure to ask them about that, okay? You may find—as I found when I investigated this kind of question at Martin Van Buren’s old farm estate in Kinderhook, NY—that the same kinds of reformers who were trying to fix rural life and keep young people down on the farm were also involved not only in the creation of the kinds of model farms that we now often visit as museums, but also with historic preservation and land conservation efforts as well. There are things we can all learn from their experiences, and those of other, less elite reformers, that might help make this latest reinvention of the farm economy a more lasting one.

Next week: How you can help with the hacking of farm history.