Lisa Junkin - A question of the stomach: A museum contemplates its role within a movement

“It is a part of the new philanthropy to recognize that the social question is largely a question of the stomach.” – Jane Addams 

Five years ago, the Slow Food Movement was new to myself and my colleagues at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. We considered ourselves to be urban foodies in our own rights, but we were just catching wind of a broad movement that would soon sweep the nation and transform our museum. We wanted a place at the table, but we did not yet know where we belonged.

We read Carlo Petrini, Alice Waters, Raj Patel, Michael Pollan. We spoke with farmers, activists, chefs, economists, doctors and historians. We learned that while the Slow Food Movement has radical roots, in the United States it has been characterized by activists as elitist. Opponents argue that a movement dedicated to food shouldn’t be concerned with the pleasures of fine foods and preserving the "slow" traditions of the past, but rather should be committed to advocating for food justice and a better future for all.

Referring to The Jungle, a book that set off a food movement of its own, Upton Sinclair wrote: “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” For the last five years, the Hull-House has aimed squarely at our audiences’ stomachs, developing a suite of food projects that includes a modern day soup kitchen, an urban farm, an artisan jam operation, an heirloom seed library, and an exhibit called 21st Century Home Economics. As a result of this work, we offer two responses to the divisions within the Slow Food Movement. The first has little to do with public history but everything to do with movement building, and that is that pleasure is not at odds with social justice. Alice Waters refers to the slow food movement as a delicious revolution, arguing that when pleasure and community-building are prioritized, ecologically and socially responsible systems will follow. This framework has transformed our understanding of what activism looks like. A hot bowl of soup, organic and made with care, serves as a reminder that we are fighting for all people to be nourished in body, mind and spirit. There is pleasure in justice, and in the ongoing struggle we do well to remember that medicine goes down easier with a spoon of honey.

Our second response has everything to do with public history, which is, the past is not at odds with the future. At Hull-House, our foray into the food movement is lens for investigating issues of social justice, past and present. Many of our food related programs reflect the fierce urgency of now, but they are grounded by a site-specific historical context that inspires and shapes our participation in the larger movement. (For an in-depth examination of how Hull-House’s food programs relate to our site’s history, see article by former director Lisa Yun Lee: “Hungry for Peace: Jane Addams and the Hull-House Museum’s Contemporary Struggle for Food Justice.”)

To be honest, we didn’t know much about how Hull-House residents engaged with food when we started this work. But as we learned more about the food movement, we began to ask new questions of the past. Who cooked at Hull-House? Where did immigrants purchase their food? Were there community gardens in the 1890s? What solutions to food insecurity were devised 100 years ago? Not surprisingly, our research yielded a bounty: the Progressive Era residents at Hull-House helped create the field of Home Economics and engaged in research on nutrition. They advocated to collectivize housework, to “light one fire instead of many.” They created a public kitchen that served affordable food to families, factory workers, and school children. They created the first pasteurized milk station in Chicago, helping to end a public health crisis that claimed the lives of hundreds of infants. And they formed urban farms alongside their immigrant neighbors in order to nourish and sustain their community.

When we examined our site’s history around food, suddenly the past no longer felt distant, nor did the movement feel quite as fraught. This historical content became the foundation of our food programming and contributes significantly our conversation on contemporary issues. For example, at a program about rapidly increasing desires for raw milk, small batch ice cream and other artisan-made foods, Hull-House staff offered insight about why Settlement residents advocated for the regulatory agencies that many foodies today reject as authorities on what foods are safe and edible. During a conversation about so-called food deserts-- neighborhoods lacking food security--we grappled with how the Hull-House Diet Kitchen failed due to the residents’ lack of knowledge and sensitivity about immigrants’ palates and inflexible notions of nutrition.

We now understand the museum’s role as such: to bring together doctors, farmers, chefs, students, economists, and artists in share meals and discuss the food movement today, and to share a broad historical narrative that offers critical insight and inspiration. Five years after we began our love affair with food and justice, we have found our place within the movement. It is in the dining room, on the farm, inside the archive and out in the streets.

- Lisa Junkin, Interim Director, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

Photographs: Re-thinking Soup in the Residents’ Dining Hall, 2008; The Urban Heirloom Farm at the Hull-House Museum, 2011; Canning Labels, 2011; Seed Starting Workshop, 2012.

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.

How do we know when farming is "for real"?

I launched the blog last week in a fit of somewhat irrational exuberance, without having all of my initial examples listed and organized on the links page. Finishing that task this week pushed me to think through how I’m defining “working farm” and “historic site,” the two sides of the equation that I’m planning to focus on here. And it reinforced my initial sense that there are lots of things going on at the borders of these two things, but still relatively few that are actually finding ways to merge them.

When I think about what makes a “working farm,” I’m looking for something that is directly involved in selling food that people will eat in their everyday modern lives (not just apple butter or maple syrup that is made as part of a demonstration and perhaps sold as essentially a souvenir, but something that people would buy as part of their food shopping).

This definition knocks off the list a number of farming projects at historic sites that seem, on the surface, to be worth including. For example, at Booker T. Washington National Monument, the local Rotary Club helps distribute food from the national park’s Heirloom Garden to low-income residents of the area. At Carroll’s Hundred in Baltimore, the “Black Damask Project” involves urban youth who have helped replant a 1760s orchard as a way to help them gain a sense of community history. These kinds of projects, while they utilize historic places, foods, and methods in often exciting and creative ways, don’t rely on the proceeds of the food they grow to support themselves. They’re more oriented toward education, demonstration, or providing a service, rather than selling a product.

There are certainly lots of farms and farmers in the sustainable/local food movement who are interested in more than just making money.  To give just one example, my friends Deb Habib and Ricky Baruc at Seeds of Solidarity in Orange, Mass., blend farming, education, environmental awareness, and social change on every level of their operation.  (Those are Ricky's greens in the photo at the top of the page.)  But entering into the real-life agricultural marketplace makes an important statement that farming is about real-life food production, and that it’s not enough just to show how food can be grown, cooked, and consumed in ways that challenge the dominant industrialized food system--we also have to address the marketing and distribution pieces of the puzzle as well. Finding a customer base and a distribution network becomes a test of a farm’s vision and viability, and argues for the realistic possibility of small-scale farms surviving without heavy subsidy of one kind or another.

So the various historic sites that host community gardens (for example, Fort Dupont in Washington, DC or the massive community gardens at Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City) didn’t make it onto my links page, because those growers are producing food for their own use rather than selling it to others.

And for a different set of reasons, historic sites where representing the past is the underlying goal also didn’t get onto the list. A recent issue of Organic Gardening features an article about how Colonial Williamsburg recreates colonial-era food gardening techniques and crops. But the emphasis at CW is on depicting the past as accurately as possible--what Richard Handler and Eric Gable have called “mimetic realism”--rather than on farming in a way that directly engages the present. That dividing line shows up in a discussion of how the site’s growers deal with pests that hadn’t taken up residence in North America until after the eighteenth century. “We have to deal authentically with inauthentic pests,” one of the gardeners is quoted as saying. This is very different from the approach of Tillers International, which has created a “Reinvention Lab” to experiment with ways in which historic methods and tools might make “low-capital” farming more feasible for farmers around the world.

So that’s how I chose the examples on these links pages. Can you think of other examples that might test or challenge my definitions here? Should I be including anything that I’ve decided to keep off the list?

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And I promised to give a shout-out to the first ten of my Facebook friends who signed up to receive these blog posts via email. Here are the top ten—but I’m very grateful to all who’ve signed up so far!

Thanks to Carrie Kourkoumelis, Pam Donnelly, Craig Stockwell, Susan Sawyer, Maureen Riendeau, Stacie Gay, Amahl Bishara, Sue Cloutier, Linda Ruel Flynn, and Leah Mason.