Here's to the sprouting season

Source:  Tufts Digital Collections and Archives.

I've been grubbing away quite diligently on my food/farm/history project since my last post, but the Spring 2014 teaching semester and conference schedule steamrolled over my good intentions to keep posting here occasionally.  Now that all of that is more or less over, I'm planning to get back into some regular blogging again.

That's not me grubbing in the dirt at the left, BTW.  It's a Tufts College (well, technically Jackson College, Tufts' then-new college for women) undergraduate helping to prepare the ground for the school's World War I garden in April of 1918, on the site of what's now the arts complex. Opening some new research into the history of food production on the Tufts campus is one part of what I've been doing this spring, in collaboration with a terrific group of students in this year's "New Food Activism: Roots and Visions" course.  I've just finished grading the final papers from that class, and they've opened up some exciting directions that I'll be pondering more deeply, including in blog posts here and some advance planning for next year's class and possible future projects at Tufts. 

Kate Christen: Kinetic history at play (and at work, of course…) in the fields of local food movements

Slavic Village Learning Farm, one of Cleveland Botanical Garden's Green Corps sites

The local food movement topic--all the topics our prior posts have highlighted (history, policy, community ramifications, etc.)--constitute a strong personal research interest of mine, and even more (especially since my research time is strictly limited!) a strong personal interest, full stop. Personal engagement plus research/professional interest clearly both factor for all of us in this workshop.

Doubtless also common amongst us is the draw of the topic's close framing in action-potential--its focus on historians as kinetic actors. From the initial description: "This Working Group is based on the premise that the methods and critical insights of public historians are crucial in uncovering and communicating those more nuanced histories, and that doing so is an outstanding way to link our own methods and values with vital public dialogue about a wide range of environmental and economic issues." Also in the original description (I think that's where): "developing or amplifying a historical and theoretical framework for thinking about the public history/food movement nexus and the opportunities for partnerships to extend civic dialogue and action in these realms." And as Cathy wrote this weekend, our posts show "that we're all groping toward defining a specific role for ourselves and our skills as public historians who want to strengthen efforts and discourses around local food while asserting the value of the kind of careful, contextualized knowledge that historians can help to build."

For our in-person time, I’m interested in exploring ways we may want to move on helping define and implement specific roles for public historians within these food-related settings, how we might pull these into action, including perhaps through some form of practice-oriented trainings.

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.

Diana Lempel: With taste, smell, and imagination

I’m standing in the basement of Bondir, the intimate, award-winning Cambridge restaurant, watching Chef Jason Bond dismantle a hindquarter of beef, removing fat from muscle and muscle from bone. As he drops each chunk into its designated plastic tub, he explains to me what it will be used for. Every bit of this 200 pounds of meat will be consumed. The steaks will dry-age for some months; the fat, brightly yellow because the cow was grazing on bright green grass, will be rendered and used for daily cooking; the tough muscles will be stews, cooked with the stock made from the bones. This one animal will feed hundreds of diners; it’s the only way for high-quality meat like this, Chef tells me, to be economic.

But I don’t think it’s just economy that drives Bond’s pursuit of a "snout-to-tail" approach to beef, or his painstaking efforts to remove different kinds of pollen from every dried blossom of a fennel bush, or his abiding affection for his long-lived sourdough starter.To show what I mean, here’s a reflection offered by Sous Chef Rachel Miller, as she prepped spiced kuri squash. "I like to read a lot of old cookbooks because they’re more resourceful... it’s more about ingredients and a process... different ways to utilize what grows here, because that’s what we’re going to have a lot of."

Briann Greenfield: What row to hoe?

The author picking spinach in February.

What role should a state museum, like the Connecticut Historical Society (CHS), play in preserving and interpreting the history of agriculture and food? How can such an organization tell the history in a way that fits its specific mission, institutional strengths and priorities? I ask these questions from a several perspectives. I am a Professor of History and Public History Program Coordinator at Central Connecticut State University where I teach courses in museum studies and material culture that regularly use the museum’s collection. I am also a member of CHS’s Collections Steering Committee and Deaccession Task Force, two groups charged with enhancing the collection’s strength, relevance, and overall quality. Finally, I’m interested on a very personal level as someone deeply involved in the local food movement as a 4- season gardener on my own city lot and a regular volunteer at Urban Oaks Organic Farm, a 12-year old farm in an urban food desert. These perspectives make me see both the potential for agriculture and food history, but also make me cautious about committing limited resources to its pursuit.

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.

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.

State of the field(s): What history adds to a snapshot of the present

The final narrative chapter of the Martin Van Buren NHS Ethnographic Landscape Study was a snapshot of northern Columbia County agriculture in 2010, when I completed the research for the report.  Drawing on a quote from one of my interviews, it was titled "A Lot of Ways to Keep a Farm Going (1974-2010)" and brought the histories of some of the older farms I'd looked at across time up to the present.  It also added a handful of new sites as a way to cover a wider range of farming practices in the county.

2009 promotional map of CC farm products

The mix included everything from well-to-do horse farms to old Dutch farmsteads now converted to purely residential properties. I looked at one large and one small Community Supported Agriculture farm and an orchard business that was almost entirely reliant on pick-your-own and agritourism income.  I included a large (by Columbia County standards) "conventional" dairy farm whose owners had moved to New York state after being priced out of suburbanizing Connecticut, and who currently work other farmers' fields all over this part of the county to grow feed crops for their cows.  In contrast to this was a family who had been farming the same property for 200 years and who had purposely decided to scale back their operation to keep from falling into some of the cycles of expansion, debt, and over-production that have plagued dairy farmers.  Every farmer included in the chapter had stories to tell about the hard choices to be made in remaining solvent, maintaining yields and land fertility, and staying in sync with what customers want and will pay for.

Before the July 2010 fire at Harrier Fields Farm

One of the uses of this kind of "round-up" chapter is simply to show the continuation of very long patterns of volatility and change in what often appears to non-farmers as a rather slow-paced way to live and work.  Two dairy farmers I'd been hoping to interview went out of business between the preliminary and primary research phases of my project;  the pick-your-own orchard changed hands before the report was printed;  and in a particularly heart-breaking happening, the early 19th century barn complex at Harrier Fields Farm (pictured above) burned to the ground in a hay fire just a few days after I'd interviewed farmer Mike Scannell there and admired the hay he'd just laboriously gotten in.  The fire made all the stories I'd heard from farmers about past losses and disasters much more poignant and pointed, and it's also made me much more aware of the costs of subsequent events like the floods after Hurricane Irene last year or the drought of this past summer.

The other utility of this survey chapter, for me, was to illuminate the range of ways that farmers continually draw on ideas and discourses from the past in constructing their own approaches to keeping a farm going.  Neo-agrarianism of various kinds came to the fore in many of my interviews, particularly with farmers in the "sustainable" or "eat local" fold.  In one of his newsletter columns [PDF] for Roxbury Farm's shareholders, Jean-Paul Courtens talked about re-embracing the label of "peasant farmer" as a way to challenge the logic of purely profit-oriented or fully-industrialized agriculture.  Mike Scannell, on the other hand, harkened back to the Jeffersonian idea of the yeoman farmer, emphasizing the importance of land ownership, freedom from the burden of debt, and Wendell-Berry-inspired reliance on muscle rather than mechanical power.

Some of the farmers drew on more personal histories and memories, including those of distant and recent forebears.  A few even invoked Martin Van Buren, often referencing his early adoption of orchard produce as a cash crop or--in Mike Scannell's case--his attempts to rein in the growing political power of consolidated capital in the U.S. ("He was the last President to really stand up to the banks," Mike said during our interview).  It was fascinating and useful to trace the overlapping and diverging currents of conversation among farmers in the area, and to recognize agrarian, reformist, industrialist, and occasionally utopian notions whose roots went back at least two centuries and sometimes far longer.  History often complicates things, as several of these recent posts have shown, but it can also provide a sense of depth and perspective in a way that nothing else can.

In what's going to be my final post for a while, I'll talk next about how I tried to roll all of this into some concrete suggestions for the national park.  Then I'm going to hand over the reins of the blog to a great group of colleagues who will be sharing their own thoughts about the farm/food/history nexus over the next several months.  More on that tomorrow!

What we can (and can't) ask history to do for us: Lessons from Martin Van Buren

Lindenwald's kitchen reflects the park's expanded focus on food and farming

Shortly before he lost his bid for Presidential re-election in 1839, Martin Van Buren purchased an old Dutch farm in his home town of Kinderhook, New York.  After the election, he moved there permanently, continuing to play a part in national politics but also becoming a serious farmer.

170 years later, the small national park centered around Van Buren's country mansion expanded its boundaries to include the property's 19th century farm fields as well.  Those fields are now protected for agricultural use in perpetuity and most of them are currently being cultivated by Roxbury Farm, a vibrant biodynamic CSA.  Prompted in part by concern about keeping prime farmland in Columbia County in cultivation, the boundary expansion has been both supported by and the impetus for a number of park-commissioned studies documenting Van Buren's farming and--in the case of my own Ethnographic Landscape Study--the longer history of agriculture in the county.  In thinking through the practical utility of the chapters of my report, as I've been doing in this series of posts, I'm struck by how Chapter 5, on Van Buren's quarter-century at the farm, brings us up against some of the thornier issues of moving good historical scholarship into the public sphere.

While I was doing my primary research, the park and the farm were engaged in trying to negotiate the terms of their new relationship, a process that is still ongoing and that exposed tensions between differing philosophical approaches, management styles, and economic imperatives.  A question that the park and I were both wrestling with, in parallel, was, "What kind(s) of contemporary farming are compatible with the park's core mission of interpreting the life and political career of Martin Van Buren?" 

This question was most salient for the small amount of land owned outright by the National Park Service (most of the acreage is actually in private hands) but also for thinking about possible future partnerships with other farmers who might farm the property at some point.  For the second half of the 20th century, Lindenwald's farmer-owner had grown corn, potatoes, and other commercial crops using DDT and other toxic pesticides, and there was a strong consensus--supported by general NPS policies--that this was not a compatible use.  But the question opened a real can of worms:  toxic pesticides might be off the table, but what other methods were acceptable or unacceptable?  Did Martin Van Buren's own farming practices offer any kind of guide to defining those limits?  How useful was the historical record in helping to guide present- and future-oriented decision-making?

Jesse Buel's Albany-based farm journal

There are certainly many intriguing overlaps between Van Buren's farming and some elements of the contemporary food movement, including CSA and biodynamic farming.  Van Buren's farm provided much of the food for his own household;  this was still a time of "eating local."  Commercial markets were beginning to exert a much stronger influence on what farmers grew and how they sold it, making the mid-19th century not unlike our own time in its particular blend of local consumption and more distant marketing.  Van Buren was au courant with many of the farm reform ideas of his time, and seems to have shared the concern of many in the northeast about the future of farming and the livelihoods and values that went with it (including, importantly for Van Buren, the virtues of "free soil and free men").  Duke University historian Reeve Huston, who conducted a Special History Study [PDF] on Van Buren's farming for the park, tended toward an interpretation of the former President as an enthusiastic adopter--if not precisely a pioneer--of techniques such as restoring the fertility of over-worked fields through manuring, experimenting with new crops like hops, and reading progressive farm journals like Jesse Buel's Albany-based Cultivator.  Roxbury Farm's practices echo and mirror many of these historical precedents, including that its founder, Jean-Paul Courtens, is himself Dutch-American, like Van Buren and others who cultivated this land from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

Jean-Paul traced out some of these similarities in a September 2010 newsletter [PDF], locating Roxbury Farm within the longer trajectory of reform efforts in Columbia County, and we used this history as the basis for a "three-century farm tour" at the park's 2010 Harvest Day celebration (at left, after the tour, are Otter and Conrad Vispo from the Farmscape Ecology Program, Jean-Paul Courtens and Jody Bollyut of Roxbury Farm, Anna Duhon from FEP, yours truly as the early 20th century daughter of a neighboring farm, and Kinderhook historian Ruth Piwonka).

But despite all that, when I came to write Chapter 5 of my report, the conclusion I rather reluctantly came to is that the history of Van Buren's own farming in no way provided a straightforward guide to what might be done on the farm in the present or future.  There were overlaps but also sharp differences, including of course the fact that no era is ever an exact repetition of a previous one.  And Van Buren himself, like virtually all farmers, created his own idiosyncratic set of choices and practices, pursuing some of the latest technologies but also planting his potatoes according to the phases of the moon, as his forebears had done. If there was a simple answer to guide the park's planning, it was that farming is an immensely complicated and dynamic activity that is inherently in dialogue with the changes and conditions of its own moment and practitioners.

So there were two takeaways for me from Chapter 5, in terms of history's utility in thinking about present-day farming and historic sites.  First, the chapter was an important corrective to the hope that the historical record can somehow provide a model or a map for "getting it right" in the present.  If anything, the historical record will almost invariably complicate things, which is frustrating but also important in keeping us from leaping to too-hasty or too-simple conclusions.  History, if you look closely at it, has a habit of forcing you to reflect more deeply and weigh alternatives more carefully.

And the second takeaway, since we do sometimes need to act rather than getting stuck in the pondering phase, is that it's important to be clear about what historical research can help us with and what just needs to be decided based on more present-oriented considerations.  In other words, we need to beware of asking history to do too much as well as too little.

Next:  Finding new histories--and unseen alternatives--between the lines.

Beyond baby animals: Farm/history synergies and the insidiousness of pastness

Admit it.  When you look at this image, you think "yesteryear" or something close to it.  The photo isn't, however, of a living history village or reenactment of olde tyme farming.  It's from the Tillers International website, and shows a pair of the oxen that Tillers uses in teaching and developing small-scale, non-energy-intensive farm techniques--mostly intended for use in international rural development projects--based on the tools, methods, and lessons of American agricultural history.  In other words, it's very contemporary, even cutting-edge, as are the many small farms that use draft animals rather than (or along with) petroleum-powered machines. 

But that "yesteryear" impulse is a tough one to get rid of, and my own dissatisfaction with it--and  the way it permeates virtually all historic sites and projects relating to agriculture--is one of the main reasons I was eager to take on the Ethnographic Landscape Study project for Martin Van Buren National Historic Site.

In the first chapter of the study, I set out some of the reasons why historic sites might want to build stronger partnerships with contemporary food activism, education, and markets, especially at the "sustainable" end of the food and farming spectrum.  I also tried to spell out some of the things that stand in the way, including the fact that most farms have to be very attentive to profitability in ways that differ from non-profits'  approach to finances.  That need to stay profitable also means that farmers have to adapt, sometimes very quickly, to changing weather, markets, and other conditions, which puts them somewhat at odds with historic sites' tendency to focus on a single period or span of time.

I've touched on all of that already in other posts, so in this one I thought I'd just mention one additional idea that I put forward in Chapter One:  that it can help to parse out the various layers of synergy between historic sites and working farms.  To my eye, there seem to be three:

1. Direct synergy.  This happens when a historic site's agricultural or agrarian history is part and parcel of the reason why it was preserved, as at Shaker settlements or farmers' museums like the one at Cooperstown.  As with everything else about farming, though, even this "direct" connection is often fuzzier than it seems at first.  The most holistic, "authentic" agricultural landscapes (for example, living history villages) are often re-creations, villages, while the most direct, contemporary cultivation of historic farms may prove difficult to integrate into historic landscapes, as has been the case at Martin Van Buren NHS.


2. Indirect synergy.  This comes in various forms.  
   • Because farming was such a widespread way of life in America until well into the 20th century, many--perhaps most--historic sites have an indirect synergy with farming, even it it's not part of their original mission.  Civil War battles fought in farmers' fields have resulted in preserved battlefields that need to be kept cultivated in order to convey a sense of the historic landscape.  
   • A second kind of indirect synergy emerges from shared concerns with education about past and present farming practices.  For many farmers, especially in the local food and sustainability movements, public access to farms and education about farming practices are essential to building an informed clientele that will enable small-scale and artisanal farms to survive and thrive.  For historic sites, of course, education about the past is seen as inherently valuable;  teaching people about present farming practices falls into a somewhat grayer area.
   • Finally, the values of the kinds of people who tend to work in historic preservation, public history, and cultural resource management tend to involve them in "localism," land stewardship projects, and environmentalism, making them personally and professionally sympathetic to things like small-scale farming, the sustainable food movement, and efforts to protect open space and working farmland.


3. Implied synergy.  This is the insidious one.   For many contemporary visitors to historic sites, farming itself is inherently historic, old, and unfamiliar, creating expectations and perceptions that may turn out to be at odds with present-day farming practices and landscapes.  Especially in the all-encompassing environment of older-style living history farms, visitor nostalgia, escapism, and purely aesthetic pleasure (just look at those pretty purple flowers in the photo above!) can quickly override interest in more present-oriented farming issues and methods.

Hancock Shaker Village combines baby-animal cuteness with working agriculture.

It's my hope that the continuing expansion of the local-food movement signals new potential for overcoming what I think of as the baby-lamb (or sometimes piglet) effect.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy the flowers and the fuzzy baby animals--just that it would be great if we could learn to see them as part of agricultural landscapes that are both "historic" and "working." 

Next post:  Trying to see farming (and culture) outside of Western categories.

Church, Grange, contradance: The role of old buildings in building new food infrastructure

The Montague Grange (Photo:  Friends of the Montague Grange)

I was going to start unpacking the chapters of my Martin Van Buren National Historic Site Ethnographic Landscape Study in this week's post, but there was an article in my local paper that feels worth commenting on, so I'll delay the report discussion for another week.

When I say "local paper," I mean really local.  I went on a media fast more than 20 years ago to cleanse my mental system, and it felt so great that I've never really gone back.  I get much of my breaking news either through various social grapevines or from the Greenfield Recorder (whose "Obama wins" headline this Wednesday was well below the news of both Elizabeth Warren's Senate victory and a too-close-to-call race for state rep).  Since we moved to Wendell a year and a half ago, we've also subscribed to the Montague Reporter, a decade-old weekly that calls itself "The Voice of the Villages" and covers a number of the small towns in eastern Franklin County, including ours.

This week's Reporter includes a lengthy story by Lee Wicks about the Montague Grange turning its charter back in to the state Grange, signalling the end of its 125-year history as an active part of what was once a broad national network focused on farm and rural concerns.  As with many Grange chapters, its membership has dwindled down to almost nothing, and in recent years it has been just one part of a three-headed organizational structure along with the Corporation of the Grange Hall, an entity that actually owns the Grange Hall, and the Friends of the Montague Grange, which exists for fundraising and maintenance of the 1834 building. 

One of the things that was interesting to me about the article was how much history it included.  There was a long quote from a history of the local and national Grange (written by Mik Muller in 2008 and available on the Montague town website), focusing on the many progressive social and political projects the Grange movement has supported in the U.S., from rural road improvement and school lunch programs to the land-grant university system, ballot reform, and anti-monopoly legislation.  The Montague Grange was formed in 1887, 20 years after the launch of the national Grange, and Wicks makes it clear that at least in the early years, farmer activism tended to be as wide-ranging and politicized as it is today with the local-food movement.

The one vote against giving up the Montague Grange's charter came from a member who is quoted as arguing that "The Grange played an important role in our collective history;  at some future time we might need it back."  That strong sense of historical consciousness, too, struck me as interesting, but perhaps a bit narrow to fit the way that civic organizations and structures--things that have come to be termed "civil society"--tend to morph into each other over time, particularly in small towns and cities.  The Montague Grange Hall, pictured above, spent its first century as a Unitarian Church;  the Grange used to meet in the Town Hall space now occupied by the public library;  other civic spaces and groups have come and gone over the years, but always, I'm guessing, with considerable overlap in membership and perhaps also in purpose.

Muller's history shows that like other local Granges, the one in Montague had become basically a village improvement society quite early in its history, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't performed an important function in keeping social connections and meeting spaces alive so that people can work on issues of shared concern.[1]  We do of course need organizations that can do the kinds of things the Grange did in its early years, but civil society theory suggests that a lot of the infrastructure for doing that is created and maintained not just through direct political and financial organizations but also through contradances, sports leagues, book groups, local newspapers, and historic preservation campaigns.  So even without its charter, the Montague Grange may be holding that physical and social space open, in the same way that I've argued agritourism may be helping to hold open spaces for persistent, low-level infrastructure-rebuilding in the food and farming sector.  A sense of the fluid history of organizations like the Grange may help us to see the value in these less-direct forms of activism.

(Source:  Collier, A History of Old Kinderhook)[2]

Martin Van Buren link:  The Lindenwald Grange in Van Buren's home town of Kinderhook, New York (named for the post-Presidential estate of the town's most famous son) similarly acquired an unused public building--in this case, the 1836 Academy that once served as the town's high school, shown at left--and occupied it until 1975, when its membership had also declined to the point that keeping up the building was more than it could manage.  Columbia County, New York, like Franklin County in Massachusetts, has been a hotbed of new farming and farm organizing in the past decade, and in my next few posts I'm planning (if not distracted by fun things in the newspaper) to say more about how I think historical research can play a role in supporting that.

[1]  See R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History (Ames, IA: Iowa State
University Press, 1994), pp. 203-5 for an overview of the Grange's shift away from radical cooperative activities into a more general educational and civic focus after the 1870s.

[2]  Edward A. Collier, A History of Old Kinderhook (New York and London: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1914)

Big Generic vs. Small Generic in Salt Lake City

My co-panelists Michelle Moon and John Forti at the market

I can’t help it.  I spend a lot of time thinking and occasionally writing about the kinds of spaces—usually large downtown hotels and convention centers—where those of us with an academic and professional interest in place, memory, and history tend to congregate for our meetings. These places usually reflect (but seldom admit to) histories of urban displacement and consolidation that often add up to a feeling of placelessness, and much of downtown Salt Lake City reflects this.  But as in so many cities and towns, the still-expanding local food scene is helping to create very different, if still mostly ephemeral, spaces of encounter and consumption, as my fellow panelists and I discovered after our “From Sustenance to Relevance: Reinterpreting Food, Place, and Local History” panel at the AmericanAssociation for State and Local History conference this weekend.

Convention center and farmers market locations in SLC

Salt Lake City’s convention center bears the hallmarks of familiar patterns of downtown redevelopment in American cities:  successively larger structures designed to attract and accommodate mega-events of various kinds.  The original 1899 “Salt Palace” for which the current center was named incorporated a race track and dance hall;  a 1910 replacement was itself replaced in 1969 ahead of the city’s first unsuccessful bid to host the Winter Olympics (it tried again in 1998 and finally won in 2002).  That facility was demolished in 1994, and the current gigantic convention center and an adjoining arts and culture complex now cover three full city blocks, about the same size as—but far more monolithic than—the Mormon Temple campus just to the northeast.  The convention center served as the media headquarters for the 2002 Winter Olympics, which was famously rescued by local hero and successful venture capitalist Mitt Romney, and the whole area, along with much of the rest of the downtown, has the feel of something that was constructed to  demonstrate that the city was ready to enter the new era of global spectacle and competition.

City Creek, adapted for its new setting

Two enormous and fairly new shopping complexes bracket the convention center, including the City Creek Center, built on the site of the city’s first market.  It’s very easy, if you’re given to noticing such things, to spot the traces of a covered-over past here:  the plaques marking vanished buildings (including, in a weird twist, the original city museum), the now-tightly-sculpted eponymous creek, and even the critters that presumably once hopped and waddled through here, represented in stone and bronze for all time (or at least until this type of mall development becomes passé and is replaced by something new).  

The desert cottontail once hopped through here

Plaque in the City Creek Center marking SLC's first market

After wandering around these downtown spaces for a while, it was a nice change to go to the outdoor farmers market after our Saturday morning panel.  Interestingly, these local-food markets have become ubiquitous enough that like the downtown developments, they actually feel somewhat generic to me, even as they try to assert a very specific sense of place.  The artisanal cheese- and soap-makers, bountiful displays of fruits, veggies, and baked goods, variably-talented buskers, and displays of dangly earrings vary only slightly from region to region.  With minor variations in the types of squash and sausage being sold, we could have been in Boston’s Copley Square or one of Portland, Oregon’s multiple outdoor markets.

But I find this somewhat generic quality much less troubling at farmers markets than at downtown convention centers or constructed shopping environments.  First, it’s all about scale:  even a large market like the Saturday one in Salt Lake City represents many small producers rather than a single large owner in partnership with a lot of chain businesses.

Giant convention centers often create landscapes like this one

And second, the networks through which the patterns seen in contemporary farmers market are spreading are quite different from those that disseminate widely-copied urban planning orthodoxies like arts districts, massive convention centers, and the like.  Those networks do sometimes intersect, interestingly, and the same city planners who are ready to gut out several downtown blocks to build a behemoth of a convention center may also enthusiastically support a farmers market, if it dovetails with a general project of appearing vibrant and diverse. 

But in general, the widely-circulating ideas about local food and alternative farming economies are traveling along different circuits.  The decentralized and far-flung networks spreading the Small Generic gospel are filled with people and groups who are much readier to question the economic, environmental, and social effects of globalized industrial capitalism, rather than being—like the downtown redevelopers—pretty much in step with those who are trying to extend its reach as far as possible.  It’s exciting to see how those alternative networks have continued to expand throughout the worst recession since the Great Depression, suggesting that Big Generic may one of these days have a real run for its money.

Now if our public history organizations could just find someplace to meet that didn’t require navigating the cognitive dissonance between convention centers and farmers markets…

Planning while doing: The Wendell Food-Farm TimeMap

1887 bird's-eye map showing northwest corner of Wendell

One of the things I've found blogs useful for is to push me to write about things I don't have time to work on in more depth.  That may sound sort of slipshod, but it's been a way for me to continue tying together various interests and bits of research in the midst of teaching and other work. Especially with the research that relates to energy use and climate change, this feels compelling enough to make some room for in the midst of a too-busy schedule, and important enough that doing it in even a small-scale and scattered way seems better than not doing it at all.

I'm pushing myself even a bit farther out on the limb this weekend by launching a little community history project in Wendell, Massachusetts, where I live (and which I wrote about in an earlier post).  I'm calling this the Wendell Food-Farm TimeMap, and it's designed to gather and consolidate more knowledge of the town's food and farming history, with an eye to informing some of the community discussions that have been going on here for many years about local resilience, self-sufficiency, and interdependence.

Tomorrow is Wendell Old Home Day, which is what I've been aiming toward as an official launch of this project.  (For those who don't know, Old Home Days are a New England tradition that emerged around the turn of the 20th century in depopulated, often rural places trying to mobilize sentimental connections--very often centering around farm life--among people who had left, with an eye to drawing needed resources back into the towns.  Now they're essentially just annual town fairs, where they still take place.)  My plan is a pretty loose one, and I thought I'd set it out here as a way to sort of document things as they go along.  One hope I have is that this might produce a useable template for people in other towns who might want to do similar projects, so I want to pay attention to what works and what doesn't.

Here's the plan:

• I'm thinking of this as a three-summer project:  one summer to begin gathering data, one to build out from the initial materials and add to them with some additional research and perhaps interviewing, and a final summer to consolidate things in some form (probably a webby one) so it can be disseminated and perhaps added to in future years, if someone feels inspired to do that.
• To a large extent, this project is about finding out what people already know about Wendell's food and farm history.  As much as anything else, I'm curious about that.  So particularly in the first phase, my main task is just to try to talk to as many people as possible, and to use whatever they tell me as a guide to the next stages of research.
• I'm planning to do that by setting up at Old Home Day and perhaps other events in the fall with a number of big laminated historical maps of the town plus a timeline that follows the general history of agriculture in the northeast.  I'll ask people to add things to the maps and/or timeline, and will try to get contact information for people who want to share more of what they know and recollect.  In future phases, as data gets added, the timeline can be more Wendell-specific and I can figure out a way to collate and display what people have told me so far (probably an indexed listing of names, farms, and properties, as I'm anticipating that that's how most people are going to find their way in to this).

1871 Beers Atlas map showing same part of Wendell

And that's pretty much it for now.   It's a loose plan and I don't have a great deal of time to pursue it, so I'm trying to keep this as simple and feasible as possible (which may actually be a plus in terms of showing people elsewhere how it might be useful in their own towns).  I've set up a Facebook page for the project and may also use my own website as a temporary online venue for materials relating to this once they start accumulating.

I hope that they do, and that I don't lose my voice tomorrow (I've had a nasty cold for a week), and that I haven't over-reached too far in adding yet another thing to my plate.  Stay tuned to find out!

What would keep us from going down the same path to "big ag" all over again?

As I've been pondering local food networks and activism over the past couple of years, one question keeps coming to mind.  It's all very well to be rediscovering smaller-scale modes of production and consumption, but our current large-scale systems developed for reasons that seemed wise at the time (trying to help farmers make a secure living, make food more affordable, reduce the back-breaking labor of cultivating land).  What would keep us from enacting the same cycle again, and ending up with just a nouveau version of today's "big ag"?  How do we hold the line at things that work at a local or regional level, rather than letting market logic push things toward the national and global?  As the networks of distribution and supply in the local food realm become more extensive, with "food hubs" and other intermediaries, aggregators, and specialized services of various kinds now appearing all over the landscape, this seems worth considering.

What happened the first time around is that competition and economies of scale came to favor larger producers, companies, and distributors, beginning as early as the mid-19th century but really becoming entrenched after World War II.   So if we're going to create and maintain small- and mid-sized systems, there needs to be something that can counter that trend toward bigness.

I spend a lot of time critiquing tourist-oriented development, so I feel a bit funny saying this, but I really think that tourism (and the whole repertoire of tourist-oriented techniques of publicity and experience-marketing) might help us here.  I wrote about this elsewhere in relation to fuels, cars, and railroads, and I wonder if the same thing might apply to local food.  At the moment, the case is being made for relocalizing/regionalizing in ways that are largely touristic, focusing on creating "hereness" and branded identities or products and locating local food within constellations of other heritage- and recreation-oriented attractions.  But that's not to say that the infrastructure that's being built in the process won't have its own staying power if and when times get tough(er).

Agritourism and selling experience rather than just food may not seem like smart strategies for the long-term survival of small food producers, but it's worth remembering that domestic tourism actually flourished in the Great Depression, as people saved money by taking vacations closer to home.  More to the point, the emerging networks we're now seeing may be building systems and connections and knowledge that will be highly serviceable for robust local and regional food systems down the road. If present-day tourism helps us do that, then I'm all for it.

And my assumption is that by the time we find ourselves finally facing up to the realities of a carbon-saturated, fossil-fuel starved world (the imminence of which is becoming more apparent every day), many of the "externalities" inherent in the national and global food systems that now feed us will have shown themselves to be "unsustainable" in the long run.  The costs of obtaining oil, public subsidy of industrial food production and the transportation systems it relies on, reliance on below-market-value legal and illegal labor--our present way of producing food has multiple weak spots.  We may wake up one morning to discover that the smaller-scale, less energy-dense, more reciprocal networks we've been putting in place have simply become the new way of doing business.

So as corn and soy crops wither in this year's drought and Greenland's ice cap melts, the somewhat odd blend of people and motivations in the local food movement--boutiquey, nostalgic, and political in about equal parts--may offer some hope that in decentralized and sometimes contradictory ways, we're reinventing things right out from under the industrialized system.  I was heartened to read a recent Wall Street Journal interview with the chef at the upscale Stone Barns Center, running along these same lines.  "Five years ago," he says,  "I would have said that locavorism was at its height and that a new fad was coming to replace it. Now I'm actually convinced we're just beginning to see its potential." As we also see the potential of extreme weather and growing competition for fuel and other resources, that's a hopeful thought to hold onto.

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. 

Cross-posted from The Veg Table: Saving Seed, Saving Face

NOTE: This week's post is a cross-posting from The Veg Table, a blog by Signe Porteshawver. Signe is a recent Tufts graduate who wrote a great senior honors thesis on Community-Supported Agriculture and who's now working at Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, Mass. This post seemed to follow really nicely on my own thoughts last week about questions relating to scale in local and regional agriculture, and Signe graciously agreed to let me cross-post it here.
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"Saving Seed, Saving Face" 

I recently re-discovered a memoir on my bookshelf. I was drawn to Gathering: A Memoir of a Seed Saver mostly because of the author’s roots. Diane Ott Whealy grew up in rural Iowa, and relates fond memories of its countryside and culture. The agrarian history of thriftiness and neighborliness is nostalgic and enchanting. In Whealy’s childhood, as in many areas of the United States during that time, large gardens and livestock were maintained as a matter of necessity. Saving seed was commonplace and economical. The practice of saving seed exemplifies the more humble sense of economy felt during that time.

In The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry argues that modern economic thought is reflected in today’s homes. Whereas in Ott-Whealy and Berry’s youth the home was a place of production as well as consumption, the standard American home is only a site of consumption. Consumption engages the economy of money, but disregards the economies of land and energy. Homesteading communities engage in these more tactile economies every day, as they live with the results of their practices, gathering those seeds, promoting connectedness of process and product, use with replenishing.

 A home-based agricultural economy trusts in and heeds the economy of the land. Place matters to this economy. Weather and soil type and community all make a difference. This is especially true in seed saving, as varieties are shaped through selection to thrive in specific regions and climates. The modern American home instead has no response or ties to place. It is only a symbol of status and leisure.

 If Berry’s discussion of appropriate economy didn’t get me thinking about E.F. Schumacher, certainly this quote would have, “….as a society, we have abandoned any interest in the survival of anything small”. When asked by a friend the best political action to fuel revolutionary economics, Schumacher said, “…my suggestion would be to plant a tree”. Certainly, investing in your home as a site of production, saving seeds in your backyard, and rethinking economies is incredibly important, especially to personal well being. But is seed saving sufficient politics? I had a nagging question the whole time I was reading Ott Whealy’s memoir: What about commercial agriculture?

A bit about Gathering. Ms. Ott Whealy founded the Seed Savers Exchange, the biggest heirloom seed collector in the country, with her husband in 1975. (In their basement! At one point they housed 4,000 bottles of over, 1,200 varieties of beans!). The organization has since grown into a diverse network of over 13,000 members who grow, save, and exchange thousands of endangered seed varieties every year. Seed saving preserves biodiversity, reinvigorates memories and cuisines, carries on family traditions and rural culture, promotes food sovereignty, and works towards “closing the loop”. The values, sentimentality, and community around the practice are also very powerful, but I’ll leave that to Ott Whealy’s passion and humor. SSE produces an annual yearbook with information about all the growers and their varieties, which are available for trade. They also sell seed online, maintain a hugely diverse demonstration farm, and host community-building campouts.

As passionate as SSE is about saving seed, Ott Whealy admits the lack of political drive within the organization. It is certainly political in Berry’s sense of home economics that I discussed above, and to Schumacher as well, but Gathering did not bring up how seed saving can help change the way food is grown in this country in a big way. SSE does compile a directory of commercial seed companies that offer non-hybrid varieties. The catalogue is called the Garden Seed Inventory and is no doubt a great resource for gardeners and perhaps commercial growers as well. However, saving seed and choosing heirloom varieties becomes harder at a larger scale.

Saving seed on a commercial vegetable farm is next-to-impossible, if not hugely impractical. Twice the staff and twice the land area would be required. Many plants are easily cross-pollinated and varieties have to be covered when flowering or planted acres apart from one another. If covered, the plants must be hand-pollinated. The fruits have to be harvested at a specific time and allowed to cure or dry, the seeds extracted and properly stored. Labeling is, of course, crucial.

Farming and selling vegetables is hard enough in and of itself. I can’t imagine also worrying about growing our own seed. There would be a lot of risk involved. What if the seeds don’t store well or the beets mold in the root cellar over the winter? (Beets are biennials, meaning they flower every other year. To harvest seed you must pull them, keep them happy through the cold months and replant them out in the spring.) Saving (and finding new seed varieties) is a huge job, as Ott Whealy will tell you.

The varieties we grow are constantly changing depending on pest pressures, customer preferences, and convenience. We want hybrids as well as open-pollinated crops because folks like big beef tomatoes and we like tomatoes that are late blight resistant. We use pelleted lettuce seed so our eyeballs don’t explode. Sometimes we buy non-organic seeds because the trusted and tasty varieties are not always available organically. We also keep an eye on the price tag. Heirloom and organic seeds can add up fast on a large scale.

Despite the impracticalities of seed saving, I’m sure many commercial, locally-focused, sustainable vegetable farms buy into the idealism of saving seed. We live by the humbling economy of the land. We are intimately connected to place. We are the queens of thrift. How can we hold on to and promote seed saving without participating? This type of question comes up a lot in the food movement: How to promote, re-invigorate, and protect the more appropriate practices of the past, while also reshaping them to accommodate today’s economy, the farm economy, and customer preferences. How can commercial operations be true to ideals of the past and thrive in today’s world?

~ Signe Porteshawver

Getting ready to "food-map" Wendell

This blog isn't going to turn into one of those this-is-what-I-planted-today-and-this-is-how-it-made-me-feel things.  Promise.  Its purpose is to help me think about the intersection of critical historical study and the local food movement, and I'm going to stick to that.  But since I'm trying to be more local in where and how I use my critical/historical skills, as well as where and how I get my food, my own place comes into the picture to some extent as well.

That place is in Wendell, Mass. (pop. 850), in a new house that we moved into just over a year ago.  We're newcomers in town, although we've lived in the area for 25 years.  Now that we've gotten through the house-building process, I'm now obsessing about building a garden--literally building it, because the soil in our part of Wendell is inhospitable at best.  I've been learning from experienced growers around here who have created thriving small farms and large gardens on equally inhospitable land--people like Sharon Gensler in Wendell, Ricky Baruc and Deb Habib of Seeds of Solidarity in Orange, and Dan Botkin of Laughing Dog Farm in Gill, among many others--and have been working on no-till "lasagne" beds and season-extending techniques (currently just a small cold frame, but I'm also trying to make a moveable hoop-house system).  We recently finished setting the last of the black locust fenceposts--"Nature's pressure-treated," according to the website of the forester we got them from. After years of container-gardening, it's a huge treat to have a big sunny space where I can really grow food.

Wendell in 1871

It's also a treat to be here because there are so many smart people in the area who are engaged in re-thinking and reinventing our food systems.  Wendell's well-deserved reputation as a hub for "alternative" ways of living is one of the things that made me decide to use this as a base for developing a "historical food-mapping" project, which I'll be launching later this spring. My plan is to start with a series of large town maps from different time periods and to invite people in town to add about what they and others have grown on particular pieces of land over time, with the goal of building up a more detailed picture of the networks of food production and exchange that Wendell has historically been part of.  The town cultural council has given me a small grant for supplies, and I'm hoping to gather enough data this spring and summer to give a sense of what kinds of additional research might help to fill in some of the blanks in the picture.

I was originally envisioning this as having a purely local focus, in keeping with the widespread notion in "transition" and "relocalization" circles that places need to become more food-self-sufficient as a strategy for resilience in an era of peak oil and climate change.  My ideas are already morphing on this, though, in large part through listening to historians and food activists like Brian Donahue who are arguing that regional self-sufficiency is actually a smarter strategy to aim for, as well as more closely reflecting historical patterns of the pre- and early-industrial eras.  And that makes me think that these food-maps should keep an eye open to larger scales, probably by asking not only what people have grown here in various time periods but also what food they've bought and from where. 

One crucial piece of history for this project is the story of why places like Wendell stopped being mainly agricultural over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.  I can see this history just by looking out the window:  as with many places around New England, Wendell's woods are criss-crossed with old stone walls that speak of farms past and abandoned.  The rocky soil is a big part of this story;  my no-till raised beds are a solution on a fairly small scale, but once agriculture became more commercialized in the early 19th century, those people who were still trying to make a living farming began to struggle with the very real limitations of this landscape.  You can actually produce food in an intensive way here, but it's labor-intensive to do it, and it doesn't work on a large commercial scale.  And of course that connects to a whole raft of issues relating to how we work and travel and eat--our whole modern, consumption-driven, energy-intensive way of living.

So as I start to develop this local food-mapping project, I'm thinking that it's going to be as much about scale as about localness per se.  What evidence is likely to be out there for Wendell's involvement in regional-scale agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries?  And what can be discovered locally about the pivotal moments (like the official designation of some environments as agriculturally "submarginal" in the 1920s and 30s, leading to reforestation and the creation of places like Wendell State Forest) when the scales changed radically?  Stay tuned--I hope to be able to report on some of this over the summer!

For an article on how the "submarginal lands" designation played out in neighboring Vermont, and how some farmers resisted it, see Sara M. Gregg, “Can We ‘Trust Uncle Sam’? Vermont and the Submarginal Lands Project, 1934-1936,” Vermont History 69 (Winter/Spring 2001):201-221, available as a PDF here.