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.
______________________________________________

"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.

A work bee, with a twist or two

Driving back from running errands yesterday, Fred and I noticed a sign on Route 202 near the Hunt Farm in Orange:  "Plow Day."  When we stopped to look, we saw that a number of antique tractors were crossing and re-crossing the big field where George Hunt grows feed corn for his dairy cattle.

I already knew that there's a whole sub-culture of tractor collectors and enthusiasts.  I didn't realize, though, that some of them--in this particular case, Chapter 18 of the International Harvester Collector Club--periodically converge on a willing farmer's field to practice their plowing skills or just (as one man put it when I asked him about the event yesterday) "to play" with machines that they wouldn't otherwise get a chance to use.  A bit of Internet research on Plow Days turned up a definition, some similar events using draft animals, and a  YouTube playlist of videos from around the country.  (I wouldn't necessarily say that watching someone plow a field is less riveting than watching paint dry, but I did find that watching just a few of these more than satisfied my curiosity.)  Closer to home, I found some video of the 2011 event at Hunt Farm and an article about 2010's gathering.

This is actually proving to be a more complex event to wrap my head around than I thought at first.  On the surface, it looks like a bit of old-fashioned reciprocity among farmers (or new-fashioned, if you compare it with the crop mob phenomenon among a younger slice of the farming demographic).  I have land that needs plowing, you have a group of people looking for a place to use their tractors--hey, kids, let's get together and plow some fields!  The fact that the tractors are from a previous era just seems to make it an interesting example of using older tools and skills around the edges of the present-day farm economy.

But the hobbyist aspect makes this a somewhat different animal.  My guess is that the main reason the tractor enthusiasts are willing to volunteer their skill and labor is that it gives them a chance to do something removed from the realm of present-day farming.  The old tractors are fun and collectable in large part because they're obsolete, and the reciprocity is strangely indirect.  It takes a detour into the kind of antiquarianism that you encounter in living history settings, where people work to recapture the past for reasons of recreational pleasure, education, or self-discovery rather than for more utilitarian purposes.  This is something quite different from choosing old machinery because you think it has some inherent advantages (as Tillers International does, for example).

Still, it's interesting to think about how the "pastness" of the tractor collectors and the present-day operations of a host farm come together on Plow Day.  It strikes me that this is a precise mirror image of a historic site that invites modern-day farmers to work its fields in order to preserve a historic landscape (something that happens, for example, at Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio).  This leaves me with the same sense of disconnection that frustrates me when I encounter it at historic sites--but at least the old and the new are butting up against each other within the same framework.  When that happens, there's the possibility that someone will figure out how to take things a step further.  And meanwhile, the fields are getting plowed and everyone is pleased--so even to my cynical eye, this seemed like a pretty happy occasion!

Designing for depth

The cultural resource management realm is a strangely siloed one, where historians, biologists, archeologists, landscape architects, and other professionals cross paths but don't necessarily work together over time, something that probably contributes in an indirect way to the struggle that many historic sites have in building close relationships with working farms.  We all have our specialized languages and methods, and although we're often talking about the same things, we don't often talk with each other, let alone with people who may actually be working and using the land we're studying.  Movement is often centripetal, continually focusing our attention inward to our own disciplines and professions rather than outward in more expansive and inclusive ways.

I was particularly struck by this on Wednesday, when I viewed the presentations from a landscape architecture studio led by Ethan Carr (left), a professor in the Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  Ethan's students have been working on new design ideas for Martin Van Buren National Historic Site, on which my recent Ethnographic Landscape Study (about to be released imminently, I hope!) was focused.  The students' plans centered largely (although not entirely) around agriculture, particularly on the need for structures, paths, views, and interpretive facilities that will enable the park to tell a broader story about farming at this site, perhaps in partnership with Roxbury Farm, the large CSA farm now cultivating the fields.

Like me, Ethan's students benefited from the unusually cohesive body of existing scholarship commissioned by this park, particularly the two previous cultural landscape reports.  Unlike me, though, they had only a very short time--a single semester--to get to know the site.  Based on what they were able to glean from a handful of site visits and some familiarity with the earlier studies, they produced proposals for various ways to re-narrativize the landscape and enable visitors to come into closer physical and interpretive contact with past and present farming here.

I took two main ideas away from the presentations.  First, I realized how little I actually know about the vocabulary and methods of landscape architecture.  Although cultural anthropologists like me supposedly share a core concern--culture--with those who study and design cultural landscapes, our approaches are miles apart.  Their focus on "contributing features," views, and entry/exit points is as foreign to me as my interest in the politics of class and ethnicity may be to them.  I know intellectually that professional disciplines often end up talking past one another like this, but it's different to see it actually happening in the case of a site where you've done intensive study yourself!

And second, I realized that despite the obvious limitations of this kind of student project, there was still some possibility for ideas that push the conversation outward rather than circling it in on itself.  The strongest proposals were the ones that acknowledged the gaps in the planners' own knowledge and left physical and conceptual room to fill in some of those gaps with on-the-ground encounters and experiences.  Some of the students had rushed to propose what the farm could grow and where, and how they might market it, ignoring the very specific type of growing and selling that already happens here and the kind of long-term familiarity with land and community represented by this mode of farming.  In a sense, they were replicating the hubris of industrial agriculture, which approaches land as a kind of blank page onto which growers can write whatever they want.

The subtler plans left a different kind of blank space--a dialogic one that made room for visitors to ponder the existing farm operations in a more open-ended way.  The most effective designs made room for the kind of looking and listening that might--for attentive visitors--foster greater depth of awareness and understanding of what was around them in both space and time.  Perhaps not surprisingly, it was the simplest proposals that looked as though they would do that best--a classic case of "less is more."

In search of the multivocal conference panel

I'm getting ready for my annual pilgrimage to the National Council on Public History conference in a couple of days, and this reminds me that I've been meaning to write a post about another recent conference I participated in, the New England regional meeting of the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums (ALFHAM), which was held in Bristol, Rhode Island early last month.

The usual goal with a conference panel is to create something that fits together cohesively--a set of complementary papers or presentations, often capped off with some unifying comments by a discussant. In practice, what this often means is that panels get put together by fairly similar people who approach things in a fairly similar way. Over the years, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of conference panels I've been to that successfully brought together different kinds of voices within the same framework--for example, scholars and labor organizers, or literary and academic writers. That more "multivocal" kind of panel--which doesn't always work neatly but which has the potential to "break the frame" of more inward-looking combinations of people and ideas--was what my co-organizer and I were after with our offering at ALFHAM.

ALFHAM, founded in 1970 to coordinate efforts and education within the then-new living history movement, is an obvious starting-place for anyone who's interested in the nexus of farming and historic sites. I'd been vaguely planning to try to connect in some way with people involved in the organization, and found the impetus I'd been looking for when Michelle Moon, Assistant Director of Education for Adult Programs at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., got in touch with me after hearing me speak at a conference at Plimoth Plantation in the fall. Michelle is active in the Slow Food movement and has worked to link her museum work with food activism at the Peabody Essex, Strawbery Banke Museum in New Hampshire, and elsewhere. Like me, she's been looking for ways to make the food/history link more explicit and to make a case for the importance of historic preservation and interpretation in creating broader, more informed and critical public analyses of food systems and all that connect to them.

The c.1840 barn located at Waters Farm, Sutton, Mass.

So Michelle and I put together a panel for the regional ALFHAM conference, aiming for a very specific mix of scholarship, case studies, and practical advice.  We enlisted a couple of people involved in food and farming at historic sites in the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor in southeastern Mass. and northern Rhode Island:  Pat Nedoroscik, vice-president of Waters Farm Preservation Inc. the non profit organization charged with the operation of the 120 acre Waters Farm property in Sutton, Mass., and Lisa Mosczynski, who runs a seasonal farmers market at the E.N. Jenckes Store Museum in Douglas, Mass.  Yours truly supplied some scholarly/historical context for the emerging reconnection between "enclaved" historic sites and present-day working agriculture, Michelle talked about her rationale for emphasizing food and farming in many of the public programs she's organized, Pat gave us an overview of the family and farming history of Waters Farm, and Lisa got into the nitty-gritty of running a farmers market (including challenging us to name the most problematic product that farmers bring to sell*).

These were four quite different approaches, but it was heartening to see how well they all fit together, and how the discussion that followed ranged from considering big historical questions to thinking about the practicalities of promoting locally-sourced food.  I was really happy to see scholarship as just one piece of a broader conversation, rather than a privileged or separate discussion.  Michelle's examples gave me hope that imaginative public history practitioners at museum sites can really take this local-food phenomenon and run with it, Pat's story of the Waters family confirmed the long history of community concern in New England with preserving agricultural land, and Lisa's account of dealing with boards of health and other issues provided an important corrective to more utopian or abstract dreams of how we might reinvent a more local or regional food system.  The discussion wasn't conclusive or tidy, but despite that, or maybe because of that, it felt very productive (in addition to inspiring me to want to visit these historic sites sometime soon).

Any similar experiences with multivocal conference panels? 

*And any ideas what the most challenging farmers market product might be?  Post them below!

April is the Busiest Month

I stole a little time away from work yesterday to put a few plants in the ground and continue getting my new garden infrastructure in place. The deer, the porcupine, and the neighor's marauding dog have all put in an appearance this week, and I'm feeling the need to get those fence-posts in very soon! But the time outside, while useful and therapeutic, put me even farther behind, because I'm in the throes of an over-busy spring of teaching, planning, and conference-going--which is to say, a pretty normal spring for anyone in the academic business.

This puts me in mind of something I came to realize while I was doing my research a couple of summers ago in New York state: farmers’ and academics’ schedules are diametrically opposed, in ways that are either perfectly complementary or impossibly out of sync. This isn’t accidental, of course--our school year is still based on the old let-the-kids-out-to-work-on-the-farm-in-time-for-haying pattern. The majority of people in this part of the world were no longer farmers (or even rural) by 1920 or so, but the rhythm of the agricultural year still shapes our academic lives, even after all this time.

Mike Scannell, Harrier Fields Farm

What this means for academics who want to study agriculture is that the people you need to observe and talk to are at their very busiest during the months of the year when you actually have time to do your research. Many of my fieldwork interviews in Columbia County were done literally in a field—that is, in a farmer’s field. One dairy farmer excused herself in the middle of our interview to help her daughter-in-law chase the cows back into the barn, and one of my most useful and memorable encounters, with latter-day yeoman farmer Mike Scannell of Harrier Fields Farm, took place among his Red Devon cows, who live outside year-round and who were busy fertilizing the field for him the whole time we were talking.

One of the reasons my interview with Mike was so useful was that he's a farmer who has read widely and thought very deeply about the history of American agriculture and the various dilemmas that small farms find themselves in today. When does he do all this reading? In the winter, of course--when life on the farm slows down and he has more time to reflect. It's another one of those natural-rhythm things that make sense in the context of an agricultural life. There's a time when you're crazy-busy, and then a time when you can actually catch your breath before it all starts up again.

Lately I never seem to get out of the crazy-busy phase, and I hear the same thing from more and more of my fellow scholars (Sharon Leon at the Roy Rozenzweig Center for History and New Media wrote a good blog post about it earlier this week). Digital technology and the increasingly rushed and productivity-oriented pace of many areas of higher education, plus the fact that "contingent" knowledge workers like me usually have to juggle multiple overlapping jobs and schedules, means that there's no longer any naturally-occurring down-time for many of us.

A lot of people are working on eating more seasonally these days, and it strikes me that it would be a good idea to figure out how to work more seasonally, too. That might mean gearing up during the growing season and then slowing down in the winter, or maybe it would be an academic schedule that actually did give us a chance to think and reflect and write during the summer. Or maybe (and this is my own perfect world) it would involve a nice syncopation of the two different but potentially complementary rhythms. 

Whatever the mix might be, I guess this particular season is always going to be busy.  One of my farmer-interviewees in New York state told me, during a hectic 30-minute conversation in his barn, "On the first nice day of spring, a dairy farmer gets a week behind schedule;  by the fifth nice day, he's two weeks behind." That's about where I am right now, madly prepping conference presentations and classes while trying to carve out a little time to put manure on the new garden beds and get the holes dug for the fence posts.  It's all good, and I tell myself that there are far worse things than having too much work that you love.  I hope that someday soon I'll have a chance to work on book-scale rather than blog-scale ideas again, and in the meantime, I'm just trying to do what the farmers do:  to keep growing. 

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?