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(With thanks to Callum Robinson and his wonderful first book “Ingrained��)

My gardening hands have a way of forgetting from one season to the next. Some of this stems from being out of practice—winter’s dormancy and frozen ground had forced a pause in my outdoor activities. Forgetfulness is also brought on when I skip the planting of a particular vegetable for a year or two (such as when I acknowledge that I never really liked Brussel sprouts). This occasional planting hiatus makes me think twice about its precise seeding and cultivation requirements when I do try again. Of course, I can always consult the back of the seed packet or a gardening book, but at this point in my life I prefer feeling my way through a task rather than thinking about it. After all, the more you’re in your head as opposed to trusting your hands, the more you’re out of touch.

I must concede that some of this lapsis in my manus is age-related. The words of an eighty-five-year-old Kansas farmer I once interviewed come to mind: “Every year the ground gets a little further away from me.�� Also, the curmudgeonly farmer in Connecticut who once explained to me his strategy for reducing the impact of aging on his farming: “The corn don’t grow so good around the edges, so this year I ain’t planting any edges.��

My digital dexterity, which once happened without premeditation, is partially thwarted by arthritis that has invaded several knuckles. This becomes particularly apparent when I start indoor seeding. From late winter into early spring, I will fill cardboard containers with potting soil then soak it with water, pressing my finger tips to the surface to check for the appropriate degree of sponginess. The first seeding of a container is always clumsy—the seed sticks to my palm, disappears between the gaps in my fingers, doesn’t fall correctly onto the soil, or lands too closely to the previous one. As I gently shake the packet, too many seeds may spill out, or they adhere to the inside envelope leaving me with too few on the surface. Rather than rely on my stiff fingers to capture the errant seeds, I’ll blow into the packet to dislodge them. Too often, however, this causes a helter-skelter scattering of seeds, leaving one or two “planted�� up my nostrils.

But by the time I reach container number seven or eight, the feeling that came to me last spring as easily as the “leaves to the trees,�� begins to return. The tendons and joints become pliable as they remember sensations forgotten from neglect. Even the tension from the seeping spread of arthritis gives way to motions formerly latent. The hand catches the seed, the other hand’s thumb and index finger pinch them one at a time to be laid softly on the potting soil; spare fingers press them to the proper depth—knuckle deep for peas, to the lower part of the fingernail for tomatoes, to the top of the finger nail for lettuce. Fifty years of my fingers transporting information to my brain which processes it and sends it back again in a micro-second tells me if everything is okay or if adjustments are required.

I’ve often held my hands up to the New Mexico sun hoping that the intense light would illuminate the bones like an x-ray. I do this more out of wonder and respect for these two divine instruments than to better understand the mechanics of each one’s 27 bones. But oh, the things they’ve done over the years without me asking, like that foul ball at Fenway Park that magically passed through two dozen outstretched hands before landing in mine. I remember admonitions from basketball coaches to “dribble with your fingertips�� that allowed me to make that turn around jump shot at the age of 17. Arcing over the hands of opponents, the ball fell gracefully through nothing but net, a goal that won our intra-mural league championship. Now it’s those wonderful few hours spent shooting baskets with my grandson. The hands retain the feel of the ball, its resistance to the ground and the bounce against the backboard, even when, like the Kansas farmer’s receding ground, the basket seems to get higher every year.

How about lovemaking? The manner in which your hands wander across the body of your lover—knowing when to wait, when to proceed, how to caress, squeeze, stroke, or even pinch—is important to all relationships. How long did it take you to get it right (did you ever)?

What about the writing and related technology I’ve had to master to bring these words to you? My first letters, words, and sentences were brought to life with a Number 2 pencil. I can still remember Mrs. Robinson, my third-grade teacher, guiding my hand to make the loops and curves that would become the building blocks of “my letter to the world.�� Other than the addition of a pen, not much would change until the typing course I took in summer school seven years later. Over the course of 20, hot and humid un-air-conditioned days, I would say goodbye to hunt and peck as I touch typed my way to 30 words per minute! When I look back on 19 years of education, that may be the most important course I ever took (other than drive ed). Following a progression of manual and electric typewriters, giant desk top computers, laptops, tablets, and smart phones, my fingers would prove adaptive even though my brain resisted the ceaseless pace of change with every cell of its being.

Often my hands are the messenger of my carelessness. Thinking my bare paws are capable of grabbing and holding anything regardless of its size, weight, or level of risk, from cigarettes to firewood to skillets, my stinky, splintered, and blistered hands remind me that there are definite limits in my pursuit of cool.

Our sense of touch is the least utilized of our senses. Most of us see and hear all the time. Though not as robustly as our canine friends�� powerful schnozzes, the human nose is regularly sizing up an array of atmospheric scents, or our mouth is enjoying (or not) a host of tastes. But touch, though we do it all the time, is frequently relegated to everyday functionalities like grabbing the doorknob, pulling our pants up, or judging the temperature of a can of beer.

But for the sake of sheer sensuality, I’ve never found anything that revs up the potency of touch like gardening. Blindfolded, I can plant garlic cloves in the fall by finding the tiny root hairs with the tip of my finger, point the clove downward while nestling it snugly into the soft earth just above my second knuckle. Pulling a weed tests the hand’s strength which in turn tells me that it needs help from the other hand, or maybe we give up and use the trowel. Passing a hand across human skin is divine and often erotic, but gliding your finger tips over the skin of a vine-ripe tomato can be a close second. For the sensuous gardener, a brief caress of the vegetable nearly mature on the plant in the sun’s heat stimulates the taste buds and conjures up a recipe or two. Even the offending tomato hornworm, rapacious in its path of destruction, has a silken, fleshy feel as it’s pulled from the plant stem and terminated with extreme prejudice between two bricks.

Our gardening hands have grown lazy and forgetful from a winter of disuse. It’s time to plunge them once again into the moist, cool spring soil. That will wake them up, and I hear tell that the dirtier they get the more they’ll remember.

“Stuff the dried leaves gently between the burlap and the tree. Work them into the branches but be careful not to break any branches. There are more leaves over there near the river. You hold the burlap open while Mark stuffs the leaves in. Yes, that’s good. Don’t skimp on the leaves; it gets cold here in the winter and fig trees need plenty of insulation. Now wrap the burlap tight. Don’t leave any gaps.��

That’s more or less what I remember from that November day sometime in the late 1990s. Dr. Joan Dye Gussow was directing the three visitors she had invited for a “working lunch.�� We were tromping around the sodden backyard of her home perched on the Hudson River’s left bank, just upriver from the Tappan Zee Bridge. If you stood at the very back end of her lot—the rear edge of a long, narrow yard saturated with a helter-skelter horticultural extravaganza of which the fig tree was only the latest addition—you could kneel to the ground and thrust your hand into the fast-flowing waters.

We three “guests�� had suspected all along that this would be no free lunch. As we were all working hard to keep up with Joan’s instructions, I recall spontaneously breaking into some improvised lines “I ain’t gonna work on Joan’s farm no more��.�� But with the tree finally wrapped snugger than a new-born infant lashed to her mother’s chest, we proceeded to pick up our tools and scraps of materials expecting to now be fed. We should have known better. The work portion of the morning’s activities would be followed by a mini-ecological lecture that was as wide-ranging as Joan’s capacious mind. We learned more about the life of the Hudson, the risk to flooding her backyard (which would happen soon), the history of a newly developed, nearby community garden, and the infinite complexities of and reasons-why she chose the fruit and vegetable varieties she did.

Not content to stick with the abundant natural classroom that surrounded us for our lessons, she seized on another teaching moment. Upon spotting my untied shoelace, she said, “Here, let me show you a new way to tie your shoes. Do it this way (she bent over and made some complicated twists and turns with my laces), and they’ll never come loose again. Now you try.�� I kneeled, tried manipulating the laces in a similar fashion as Joan’s interceding digits corrected my mistakes. Never finding the same configuration as her, I finally said with exasperation that what I learned when I was four years old was good enough. “There’s always a better way!�� she cajoled me with a teasing grin.

As with the way we keep our shoes secured to our feet, so it was with our food system. As far as Joan Gussow was concerned, once she had turned her prodigious intellect to the issues of food production and consumption, she knew there had to be a better way. Her research, analysis, and warnings were compiled in her 1980s and 1990s books including the Feeding Web, The Nutrition Debate, and my all-time favorite, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce, and Agriculture: Who Will Grow Tomorrow’s Food? It’s an oeuvre that both guided and inspired the food movement by making connections between health, nutrition, agriculture, sustainability, and the corporate food culture that was then sending it slimy tentacles in every direction. When I would hear her speak at the many food and farm conferences that were then gaining popularity, I couldn’t help but compare her to Paul Revere sounding the alarm—instead of Redcoats, however, it was the industrial food system that was coming and we had better be prepared to take up the appropriate arms. And if there was a notion that propelled Joan into the saddle of her mighty steed faster than any other, it was a headline like this one from a 1980 New York Times article: “Outwitting Nature to Produce More Food�� (as quoted in Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture).

As a woman of science in an era when science was still not comfortable with women, Joan brought the rigors of her training and education to the one niche where women dominated—nutritional science. But she wasn’t buying the better living through chemistry mantra that the industry was putting out, and that women like my mother were lapping up faster than an electric can opener could shear the top off a can of beans. She’d rail against the Disneyfication of our food supply best expressed by Epcot Center’s “technological paradise…where the plants are held up by mesh rather than messy dirt…and the air filtered and sterilized to prevent the introduction of insects and disease.�� This would lead to her “spread[ing] the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm�� that two USDA scientists, Marin Rogoff and Stephen Rawlins, had deployed a nightmarish biotechnology process that would bypass natural farming practices of raising chicken with a laboratory extrusion of sun, CO2, water, and cellulose. Dr. Gussow would label this technology and the descent from nature-based food production as “Chicken Little.�� She warned that, henceforth, our food supply would be Pharmed, not farmed.

The role that Joan the Scientist played in spotlighting the shift from real to ersatz food is perhaps less important than the role that Joan the Teacher played. As I was starting my career in the 1980s in Hartford, I would increasingly run into people who were or had been her students, those that had read her books, or referred to a talk of hers they had just heard. They always impressed me as among the most passionate and committed of the colleagues I would work with, people with the most fire in the belly. The number of Joan’s acolytes grew over the decades, and like a million butterflies, set off on a mission of pollination across the land. Providing nourishing instruction was Joan’s great gift, and she bestowed it generously and lovingly, whether you were a student of hers at Columbia Teacher’s College or a plodding practitioner like myself patching together food projects in a crumbling city like Hartford.

We did eventually have lunch that November day. Joan’s creation was as lively and tasty as the conversation that ensued. Subsequent photographs of her garden that I’ve seen strongly suggest that the fig tree is flourishing, no doubt the result of the less than willing workers that folded one dead leaf after another into its proper cavity.

During the course of a sporadic email correspondence with Joan over the last few years, I never noticed a flagging in her interests, insights, and intense desire to be helpful. As she was marching toward her mid-nineties, I had asked her for an article “Women, Food and the Future�� that she had written in 1985 for some research I was doing on food and gender roles. Not being available online, it took her some considerable effort to find, copy, and mail it to me. In the article—a kind of manifesto that could have been titled “Feminism My Way!”—Joan strives at some length to affirm the traditional nurturing role of women, not to deny them access to the same opportunities as men but to assert that the threats to the planet, including the food supply, require the kind of eco-feminist attention that women are well suited to provide. “Women are told that in order to ‘make it�� they have to be more like men,�� Joan wrote. She went on to say that, “I find the idea that women should try to join the male world terrifying��.[T]he earth is not in crisis for lack of technologists but for lack of nurturing. I know that the food system and the society are in trouble…[But] I do not believe that things will be remedied by women learning to fit into the existing system, but by working with men to change the system to a more sustainable one.��

If the 1960s idea of Earth Mother is still relevant today—and not only do I believe it is, but we may also in fact need it more than ever—Joan Dye Gussow sits astride that throne like the true nurturing matriarch she is.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.William Butler YeatsPress ReleaseWashington, DC. February 10, 2025. To ensure the safety and well-being of America’s Billionaire class, the Trump Administration announced today a series of measures to reduce the cost of the country’s runaway, fraudulent, corrupt, and weaponized food and nutrition programs. Sub-comandante Elon Musk said, “As the Duke of DOGE, I proclaim that all federal food programs will return immediately to their 1969 spending levels.”President Trump pronounced that from here on in, participation in food stamps, WIC, and School meals will be based solely on merit. “Merit�� will be judged upon the successful completion of a new 57-page form that, among other things, requires applicants to write a 3,000-word essay describing in vivid detail why their current state of misery and overall worthlessness as a human being justifies receipt of the crumbs generously awarded by His Majesty.Additionally, participants will sign a pledge prohibiting them from using federal benefits to purchase food from companies with DEI policies. This prohibition extends to the purchase of any “trans�� (transgenic?) food. The Administration is awaiting further guidance from the Secretary of Agriculture concerning the meaning of “trans.”All participants over the age of 6 and under the age of 90 will be expected to work at least 20-hours per week in one or more Trump or Musk-owned companies, or any other approved billionaire run facility for little or no pay.Gender extremism among children participating in school meal programs will be firmly and resolutely terminated. Children showing any ambivalence as to their gender identity will be subject to an unannounced inspection on the premises. School meals will be denied to any individuals or persons expressing “radical�� and “extreme�� political views considered contrary to being a patriotic, God-fearing American. Children coming from Evangelical homes will be given twice the amount of food at half the price charged to non-Evangelicals.The Thrifty Food Plan, a sick and communist-inspired action of the Biden Administration, will now be based on the price of a loaf of bread and gallon of milk in 1969. Alternative measures for lowering the benefit levels will be developed that include determining the minimum amount of food that can be fed to an adult before severe hunger pangs set in.###

Think this is joke? It may not be for long if the Trump/Musk Administration gets their way. Eviscerating the nation’s most essential safety net programs, the ones that nourish people—SNAP, WIC, School Meals—would be their way of turning their noses up at America’s most vulnerable people while steering hundreds of billions of “saved�� dollars into more tax breaks for the country’s wealthiest individuals. It’s Godzilla run amok; Attila the Hun pillaging the countryside, and Hitler’s Panzer divisions eating up Europe. Yes, the barbarians are at the gate!

The nutrition safety net—complicated but largely effective at keeping hunger at bay—began to weave itself together during the 1930s with federal food coupons, designed to help starving Dust Bowl victims as much as struggling farmers. Good nutrition would find itself institutionalized as federal policy when Harry S. Truman created the national school lunch program shortly after World War II. Multiple innovations and diversifications would follow over time leading to school breakfast, after-school snacks, farm-to-school initiatives, a dramatic improvement in the quality and health of school meals, and community eligibility which is gradually making good school food free for all.The food stamp program, later known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would come to life in the early days of John F. Kennedy’s administration. It too would undergo a number of diversifications and alterations in the decades to come. The last major weft in the nation’s nutrition weave would appear through the addition of the Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) program enacted in 1972 under Richard Nixon. It would bring infants, children up the age of 5, and pregnant and breastfeeding mothers into a healthy cocoon of local care.Always an easy target for those who want to denigrate government and snip the safety net’s strands, SNAP in particular has been accused of every form of chicanery that the flesh is heir to—a repository for lazy, filet mignon-eating welfare cheats who’d rather rip off Uncle Sam than put in put in an honest day’s work. Little to no evidence is available to validate any of those claims, of course. But the evidence does show that out of SNAP’s current 42 million recipients, the largest category is comprised of children (36 percent) trailed closely by those over 65 years of age (11.5 percent). For those who claim SNAP’s caseload is riddled with illegal immigrants, fully 82 percent of its adults and 97 percent of its children were born in the U.S. And if you’re a red-state Republican from the South (which is most of the South), you might be concerned that 40 percent of all U.S. food stamp recipients live in your region). When you add in the WIC and School Meal programs—some mothers, but the vast majority infants and children—these federal nutrition programs are more than a safety net, they are the cornerstone to the healthy development of tens of millions of America’s lower income young people. I dare anyone to identify a better public or private investment in our nation’s future.Arrayed against those receiving nutrition assistance are America’s billionaires including a President who, with his minions, demonstrate a sensitivity to the needs of others akin to Pol Pot and Josef Stalin. They are already eviscerating U.S.A.I.D., thus elevating the level of hunger and even starvation worldwide. Let’s not be subtle with our analysis: every dollar taken from the mouths of children or from an agricultural development program for small African farmers is another dollar available for tax cuts for the rich.Sadly, all of this is in keeping with the ever-widening economic gaps in the U.S. where 20 percent of all individual income (and 35 percent of capital) goes to less than 1 percent of the people. In 1913, near the end of the Gilded Age, 19 percent went to the 1 percent. But through progressive government policies and rising national equality, that number had been chopped down to 8 percent for the 1 percent by 1976. Not only has our march to equality gone terribly backwards since then, we are now seeing the realization of what the economist Thomas Piketty predicted in his award-winning book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), that an inequitable concentration of wealth not only means that the rich get richer, they also become more powerful politically. Welcome to America 2025!With a kind of macho zeal associated with tattooed bikers, the Republican members of Congress are vying to see who can be the biggest bad-ass when it comes to taking food from children. They are throwing around proposals to cut billions of dollars from SNAP, alter the Biden-revised Thrifty Food Plan that gave SNAP recipients a long-over-due 23 percent boost in benefits, and cut $12 billion from Community Eligibility which has worked miracles increasing participation in school meals. These proposals are mindless, heartless, and soulless! If you think so too, let all your members of Congress, both your representatives and senators, know that we invest in our children and those who need a helping hand (think LA fire victims for whom SNAP has come to the rescue) to ensure a better future for everyone.If you’re involved with a food pantry or food bank, you better ratchet up your advocacy efforts right away before the thousands of new hungry mouths show up on your doorstep. The Food Research Action Center (FRAC) has one way for you to be in contact with your lawmakers. Here it is: FRAC Federal Nutrition Programs Update. Be sure to get on their mailing list so that you can stay apprised of further developments. (As a footnote, FRAC might consider finding alternatives to Facebook and X for obvious reasons).I go back to the days when Ronald Reagan began to scythe down the programs and services that were finally lifting people out of poverty. He began his demolition just about the time that America was getting a handle on economic inequality (see above). But even then, there was the vestige of a morality that put guardrails on policies and displayed a modicum of care for others. With Trump, his self-centered Silicon Valley frat boys, unqualified sycophants taking cabinet posts, and 1600 pardoned, cop-beating “brown shirts,�� there is an unprecedented disregard for who might be harmed, the rule of law, and moral boundaries. The American people are far better than that. They will not accept the unprecedented cruelty being heaped upon their brothers and sisters, both here and abroad. They are willing to fight for the well-being of others, unlike those who only care for themselves.

“Work and learn in evil days, in insulted days, in days of debt and depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows.�� Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Azteca Food Center Planning Committee, Laredo, TX

I’ve used this quote from Emerson before, and I bet you can guess when—November 2016. Yes, after Trump’s first presidential victory when the atmosphere positively reeked of doom and despair. In that post I urged others to do as I was determined to do myself—don’t wallow in defeat but stay focused on the good work we are all doing, especially that which serves others. Besides protecting the more vulnerable among us and developing a sustainable and just food system infrastructure, we must also hold all levels of government accountable for these same purposes, to which I will add preparing for the next election.

I must admit that Trump 2.0 is taking as much grit as I can muster—and the occasional Triple-X Margarita—to not drown in the trail of slime that oozes from him and his cronies. The prospects of the soon to be Felon-in-Chief running what I used to believe was the best nation on earth has awakened my once-dormant irritable bowel syndrome that even a double-dose of omeprazole can’t quell. Nevertheless, I will resist his chicanery, gird my loins for battles to come, and set my sights on 2026 and 2028. As exhausting as it can be, democracy is a job we must work at every day.

Laredo, Texas
But to live I need joy too! Kamala Harris gave me a shot of it for which I’m grateful. The kind of joy I’m talking about, however, is what I got on a recent trip to Laredo and New York City where good food, good community, and good projects were the best medicine I could get. Laredo, Texas, about which I’ve written before (Laredo Shows the Way to a Mending Wall | Mark Winne) engaged my services and those of Susie Marshall and her organization, Grow North Texas, to assist with the development of a small food store in the city’s Azteca neighborhood.

Azteca is an unusual area to say the least. Not only is it an old neighborhood of small, densely built homes, many dating back to just after the Civil War, it is largely lower income, partly due to the impact of NAFTA. Being not much more than an avocado throw from the Rio Grande and Mexico, Azteca was cut off from the rest of Laredo when the brand-new Interstate-35 came roaring across the river from the Puente International Bridge. Anything in its way was crushed or displaced including hundreds of Azteca residents. As a result of NAFTA, Laredo is the biggest inland port in North America. Millions of tons of fresh produce from Mexico pour into the U.S. without a single pound benefiting Laredo’s residents. Spiraling downward conditions sent Azteca’s last grocery store fleeing which left the neighborhood as an official food desert. Hence, the residents have expressed a fervent desire for a grocery store.

About 20 residents showed up at Canseco House, a beautiful neo-classical community building that was also the sight of a well-tended, half-acre urban garden showcasing late fall (South Texas) cabbages, okra, and collards among other veggies. Since most of the participants only spoke Spanish, we relied on simultaneous Spanish-English-Spanish translation. Our highly-able translator was quickly overwhelmed as the excited gathering unabashedly shared their food, hence, stocking preferences, management and ownership ideas, and options for how to divvy up the space—an abandoned 1,000 square feet-plus building owned by the City of Laredo. Their energy was sustained by a delicious catered lunch provided by a couple of cottage food vendors.

Three hours of hard work produced clear sets of preferences for the mercadito—local, organic, fresh food; no candy, chips or tobacco! Most of the space would be dedicated to a small, high-quality food store with a small space reserved for a prepared food kitchen and meeting area. And ownership tastes leaned toward using an existing non-profit organization with a strong community advisory board. As productive as all their work was, I was buoyed by the energy in the room and the people’s desire to never settle for the status quo. Nothing can stop an ignited and united community!

New York City
The journey continued on to New York City where I strolled down memory lane while taking in the present-day sites and scenery. I began the morning of my first day knoshing a toasted sesame bagel with smoke-cured lox and cream cheese at Russ and Daughters on East Houston. It was a bagel so perfect, so unlike anything I could buy in New Mexico that I nearly fell to my knees in gratitude.

My next stop at the Union Square Farmers�� Market netted scones, pears, apple cider, beeswax candles, and a bottle of “locally grown�� Rye Whiskey from Orange County. New York. The market’s atmosphere and the vendor vibes were warm and friendly in spite of the December rain. By contrast, some 30 years ago, I can remember Tony Manetta, the market manager, sternly warning the men to carry their wallets in their pants�� front pocket because the market’s pick pockets were the best in the city. A few minutes later he was scolding a pair of elderly matrons who had lost control of their two pedigree dogs which were about to tear each other to shreds. Through Tony’s muscular intervention, he held the snarling animals apart with a leash in each hand. Call me twisted, but sometimes I miss those rough and tumble days.

Maritza Wellington-Owens and Me

This brings me to my initial reason to be among “The City’s fiery parcels all undone.�� It was to celebrate the retirement of one of my all-time favorite food organizer heroes, Maritza Wellington-Owens to whom I dedicated two-full pages in my first book Closing the Food Gap. Starting in 1993, Maritza, in a state of benign ignorance regarding farmers�� markets and fueled by a hard-edged passion for justice—receiving a meager amount of assistance from me—started one of the New York’s first farmers�� markets largely dedicated to serving its impoverished communities. Until then, the world-famous GreenMarkets (now “GrowNYC��), of which Union Square was their first (1975) and still flagship market, was dedicated to providing profitable direct marketing opportunities to the then shrinking numbers of the region’s farmers. Although noble and worthy intentions, that goal left out giant swaths of the city’s low-income neighborhoods imprisoned in food deserts. Maritza’s vision, embedded in the non-profit she founded, Harvest Home Farmers�� Markets, eventually led to the creation of 21 farmers�� markets later consolidated to 14 markets operating today in places where people need them the most.

Several farmers made a two-hour trek on a rainy New York night to the retirement party’s venue just south of Union Square. I spoke with Joe Morgiewicz, who with his two brothers and mother, drove in from Goshen, New York where they’ve operated their family farm for five generations. Joe told me they have been working closely with Maritza for years now and distributing some of their 400-acres worth of produce at Harvest Home markets as well as into New York State’s farm to school programs. When I asked what role subsidies play in New York City sales, he said, “They’re huge. Well over half our sales at Harvest Home markets are WIC, senior, or Health Bucks (New York City’s SNAP coupon program that incentivizes healthy eating).�� His brother Don gave an eloquent toast in Maritza’s honor noting humorously that “we’ve had our disagreements which we’ve always managed to work out. In spite of those moments, we are strong supporters of Maritza’s mission, after all, she actually spent time at our farm to learn how we produce food!��

But one conversation reminded me of what makes Harvest Home stand out. Helen, a Black woman in her 60s, had been volunteering at one of the markets. Inevitably, she started buying, learning how to prepare, and eating a lot more local fruits and vegetables. “For the first time in years, I recently got off my medications. Eating well was my new ‘medicine��,�� she proudly told me, and with a grin and a twinkle in her eye said, “I told my doctor I don’t need him anymore!�� When access to healthy food is provided; when the means are available to purchase; and when educational support is part of the package, many small miracles happen. That’s what Maritza started, nurtured, and is now being sustained by Harvest Home.

I had a few moments to chat with their new executive director, Johann DeJesus, and the board president, Patrick Holder, who’s an architect when he’s not volunteering with Harvest Home. Both of them acknowledged the extraordinary leadership and courage that Maritza had demonstrated over the years to make Harvest Home the second (GrowNYC being the first) largest farmers�� market network in the city. But both of them know that simply walking in her footsteps is not enough, and that they are excited by the upcoming opportunity to reimagine and reinspire Harvest Home’s work, especially in light of the ever-soaring dietary health needs of New York’s large lower income communities. To that end, they used the evening’s celebration to launch the “Maritza Wellington-Owens Legacy Fund�� as a way to broaden and enhance Harvest Home’s work. I would urge anyone who’s passionate about supporting people-of-color-led organizations that target the most challenging community health needs to seriously consider contributing to this fund .

As the evening was drawing to a close, and apparently not knowing that I was half Irish, I was asked to give a toast. Besides heaping richly deserved praise on Maritza, I stressed two things. The first, which could be said for the Azteca residents as well, is that “in insulted days�� like we are rapidly approaching, we must protect the most vulnerable among us and ensure that their needs are met. And secondly, as much as we must see to the first task, we must hold our government accountable, never let them off the hook, don’t back down, and insist with every ounce of strength we have that social and economic justice is done.

Under “a cloud of arrows,�� however, we found our joy. The locally sourced dinner lovingly prepared by Touchef Coupet, accompanied by some good New York wine, set the stage for speechifying and dancing. As the DJ brought the music up and found the right mix, people worked their dance moves, synchronized their steps, and found a common beat of celebration. “Beauty is a defiance of authority,�� said William Carlos Williams, and the beauty of people yearning for healthy food and communities is unstoppable.

Just in case you were thinking I took the summer off, let this post assure you that I’m still kicking. The astute among you, however, may gauge my temporary absence as something more than choosing beach diversion over writing immersion. And you’d be right.

No, I’m not quitting, at least not yet. And in spite of numerous offers from the NFL, I’m not putting on the shoulder pads this season. But once again from atop Mount Muse, the Sirens have beckoned me with a book deal. While the title won’t be known until the day before it goes to press, one contender is “The Old and Rejected Works of Mark Winne.�� Fortunately, more upbeat options are in the offing since my plan is to select and assemble some of my essays, articles, and posts going back 20 years. They will be thematically organized in hopes of taking a fresh look at their content as well as reflecting on their current relevance. My publishing partner in crime is Bloomsbury Press, that venerable British book maker who probably views this project with as much anxiety as the generals who witnessed the evacuation of Dunkirk.

I don’t intend to forsake this platform for too long, however, nor will I pass up an opportunity to occasionally give voice to some story that’s just screaming to be told. But I do have to put my nose to the grindstone to complete my contractual obligations—or else!

Southwest Colorado

As a small token of my appreciation for your loyalty, and with the hope that you won’t abandon me in the meantime, I offer some observations from a recent road trip up the western-facing spine of the Rocky Mountains. My route out of New Mexico took me into southwest Colorado and the San Juan Mountains. It was selected in accordance with my remembrances of food, farms, and places past. The landscape ripples with mesas, escarpments, and sweeping meadows whose lush summer grasses are slowly munched into protein by small herds of black angus.

This is also a region replete with innovative small farmers, ranchers, and food system activists as well other members of the creative food classes. My past farm visits to the region include a fruit farmer near Grand Junction who not only grew the best peaches I’d ever eaten, but also invested heavily in farm worker housing. The small homes on his property were giving his workers affordable, high-quality year-round housing, but also the opportunity to settle themselves and their families into the community.

But far and away the most unusual farm “transaction�� I’ve ever encountered came from a western Colorado vegetable and poultry farmer who operated a CSA. He had been diagnosed with an operable form of brain cancer, but like too many farmers, he didn’t have health insurance. Fortunately, and generously, one of his CSA members was a brain surgeon who accepted a year’s produce share in return for a very successful tumor removal. As it turns out, the doctor felt he got the better deal!

Though wilderness, dark forests, and wildlife abound, there is little to fear in this rugged part of the state, other than perhaps the politics. You see, crossing Colorado’s southwestern border means that you are entering the Lauren Boebert Zone, better known as Colorado Congressional District 3. Fortunately for her constituents, the gun-toting, trash-talking congresswoman of uncertain intelligence only has a few months left. Her margin of victory in 2022��546 votes, the slimmest of all federal races that year—presented too big a risk for her to run again against her Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch. But for a woman who never says never, her and her carpetbag slipped over the Rockies one night to become the Republican congressional candidate in the state’s more solidly Republican eastern 4th District. She’s up against a tough Democratic opponent, Tricia Calvarese who may save the good people of eastern Colorado from the stigma of being represented by Boebert. As the Colorado cowboys say, “No brain and no shame, cause nothing but pain.��

My path takes me into the town of Durango (population 20,000, with a margin of error of +/-2%) whose robust food scene far exceeds its size. Set amidst stunning scenery and with a downtown core that retains much of that Old West charm, its ever-expanding edges are overly encrusted with uninspired growth that exists mostly in service to motor vehicles. Nevertheless, Durango’s popularity persists driving up the number of new settlers by 20 percent over the past decade. Native Americans and growing Hispanic communities also continue to deepen and enrich a culture that had, until recently, remained largely white.

Follow the road north through Durango for about 12 miles on a course that parallels the narrow-gauge scenic railroad and you’ll reach James Ranch. In the universe of foodies, James Ranch is the citadel, some might say the holy temple of local agricultural perfection, a place so in harmony with both community and nature that one could be forgiven for thinking that it was the original blueprint for Eden.

I’m sitting in the outside patio at the James Ranch Grill and Café with Jim Dyer, a long-time Durango food activist and small farmer, taking in a multi-million-dollar view. Stretched out before us is 400-acres of one of the best managed cattle grazing lands in the West. The cows eat for short periods on sections of no more than 2 or 3 acres at a time before they are moved to a new location. This is a process I witnessed during a previous visit to the ranch where one person adjusts a few electrified strands of wire fencing, then slowly moves the herd to an adjoining section of pasture. The whole process of moving the cattle took no more than an hour. This low-intensity form of ranching is easy on one’s body and lifestyle, makes for no-stressed animals, and produces the highest quality grass that the earth is capable of.

Blocking out a few bloody scenes that are a necessary part of cattle raising and meat eating, Jim and I enjoy a perfect, grass-fed, totally organic burger smothered in cheddar cheese also hatched from the same grass. Under far less brutal circumstances, the cheese comes from another branch of the ranch’s bovine community, Jersey cows. Milked in small numbers at the ranch’s New Zealand style milking parlor, the cheese is then made and aged on the premises. As David James, the ranch’s pater familia told me, “We buy our Jerseys from New Zealand, and boy, do those cows know how to eat grass!��

In keeping with one of the ranch’s major postulates of reducing labor to promote a sane and happy agricultural life, the cows are only milked once a day (two to three times a day are the factory dairy norms) and they are “rested�� (not milked) in the winter when the pastures are covered in snow—animals, people, and nature take a much-deserved break. “This is how you get your children into farming—reduce the labor,�� said David. By emphasizing quality of life over production and profits, David and his deceased wife of 59 years, Kay, have kept four of their five children on the farm as active managers of different parts of the operation.

Speaking through his billowing white beard that he jokingly says catches enough food for his next meal, Jim reminds me that James Ranch has diversified far beyond livestock. A very large market garden keeps CSA members well supplied and the café and their retail outlet adequately provisioned. The small retail market sells not only their meat, cheese, and vegetable products, but also the products of area farmers and ranchers. Since the ranch doesn’t grow potatoes, the grill buys 40,000 pounds a year of Colorado potatoes to keep it supplied with hand-cut French fries. A quirk of climatic fate allows the garden to sustain fresh pea production from late spring until late summer, far beyond the normal range for the region. Education and community outreach extend the Ranch’s production related focus for beyond the realm of most business enterprises. Classes of chattering students are a pleasant and regular presence throughout the different activity centers. During a previous visit I listened in on a lecture by one of David’s children for visiting students from Dine (Navajo) College.

The near perfection of James Ranch is almost enough to distract you from the fact that Durango and surrounding La Plata County have challenges and other imaginative folks. As we’re polishing off our burgers and a pint of local beer (not James Ranch), Jim shares an admirable list of community-based actions that are transforming the area’s food system.

opened at the Riverview Elementary School as the result of a science teacher who had a vision for real hands-on learning experience. There are now 24 education garden beds and 50 community garden beds at the school. That represents the completion of Phase One with four more phases to follow including expansion to more schools.

has set about the task of “building a just and thriving food system�� that is focused on using locally grown to increase access to healthy food. To that end, they bought $230,000 of food from southwest Colorado producers that found its way to schools, food pantries, and healthcare facilities. Not content to only distribute food, the Collective does advocacy and food policy work which included passage of the Colorado “Healthy Food for All�� act.

Durango Farmers Market is a vibrant, Saturday local vendors market, mostly food and farm products, that infuses downtown Durango with the kind of social energy, zest for authenticity, and joie de vivre that everyone expects from a farmers�� market. Here’s an  of vendors that shows you where to find the who’s that make the market a big what.

helps you find new and maturing growers, a positive trend that Jim Dyer notes should ensure the sustainability of local food production. Maybe more importantly, he was delighted that the producers took over this task of maintaining the directory!

is the place that has raised the bar on locally produced food and eating to new heights.

 has a strong community orientation and is one of the very best restaurants for sourcing local food and investing in local producers.

 is a Colorado public radio show hosted by Colorado University Extension agents Tom Bartels and Darrin Parmenter.  They also produce some great “how-to�� videos that you can find at the ���ɱ�������ٱ�.

  is a robust connector of farms and schools that includes such local giants as James Ranch and  which supplies wagyu ground beef.

 provides an agricultural education and incubator program that includes a Native American focus (almost half of the college’s students are Native American/Alaskan).

Karlos Baca is a local Southern Ute Chef who spotlights Native cuisine and food production. Learn more about their collective .

, run by Dan and Nanna, moved their farm to just west of Cortez recently. Their work on chiles, garlic, seeds, grains, and how to use them is well worth checking out.

Durango and much of Southwestern Colorado are a special place, loaded with natural beauty and imaginative, hard-working food actors. And in my humble opinion, based on my career and travels back and forth across the country, there’s no reason why your place can’t be (and may very well be) a dynamic food place as well.

A note to my readers : Writing this post during the high light of summer felt almost out of place against the gloominess that has enveloped us over the last few weeks. Not wanting to succumb to the darkness, however, I persevered because it’s a story about people and a place that have worked long and hard to build a beacon of light and hope. That’s also one way of explaining why this post is so long. I just can’t be short and pithy when the subject cries out for many words. So, open it, start reading, take a break, weed your garden, get a glass of iced tea, and come back, even two or three times, if necessary, to finish it. Thank you for making the effort, and may you revel in summer’s effulgence!

Just like words, looks can be deceiving. Such was the case with my journey down an arrow straight county highway in eastern Kansas that was lined with newly fabricated malls carved from tidy rectangles of former farmland. Land that once supported precisely laid out rows of corn and soybeans now sprouted America’s meccas of materialism, whose physical profiles, brand names, and endless parking lots had become the universal language for Consumer Nation—devoid of character, regional identities, or accents.

At first glance, my destination that day seemed to echo a landscape that had been stripped of its former pastoral beauty and re-dressed in Chamber of Commerce tropes. I was looking for Innovation Drive, the site of the Kansas State University Olathe campus, whose website’s promotional prose spoke of “education that drives business,�� “upskilling opportunities,�� and “course material…built with the input of industry partners.�� Not that there was anything new here—higher education has been prostrating itself before the STEM gods for some time now, urging young people to relinquish their doomed pursuits of the humanities in favor of joining today’s work force. But the words of the university’s ad-copy writers and the visuals of the immediate surroundings did not comport with what I found at the Olathe campus, site of K-State’s Urban Food Systems Initiative.

An urban food and agriculture initiative? Excuse me, but aren’t we in Kansas? The contradiction first hit me a couple of years ago when the Initiative’s director, Eleni Pliakoni, asked me to join the advisory committee for their GRIP Project. GRIP is an acronym for “Game Changing Research Initiative,�� which like the campus’s street name, Innovation Drive, is meant to inspire faculty and students to take their own professional moon shot. But after a couple of longish Zoom calls with their faculty and staff, and reading between the lines of their promotional copy, I found my cognitive dissonance slowly dissolving.

Instead of a bastion of corporate agribusiness, I was hearing about a large research farm where appropriate-scale technology was helping urban and peri-urban farmers churn out both big yields and decent livelihoods; research, monitoring, and remediation methods that were turning lead-laden city lots into productive and safe urban growing and living spaces; and graduate students, many from conventional Kansas farms, with a desire to stay in agriculture, but only if it leads to a stronger sense of community and upholds their beliefs in social justice. Intrigued, I invited myself for a visit to the campus, which included a sampling of the Kansas City urban farming scene, many of whose players partner with the Urban Food System Initiative.

Located only 25 miles from Kansas City, Missouri, the Olathe campus was opened in 2009 and houses programs in hospitality (it includes a state-of-the-art, multi-purpose community kitchen space), animal health, agribusiness, horticulture and natural resources, and urban food systems. Though its building looks every bit the corporate citadel, the daily comings and goings of those inside its glass skin are decidedly warm, welcoming, and community friendly. With a PhD in Agriculture Sciences, Eleni has a focused and intense nature, sharpened a bit by a pronounced Greek accent. Under her leadership, she and her colleagues have created what is still an emerging, comprehensive approach to teaching and researching urban food systems. Becky Stuteville, a PhD in political science who’s developing a food policy course for 2025, called it a “radically inter-disciplinary�� program that, like the more expansive understanding of food systems implies, draws from a wide array of academic and experiential learning. “This is a great, innovative environment where faculty have complete agency,�� she told me. Becky also sent a jolt of electricity through my system when she told me she was a niece of one of sustainable agriculture’s academic icons, John Ikerd.

My tour of the facility literally starts at the molecular level of the food system. Eleni escorted me into her inner sanctum—the chemistry and biology laboratory where food and plants are tested and analyzed for a number of ingredients, attributes, and purposes. I enter a lab with some trepidation because I’m still haunted by images of high school chemistry class and 17-year-old boys playing with Bunsen burners and, at the other end of the spectrum, people wearing HAZMAT suits. Fortunately, I find neither as I enter a darkened room packed with highly sophisticated instruments capable of measuring every facet of the tiniest compounds, and then displaying the results across computer screens.

There’s a spectrophotometer that is used to measure total antioxidants, total phenolics, anthocyanin, Vitamin C, chlorophyll, and other compounds important for human health. Then there is high-performance liquid chromatography which, Eleni explains, “We are using to measure individual phenolic, flavonoids, and carotenoids, (important compounds for human health). When we analyze hemp samples we are measuring cannabinoids.�� They also use gas chromatography which is used for aroma volatiles and terpenes.

Realizing I had just had more chemistry in the last five minutes than I’ve had in the last 50 years, I ask Eleni if something like smelling a fresh tomato isn’t just a subjective experience. She reminds me, with just a hint of “tsk, tsk,�� that what you are smelling are very precise compounds. “The consumer wants a nice red tomato that smells good,�� she says. “In our role within urban food systems, we’re evaluating the quality of fresh produce grown under a number of very different conditions.��

Photovoltaic system in field trials with tomatoes at OHREC Farm

Over the next 48 hours, I was to see and hear about those “conditions�� including urban soils that face multiple challenges. By taking an integrated approach, the Olathe program evaluates a number of opportunities to assist growers. For example, agrivoltaics technology now under development at the Olathe Horticulture Research and Extension Center (OHREC), a 300-plus-acre farm owned by K-State located only 20 minutes from Olathe, includes vertical solar panels spaced at 12-feet intervals in small, trial tomato plots. The hope is that small growers will reap the benefits of solar energy without sacrificing limited land space or the quantity and quality of their produce. Trial tomatoes from the research farm go to Eleni’s lab where grad students, who are learning to do research, analyze every feature of the tomato with the ultimate intent of sharing results with urban growers.

Carefully navigating my way through the laboratory’s sensitive and expensive instruments, I ask Eleni about a small, hand-held metal press sitting on a shelf. It seemed out of place in a room that looked a lot like a NASA mission control center. She picks up the object and grabs a rubber tomato out of a basket of toy vegetables that I just notice. To illustrate its function, she places the “tomato�� on a metal tray, pushes down hard with the press’s flat bottom until the rubber bulges out around the edges in a mildly amusing manner. “This is how we start the testing process�� she says with the hint of a smile. For a real tomato, the resulting pulp would then go through a dehydrator and extractor, be fed into various measuring devices, and display everything humanly knowable about itself by way of points and lines on a grid scrolling across a computer screen. I took some solace in knowing that a little bit of human touch is still necessary to start the scientific ball rolling.

Since I was a freshman in college, the thing about academia that most perplexed me was its obsession with proving what often seemed to be a keen sense of the obvious. But as I’ve hopefully matured over the years (some will differ), I now see how many of my so-called commonsense assumptions (e.g., nature is good for you) have been wrestled to the ground by scholars who, believe it or not, have often proven such vague notions to be true. And more importantly, the best among them have endeavored to place those truths in service to the public good. As if to subscribe to Edmund Burke’s prescription, “It is not only our duty to make the right known, but to make it prevalent,�� the people associated with K-State Olathe disseminate their findings as rapidly as possible into the community.

A case in point is the work of Ganga Hettiarachchi, an agronomy professor of Sri Lankan background who is based at the K-State main campus in Manhattan, Kansas. As a soil scientist (she laughed when I said, “Oh, you’re a diva of dirt!��), Ganga’s research and educational scope goes to the heart of one of America’s longest-standing public health threats and environmental injustices: lead toxicity. As the country’s post-World War II urban decay led to the demolition of millions of lead-based painted buildings, lead levels in soils of the resulting vacant lots soared to dangerous levels. As part of a seven-year brownfields study, Ganga’s research found lead levels in some areas of Kansas City, Missouri as high as 400 parts per million (ppm) compared to what were normal ranges nationally of 15 to 30 ppm. Due to the high concentration of lead in these areas��50 percent of 262 lots tested had elevated levels—lead levels in children from these largely disadvantaged communities were nine times higher than the national average. This much lead in soil also posed risks for vegetable production due to a variety of factors such as what crops were planted (e.g., lead tends to accumulate in roots crops) and water hitting the soil and splashing on leafy vegetables.

“When you consider the benefits of gardening and the limited capacity of many under-resourced cities to monitor lead and implement abatement procedures,�� Ganga explained, “we had to find other solutions.�� Phytoremediation—using plants to take up soil-based toxins, then harvesting and destroying the plants—works on some contaminants like arsenic but not lead. Her resolution was determining that phosphorous, one of the three basic elements for soil fertility (nitrogen and potassium being the other two), and heavy applications of compost, also good for soil health, were effective in making them safe for vegetable production by reducing the bioavailability of lead.

Ganga sees herself as a scientist in service to the community. “It’s my responsibility to educate,�� she told me. To that end, she has developed written material on the subject of soil safety and gardening in potentially contaminated environments for university extension bulletins that are used frequently by the Master Gardeners program. She’s particularly proud of the fact that she was able to get those materials translated into Spanish for the many Spanish-speaking gardeners in the Greater Metro Kansas City area.

In a similar vein, her students benefit greatly from her commitment to education, which drove me to ask about a quote in her university bio which read, “I advise my students to find a niche they enjoy, rather than just seek out the best job prospects.�� I wondered if such a remark didn’t fly in the face of the higher education trend that allows earning potential to determine a student’s learning path. A recent New York Times (5/26/24) report examined the growing propensity of college graduates to “sell out�� in favor of high paying jobs. “In an age of astronomical housing costs, high tuition, and inequality,�� the Times wrote, “students and their parents…see college as a means to a lucrative job, more than a place to explore.�� Ganga stuck quietly to her guns. “I went with my gut feeling to be a soil scientist. We should find what excites us.��

As I was speaking to Candice Shoemaker, a retired K-State professor in horticulture therapy, it dawned on me that gut feelings and individual passions can play a bigger role in the evolution of higher education than universities may care to admit. Amanda Lindahl, one of the program’s earliest graduates (2016) and now an educator for K-State Extension, credits Candice as a catalyst for the urban food system program. “The reason the program is in Olathe,�� she tells me, “Is due to some very passionate people like Dr. Shoemaker.��

For Candice, the passion was stirred early in her life while working at a foster home for 15 children in Seattle—she lived in a tree house on the home’s grounds—where she first learned to use horticulture to reach children with serious disabilities. She fondly speaks of a 9-year-old with cerebral palsy named Danny who helped her understand how plants�� healing powers extended far beyond nutrition and aesthetics. Her observations were later confirmed when she studied the seminal research of Roger Ulrich who explained why exposure to nature reduces psychological and physiological stress. Later, during a professional stint at a psychiatric hospital in Georgia, Candice would see for herself how patients who worked at the facility’s farm healed faster than those who didn’t.

After earning a PhD at Michigan State University in plant physiology, she worked for a while at the Chicago Botanical Garden. In 2000, Candice landed one of the two faculty positions in the horticulture therapy program at Kansas State, the first such program in the nation. Though her journey up until this point might be called a slowly evolving but essential part of the Urban Food Systems�� creation story, it wasn’t until Candice connected with Katherine Kelly that sparks started to fly.

Katherine Kelly and the uncooperative goat

As the head of Kansas City’s premiere urban farming non-profit, Cultivate KC, Katherine was on a tear to not just make urban farming known, “but to make it prevalent.�� Though not from a Kansan farm family by birth, she grew up working on Mr. Nuttle’s farm, a Wichita neighbor with a 1200-acre spread that grew and raised everything. “I was always at my best when I was riding horses, driving cattle, or taking hogs to market,�� she tells me. But powered by an innate sense of social justice, she later grew agitated upon eyeing Kansas City’s thousands of vacant lots and became determined to put them into production. Her larger goal, as she put it, was to “normalize urban agriculture.�� Being pragmatic, however, Katherine knew she needed deep support to attain her goals, and not just from the garden variety partners available in the non-profit world.

“If you can get in with the university and help them do what they do, but only better, they can be great partners,�� she states in a manner that sounds as cleared eye today as it must have been 15 years ago when she forged ties with Candice. Together, they began the long, slow slog of bringing Kansas State, with its deep roots in conventional commodity agriculture, into the ill-defined, still hippie-influenced world of urban agriculture. Candice took on the necessary chores of writing the curriculum, developing educational goals, and addressing an infinite number of details required to secure university sanction. Katherine would add her energy, advocacy, and strong background in diversified forms of food production to the mix. They drew in a couple of other Midwest agricultural legends, Dan Nagengast, former director of the Kansas Rural Center, and Mary Hendrickson, an agricultural economist at the University of Missouri for advice and further legitimacy.

At 62, Katherine is a wiry, bespectacled woman constantly in motion. My first encounter with her occurred atop a mulch pile at the Olathe Research Farm where she was attempting to corral an ornery goat refusing to join the herd in a nearby trailer. Like chemistry, goat herding is not one of my strong suits, but I was conscripted on the spot to block one escape route that the agitated culprit was trying to reach. Seeing that I was of minimal use, I was quickly relieved of my duties and would catch up later with Katherine at a picnic table under the shade of large ash trees. Having left Cultivate KC four years ago, she now runs her farm that uses goats for two purposes: to perform what she calls targeted grazing services which harnesses goats�� propensity to eat anything to clear areas of browse not accessible by cutting machines; and as meat (she didn’t say if uncooperative goats ended up in this category) for Kansas City’s large Afghanistan community.

Currently taking an extended break from nonprofit work, she reflects candidly on her experiences and the role of urban agriculture in today’s food system. She confesses to being very entrepreneurial and hard driving with the organizations she’s spearheaded and the networks she’s built. Not only has this led to the rise of the Urban Food System Initiative within a major university, it has made the metro Kansas City region a hotbed of urban agriculture. Yet that kind of start-up energy can also feed an impatience with bureaucracies, technocrats, and even the staff from many urban farming organizations who, in her estimation, don’t have the same fire in the belly that she has. Honestly assessing her own personality traits and leadership style, she readily admits that, “Sometimes I could be a real asshole!��

In spite of her deep introspection, Katherine remains a dogged proponent of urban agriculture. When I raised some of the attacks brought by the concept’s opponents, such as the futility of ever growing enough food to feed a hungry world from small, densely built places, she vigorously counterattacked. “Cities are where most people live; that’s where they encounter food choices,�� she says, noting that the more you can “integrate good food into people’s lives, the more you can change the basic framework [of the food system].�� This is another way of saying that wholesale economic and social change is actually the goal, and that urban agriculture is only one piece of a much larger strategy.

But the other major element she raises is that urban agriculture is also a way of not just humanizing the food system, but of reestablishing community ties that have been severed by rural and urban divides. One example she offers is the Kansas Farm Bureau which like state farm bureaus around the country, is known for some conservative and entrenched positions on the American food system. “We have younger members of the Kansas Farm Bureau selling in the cities,�� she says with almost as much incredulity in her voice as I feel when hearing it. According to Katherine, farmers are establishing new relationships with city folks that are breaking down their former stereotypes. “When today’s young farmers see they are growing food for a young mom with a diabetic daughter, they see things at a more human level.��

KC Farm School’s Mission Statement Greets All Visitors

Maybe the best defense of urban agriculture is, well, urban agriculture. A tour of two nonprofit farms in Kansas City, Kansas, directly across the Missouri River from the other Kansas City—about the distance a professional outfielder can nearly throw a medium kohlrabi—demonstrates the multiple benefits that unconventional farming brings to a community. At the KC Farm School (Eleni Pliakoni is one of their board members), 3 acres of land and 6,000 sq. ft. of high-tunnel greenhouses located in a modest residential neighborhood are a springboard for about 10,000 pounds of produce each year, as well as bountiful crops of new farmers. Over 500 volunteers, tens of thousands of starter seedlings for backyard gardens, an on-site farmers�� market that serves the neighborhood and accepts SNAP and Senior Double Up Buck coupons, and a recent purchase of an adjacent 11-acre parcel across the street, make this urban farm a small gem whose luster enriches the lives of residents and the value of properties for blocks around.

But the value of the farm’s human capital exceeds even that of its food, land, and greenhouse outputs. Young children come to the farm for special nature and gardening programs (kids sometimes cry because they don’t want to leave when their parents pick them up). And high school age apprenticeships provide paid work and learning experiences that have morphed into jobs and even careers on area farms. In this regard, Olathe’s Cary Rivard, director of the OHREC research farm, noted that this is part of the Growing Growers program, which has produced 275 graduates since 2004, of which 22 percent started a farm, 67 percent went to work on farms, and a substantial number of others went to work in other parts of the food system. As one high school teacher said who had instigated the program for 13-to 17-year-olds, “We need ‘hands-on�� programs like the one at KC Farm School because we don’t want our kids spending their life on a couch!��

Not far from KC Farm School is Juniper Farm, which is part of the Cultivate KC network but with a very special purpose: to give “New Americans�� (immigrants and refugees) with agrarian backgrounds a fighting chance to farm in the USA. Walking onto Juniper’s property is an exercise in visual contrasts, with the Kansas City, Missouri skyline looming to the east and the remnants of a vacant, 250-unit public housing project surrounding three sides of the 9-acre farm oasis. Hoop houses, assorted agriculture hardware and out buildings, and 18 neatly tended quarter-acre plots gracefully slope downhill toward the Missouri River.

Over the course of a 4-year program, this infrastructure is put into service to prepare recent arrivals from such places as Somalia, Thailand, Burundi, Congo, and Burma—with cultivation methods required for the American Midwest. Just as importantly, they are also equipped with the marketing tools necessary to meet the consumer demand they’ll find in metro Kansas City farmers�� markets and beyond. Juniper is the antithesis of the scruffy community gardens often found scattered among orphaned wedges of city land. It’s a beautiful place with a serious purpose. By the time these New American farmers get their production and marketing mojos working, people like Biak Par, Ca Saw, and Ngun Tial are earning an admirable $15,000 to $20,000 a year from product sales off a quarter acre of land.

Juniper Farm, Kansas City, Kansas, Surrounded by Vacant Public Housing

On the same site, Juniper also manages a 100-member CSA as well as sales to restaurants and a food hub that provide their farmers with additional sales revenue. By the end of the four-year training period, farmers are expected, with Juniper’s assistance, to find a place of their own, preferably a half-acre piece of land with a house on it. Over the past 10 years or so, 46 farmers have graduated from the program, and, according to Juniper’s records, 32 are still farming.

When I asked farm staff how easy it is to find suitable land, they told me it’s getting harder. Even with 10,000 vacant lots in the KC metro area, land is growing less affordable. While Kansas City, Missouri has a comprehensive 14-year urban agriculture land use ordinance on the books (Kansas City, Kansas, where Juniper is located, has almost nothing), it doesn’t make it any easier to compete against new multi-story residential projects, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants hungrily eyeing the same empty land.

Urban agriculture’s challenges aren’t based on inherent flaws in its concept or methods, but rather in the systemic failures of American land use policy. The ruthless efficiencies demanded by modern capitalism are deployed to exploit land for its so-called highest and best use. This means wringing the greatest financial return from every square foot of land. To do that, developers and city officials must dismiss or minimize the softer and more diversified returns of recreation, beauty, food production, environment, skill-building, mental and physical health, to say nothing of that old fashion idea called quality of life that just about every household seeks from the place they live.

Leaving Juniper Farm, Cary takes us past the property’s southern end, which is still used by Somali-Bantu farmers for food production (a project that was originally funded by a USDA Community Food Project grant). Nearby, we stop for a moment at the site of the housing project’s former basketball court. Rather than young people lobbing long arcs of 3-pointers, the site now sports the framing of a just-erected 54-feet-by-96 feet greenhouse, soon to be sheathed in plastic, that will be integrated into Juniper’s program. “It took lots of volunteers, donated equipment from the research farm, private donations, and plenty of muscle to build that thing,�� Cary tells me with both satisfaction and a hint of relief. “And it started by ripping up and hauling 14 dump truck loads of tarmac off this site!�� It’s what the Olathe staff do in their “spare time”—they find creative and flexible ways to make their expertise and resources available to the community.

To judge the value of urban agriculture, a judgment that in this case applies as well to the underlying value of Olathe’s Urban Food System Initiative, you have to ask the most important stakeholders—the students. Presently, the initiative has 37 graduate students (an additional 23 have graduated from the program since its inception) of which I was able to chat with nine, including two alumni. Over lunch, as well as a Zoom call, I discovered a strong undercurrent of passion for sustainable food, farming, and social justice. Their backgrounds varied considerably—some grew up on large, traditional Kansas farms, two students were from Ghana, while others had no or limited agricultural experience.

Alex had just finished his first semester and was engaged with the agrivoltaics work at the research farm. He told us that he chose the program because of something he called “self-ownership,�� which was a form of self-sufficiency. “I hadn’t grown anything from seed in a long time; now I spend all my time at the research farm learning skills so that I can own myself.�� His political analysis of the food system targets planners and certain agribusiness interests that he feels have an anti-urban food system bias that deters progress toward individual self-sufficiency. For him, urban agriculture’s major benefit is its “undoing of consumer indifference toward food.�� He was the source of the most memorable quote during my time in Kansas: “If someone who doesn’t love you controls you, they own you!�� I would catch Alex the following day at the research farm where he was wearing a floral coolie hat and doing as poorly as I did corraling goats.

Comfort is a young woman from Ghana working on a masters in advanced food systems. Her reasons for being in the program are perhaps a bit more sobering than the American students. As she said, “I’m from Africa, which has lots of food insecurity and high rates of food-borne illnesses.�� Those starker realities are why she’s working with Eleni in the laboratory on food safety. “I’m here because I want to help the poor people in my country, not like the corporations who are there to profit.�� After seeing snow for the first time in her life, she naturally wondered how one grows food in the winter, and “then I see hydroponics, greenhouses, and food growing inside buildings!��

Besides the majority of students who are in their twenties, there are a few older, what might be referred to as nontraditional students. Vanessa, perhaps in her early 50s, already has a degree in clinical social work, is a master gardener, and uses a version of horticulture therapy with children in a high-poverty area of Wichita. Drawing from her training, she starts with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to explain, “If we don’t have food and can’t eat, we can’t do anything.�� She says that as a child she went to a school where 80 percent of the students qualified for free and reduced-price meals. “I grew up on paper food stamps, before SNAP/EBT! For me, autonomy and choice are social justice issues. I’m in this program to make the food system more resilient.��

All the students and alums had fascinating stories, deep wells of commitment to food system change, and well-thought-out reasons to be in the Olathe program, but Ryan’s story struck a particular chord. He’s in line to become the sixth-generation owner of his family’s traditional Kansas farm, but before he signs on the dotted line, he’s exploring alternatives which included a B.A. in social work and, currently, working at the Kansas Rural Center. At a practical level, he liked that the university program was online which meant he didn’t have to commute 2½ hours to the campus. But philosophically, he felt that “Olathe is more ‘on the ground�� and applied…it’s uplifting for small farmers and not there to serve corporations.�� He wondered out loud “if there’s space within a conventional agricultural system to care about people,�� but immediately checked his thoughts with, “Is that too harsh? Am I repudiating my family’s agricultural lifestyle?�� Ryan’s thesis at this point in his exploration is that urban farming offers an antidote to large-scale, agricultural anomie because of its “proximity to people and the nature of relationships.��

As might be expected, the Urban Food Systems Initiative’s core staff are tenacious defenders of not just their respective disciplines but the object of their scholarship—urban food systems. While they will acknowledge their inherent bias, they conduct their work with rigorous methods and an allegiance to the data and evidence. I’m sitting around a faculty table with Tricia, Cary, and Eleni with hopes of digesting the massive load of stimuli I’ve ingested so far. Eleni eases my discomfort a little bit when she says, “What you see now [physically and programmatically] took 14 years of work.�� She’s referring to a confluence of timing, history, circumstances, advocates, and funding—some of which is intentional and some of which is luck—that makes up their story. For instance, much of their classroom teaching (not the lab or research farm) was online before the onset of Covid, which actually helped to increase the number of students threefold to an average of 32 per class. Money helped as well. “We gained trust and respectability when we received the $1 million GRIP grant,�� she said.

Those things and the fact that food security was built into the mission of the larger Olathe campus helped them outlast a string of CEOs, including one of whom was obsequiously pro-industry and decidedly anti-urban food system. With both pride and a note of defiance, Eleni said, “We earned the right to be here because we were successful.�� And their right to remain for something close to eternity will be assured if they are successful in securing a $10 million grant from the AFRI Sustainable Agricultural Systems (SAS) program, an application whose chances of success are enhanced by the $1 million GRIP grant.

Bonding with the region’s urban agriculture community, achieving academic and institutional respectability, and mustering the necessary multi-disciplinary brain trust and resources have positioned the Urban Food System Initiative at the national forefront of urban agriculture. But what of the concept itself? Does small scale farming, even gardening, to say nothing of the often feisty, sometimes obstinately undefinable world of peri-urban and urban agriculture have a future? When millions of hungry mouths are added to planet Earth every month, or even when well-intentioned local officials push growers off a city lot to make room for 10 units of much-needed affordable housing, how will urban agriculture argue its case?

These questions are precisely the ones the UFSI’s GRIP grant is addressing. Tricia Jenkins is using the Community and Agriculture Resilience Audit Tool (aptly acronymed as CARAT) “to assess how urban agriculture production sites influence community food resilience, community health, food production, and environmental sustainability by doing surveys in communities.�� One obvious application of this tool, Tricia explains, is that once they’ve identified and have metrics for urban agriculture’s co-benefits—assuming that “feeding a hungry world�� is not the primary goal—then both academics and practitioners will have stronger leverage with public officials to make land use decisions more favorable to urban agriculture. Ultimately, they expect to create an AI tool that will enable city planners, for instance, to identify the multiple values of placing, let’s call it the Fats Domino Urban Farm, at the corner of 12th Street and Vine.

Cary puts the argument another way. “We see people with diabetes and other

Cary Rivard Showing Off OHREC’s Greenhouse on Rails

health problems that are the result of a broken food system that doesn’t value real food,�� he says, “The symptoms of that broken system are seen most acutely in urban communities.�� These seemed like slightly more idealistic sentiments than you’d expect from a man of science. But then I remember riding with him in an ATV across the research farm’s fields and dirt roads as he enthusiastically showed off low-cost agrivoltaics systems, high tunnel greenhouses that could be moved manually along rails, fruit and vegetable seed trials for small-scale, commercial production, dozens of master gardeners tending community garden plots and dispensing advice to thousands of people across the county, and eager packs of graduate students managing all this apparatus while dutifully recording every minutia of data. All of this is low-tech and low to moderate cost—not computer-controlled, energy intensive, multimillion-dollar price tags, indoor vertical agriculture systems accessible only to venture capitalists. This is the nuts and bolts, applied research that the 21st century urban and peri-urban grower needs to competitively feed—if not a hungry world—at least a hungry city.

The question of whether or not urban agriculture can feed a hungry world seemed increasingly ironic to me. Has conventional, large-scale agriculture as we know it in the US fed a hungry world? Not if you ask the 828 million people that the U.N. identified as food insecure, or the 40 million U.S. citizens who were identified similarly by the USDA; not if you ask the 35 percent of Americans who are obese, or the over 10 percent who are persons with diabetes; not if you ask folks and farmers in western Kansas where the Ogallala Aquifer is drying up; and not if you ask those of us choking on record heat from greenhouse carbon emissions, 25 percent of which are agriculture generated.

The Urban Food System Initiative at K-State Olathe doesn’t pretend to have answers to all of these immensely important questions, but at least there is a place with the demonstrated competency, capacity, and partners to take up the challenge of feeding our cities. And it just so happens to be in Kansas.

The Community Food Projects (CFP) grant program is to the U. S. Department of Agriculture what one tomato seed is to a large garden. It may not look like much in the palm of your hand, but when handled properly, it’s a mighty force for community food system change. Since CFP is harbored within the Farm Bill and occupies a small slip within the SNAP program, it, like numerous other food and farm programs is up for Congressional reauthorization this year. That means we �� Food Citizens United! �� must rise up now to ensure CFP’s inclusion within the new Farm Bill, and that it receives $10 million per year in funding, up from its current level of $5 million.

Like this newsletter that you read for free, CFP is a bargain. I have seen dozens of funded projects and the communities they benefit over the years. I have written about many of them ( , , , ) to illustrate the thousands of food system jobs those projects create, the tens of millions of local and state dollars they leverage for healthy, local food, and the contribution they make to the vivacity, sustainability, and quality of community life. Punching way above its weight, CFP gives the imaginative among us—those possessed of a vision for a healthier and prosperous place—permission to dream and the means to bring that dream to life.

Other than the ten minutes of your attention this newsletter requests of you each month, I have never asked for even a modest subscription fee, nor a portion of any negotiable securities you may possess, not even a few trinkets from your semi-precious jewelry. Well, it’s payback time! All that I ask you to do in return for this humble blog is to contact your Member of Congress and your two U.S. Senators and ask them to include CFP in the Farm Bill and authorize a funding level of $10 million annually (I’ll give you more details in a minute).

What happens if you don’t? Well, not only may CFP get washed out to sea via some industrial farm’s pesticide-laden drainage ditch, but the opportunity also to advance food system change will be seriously diminished. How will I know if you don’t contact your elected federal officials? The algorithm I designed for this blog tracks it all! It knows if you garden, the kind of peanut butter you feed your children, and the last time you ate a hot dog. It also knows the two subscribers who voted for Trump in 2020 (You have six months to get right with your Lord!).

Wherever a CFP grant lands, serious amounts of good gets done. In Dorchester, Mass., CFP funding helped community residents fulfill their long sought after hope of developing a food coop, Now largely staffed by the people who live there, it’s bringing healthy, local and affordable food to a neighborhood that has had limited access to the same. Along the shores of the Klamath River in northern California, a CFP grant has enabled the Yurok Tribe to reclaim the food sovereignty it once enjoyed a century ago, and in so doing, restore the health of their tribal members. After the Flint, Michigan water crisis forced two grocery stores to close, CFP funds and the North Flint Development Corporation, serving a 98 percent Black community, are putting the finishing touches on a new grocery store. Converting a 21,000-square-feet, former church to a full-service coop supermarket, this enterprise is owned and loved by over 1,000, North Flint community member investors.

How do we keep this ball rolling? Contact your Congressperson, each of your two senators, and, if you have one or more Congresspersons in your state who serve on the House Agriculture Committee, contact them too. You can Google your Congressperson’s name, go to their website, and leave your message. You can also call the Congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to be connected to your member (you’ll have to do it one member at a time) and then leave a message. To see if you have a House Agriculture Committee member in your state, check here .

What do we say? Ask them to please keep the Community Food Projects grant program in the Farm Bill and to authorize spending at $10 million per year. If you know anything about a CFP project in your area, leave a brief and positive description of it. If you have friends or family, ask them to speak up as well. If you don’t, CFP is a great way to make some. I met a couple once who met each other while turning the compost pile at their CFP-funded community garden. They married a year later.

Since you’re reaching out to your elected officials any way, there’s one more thing I’d like you to ask, and this is from my friends at the Food Research Action Center (FRAC). Request that your members “oppose a Farm Bill that would make harmful cuts and policy changes to SNAP and any other federal nutrition program.�� You see, those House Republicans are always up to some mischief. After all, their first priority is making the world safe for billionaires by keeping their taxes low while looking for ways to cut food stamps. I’ve always wondered what church or temple they attend, and try as I may, I’ve yet to find scripture that says, “Thou shall take from the poor and give to the rich.��

What I’m asking you to do is a prime example of food democracy—people speaking up loud and clear for what they want. With Community Food Projects, we are not only striking a blow for food security and food justice, but we are also providing the tools that communities need to build the food system they need.

Thank you, and don’t worry, your subscription is safe!

“We must cultivate our garden.�� Voltaire

The crack of the bat. The soft shoosh of the shovel blade sliding into the yielding earth. The satisfying humpf of a baseball smacking a leather mitt. Coming out of its winter hibernation, the wheelbarrow squeaks its way across the backyard, signaling resistance to the heavy load of manure. Cool and moist, the early morning dew settled across the local baseball diamond, then rose in a mist before the sun’s early rays. The garden bed thawing in the April warmth exhales a last cold breath followed by hints of richly scented fecundity. The dirt is already under my nails; the first beads of perspiration bubble across my brow.

Whether scooping up ground balls or plunging garden implements into the ground, spring’s necessary rhythms ground me. The weekend’s choices boil down to two: do I spend the day in my favorite sun-drenched seat, ten rows back from first base at the nearby minor league baseball park, or, wrapped in my ill-fitting, unfashionably ripped denim work jacket (it was roomy 40 years ago), do I push snap pea seeds knuckle deep into the moist soil until my fingers grow stiff with cold.

For a moment, fantasy gets the best of me. I see myself moving with balletic grace around my living room sofa to spear a sizzling hot groundball. With a pivot that would put Derek Jeter to shame, I make a whiplash sidearm throw to my television set across the room turning the double play. The crowd erupts; the fans are on their feet; I tip my cap.

Then reality sets in. The garden won’t plant itself. Those hundreds of seedlings I started indoors under Gro-lights are screaming for more space. Night temperatures still hover around freezing, but the days are warm and welcoming. The planting instructions on the Johnny’s seed packet issue a Calvinist warning, “Begin sowing in spring as soon as the garden soil is prepared,�� implying that those who are lazy and negligent will bring shame upon themselves and endure a long, hungry winter. Bouncing a rubber ball off my back wall does little to advance my food security; a hotdog-chomping day at the ballpark creates a mountain of opportunity costs I can’t afford. And in spite of my wildest hopes, The Baseball Encyclopedia has no record of someone my age ever being called up to the majors.

But even stronger forces eclipse the garden’s seasonal imperatives, my fantasies, and the fable of the grasshopper and ant. Taken individually and spread out across the globe as they are, any one event now impinging on food production or distribution may elicit our sympathies but may not necessarily raise a personal alarm. Food inflation is one item that makes shoppers skittish, especially as it did this past summer when it was rising faster than the foam on a badly poured beer. Though the upward food price trend has moderated substantially, the Republicans love to gin up their base with fears of mass starvation based on months-old data. However, they give little attention to the underlying and shifting causes of food inflation that don’t often find their way into our daily newsfeeds.

For instance, the war in Ukraine has thrown grain markets for a loop, droughts in India, Indonesia, and other Asian food exporters have reduced harvests, and Pakistan lost much of their crops to torrential flooding in 2022. The litany of man-made causes of hunger and food insecurity (war and the real starvation in Gaza due to the near-genocidal behavior of Israel), and the man-nurtured causes (natural disasters that have a close climate change link) can send world food supplies and prices into a tailspin. Some of these forces were responsible for driving up the Asian benchmark price for rice by 25 percent last winter. Hiral Patel, the head of sustainable and thematic research at Barclays in London, summed up the world food situation this way: “There’s a range of new external shocks. The range of factors make it even more challenging to predict how volatile it will be going forward�� (The New York Times, 8/11/23). In other words, there’s an interconnection of international economic, political, and climatic events that send ripples of food system pain, large and small, across the globe—and don’t expect to receive a notice early enough to be well prepared!

On the domestic front, it’s probably not prudent to expect American food corporations to restrain food prices for the benefit of the American consumer. That’s asking too much. But some recent research has raised the question as to whether food companies used the excuse of the Pandemic’s impact on disrupted food supply chains a little too long—after those disruptions had been resolved—to keep prices artificially high for consumers. And recently, the Federal Trade Commission has announced its opposition to the proposed merger between the two food retail giants, Kroger and Albertsons because it will increase food prices. The corporate argument—they need to get bigger to compete with Wal-Mart—is one of those disingenuous claims that always fails to bring a tear to my eye.

As if I needed more reasons to roll off my couch and turn over the garden’s back 40 (square yards), I only have to look at the beautiful mountains and basins that surround me. Like the rest of the West, they are drying up. In the Southwest, our stingy 12 inches of annual precipitation rises and falls slightly based on which La Nina/El Nino cycle we’re in, but more people mean more water demand and more competition between developers and farmers for our region’s most precious asset. In an outstanding series on the decline of groundwater across the U.S., The New York Times (9/2/23) documented a frightening picture of aquifers that irrigate vast expanses of farmland being so severely depleted that they may never recharge, hence becoming unusable. “Groundwater loss is hurting breadbasket states like Kansas, where the aquifer beneath 2.6 million acres of land can no longer support industrial-scale agriculture,�� The Times reported.

A recent fund solicitation letter from the American Farmland Trust reminded me of what environmental movement was ultimately about. It said, “Imagine celebrating Earth Day in a world where everyone can access affordable, nutritious food. It’s a shared goal, but one that is truly becoming more elusive as record-setting droughts, floods, storms, and other extreme weather wreaks havoc on our agricultural systems �� causing crop failures and livestock losses. Climate shifts also disrupt pest and disease patterns, posing additional challenges to food production�� (4/18/24). According to the Trust’s data, for most of this century’s first two decades, America has been losing or compromising 2,000 acres of farm and ranchland every day (. This simply can’t continue if America is to feed itself and a world that is frequently upended by catastrophes—what I would increasingly call natural man-made catastrophes—in ways we couldn’t have even imagined 20 years ago.

In view of these events and the likelihood that they’ll only grow more severe, my whining about garden work is unlikely to elicit much sympathy. After all, the return on my annual investment of about $125 in seeds and composted cow manure more than justifies the many hours of glorious exercise I get from gardening. By my most conservative estimate, the annual net savings in fresh fruit and vegetable purchases for 2023 was $1,000. This is what I ate fresh, canned, and frozen, and shared with friends and a local food pantry. I even took a portion of that food savings and donated it to the New Israel Fund to help alleviate food shortages in Gaza. All in all, this was a satisfying payback for doing something that I inherently love.

So, I put my shoulder to the plow once again. My motivation is reconstituted, and the spring’s priorities are clear. The garden must be prepared, seedlings transplanted, and direct seeding begun. This doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t succumb to the occasional whimsey, as when a non-decomposed avocado pit is surfaced by my hoe. Tossing the ping-pong sized pit up in front of me—a bit high and to the outside—I swing the wooden-handled garden tool connecting with it solidly. The pit clears my garden fence by a wide margin but lands a little too close to my neighbor’s new truck. Fortunately, they don’t notice, but I make a mental note to give them a few more tomatoes this year.

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.�� Francis Bacon, 17th Century English philosopher

Shelves stuffed with books are supposed to be a symbol of their owner’s intelligence, culture, and a certain savoir faire. Not only is a subjective assessment of your refinement on display, but the quantity and composition of your collection speaks to your values, identity, and idiosyncrasies. They can make an emotional statement as well. After quickly perusing some people’s bookshelves for the first time, I was so excited that I wanted to be their friend for life. On other occasions, I was so appalled I couldn’t find my way to the door fast enough!

My mother’s notion of how an upscale 1950s and 1960s suburban living room should be decorated pivoted around books as much as furniture. The number and right kind of books were not matters to be taken lightly due to the essential role they performed in shaping our status. I can only imagine that there was a “Good Housekeeping�� magazine edition of that era with precise recommendations for ratios of bookshelves to total wall space, as well as a curated list of titles that should populate those shelves. For example, five books of poetry (Frost, Keats, D. Thomas, Cummings, and Sandburg), a few volumes of Shakespeare’s “greatest hits,�� some Greek and European classics (“Classic,�� proclaimed Mark Twain, “A book which people praise and don’t read��), and contemporary fiction that spoke to how au courant you were. “Isn’t he a Negro writer?�� one of my mother’s friends inquired with a raised eyebrow as she pulled the James Baldwin novel off the shelf, while another friend would say, “Good for you! You have Ayn Rand!�� The copy of Lolita carefully concealed in one dark end of a shelf always evoked a titter or two during my parents�� cocktail parties. And what modern American home would be complete without an encyclopedia—preferably the entire edition rather than just “A�� through “H�� which was a dead giveaway that you’re buying the entire volume “on time�� (I’m convinced I would have got into a better college if “U�� through “Z�� had arrived before I was 17).

But what does all that say today about me when the most prominent feature of my office is a bookcase stuffed with food and farm books? There’s the anonymous warning found in an ancient Latin text that advises us to “Beware the man of one book!�� When I think about today’s extremists, frothing at the mouth over the published pontifications of the latest tech guru, that quote sends chills up my spine. But should we be equally worried about the man of one kind of book? Does having a room where I’m surrounded by nothing but a small sub-genre of non-fiction—one that is as much about bread and butter as it is about how I earned my bread and butter—suggest that I’m one-dimensional?

To be honest, my living room is largely given over to books as well, though you will find nary a food or farm book there. I once tried to change that, but to ill effect. In the interest of applying an inter-disciplinary approach to interior design, I integrated many food books from my office into my living room. My thinking was that diversity of topics and perspectives would be healthy for everyone. Wrong! Soon, I heard rumblings coming from the living room late at night, even expletive-laced directives as to where to stick “your English cucumber, foodie!�� I thought I was dreaming until I found books scattered across the floor the next morning. The noises grew louder and angrier night after night; the cracking of spines and ripping of pages were audible, and shredded jackets of a dozen or more books were ground into the carpet. When terrible things about Shakespeare’s mother were scrawled on the Bard’s play covers, I’d had enough. Gang warfare had erupted! I halted my experiment with genre diversity and returned my food books to the office.

Since my books have agreed to a forced armistice, I can enjoy my food and farm titles for the tales they tell, about my evolution as well as that of the food movement. Dropping back nearly 50 years, there were two books that captured my attention as a just-out-of-college kid trying to align my moral compass with the need to make a living. Food For People by Catherine Lerza and Michael Jacobson (1975), my copy now yellowed and duct-taped, was so far ahead of its time with respect to hunger, nutrition and health, and food production that we’re still trying to catch up. Radical Agriculture, edited by Richard Merrill with essays by Wendell Berry, Jim Hightower, and Michael Perelman (1976) synthesized the work of such forebearers as Robert Rodale and began the task of swinging the lumbering ship of conventional farming to the more abiding shores of organic, sustainable, and regenerative.

But as I’ve heard Jim Hightower say on several occasions, “While it may be the rooster who crows, the hen delivers the goods,�� I also include Joan Dye Gussow’s and Jan Poppendieck’s books among my first influencers. Gussow’s Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce, and Agriculture (1991) became a part of the early warning system that alerted us to how food production was becoming “de-natured�� and our food system was blindly falling under the spell of science and technology. Poppendieck’s Sweet Charity? (1998) pulled the bandages off the bourgeoning food banking and emergency food world to reveal that bandages weren’t enough. Together, these two volumes sharpened my analysis of the perils associated with prevailing but non-systemic solutions. The result was a renewed resolve to engage public policy and grass-roots food activism.

Apart from that first round of tomes that ignited a fire under this would-be food system reformer, there were a category of mostly 21st century pubs that either sharpened my analysis or softened my heart. Among the former of course was Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food (2008) whose distillation of his seminal food reporting and the holy bible of the food movement, �����Ծ����ǰ���’s Dilemma, enlivened our food consciousness for a good long while. (Against my better instincts, I loaned out my copy of �����Ծ����ǰ���’s which, of course, was never returned. Book kidnapper, you know who you are! Your soul and those of your children will never be at ease until you return my book!).

School Food Revolution (2008) by Kevin Morgan and Roberta Sonnino built a framework for the fast-emerging farm to school and good-food-in-schools movement. The book’s title is perhaps one of the more accurate in the food issues sub-genre often known for its hyperbolic titles. Given that the change over the last 20 years in school food has been nothing less than spectacular, Morgan and Sonnino nailed it.

Less granular, perhaps, but more spiritually uplifting are three books on my shelf whose author’s words touched me when and where I needed it most. The Seasons on Henry’s Farm (2009) by Terra Brockman and Food and Faith (2011) by Norman Wirzba, both gave me reasons to believe in my work when my hope was at a low ebb. Stanley Crawford, author of The Garlic Testament and Mayordomo, passed away this winter leaving the hills of Northern New Mexico and the Santa Fe Farmers�� Market grieving the loss of his gentle presence. But Stan’s books will inspire and instruct for decades to come (pictured here is The Garlic Papers (2019) since the same person who “borrowed�� �����Ծ����ǰ���’s Dilemma probably has my copies of Crawford’s other work as well. Second warning: charges against you may be upgraded to a felony).

Contrary to my mother’s thinking, having a large number of books doesn’t necessarily make you a good person. Hitler supposedly owned 16,000 books while Stalin’s collection topped out at 25,000 (The New Yorker, 2/26/24). I heard a mid-list author once say, “I own 1,000 books, but 900 of them are mine.�� Apparently, his publisher offered him his unsold editions as an option to dumping them into the remainder pile. My shelves only store a modest number of my own books, which I keep in inventory pending the day when their rarity drives the price through the roof. A more likely scenario, however, is when I had to use eight copies of Stand Together or Starve Alone* to hold my office door open during a particularly hot and windy summer day. Upon seeing this, my son couldn’t help but crack, “Finally, Dad, your books are being put to good use.��

Though nothing beats the thrill of having your own book placed in print for the whole world to fondle, a close second is helping a would-be author realize their dream. That’s why writing a forward or an endorsement for another’s book, or even helping a colleague through the complicated writing and publishing process can sometimes be a joy. I say “sometimes�� because the food book sub-genre, like the food system itself, has generated its share of “waste.�� There are too many people who fashioned themselves as writers who, frankly, should have never strayed from their day jobs. But for those who have both the itch and the ink to pull it off, I’ve had fun playing a small midwifery role.

To that end, I pulled more than a dozen books off my shelf whose creation I’m proud to have been associated with, even if it was just as a reviewer. One in particular is Breaking Through Concrete (2012) by Edwin Marty and David Hanson (forward by Mark Winne) that speaks to the beauty and excitement of urban farming that’s taking back real estate at both the city core and urban fringe. The Color of Food (2015) by Natasha Bowens (I advised and endorsed) was an early entry into the often-overlooked field of how people of color are (and have been for a long time) staking a claim to land to make what magic they can from its soil. Like Breaking Through Concrete, it’s a story told with robust words and beautiful photographs. And an old hometown favorite is Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries (2021) by Katie Martin (I advised, coached, and connected), a former intern of mine during my days in Hartford, Connecticut. Reinventing does just that by bringing fresh ideas and new juice to an emergency food system that had become brittle and dry.

In my third book Stand Together or Starve Alone* (now in paperback and available directly from me or Amazon*) I identified the growth in published food issue books since 2005. Even I was astounded by the numbers. Limiting my search to categories like hunger and food insecurity, sustainable agriculture, and food systems (this leaves out large swathes of topics like health and nutrition, cookbooks, and garden books), the number of published titles grew four to sevenfold in ten years:

Food Systems: 2005 �� 52 titles; 2015 �� 372 titles

Hunger and Food Security: 2005 �� 148 titles; 2015 �� 929 titles;

Food Policy: 2005 �� 53 titles; 2015 �� 241 titles

I and other food authors have benefitted from this rising tide of attention as much as we have sometimes been diluted by the tsunami of titles. Yes, at times it does appear to be too much, especially when one sub-genre of food books would divide and sub-divide again into a reductionist pile of crumbs. But for the most part, our world’s food, health, political, social, economic, racial, and environmental knowledge has been leavened like a beautiful souffle by the onslaught of literature that sparkles with every facet of our sustenance. Our book shelves may be embarrassingly overweighted with food titles, but at least they are conversing amicably, sharing information openly, and on their best days, advancing a more unified view of the food system universe.

*If you want to purchase the paperback version of “Stand Together or Starve Alone�� directly from me for $20 including shipping, send me an email at [email protected]. Also available on Amazon: .

Palestinian Olive Oil distributed by Equal Exchange

I grew up under the sway of Zionist ideology.  Like a similar ideology that underpinned my 1950s and 1960s American history lessons, Zionism presented a virtuous cause framed by a tale of divine destiny that was forged in a cauldron of suffering and activated by a ferocious work ethic. My mother and father, who didn’t have a Jewish bone in their bodies, raised me and my three siblings in a Presbyterian-lite manner. To highlight just how vanilla our religious life was, however, my mother would regale us with tales of the Jews making the deserts of their new Israeli nation bloom. She spared no details when sharing the emerging horrors of the Holocaust, and why the “chosen people�� were entitled to every last acre of what was then called Palestine. Thusly imbued, I can remember joining in a burst of 17-year-old bravado that erupted from our high school cafeteria table in June of 1967 when we learned that Israel had “kicked the Arab’s asses�� in only six days.

But like our social studies textbooks that sometimes weren’t worth the glue that bound them, the stories of messianic zeal that fired Zionism and, likewise, America’s Manifest Destiny, had several pages “missing.�� Those were the unwritten chapters that would have told us of the trampling, enslavement, and near erasure of those who already occupied that land, as well as those people who were forced here after being separated from their traditional lands. Indeed, one humiliation imposed by the oppressor throughout history has been denying the vanquished access to their land, its fertility, and its productions. From the salting of seized fields in the ancient Middle East�� “a covenantal curse, a means of ensuring desolation”—to the near annihilation of the buffalo by America’s white settlers to today’s apartheid wall in Palestine’s West Bank, the conqueror not only cut the conquered off from their food and their livelihoods, they ensured their disappearance as a people.

Taking a page from those unwritten chapters, we see the same story unfold in the West Bank. The modern beginnings of that history goes back 75 years to when the Zionists displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their traditional lands. It continued through Israel’s seizure and occupation of the West Bank, and has now intensified since Hamas’s barbaric attacks on Israeli sites on October 7.

According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization, “October 7 was a launching pad for a campaign of incitement against Palestinians in the West Bank, focusing on farmers and on preventing the [olive] harvest…False information that Palestinian harvesters were out to attack [Israeli] settlers spread…Israelis carried out planned attacks on people whose only sin was harvesting their own olives. [O]n October 28, 2023 a settler who was also a soldier on leave fatally shot Bilal Saleh, a father of four from a-Sawiyah. Bilal was harvesting olives with his children…on his land in an area that does not require prior coordination with the military. The settler who killed Bilal was arrested and released five days later.��

Yesh Din , which is part of the non-profit New Israel Fund, has fastidiously documented the human rights violations of settlers and soldiers against Palestinians. Since October 7, 389 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s military and civilian forces in the West Bank compared to 29 Israelis killed (an additional 103 Palestinians were killed in the nine months before October 7). But a special form of intimidation was reserved for the olive harvest which was at its peak this fall. The 2023 olive harvest season were marked by 113 incidents of violence against Palestinian harvesters including soldiers and settlers physically assaulting harvesters (24 incidents), firing live ammunition at harvesters (11 incidents), and cutting down or torching 715 olive trees (29 incidents). Yesh Din concluded that the “scale of violence during the harvest was two to three times greater than in previous years.�� The incident reports and personal stories of the victims are reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan’s intimidation and harassment of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, including the near total absence of prosecuting the offenders.

For Palestinians, olives are not just another crop that produces a vital stream of income, it also a national and cultural symbol. According to the Palestinian Agriculture Relief Committee (PARC), there are an estimated 13 million olive trees in Palestine, some of whose roots go back 5,000 years, and whose ownership is spread across hundreds of thousands of smallholders. PARC’s diversified farming activities and overall respect make it the dominant Palestinian agricultural force. It oversees 41 farmer coops that, in addition to olive growers, include producers of dates, almonds, poultry, and other crops. It also operates an agricultural training program for about 1600 young people annually.

Robert Evert, a principal with the U.S.-based fair trade organization Equal Exchange, tells me how inspiring his visits to PARC’s training sites have been. “On the West Bank, people are getting beat up and shot at. In other words, there’s not a lot of hope,�� he says. “But it’s very moving to see the spirit of the young people in PARC’s training program. It gives them hope and a reason to get up in the morning.�� Evert also adds that the young participants are very diverse with respect to gender, about 50/50 male and female.

As important as these organizing and training programs are, it’s critical to the Palestinian economy that its agricultural products generate export revenue. That’s where PARC’s for profit partner, Al-reef comes in. They’ve developed the capacity of producers to grow high quality crops, and, with investment assistance from such groups as Oxfam, have constructed processing facilities such as a state-of-the-art olive oil bottling plant. The plant includes high quality product testing and monitoring that are required to comply with the stringent “extra virgin�� designation and export conditions to North American and European markets (as a purchaser of Al-reef’s olive oil through Equal Exchange over the past three years, I can vouch for its quality and delicious flavor profile). For two months at harvest season, the olive oil presses are going 24/7. And there is no waste: olive pits are used to fuel the plant’s boiler and the spent flesh is composted.

Saleem Abu Ghazaleh is Al-reef’s general manager. As such, he oversees the farmer connections, processing, marketing, and shipping of their products. Though a successful professional who now runs one of the more substantial non-governmental enterprises in the West Bank, Saleem “enjoyed�� a youthful Palestinian rite of passage by resisting the Israeli occupation and paying the price: five years in prison. Rob Evert has spent time with Saleem at his Al-reef facilities in Ramallah. This included time in his office which, according to Evert, is tiny. “Saleem told me that his office is about the same size as his prison cell, but then he said, ‘at least I now have a key!’��

In a February 11th correspondence with me and Equal Exchange, Saleem said, “the level of violence committed by Israeli settlers and Israel forces has not been slowing in the West Bank, on the contrary, they have been increasing. The leaders of those settlers who are also Ministers in this right-wing Israeli government…call for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank.�� Citing the many hostile actions and restrictions on farmers as well as unusually poor growing conditions in 2023, he said the supply of Palestinian olive oil is way down. The decline in supply was also due to the loss of 3000 tons of olive oil in the Gaza strip because the war there prevented the 2023 harvest from taking place. “We had to decrease Equal Exchange’s order of olive oil because of the situation of farmers,�� Saleem said. Equal Exchange normally buys about 25,000 bottles of olive oil annually, about 15 percent of Al-reef’s production. While the supply cut will be a small inconvenience for Equal Exchange’s shoppers, the lost sales is potentially devastating for Palestinians.

There is a pall of oppression hanging over the West Bank and Gaza the likes of which would never be tolerated in the United States. According to a recent New York Times Magazine article (2/4/24), the per capita income in the West Bank is $5,600 compared to $50,000 in many of the illegal Israeli settlements. Economic prospects, always bleak at best, were made worse when Israel suspended payments to the Palestinian Authority, and West Bank Palestinians could no longer go into Israel to work. This adversely affected 139,000 Palestinian workers (according to Saleem, the loss of paychecks forced some olive oil coops to sell their oil early simply to raise cash for their members�� basic living expenses). Israel routinely tears down Palestinian buildings, both residential and agricultural, including 15,000 homes in Jerusalem, supposedly because they lacked building permits. Politically, the Palestinians have never consented to be governed by Israel, yet they live under an anti-democratic, apartheid occupation. In light of these conditions, is it any wonder that there are periodic intifadas and, sadly, it is why many Palestinians regard October 7 as their liberation day, “the day when they became visible again.��

Almost a year ago, I attended a lecture by Miko Peled who wrote a book called The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine. His father was a prominent military leader in Israel’s 1948 and 1967 wars which enhances Peled’s credibility as an outspoken critic of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Speaking forcefully, he ticks off a litany of Israel’s abuses asserting that they constitute crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. He asks rhetorically “how could people who survived the Holocaust do these things?�� Perhaps with my age group in mind, Peled urges us not to think of Israel’s illegal settlements as the idealized “hippie�� kibbutz of our youth (to impress the Jewish woman I was dating in college, I may have even suggested joining one). These are now the large settlements of evangelical Jews, supplied with thousands of weapons by the IDF, and terrorizing West Bank Palestinians. Peled called upon the audience as American taxpayers to make a moral decision to hold our own government accountable for funding these crimes. Lastly, he warned us not to be put off by accusations of anti-Semitism, a default term that is now used to shield Israel from criticism.

All recommendations for peace, reconciliation, or the much-touted two-state solution feel hopelessly faraway in today’s climate of hate. As Mohammad Shtayyeh, the Palestinian prime minister, put it, “Israel…is behaving like a wounded bull. They’re acting in a mood of revenge, killing for the sake of killing.�� Suggesting that the bull do anything other than exhaust its blood lust feels hopeless for now. Yet the taking of land, the uprooting of trees whose millenniums of witness take in Jesus, Abraham, and Muhammad; taking the harvest from the community and the fruits of labor from the farmer, these are forms of retribution reserved for those who not only deny the existence of others, but also deny their own humanity and humanity’s common bond with the earth. To thwart such blindness requires the light of hope and witness provided by Yesh Din, PARC, Al-reef, and other forward-looking, on the ground organizations willing to risk their money, their energy and sometimes their lives for a brighter future. And it requires American political leaders with real courage to end the bloodshed and forge a path to peace and prosperity.