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The Deep Dish
An insider look at food and farming from Civil Eats
Issue 24, November 2023: A First Look at Our Holiday Book Gift Guide
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The Editors' Desk
In our final Deep Dish of 2023, we share a first look at our much-anticipated Holiday Book Guide. For this issue, we reviewed our favorite picks alongside several picks from our members. The full guide, with many more contributors and books, will be online next week. The Holiday Book Guide, our Summer Book Guide, and our ongoing book coverage represent our commitment to bringing you new ideas and voices in the world of food, agriculture, the environment, and social justice.
Also in this issue, we share photos from Kate Medley’s new book, Thank You Please Come Again, which explores how gas stations with restaurants are central to community in the South, and an interview with the renowned Canadian market farmer and educator Jean-Martin “JM” Fortier about his new book with Catherine Sylvestre, The Winter Market Gardener.
We hope you will agree that this is an engaging and inspiring way to end a truly terrific year at Civil Eats. In case you missed it, we celebrated more than a dozen awards and finalist nominations for our reporting this year, and we couldn’t have done it without your support. Membership fuels our work, and we are sincerely grateful for your donations and contributions. If you'd like to increase your support for our work with a tax-deductible donation, please click the button below.
From all of us at Civil Eats, wishing you a peaceful and bountiful holiday season and a peaceful and joyous new year. We will see you back here in 2024, and look forward to celebrating our 15th anniversary with you all!
~ The Civil Eats Editors |
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Member Updates |
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As we wrap up 2023, we want to thank you for supporting our reporting on a monthly or yearly basis. An important part of our work is engaging with you, our most dedicated readers, so this year we introduced two new membership benefits: Civil Eats Salons and our members’ Slack community.
You responded by participating in our salons on School Food Access and Climate Change, Agriculture, and the 2023 Farm Bill, and more than 50 of you have joined our Slack community. (If you’d like to participate, please review the Community Rules and Agreements and accept this invitation link, which is good through December 25. Here are the instructions if you’re using Slack for the first time.)
We also appreciate your responses to our requests; they helped round out some of our reporting this year. You shared some of your favorite books for our Summer 2023 Food and Farming Book Guide and for the Holiday Book Gift Guide below. And your recommendations helped us compile this list of U.S. urban farms. Most importantly, your comments on our member survey earlier this year helped us better understand the values you see Civil Eats represent.
Furthermore, with your support, this year we completed a shift to a better membership platform system that allows you (and us) to more easily manage your subscription. Look out for more good things to come in 2024 (including a new members-only section of our website).
Thank you for supporting and helping to make our work possible! If you have questions, ideas, or testimonials that you would like to share, reach out to us at members@civileats.com.
~ Kalisha Bass, Membership Manager
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Here’s a small confession: I don’t read much “food writing.” Yes, I’m immersed in food news, but getting to explore the essays, memoirs, and other genres that fit into the wider field of food writing is a rare treat. That’s why I am so appreciative of the Best American Food Writing series—each year, it provides a reliable, eye-opening showcase of a wide range of truly interesting, insightful writing about how food shapes our lives.
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Here’s a small confession: I don’t read much “food writing.” Yes, I’m immersed in food news, but getting to explore the essays, memoirs and other genres that fit into the wider field of food writing is a rare treat. That’s why I am so appreciative of the Best American Food Writing series—each year, it provides a reliable, eye-opening showcase of a wide range of truly interesting, insightful writing about how food shapes our lives. |
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This year’s edition, edited by Mark Bittman, is no different: Entries span from Caroline Hatchett’s comprehensive history of rosin potatoes (AKA pitch potatoes) from Bitter Southerner to Curtis Chin’s short but sweet story from Bon Appétit about the night his two worlds—Detroit’s Chinatown and its surrounding “gayborhood”—collided in his father’s restaurant. The series recognizes that food is interwoven in all aspects of life, just like we do at Civil Eats, so I’m especially honored to have two Civil Eats writers represented in the series. Our Staff Reporter Grey Moran has a delightful article about foraging, published in Grist, included in the book. And our former Senior Reporter Wesley Brown’s powerful article about Black farmers in Arkansas, included at the end of the book, serves as a poignant reminder of all the work that remains in building a more just and equitable food system.
~ Matthew Wheeland, Managing Editor |
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The coeditors of Good Eats, both English professors and authors, have gathered a selection of creative nonfiction essays that requires “ecological thinking and a close attention to relationships, the environment, and diversity.” The 32 selections showcase the myriad (and often thorny) issues of ethical eating through personal stories, poetry, recipes, and more. |
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The coeditors of Good Eats, both English professors and authors, have gathered a selection of creative nonfiction essays that requires “ecological thinking and a close attention to relationships, the environment, and diversity.” The 32 selections showcase the myriad (and often thorny) issues of ethical eating through personal stories, poetry, recipes, and more. |
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The editors acknowledge that their understanding of ethical eating was shaped, in part, by our work at Civil Eats—and we are happy to see a reprint of the essay “An Afro-Indigenous Approach to Agriculture and Food Security” by Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm, which was previously published on Civil Eats, among the selections.
In “Do I Have to Give Up Chocolate?: An Ethical Dilemma,” Lynn Z. Bloom considers whether to boycott the popular confection in an effort to combat child slavery and environmental destruction in cacao production. In “Colonialism Ate My Body: Exploring the Intersections of Genocide and Diet from Manifest Destiny to Trendy Veganism,” scholar Taté Walker (Mniconjou Lakota) traces the changes in Indigenous diets from pre-colonization to the present and analyzes what she calls “morality-based food policing.” Many of the essays provide more questions than answers about what an ethical food system should look like—a dilemma we often face in our reporting as well.
~ Naomi Starkman, Editor-in-Chief |
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Expensive avocado toast has often been used as a reductive symbol of the millennial generation’s penchant for indulgent spending. And yet, as British food policy advocate Honor May Eldridge’s debut book The Avocado Debate points out, the modern avocado trade is full of much deeper problems than the fruit’s use on pricey toast.
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The coeditors of Good Eats, both English professors and authors, have gathered a selection of creative nonfiction essays that requires “ecological thinking and a close attention to relationships, the environment, and diversity.” The 32 selections showcase the myriad (and often thorny) issues of ethical eating through personal stories, poetry, recipes, and more. |
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“Buy an avocado from Mexico and you might be supporting the activities of a drug cartel,” writes Eldridge. “Choose one from Chile and you might be furthering the extraction of much-needed fresh water.” Even monarch butterflies have lost habitat due to the prevalence of monocrop avocado orchards, along the once lush, biodiverse hillsides of Michoacán in Mexico.
Yet Eldridge is far from calling for an avocado boycott. She acknowledges that many consumers can’t afford more ethically grown avocados—and that most globalized commodities share a similar story of extraction. Rather, it’s a call to consider our food’s origins more deeply, and the many hands it may have passed through before our own. By tracing the rise of the avocado from a subsistence fruit to a global commodity, Eldridge also offers an illuminating history of the globalization of food. My only qualm is that, for such a ripe topic, the book can be dense and dry in sections. But overall, The Avocado Debate is a humbling experience, and a potent reminder of how often food chains obscure our knowledge of food’s true origins.
—Grey Moran, Staff Reporter |
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When fourth-generation farmer Will Harris took over his family cattle farm in southwest Georgia in the 1970s, he followed in the footsteps of his father and the thinking of the time and grew adept at industrial methods, manipulating fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, antibiotics, and hormones to maximize the efficiency and productivity of his operation. |
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When fourth-generation farmer Will Harris took over his family cattle farm in southwest Georgia in the 1970s, he followed in the footsteps of his father and the thinking of the time and grew adept at industrial methods, manipulating fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, antibiotics, and hormones to maximize the efficiency and productivity of his operation. |
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Then one day in 1995, while packing his cattle into a double-decker semi-truck bound for a slaughterhouse several states away, he recalls that something suddenly felt wrong. A Bold Return to Giving a Damn details Harris’ transition away from industrialized, commoditized, and centralized agriculture to the regenerative model he uses now, which he says prioritizes the health of the herd, the land, and the local economy of Bluffton, Georgia. Now, White Oak Pastures—a significant player in the regenerative agriculture movement—raises cows on organic pasture, allowing them to carry out their instinctual behaviors in a rotational system.
Civil Eats has reported on Harris’ operation several times—most recently covering a controversial study on the farm’s ability to sequester carbon—so I was excited to read his memoir. The book exceeded my expectations. It is strong in narrative, rich in description, and has a palpable sense of place. It reads as a love letter to his land, his herd, and his rural community and a manifesto on how and why to farm in a way that protects them all. Harris has a strong vision for how to manage animals more humanely and holistically than the dominant agricultural system, and his story presents living proof that a better way is possible.
~ Christina Cooke, Associate Editor |
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In the spring of 2017, veterinarian and environmental scientist Elizabeth Hilborn noticed that all the tadpoles had disappeared from a normally teeming swale on her North Carolina farm. That initial discovery kicked off a one-woman investigation into the cause of the disappearance, which she conducted as the contamination’s ripple effects gradually eliminated bees, worms, birds, and bats from her property. |
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In the spring of 2017, veterinarian and environmental scientist Elizabeth Hilborn noticed that all the tadpoles had disappeared from a normally teeming swale on her North Carolina farm. That initial discovery kicked off a one-woman investigation into the cause of the disappearance, which she conducted as the contamination’s ripple effects gradually eliminated bees, worms, birds, and bats from her property. |
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Hilborn traced the mystery to the agricultural chemicals—neonicotinoids, fungicides, and glyphosate—used on an adjoining property. With this revelation, Restoring Eden becomes an examination of how much remains unknown about the impacts of widely-used pesticides—even within the local agencies tasked with environmental protection in farming communities. And Hilborn’s intimate, passionate connection to her land and its ecosystems demonstrates what’s at stake. Without the web of creatures that sustain her farm, Hilborn’s soil degrades; her garden, without pollinators, is stunted.
Hilborn’s story zooms in on the issues I've reported on at a macro level by looking at the level of a community, a farm, and a stream—where the frogs no longer serenade her to sleep and the bees no longer pollinate her blueberries. On the impacts of neonics—the chemicals that coat most corn and soy seeds in this country—especially, her experience illuminates so much. While the contamination disasters I’ve covered are extreme, what is more alarming is the fact that in farm communities all over the country, the normal annual planting of neonic-coated seed likely results in many undocumented situations just like hers. It just takes a keen observer to notice and a dogged investigator to make the connections. In the end, Restoring Eden is a story about the precarity of the biodiversity that sustains life on this planet in the face of an agricultural system that runs on chemicals that threaten it.
~ Lisa Held, Senior Staff Reporter |
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| In 1996, Slow Food launched the Ark of Taste to catalog roughly 5,000 foods from 150 countries that are in danger of going extinct. Since these plants, animals, traditional foods, and techniques hold cultural significance, Slow Food wanted to ensure their survival by creating awareness and boosting demand for them. Its motto: "Eat it to save it." |
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In 1996, Slow Food launched the Ark of Taste to catalog roughly 5,000 foods from 150 countries that are in danger of going extinct. Since these plants, animals, traditional foods, and techniques hold cultural significance, Slow Food wanted to ensure their survival by creating awareness and boosting demand for them. Its motto: "Eat it to save it."
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Four years ago, Sarah Lohman embarked on a mission to study Ark of Taste entries from eight U.S. regions, including the Navajo-Churro sheep nearly eradicated by the U.S. government; the unique American dates grown only in California's Coachella Valley; the heirloom sugar cane still cultivated in Hawaii; and the Carolina African runner peanut, which was thought to be extinct since the 1930s. In Endangered Eating, Lohman goes deep into the backstories of these iconic foods to surface how they came to become part of the cultural fabric of local communities and why they're so threatened today.
For example, we learn about how sassafras trees, whose leaves are dried and ground into filé powder, are at risk of becoming extinct in Louisiana due to disease. We also learn how the Choctaw people introduced filé powder to African cooks, who added it to a West African stew that became known as gumbo. And we meet Lionel Key, revered for grinding filé powder by hand on his "mortar and pedestal" until his death in 2017. As a fun bonus, Lohman provides recipes throughout the book, including one for gumbo that was inspired by three cookbooks dating back to 1903. This particularly resonated with me and my love of old cookbooks, especially junior league cookbooks, which provide a fascinating snapshot in time of a region's most beloved recipes.
~ Tilde Herrera, Associate Editor |
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| Emmy-winning chef, ethnobotanist, and food sovereignty activist Loretta Barrett Oden (Potawatomi) is regarded as a Native American culinary trailblazer, whose work predates today’s robust Indigenous foodways revitalization efforts. When she and her son opened Corn Dance Café in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1993, it was the first restaurant in the United States to shine a spotlight on local, Indigenous ingredients. |
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Emmy-winning chef, ethnobotanist, and food sovereignty activist Loretta Barrett Oden (Potawatomi) is regarded as a Native American culinary trailblazer, whose work predates today’s robust Indigenous foodways revitalization efforts. When she and her son opened Corn Dance Café in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1993, it was the first restaurant in the United States to shine a spotlight on local, Indigenous ingredients. |
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Oden’s debut book is equal parts memoir and cookbook, sharing the stories of her upbringing in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and showcasing Native recipes geared toward home cooks. She explains that as a child she “learned to walk in two worlds,” referring to the contrasting lives she led with her mom’s Potawatomi family—gardening, foraging, and cooking alongside grandmothers, great- grandmothers, and aunties—and her dad’s European family, whose ancestors came to America aboard the Mayflower.
At 48, she realized she wanted to explore the world and better understand her place in it. Thus began a cross-country journey learning from cooks, elders, and knowledge keepers, which ultimately landed her in Santa Fe. During its 10-year run, Corn Dance Café drew national attention for its hybrid cuisine—reflecting her own ancestry—and featured pre-colonial ingredients like bison, elk, rabbit, wild rice, corn, beans, and squash. These simple yet satiating foods factor heavily into her book, which offers easy recipes spanning from the plains to the forests to the oceans. With this tome, Oden encourages everyone to embrace local Indigenous flavors. “I believe we are connected to life when we sit down together over a good meal,” she writes. “If we can come together at the table, we can come together in peace.”
~ Kate Nelson, Indigenous Foodways Writer |
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Jo Turner’s The Preserving Garden encourages readers to customize their gardens to produce food that they either want to have around regularly or want to experiment with at their own discretion—and how to preserve the bounty that they’ve dedicated time to, in order to take full advantage of the work they put in.
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Jo Turner’s The Preserving Garden encourages readers to customize their gardens to produce food that they either want to have around regularly or want to experiment with at their own discretion—and how to preserve the bounty that they’ve dedicated time to, in order to take full advantage of the work they put in. |
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Personally, I'm a beginner when it comes to gardening, so I appreciate how the book categorizes the flavor profile of each variety of fruit, vegetable, and root, as well as how to nurture each plant. Turner then explains how best to preserve each item and suggests how to make use of it later, when it's ready to eat.
With plums, for example, you can freeze them or cook them down with sugar, brown malt vinegar, and seasonings to preserve them as sauce that will last at least four weeks. Capers, on the other hand, can be preserved by dedicating almost 20 days of curing. Luckily, Turner gives readers best practices on how to properly care for their preserves by reviewing at-home food safety measures. Because the book explains not just how to conserve one's garden produce but also when to plant, harvest, and prune, as well as whether to cross-pollinate, it serves as a how-to guide for gardening novices—and a beneficial resource for anyone looking to understand their garden better, from planting to plating.
~ Marisa Martinez, Audience Engagement Editor |
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Ingredients:
Yields: A lot of emotional connection
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Ingredients:
Yields: A lot of emotional connection
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Combine archival research, family stories, interviews, and personal experience, and you’ll get Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts. Writer Crystal Wilkinson adds a pinch of story about Black settlement in Casey County, Kentucky, then stirs in the arrival of her maternal great-great-grandparents to help uncover the Black Appalachians omitted from history. She bakes in stories of her ancestors and their use of their land’s food resources and sprinkles in her own family recipes. Each chapter is filled with different food-related themes and blended with stories from her “kitchen ghosts.” Wilkinson mostly recounts her time with her grandmother, the matriarch and cook in her family, and says her grandmother's memories live in her own cooking.
Praisesong inspired me to think about my own north central Kentucky family. Although my core childhood days reside across the country from my family of ancestors, I can imagine them sharing recipes and techniques similar to those of the Wilkinson family. When I’m whisked back to my own childhood, I can see our “kitchen ghosts” come through my mom when she prepares our version of the “Wild Greens,” “Garlicky White Soup Beans,” or “Hearty Vegetable Soup with Hamburger (and Spaghetti Noodles)” just as Wilkinson rolls out in this book.
~ Kalisha Bass, Membership Manager |
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This book is built on the story of rice, refugees, and the cultural challenges that unfold for one family that makes its way from Laos to the U.S.
~ Bob S. |
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This book is built on the story of rice, refugees, and the cultural challenges that unfold for one family that makes its way from Laos to the U.S.
~ Bob S.
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Maisonet does a great job of explaining the basics of Puerto Rican cuisine and how the diaspora has morphed and changed it based on what's available in new locations. For those of us who aren't Puerto Rican, Maisonet also explains the cuisine’s foundational seasonings and ingredients and how to make or find them.
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Maisonet does a great job of explaining the basics of Puerto Rican cuisine and how the diaspora has morphed and changed it based on what's available in new locations. For those of us who aren't Puerto Rican, Maisonet also explains the cuisine’s foundation seasonings and ingredients and how to make or find them. |
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She's a huge proponent of buying local meat and produce whenever possible. Because of her, we've incorporated things like Adobo and Sazón into our everyday rotations and have been able to explore a whole new world of food. I am a big fan of Maisonet’s work and her cookbook. It's not sugar-coated; it's real, down to earth, and honest.
~ Mollie I. |
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The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days |
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By Helen Rebanks |
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This book is a gentle, rich, beautiful memoir (with recipes!) about how the author came to embrace a life—the life of a farmer’s wife—that she grew up rebelling against. As a farmer’s daughter in the rural north of England, she dreamed of getting away and finding self-realization as an artist. |
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This book is a gentle, rich, beautiful memoir (with recipes!) about how the author came to embrace a life—the life of a farmer’s wife—that she grew up rebelling against. As a farmer’s daughter in the rural north of England, she dreamed of getting away and finding self-realization as an artist. |
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In the book, Rebanks records and reflects on a single day in her life as a wife, mother of four, and domestic and business partner to her husband James, who is not only a small farmer but also a high-profile writer and global sustainable-farming advocate. She creates a charming evocation of place, as well as a subtle and nuanced argument for revaluing both the traditional role of “farmer’s wife” (and “wife” more broadly) and also traditional forms of farming and land stewardship.
~ Nicola P. |
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Find Civil Eats’ coverage of James Rebanks’ book here. |
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The New Fish: The Truth About Farmed Salmon and the Consequences We Can No Longer Ignore |
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By Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli |
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This book is very disturbing but a great, easy read. It does a great job detailing the vast issues surrounding aquaculture. I kept hoping the next chapter would detail the Norwegian government having an epiphany and passing the appropriate legislation, but that never happened. While the book doesn’t have a happy ending, it did inspire me to vote with my dollars and not buy farmed salmon.
~ Ann P. |
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Find Civil Eats’ coverage of this book here. |
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This book is very disturbing but a great, easy read. It does a great job detailing the vast issues surrounding aquaculture. I kept hoping the next chapter would detail the Norwegian government having an epiphany and passing the appropriate legislation, but that never happened. While the book doesn’t have a happy ending, it did inspire me to vote with my dollars and not buy farmed salmon.
~ Ann P.
Find Civil Eats’ coverage of this book here. |
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This wonderfully written book is broken down into categories of foods with a brief (but not dry) history and how some of our current food systems aren’t sustainable. It also looks at food systems in practice that are sustainable. An excellent read!
~ Yoshi O. |
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This wonderfully written book is broken down into categories of foods with a brief (but not dry) history and how some of our current food systems aren’t sustainable. It also looks at food systems in practice that are sustainable. An excellent read!
~ Yoshi O. |
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Eating to Extinction takes a world-wide view of crops, animal products, and food traditions that are or were at the brink of extinction. Saladino explains why they are/were at that point and tells the stories of how humans have worked to keep them alive. While you can tell the research on each of these stories is very deep, Saladino's writing style makes consuming that information very smooth and easy.
~ Christine R. |
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Find Civil Eats’ coverage of this book here.
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The Check-In: The ‘Market Gardener’ Is Back with Advice on Winter Farming for Food Sovereignty
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By TWILIGHT GREENAWAY |
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On a recent video call, the renowned Canadian market farmer and educator Jean-Martin “JM” Fortier stood in a greenhouse, wearing a winter vest and talking about the wide variety of fresh herbs and greens—from sweet spinach to cilantro to frilly mustard greens—tucked snugly into rows behind him.
“Here we are in mid-November, and we're just under 10 hours of daylight [a day],” said Fortier, who added that the challenges of growing in winter have always been much more about lack of light than temperature. “We got all our crops in a greenhouse, eight to 10 weeks ago, and now the crops will be staying in the ground, not really growing anymore because there's not enough light, but just staying in a cool place. We will harvest them every week until the growth picks back up in February.”
For the last few years, Fortier and Catherine Sylvestre, a professional agronomist and director of vegetable production at the Ferme des Quatre Temps or Four Season Farm—one of three farms at the heart of Fortier’s Market Garden Institute—have gotten serious about winter farming. When the pandemic disrupted multiple supply chains and made it challenging to get fresh vegetables from southern climates in Eastern Canada, policymakers in the region started thinking seriously about food sovereignty. As Fortier writes in the introduction to his new book, The Winter Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Year-Round Harvests:
In Quebec, one of the main policies was a massive investment program to double the number of greenhouses within five years. . . . Unfortunately, the idea only got picked up by large-scale producers . . . [who] grow summer crops in monoculture regardless of the season.
Catherine and I decided then to propose our alternative: to invest the same amount towards better equipping and educating 50 family farmers, so that they can use greenhouses and extend their growing season to provide a diversity of seasonal and local produce.
The book, the second for Fortier—who also teaches the Market Gardener Masterclass (from which more than 4,000 students have graduated) and whose institute has also sparked a restaurant, magazine, and reality TV show—expands on the existing literature on winter farming. The guidebook takes a research-based, data-backed approach that he hopes could inspire a whole generation of small-scale farmers to consider growing food in winter.
Civil Eats spoke with Fortier about the book, the history of winter farming, and what it might take to get more people to love the taste of winter greens. |
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Winter farming is often seen as a missing piece of the local food puzzle, because that’s when consumers are especially reliant on produce from places like California, Mexico, and Florida. Why did it feel important to take a data-driven, highly scientific approach to this guidebook to start filling in that gap?
When I was a younger grower, I was really influenced by Eliot Coleman, who pioneered modern winter farming [in the U.S.]. And I had some anecdotal experiences on my farm where I was doing winter farming and trialing it. Then around six years ago at Ferme des Quatre Temps (FQT) Farm, Catherine and I started to do some research trials, where we tested out planting different cultivars at different times of year. And after a few years, we really got the hang of it.
After COVID, there was a big push for more super high-tech greenhouses where they grow tomatoes, peppers, and even strawberries, but no one was talking about lower-tech greenhouses growing greens that are super hardy.
And so the book is about getting the message out there that food sovereignty is about having produce in the winter that is in tune with the seasonality, with the low-light conditions, with the coldness. And these are the crops that we grow. It was also about sharing all the research that we have done at FQT Farm, and sharing it so that other growers can apply some of these principles and have success on their own.
And nutritionally, the greens that you're growing are very different than tomatoes and cucumbers and strawberries, right?
Yeah, that's what we're realizing here. People assume that cold is something that stops us from growing vegetables in the Northeast, but because of the coolness factor, our veggies have very concentrated sugars; their Brix level goes up, and their nutrient density goes up. And when these vegetables get a light frost, they change and become so incredibly flavorful.
Can you describe this idea of “hardening” the vegetables? It sounds almost like you're able to train the plants to adapt to the cooler temperatures.
When we start to get cool [autumn] nights on the farm, I leave the [row covers] open on the greens beds for two or three weeks, so that they get acclimated slowly to frosty nights. Then when we have colder nights in December and January, these crops will be able to handle it. Some of them can get a hard frost and survive; kale, spinach, and others can get a light frost.
I loved your description of rolling back the cloth and seeing the frozen vegetables, but then watching them come back to life as the day warms up.
Every fall at FQT farm we train 10 apprentices, and we bring them out when there's a frost, and they're always super disappointed. They're like, "Oh, after all our effort putting these tunnels up, the crops are dead." And then we laugh because the next day, we're like, "Come on, and check it out." We take the snow out of the beds and the crops are fine.
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How did you arrive at the idea to use greenhouses that are just warm enough to prevent freezing of some crops at night?
We knew from visiting other farms and reading writing by Coleman and other growers that it was possible to grow vegetables in winter. But is it economically viable? That's really the question we were asking ourselves when we started out. We measured the yield harvested when we planted the crops at different times in the fall—before the 10-hours-of-sunlight cutoff [which is different in different places]. We also measured the cost of the operation, including the energy cost for heating greenhouses and the cost of labor involved in rolling and unrolling the row covers day and night. We did the math on all these different techniques. And what we were trying to find is the sweet spot where we have [ample] yields and an economic upside. We’ve also been experimenting with going carbon neutral with different heating systems with water tubes and electric heat pumps.
We wanted to reinvigorate younger growers and get them excited about the possibility of growing year-round. If they already have markets and infrastructure, we’re saying why not try to make the most out of them and go year-round?
Do you have thoughts about what it might take to get more people to eat the kinds of vegetables you’re growing? We know there's an appetite for tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries. But some consumers are less familiar with Asian greens and bitter greens and other different flavors.
That's an important element. All the farms can grow year-round, but then they need to have markets. And [there] have been pockets of places where people are so excited about local foods, especially in the Northeast, Maine, Vermont, upstate New York. There are a lot of places where there's demand and consciousness around the local food systems and the impact of the globalized economy. People are more aware than ever.
But if this is going to go further, there needs to be a collective movement toward food sovereignty. And I believe food sovereignty should be localized at the state or province level. Each state should have a policy of resilience, especially in the face of climate change and future pandemics. We can grow almost everything! So, why would we want to import so much of it from abroad? There's an environmental cost to that, and there's a social cost. Our work is nested in a bigger movement, which is about decentralizing the food system and empowering communities with access to super healthy, local foods.
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Photo Excerpt: Thank You Please Come Again |
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Grocery stories—whether they’re about supermarkets, corner stores, or, in this case, gas stations—are among my favorite food-system topics to cover, so I was immediately drawn to Kate Medley’s new photo book, Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed and Fuel the American South.
The simple reason I find these compelling is that groceries are so very complex. Take a close look at a single food retailer and you will find a microcosm of interwoven issues, including labor, policy, nutrition, supply chains, climate change, economics, community investment and development, and almost any other topic you find interesting. In Thank You Please Come Again, Medley brings a keen eye and a broad perspective to how gas stations that have restaurants—or, as writer Kiese Laymon writes in his compelling foreword, “restaurants that serve gas”—are central to community, economy, and culture across the South, especially in rural areas, where food and fuel services can be many miles apart.
Across the hundreds of photos that Medley uses to document gas station restaurants, she shows how these businesses, and the people who run and frequent them, reflect the past, present, and future of life in the southern U.S.
Medley documents the Fred Eaton Service Station in Prichard, Alabama, for instance, which has been in operation since the early 1960s and is one of fewer than 50 Black-owned gas stations in the entire country. She visits Betty’s Place in Indianola, Mississippi, which was opened in 2008 in the same location on the town’s Main Street where a whites-only gas station had once existed. And she spotlights a number of immigrant-run restaurants serving foods from home—including, in Louisiana alone, Peter Nguyen’s Banh Mi Boys in Metairie; Abbas Alsherees’ Shawarma-on-the-Go in Uptown New Orleans; and Gurpreet Singh’s Punjabi Dhaba in Hammond.
It's not always a pretty picture, but Medley’s photos offer a revealing, beautiful glimpse into one facet of life in the Deep South that even folks who have spent time on the roads through those states may not have witnessed or fully embraced.
– Matthew Wheeland, Managing Editor |
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