Days start early in the garden. As the sun rises over the Santa Clara Valley’s Diablo Range, we’ve already gathered and prepared seed beds for planting. The smell of damp soil fills the air as we carefully place fava beans into the dark earth. The soil under our fingernails and caked onto our knees doesn’t bother us—it reminds us of where our food comes from. We fill our bellies with warm coffee and pan dulce as we plant and discuss what the day will bring.

Silicon Valley might seem like a strange place for a gardening movement to flourish. Our plantings are hidden amid the palm tree-lined technology campuses of companies like Google, Cisco, and Apple, buried under the sounds of busy freeways, and packed neatly into an urban center where millions of people live. Yet the ways these gardens have found a home here can teach us a lot. By cultivating physical spaces to grow food in the margins of modernity—in the places ecologists call “ecotones,” where habitats, or worlds, collide and the unexpected emerges—we are also nourishing political spaces to live 21st-century life.

In 2012, while researching urban agriculture in Silicon Valley, I met the director of La Mesa Verde, an organization that teaches gardening and food literacy in the low-income communities of San Jose. She gave me a neighborhood tour, and then invited me to participate in a community action research project that would change my life.

For over a decade, I have been learning from, planting alongside, and writing about the home gardeners of La Mesa Verde. They live in parts—Alma, Alum Rock, Campbell, Willow Glen, Spartan Keyes, and East San Jose—where their options for fresh, healthy, and culturally relevant foods are limited. Most of the families in the program are Spanish-speaking, but it is a multi-ethnic, multilingual group of gardeners. With the help of the UC Master Gardener Program and the extensive farming and gardening knowledge of many of its members, gardeners who participate in La Mesa Verde are more than successful growers; they are advocates for community transformation. They share surpluses to challenge market logics. Their collective efforts promote their right to food and challenge their marginality by bringing together people who might otherwise not come together. They celebrate life by centering dignity in their efforts to transform their food system.

Countless nonprofits have popped up across the country to help alleviate the lack of access to quality food in many low-income communities. The belief is that state-sponsored intervention such as food pantries or the strategic placement of farmers markets are the best way to bring food into the community. There is an assumption that people living in these communities are too poor, busy, or ignorant to fix the issues they face related to food access themselves.

These communities are not naturally occurring empty “food deserts,” but rather they are products of food apartheid, or a food landscape that has been engineered in ways that benefit some and harm others. Ironically, even well-intentioned nonprofits seeking to “fix” low food access in underserved areas can end up prolonging it because their food charity interventions address the symptoms of hunger rather than the root causes of social inequality.

As I have gotten to know these Silicon Valley neighborhoods and the people who call them home, I’ve learned that community members address issues of food access in ways that do not fit the mold these initiatives promote. Food emerges from the neighborhoods’ lost, forgotten, and marginalized places. There are orange, lemon, lime, and pomegranate trees towering over houses; pinto and green beans climbing up chain-link fences; and yerba buena, epazote, and verdolagas propagating around foundations.

In fall 2013, I met a gardener in his early 80s originally from the outskirts of Mexico City. He and his wife lived in half of a two-bedroom duplex, with his daughter and her two kids next door. The best thing, he told me, was that while they had separate living areas, they shared a backyard, which was large enough for him to grow food and his grandkids to explore.

Gardening had played a central role in his life—as a kid he grew corn, beans, and squash in his family’s huerta (vegetable garden)—but what stood out the most from that conversation was how he explained the act of gardening as a reciprocal relationship between people and places. “Ser un jardínero,” he said, “es estar en comunicación. Comunicación con la comida, familia, comunidad, y tierra.” (“To be a gardener is to be in communication. Communication with food, family, community, land.”)

That afternoon, I watched him tend to his heirloom corn, summer squash, pinto beans, and jalapeno peppers. He moved through the garden as if in sync with its rhythms. It became evident that for him, gardening was less about food production, and more about cultivating relationships with his food through his labor—something most of us have lost touch with in recent years.

Labor is the source of value in these gardens, but not in the classical economic sense of how much things cost. Rather, value manifests in what gardens can restore. Most of us living under capitalism work for a living, and the more energy and time we invest in earning money, the less time we have for ourselves. Many of the gardeners I have interacted with hold part-time, low-wage jobs—sometimes two or three—that take them away from their families and communities. They are caretakers, food service workers, housekeepers, landscapers, and retail employees. But when they garden, their labor contributes to the social and cultural reproduction of their communities and cultures. Their simple acts of gardening challenge the capitalist ideal of individualism over all else because gardening does not separate people from community; it roots them in community. As a gardener told me one afternoon, “Tener un jardín es contra este sistema.” (“To have a garden is against this system.”)

Another La Mesa Verde gardener once told me, “When I go into my garden, I greet life.” He was doing more than referring to the ways growing food supports his physical health. By growing and sharing food, home gardens allow people to root themselves, regain control over their agricultural production, re-envision communal organization, and remind themselves—and us—how to be human again.

When we grow food, we work toward a reciprocal partnership with the human and non-human communities around us: We hope to support them as we rely on them to support us in turn. Gardening regenerates healthy soils, communities, peoples, and cultures. Silicon Valley’s home gardeners are growing food to feed the physical and spiritual needs of their communities—and they’re doing it at the epicenter of modernity and technology, in one of the most expensive and alienating places to live in America today.

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Americans went nuts for the 567-page volume, buying The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in numbers the publishing industry had never seen—around 360,000 copies by the time author Fannie Farmer died in 1915. Home cooks in the United States loved the tastiness and inventiveness of Farmer’s recipes. They also appreciated her methodical approach to cooking, which spoke to the unique conditions they faced. Farmer’s recipes were gratifyingly precise, and unprecedentedly replicable, perfect for Americans with newfangled gadgets like standardized cup and spoon measures, who worked in relative isolation from the friends and family who had passed along cooking knowledge in generations past. Farmer’s book popularized the modern recipe format, and it was a fitting guide to food and home life in a modernizing country.

Recipes today serve many purposes, from documenting cooking techniques, to showing off a creator’s skills, to serving up leisure reading for the food-obsessed. But their most important goal is replicability. A good recipe imparts enough information to let a cook reproduce a dish, in more or less the same form, in the future.

The earliest surviving recipes, which give instructions for a series of meaty stews, are inscribed on cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. Recipes also survive from ancient Egypt, Greece, China, and Persia. For millennia, however, most people weren’t literate and never wrote down cooking instructions. New cooks picked up knowledge by watching more experienced friends and family at work, in the kitchen or around the fire, through looking, listening, and tasting.

Cover of 1919 edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer. Image courtesy of Smithsonian Libraries.

Recipes, as a format and genre, only really began coming of age in the 18th century, as widespread literacy emerged. This was around the same time, of course, that the United States came into its own as a country. The first American cookbook, American Cookery, was published in 1796. Author Amelia Simmons copied some of her text from an English cookbook but also wrote sections that were wholly new, using native North American ingredients like “pompkins,” “cramberries,” and “Indian corn.” Simmons’s audience was mainly middle class and elite women, who were more likely to be able to read and who could afford luxuries like a printed book in the first place.

The reach of both handwritten recipes and cookbooks would expand steadily in the coming decades, and rising literacy was only one reason. Nineteenth-century Americans were prodigiously mobile. Some had emigrated from other countries, some relocated from farms to cities, and others moved from settled urban areas to the Western frontier. Young Americans regularly found themselves living far from friends and relatives who otherwise might have offered help with cooking questions. In response, mid-19th-century cookbooks attempted to offer comprehensive household advice, giving instructions not just on cooking but on everything from patching old clothes to caring for the sick to disciplining children. American authors routinely styled their cookbooks as “friends” or “teachers”—that is, as companions that could provide advice and instruction to struggling cooks in the most isolated of spots.

Americans’ mobility also demonstrated how easily a dish—or even a cuisine—could be lost if recipes weren’t written down. The upheaval wrought by the Civil War singlehandedly tore a hole in one of the most important bodies of unwritten American culinary knowledge: pre-war plantation cookery. After the war, millions of formerly enslaved people fled the households where they had been compelled to live, taking their expertise with them. Upper-class Southern whites often had no idea how to light a stove, much less how to produce the dozens of complicated dishes they had enjoyed eating, and the same people who had worked to keep enslaved people illiterate now rued the dearth of written recipes. For decades after the war, there was a boom in cookbooks, often written by white women, attempting to approximate antebellum recipes.

Title page of Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book, by Catharine Beecher, 1862. Image courtesy of Smithsonian Libraries.

Standardization of weights and measures, driven by industrial innovation, also fueled the rise of the modern American recipe. For most of the 19th century, recipes usually consisted of only a few sentences giving approximate ingredients and explaining basic procedure, with little in the way of an ingredient list and with nothing resembling precise guidance on quantities, heat, or timing. The reason for such imprecision was simple: There were no thermometers on ovens, few timepieces in American homes, and scant tools available to ordinary people to tell exactly how much of an ingredient they were adding.

Recipe writers in the mid-19th century struggled to express ingredient quantity, pointing to familiar objects to estimate how much of a certain item a dish needed. One common approximation, for instance, was “the weight of six eggs in sugar.” They also struggled to give instructions on temperature, sometimes advising readers to gauge an oven’s heat by putting a hand inside and counting the seconds they could stand to hold it there. Sometimes they hardly gave instructions at all. A typically vague recipe from 1864 for “rusks,” a dried bread, read in its entirety: “One pound of flour, small piece of butter big as an egg, one egg, quarter pound white sugar, gill of milk, two great spoonfuls of yeast.”

By the very end of the 19th century, American home economics reformers, inspired by figures like Catharine Beecher, had begun arguing that housekeeping in general, and cooking in particular, should be more methodical and scientific, and they embraced motion studies and standardization measures that were redefining industrial production in this era. And that was where Fannie Merritt Farmer, who started working on The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in the 1890s, entered the picture.

Farmer was an unlikely candidate to transform American cookery. As a teenager in Boston in the 1870s, she suffered a sudden attack of paralysis in her legs, and she was 30 years old before she regained enough mobility to begin taking classes at the nearby Boston Cooking School. Always a lover of food, Farmer proved to be an indomitable student with a knack for sharing knowledge with others. The school hired her as a teacher after she graduated. Within a few years, by the early 1890s, she was its principal.

Julia Child’s handwritten recipe for pain de mie. Child’s Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen is on view in the exhibition FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950–2000, at the National Museum of American History. Image courtesy of the National Museum of American History.

Farmer started tinkering with a book published by her predecessor a few years earlier, Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book. Farmer had come to believe that rigorous precision made cooking more satisfying and food more delicious, and her tinkering soon turned into wholesale revision.

She called for home cooks to obtain standardized teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups, and her recipes called for ultra-precise ingredient amounts such as seven-eighths of a teaspoon of salt, and four and two-thirds cups of flour. Also, crucially, Farmer insisted that all quantities be measured level across the top of the cup or spoon, not rounded in a changeable dome, as American cooks had done for generations.

This attention to detail, advocated by home economists and given life by Farmer’s enthusiasm, made American recipes more precise and reliable than they ever had been, and the wild popularity of Farmer’s book showed how eager home cooks were for such guidance. By the start of the 20th century, instead of offering a few prosy sentences that gestured vaguely toward ingredient amounts, American recipes increasingly began with a list of ingredients in precise, numerical quantities: teaspoons, ounces, cups.

In more than a century since, it’s a format that has hardly changed. American cooks today might be reading recipes online and trying out metric scales, but the American recipe format itself remains extraordinarily durable. Designed as a teaching tool for a mobile society, the modern recipe is grounded in principles of clarity, precision, and replicability that emerge clearly from the conditions of early American life. They are principles that continue to guide and empower cooks in America and around the world today.

The post How Recipe Cards and Cookbooks Fed a Mobile, Modernizing America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then scurvy would break out—as it has recently in a mental hospital in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and at a clinic for diabetics in Sydney—with typical lesions on the skin and mucous tissue, aching joints, and various kinds of vascular damage. Once this happens, vitamin C (ascorbate) has to be ingested immediately to prevent sustained damage to the bones, the blood vessels, the network of nerves, and the brain. Teeth fall out, cartilage disappears, and internal bleeding begins. The heart is under pressure, and the brain can start to hemorrhage. At the same time, scurvy sufferers experience either stupor or powerful dreams and hallucinations. Untreated, scurvy will kill you.

The story of our mutated gene bears strong similarities to the Biblical account of the fall of man, with one important difference. Fruit then was the cause of original sin and our mortality, and fruit (lemons and oranges) now is what infallibly will cure scurvy. But in both scenarios choice of food is a life and death issue.

“Govern well thy appetite, lest sin/ Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death,” Raphael warms Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost, first published in 1667.

Around the same time, Robert Hooke, an eminent member of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, remembered the warning when anticipating the great improvements to life and health that experimental science was about to deliver: “And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way … by tasting too those fruits of Natural Knowledge, that were never yet forbidden.”

Hooke’s optimism about human ingenuity didn’t blind him to the fact that we all carry in our bodies the seed of mortality, of which that mutated gene is the physical specimen and scurvy, the specific proof. From Hooke’s era to ours, the biological defect we share with guinea pigs and fruit bats has been a constant in our lives, and for much of that time we have been ignorant of what we need to make us whole. We are none of us perfect, being unable to extract from otherwise nourishing food the vital principle without which we shall die: fat, protein, carbohydrate, and sugar don’t contain it, neither do preserved fruits or boiled vegetables.

Like goiter and rickets, scurvy is a nutritional disease. You don’t catch it, like Ebola or bubonic plague. It waits for an interruption in the ingestion of fresh food, and then—if the interruption is long enough—makes its fatal appearance. On hearing that she had scurvy last year, a patient in the Sydney clinic for diabetics, with a scorbutic ulcer on her leg cried out, “I didn’t realize you could be obese and malnourished at the same time.” A lot of people don’t realize this, which explains why scurvy will always be with us.

A survey of college students in North America found 14 percent with ascorbate below the level for good health. In the Sydney clinic where the outbreak of scurvy occurred, 60 percent of the target group was in a more dire state of depletion. Amnesia about our peculiar gene isn’t limited to people who choose to eat badly. According to The Guardian, since the onset of austerity economics in Britain five years ago, “the number of bed days accounted for by someone with a primary or secondary diagnosis of malnutrition,” including many elderly people, has risen 44 percent.

There is however another reason why alertness or indifference to the dangers of scurvy is part of our history. The difference between neo-Platonic and empirical beliefs about the perfection of the human entity was exhibited when Hooke started inventing machines designed to supplement the deficiencies of the senses. He designed microscopes for the eye, hygrometers (to measure moisture) for the nose, a sort of telegraph for the ear.

John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher, was incredulous: Why be dazzled, suffocated, and deafened by impressions our nature was never intended to feel?

Hooke thought we needed the supplement of machines if we were ever to feel things as they truly are, and shed our sin and mortality. Locke, on the other hand, was an empiricist to the extent he believed that all we know comes to us via the senses, but like Descartes and Plato he believed we needed no additional help in order for our perceptions to be perfect—or as perfect as was consistent with God’s will. His empiricism was flexible enough to accommodate Plato’s and Descartes’ belief that truly good and wise humans are never in a state of becoming, but already complete in their faculties unless seduced and enslaved by false representations. Margaret Cavendish, the 17th century English aristocrat and scientist, was of the same opinion and, later, so was Locke’s pupil, the elegant philosopher-earl Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury.

Hooke thought we needed all the prostheses we could lay our hands on if we were to regain what we lost in Paradise; so he ably abetted his friend, Robert Boyle, in the management of an air-pump, a sort of artificial lung, in his efforts to discover the vital principle of air.

And Hooke’s colleagues Thomas Willis and Walter Charleton, two great 17th century specialists on scurvy, came as close as any scientists, before the isolation of vitamin C in 1933, to the secret of the vital principle of food. They called it a nitrous salt, a latex, a nutritive sap which, they showed, directly affected the efficiency of the nerves as well as the scaffolding of the body. They knew it added nothing to body mass, but that without it even the most robust constitution would fail.

Almost a hundred years after their hypotheses were confirmed by bio-chemical proofs, a significant fraction of the population remains at risk of diseases that supervene when ascorbate levels are low—a risk that can in many cases be minimized with a healthy dose of vitamin C. It has recently been discovered that large intravenous injections of vitamin C will reduce deaths from sepsis by three-quarters. Current research at Vanderbilt University indicates that seizures are much more likely when the body is carrying insufficient ascorbate. A colleague assured me that five years of his life were lost to chronic fatigue syndrome until he started intensive doses of vitamin C.

It is not for nothing that the first outbreak of scurvy in Australia in almost 200 years occurred at a clinic for diabetics. Type 2 diabetes is largely caused by a poor diet cooperating with oxidative stress, a major factor in depleting reserves of ascorbate.

Is it because we thought we were perfect that scorbutic imperfection dogs us? Or is it that artificial perfection is too tedious to attain, and we would rather dally with our sin?

The post Why Scurvy Is Still a Snake in Our Nutritional Lost Paradise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But at the recent Zócalo/UCLA event, “What’s So Bad about GMOs?”, held at MOCA Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, three food and agricultural experts argued that GMOs really shouldn’t be controversial at all. Indeed, getting hung up on genetic modifications in crops might be keeping us from solving food supply and environmental problems.

“Can you in fact feed the 9 billion people we’ll have by 2050 … and how do you do that with minimal ecological impact?” mused UCLA molecular biologist Bob Goldberg. “I think the way to do that is through food science.”

Kleiman, a sustainable food advocate, asked the panel what GMOs a consumer is likely to throw in the cart during a trip through the supermarket.

“Either everything or nothing,” said Russ Parsons, former food editor at the Los Angeles Times. A shopper buying a lot of processed foods might have a hard time avoiding GMOs in corn or soybeans; one seeking just fresh fruits and vegetables might find it “impossible to find anything” genetically modified—besides a few types of zucchini and Hawaiian papaya.

After finding that many audience members in the packed house didn’t know papayas were genetically modified, Kleiman asked Goldberg for a definition of GMOs.

“Those of us who do this think all plants are GMOs,” he said, pointing out that traditionally grown crops have also had genes altered. “There’s really no difference between manipulating a gene the classical way, through breeding, or by adding a gene.” Some of the technology that allows scientists to edit genes has been around for 40 years, he said. People you know personally may be technically GMOs, because they’ve had medical treatments that alter their genes. Ingredients in the dye that colors blue jeans are also genetically modified.

Turning to Edward Parson, a co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA who has advised the U.S. and Canadian governments on environmental policy, Kleiman asked, “How do we know that GMOs are safe?”

“You never know for sure, because you can’t prove a negative,” said Parson, who said he found it “puzzling how passionate people get about this.” The usual concerns about GMOs—that they might be unhealthy, or that they hurt the environment—have not been borne out after more than a quarter century of growing GMO crops in North America. There’s no known detrimental impact in North America compared to Europe, where people have been exposed very little to GMOs, he noted.

So why, asked Kleiman, are consumers opposed to them? How much of the discomfort with these products has to do with the businesses that created and market them—with an “economy that doesn’t respect ecology?”

The panel, by and large, thought that lens didn’t make much sense. Companies involved in producing genetically modified crops aren’t entirely bad, and aren’t necessarily working against a sustainable environment. Organic food producers aren’t entirely virtuous, either.

“It strikes me that when people question GMOs, they have broader concerns about food and the agricultural system,” said Parson. “They seek safe food, produced in sufficient quantities to nourish the world, in an environmentally sustainable way that also sustains the people who work on it.” He expressed his support for these “great” and “valid” concerns—but added that “focusing on GMOs is a lousy proxy for those concerns.” Instead, he thought consumers should focus on other levers: environmental regulation, workplace health, and safety regulation.

Goldberg added that originally, in the 1980s, it wasn’t the large chemical companies that pioneered GMOs—it was small entrepreneurial outfits. He explained that after the government started regulating GMOs and the costs of testing the products grew, giants like Dow and Monsanto took charge. “In some respects, we created these monsters,” he said. “There’s not a place in our agricultural economy for tiny little startups.”

Goldberg noted that the GMOs on grocery shelves have undergone 10 to 15 years of testing, while conventional crops have gone through none. He might engineer a hypoallergenic peanut that would take a decade to make it to market. A breeder using traditional methods could create a hyper-allergenic peanut and have no problem shipping it out to farmers, with no oversight. “It’s screwed up,” he said.

Talk turned to the aesthetics of GMOs. Food writer Parsons said opposition to GMOs he had encountered had a great deal to do with our uneasy relationship with modernity. “One of the reassuring things in food is farmers markets—they reinforce this idea of romantic pastoralism. But it really is just a romantic image,” he said. “For people who live on farms, for everything in nature to take its course is often the worst thing.”

Parsons said his personal journey from GMO skeptic to accepting the technology (“my apostasy”) began in the 1980s, as the organic movement emerged and he saw his peers viewing agricultural technology in black and white. “The image was, you were either buying stuff from barefoot baby Jesus or you might as well have been mainlining Agent Orange,” he said. “The agriculture I saw was happening in this gray area.”

So when GMOs started making headlines, he had a little more open mind. He mentioned two hot topics in agriculture today: Roundup Ready GMO crops, which are genetically modified to be resistant to the Monsanto herbicide Roundup and are loathed by many environmentalists, and “no-till” farming, which is seen as a boon to sustainability because it reduces erosion. It turns out that it’s very difficult to go no-till without an herbicide, because avoiding herbicides means a farmer must plow—the opposite of no-till.

“It’s not accurate to think of all of these [GMOs] as being tools for degrading the planet,” Parsons said. “There’s great promise for sustaining the planet.”

Goldberg said that his lab is studying genes of plants from all over the world to find DNA that could make crops better. “I see this as an organic farmer’s dream,” Goldberg said. “Fifty years from now I doubt we’ll be spraying tons of stuff. That’s what excites me.”

Audience members weren’t entirely convinced by the panelists’ arguments, challenging the assumptions that safety tests were sufficient, or that monoculture crops weren’t a danger.

One person asked if the nutritional value of organic food and non-organic food is the same. Would non-organic food make her more likely to become ill? Will she be healthier if she eats organic?

Parsons said avoiding conventionally grown food because it might provide “a 1 percent gain in vitamin K” seemed shortsighted. Studies suggest that the benefits of eating organic are marginal, he said.

“Also it’s a very privileged place to be,” Kleiman said. “It’s good to remember that. Boy, do we live in a series of concentric bubbles.”

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And—they butcher ducks.

One of the most important parts of France’s national culinary heritage is the production of foie gras, the liver of a specially fattened duck or goose. It has long been prized as one of the greatest and most traditional delicacies of French cuisine. In 2005, it was even enshrined in law as part of the country’s “officially-protected cultural and gastronomic patrimony.” This protection was more than symbolic—it was also economic.

Foie gras belongs to the “terroir,” or taste of place, of Southwest France. According to French folklore, this localized practice is centuries old, and knowledge of it dates back even further to ancient Egypt and Rome. Today, about 80 percent of the world’s foie gras production occurs in the Southwest, which uses a European Union food labeling program to claim a “protected geographical indication” for foie gras. When I first traveled there nearly a decade ago, I observed professionally designed billboards for large foie gras companies lining the main highways. Signs inviting travelers to visit small foie gras farms—often hand-drawn to evoke rustic charm or showing cartoon ducks wearing bowties or playing musical instruments—peppered the countryside’s narrow, winding roads and picturesque rolling hills. Tourism information offices in historic town centers distributed fliers from nearby artisanal foie gras farms, entreating visitors to stop by and enjoy a tasting.

Fattening of ducks for the production of foie gras in France in 2012.

Since the early 2000s, however, the production of foie gras has become hotly contested on moral grounds and has even been outlawed in other European Union countries. The fattening process, called gavage, involves force-feeding the duck or goose with a tube (typically made of metal). This rapidly enlarges the liver six to 10 times in size and increases its fat content to 80 percent over the two-to-three week gavage period. Today, there are two types of gavage used in France: artisanal and industrial. The first method allows farmers to hand feed the birds, while the latter uses a feeding machine. The industrial method is usually contracted by large companies that distribute their brands around the country and world.

Opponents to gavage say it is cruel and inhumane because it causes the birds immense pain and suffering and inflicts disease upon their bodies. Foie gras producers and enthusiasts, on the other hand, argue that gavage takes advantage of specific biological features of ducks and geese, which overeat and store fat in their livers prior to long journeys and whose tough esophagi lack nerve endings and gag reflexes that would cause pain.

What does it mean for a food to be celebrated and marketed as part of national heritage when it is also morally polarizing worldwide?

Many French citizens told me they perceived attacks, symbolic or otherwise, against their nation’s celebrated food practices as assaults on its heritage, culture, and identity. When I asked about bans and critiques of foie gras outside of the country, almost everyone—from everyday consumers to the president of the national industry group—responded doggedly by calling it traditional, authentic, and a part of French heritage.

But it’s not quite that simple. How foie gras is marketed to the French public today conveniently obscures the industry’s expansion from a seasonal specialty item into a year-round, multi-billion euro industry. It ignores the fact that the industrial model, spurred by capital and state investment, now accounts for about 90 percent of the country’s total foie gras production. And it was only in the 1980s and 1990s, when France was growing into a larger role in European integration politics and markets, that the country’s southwestern regions also began establishing extensive agri-tourism activities celebrating “fat ducks” and decisively working to craft foie gras as a national treasure—one that needs state protection in the face of outsiders’ vociferous opposition—using the framework of terroir tourism.

Municipalities throughout the Southwest have created activities to encourage people not just to visit, but to also partake in the artisanal foie gras experience. If timed right, visitors to these foie gras farms are welcome to watch gavage and butchery. Visitors can also stroll through amateur-designed foie gras museums, shop at newly-created “fat markets” to purchase whole carcasses and livers, and attend “foie gras weekends,” staying in farm guest rooms where the main activity is butchering your own duck or goose to take home. Local officials use these campaigns to acquaint the French and foreigners alike with the production and the producers of foie gras, to increase consumption, and to prove foie gras’s national cultural value. But what is crucial to recognize is that this public face of foie gras—the picturesque, romanticized farms that are conspicuous and welcoming—only accounts for about 10 percent of total national production.

Interestingly, local histories and residents reveal that while tensions between artisanal and industrial foie gras producers were common in the past, both kinds of producers are now, for the large part, mutually supportive. Many are neighbors, some even friends, and see themselves as targeting discrete consumer markets. And each benefits from ongoing demand for the other.

Despite global opposition to foie gras, French producers of all sizes seem aware of needing to feed a “heritage mentality”—to safeguard this food as an endangered symbol of French national identity and cultural wealth, whether or not traditional production methods are used. French people become complicit through active participation as well as consumption. The work of preserving and promoting foie gras—by artisanal and industrial producers, consumers, and the French state—has become a small but significant way to defend the taste and place of “Frenchness” in the 21st century.

The post Why France Continues to Bitterly Defend Fatty Goose Livers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There was a complete lack of healthy food in my community. Growing up in South Central L.A., we had restaurants where you could sit down. But some time in the late ’70s or early ’80s, those places shut down and were replaced by fast food joints. Later, when I was raising my kids, I used to drive damn near an hour round-trip to places like Culver City to find fruits and vegetables that hadn’t been grown with pesticides.

I wanted to change all of that. I wanted to rid the streets of trash. I wanted people walking down the sidewalks of my neighborhood to smell jasmine, lavender, sweet basil, and lemongrass. And I wanted healthy food options and organic fruits and vegetables for my family, my neighbors, and myself.

So, in 2010, I planted towering sunflowers, kale, and pomegranates in the 10-foot-wide, 150-foot-long parkway in front of my house—the space between the curb and the sidewalk. The beauty and color of that garden quickly attracted people (and insects).

When people saw this food literally growing along their streets, they began to see the possibilities. That same year, I founded a group with like-minded people who wanted to grow and share their own food and show others how to do it. It’s a simple concept: If food is not there, put it there! It’s our responsibility—if we want to change our neighborhoods, it has to come from within.

We started planting gardens around the neighborhood and in peoples’ yards for free. But I learned the drawbacks. When people get something—like food in their garden—without having to do the work themselves, they don’t assign such things the same value. People need skin in the game. Unfortunately, we found that a lot of the gardens we planted weren’t being maintained.

Then, in May 2011, I got a citation to remove my garden from the city’s Bureau of Street Services—it said that, since the city has jurisdiction over parkways, I had two options: clear the “overgrown vegetation” or purchase a $400 permit. I didn’t do either, of course. The citation turned into a warrant. I got an arrest warrant for beautifying my street—a warrant for planting a carrot!

My first thought was: Bring it. It’s a stupid, antiquated law that needs to be changed. There was no healthy food in the neighborhood—and those parkways were the only land where people could grow food. Plus no one was being cited for the discarded old toilets, couches, and used condoms on the street—but I got a citation for bringing nature, beauty, pride, art, and a sense of peace and calm to the neighborhood. It just made no sense.

But the police never came for me. The warrant was suspended. Over the summer, L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez got interested and wrote about the garden. There was a petition started in support. Then Councilman Herb Wesson got involved. In 2013, the L.A. City Council voted to change the law—it is now legal to grow food on your parkway in Los Angeles.

There has been a shift in the paradigm. Now the city is encouraging more green spaces and there are plans to utilize its 26 square miles of vacant lots to benefit underserved communities—to turn them into green space and urban farms.

The last few years have been incredible. I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Greece, Qatar, the United Kingdom, Stockholm, and Hawaii to speak publicly about food injustice. It all started in 2012 when the nonprofit TED invited me to a worldwide talent search in Vancouver, Canada. I gave a talk the next year at a big TED conference that has more than two million views to date. I’m contacted every day by people who saw the talk and want to know how they can get involved.

The message is getting out. People across L.A. (and around the world) are planting gardens at home, in schools and businesses. It changes people’s lives when they are able to see beauty instead of concrete and asphalt.

These days, I’m focusing on raising funds for the Ron Finley Project, a plan to acquire an acre of land in South Central L.A. behind the city’s oldest operating library and turn it into an urban garden oasis. When it’s done, the Vermont Square library garden will consist of a greenhouse, a café in a shipping container, and a community garden where people can grow, exchange, and sell their food at a bi-weekly food stand. We’ll also offer gardening and art classes and a program to use the thousands of pounds of fruit from people’s yards that go to waste each year. We want to use the fruit in the café and donate it to shelters. We want to teach people how to turn that fruit into income—to make preserves and other items. The idea is to help people become self-sustaining and healthy at the same time.

Teamwork is essential to making change—and it helps to have an ally or two in City Hall. It’s been great to be surrounded by like-minded people with common goals because 1,000 shovels can get work done much faster than one shovel.

If you want something changed, you have to stop waiting for someone else to do it. You are the change! This is your canvas, you should paint it. Your health, and the health of your community, is your responsibility and no one else’s. Once we’re done transforming South Central L.A., the next move is to transform the world.

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I assumed he was preparing food for the family to eat later in the day. Instead, he told me the sandwiches were going to nearby apartments of elder adults who had very limited access to food. He said this would likely be their meal for the day.

I asked if I could visit the seniors he was helping, maybe bring a casserole or some flowers to cheer up their day. And so the following Monday morning, my friend Marie and I brought little tuna casseroles and cupcakes, and joined the clergyman on visits to three apartments within three miles of my house.

Each stop went from bad to worse. The first apartment, a block from the Rose Parade route, was home to a lovely woman whose hands were crippled by arthritis and whose back was curled over. She could only push buttons on her microwave and use pop-top cans. The second apartment wasn’t much better. The third apartment stank of stagnant air and animal feces. A very thin woman with extremely swollen ankles the size of baseball bats and large eyeglasses sat on a bare daybed mattress with no sheets or blankets. Her closet door was open, and only one dress was hanging in it. She offered us water–apologizing for having nothing else to share–and said that the glasses were in the cupboard. We found just one glass and nothing else but cans of cat food. Her fridge was empty.

We chatted about the weather and the TV show she’d been watching, but my head was spinning, and I couldn’t focus. It felt like hours had passed, but it was only minutes. I’d walked by this building a hundred times, coffee and cell phone in hand–often on my way to or from a meal.

As I stood with my hand on the door, I felt I had to make a decision right then and there. Do I do nothing and let this be someone else’s problem, and feel pain and intense guilt when this woman dies from neglect? Or do I get involved?

An hour later I dashed into Trader Joe’s in South Pasadena and shared my shock at what I’d just seen and experienced. A wonderful man named Joe–not the Trader Joe–told me to come back on Wednesday. He would help me get some easy-to-open items that the people I’d just visited could eat.

Joe was as good as his word. He helped fold down the seats of my Prius and loaded dolly after dolly of fruits and boxed vegetables. He explained that this food was excess, and the store donated it to make room for newer shipments. (I would learn later that other grocery stores–but not all–do this and more) There was so much food that I could only make left turns; I couldn’t see out the other window.

I soon learned more about the 49 million Americans–one in six of us–who are unsure of where their next meal will come from. I also learned that grocery stores and many food-derived businesses discard their excess unexpired food daily instead of donating it: Up to 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. is wasted. My big question was: Where did this discarded food go, and how could we get it to struggling people like those I had met in my neighborhood?

For the next two and a half years, I made weekly pick-ups at Trader Joe’s and delivered food to organizations in the Pasadena area, including the AIDS Service Center, the Union Station Homeless Services, and Holy Family Church’s Giving Bank. Meanwhile, I learned everything I could about food waste.

In spring 2010, I attended a convention in San Diego on organics recycling and sustainability to gain an overview of the waste industry. I wanted to be able to have a respectable conversation if a food supplier chose to not donate edible food. For three days, I was a human sponge, absorbing information about sustainability, composting, and renewable energy. The waste industry didn’t particularly care about feeding people, but I gained an enormous amount of respect for its passion and commitment to efficiency and reducing waste. The people I spoke with cared as much about preserving the same pristine organic food I was interested in, just for different reasons.

When I got home I reached out to local agencies in need of food: homeless shelters, churches, food banks from Long Beach to the Westside, senior centers, children’s homes. I asked them how often they needed donations, and whether they required food to be prepared and pre-packaged or if it could be kitchen-made. Then I approached the health department about food safety regulations. Through these meetings I realized that it wasn’t as simple as taking food that one place didn’t need and delivering it to where it was needed. Donating food, I discovered, had a unique set of rules that were outdated and hadn’t been adapted for today’s state-of-the-art methods of heating and cooling food.

I realized the process could be made much more user-friendly so that more cities and companies would want to participate.

In 2012 I founded Urban Harvester, a Los Angeles-based 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Our focus is getting untapped food resources to the nearest shelter, soup kitchen, and pantry. We designed a scalable model that includes education and outreach to bring communities and businesses together.

We don’t have a fleet of trucks or a facility; our goal is simply to connect the dots. We are like a dating service bringing together food and the agencies that need it. Today we are partnering with 211 LA County—a countywide network that includes 49,000 city, county, public assistant, and nonprofit programs–to try to connect to more agencies for our food work. 211 LA County is part of a larger national network of programs that serve 93 percent of the country. Today, this connection work is done personally and locally, but we have built a database and are using technology to build up a system to connect food and agencies that need food at any hour and across the world.

All types of food suppliers are now involved–not just grocery stores but restaurants, food trucks, Starbucks, the South Pasadena Unified School District, a music festival, a temple, a farmers market, and many wonderful food retailers that prefer to donate food quietly. Just a few weeks ago, we proposed and won unanimous passage from the South Pasadena city council of our first resolution: Businesses, instead of disposing of edible extra food that is professionally prepared, are encouraged to connect the food to local agencies. Our goal is to keep taking big steps, albeit one at a time, to help people with their basic needs.

The post I Dish Out the Food Your Supermarket Can’t Use appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Evan Kleiman, host of KCRW’s Good Food, who was interviewing McMillan in front of a full house at the Goethe Institut Los Angeles, called McMillan’s new book, The American Way of Eating, “the anti-foodie book–it’s flipped on its head.” What was it like, she asked McMillan, to earn minimum wage in different parts of the country–and how were she and her co-workers eating on this salary?

In the fields, McMillan didn’t even make minimum wage; her first day picking garlic she received $16 for a full day’s work. Even experienced pickers would make at most under $50 a day for picking 30 buckets worth of garlic; to make minimum wage, they’d have to pick at least 40 buckets–an impossible number. To get around this, workers’ pay stubs don’t reflect the true number of hours they work but rather the number of hours they would have worked if they were making minimum wage. The people she worked with in the fields couldn’t even afford fast food, said McMillan. She was boarding with a family and eating rice, beans, and tortillas from scratch along with everyone else in the house. She was happy with her meals–until she realized that the person in the kitchen was the family’s 14-year-old daughter, who was cooking instead of attending school.

Kleiman asked if the workers had heard “the messages from on high” about how they were supposed to be eating.

People know fruits and vegetables are good, explained McMillan, who saw how much her fellow farmworkers prized the produce they received from a local food bank. “People grasp basic nutrition information,” she said, “but figuring out ways to operationalize that in their daily lives is really tricky.” She explained that cheap and easy is the best a lot of people can do, from the pickers in the fields to employees at Wal-Mart and Applebee’s. “It’s not necessarily about telling people to eat their vegetables,” she said. “It’s about asking, how do we make it easy for folks to eat well?”

It’s a complicated question. In urban areas, poor eating habits have been attributed to “food deserts” where grocery stores are beyond a certain radius. But recent studies, said Kleiman, have refuted this theory. “The idea of supermarkets fixing everything has always been crude and flawed,” said McMillan; the produce at the Wal-Mart she worked at, for example, was terrible. It’s not simply an issue of access but also one of time and effort.

“What intrigues me is this idea that it’s easy to cook,” said Kleiman. Cooking is only easy when you have the skills and the time for it–which McMillan and her fellow low-income co-workers did not. At issue is a cultural change rather than simply a change in education and access.

“Food isn’t really the problem here,” said McMillan. “People actually like and enjoy good food when they have access to it.” Better eating doesn’t just happen because people decide to respect the farmer and the land and the environment. Instead, she argued, it’s about making the same social and economic commitment to getting people good food that we make to getting them clean water.

In the question and answer session, Kleiman suggested that systemic change needed to come from the government rather than corporations or even education. “So much that appears to be free choice when we walk into a store has already been chosen by someone else,” she said.

“People eat crappy diets because we’ve made it really easy and cheap to do,” said McMillan. And although people believe that fresh food is less expensive–and it is, when you weigh 10 pounds of potato chips and 10 pounds of raw potatoes-the calculation isn’t that simple. Her co-worker at Wal-Mart would have a bag of chips and a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew for lunch; it cost him $2, and filled him up more than an apple–which would be cheaper but also probably out of season. “People gauge time and convenience and flavor along with cost,” she said.

In Southern California, we’re lucky to have farmers markets and access to fresh, local produce year-round, said Kleiman–but that’s not the reality for most of the country. McMillan noted that less than 2 percent of Americans shop at farmers markets.

Supermarkets have traditionally resisted going into urban neighborhoods. Grocery stores gauge potential success based on a suburban model–the median income of an area. But in cities, a neighborhood with a lower median income is more densely populated than a suburb. Supermarket executives have also gone into lower income areas and tried to explain their absence with the idea that a particular population isn’t “our customers.” This is like saying, “People in the suburbs like to eat a rich and varied diet,” but the rest of us don’t, said McMillan. “It’s kind of messed up.”

Will it ever be possible for the entire nation to eat organic, sustainable, and local? McMillan admitted that she couldn’t give a yes or no answer, but she noted that almost 90 percent of food grown in the U.S. is not for humans to consume. And right now we grow only half the amount of fruits and vegetables we’d need for the entire nation to eat the recommended balance.

Southern California remains a bit of a bubble compared to places like Detroit–or even New York, said Kleiman. “In New York when I order a salad in winter, I’m shocked,” no matter what type of restaurant I go to, she said. “It’s a part of our culture here, and I don’t think we appreciate it enough.”

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Amazon, Powell’s.
Read expert opinions about whether Americans eat worse than people in other countries here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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Perhaps a recent Onion headline sums it up best: “Taco Bell’s New Green Menu Takes No Ingredients From Nature.” Americans have never been famous for eating right. We’re unceremonious about dining, dependent on unhealthy foodstuffs, and obese about the middle. But do we eat worse than people in other countries? In advance of the Zócalo event “Is Eating Well Just For the Rich?,” we asked two Americans who do manage to eat natural ingredients for some thoughts on how Americans dine today.

U.S. immigration is our national strength–and our culinary weakness

“You know how we can tell Americans don’t care about food?” my Lebanese Arabic teacher Manal asked me, laughing. “You have such tiny kitchens!” In Lebanon, she said with pride, the kitchen is the biggest room in the house–and only an idiot would rent an apartment with a so-called “American kitchen.” In my travels, both in the developed world and in developing countries, I’ve encountered this sad truth: not only does much of the rest of the world eat better than we do; it even mocks our misfortune.

Of course, Mediterranean cultures like Lebanon, with their millennia of food traditions, are perhaps an unfair comparison for a newer nation like ours. But even in the Netherlands, hardly known as a nation of foodies, the Dutch at least have as sensible an approach to eating as they do to everything else: cheese sandwiches, fresh herring, and biking to balance out the French fries. Even when dinner isn’t delicious, it’s always a welcome social event.

Why is America’s food system so disastrous, our culinary knowledge so feeble? Our country’s greatest strength is its hard-working immigrants and geographical diversity–but, for food culture, that’s a weakness. The work ethic that built our country doesn’t leave time for a leisurely dinner, so food becomes simply fuel. Immigrants often work here without the support of family, and food traditions can fade in the course of assimilation. Immigration to America’s varied landscapes has produced regional specialties like Creole gumbo and New Mexican green chile enchiladas, but we still have no national food language. We struggle along in the pidgin of Hamburgerese.

Many Americans have bigger kitchens than Manal realizes–I brought her up to speed on granite countertops and Viking ranges. The next step is to relearn the world that can be created in those kitchens–then proudly call it American, and teach it to others.

Zora O’Neill is a guidebook writer and co-author of the cookbook Forking Fantastic! She is working on a book about Arabic language and travel in the Middle East.

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Our food habits are bad–but there’s hope

In my opinion, Americans eat worse than people in many developed countries. We no longer value gathering around the table with family and friends. We see an emphasis on eating quickly and on the go. With this kind of disrespect for the meal, it is no wonder that people are not as concerned about the quality of the food. Reverence for the social and cultural values of breaking bread is what prompted journalist Carlo Petrini’s protest in Italy. In 1986 when McDonald’s fast food chain was planning to open a franchise in Rome on the Spanish Steps, an 18th century landmark, Petrini and a group of protesters gathered with bowls of pasta and other cooked dishes instead of picket signs. This simple act of defiance spawned the Slow Food Movement, which now boasts 100,000 members in 150 countries. The Slow Food chapters are called convivial–a name that calls to mind a place where people enjoy themselves over food.

But improving the way Americans eat is not as simple as restoring the family dinner around the table. Over the past 40 years food production, processing, and distribution in the U.S. have grown to an almost unimaginable scale, rewarding size and speed foremost. The subsidies in the U.S. Farm Bill have made fruits and vegetables more expensive. And most Americans live where there is little access to full-service grocery stores or farmers markets. Big-box stores reduce prices so much that smaller food stores cannot compete.

Fortunately, there is an increasing awareness of obstacles to good food. People are growing their own, shopping at farmers markets, relearning cooking skills, making better procurement choices. The tighter economy is reversing the trend of eating meals away from home. With education and civic engagement there is hope that our food future will be better than our food present.

Cheryl Danley is an outreach specialist and a Kellogg Foundation Food and Community Fellow with IATP. Trained in Food and Resource Economics, she currently works with the Center for Regional Food Systems at Michigan State University.

*Photo courtesy of Accidental Hedonist.

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