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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15697446056207219492019-04-12T11:59:35.995-07:00History at the TableCATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-7561695265197969162018-08-14T08:36:00.000-07:002018-08-14T09:02:09.706-07:00Unlikely alliances (revisited)

Holt-Giménez: the food system's not "broken." It's just capitalist.

I had a little epiphany this morning while thinking over Eric Holt-Giménez's keynote talk from this weekend's NOFAMass conference.

 In his wide-ranging overview of what capitalism and industrialism have done to our food systems, Holt-Giménez talked about how an unexpected alliance in England's early industrial period helped to push back temporarily against the growing power of middle-class financiers and manufacturers. Landed gentry, who were losing their social and economic preeminence, made common cause with displaced and disgruntled farmers seeing their own status and security decline.

The farmers had been displaced largely through the processes of enclosure that big landowners themselves had set in motion earlier in the period. But as the industrial capitalist juggernaut continued to gain strength and both rich and poor with livelihoods tied up in the land realized just what they were up against, gentry with land and farmers without it found ways to join forces.

Their relationship was still very unequal—everyone had to pretend that the lord of the manor really was superior to his lowly tenant farmers. But their alliance created a space for small-scale farming to continue and even thrive as the new capitalist class was busy commodifying everything it could get its hands on. It's a process that has unfolded in similar ways in many parts of the world that have moved toward industrial capitalism. Holt-Giménez sees that semi-protected space as one of the reasons why agriculture has often been so interestingly resistant—often in ways deemed "backward"—to that overall trajectory.

Jump to the present, of course, and most things about the mainstream food system in much of the world have now been pulled very fully into the speculative commodity market, with ongoing disastrous effects for both small and large-scale farmers. Holt-Giménez commended the organic farmers at the NOFAMass conference for holding out against that trend. But one dot he didn't connect—and this was my epiphany—is that we're increasingly seeing a similar kind of alliance between landed elites and landless or non-wealthy farmers, with many of the same paradoxes and tensions as the earlier version.

Interpretive center at Billings Farm, Woodstock, VT

I've written about this before on this blog, suggesting that contemporary non-profit organizations, historic farm sites, land trusts, and government agencies may be taking the role of those old aristocrats and gentleman farmers. These entities often provide land for young and new agrarians who are part of the current movement to reinvent and reclaim more land-centered forms of farming and living. One of the newest entries is the Agrarian Trust's FaithLands initiative, which adds faith communities to the list of landowners trying to make common cause with those who are trying to find a livelihood farming.

What seems important to pay attention to here is the potential for both division and solidarity across class lines. In many cases, the new landed gentry and the new agrarians are part of the same social strata, with similar levels of educational and cultural—if not always financial—capital. Like the old aristocrats, their influence is dwindling in many ways, a casualty of the long-running "culture wars" in the US and elsewhere.

In other cases, there are sharp distinctions of race and class—affluent white suburbanites sharing their land with impoverished immigrant farmers of color, for instance—that risk replicating the old lord-of-the-manor dynamic. There's lots of work for the lords of the manor to do in unpacking their own layers of privilege, but also lots of opportunity to understand how these long processes of displacement and commodification have harmed and divided us and how those processes continue right into the present.

Yours truly will be speaking at Wright-Locke Farm on Aug 22

Next week I'm going to be speaking at Wright-Locke Farm in Winchester, Massachusetts, a great example of an educational farm seeking to create a role for itself in discussions about today's food economy. Not sure if I'll get as far as talking about landed gentry and new solidarities, but it will definitely be in the back of my mind as I explore how this particular farm's history might help enrich those discussions!

CATHY email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-59724691351737088882014-09-30T05:50:00.003-07:002014-09-30T05:50:46.486-07:00Growing a historic site: The Oliver H. Kelley Farm

Farm fields at the Oliver H. Kelley Farm in Elk River, Minnesota

Jill Lepore has spoken about what she terms "cuspiness"--the feeling of being on the edge of big changes. I often have that sense when I look at what's happening in the realm of food and farming interpretation in the museum and public history realm, and it's been confirmed by encounter with many people in those fields who are reaching toward a much more consequential and socially-engaged way of connecting audiences with big questions relating to food.

Michelle Moon and I were once again struck by this at a workshop we led at the American Association for State and Local History conference in Minnesota last week, and it struck me even more on a tour I took as part of the conference, to the Oliver H. Kelley Farm in Elk River, Minnesota.

Kelley was a New-England-born self-taught farmer and mid-nineteenth-century agricultural "improver" who carried the gospel of mechanization, efficiency, and commercial competitiveness into what was then the western frontier. He was initially focused on politics and real estate speculation, purchasing land on the Mississippi River near what he hoped would be the state capital. When Minneapolis, 30 miles downstream, was chosen instead, he shifted into journalism, advocacy, and education on behalf of farmers, while using his own 190-acre property as a model for what he saw as the agriculture of the future. Although he returned to politics and the east coast after the Civil War, he had a lasting effect on American farming through his founding of the Patrons of Husbandry, a fraternal organization for farmers better known as the Grange, which became (and to some extent remains) an active force in the agricultural sector.

Two-horse-power threshing machine at the Kelley Farm

Kelley's Minnesota farm was bought by the Grange in 1935 and operated as a small museum-cum-shrine until 1961, when the organization donated it to the Minnesota Historical Society. Twenty years later, MHS launched a living history program representing the kind of "progressive" mixed farming that Kelley's family had practiced there in the 1860s. The emphasis has been on hands-on learning, heritage breeds and seeds, and period demonstrations of things like horse-powered threshing (at right), woodstove cookery, and the like.

All of this initially struck me as being heavily imbued with the kind of "pastness" that I've felt working against public history's ability to make more active contributions to present-day discussions about food and all that connects to it--land and energy use, economic paradigms and scales, social and environmental impacts and relationships. Standing in the kitchen of the Kelley house watching two interpreters show people in our tour group how to pound cabbage for making sauerkraut, I found myself thinking, "What a waste of a truly spectacular farm history site." A 190-acre working farm less than an hour from a major urban area seemed to offer extraordinary opportunities for doing far more than simply showing "how things used to be."

There were a couple of signs that more was going on. One of the farmhand interpreters told me about a new chapter of the Grange that he and some other younger public/living historians and educators--many of them in urban places--have founded, putting me in mind of how the Greenhorns and other new and young farmers' organizations have keyed off older forms of organizing and mutuality as they work to rebuild smaller-scale agricultural and economic systems.

Pickling demonstration in the Kelley kitchen

And in conversation with one of the kitchen interpreters, I heard that on a longer tour than our tight schedule allowed for, visitors would have been encouraged to make more connections with the history of the Grange as a farmers' movement. When I asked whether audiences seemed curious about those more political questions and how they resonated with present-day food politics, the interpreter said, "I think they are but they don't really realize that they are," confirming my sense of "cuspiness" and an emergent new role for historic sites like this one.

It wasn't until we were back on the bus heading for the Twin Cities that it became clear this idea is far more than just a gleam in the eye for the Minnesota Historical Society.

After a thoughtful planning process involving multiple agricultural partners ranging from "Big Ag" companies to sustainable-farming networks, MHS has launched an ambitious project to expand and re-set its operations and interpretation at the Kelley Farm. With $10 million in funding from the state legislature, they will build an expanded and multi-functional Visitor Center, add more cropland, and explode the site's timeline so that everything from restored prairie to twenty-first century machinery will be found on the property.

Bob Quist, the site manager for the farm, gave us an enlightening behind-the-scenes glimpse of the conversations and coalition-building that resulted in this really impressive commitment to a reenvisioned food and farm interpretation. As a state-affiliated, largely state-funded agency seeking substantial public funding for a farm-related project in a heavily-agricultural state, MHS could hardly ignore the perspectives of the mainstream agricultural sector, which includes the kind of heavily industrialized farming that is anathema to many food-movement activists.

The Kelley Farm's c.1980 visitor center will be replaced by 2016

But although those interests were part of the support that MHS built for its funding request, advocates for smaller-scale, lower-input farming were apparently also at the table when the new interpretive approach for the Kelley Farm was being hammered out. This range of viewpoints alone seems to enable that a much broader and more critical set of questions about agriculture can be asked at the site. Intriguingly, these planning conversations have already produced consensus among a wide range of farm interests that there are three key ideas that the public should consider about agriculture:

Everyone needs to know more about how their food is produced.

Old-fashioned and romanticized notions about farming--"a guy with a straw hat," in Bob Quist's words--get in the way of understanding present-day realities in the agricultural sector.

There is a crying need for more smart people to get into agriculture.

The devil of all this may still appear in the details--"more smart people" may mean more genetic engineers to some farmers, while others may see a need for smart farming and marketing methods that directly challenge the dominance of lab-based approaches to breeds and seeds. But it seems very heartening that MHS has at least convened a forum where those questions could conceivably be raised. And I look forward to revisiting the farm after its re-set (projected for spring 2016) and seeing how they've been able to work things out in practice. At least from a preliminary glance, the project seems to embody the promise of what historical organizations can bring to the often-fraught debates over food and farming: some kind of common ground, a little intellectual and political breathing-room, and the benefit of historical perspective that can counter-balance both nostalgia and ideology.

On the way home from Minnesota, this larger-than-life billboard at O'Hare Airport in Chicago struck me as exactly the kind of simplistic boosterism that a site like the Kelley Farm may be able to challenge. True, far more people will likely see the billboard than will visit the farm, but it's an important and promising step. Large-scale and industrialized farmers are by no means blind to the problems of the dominant food system--in fact, they probably feel its effects more sharply than anyone else along the food chain. Convening a conversation and crafting an interpretation that includes them is in itself a profound challenge to both pastness and spin, which seems likely to enrich public understandings about how we ended up with our present-day food system and what it might take to rethink it for the future.

CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-30281163851606545632014-09-04T06:07:00.000-07:002014-09-04T06:07:43.457-07:00History at the edges of the conversationA couple of high-profile entries in the civic conversation about the politics of small-scale farming--one in the New York Times and a response on Huff Post's Green blog--show some heartening, if also still small-scale, historical perspectives on the odds of making it as a farmer in the U.S.

Bren Smith's much-discussed piece in the Times, "Don't let your children grow up to be farmers" (August 9, 2014), noted how farmers' long-standing problems of debt, access to land, and competition are playing out within today's food movement. He points to the proliferation of CSAs, hobby farms, and non-profit farm projects as a new pressure within the marketplace, and notes that like most farmers, he's had to supplement his income with other kinds of work in order to keep his farm going.

Interestingly, he also looks to earlier "food movements" of the late nineteenth century, the Depression era, and the 1970s as models for the kind of direct political action and advocacy that he thinks today's small-scale farmers need to embrace more seriously.
 "[H]ighly organized farmers' organizations--like the American Agricultural Movement, National Farmers Union and Colored Farmers' National Alliance...went toe to toe with Big Ag: crashing shareholder meetings; building co-ops and political parties; and lobbying for price stabilization," he writes.

This is exactly the kind of "movement consciousness" that I've been arguing has been missing in most of the food activism in the present, and it would be great to see it expanding (and also to see it considering more carefully what it would take to mobilize farmers in this way again, now that they constitute such a smaller percentage of the overall American population).

The Huff Post rejoinder to Smith's piece, co-authored by several farmers and "co-producers," also draws on history, but in a somewhat more nuanced way. It emphasizes the centrality of good business planning in running a viable farm operation, but points out that "economic viability" may not always look exactly like the conventional model of a full-time farm family making a steady living from farming alone.

In fact, the piece challenges how "conventional" that model actually is. "Historically," the authors note, "'part-time farming' has been the reality for much of American agriculture for generations." And they see wisdom in this: "While some may decry the notion that farming as a full-time occupation often is not enough to pay the bills, in this economy there's something to be said--economically and socially--for households that have a measure of diversity in their income stream."

History is a small piece of these two articles, but an important one. In both cases, it helps nudge us toward new questions (what happened to the gains made by those earlier farmers' movements? how might we build on those gains but hang onto them this time around? did small-scale farming ever really look like the idealized model of the self-sufficient yeoman that we've inherited from collective memory?). I'm happy to see it working its way more fully into discussions as the "food movement" continues to mature and (contrary to Bren Smith's pessimistic predictions) expand.

CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-16186712887357718872014-05-20T07:03:00.000-07:002014-05-20T07:04:41.444-07:00Looking under the lawn

The Tufts campus is at its loveliest at Commencement time.

This past weekend was Commencement at Tufts University, always an inspiring rite of passage and a chance to reflect a bit after the intensity of the academic year. It's particularly reflective for me this year, after a spring spent gathering information and ideas about the campus as a former, current, and perhaps future site of food production. My "New Food Activism: Roots and Visions" class was devoted, in part, to reenvisioning the landscape around Tufts' Medford campus through the lens of its agricultural history, and my sense of the place has been shifting as a result. In particular, I've been rethinking the lawns.

Like other traditional schools, Tufts spends an immense amount of time grooming its lawns and gardens, which are always at their freshest and most beautiful during the spring Commencement celebration. As soon as the snow melts, the leaf-blowing, tree-trimming, mowing, patching of bare spots, and mulching begin. The result is a lovely landscape that dovetails nicely with most people's idealized image of a New England college campus: red brick buildings surrounding a leafy quad, green swaths of athletic fields, blossoming trees lining the walkways. It's bucolic, inviting, and wholly constructed, despite its seemingly "natural" appearance.

I knew all of this, of course, but my spring class helped me to see it much more clearly in relation to the specific histories of this piece of land. This clearer look started in conversations with Susanne Belovari at the Tufts Digital Collections & Archives, who has been gathering materials relating to changing land uses on what was known in colonial days as Walnut Hill. Susanne pointed out that the early colonists cut down the walnut trees that gave the hill its name, leaving a bare knob (actually a glacial drumlin, like many of the neatly-defined hills around Boston). When the soil eroded as a result of this deforestation, the hill became an agriculturally marginal place for grazing sheep and growing apples.

The Tufts campus in 1877. Source: Tufts Digital Collections & Archives

In the words of college chronicler Edwin Rollins, by the time Charles Tufts donated this parcel of land to the newly-formed college in the early 1850s, Walnut Hill "was not a smoothly rounded hilltop covered with grass and stately trees, but a barren and uneven bit of pasture: twenty acres largely enclosed in fieldstone walls... [with] little to recommend it beyond the marvelous view." Early administrators and classes set about planting trees and re-greening the hill, a project that continued well into the 20th century and arguably isn't over yet. (The agricultural lineage of the early campus, as well as the early tree-planting efforts on the hill, can be seen in the 1877 view above.)

1915 Tufts baseball team. Source: Tufts Digital Collections & Archives

My initial focus in the course was on bringing those older agricultural uses into greater visibility, but my students nudged me in some new and more complex directions. During an afternoon that the class spent in the archives, one student was repeatedly struck by how unkempt the lawns and playing fields looked in the early 20th century, judging by today's standards. Reading into photos that weren't actually about the landscape (like this one of the 1915 baseball team standing in ankle-high grass at the edge of the playing fields), he started to piece together a history of meaning-making through landscape reconstruction, tracing some of the aesthetic and technological changes that have led to today's neatly-mowed and manicured grounds.

Another student repeatedly reminded us, whenever my own focus on farming came to the fore, that European agriculture itself was a violent imposition on the subsistence landscapes of indigenous inhabitants. Of course I knew that too, but it's amazing how difficult it can be to see it through the layers of subsequent uses. The old photographs help give us a much more vivid sense of the 19th and 20th century layers, but they also paradoxically help to obscure what went before, in the same way that the manicured lawns obscure the farmland. Bearing that longer timeline in mind is going to be a crucial task as I continue to work on this project with future classes.

Lawn next to Anderson Hall, Tufts University.

The students' main assignment in this spring's class was to propose ways that the histories of cultivation of this particular piece of land could be brought into greater visibility and linked with the contemporary "food movement." One proposal--which I'll say more about in a future post--was to reinstate the position of campus farmer, a job that existed until about the time of the First World War and was then absorbed into the groundskeeping functions of the Facilities Department. At precisely this time, the new President of Tufts College, John Cousens, was calling on the school to make "the Hill a Garden"--but not a food-producing garden. The continued transformation of the campus reflected the increasingly long distances between New Englanders and their food supply, and the way that institutions like Tufts were taking on new roles in the long shift toward a more knowledge- and service-based economy in the region.

What strikes me now about the campus farmer proposal is that Tufts is actually still cultivating this landscape. But the primary crop is now turf grass--and that actually puts us squarely in the mainstream in terms of what Americans grow these days. When Tufts graduate Ted Steinberg wrote American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn in 2007, there were 25-40 million acres of lawn in the U.S. (p. 4), making it by far the largest crop in the country. To recover any sense of Tufts as a food-producing landscape, let alone to make it productive in that way again, we're first going to have to get underneath all that lawn and ahead of the small army of groundskeepers that maintains it (as Biology Professor George Ellmore tries to do in this short video).

CATHY email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-30504023648404129032014-05-10T08:29:00.001-07:002014-05-20T07:05:11.304-07:00Here's to the sprouting season

Source: Tufts Digital Collections and Archives.

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

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

Now that I'm not running back and forth to the other end of the state a couple of times a week, I'm also looking forward to getting back into my Wendell Food Mapping project. There are lots of great food- and farming-related things going on in the North Quabbin and environs these days, including the North Quabbin Community Co-op's impending move into a new storefront location in Orange, in partnership with the very local-food-friendly Mount Grace Land Trust. History is still not quite at the table in these projects, though, and I'm hoping to keep looking for ways to get it there, using my own town of Wendell as a base.

Michelle Moon and I led a workshop at this year's National Council on Public History conference in Monterey, California, and will be offering it again at the September conference of the American Association for State and Local History in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The NCPH workshop built on last year's Working Group conversations, which were held in part here on the blog, and they gave us a chance to think about the big challenges of fostering the kinds of critical conversations we're envisioning between food activists and public historians or museum interpreters. We've realized that getting to the point of making a broad and politicized analysis about our food systems and all that they connect to (which is virtually everything about industrial capitalism!) takes time, and that we're all working through these questions in our own ways and at our own pace. So how can we best support that often-gradual process at historic sites, and how can we combine it with the sense of deep urgency that both of us feel about what's happening at this nexus of economic and environmental issues? Stay tuned as we continue to work on that, including in our book-manuscript-in-progress.

All of this overlaps and merges in multiple ways, and I'm really happy to feel that the various bits of work I've been able to do on these projects in the past four or five years are coalescing into some definite projects as well as some larger understandings. Ironically, my actual gardening is 'way behind schedule this spring because there's been so much else going on, but things are sprouting there, too, and the garlic crop I planted last fall (above left) is going strong already. This is a slippery metaphorical slope to start down, but it is good to feel the energy of spring and a new growing season, after a winter at the computer and in the classroom!

CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-69044694917030021392013-12-13T15:55:00.000-08:002013-12-13T16:15:41.604-08:00Dairy dilemmas: Milk and cheese as "wicked problems"

Dairy cows at Appleton Farms in eastern Massachusetts

Sandra Batie, an agricultural and resource economist at Michigan State University, uses the term "wicked problem" to describe issues so fraught with internal paradoxes and inconsistencies and so overlaid with competing and often contradictory ideologies and assumptions that it is difficult or impossible even to have a collective conversation about them, let alone figure out how to fix them.[1] Batie sees agriculture as a particularly "wicked problem," and much of my recent focus on food and farm history arises from this same idea. Because we have so little shared sense of how we got to the food system we have now, many of the attempted fixes and alternatives often feel fragile and ungrounded.

Take dairy. It's one of the agricultural sectors most overlaid with both nostalgia (think milkmaids, butter churns, black and white Holsteins on a Vermont hillside) and ideology (think childhood nutrition, school lunch subsidy, and the raw vs. pasteurized debate). It's also one of the liveliest frontiers of local-food revitalization (think urban professionals turned artisanal cheesemakers).

Yet it's a component of the food system whose history is particularly murky and ill-understood.
 Behind the orthodoxy that growing children require milk, and that the safety and affordability of that milk should be guaranteed by government, there's a whole saga of turn-of-the-twentieth-century science and reform, which intersected in sometimes-weird ways. That history, which Melanie DuPuis has traced in her work [2], continues to reverberate today in our fixation on milk as a staple food (just try to find it in the supermarket before a big snowstorm) and in the way most dairy farmers struggle to make enough money to cover their costs of production.

Never mind that many people are lactose-intolerant and that there are many other, possibly healthier ways to obtain calcium and the other dietary benefits of dairy. Never mind that American cities now have reliably safe access to clean drinking water, which was one of the concerns that led people to see pasteurized milk as a crucial component of children's diets. We accept the idea of dairy as essential because earlier generations accepted it and managed to get it written into public policy.

What got me thinking about this was an article by Genevieve Rajewski in the new issue of the Trustees of Reservations' "Special Places" magazine. "An old industry learns some new tricks," the headline runs. "Dairy farmers take new routes to customers to survive and thrive." The article describes the ongoing expansion of dairying at Appleton Farms in Hamilton and Ipswich, Massachusetts, which now offers liquid milk, yogurt, and cheese as part of its extensive CSA and in its on-site retail store. Rajewski mentions the cost-of-production problem, noting that like a number of other direct-marketing dairies, Appleton Farms charges a much higher price ($4.25 a half-gallon of milk, compared with about $3 for supermarket organic and $1.50 for non-organic) which enables them to stay in business. These farms promote their products on the basis of healthfulness (super-freshness, no growth hormones) and work toward cultivating a customer base that will pay a premium for these qualities.

This is where I always feel ambivalent about my critiques of the food movement. Appleton Farms is an inspiring site, a small-scale New England farm in continuous operation since 1636 that is demonstrating what a diversified agricultural operation within Greater Boston's foodshed might look like in the 21st century. The Trustees are doing some of the smartest work on sustainability and local agriculture in the region, to my eye. And yet...

The purely upbeat tone of the "Special Places" article jars me, because it overlooks so many "wicked" things about the history of dairying. This is where the ideal of providing access to safe, healthy food for all (which motivated the milk reformers of a century ago) runs headlong into the realities of commercial markets and governmental attempts to mediate between profit-oriented farming and the goal of keeping farmers on the land. It's where the persistent elitism of the local food movement seems most obvious, and most troubling.

I'm really glad Appleton Farms is building a robust dairying operation, and that it's finding a customer base to support its work. But in talking and writing about it, I think those of us with an interest in both history and food politics have an obligation to touch on the more complicated questions too. Otherwise, it's just another feel-good story with pretty illustrations ("Small-scale dairying has seen a long decline, but it may be coming back again") that doesn't engage with the real challenges of making this kind of farming viable beyond the most privileged--or most heavily-subsidized--areas of the market. I suspect that conversations about this are going on at Appleton Farms, as they are throughout the local food movement. We need to hear more about them if we're going to make any inroads on the wicked problem of how to sustain these great projects over the long haul.

---

I haven't blogged here in a while, but as I gear up for some spring teaching and event organizing at Tufts relating to food and farming, and look toward the summer when I plan to get back to my more local food/farm/history projects, I'm hoping to start posting again, at least once in a while. Stay tuned!

[1] Sandra Batie, "Wicked problems and applied economics," American Journal of Agricultural Economics 90 (December 2008):1176-91.
[2] See, for example, Nature's perfect food: How milk became America's drink (New York University Press, 2002).

Photo credit: Aimee O'Brien Jeyarajan for Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism.

CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-41297466033424338902013-05-24T13:55:00.000-07:002013-05-24T13:55:25.503-07:00Around the table in Ottawa: A report from the Working Group on Public History and the Local Food Movement

The Working Group at Ottawa's Experimental Farm, April 18, 2013

The series of posts that appeared here in the first few months of the year were written by members of the "Public Historians and the Local Food Movement" Working Group that was convened for the 2013 National Council on Public History conference, held last month in Ottawa. The group held its face-to-face meeting at Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm, a visit that enriched our thinking about some of the ways that public historians do and might intersect with both agricultural practices and public interest in food and farming.

Participants came to the table with a very wide range of backgrounds in interpretation, training, research, advocacy, and community organizing. Some key ideas that emerged from our discussions included:

the importance of challenging the class distinction between manual and intellectual labor

how to use tangible/physical experiences of growing and cooking food as a way to develop stronger questions that can inform our work as historians

the need for long-term commitment to food- and farm-related projects

how to educate ourselves and others about the complex realities of farming, agricultural policy, and marketing food

ways to use public historical spaces and legitimacy to create new forums where people can connect across various class, political, and occupational boundaries.

The Working Group has a working lunch

One of the most stimulating parts of the meeting for me was the discussion of how our work as public historians can best relate to advocacy and activism. Most of the people around the table were involved in some kind of food and farm education and interpretation, usually in ways that intersected with "the food movement" (broadly defined). We recognized that our own values, tastes, and politics underpinned our interest in pursuing food-related projects, so we certainly weren't arguing that public historians should seek some kind of purely neutral or disinterested stance.

But at the same time, we found ourselves agreeing that historians' essential neutrality (that is, our core commitment to critical, contextualized inquiry) is a gift that can help us to raise more nuanced questions and create useable spaces for discussion within a politicized and complex field. So while we generally saw ourselves as advocates and allies for those working to relocalize food systems and challenge the dominance of big, industrialized agriculture, part of what we wanted to advocate for is a balanced conversation that doesn't demonize "big ag" or romanticize "the local."

Another working group: the Experimental Farm's dairy herd

That's a stance that many museums and public history sites have adopted in an era of "civic engagement, so it's not as though we came up with anything entirely new here! What is new about linking this approach to food and farming related issues, I think, is the way our own actions and identities become immediately much more salient than is usually the case. We talked about the importance of being willing to get our hands dirty--in the field and in the kitchen--as a way to build credibility and accountability with partners. We touched on the potentially uncomfortable ways that our own class positions come into play in relation to food and farming (for example, in the way that the mostly-white, mostly-middle-class demography of public history replicates that of the food movement in general, something I wrote about in a blog post last year). Because food is such an intimate and everyday thing, as well as creating such a powerful cultural and political field, that balancing act between advocacy and neutrality becomes both trickier and more essential.

For my co-facilitator Michelle Moon and I, the next steps after the meeting in Ottawa involve the book project that we've been developing around these questions. I'm hoping others in our Working Group will share a few thoughts here about where they see their food-and-farm-related work headed now. What next after Ottawa?

~ Cathy Stanton

CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-31568160328909189512013-04-15T13:00:00.000-07:002013-04-15T13:00:09.408-07:00Kate Christen: Kinetic history at play (and at work, of course…) in the fields of local food movements

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

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

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

For our in-person time, I'm interested in exploring ways we may want to move on helping define and implement specific roles for public historians within these food-related settings, how we might pull these into action, including perhaps through some form of practice-oriented trainings.
 My work at Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation (SMSC) centers on developing and implementing practice-oriented graduate and professional training courses in conservation science and related human dimensions. These are typically offered in three-day, one-week, or two-week intensive residential sessions.

I'd be very motivated to consider the potential of developing local-food-history-related (however that shakes out, whatever it means) trainings here at SCBI/SMSC, and of formal and informal collaborations for this purpose. The Shenanadoah Valley of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay watershed are promising settings for such topics. We already have some networks developed through other SCBI programs, particularly our Virginia Working Landscapes program. I've worked with local farmers and instructors to provide instruction and programming about local farming/food systems to our undergraduate Semester and soon will be launching, with the University of Virginia's Institute for Environmental Negotiation, a set of short courses focused on conservation collaborations and leadership in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, several of which will concern, centrally or more tangentially, agriculture-related topics. Current SMSC course listings are found here. For more background about the program and its antecedents at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) (located in Front Royal, Virginia, USA), you may be interested in an article I wrote for the Nov/Dec 2012 Zoogoer Magazine (pp. 16-19 in the linked PDF).

In somewhat random closing, a highly kinetic image I gleaned last week from Geri Unger, Director of Education at the Cleveland Botanical Garden, who describes her institution's Green Corps--urban high school kids farming city plots--as involving three chaos systems: high school-age kids, our US agriculture system, and urban poverty. She also described the transformative power a project like Green Corps offers to help bring order out of chaos, for the students, the community and the ecology of vacant properties. Some green Corps pictures here. And an article about Green Corps.

Looking forward to seeing you all very soon, and apologies for tax-time induced late posting.

Regards,
Kate
 CATHY email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-89294941228548934552013-04-11T10:30:00.000-07:002013-04-12T12:36:59.254-07:00Tyler French: Attending to other tables as well as our own
I have just finished writing the copy for Nourish SC, a traveling exhibit of eight panels addressing community food security in my home state of South Carolina. I hope for the exhibit to become a rallying call for members of the local food movement to expand their efforts on the social equity front, which has been ignored in favor of the environmental and economic fronts of the movement. In creating the content for the exhibit, I interviewed 13 individuals involved in either the local food movement or increasing food security, including a local farmer, a USDA official, a food bank COO, social work and public health professors, and a board member of United Way of the Midlands.

I immediately encountered tension between the spoken and the actualized goals of the local food movement.
 My first interview was with a representative of Slow Food Columbia. I asked about barriers to eating locally and she told me about a potluck Slow Food recently sponsored which asked members to bring a dish featuring local ingredients that did not exceed $5 per serving. This potluck was presented as a way to show how eating locally is actually affordable. The average daily SNAP allotment is $4 per person.

Although this event and a number of the events Slow Food sponsors are geared toward more privileged members of the community, I was surprised by the disconnect between this view of affordability and the international organization's statement of Good, Clean & Fair, where fair means food is "accessible to all, regardless of income..." This local chapter does have events on the horizon to engage lower income community members and they do a lot of good for the local food movement in Columbia but how far ahead should we push the movement without engaging an entire portion of our community? How can we assure the inequities of our current food system will not bleed into alternative food systems without first paying attention to fairness for all eaters?

The leading rhetoric, pushed by the popular leaders of the movement, is that eating locally can be easy. By doing a little more work, and sometimes spending a little more money, change will happen. They fail to acknowledge that 50 million Americans have trouble putting enough food on their tables of a healthy enough quality to nourish their families, without even bringing into question how far that food traveled.

After my first interview, I decided to focus on how assets and access affect the food choices low-income households are able (or not able) to make (Gregson). I largely ignored the role of education in increasing food security because it often distracts from the structural inequalities that are perpetuated in the local food movement. When asking customers to pay more for their food, those unable or unwilling to pay more are viewed as not valuing the benefits of eating locally (Guthman). By focusing on the structural inequalities already present, I hope to encourage investigation of potential alternatives to increasing low-income eaters' food purchasing power and access to healthy, sustainable foods.

Although food insecurity can be answered locally, treating the environment and the farmers with more respect than the conventional food system, it is not the only scale of action necessary to create real and lasting change for every eater (Purcell, Libman). One program I highlight in the exhibit that addresses food insecurity on a local level well is the Right Choice, Fresh Start Market in Orangeburg, SC.

The Right Choice, Fresh Start farmers market opens every summer at the Family Health Center in Orangeburg. The market is a partnership between the health center, the College of Social Work, and the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network at USC. The community that uses and lives around the health center chose the market's name, its operating hours, and a market manager. For the first $5 of food assistance market customer spend, the market doubles the amount of produce those customers receive.

The Right Choice, Fresh Start market provides a useful model in considering food insecure households when discussing the local food movement. The market, while built for the disenfranchised, benefits every participant. Higher income customers in the area don't have to drive farther away to another market. Farmers are able to sell their produce for a profit. The state economy captures a greater percentage of the food assistance money than it would otherwise.

At the national level, the local food movement needs to advocate for fully funded food assistance programs to increase the food purchasing power of local income households. If we demand that eaters pay the full price for their food, accounting for all of the negative externalities our current food system creates, shouldn't we ensure that low-income households have the ability to do so? Produce prices that reflect their true cost, while benefiting the farmer and the environment, do so to the detriment of food insecure eaters. Without adjusted food assistance programs, the diet quality and consequently the health of these eaters would suffer (Berg).

The spaces we create or maintain as public historians, especially when talking about the local food movement, need to take into account all socioeconomic levels. My part in the local food movement as a public historian is to widen the conversation to include every eater, to fulfill the promise of Slow Food in creating a fair food system. Nationally, this means fully funded food and nutrition programs and locally this means building points of access to healthy, sustainable food for low-income eaters. The popular arguments of the local food movement, the leading rhetoric of ease, needs to be revised. It needs to acknowledge the necessity of attending to others tables as well as one's own.

Certainly we have a stake in regaining lost knowledge, teaching how to garden, teaching how to cook, but this educational component needs to be paired with an analysis of the structural inequalities that hamper food choices. Food purchasing power and food access are key issues along with this question of education. Public historians can play a role in facilitating the conversation around the local food movement by including low-income eaters. The model of community engagement supplied by the Right Choice, Fresh Start market can be more often revisited when we create content, especially when that content involves food. Food is central and essential. As eaters, we are all experts.

(If you want updates on the project as it is presented, Like the Facebook page and follow the twitter, @nourishingSC

~ Tyler French is a senior at the University of South Carolina's Honors College, where he is focusing on Public History, Writing, and the Visual Arts

Works Cited
Berg, Joel. All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011.
Gregson, Jennifer. How Inequality Influences Individuals through the Built Food Environment. Diss. University of California, 2009. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2010.
Guthman, Julie. ""If They Only Knew": Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions." Taking Food Public. Psyche Williams-Forson and Carole Counihan. New York: Routledge, 2012. 211-222.
Libman, Kimberly. Eating the City: Food Environments, Inequality, and the Everyday Journeys of Eaters in New York and London. Diss. The City University of New York, 2012. New York: UMI, 2012.
Purcell, Mark. "Urban Democracy and the Local Trap." Urban Studies. 43.11 (2006): 1921-1941.CATHY email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-88824051453089635422013-04-07T13:27:00.002-07:002013-04-07T13:29:30.847-07:00Plowing Boston Common

"Victory Garden Program. Secretary Plowing Boston Common, 04/11/1944"

Maybe some of you have seen this image before, but it was new to me - I stumbled on it while looking for something else in the Flickr Commons. The source captions it as above, and I'm assuming that the "secretary" is the state or federal Secretary of Agriculture, but that's not specified in the archival description. (It looks like it could be Claude Wickard, FDR's Agriculture Secretary in 1944).

I love lots of things about the photo, but particularly the fact that they're using draft horses, which seems to suggest either that they were going for an "olde tyme" kind of association or trying to make a point about conserving fuel during the war (or maybe both). And it raises so many questions for me, including where these guys in suits learned to plow with draft animals!

~ Cathy

CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-48115500785332894392013-04-02T17:55:00.003-07:002013-04-02T17:55:50.830-07:00Rebecca Bush: Farm families beyond "Farmer Bob"Picture an American farmer. Strong, independent, face well-worn with creases caused by worries about weather and money and the future - the image isn't too hard to conjure. Dodge used this familiarity to great effect with its 2013 Super Bowl commercial, one of the most talked-about ads of the game:

So based on the majority of that lengthy ode to farmers of America, what demographic boxes can we check off? Almost always, our imaginary farmer is a native-born white man over the age of 40, probably living in the Midwest, Great Plains, or certain areas of the South. This may be an easy and effective advertising trope, but it doesn't begin to capture the complete story of agriculture and food production in the United States, either historically or today.

In the American South in particular, agriculture and food is wrapped up in a messy racial relations stew, one that touches on the history of 300 years of unequal labor and land ownership determined by skin color.
 Cotton is the most significant crop in this narrative, but after the Civil War, it determined whether African Americans and poor whites could devote enough land to grow gardens to feed their own families, or whether they needed to depend on credit from not-always-reliable country stores. Yet food and agriculture are among the most universal of shared histories - after all, everyone has to eat. How then to reconcile a potentially uncomfortable conversation with the simple universal appeal of food?

The Harriet Barber house in Hopkins, South Carolina

I've been thinking about these questions for a couple years now, starting with my time at the University of South Carolina. In looking for a thesis topic that put a different spin on a rural topic, I found a group of land-owning African-American farmers during Reconstruction who lived near Columbia. Though many of these individuals failed to make payments to keep their land, some were successful in creating small farms that offered food and livelihood for their families. Further investigation revealed that family gardens, though not always an indicator of success, seemed to make a difference in how long families could keep their land, with 10 families retaining land ownership nearly 140 years later.

The history of African-American agriculture has often been one of discrimination and exploitative labor - unpleasant topics, to be sure, but important ones. Food preparation and tradition, particularly when it's home-grown, seems to offer a friendlier and equally important narrative. What is the best way to combine these two facets of Southern history: delicious regional dishes with ingredients pulled from a garden, prepared by those who did not always control their own agricultural production? It's easy enough to pull recipes from a Junior League cookbook or even from a 1902 fundraising cookbook meant to establish free kindergarten schools "for the education and moral training of the children of the poor." Talking about the foods eaten by those "children of the poor" can be seen as more depressing, less "fun," and not as readily accessible without conveniently archived recipe books.

Today, the act of buying food is still stratified by class - certain stores are considered to be lower-class, while other stores, especially chains like Whole Foods or Fresh Market, are sometimes seen as only for those bringing home a certain salary. (For proof, look no further than my favorite SNL one-liner in recent memory, which defined the poverty line as "the invisible line that separates Target from Wal-Mart.") It's important to remember these common perceptions as we publicly present the history of food production and consumption.

I am currently planning a large exhibition on the history of regional food and agriculture in the Chattahoochee River Valley region of Georgia and Alabama. As I prepare this exhibit, I'm seeking to capture diverse stories from men and women of many different ethnicities and ages. There are older "traditional" farmers in the area, as well as a couple that has been featured in a Southern documentary about young organic farmers. As part of the exhibit, I want to spark community dialogue through the inclusion of contemporary voices and programming that introduces visitors to ideas, debates, and resources about local food. My hope is that all of these elements will create a diverse story that speaks to many people and provides a catalyst for more conversations about local food today.

~ Rebecca Bush, The Columbus Museum, Georgia CATHY email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-74337745176623423602013-03-10T17:27:00.002-07:002013-03-10T17:29:56.676-07:00Diana Lempel: With taste, smell, and imagination
I'm standing in the basement of Bondir, the intimate, award-winning Cambridge restaurant, watching Chef Jason Bond dismantle a hindquarter of beef, removing fat from muscle and muscle from bone. As he drops each chunk into its designated plastic tub, he explains to me what it will be used for. Every bit of this 200 pounds of meat will be consumed. The steaks will dry-age for some months; the fat, brightly yellow because the cow was grazing on bright green grass, will be rendered and used for daily cooking; the tough muscles will be stews, cooked with the stock made from the bones. This one animal will feed hundreds of diners; it's the only way for high-quality meat like this, Chef tells me, to be economic.

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

"This is how we should be eating," she said. Invoking the resourcefulness of their grandmothers or the historic cookbooks they pore through, Bond and Miller are interpreting a way of historical thinking through their food. They are not strict---when Bond wants figs he'll use figs, he tells me, and the dish I watched Miller prepare was sweetened with Japanese black sugar--but their message about history-inspired eating is clear. We're meant to use the products of our immediate environment, be frugal and resourceful. In doing so, we evoke the land and memory with every flavor. This is historical storytelling--not with language, but with flavor.

It's this process that brought me to Bondir's kitchen. I am working to understand how restaurants are participating in historic interpretation for their guests, acting as de facto learning institutions in their communities and beyond. What causes them to seek this culinary connection to their past, whether personal, cultural, or imagined? What do their guests get from it? What can we learn from this sensory mode of storytelling, and what can we bring to it, to deepen the learning?

Of course, anyone who follows the local food movement (or the maker movement, or the historic preservation movement, or...) knows that historical language like that used at Bondir is surging through our everyday lives. "This is how our grandmothers ate," "Let's go back to basics," "Bring back the victory garden," someone always seems to be saying. But imagining "the old days" isn't the same thing as building historic understanding. We need nuance, stories, complexity, lived experience, context, context, context. If the kuri squash is from Rhode Island, what kind of imagination of New England agriculture does that evoke in a diner? If Chefs Bond and Martin are using a historic cookbook recipe to inspire a dish, what of that does the eater get? How can servers interpret more than cooking techniques and ingredients, so a dish, its culinary and agricultural origins, really come to life? So, I'm also interested in trying to figure out how people make this mode of historic interpretation effective.

Hospitality to me has the potential for facilitating deep learning, as the restaurant itself is designed for immersive experience, and smell and taste are such tangible evocations of place and memory. Not only that--every group of guests has their own guide through the experience, their server. Bondir hosts private events--the Burns Night, featuring poetry and the obligatory haggis, for example--that bring together a community of diners around punchbowls, song, instruction, and a thoughtful, informative menu that brings the flavors of Scotland to life. As at all dinners, the servers work ensure that guests are as comfortable, inquisitive, and informed as they desire. "Jason's food is," one told me, "very special... I think he's born to do this, and it's my job to get that across... Answering questions and making them feel comfortable to ask questions."

As a history-trained, museum and gallery veteran, former cooking class teacher and now urban planning student/scholar, I'm starting to experiment myself. For Mother's Day 2012, I worked with Cuisine en Locale to develop ONCE in Barre: the Culinary Heirloom Project, an event featuring recipes from a set of archival family cookbooks from Gilded Age central Massachusetts. And over the summer, I hosted a series of public dinner events at a specialty foods farmers market, with the goal of creating intimate experiences with neighbors and food professionals, a space for interpreting and experiencing local products. I am definitely, definitely still learning about how to make these events successful; experiments, I've found, illustrate where pitfalls and challenges lie more than they give me a sense of success. For example, as in any exhibition, not all diners at ONCE in Barre engaged with the interpretive materials beyond my basic tableside explanations. It takes "scaffolding," to use the pedagogical term, to encourage even the most inquisitive eventgoer to go from enjoying a tea cake to deciphering an archival document, and getting something out of it.

This is where research comes in. I think if we start thinking about restaurants as part of the system of local learning institutions in our communities, we might start to build better tools to analyze and evaluate how they are interpreting and presenting matters of foodways and heritage. I want to write about and discuss these places in this way, to start helping the public history conversation intersect with the food movement conversation in terms of restaurants, markets, farms and forests, home kitchens and dinner tables. We can learn from them about how to engage every sense, how to facilitate comfort and curiosity, how to give guests the feeling of being "at home." How to do historical storytelling with taste, smell, and imagination. As Chef Jason Bond told me, "the best meal is when your grandmother goes out to the backyard, picks some asparagus from the fence yard, and cooks it for you for dinner." Where the fence yard is, how the grandmother lived, how the asparagus was grown and harvested, what her kitchen looked like--there's so much story in every bite.

~ Diana Lempel is a PhD student at Harvard University. Her research, writing, and occasional experiments focus on the ways people build meaning in the places they inhabit. Her writing on heritage, cities, and imagination can be found online at dianalempel.com; her food events have their home at terroirstudio.com. Follow her @publiccurator.

Images (top to bottom)

Pre-service staff meal in front of the hearth at Bondir

An abundance of local squash at Bondir

JJ Gonson of Cuisine en Locale, serves a table at ONCE in Barre; Liz Donovan records oral histories. Photo by Alykhan Mohamed

Colleen Hein of Eastern Standard leads a wine tasting at Swirl and Slice Market, Union Square Somerville, as part of my Tasting Table series

CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-51631527076080669132013-02-25T04:07:00.000-08:002013-02-25T04:07:18.895-08:00Clara Silverstein: In the garden with Michelle Obama

I remember the crisp October day that I stood on the White House lawn, notebook poised, as First Lady Michelle Obama led the first official fall harvest of her White House Kitchen Garden. Mrs. Obama slipped on a pair of black gardening gloves, dug a pitchfork into the sweet potato bed, and pulled up a dirt-caked vegetable.

"Now, this is a sweet potato! Let's see who can get the biggest," she said, as fifth graders from the Bancroft and Kimball schools in Washington, D.C. prepared to help. One girl squealed, and Mrs. Obama laughed. Then she and the students went to work, pulling out radishes, lettuce, bell peppers, eggplant, and more than a dozen crops.

I visited the garden as part of my research for A White House Garden Cookbook, published in 2010 by Red Rock Press. The book chronicles the first year of the White House Kitchen Garden, and includes recipes from the White House as well as gardening groups around the country that work with children. All the recipes in the book contain at least one ingredient that the White House grew in 2009, the first season of the 1,100 square foot garden (since expanded) that Mrs. Obama spearheaded. The 55 varieties of vegetables, berries, and herbs ended up on the First Family table or at official functions, including state dinners. A soup kitchen in Washington also received White House grown crops. In all, the garden produced more than 1,000 pounds of produce in its first year.

When Mrs. Obama dug up a patch of the South Lawn at the White House, she planted the first vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt grew a Victory Garden in 1943. Thomas Jefferson started the tradition with his 1801 vegetable garden. A bed in the current White House garden, planted with heirloom beans and lettuces sent from Monticello, his restored home in Virginia, commemorates Jefferson.

Research for the book took me back through Presidential history, but also into farms, after-school programs, and botanical gardens that currently work with children. Mrs. Obama uses the garden as a way to encourage Americans, especially children, to take an active role in growing their own food and eating a healthier diet. But what other connections can we make between government and the local food movement?

Mrs. Obama has published American Grown, her own book about the garden, to tell the story of how she planted it and used it to spark public policy initiatives for school lunch and exercise programs. The National Archives last year presented "What's Cooking, Uncle Sam?" to explore government policy and food eaten by Americans, from seed distribution programs to school lunches. This exhibit inspired chef and restaurateur Jose Andres to open a pop-up restaurant in Washington that served historic American recipes.

As a cookbook author with a degree in Public History, I would like to further explore the ways that government policy and the local food movement intersect. What will happen to gardening as a symbol of American self-reliance and healthy food for children when Mrs. Obama leaves the White House? How can her legacy as unofficial vegetable gardener-in-chief continue? What will continue to encourage children to participate in growing and preparing their own food?

Of course, I'll also continue to think up appealing ways to present kohlrabi, okra and other unusual vegetables to children and families. As the First Lady leads the way, eating vegetables has become newly patriotic after the Victory Gardens of the 20th century. I'm glad to give citizens around the country practical ways to take this message into their kitchens, but now I'd also like to do more to inform the public about how the history of gardening at the White House has relevance for food grown today.

~ Clara Silverstein

CATHY email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-21869753508176671902013-02-19T17:03:00.000-08:002013-02-19T19:26:26.431-08:00Lisa Junkin - A question of the stomach: A museum contemplates its role within a movement
"It is a part of the new philanthropy to recognize that the social question is largely a question of the stomach." – Jane Addams

Five years ago, the Slow Food Movement was new to myself and my colleagues at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. We considered ourselves to be urban foodies in our own rights, but we were just catching wind of a broad movement that would soon sweep the nation and transform our museum. We wanted a place at the table, but we did not yet know where we belonged.

We read Carlo Petrini, Alice Waters, Raj Patel, Michael Pollan. We spoke with farmers, activists, chefs, economists, doctors and historians. We learned that while the Slow Food Movement has radical roots, in the United States it has been characterized by activists as elitist. Opponents argue that a movement dedicated to food shouldn't be concerned with the pleasures of fine foods and preserving the "slow" traditions of the past, but rather should be committed to advocating for food justice and a better future for all.

Referring to The Jungle, a book that set off a food movement of its own, Upton Sinclair wrote: "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach." For the last five years, the Hull-House has aimed squarely at our audiences' stomachs, developing a suite of food projects that includes a modern day soup kitchen, an urban farm, an artisan jam operation, an heirloom seed library, and an exhibit called 21st Century Home Economics. As a result of this work, we offer two responses to the divisions within the Slow Food Movement. The first has little to do with public history but everything to do with movement building, and that is that pleasure is not at odds with social justice. Alice Waters refers to the slow food movement as a delicious revolution, arguing that when pleasure and community-building are prioritized, ecologically and socially responsible systems will follow. This framework has transformed our understanding of what activism looks like. A hot bowl of soup, organic and made with care, serves as a reminder that we are fighting for all people to be nourished in body, mind and spirit. There is pleasure in justice, and in the ongoing struggle we do well to remember that medicine goes down easier with a spoon of honey.

Our second response has everything to do with public history, which is, the past is not at odds with the future. At Hull-House, our foray into the food movement is lens for investigating issues of social justice, past and present. Many of our food related programs reflect the fierce urgency of now, but they are grounded by a site-specific historical context that inspires and shapes our participation in the larger movement. (For an in-depth examination of how Hull-House's food programs relate to our site's history, see article by former director Lisa Yun Lee: "Hungry for Peace: Jane Addams and the Hull-House Museum's Contemporary Struggle for Food Justice.")

To be honest, we didn't know much about how Hull-House residents engaged with food when we started this work. But as we learned more about the food movement, we began to ask new questions of the past. Who cooked at Hull-House? Where did immigrants purchase their food? Were there community gardens in the 1890s? What solutions to food insecurity were devised 100 years ago? Not surprisingly, our research yielded a bounty: the Progressive Era residents at Hull-House helped create the field of Home Economics and engaged in research on nutrition. They advocated to collectivize housework, to "light one fire instead of many." They created a public kitchen that served affordable food to families, factory workers, and school children. They created the first pasteurized milk station in Chicago, helping to end a public health crisis that claimed the lives of hundreds of infants. And they formed urban farms alongside their immigrant neighbors in order to nourish and sustain their community.

When we examined our site's history around food, suddenly the past no longer felt distant, nor did the movement feel quite as fraught. This historical content became the foundation of our food programming and contributes significantly our conversation on contemporary issues. For example, at a program about rapidly increasing desires for raw milk, small batch ice cream and other artisan-made foods, Hull-House staff offered insight about why Settlement residents advocated for the regulatory agencies that many foodies today reject as authorities on what foods are safe and edible. During a conversation about so-called food deserts-- neighborhoods lacking food security--we grappled with how the Hull-House Diet Kitchen failed due to the residents' lack of knowledge and sensitivity about immigrants' palates and inflexible notions of nutrition.

We now understand the museum's role as such: to bring together doctors, farmers, chefs, students, economists, and artists in share meals and discuss the food movement today, and to share a broad historical narrative that offers critical insight and inspiration. Five years after we began our love affair with food and justice, we have found our place within the movement. It is in the dining room, on the farm, inside the archive and out in the streets.

- Lisa Junkin, Interim Director, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

Photographs: Re-thinking Soup in the Residents' Dining Hall, 2008; The Urban Heirloom Farm at the Hull-House Museum, 2011; Canning Labels, 2011; Seed Starting Workshop, 2012.CATHY email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-90538167962974518332013-02-08T15:36:00.001-08:002013-02-08T15:36:55.538-08:00Linda Norris: Moving beyond the butter churn

I'd been tossing around in my head what to write in this blog post, and thought I would be writing it from eastern Ukraine, but circumstances intervened and I'm actually home in chilly upstate New York. Luckily, this photo appeared in my Facebook feed one January morning, with Katya's caption, "my daily winter tea." And somehow, amidst this glorious tumble of collected herbs, my thoughts began to crystallize.

I've been lucky enough to travel and work in all kinds of different places, but one place that has captured more of me in the last four years has been Ukraine. I first went in 2009 as a Fulbright Scholar and have continued to return on an irregular basis, co-founding the Pickle Project with fellow Fulbrighter Sarah Crow to encourage conversation in both Ukraine and the United States about food, culture and sustainability.

When I asked about the tea in the photo, Katya replied, "I don't know the exact meaning of those herbs, but I believe they are much better for me as usual tea from a shop, because gathered by my mom on my motherland." In that one phrase—her mom and her motherland-- she shared both the intensely personal and the intensely political nature of food in Ukraine.

The personal means that the local food movement isn't a movement in Ukraine; it's a way of life for many. The idea of a local food movement generates many bemused smiles. But that way of life depends on shrinking generations of mothers and grandmothers who still make the time to collect herbs, to pickle and to preserve, either in their home villages or in their dachas (summer homes) where intensive small cultivation is how every weekend is spent.

The political nature of local food is harder to see than the village gardens and root cellars, but like the old Soviet system, it pervades every part of Ukrainian life. Most Americans have never heard of Holodomor, the enforced famine of 1932-33 during which Stalin's orders starved millions of Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens to death, despite living in the region known as the Bread Basket of Europe. And few Americans understand the full extent of the extreme privations that happened on the Eastern front during World War II. But most of us do know a bit about Chernobyl and the contamination that continues to resound on many levels—including the food supply.

Those 20thcentury events created powerful national and personal memories. Those memories mean that the political is personal. For many, the safest path in the food chain is to rely on your own family's hard work--or the babushka at the market selling homemade pickles--no matter that every day you pass a McDonald's outside the metro station.

The transition from a peasant economy to the Soviet collectivization of agriculture is something virtually unaddressed in Ukrainian museums, much the same way American local history and outdoor museums often take a pass at the transition to corporate agriculture. It's complicated—so it's often ignored. If museums everywhere cannot address the big changes of the 20th century, it's equally hard to imagine how they will address the big changes of the 21st.

I think of my extended experiences in Ukraine as a continual, surprising, process of turning my own thoughts and assumptions around, looking at them from different angles and perspectives. As public historians, I think that's one role we can play, no matter where we are, creating situations where farmers, foodies and everyday people can look at food from different angles. We can create dialogues that cross boundaries, including those of class and location. I'm interested in exploring how historians could contribute to--and how museums might create--a model such as Conflict Kitchen, the amazing Pittsburgh pop-up that only serves food from countries that the United States is in conflict with as a way of encouraging conversation, including international Skype parties between citizens of Pittsburgh and those in Iran and Afghanistan.

In 2011, with support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Pickle Project sponsored a series of four open public conversations in four Ukrainian cities. Such open conversations are unusual in Ukraine—and not surprisingly, we found that the food conversations opened up much broader conversations about politics, memory, a sense of place, and the future. (You can read more about the conversations both on our blog and in an article in the Spring, 2012 issue of Museums & Social Issues).

Such work means though, that we have to go out of our comfort zones, as historians and as museums, take a hard look at our own biases and assumptions and move beyond the butter churn.

~ Linda Norris

Photos:

Tea by Katya Kuchar

Preserves and pickles for sale at the market in L'viv by Sarah Crow

Workers on a collective farm, undated.

 CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-86027318681811495502013-02-02T16:31:00.001-08:002013-02-03T10:16:21.405-08:00Briann Greenfield: What row to hoe?

The author picking spinach in February.

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

It is clear to me that local food advocates could be a wonderful audience. I know them to be a community that thinks broadly about issues, understands complex social and economic forces, and is dedicated to their cause. I also believe that there is a natural synergy between local food advocates' desire to connect with producers and merchants in their area and a historical society's mission to cultivate a sense of place. Both are searching for a deeper connection with their community and both regularly seek out that which is distinctive or unique. It's also worth recognizing that the historically- and environmentally-minded share an orientation to the future as they preserve resources for the next generation. But I also wonder to what degree local food advocates would become a long-term audience for the museum. Is this an audience whose interests will be limited to programs designed specifically around food and agriculture themes? Is this an audience that will support the museum with donations or volunteer time? Again relying on my own observations, local food advocates have an activist agenda and seek not just knowledge or experience, but the chance to effect social change. If a historical society does not address that aspect of their motivation, is the match really a good fit? I look forward to hearing from other museum professionals with more experience in this area.

Beyond the question of cultivating local food advocates as a museum audience is a historical society's responsibility to collect and preserve this fundamental aspect of the state's history. Having worked on CHS's deaccession and collecting committees for several years, I'm very cognizant of the need to collect strategically. Staff and storage are both limited resources and must be used wisely. For starters, this means not replicating what has already been done. With Old Sturbridge Village, one of the country's largest living history museums less than an hour away, CHS has an opportunity to move beyond the traditional focus on early American tools and farming techniques and create a collecting strategy with relevance to the local food movement. What would such a collecting strategy look like? What, specifically, would we collect? I am just beginning to think about these issues (and have not even considered the question of how to acquire items), but I already see potential for collecting in several areas:

History of the seed industry in Connecticut. A few years ago, I attended a session at the Connecticut Chapter of the Northeast Organic Farmers Association conference in which founders of the Hudson Valley Seed Library explained how they had used the artwork on 19th and early 20th century seed packages to identify recovered heirloom varieties. CHS currently has several seed catalogues in its collection. Additional materials would provide valuable insight into this central agricultural industry.

History of home food production. Home food production is a subject of particular importance to today's local food movement. Earlier traditions include Victory Gardens, back-to-the land movements, and the distinct practices of ethnic immigrants. Already in the collections are books by Adelma Simmons (1903-1997), a well-known herbalist who promoted home herb gardening. The Simmons's materials are good reminder that the recent past has a history that is ripe for collecting too.

History of cooking and foodways. Students in my museum studies class recently completed a small exhibit using CHS's cookbook collection. Cookbooks are often narrowly interpreted as culinary history, a history limited to cooking methods, recipes, ingredients, and gastronomic traditions. But working with these materials helped me see that they also could reveal a lot about our relationship to food. I was particularly struck by how well the cookbooks documented changes in food sources, particularly the rise of prepackaged convenience foods.

Clearly, the areas above are just a start. I am especially interested in collecting materials that reveal developments in labor practices, business history, the market economy, and government policies. I look forward to brainstorming with public historians, farmers, and local food movement proponents.

~ Briann Greenfield, Central Connecticut State University
CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-67485778413773339702013-01-25T10:34:00.000-08:002013-02-02T17:06:27.586-08:00Anna Duhon: Windows onto the farmscape: Becoming part of the story

FEP researchers Anna Duhon, Conrad Vispo, Claudia Knab-Vispo

How do we help facilitate people's connection to the land? This is the central question that drives our work at the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program, a small, community-based research and outreach initiative on a working educational farm in the mid-Hudson Valley.

Our trio of researchers includes a botanist, a wildlife ecologist and a social scientist. Together we strive to open different windows of knowledge onto our county's 'farmscape'--the term we use to describe a landscape that even in its most out-of-the way corners has been shaped by a long history of agricultural land use and for which agriculture continues to be a defining factor.

The windows we open are often very different--a look into the native butterflies and the fields they thrive in, or the industrial history as it impacted land use, or the new farmers that are just marrying their visions to a piece of land. With the landscape as the connecting core of our research, we are always striving to mesh our different disciplines into a more holistic picture. This involves bridging areas of research that are often separate or even at odds, such as the cultural and the ecological, or agronomic and conservation sciences. By opening such different windows, we hope not only to deepen our own perspectives, but also to invite further exploration and engagement with the land from a broad base of interests; creating entry points that might draw in farmers alongside history buffs, or wildflower enthusiasts alongside local food lovers.

Our approach throughout, however, is to frame these many perspectives as part of a larger story of the land and our relationship to it. This framing, and the resulting broad conceptualization of the Program, crystallized early on when my colleagues were surprised by how interested people were to hear ecological stories in an historical context. A basic focus has thus been studying history in order to understand the present, such as through historical ecology that works back from the present to ask: how is what you see in front of you a product of the history that came before? This approach inherently ties present to past (not always an easy link) and, because it's a process history, easily links to thinking about how the now evolves into future history. We ask in multiple ways: Where has this land been? Where is it now? Where do we want it to be? And by extension: What is our role in this unfolding story?

This approach calls on us to find ways of deeply involving people in this story and conversation, whether through participatory research or sharing our research through community-engaging outreach. For nearly a decade we have been fortunate to be in the unique position of doing place-based research in a rural county with our primary audience being the people who live here. We have honed in on the scale of the county because that seems to be the right scale for storytelling; big enough to contain ecological and cultural diversity, but small enough so it still feels like a place with which people identify. Yet we always are grappling with the challenge of reaching and engaging diverse members of this county in meaningful ways.

Click here for map as PDF

One of our recent projects taught us a lot about the potential for sparking rich community dialogue through shared research. In the New Farmer Narrative Project we interviewed 20 different farmers who had started or taken over farms in the county within the last decade about their journey into agriculture, their current farm and their visions for the future. From these interviews, photographic tours of the farms and aerial and historical photographs of the land, we created a 17-panel moveable exhibit [downloadable as a PDF file] that was displayed at 10 different local public venues (mostly libraries) over the course of four months, usually staying a couple of weeks at each. Initially this was the extent of outreach we had planned, but fortunately we decided to hold a kick-off event in conjunction with the first installation of the exhibit.

That event quickly showed us the potential for gathering a wide group of farmers and community members together and opening up discussions about the story of farming in this area. We ended up organizing a kick-off event for every stop of the county-wide tour, most involving some presentation of the research and a panel of new farmers from the immediate vicinity sharing their experiences and answering questions. We were surprised to find these events filling up to overflowing with 40 or 50 people, including older farmers, longtime residents, more recent transplants, and even local high school students.

The conversations that emerged were noticeably different in different parts of the county. In a hilly corner of the county that has long been dairy country, people grappled with the decline in dairy farms, and the fact that new farmers--even those raised on dairy farms--could not see a path ahead for continuing the dairying tradition. For many people it was a revelation that the number of farms in the county was actually increasing and that there was a whole group of energetic new farmers with small, diversified operations. Large dairy and fruit farms have long been the dominant face of the county's agriculture, and as these industries have struggled, farming has often been viewed as part of a declining past, not a vibrant future. Through these events we were able to frame the stories of new farmers into the larger context of the changing story of agriculture in this county, and open up a meaningful space for shared conversation amongst diverse community members about how these changes are being experienced and engaged.

Looking ahead, we are hoping to build on this idea of creating traveling exhibits that can be paired with events and forums in local community venues. One way we're planning to do that is through a participatory research project that would invite people to share their unique views on the landscape through resident-employed photography and other photo-elicitation methods. Researchers have used such methods with farmers (Beilin 2005; Sherren, Fischer and Price, 2010) as well as other groups with land-specific knowledge (Dandy and Van Der Wal 2011) and the general public (Beckley, Stedman, Wallace and Ambard, 2007) to inquire about different aspects of people's use and perception of the land. Such methods might easily lend themselves to a photo essay display and conversations sparked by the experience of getting to "see" the landscape through different eyes, opening up another set of windows on the land and its story.

View of Hawthorne Valley Farm from a nearby hill (March 2008)

Of course the story is never complete and we continue to work as a Program on how to truly integrate our different disciplines. For example, at about the same time as I was exploring the perspectives of new farmers, my colleagues were studying the same farms from an ecological perspective--looking at how native plants and animals from the surrounding areas affect agricultural production and what habitats farms provide for native plants and animals. How might we better incorporate these varied perspectives? We are hoping to start answering this question through our current multi-year initiative, the Living Land Project, which will explicitly involve paired ecological and cultural research that will be integrated into exhibits, forums, and ultimately, an eco-cultural field guide.

In his 2002 article making the case for photo-elicitation, Harper describes the effectiveness of using photographs that "break the frames" of people's normal view in order to elicit deeper reflections in interviews. This is a good description of how we might wish our research to function overall. Whether zooming in to look at the favorite place of a farmer or zooming out to look at the distribution of ground beetles across the landscape, we are hoping to provide new perspectives that might jostle people's normal views of the land just enough to create reflective space for deeper engagement.

Perhaps one of the biggest frames that can be broken is the present-centered view. By rooting our research in the history of this area while asking what kind of future on the land we want to create, we invite people to see how they might consciously fit themselves into this evolving story as thoughtful and engaged participants.

~ Anna Duhon, Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program

References
Beckley, T., Stedman, R., Wallace, S. and Ambard, M. (2007). Snapshots of what matters most: Using resident-employed photography to articulate attachment to place. Society & Natural Resources: An International Journal, 20(10), 913-929.
Beilin, R.J. (2005). Photo-elicitation and the agricultural landscape: 'seeing' and 'telling' about farming, community and place. Visual Studies, 20(1), 56-68.
Dandy, N. and Van Der Wal, R. (2011). Shared appreciation of woodland landscapes by land management professionals and lay people: An exploration through field-based interactive photo-elicitation. Landscape and Urban Planning, 102, 43-53.
Harper, D. (2002). Talking about pictures: a case for photo elicitation. Visual Studies, 17(1), 13-23.
Sherren, K., Fischer, J., and Price, R. (2010). Using photography to elicit grazier values and management practices related to tree survival and recruitment. Land Use Policy, 27, 1056-1057.CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-52939919416801063612013-01-14T05:32:00.000-08:002013-02-02T17:07:14.146-08:00Angi Fuller Wildt: Communicating the virtues of local foods

Olives grow in the U.S. too!

As both a co-owner of a small-scale sustainable agricultural business and a public historian, the work that I do synthesizes public history with actively producing and marketing locally and regionally produced foods. In addition to cultivating, growing and selling mushrooms, herbs and produce to local restaurants and at our Columbia, South Carolina All-Local Farmers' Market, our business sells olive oil made from olives grown in southeast Georgia. One aspect of our marketing entails informing our customers about the 18th and 19th century exportation of olive oil as a commodity from coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Most people are quite surprised that olives can be cultivated in the southeast United States. Sharing the history allows them to have a sense of connection to the roots of the region. Many customers appreciate that the product isn't shipped across the country or an ocean and that it supports economies close to home.

Another educational opportunity takes us into university classrooms and local venues to engage in dialogues about the ecological and economic benefits of growing and consuming heritage varieties of produce and other foods grown organically and locally.
 As members of Slow Food, we work with a likeminded group of people in a growing movement to share our knowledge about the benefits of locally-produced, sustainable foodways with the community. This summer we participated in the Tasty Tomato Festival, a co-production of our Columbia Slow Food chapter and another organization, Sustainable Midlands. The event draws over 1,500 people and is held at an in-town sustainable farm called City Roots. The location itself invites attendees to see the possibilities of a different kind of urban renewal. The owners transformed three acres of a formerly vacant lot lies between the edge of a working class neighborhood and a light industrial area into a working farm. An information tent at the event featured Faces of Local Food with photographs and quotes by producers and customers. Another tent offered a wide variety of locally grown tomatoes for attendees to sample. Nearby, children lobbed commercially-grown tomatoes at a target.

Many of these efforts "preach to the choir," however, and we occasionally struggle to quickly and easily explain in just a few sentences why local is better. Getting the message across that higher production costs equate to higher prices can be difficult in the minute that we might have with a potential customer. Those who are already aware of the environmental and societal costs created by government-subsidized food grown with hormones and chemicals, harvested by low-wage labor and shipped across long distances don't need to be convinced of the value of buying locally-produced food. The founders of the Tasty Tomato Festival had the right idea. Featuring flavorful ripe red tomatoes alongside their bland, mealy, pink, mass-produced hothouse tomato counterparts makes it easy to see and taste the difference in quality. Making that connection, at a fun event with local food, local musicians, and a range of related activities gets the message across in a more palatable way than a few dry facts can. I would like to explore more ways to effectively communicate the virtues of locally grown foods to as many community members as possible. One idea to reach a more diverse audience includes partnering on events with other local organizations and groups whose members we may not typically encounter at the farmers' market. Programs that connect participants to the history and the present of their communities create a sense of belonging. In addition to sparking an appreciation for quality, inclusive events can invoke a sense of civic responsibility, stewardship, and pride of place.

~ Angi Fuller WildtCATHY email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-83760047849467964752013-01-08T06:17:00.002-08:002013-02-02T17:07:49.865-08:00Will Walker: Oral history as a way in to complex discussions

Farmland, upper Delaware River, New York state, 1943 (Library of Congress)

 Interviewer: Do you feel you have a different attitude towards food than someone from a more urban area?

Narrator: Well, I think something that a lot of people don't realize and I think that they should start thinking about it more is our water supply. A good water supply, we're losing it, for drinking water. Now my house, my farm is all on spring water. The farm up there, that's gravity feed, we don't even have a pump on it. The water runs freely to the three houses, the barn, and the cows. It's self-flowed, runs right to the barn. Up on my house where I live in Pierstown, that's all spring. The farm when we had it up there was all spring. I think that with this drilling and spoiling the water with doing things, building houses and stuff, we're losing a lot of our good water supply and I think that we should be thinking about it.

This past fall, several of my students and I used oral history selections like the one above as the starting point for dialogue sessions on issues related to farming and the environment. These narrative pieces offered a way into complex discussions of land use, natural resources, and agriculture. Such conversations are urgently necessary in the area in which I live and work—upstate New York—as the natural gas industry presses for authorization to drill using the controversial technique known as hydrofracking. Fracking was not, however, the only topic of discussion at the four dialogue sessions we convened in the fall.  Longer-term questions of agricultural and environmental change were also consistently part of our conversations.

Dialogue sessions have been the most effective way I've discovered thus far to engage community members on environmental and agricultural issues. Using a model borrowed from the New York Council for the Humanities "Community Conversations" series, my students and I have had success getting a diverse group of participants to engage honestly with difficult issues. I have been surprised both by the willingness of people to participate in dialogue and the range of people who have shown up for the programs. We have had farmers, environmental activists, doctors, museum professionals, artists, and others attend.

Still, I can't help but feel that we are only reaching a fraction of the population, and we are missing two very important groups—organic farmers and pro-fracking individuals.  I'd very much like to get people from each of these groups together to speak openly and honestly not only about fracking, which would almost certainly be acrimonious, but about larger issues of the past, present, and future of farming. To date, however, I've found the organic farmers in the area to be reluctant to speak—about much of anything. They'd rather tend to their farms and businesses than get involved in oral history projects. At the same time, I must admit I've been reluctant to actively pursue direct dialogue with pro-fracking individuals. As we move forward, my students and I will work harder to broaden the reach of our work and expand the number of voices that are heard. Perhaps the other members of the working group can provide us with tips on how to do more effective outreach in these areas.

~ Will Walker is assistant professor of history at the Cooperstown Graduate Program (State University of New York-Oneonta). This post is part of a series of pre-conference discussions for the "Public History and the Local Food Movement" Working Group of the 2013 National Council on Public History meeting in Ottawa.
CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-88951040627217907262013-01-02T18:10:00.002-08:002013-02-02T17:08:34.384-08:00A New Year's Toast: Let Us BeginGreetings all, and thanks to Cathy, our host at History at the Table. I'm delighted to be the first guest blogger in our discussion of public history and the local food movement, which will of course culminate in our Working Group meeting at the NCPH 2013 meeting in April. This will be the first of many posts on this intersection in coming weeks, as each member of the Working Group takes a turn offering insights and questions. Knowing that the conversation to follow will be lively and provocative, I raise a metaphorical glass to all present and say "Let us begin."

I'll be speaking from personal experience first, describing how my work at one museum led me into the local food movement, and then making the case more generally for a strategic re-evaluation of food interpretation in museums.

How One Museum Got Slower

In 2004 I became education director at a historic site and museum called Strawbery Banke, a preserved urban neighborhood in Portsmouth, NH. Its more than 20 restored houses (with associated period landscapes) feature a mix of traditional interpretive strategies - first person roleplaying, didactic displays, period rooms, guided programs.

Like many such sites, we faced the challenge of maintaining audience attendance in a time of widespread decline. With tongue only partly in cheek, Cary Carson, chief researcher at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, predicted "the end of history museums" in 2008, noting that attendance has been sinking for three straight decades . Reach Advisers found that history museums, compared with 7 other museum genres, ranked lowest in popularity with all demographic groups. Only 31% of family museum visitors even venture to historic sites.

What could we do to forge new connections with potential participants? We didn't have to look far for inspiration. The local food movement was blossoming around us.
 A 30-year-old farmers market was suddenly teeming with new, young farmers. A grassroots locavore group sprang up, helping people find locally produced food. Ideas of reviving localism infused the business community with 'buy local' campaigns creating new interdependent relationships.

In this cutting-edge movement, the museum could contribute unique, localized content drawin on a rich past. Evidence from milennia of food production, cooking, and eating was visible on (and in) the land. Audiences were clamoring for content the museum had to share: local climate, seed, and soil knowledge; regionally adapted strategies for food cultivation, preparation, and preservation; personal histories of migration and its impact on the foodscape; detail on the mechanics of earlier farm-market and import economies.

Our interpretive leadership team began to engage allies in the community. We established a Slow Food chapter, inviting the membership to meet monthly at the Museum to taste and learn from its kitchens, gardens and orchards. We collaborated on community food festivals, hosted a CSA information fair, brought in topical speakers. Slowly we built a community of local supporters who otherwise might not have valued our site as anything other than a quaint place to bring out-of-town guests.

As folklorist Millie Rahn observes, there is often "no model, and usually no precedent," for previously unconnected members of a community to begin talking to one another. Forging bonds with the local food community required new behaviors and new relationships on the part of our staff. We hit the streets and fields, having long one-on-one conversations about mutual goals and ideas at Saturday morning farmer's markets, evening potlucks, in produce markets and pubs. We approached potential partners in a spirit of openness, letting plans emerge from mutual goals rather than orchestrating every outcome. We worked around, and through, institutional and external obstacles to collaboration. It was all up close and personal. Local food networks are known for increasing intimacy among constituents, and our museum was no exception. We became engaged at a personal as well as institutional level, and began making change.

Two Roads Diverged

Stepping back from the Strawbery Banke example to take a broader view, I've been wondering how historic sites and museums have been rendered nearly invisible as resources for community exchange and learning around local food, despite intense interest on the part of the public in the subject matter we steward.

In part, we can blame ourselves. Past choices in food interpretation, though well-intentioned, do not resonate with the public as currently relevant. Food is often assigned a supporting role, viewed as a hook to get visitors interested in the "real history," rather than as a topic in and of itself. It's served as a sensory detail to add ambience, animate domestic interiors, and provide demonstration content for (usually female) indoor interpreters. The focus is typically on ingredients, equipment and methods, perhaps a bit of medicinal or seasonal lore. Buried in minutiae, obsessed with creating the illusion of a living past, and often skewed for popular appeal, food presentations have failed to illuminate significant (and ongoing) historical concerns: economic structures, food justice issues, supply and labor chains, competing and contentious cultural expressions, relationships with technology, and the mechanisms of change.

How did we end up with this disconnect between the way we present food in museums and the way we discuss it in contemporary society? The answer may lie in an inherited philosophical rift between museum practitioners and academic historians. Food historian Ken Albala identifies two distinct approaches: food history, rooted in late-20th-century social history scholarship, deals with the "social, economic, intellectual, and cultural parameters of consumption," while culinary history focuses narrowly on the specificities of "ingredients, cooking methods, recipes, and the history of the cookbook, often accompanied by the reconstruction of historic cooking in situ."

Culinary history has been, by default, the dominant approach in museums. Predating the social history revolution of the 60s and 70s, it reflects gendered ideas of food as a trivial topic, falling outside the range of serious theoretical study. In museums around the country, biscuits brown, butter is churned, and salt cod soaks, while interpreters in homespun garments sweep the hearth in an eternally recreated Wallace Nutting picture. Academic historians, Albala says, resisted this "hands-on approach" because "the physical act of cooking was considered more appropriate for antiquarians than professional historians. This bifurcation has had longlasting effects, namely that food history often neglects the kitchen, while culinary history often ignores the rigorous methods…used by food historians."

The culinary history approach to food interpretation can be problematic, degrading into a shallow form of interactivity without larger purpose. It can invite othering views of past people as bizarre or unsophisticated, especially when the emphasis is on the strangeness of ethnic and archaic tastes or the deprivations of hardship. It risks transferring simplistic, feel-good stereotypes of "Back Then," the time when "They" raised their own food, always ate wholesomely, wasted nothing, and were happy with little. It is often content with creating a "sense" of time and place, reducing historical forces, painful and exciting changes, and varied individual responses to a set of smells, tastes, and accessories.

Reimagining Food Interpretation

What if museums became sites for reuniting food studies with culinary history? This could be an interpretive revolution, deepening and broadening investigations of the past, while connecting to a mighty engine of contemporary relevance.

Public history sites are well-equipped to present a new, integrated approach to food interpretation grounded in scholarship, dealing in nuance and complexity,and linked to big, vital ideas. As always, they can share know-how by teaching methods and practices offering immediate utility, like seed saving or apple drying; but they could also introduce analogues and comparative episodes from the past to help participants understand change, contributing to solutions that avoid past pitfalls and fit contemporary constraints. They could be present-oriented, moving beyond nostalgia and set-dressing and delving into history as a useful tool for living and solving complex community problems.

History institutions ignore the food movement to their own detriment. Starving to death at a banquet, they scramble for crumbs of participation and support, while the public stampedes by the front gates by on the way to to the farmer's market, the community garden, the crop-mob, or the harvest festival, all the time seeking connection, information and practical skill which could be gained on our sites. Food producers and consumers miss out on the depth of content and historical framing public history could supply. We have a great deal to share with one another, and, if we accept it, a central role to play that fulfills our public educational mission and cements our bonds to our communities. If we begin by re-imagining our institutional relationships with food, bringing food topics into serious investigation that considers present-day issues while exampling the past, we can feast together with new constituencies in stronger communities.

It could just save our bacon.

What are your observations about food interpretation at museums and public history sites? Do you agree that there is a schism between the social history of food and the technical focus of the culinary demonstration? Do we need to re-imagine food interpretation as part of an effort to conduct dialogue on contemporary food issues?Michelle Moonhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-66118037125000231172012-12-29T13:30:00.000-08:002013-02-01T11:15:22.305-08:00From "so what?" to "how?" Merging farm histories with farm and public history practiceIn recent posts, I've been teasing out some of the useful aspects of the kind of detailed ethnohistorical knowledge about past and present farming practices that went into my Ethnographic Landscape Study of farmers and farming in Columbia County, New York, in an attempt to address the fundamental "So what?" question that lurks behind any historical inquiry. However, "So what?" only gets us part of the way toward a more vital, shared historical consciousness about the agricultural past. Equally important is how to put this kind of knowledge into active practice so that it can inform contemporary debates and choices relating to food and farming.

Wayside plaque at Martin Van Buren NHS

The final chapter of my report to Martin Van Buren National Historic Site proposed two guiding principles that the park might use in its management and interpretation of the agricultural land within its boundaries. The first principle was that there's an ever-present danger of creating an aura of "pastness" through too much focus on "period" farming techniques and landscapes, which should be countered by emphasizing longer-term questions and issues (such as the ones I wrote about in a previous post) and creating a permeable boundary between past and present. The second--important in any kind of partnership, but perhaps particularly with partners trying to survive in a risky and demanding business like farming--is that any farm-related projects should offer some identifiable, concrete benefit for the farms as well as for the park.

Building on those basic principles, I outlined a number of recommendations and sample project ideas, which can be found in Chapter Nine of the report itself. Some of these raised as many questions as they answered (for example, how should a public agency like the National Park Service make decisions about which specific farms or modes of farming to partner with?). But I've come to accept that farming is just like that--there are few, if any, definitive guidelines! My suggestions tried to take into account both the politics and the practicalities of contemporary Columbia County agriculture, as well as the particular role played by Martin Van Buren himself and the park that preserves his working farm, while leaving room for the shared production of new knowledge informed by a careful consideration of evidence and debates from the past.

All of this has left me with a desire to extend these questions and ideas further, which I'll be doing this spring along with a number of fine public history colleagues. And that gets me to the plan for the next several months of the blog. In partnership with Michelle Moon of the Peabody Essex Museum, I'll be facilitating a Working Group session on "Public History and the Local Food Movement" at the National Council on Public History annual meeting in Ottawa, Ontario in April. NPCH Working Groups are usually convened to focus on specific issues or projects, and ours is intended to further the professional conversation about the food/farm/history intersection and set out some of the theoretical and methodological issues in a way that's broadly useable by people in the field.

Working Groups also generally hold some kind of pre-conference intra-group discussion, and that's where the blog comes in. We're planning to hold our discussions here, in the form of a weekly post from someone in the group and some commentary by others. We welcome broader participation by readers and friends--any and all ideas will enrich the mix. Michelle will lead off with the first post shortly, followed by what I think will be a really intriguing series of pieces focusing on that core issue of useability--getting history to the table as we're rethinking our food systems and all that connects to them. This is not--I repeat, not--merely a ploy on my part to get out of writing a blog post each week! I'm looking forward to expanding the dialogue and moving toward our face-to-face gathering in Ottawa in April.

Happy New Year to all, and happy eating!

CATHY email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-70014314563562634202012-12-28T16:27:00.001-08:002013-02-01T11:15:07.477-08:00State of the field(s): What history adds to a snapshot of the presentThe final narrative chapter of the Martin Van Buren NHS Ethnographic Landscape Study was a snapshot of northern Columbia County agriculture in 2010, when I completed the research for the report. Drawing on a quote from one of my interviews, it was titled "A Lot of Ways to Keep a Farm Going (1974-2010)" and brought the histories of some of the older farms I'd looked at across time up to the present. It also added a handful of new sites as a way to cover a wider range of farming practices in the county.

2009 promotional map of CC farm products

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

Before the July 2010 fire at Harrier Fields Farm

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

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

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

In what's going to be my final post for a while, I'll talk next about how I tried to roll all of this into some concrete suggestions for the national park. Then I'm going to hand over the reins of the blog to a great group of colleagues who will be sharing their own thoughts about the farm/food/history nexus over the next several months. More on that tomorrow!CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-31375547513986595192012-12-27T15:39:00.002-08:002012-12-27T15:39:57.318-08:00It's the petroleum, stupid: The surprising persistence of small-scale farms in the northeastIn my experience, every writing project presents some unexpected question that you have to wrestle with before you can get things to make sense. In my Ethnographic Landscape Study for Martin Van Buren NHS, that question was, "When did working farms and historic or touristic farms in the American northeast actually part ways?" I was working from the basic assumption that agriculture in the region was already in decline as a primary economic driver by the late 19th century, a basic tenet of the "farmers moved west in search of more fertile land" narrative. I also knew that the historic preservation movement was getting into full swing by that time, with the national centennial of the 1870s, the colonial revival of the 1890s and later, the founding of groups like the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (1910), and then the first wave of American "living history" villages like Colonial Williamsburg and Greenfield Village in the 1920s. I confidently expected to find that those two trajectories would overlap somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, or perhaps closer to 1920, when, for the first time, more Americans lived in urban than rural places.[1]

Undated handbill, Capital District Cooperative

But as I was casting around for evidence of this definitive split, I kept finding information that went in two different directions. First, farms and farmers were catering to the tourist market in a variety of ways far earlier than I had realized, dating back at least to the mid-19th century Shaker settlements (which welcomed visitors for a variety of reasons) and creating a sizeable sector of what we now call farm-stay vacations or agritourism. And these flexible strategies, along with a still-robust regional food network comprised of truck farms, urban markets, and cooperative ventures like the Capital District Cooperative in Menands, New York, helped small farms to remain active and competitive right through the first half of the 20th century. The split I was looking for just wasn't there--until after World War II.

And that was the big takeaway from Chapter 7 of the report, which covers the years between 1917 and 1973, when Martin Van Buren's estate became a national park. Small farming was by no means as ubiquitous in the northeast as it had once been, but it was surviving fairly healthily until the postwar oil economy clobbered it in the 1940s and 50s. Long-distance trucking, supermarket chains, expensive new "inputs" like petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, and machines, and rising land prices as suburbs expanded into former farming areas all combined to make it exponentially more difficult for small farmers to survive. In his book about Land's Sake, the community farm he helped to start in Weston, Mass., Brian Donahue points to this "sensible regional food system" and suggests that we might do well to aim for something very similar if we're serious about re-regionalizing now.[2]

What's the utility of knowing this? I would suggest that it's a crucial reminder of how extremely recent our current system actually is. My parents grew up with much shorter food supply chains; it's only been within their lifetimes, and mine, that the famed 1,500-mile Caesar salad has been conceivable. And the fact that people are increasingly questioning the wisdom of eating this way begins to make it look as though we could soon see the second half of the 20th century as a stark anomaly, a moment when we let relatively cheap oil seduce us into thinking we could have a level of choice and convenience far beyond what anyone actually needs. Marianna Torgovnik has argued that World War II casts such a long shadow over subsequent U.S. war memories that it's difficult for us to see around it, and I'm wondering whether the same is true of the postwar shift into fully petroleum-powered agriculture.[3] If it is, then the surprisingly interwoven histories of agritourism, preserved farms, and real-life farming before the war can be a useful counter-balance for the tendency to think of the robust small family farm as a thing of the much more distant past.

Next: "A lot of ways to keep a farming going."

[1] R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History (Ames, IA: Iowa State
University Press, 1994) p. 26.
[2] Brian Donahue, Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 66, 74.
[3] Marianna Torgovnik, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (University of Chicago Press, 2005).CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-66184247190607145752012-12-26T16:44:00.001-08:002012-12-27T17:51:41.378-08:00"Bloody Mary" and back-to-the-land: Letting Polish farmers complicate the big storyWe're closing in on the end of the year, the end of my discussion of my Ethnographic Landscape Report chapters, and the end of this phase of "History at the Table." I have four chapters left to talk about, which I'm going to attempt to do in the next four days, and then the blog will enter a new mode for a while, which I'll say more about shortly.

How historical research looks in the movies

In movies and TV, people who are uncovering secrets from the past always stumble on some intriguing initial clue that leads them to a usually-linear series of discoveries culminating in a clear epiphany. Historians know that this seldom happens, and that real archival and ethnohistorical research more often involves finding tiny snippets of information that get pieced together to make more provisional interpretations. That's one thing we can learn from the process of doing rigorous historical investigations. But another lesson is that occasionally things actually do follow that clue-discovery-epiphany model, and when it does, it's tremendous fun. That was the case with Chapter 6, which covered years between Van Buren's death in 1862 and the First World War.

This was a time of sweeping transition in the American farm sector, with the continued ascendancy of commercialized markets, ever-more mechanized agriculture, and increasing attempts to bolster farmers' profitability through a range of policy measures, cooperative organizations, and technological innovations. The big story arc of farm history in the old northeastern states in this period can be described as "dwindling," with far more people leaving the agricultural economy than entering it. And yet...

In real life: misspelled Polish names in old Census records!

I found an intriguing little clue in Martin Van Buren's Kinderhook neighborhood that suggested there were people getting into farming in Columbia County even as many of the older farm families were getting out. I wouldn't have noticed it except that I'd just completed a previous National Park Service ethnography study that focused on Polish-Americans. Because I was attuned to looking for Polish surnames, they jumped out at me from the U.S. Census records around the turn of the 20th century. Once I started looking more closely, I found a sizeable number of Polish immigrants in the immediate area, clearly part of the large wave of migration from occupied Poland in this period.

The majority of Polish immigrants in the U.S. settled either in industrial cities or regions that serviced industry, like the coal-mining areas of Pennsylvania. Few were able to follow up on the widely-shared dream of becoming small independent farmers, but I knew from my earlier research that a minority had done so, often taking over the older farms of New Englanders and other northeasterners and sometimes making them highly productive again. (This was particularly the case in parts of the mid-Connecticut River Valley, where Polish family farms remain an important part of the local agricultural economy.) It became clear that Columbia County's Poles had followed that anomalous path, with sons and daughters often working in the county's small factories but with many family members--particularly the men--listed in the census as "farmer" or "farm laborer."[1] Like many Dutch- and English-Americans of earlier generations, they combined waged labor for other farmers with subsistence and small-scale market farming on land that they bought or leased.

This neighboring farm (c. 1890) regularly hired Polish workers

Some Internet searching and asking around about family names from the old Censuses helped me to track down some descendants of the immigrant generation, and this new data helped me "read into" some of my earlier interviews and sources in a richer way. For example, a charming memoir by the daughter of a neighboring farm family provided some tantalizing glimpses of the tensions between the Polish farmers and well-to-do Dutch-American farmers whom the immigrants probably saw as analogous to the landed gentry of Polish rural areas: country squires and landlords who sometimes needed reminding of their responsibilities to the less well-off.[2] The memoir recounts stories about a Polish woman that the family called "Bloody Mary" because she was the one who caught the pigs' blood in a pan during butchering. After one day of harvesting potatoes, she was found to have stacked one bushel inside another to hide some potatoes she had taken for her own use, but like others who were caught pilfering feed grain, lumber, and other supplies, she seems to have been hired again the next year. Perhaps "Bloody Mary" viewed her purloined potatoes as an informal benefit for her hard work and a way to remind her employer of his more-than-merely-financial responsibilities to those who labored in his fields.

The discussion of Kinderhook's Polish farmers in Chapters 6 and 7 let me trace both the opportunities seized by these hard-working immigrant families and the growing challenges faced by small farmers as the 20th century went on. By the time of the Second World War, the sons and daughters of the newcomers had almost all moved on to other kinds of work; the few who stayed in farming had embraced the new mechanization, chemicals, and mono-cropping that have come to characterize industrial agriculture.

Not just a Sixties thing

So the discovery of this nearly-invisible farm population doesn't change the big story arc. But it complicates it in useful ways by showing that "decline" can sometimes be accompanied by renewal and reinvention, and that going "back to the land" was by no means confined to the 1960s and 70s. Recognizing that helped me to see other examples of it from the 1930s and the 1950s (a fascinating history that Dona Brown has recently traced in her 2011 book Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America). It also provided a kind of sideways connection with the farmers who, in 1924, invited philosopher Rudolph Steiner to give a series of lectures in German-occupied Poland to address their concerns about the decline in their soil and livestock fertility after the use of chemical fertilizers. Steiner's lectures laid out the principles of what became biodynamic agriculture, which was transplanted to the U.S.--specifically, to the Hudson Valley region--a decade later and which is practiced by the farmers who currently cultivate Martin Van Buren's old farm. All these "alternatives" and hidden histories give us a picture of how ideas about farming have historically circulated in surprisingly cosmopolitan and far-flung networks.

So this wasn't a quest on the scale of the DaVinci Code, but it was an example of how pursuing a seemingly random snippet of information can throw a new light on some of what was happening around the edges of the big, taken-for-granted story of agriculture in a given period.

Next: Sometimes history helps us see how short-term a trend actually may be.

[1] For more on Polish farmers in America, see Dennis Kolinski, "Polish Rural Settlement in America" in Polish American Studies 52:2 (Autumn 1995), pp. 21-55.
[2] Elisabeth Van Alstyne Wilson. Children of Sunnyside. Self-published, 1965. Columbia County Historical Society. The 1890 image of the Sunnyside barns above is from the book.

CATHY email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569744605620721949.post-62808754562052131192012-12-24T06:38:00.003-08:002012-12-29T17:46:14.399-08:00What we can (and can't) ask history to do for us: Lessons from Martin Van Buren

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

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

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

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

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

Jesse Buel's Albany-based farm journal

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Finding new histories--and unseen alternatives--between the lines.CATHY firstname.lastname@example.com