Tag Archives: community

Our Local Table

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We were sitting around last night during the lightning storm. Our neighbor Tim was playing the banjo while we talked. We were eating bowls of chili verde and gently arguing the merits of what a local food culture means. There were six of us for our monthly discussion, as much a convivial outing as it was a chance to exercise the gray matter.

In an era of global food distribution what is a local cuisine? I remember the awkward first outing by the Knoxville Slow Food chapter when they hosted a kimchi workshop. One can certainly use local ingredients to make kimchi, and we do. But hosting that workshop highlighted the difficulty of defining a local cuisine in this global economy and era of global migration.

When the current epoch declines, as it surely will, and we are left to pick up the pieces, what will our local table look like? All the various peoples will certainly add a mixture to that table. But the table will be influenced by what is producible in the local food shed. Your post-global cooking culture will probably still have access to imported foods. But, if coming from any distance then they will be expensive and used more for special celebratory events.

Waverly Root, in his excellent The Food of France, organizes the culinary regions based on the fat used in cooking. Which I always thought was a marvelous way to view local cooking: butter, lard, goose fat or oil. It made sense to me. All of our cooking begins with the base fat used to add flavor. The fat used in non-global cuisines is a product of your land base. A nice Mediterranean climate and you will use olive oil in your cooking. A more mountainous land or one composed of poorer soils and you are more likely to use lard or goose fat, a land composed of rich pasture land and the cooking will be based on butter. The fat used in cooking seems as convenient a way as any to explore the local table.

But for many regions of this country what could be or what was a local table is now buried beneath so many Costco’s, Trader Jo’s and Walmart’s at the intersection of an interstate commerce. That table, if glimpsed, has a museum like quality.  Like a carefully curated exhibit of old cookbooks to remind us what our table may look like again in the future.

I’m fortunate to have come from a cuisine in south Louisiana that is still vibrant and has survived the global march, largely intact. But after thirty years in Tennessee I only catch rare sightings of what an indigenous cooking culture here would look like. But that table, when it does emerge, will consist of what we raise in this, our particular food-shed. My guess is that lard and butter will once again reign supreme and define the table. And olive oil will be a mere Mary Celeste of the imagination, ghosting along the coast in search of a port.

When Everything Falls Apart

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Having just finished planting my sugar peas, I stepped back and mulled over topics for this weekend’s farm note. The peas are planted in a small bed in front of the potting shed, a sheltered area I’m hoping will stay cool enough to still yield a crop for the table in late May or early June. Fresh from plunging my hands in the dirt, I thought, perhaps I’ll write about the sense of touch?

Then I recalled a conversation with a friend this past week: “We know where to go when everything falls apart,” he said. I laughed for a couple of reasons. First, a recent blog I’d read had touched on that very comment. Second, if every friend or family member acted on that impulse, our small farm would quickly become overpopulated and over-used.

Now, people partly say that to express appreciation for the hard work we put into maintaining our farm. Perhaps, too, they say it to acknowledge the vague doubt that the system of global growth can continue forever. It is perhaps hardwired in our DNA to expect bad things to happen—a poor crop, a midnight raid on the village, the Black Death, a new religion and its accompanying war.

I’m not able to see into the future. But it is reasonable, based on human history, to expect periodic boom and bust cycles. And, I’m of the camp that believes that our increased ability to strip-mine the environment has led to a host of problems that may very well take the gloss off our shiny gadgets.

But here is some advice to everyone who wants to “bug out” to their friends’ or family’s farm in the event of the next depression, pandemic, or climatic catastrophe. Get to know your neighbors, wherever you live. Make that the start of your new community. Remember, community begins at home. Then learn to grow some food. Building community and producing your own food will do more to bring you security than hightailing it to the hinterlands.

By all means put some food aside for emergencies. But know this: it might be better to plant a few peas in that unused area by the garage, kale along the driveway, or potatoes over the dog’s grave.

You might find, as my cousin in Beaumont, Texas, has discovered, that you don’t need seventy acres of land to have a good amount of food security. In his small backyard he grows enough produce for his family, with plenty to spare for the weekly farmer’s market. And he has earned a place in the community from taking an active part in his town and church for many years.

So grow something and give it to the neighbors you just met. Those acts of growing and becoming part of your community are better security than any bug-out plan you might dream up.

Besides, our farm really doesn’t have room for all of you.

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Reading this weekend: The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries, because sometimes you just need a break.

Where Do We Go?

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Some thirty years after their passing, I visited the hometown of my grandparents. The Crowley, Louisiana, of my childhood was a bustling, thriving small town. It served as a hub of a rich agricultural landscape of rice farms. The Crowley I visited a decade ago was much as any other small town in America—it seemed to have lost its coherence, its reason for being.

A blighted and empty downtown, even as the rice warehouse district still appeared to be functioning. Housing stock that had disintegrated. A certain pride had vanished. The traffic arteries into town were littered with strip mall architecture. And with all such building, much was abandoned after ten years of use: what do you do with an old Hardees?

We sacrificed our communities and the social cohesion of small towns as farmers left the land. The small businesses supporting those families were shuttered or replaced by big box retail. We moved nationally from a citizen-producer society to a “folks”(as in quaint and harmless)-consumer culture.

The Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon, Earl Butz, had a message to farmers, “Get Big or Get Out.” And American farmers got out. Our modern policies on agriculture, to be fair to Mr. Butz, have always been thus inclined. As a nation we see value in the production of agricultural goods and pride ourselves in the amount produced. But we’ve never valued the farmer and the small town around the farm.

As a consequence of bad policies and decisions, these communities have been eviscerated of any real living core. The principal businesses of the small towns in our East Tennessee valley are check cashing, title loans, pawn shops, tattoo parlors and antique shops—businesses that either suck away the individual’s ability to squeak from one check to the next, help him hide from himself, or sell him a phantom of a past he will never reach.

We have approximately 750,000 farmers in the U.S. Compare that to more than 14 million in a comparable-size area being farmed in Europe. Is it just a coincidence that Europe’s village culture remains more intact than ours? Whatever the reasons, it is clear that various factors have conspired to preserve that European tradition, and to the benefit of a livable landscape and community.

When you can’t or won’t get big and you get out … where do you go? Where do we go?

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Reading this weekend: Paper: an elegy by Ian Sansom

Ties that Bind

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A few weeks ago I was home for the funeral of my oldest sister, aged fifty-six. The four days home saw a constant parade of neighbors and friends bringing platters of food each evening. It started a Monday evening after her death and continued through Friday on the day of her service. Each evening cars began to show up laden with casseroles, fried chicken, roast pork, boudin, banana puddings, salads and cakes of all descriptions. The parade of visitors stayed for only minutes, long enough to voice their condolences, a show of respect for a family that has stayed put for generations.

The groaning tables of food lightened the grief, made festive the gathering and allowed the extended family to have communion together over a shared meal. How often does it happen in our lives that the best memories are centered over a symbolic breaking of bread? An echo of our agrarian past, a statement that as long as we have food on the table we can weather any storm, that we can shelter in place until the danger is passed.

The average American moves 11.5 times in their life. My total was thirteen moves before settling on the farm at age thirty-seven. These past fourteen years of staying put have been an education in how to be part of a place. For me, anyway, the act of being a steward of this land has made me value those ties that bind us in life: community, neighbors, family and land. Hopefully that has made me a more thoughtful steward of those ties. I’ll leave that determination to those who know me best.

Each day when we plow through our long to-do lists each task binds us tighter to this place. Each task completed makes us more a part of this farm and value more our neighbors and distant family.  There are plenty of ways to fracture a community, neighbors, family.  But like the land they can be nourished back into productivity with a little water, manure, sunshine. Once again productive if lightly used they can be lightly harvested.

If nourished well they will thrive. If ignored and not cultivated they wither. We do give so that we can receive, that is part of the compact of a healthy society and healthy land.

And if we have done our part, our community will honor our survivors with food and honest sympathy. That the land we have worked will honor us by continuing to offer food to those who come after. And, hopefully, if the life has been lived well there will be a platter of banana pudding somewhere on the table.

Habitat Loss

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What happens to us as a people when the sources of knowledge are only to be found outside of our communities? When we ask the internet for gardening advice on a plot of land between Paint Rock Valley and Big Sandy instead of the farmer who has lived those conditions for eighty years? When our education is served up by the likes of the University of Phoenix instead of the slightly eccentric teacher living down the street? When childhood summers consist of structured play and digital devices instead of pirates and adventures?

Is the human spirit so easily channeled and contained? Is the knowledge needed to live so easily reduced and boxed up for our consuming pleasure and sold to us at Wal-Mart? Where does the “person” exist in that world?

I’ve been experiencing loss this last week for something only known to me for fifteen years and no doubt making a bit more of it than needed. But I have an old fashioned conservative streak running through my bones that hates change. So when the Sweetwater Fruit Market closed their doors a couple of weeks ago after thirty years I began to tally what was lost not just to me but to our community.

We lost a great source for fruit and vegetables sourced locally and regionally long before that became trendy. They were carrying heirlooms when they were still just the old-fashioned varieties everyone always grew. I grieve over the loss of their seed selection. The store carried ten to twenty varieties of cowpeas alone, not to mention a couple of dozen varieties of sweet corn. They knew the best variety of potato for our clay soils (Kennebec’s) and when to plant. Do you think the Lowes garden department will match that knowledge or localized selection?

Theirs was a typical small town business that carried too many items with too small margins of profit. A place that dispensed advice built on their local knowledge and from local farmers. It was a business that any small town community supported easily before the era of big-box stores. The ripple effect of this closing will extend beyond the owners and the customers. It extends from the small farm providing collards and beets to the pig farmer who weekly collected the spoiled produce. And it extends to who we are as a people and what we expect from our community.

It is another in a long line of essential businesses rendered not essential by those who can’t be bothered to shop anywhere but Wal-Mart or its ilk.

How many times do you hear someone bemoan the lack of civility, the loss of community? Yet their weekly shopping habits adds to that misery and increases that loss of community and civility from not knowing or being responsible to ones neighbors, supporting them so that they may in turn support you.

Our communities are suffering from what I see as a habitat loss as real as the loss in the natural environment. We collectively strip those habitats, both natural and social, of resources we cherish. And then express our disgust and amazement at their loss. No doubt I’m making too much of this small loss to our community. But it seems a symptom of something larger that does make one wonder what we truly value.