[Editor’s Note: I worked briefly at The Cleaver Company as an extern. My time there was cut short (pun alert!) when I snipped off the tip of my finger while chopping  candied ginger for a dessert. Unfortunately I didn’t return, except as a customer at the neighboring Green Table.

These excerpts are from a talk that Cleaver gave as the first recipient of Slow Food NYC’s Snail Blazer Award at the organization’s annual gala.]

“As a chef and businessperson I practice seriously and embrace the ability and responsibility we have — the difference we can make — by consciously directing our food dollars.

I was fortunate to be raised on good food. I grew up cooking for pleasure and as a way of contributing to the family. We had large gatherings every summer on the shores of Buzzard’s Bay in southeastern Massachusetts, and feasted on corn picked just before dawn, clams dug from the sands of the tidal ponds, mussels harvested from the rocks by the creek, and seafood just off the boats of the then-formidable New Bedford fleets. I discovered that I enjoyed cooking for a crowd: I loved the camaraderie and cacophony of a well-fed group around a big table. I found that good food was appreciated and valuable; that it fed good spirits. That it was nurturing.

When I finished college in southern Vermont I wanted to buy a farm, raise goats and make goat cheese, but my intelligent partner of these past 35 years, Ashley Hollister, pointed out that I did not have the funds or skills to do that — so instead we moved to the marketplace of New York City to find jobs. I started out washing dishes in a fancy food shop, and it wasn’t long before I discovered I could make a living by cooking for people gathered around a big table.

An Urban Forager is Born

So there I was in the great marketplace of New York City – but where was the local, seasonal food? At my first job in the fancy food shop, raspberries from Chile arrived in February and we sold them for $7.00 a pint, but it was nearly impossible to find local tomatoes in August at any price.

A wonderful thing happened when Bob Lewis and Barry Benepe opened the Greenmarkets at Union Square in 1976. I was there every day it was open, and still frequent it and others around the city in my daily routine. I knew that the taste of my food was dependent on the quality of the raw ingredients, and it became imperative to know where it came from and how it was raised. I was then, and still am, what is now called an “urban forager.”

In my search for the best ingredients, I learned more and more about just how unhealthy our food supply was. The questions started coming: Where did this food come from? How was this food produced? What is it that what I am eating has been eating? What is irradiation and why are we not treating the source of these bacterial problems rather than the symptoms? Where does the Cesium 137 go? Why is it less expensive for me to buy lamb from New Zealand than from Washington County?

What kind of earth will my children inherit – will there be one?

Slow Food NYC Connects Kids to Gardens and Food

The work that Slow Food NYC is doing in their Urban Harvest Programs directly addresses many of these concerns. We have a tremendous amount of educating to do to address the food illiteracy now rampant – and for no good reason – in our over privileged, capitalist society. The gardens that have been built and the children in the eleven schools – elementary through high school – that are benefiting from this work are learning what healthy food tastes like by learning to grow it, harvest it and cook it. These kids are being given a chance through the curriculum in the program and their experiences in the garden to choose life giving food rather than the poison so often passed off as food in our society. The work that Sandra McLean and the all-volunteer board and members of Slow Food NYC are doing through Urban Harvest in Schools and Urban Harvest Gardens is outstanding and vital. They are working hands-on with the kids in reclaiming vacant land, filling it with live soil, building gardens, harvesting, and cooking what they have grown. The kids eat delicious food, which they have not only foraged but have created, around a big table.

There is a strong and growing Good Food Movement and I thank each and every one of you who is part of it. I do believe that we all – every individual who eats – can and must take an active role in curing the food supply. We must view ourselves not as passive consumers but as active creators of a healthy food system. ’Food is not the problem, but rather the solution’ as Brian Lehrer of Edible New York said, to a myriad health and environmental problems we are facing.

Let’s use our hearts, our hands and our dollars conscientiously to create better food for all.”

Resources

Slow Food New York

Have you read about Victory Gardens? The World War generations experienced something amazing that has conveniently been erased from our country’s collective memory: When called upon during times of conflict, Americans stood up and did their patriotic duty by cultivating a garden.

Millions of pounds of fresh food and produce were raised during the war years—as much as 40% of all vegetables consumed nationally.

5,285,000 Victory Gardens in the United States

According to The War Garden Victorious, Indianapolis “estimated the value of its war-garden crop in 1918 at $1,473,165. Denver placed its yield at $2,500,000 and Los Angeles at $1,000,000. Washington, District of Columbia reached $1,396,5000.”

Thanks to propaganda (“your garden is a munitions plant”) there were 5,285,000 victory gardens in 1918. The City of Rochester, New York alone had more than 15,000.  The “estimated value of our war-garden crops for 1918 (was) $525,000,000! A half billion dollars!”

Before you get visions of Mike Meyers as Dr Evil, let’s quickly translate that figure into 2010 dollars. A half billion dollars in 1918 would be worth  $7,875,000,000 today. And that’s not small potatoes.

500 Community Gardens in New York City

During WWI Americans using urban patches that ranged from a tiny garden in New York’s Bryant Park to “the railroad right of way near the tops of the White Mountains” for war gardens. The National War Garden Commission challenged the patriots of America:

“To the importance of putting all idle land to work, to teach them how to do it, and to educate them to conserve by canning and drying all food they could not use while fresh. The idea of the “city farmer” came into being.”

Today New Yorkers working in 500 community gardens are raising fresh food by the bushel basket, often in neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is limited.

Thanks to the research efforts of Farming Concrete, we know the value and weight of produce created by 67 of those 500 community gardens.

• 67 gardens comprise 1,200 plots
• 1,200 gardeners (give or take) raised 39,518 plants
• 39,518 plants produced 87,690 lbs of food
• 87,690 lbs of food is worth $214,060

But here is the statistic that really caught my eye. All this work, all this fresh food was produced on just 1.7 acres of land, or 71,950 square feet. The parking lots at suburban malls are bigger than that!

Believe in the Power of the Urban Garden

I caught up with Mara Gittleman, project director for Farming Concrete, to ask her how this research might be used. She described how most people understand the social value of community gardens but far fewer focus on the economic benefits. Since her research only focused on food production, there were no calculations for environmental benefits like waste mitigation as food scraps get turned into compost or rainwater run-off is contained in produce soil.

local food community gardens

Gittleman believes that individual gardeners can use the data to recruit members. By gaining visibility for gardens it will be harder to see land converted to development when the garden is more firmly embedded in the community. Farming Concrete is already sharing its materials and methodology with community groups across the United States and in the UK.

So what will you grow today on your urban patch?

Continue Reading

Farming Concrete Report

It’s Fun to Garden. Really.

The War Garden Victorious

The textbook answer focuses on conservation and preservation. “What is taken out of the environment is put back in, so land and resources such as water, soil and air can be replenished and are available to future generations.”

That’s definition is inline with what farm-to-table chef and owner, Peter Hoffman of New York’s Savoy and Back Forty restaurants, would agree with.

But what if you have 32,000 restaurants serving 64 million customers in 117 countries each day? Then your definition of sustainability is a bit different.

McDonald’s made news this month with the release of its 2010 Corporate Responsibility Report and Commitment to Certified Sustainable Sources.  McDonald’s actions initially will be focused on “five raw material priorities. Beef, Poultry, Coffee, Palm Oil and Packaging, which have the most potential sustainability impacts.”

If you’re heading to McDonald’s this week does that mean you’re going to tuck into a burger and fries produced from local farms? Well, no, not for a long time. McDonald’s beef and chicken will continue to come from industrial farms.

But the megacorporation has taken some steps in the right direction. When Walmart changed the sourcing of salmon eight years ago, it had a sustainability ripple effect across the corporation. McDonald’s, too, can imbue a sustainability mindset by first focusing on key inputs. Does that sound a bit industrial? Given the volumes the company has to purchase it has to.

• Beef: Commitment against sourcing beef from recently deforested rainforest land.
• Poultry: Focus on how soy is produced that is used in feed.
• Coffee: Europe is buying coffee certified by the Rainforest Alliance but US needs to catch up.
• Palm Oil: Only certified-sustainable palm oil by 2015.
• Packaging: More certified sources of wood fiber. Target? Unclear.

When you read about McDonald’s support for The Food Animal Initiative (FAI) in Europe, with its focus on “addressing the ethical, environmental and economic challenges of food production,” you hope this goes beyond inputs to broad-based behavior change across the entire organization and its myriad of suppliers.

Additional Reading

Slashfood: McDonalds’s Courts Sustainability

McDonald’s Press Release on Sustainability

Rich People Need Organic Food to Survive

Walmart and Starbucks on Sustainability

On the Fourth of July, to protest continuously low milk prices, dairy farmers in 15 states dumped thousands of gallons milk rather than sell for less than the cost of production.

Dairy farmers are nearly two years into a crisis that, at its worst, had them earning $9 per hundredweight of milk.

To put this in perspective, the average milk production cost—the break-even price—is between $17 and $27 per hundredweight, depending on the region of the country.

So, every time the milk truck comes for a pickup, farmers are not just giving their milk away, they’re losing money.

Dairy is an incredibly difficult topic to understand; so much so, that even agricultural policy experts have trouble with it.

But one thing that should be known is that this crisis is not the fault of dairy farmers. Family farmers enduring this crisis are not naive businesspeople. They are actually some of the most innovative and efficient producers in the country. Nor is this crisis simply the result of over-supply and decreased demand, as those who are benefiting would have us believe.

In fact, people in the U.S. consume more dairy products than our farmers can produce; the U.S. is generally a net importer of dairy products. The truth is that a combination of factors has led to this situation: a nosedive in milk prices, skyrocketing production costs, a tightening credit market, unregulated imports of milk substitutes, a broken pricing system that is vulnerable to extreme volatility and price manipulation, decades of lax antitrust enforcement, and increased consolidation in the industry.

When ‘Down the Drain’ is the Only Option

The milk dump that took place on July 4th is not something that dairy farmers take lightly.

The small milk check they receive doesn’t come close to covering their expenses, but dairy farmers need it more than ever. A milk dump is an incredible sacrifice for them. But the situation is dire enough that some think it could be worth it if it brings much needed attention to this issue.

Farmers cannot donate raw milk to food pantries. It is unprocessed, and neither the food pantry nor the farmer can take on that liability. As for market alternatives, while some farmers are able to take advantage of a burgeoning market for raw milk, the vast majority of farmers are restricted from doing so due to state regulations. On-farm processing requires infrastructure costs that put it out of reach for most farmers, especially in this economic and credit crisis.

We all (even those who don’t drink milk) rely on dairy farmers: for our milk and dairy products, as contributors to local and regional economies, for farmland preservation, and as part of the social fabric of our communities. More than ever, dairy farmers need our support and our understanding of this complex issue. Farmers and farm organizations have been working diligently since this crisis began to bring the issue to the attention of policy makers and consumers. The best thing that we can do for dairy farmers right now is to join them in gathering the attention that the issue deserves.

Price Supports? Or Supertankers Importing Milk?

Dedicated farmers and farm organizations have been working to bring this crisis to an end for more than a year now. Last July, 56 organizations sent a letter to Congress to press USDA to act immediately. The letter stated “for the imperative survival of tens of thousands of dairy farmers, the price of milk paid to farmers must be changed to reflect their cost of production. At a minimum, a floor price of $18 per cwt should be instituted immediately.” Congress and USDA could still make good on this request and have an immediate impact on the fate of dairy farmers. The Department of Justice has a role to play as well. To tell Attorney General Holder to take prompt action on ongoing investigations into antitrust issues in the dairy industry, click here.

Please call your representatives and tell them how important dairy farmers are to your state and region. And pass the word along: Dairy farmers need our support, and we need them to stay on the land.

Dave’s Note: In 1970 there were about 648,000 dairy farms in America; by 2006, only 75,000 remained. New York and Pennsylvania are each expected to lose up to 500 dairy farms by the end of this summer. Vermont will lose 200. Many farmers blame these losses on anti-competitive practices in the market. While wholesale prices have gone through the floor, the cost to the consumer has remained constant.

Additional Reading

A Day in the Life of a Dairy Farmer

David Fitch, Dairy farmer, local TV interview

FarmAid.org

Most of the broad, open views that we associate today with a drive in the country are essentially manmade. The fields we pass were likely farms that went fallow as farmers sold out or left to farm in the Midwest and California after WWII.

East Coast farms face multiple threats: cheap imports, competition from huge farms, an aging farm population that often earns the minimum wage, the relentless pressure of development and a lack of infrastructure to bring products to market.

Protect Land by Farming It

If you want to preserve “viewscapes” you can do what Chef Dan Barber’s grandmother did in Great Barrington, MA: Farm your open land, or lease it to someone else to farm. Keep it in sustainable and responsible production.

Both you and the surrounding countryside will receive all manner of benefits.

Towns and landowners have a number of options to protect their agricultural heritage, including:

• Protective Rural Zoning: zoning of a very low density. This is one of the most effective ways to protect rural and agricultural land and to maintain a critical mass of land required to support agricultural economies without buying conservation easements.
• Conservation Easements: a legal agreement between a landowner and a land trust or government whereby a landowner sells or donates the rights to develop his or her property to a conservation organization. When development rights are sold or donated, the land can never be developed.
• Transfer of Development Rights (TDR): a legal agreement that allows a developer (who wants to build at a higher density than is permitted) to purchase or trade for additional development rights from a willing seller who owns land in an area designated for preservation. (Source)

These well-structured and tested programs run into well-organized business and real estate interests. Last year I sat in on an open space planning session in the charming town of Millerton, NY. An audience member worked hard to discredit a team presenting a conservation framework. It turns out he was a real estate agent looking to protect a sale of a large farm. His groundwork paid dividends. Not that night but months later, when the Town tabled the plan—two years in development—without explanation.

More Reading

Keeping Open Space Open