Every year I think about buying a pressure canner and learning to use it, so I could can our beans as beans, but I still haven’t. Squash, beans, peas, okra, corn, and basil pesto are easy enough to steam-blanch and put into the freezer in meal-sized bags. But since tomato products represent about half the bulk of our stored garden produce, I’d rather have them on the shelf than using up electricity to stay frozen. (We would also have to buy a bigger freezer.) And besides, all those gorgeous, red-filled jars lining the pantry shelf in September make me happy. They look like early valentines, and they are, for a working mom. I rely on their convenience. I’m not the world’s only mother, I’m sure, who frequently plans dinner in the half-hour between work and dinnertime. Thawing takes time. If I think ahead, I can dump bags of frozen or dried vegetables into the Crock-Pot with a frozen block of our chicken or turkey stock, and have a great soup by evening. But if I didn’t think ahead, a jar of spaghetti sauce, a box of pasta, and a grate of cheese will save us. So will a pint of sweet-and-sour sauce baked over chicken breasts, and a bowl of rice. I think of my canning as fast food, paid for in time up front.
That price isn’t the drudgery that many people think. In high season I give over a few Saturdays to canning with family or friends. A steamy canning kitchen full of women discussing our stuff is not so different from your average book group, except that we end up with jars of future meals. Canning is not just for farmers and gardeners, either. Putting up summer produce is a useful option for anyone who can buy local produce from markets, as a way to get these vegetables into a year-round diet. It is also a kindness to the farmers who will have to support their families in December on whatever they sell in August. They can’t put their unsold tomatoes in the bank. Buying them now, in quantity, improves the odds of these farmers returning with more next summer.
If canning seems like too much of a stretch, there are other ways to save vegetables purchased in season, in bulk. Twenty pounds of tomatoes will cook down into a pot of tomato sauce that fits into five one-quart freezer boxes, good for one family meal each. (Be warned, the fragrance of your kitchen will cause innocent bystanders to want to marry you.) Tomatoes can even be frozen whole, individually on trays set in the freezer; once they’ve hardened, you can dump them together into large bags (they’ll knock against each other, sounding like croquet balls), and later withdraw a few at a time for winter soups and stews. Having gone nowhere in the interim, they will still be local in February.
In some supermarket chains in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, shoppers can find seasonal organic vegetables in packages labeled “Appalachian Harvest.” The letters of the brand name arch over a sunny, stylized portrait of plowed fields, a clear blue stream, and the assurance: “Healthy Food, Healthy Farms, Close to Home.”
Labels can lie, I am perfectly aware. Plenty of corporations use logo trickery to imply their confined meat or poultry are grown on green pastures, or that their tomatoes are handpicked by happy landowners instead of immigrants earning one cent per pound. But the Appalachian Harvest vegetables really do come from healthy farms, I happen to know, because they’re close to my home. Brand recognition in mainstream supermarkets is an exciting development for farmers here, in a region that has struggled with chronic environmental problems, double-digit unemployment, and a steady drain of our communities’ young people from the farming economy.
But getting some of Appalachia’s harvest into those packages has not been simple. Every cellophane-wrapped, organically bar-coded packet of organic produce contains a world of work and specific promises to the consumer. To back them up, farmers need special training, organic certification, reliable markets, and a packaging plant. A model nonprofit called Appalachian Sustainable Development provides all of these in support of profitable, ecologically sound farming enterprises in a ten-county region of Virginia and Tennessee. In 2005, ten years after the program began, participating family farms collectively sold $236,000 worth of organic produce to regional retailers and supermarkets, which those markets, in turn, sold to consumers for nearly $0.3 million.
The Appalachian Harvest packing house lies in a mountain valley near the Virginia-Tennessee border that’s every bit as gorgeous as the storybook farm on the product label. In its first year, the resourceful group used a converted wing of an old tobacco barn for its headquarters, using a donated walk-in cooler to hold produce until it could be graded and trucked out to stores. Now the packing plant occupies the whole barn space, complete with truck bays, commercial coolers, and conveyor belts to help wash and grade the produce. Tomatoes are the cash cow of this enterprise, but they are also its prima donnas, losing their flavor in standard refrigeration, but quick to spoil in the sultry heat, so the newest major addition at the packing house is a 100-by-14-foot tomato room where the temperature is held at 56 degrees.
Participating farmers bring vegetables here by the truckload, in special boxes that have never been used for conventional produce. Likewise, the packing facility’s equipment is used for organic produce only. Most of the growers have just an acre or two of organic vegetables, among other crops grown conventionally. Those who stick with the program may expand their acreage of organic vegetables, but rarely to more than five, since they’re extremely labor-intensive. After planting, weeding, and keeping the crop pest-free all season without chemicals, the final step of picking often begins before dawn. Some farmers have to travel an hour or more to the packing house. In high season they may make three or more trips a week. The largest grower of the group, with fifteen acres in production, last year delivered 200 boxes of peppers and 400 of tomatoes in a single day. Twenty-three crops are now sold under the Appalachian Harvest label, including melons, cucumbers, eggplants, squash, peas, lettuces, and many varieties of tomatoes and peppers.
The packing house manager labels each box as it arrives so the grower’s identity will follow the vegetables through washing, grading, and packaging, all the way to their point of wholesale purchase. Farmers are paid after the supermarket issues its check; Appalachian Harvest takes a 25 percent commission, revenue that helps pay for organic training, packing expenses, and organic certification. Cooperating farmers can sell their produce under the umbrella of a group certification, saving them hundreds of dollars in fees and complex bookkeeping, but they still would need individual certification to sell anywhere other than through the Appalachian Harvest label (e.g., a farmers’ market). The project’s sales have increased dramatically, gaining a few more committed growers each year, even though farmers are notoriously cautious. Many are still on the fence at this point, watching their neighbors to see whether this enormous commitment to new methods will be salvation or disaster. The term “high-value crop” is relative to a dirt-cheap commodity grain like corn; in season, even high quality organic tomatoes will bring the farmer only about 50 to 75 cents per pound. (The lower end, for conventional, is 18 cents.) But that can translate into a cautious living. Participants find the project compelling for many reasons. After learning to grow vegetables organically, many families have been motivated to make their entire farms organic, including hay fields.
The Appalachian Harvest collective pays a full-time marketer named Robin who spends much of her life on the phone, in her vehicle, or pounding the grocery-store pavements, arranging every sale with the supermarkets, one vegetable and one week at a time. As a farmer herself, she knows the stakes. Also on the payroll here are the manager and summer workers who transform truckloads of field-picked vegetables into the clam-shelled or cellophane-wrapped items that ultimately reach the supermarket after produce has been washed and sorted for size and ripeness.
On a midsummer day in the packing house, vegetables roll through the processing line in a quantity that makes the work in my own kitchen look small indeed. Tomatoes bounce down a sorting conveyor, several bushels per minute, dropping through different-sized holes in a vibrating belt. Workers on both sides of the line collect them, check for flaws and ripeness, and package the tomatoes as quic
kly as their hands can move, finally pressing on the “certified organic” sticker. Watching the operation, I kept thinking of people I know who can hardly even stand to hear that word, because of how organic is personified for them. “I’m always afraid I’m going to get the Mr. Natural lecture,” one friend confessed to me. “You know, from the slow-moving person with ugly hair, doing back-and-leg stretches while they talk to you…” I laughed because, earnest though I am about food, I know this guy too: dreadlocked, Birkenstocked, standing at the checkout with his bottle of Intestinal-Joy Brand wheatgrass juice, edging closer to peer in my cart, reeking faintly of garlic and a keenness to save me from some food-karma error.
For the record, this is what Appalachian Harvest organics look like at the source: Red Wing work boots, barbershop haircuts, Levi’s with a little mud on the cuffs, men and women who probably go to church on Sunday but keep their religion to themselves as they bring a day’s work to this packing house inside a former tobacco barn. If sanctimony is an additive in their product, it gets added elsewhere.
The tomato room offered a 56-degree respite from the July swelter, but it was all business in there too: full boxes piled on pallets, in columns nearly reaching the ceiling. The stacks on one end of the room were waiting to be processed, while at the other they waited to be trucked out to nearby groceries. Just enough space remained in the center for workers to maneuver, carting out pallets for grading, sorting, and then slapping one of those tedious stickers on every one of the thousands of individual tomatoes that pass through here each day—along with every pepper, cabbage, cucumber, and melon. That’s how the cashier ultimately knows which produce is organic.
Supermarkets only accept properly packaged, coded, and labeled produce that conforms to certain standards of color, size, and shape. Melons can have no stem attached, cucumbers must be no less than six inches long, no more than eight. Crooked eggplants need not apply. Every crop yields a significant proportion of perfectly edible but small or oddly shaped vegetables that are “trash” by market standards.
It takes as much work to grow a crooked vegetable as a straight one, and the nutritional properties are identical. Workers at the packing house were as distressed as the farmers to see boxes of these rejects piling up into mountains of wasted food. Poverty and hunger are not abstractions in our part of the world; throwing away good food makes no sense. With the help of several church and social justice groups, Appalachian Harvest arranged to deliver “factory second” vegetables all summer to low-income families. Fresh organic produce entered some of their diets for the first time.
I grew up among farmers. In my school system we were all born to our rank, as inescapably as Hindus, the castes being only two: “farm” and “town.” Though my father worked in town, we did not live there, and so by the numinous but unyielding rules of high school, I was “farmer.” It might seem astonishing that a rural-urban distinction like this could be made in a county that boasted, in its entirety, exactly two stoplights, one hardware store, no beer joints (the county was dry), and fewer residents than an average Caribbean cruise ship. After I went away to school, I remained in more or less constant marvel over the fact that my so-called small liberal arts college, with an enrollment of about 2,000, was 25 percent larger than my hometown.
And yet, even in a community as rural as that, we still had our self-identified bourgeoisie, categorically distinguished from our rustics. We of the latter tribe could be identified by our shoes (sometimes muddy, if we had to cover rough country to get to the school bus), our clothes (less frequently updated), or just the bare fact of a Rural Free Delivery mailing address. I spent my childhood in awe of the storybook addresses of some of my classmates, like “14 Locust Street.” In retrospect I’m unsure of how fact-based the distinction really was: most of us “farm” kids were well-scrubbed and occasionally even stylish. Nevertheless, the line of apartheid was unimpeachably drawn. Little socializing across this line was allowed except during special events forced on us by adults, such as the French Club Dinner, and mixed-caste dating was unthinkable except to the tragic romantics.
Sustaining the Unsustainable
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Doesn’t the Federal Farm Bill help out all these poor farmers?
No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare. The formula for subsidies is based on crop type and volume: from 1995 to 2003, three-quarters of all disbursements went to the top-grossing 10 percent of growers. In 1999, over 70 percent of subsidies went for just two commodity crops: corn and soybeans. These supports promote industrial-scale production, not small diversified farms, and in fact create an environment of competition in which subsidized commodity producers get help crowding the little guys out of business. It is this, rather than any improved efficiency or productiveness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by families.
But those family-owned farms are the ones more likely to use sustainable techniques, protect the surrounding environment, maintain green spaces, use crop rotations and management for pest and weed controls, and apply fewer chemicals. In other words, they’re doing exactly what 80 percent of U.S. consumers say we would prefer to support, while our tax dollars do the opposite.
Because of significant protest about this lack of support, Congress included a tiny allotment for local foods in the most recent (2002) Farm Bill: some support for farmers’ markets, community food projects, and local foods in schools. But the total of all these programs combined is less than one-half of one percent of the Farm Bill budget, and none of it is for food itself, only the advertising and administration of these programs. Consumers who care about food, health, and the supply of cheap calories drowning our school lunch programs, for example, might want to let their representatives know we’re looking for a dramatically restructured Farm Bill. Until then, support for local and sustainable agriculture will have to come directly from motivated customers.
For more information visit www.farmaid.org.
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STEVEN L. HOPP
Why should this have been? How did the leafy, sidewalked blocks behind the newspaper office confer on their residents a different sense of self than did the homes couched among cow pastures and tobacco fields? The townie shine would have dimmed quickly (I now realize) if the merchants’ confident offspring were catapulted suddenly into Philadelphia or Louisville. “Urban” is relative. But the bottom line is that it matters. The antipathy in our culture between the urban and nonurban is so durable, it has its own vocabulary: (A) city slicker, tenderfoot; (B) hick, redneck, hayseed, bumpkin, rube, yokel, clodhopper, hoecake, hillbilly, Dogpatch, Daisy Mae, farmer’s daughter, from the provinces, something out of Deliverance. Maybe you see where I’m going with this. The list is lopsided. I don’t think there’s much doubt, on either side, as to which class is winning the culture wars.
Most rural people of my acquaintance would not gladly give up their status. Like other minorities, we’ve managed to turn several of the aforementioned slurs into celebrated cultural identifiers (for use by insiders only). In my own life I’ve had ample opportunity to reinvent myself as a city person—to pass, as it were—but I’ve remained tacitly rural-identified in my psyche, even while living in some of the world’s major cities. It’s probably this dual citizenship that has sensitized me to my nation’s urbanrural antipathy, and how it affects people in both camps. Rural concerns are less covered by the mainstream media, and often considered intrinsically comic. Corruption in city governments is reported as grim news everywhere; from small towns (or Tennessee) it is fodder for talk-show jokes. Thomas Hardy wrote about the sort of people who milked cows, but writers who do so in the modern era will be dismissed as marginal. The policy of our nation is made in cities, controlled largely by urban voters who aren’t well informed about the changes on the face of our land, and
the men and women who work it.
Those changes can be mapped on worry lines: as the years have gone by, as farms have gone out of business, America has given an ever-smaller cut of each food dollar (now less than 19 percent) to its farmers. The psychic divide between rural and urban people is surely a part of the problem. “Eaters must understand,” Wendell Berry writes, “that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” Eaters must, he claims, but it sure looks like most eaters don’t. If they did, how would we frame the sentence suggested by today’s food-buying habits, directed toward today’s farmers? “Let them eat dirt” is hardly overstating it. The urban U.S. middle class appears more specifically concerned about exploited Asian factory workers.
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