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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] THERE AND BACK AGAIN: A local food visit to Grand Island, Nebraska
  • Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 07:40:03 -0700

THERE AND BACK AGAIN: A local food visit to Grand Island, Nebraska,
Being an account of my travels to the Rural Advantage Conference,
with some thoughts on the importance of slow food in rural areas,
and a report on the "All-Nebraska Sustainable Banquet", a winter
feast of celebratory foods.

Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma Food Cooperative,
www.oklahomafood.coop/bobsblog/

To get to Nebraska by air from Oklahoma City, first you fly to
Denver, then you get on a somewhat smaller plane and fly to Lincoln.
I guess there isn't much direct Lincoln-Oklahoma City air traffic
these days. Be that as it may, it did mean that I got to see my
family (father and sister live in Denver) going and coming and we
ate sandwiches together in kind of a 21st century family picnic in
the airport, just outside of the Security Gate to the passenger
loading areas. The Denver Airport is of course the epitome of modern
transportation design. Soaring "tent" roofs, chrome, tile. . . and
guards wandering around with big dogs on leashes.. Such contrasts we
have in our lives. I was glad they brought sandwiches because the
airport food choices looked pretty grim, not to mention expensive.

Watching the patterns of the land below as we flew over the plains
was interesting. Humanity has done its best, northwest from Oklahoma
City to Denver and then back east to Lincoln, to impose a regular
square and rectangular checkerboard pattern upon the Great Plains.
Occasionally you see a triangle. But the limits to human planning
are very plain from the air. Just when the surveyors would think
that things were nice and square, oops there goes another river, or
a creek, maybe a small wash, a place where water moves over land,
and it goes where it wants to go, heedless of human desires. There
was a lot of green along the way which I guess is winter wheat,
alternating with patches of yellow and brown. The brown was
disturbing, mostly because it seemed likely to me that the brown
represented tilled earth, not covered with vegetation or mulch. And
that means topsoil flowing away, down those lines of water,
serpentine creeks, an occasional river. Or topsoil blowing away into
the wind, up into the atmosphere.

The weather was beautiful. I was told that I came to Nebraska on the
best two days in February in the history of the state.

The conference that brought me to Grand Island, Nebraska last Friday
was "The Rural Advantage: Profitable and Sustainable Agricultural
Opportunities for Nebraska. The meeting was presented by a
collaboration of University of Nebraska Extension and the Nebraska
Sustainable Agriculture Society. I spoke at their "All Nebraska
Sustainable Banquet" that evening, and then participated in a
breakout session the next day that discussed establishing an
Nebraska Food Cooperative on the "Oklahoma plan". The banquet speech
was mostly evangelical about local foods. Yes, it was preaching to
the choir, but having been a choir director for many years, I know
that it is very important to preach to choirs. Otherwise, they may
forget why we do what we do. This is true for both music and food..

At the breakout session we discussed the practical details of how we
do what we do in the Oklahoma Food Cooperative..

My hosts were Mark Hutchinson and Brad Zumwalt, who work for the
Food Processing Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They
picked me up at the airport, and gave me a quick tour of their
facilities before we headed out to Grand Island. It is a great
project and does a lot of good work. I believe that the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln is where the Food Processing Center as a
function of a land grant university got started.

They have been observing our progress since early last year. Mark
and Brad came down and visited one of our delivery days, and we
signed up the UN-L Food Processing Center as a producer member so
they could get a close view of how our software works from the
producer and customer angles, and receive all the customer and
producer emails.

Friday night some of the folks got out their guitars and a small
group of us settled into one of the breakout rooms for some music. I
have felt for a long time that we needed some songs, and while that
has been on the "list of things to do", it hasn't quite gotten to
the top of the list. Well, then I met Allen Moody of the Organic
Valley Cooperative and he sang a song, "There's a Better Way of
Farming", to the tune of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken". Words are at
the end of this blog entry. So now we have an anthem.

The people in Nebraska were great. And the food at the All Nebraska
Sustainable Banquet was truly good eats. They had bison roast from
Jim Tegtmeirer of Burchard and Egbers Organic Farm of Hooper. Blue
Valley Aquaculture in Sutton brought Nebraska farm raised trout,
breaded with their own recipe. The trout farm is in a former pig
CAFO. Swords into plowshares, and pig barns into trout farms, sounds
like a plan to me.

There was wheat berry salad with feta cheese and onions, all three
items Products of Nebraska. The feta cheese was made by Diana McGown
in the UN-L Food Processing Center. Mio Amore Pasta in Edgar makes
organic gourmet pastas. They brought Whole Wheat-Carrot Pasta Salad.

Common Good Farm in Raymond donated baked butternut squash (also the
onions for the wheat berry salad). Shadow Brook Farms in Denton
donated honey glazed carrots and daikon radishes, sprinkled with
just a hint of cinnamon and ginger. This was my first taste of
cooked radishes, and I am hooked. The carrots were harvested last
November, and stored in a root cellar. They looked as fine as any
spring carrot I have ever seen and tasted as good as any I've ever
et..

Open Harvest Cooperative, a member-owned retail grocery cooperative
in Lincoln, donated roasted potatoes. There were some very fine
whole wheat dinner rolls from the Grain Bin in Lincoln, a bakery and
supplier of various rolled grain products. I spoke with one of their
people, they were the first to import a particular kind of rolling
machinery suitable for small operations. It was invented by a guy in
England, and arrived with no instruction or maintenance manual. But
being farm country people, they figured it out, and over time have
developed a complete set of production protocols for items like
rolled oats, flakes, and other such items made with a variety of
grains.

The UN-L Dairy Store, an activity of the Food Processing Center,
brought ice cream and it was very good ice cream. It was better than
Braum's Ice Cream here in Oklahoma City.

This culinary adventure was coordinated by Elaine Crawford, of the
Nebraska Sustainable Ag Society and the Nebraska Cooperative
Development organization. (Hire her to do all your local food
banquets.) Besides highlighting the geography and sustainability of
the foods, they also wanted to show what a winter banquet based on
seasonal foods of the region would look like. And they succeeded,
they presented a truly inspirational meal that celebrated their
region's food production. Four stars, at least. Or maybe I should
say, "Four Pork Chops".

Now comes the really interesting part. This event happened at the
Grand Island Holiday Inn, and the organizers worked with the Holiday
Inn catering staff people who were willing to step outside of the
food industry box and bring in these great local ingredients to
prepare this banquet for the meeting.

Before the banquet there was a Nebraska wine and cheese party, 3
vintages were presented, and I thought they were all really good.
The cheese was from the UN-L Food Processing Center, and they make a
nice cheddar cheese, no doubt about that.

There was a lot of information available at this conference. They
had excellent exhibitors, who provided a lot of high quality free
information. I brought a whole bag of stuff back, I will have to
plant a couple of trees this year to balance the tree budget. There
were several farm exhibitors, and most of them had recipes to share,
and a good recipe is always a good thing. Found a great handout on
cooking grass fed beef, which I will send along later.

The Saturday breakout session was titled Developing Local Food
Systems for Nebraska. The panel was Mark Hutchinson, Brad Zumwalt,
and yours truly. Mark briefly described their research, and
discussed their observations of several local food producer/retail
operations. They also passed around a survey designed to find people
interested in participating in participating in the Nebraska Food
Cooperative. They have registered the domain www.nebraskafood.org
and have set a launch date of the Spring of 2006. Brad talked about
the survey and how important it was for people to get involved.

At the banquet, I gave what is becoming my "stump speech". I begin
by remembering the "food and family culture" of the Red River valley
of southwest Oklahoma where I was born and raised. There was talk
of "get big or get out", we rhetorically flew over rural America and
saw the small farms getting bigger and bigger and understood how
bankruptcies and politics drive that process. There is a vicious
cycle in farm country: the continued economic squeeze of low prices
for commodity crops and high prices for farm inputs causes an on-
going search for greater efficiencies, which usually means bigger
equipment, more land, and more production – which leads to even
lower prices for commodity crops, thus causing a need for more land,
bigger equipment, and more production – which leads to even lower
prices for commodity crops and so on and so forth. Nice work if you
can get it I guess but it doesn't really pay very well although it
seems to consume a vast amount of money and resources. And "consume"
is the key word in that sentence.

Any number of economists will tell us that we are all better off as
a result of that pain and disruption. We are – by definition! –
"they say" orders of magnitude More Efficient now than we
were "Before". The economists tell us this is so it must be true.
But it seems to me there are some problems with their calculations.
Their account books have no ledger entries for the human and
environmental and cultural costs of what has essentially been a
political and economic war on farmers and rural economies. They
don't value the topsoil that has blown into the wind or washed down
the river. They don't particularly care about the empty main streets
and the near-ghost towns, or the kids who move off to the city and
return home only for holidays and funerals. The world of economics
uses primitive accounting methods which delusionally pretend that if
something can't be quantified, it doesn't matter and isn't important.

We are what we eat, and our food system reflects who we are as a
people. Think about that when you look at a confined animal feeding
operation or consider what happens to and with a Tyson or Cargill
chicken.. Food is just fuel, if we get it cheaply and abundantly, we
win and that is all that matters. So says the culture of death.

If we want to change this, if we want a more sustainable vision and
practice in rural America, then there must be a market for the
products of a sustainable agriculture system. No market, no
sustainable agriculture. No amount of politicking can bring about a
sustainable agriculture system in the absence of a market for the
products of sustainable agriculture.

The way out of this mess begins with an understanding that food is
not just fuel. Food is culture. Food is family. Food is life. We got
into this situation one bad decision at a time and we will get out
of it one good decision at a time. We must act NOW before it is too
late. Environmental destruction, top soil erosion, climate change,
these wait for no man or woman. Like the river cutting across the
plain, they come upon us whether we like it or not, in fact, we
bring them upon ourselves.

There has been a drastic breakdown in the transmission of heritage
food information between generations. Our great grandparents were
solar farmers, much of that knowledge was not passed down to the
present generation. We must conserve what we have and rediscover old
ways and new ways to meet our changing situations.

We do this when we experience the authentic joys of true food, slow
food, heritage food, eaten in company with friends and family,
produced by real people using sustainable methods.

Nobody can save the world all by himself or herself, and no one
person is responsible for that. But each of us is personally
responsible for how we live our own individual lives. Do our
decisions serve life and sustainability or death and destruction?

We start small or we don't start at all. We must walk the talk, if
we say we want to protect the environment, then we must make
lifestyle decisions that protect the environment and limit the
damage we do to the planet. If we walk the talk, we get, as we say
in religion, a `testimony'. And with the testimony of our lives, we
can be powerful witnesses to others, and help them to find their own
way towards more sustainable ways of living. Talk is cheap, how you
live speaks louder than your words. For good or for ill.

This is a movement of social justice. We must not leave anybody
behind for the wolves to devour. Slow food, true food, good food, is
for everybody, rich and poor and all points between.

We must not be afraid to plant seeds, even if they be the tiniest of
seeds. We can be confident of the harvest. We should be able to see
the day when CAFOs are only a distant bad memory, a time when people
for the most part eat the fruit of their own land, rediscovering and
developing unique regional and seasonal tastes. This is can be a
self-fulfilling prophecy if we make it so.

I ended by reading two short paragraphs from "the Epistle of Joel
Salatin to the Agrarians and Urbanites," which of course is his book
Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: the food buyers guide to farm friendly
food": Joel did a reading from this book at Terra Madre 2004 in
Turn, and these paragraphs were among those he read.

"Just like any action, the most critical thing is that you do
something. Today. At least this week. Otherwise, you will have been
given knowledge that requires action, and refused to act. That is
worse than ignorance. A whole world, a wonder world, exists outside
of Wal-Mart. And although it's not a sin to go there, it may be a
sin to go there frequently."

"If you are a person of conviction, a person of action, you will
begin with one step, a second step, then a third. New habits are
formed one tiny change at a time. A year from now you'll look back
and wonder how you ever tolerated that factory fare. Your children
won't eat eggs from the store because they don't taste any good.
You'll be emotionally and spiritually uplifted, knowing your food
buying has encouraged farm friendly food."

With a launch date of Spring 2006, the good folks coming together to
form the Nebraska Food Cooperative have a lot of work to do. I am
really curious to see how they adapt our methods to their own unique
situations, and I am excited about the opportunities that we will
have to learn from their experience. We should all remember that an
essential aspect of the cooperative movement is the willingness to
help others form cooperatives. We are going to set them up with
our "Local Food Cooperative Management System" software for free. If
anyone can think of other ways that we can help them, be sure to let
us know. We are going nowhere without solidarity, because if we
don't all get there together, nobody will get there at all.

Many prayers and good wishes for the Nebraska Food Cooperators!

Robert Waldrop, still bon apetitin' down at the Oklahoma Food
Cooperative, it will be nice to have neighbors to the north.

www.oklahomafood.coop

THERE'S A BETTER WAY OF FARMING

By Allen Moody

tune: Will the Circle Be Unbroken

(1) I was standing by my window

O one bright and sunny day,

Looking at those hills all rolling

Pastures green and making hay.

Chorus:

Will the circle be unbroken,

Lest that circle come untied.

There's a better way of farming,

If we try, Lord, if we try.

(2) Those cattle grazing, looking peaceful,

Bring that sunshine to my home.

For them steaks that I am broiling

Feed my family, friends, and more.

(3) Modern farming is so short-sighted,

The old ways must be preserved.

If cheap food is all we ask for

Then we get what we deserve.

(4) Two hundred years of agriculture,

Have washed my soil away.

Ain't no `mount of, fertilizer

Gonna make this kind of farmin' pay.

(5) The voice of reason, must be spoken

If the land is to survive.

There's a dead zone in the gulf,

A thousand square miles wide.

(6) Don't believe that you are beaten

`cause you're outspent and outgunned.

Victory goes to the righteous

We will know that when we've won.







  • [Livingontheland] THERE AND BACK AGAIN: A local food visit to Grand Island, Nebraska, Tradingpost, 02/07/2005

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