Food and Health

by Breaking Through Concrete team.

By David Hanson

A grease bus breaking down in Berkeley is like having a Mac glitch at Steve Jobs’ house during the Apple Chirstmas party. Within a few hours of Lewis refusing to start, the small world of urban farmers and veggie diesel mechanics swung wide open.

Craig Reece arrived first on the scene, via cell phone. Craig runs PlantDrive.com,* a vegetable grease store of sorts. Craig sells conversion kits and components for people running waste vegetable oil in their diesel vehicles. Though we’d never met, Craig talked me through the engine and the triage process for Lewis.

Craig also recommended a few mobile mechanics. The second to show up was Billy, on his bike with pannier bag full of tools. Billy is one of the nicest men on earth. He looks a bit like Jack Black and John Belushi in his mechanic’s Dickies, Converse shoes, and heavy flannel coat. He speaks softly and deliberately; his voicemail says he is “delicately working on a car.” Billy is also the boyfriend of Novella Carpenter. Novella works at Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley, a biofuel station and urban farming shop run by five women. Novella has become a big name in the urban farm world since her book Farm City came out and chronicled her exploits and experiments with raising goats, ducks, pigs, and other livestock and fowl in Oakland vacant lots. (Read Grist’s interview with Carpenter.)

Billy searched Lewis Lewis for over an hour. Nothing. He returned the next day, this time in his red Mercedes grease sedan that looked as if it spends nights in an exhaust pipe. No answers yet again.

Eventually, a few days later, we got Lewis Lewis running. (Here’s a silly video of how we spent some of the time waiting.) We can’t begin to describe how happy we are to have him back. On our way out of waste-vegetable Shangri-La, we filled up with 100-plus gallons of greasy gold from Craig and headed south into the California night, stopping at 2 a.m. beside a classic example of large-scale monocropping—miles of potato fields sown by equipment larger than Lewis Lewis. We woke early and rolled out before coffee could brew.

A farm in the heart of Santa Barbara’s suburbs

By Edwin Marty

Edwin joined us for a four-day stint, beginning at the Fairview Gardens in Santa Barbara. He then rode with us in Lewis Lewis for a limping trek across the southern Cal desert and into Flagstaff before returning to his family and farm.

I’m standing in the last patch of working production farm in the once-verdant Goleta Valley. We’ve arrived at Fairview Gardens just after dawn, and the farm crews are heading into the fields.

Toby McPartland, the farm manager, gives us a survey of the 12-acre urban farm nestled amongst suburban houses in the heart of Santa Barbara.We walk slowly among avocadoes, peaches, plums, figs - all the wondrous fruit that used to be commonplace in the Goleta Valley. Annual vegetables form geometric lines between the orchard rows. Chickens wander the farm like they own the place. I breathe in the beauty, a different world from my home in Birmingham, Alabama, where I have my own farm. I started Jones Valley Urban Farm eight years ago on a vacant city lot. Today the working production and education farm encompasses three acres of vacant property in downtown Birmingham. I was there yesterday in the 90-degree southern heat for our second annual Slow Food Fair. Dozens of local chefs, brewers, winemakers, and food artisans shared with our community what food in central Alabama should taste like.

It’s nice to be here on the Fairview Gardens farm where, in the post-dawn cool, I can relax and appreciate someone else’s work and the history behind this beautiful growth. Unlike most urban farms in the country, Fairview has been a farm for the last 125 years. It’s one of our few examples that does not break through concrete; in this case, the farm came before the city. Housing developments and roads with increasing amounts of traffic sprouted where the avocadoes and plum trees once lined up. Fairview hung on, and the new suburban backyard walls hemming in the island of agriculture could not eliminate the traditional farm sounds, smells, and critters.

There’s an expectation of a certain order and “cleanliness” that accompanies suburban living. The farm’s realities—compost, tractor engines, roosters—were not considered amenities, despite the fact that Fairview produces fresh food available to all. Neighborhood tensions arose along with real estate pressure. In 1994 Fairview Gardens was saved from development through a conservation easement and the creation of a nonprofit organization called the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens.

Toby takes me to the freshly plowed fields waiting for the first rounds of summer crops. His vision for the future of the last farmland in Santa Barbara unfolds as he drops sunflower starts into the rich, dark soil.

“Fairview needs to be a model for small-scale sustainable farms,” he says. “We need to provide an example to young farmers that you can make a living on this scale of agriculture. If that happens, our urban spaces will be transformed by entrepreneurs reconnecting consumers with their food.”

This vision might seem like a bit of long shot. Prime farmland is still being developed on the periphery of every urban area and the scale of farms is increasing, not decreasing. The new director of Fairview, Mark Tollefson, has a complimentary view of the future of this farm—one that just might turn the tide of our globalizing food system. Fairview offers summer camps for kids and an apprenticeship program of workshops and courses for young farmers.

“We just need to have kids laughing on the farm. Once they understand the place of the farm in their lives on that level, everything else takes care of itself,” says Mark.

Mark’s own child, three weeks old, born on the porch of this farm hemmed in on all sides by the suburbanization of America, is laughing for us all.

*We here at BTC can and will plug businesses we like. We like PlantDrive. This entire post, in fact, has more product/people placements than a sitcom kitchen set.

 

 

Related Links:

Homeless learn to farm in Santa Cruz

Breaking Through Concrete: Day 1—Seattle to Talent, Ore.

Boost your support for urban agriculture with a rice-growing bra

by Darby Minow Smith.

At Seattle’s Café Nordo, the wait staff quotes Jack London, the soup is served from fish tanks, and there’s enough alcohol to ease the pain of the BP oil spill momentarily,

Nordo’s odd coupling of an oceanic musical production, “Bounty! An Epic Adventure in Seafood,” with a five-course sustainable seafood dinner is the group’s second, largely successful, venture into the world of dinner theater.

The theater aspect of the production—tables are set in a makeshift ship in which vivacious sailors go from hoisting sails to serving food—involves stowaways and evolution, scorned lovers and global warming. The resulting plot is a bit haphazard, but quite complements the food, the true star of the production.

Each course is coupled with chronological information about the sea and sustainability, starting with oysters and ending with Baked Alaska, and experiments both with flavor and what its clientele are willing to eat.

Take geoducks. If you Google this mollusk, the phallic results might make you think you accidentally turned off safe search. At Nordo, it came both raw and cooked in a seaweed salad. Our hosts tried to obscure the geoduck’s unfortunate appearance by having what looked like a dog’s ghost shuffle about humorously while we ate. In the end, the sake vinaigrette, ginger, fennel, and Pink Lady apple chunks complimented the geoduck so well we forget what it looked like anyway.

I had only two quibbles with the production.  

At one point, the ship-wrecked crew waxes on about the exploitation of the ocean, painting the sea as a woman wronged and taken for granted. Their heartfelt ode did nothing but make me want to hand the ocean my drink. If eco-plays are to have any kind of a future, they must drop the outdated habit of female personification. How many plays featuring Mother Nature as a cast member could you stomach?  

Second, Nordo’s prices are quite limiting. At $79 for Thursdays and $89 for Fridays and Saturdays, only the wealthiest can afford to show their support for sustainable seafood.

But it’s hard to complain, given the incredible cuisine and painstaking attention paid to sustainability. (Our raw oysters’ shells were recycled back into the sea after the show.)

And with the BP oil spill swirling in the back of my mind, along with the rough shape of oceanic ecosystems in general, I couldn’t help but wonder if this were the future of seafood. Will we be left with the sea’s hardiest creatures at even tougher-to-swallow prices? Will Alaska indeed end up baked?

If so, we’ll need of plenty of booze to wash it all down.

”Bounty! An Epic Adventure in Seafood” runs on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays through June 19.

Related Links:

Breaking Through Concrete: Day 1—Seattle to Talent, Ore.

Bike to Work Day and bike to work cities

Living Buildings, Living Cities, and $125,000 up for grabs

photo: McKay Savage via flickr. The southern Indian state of Kerala has officially announced a new farming policy which aims to covert all agriculture in the state to organic methods over the next ten years. In the first phase 30,000 hectares converted, The Hindu Business Line reports, and then proceeds in a "phased and compact manner."

Experts send a mixed message to consumers when it comes to eating fish: it's good for your heart health but beware of the methylmercury. A new way of organizing and ranking the pollutant's levels in fish and shellfish may help consumers navigate this apparent contradiction, according to the study's author.