Baltimore Eats - OUR COMMON TABLE - June 2007

Just recently my G-mail calendar reminded me that I had an early morning meeting with one of the local food/environmental organizations I'm a member in (Hopefully still in good standing!). I quickly shaved and showered -low-flow of course- and ran on over to join the group, all of us eager to save our local food economy, to save our bay, our childrens' health, our farmlands, and most importantly, the linchpin in all of this, our local farmers.

Now, we are an intelligent lot, with sincere motives. For my part I have always loved nature, food, working in gardens and growing vegetables. And for some inexplicable reason I've always been seriously concerned about the future of our species. I can safety say the same is true of my fellow members in these "Let's-fix-the-food-we-eat-and-grow" type organizations.

As we got down to the business of the day, trying to define what was local, and what wasn't local, what was organic, or not organic... what would be local, but not organic... (Should we say "local organic," or "regional organic?") and so forth, the situation became more confusing! Is a Pennsylvania farm a local farm - or a regional farm?,What about Virginia? Can a BIG outfit, like Tyson chicken really be called local? Should the Big Guys be excluded or converted?

It went round and round like a giant salad spinning machine when all of a sudden one of our members pointed out that here we were, coming up with all these absolutes about what farmers should be doing, and how they should grow, and how they should use their land -and SHE was the ONLY actual farmer at the table! Wow. Have you ever wanted to jump off the Hanover Street Bridge at 8:35am? I had an uncomfortable feeling I may have been to just one too many food group meetings. Or maybe not...

Numbers of farmers are down in Maryland and all over the country. Discussions about food, about how we grow it and the importance of land use is up. Somewhere in between the last two sentences is the answer. I believe that answer is in growing real food -real healthy food, and we dare not leave it solely to the farmers. We must engage the farmers, know the farmers, support our local farmers but that is just a very small start.

The more and more I think on what our food group efforts should be about, I feel it should be to encourage and teach people to once again learn how to grow. Everyone -old, middle aged, young, able-bodied, not-so-able-bodied, wealthy, poor- everyone should learn how to grow!

To completely relegate the most fundamental and necessary human activity since the early dawn of civilization itself to "other" people (or to an impersonal industry concerned only with profit-making) takes away peoples' ability to sustain themselves even minimally. This is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a society. More dangerous I believe than any other danger or challenge that lies ahead, and if you watch the news on TV, you know there are many. During a trip to Antigua in the Caribbean I went to the Saturday market (notice I did not say "farmers' market") in the capitol of St. John's with my friend Jazz Fenton, a well know Caribbean food authority. The sales areas were small by our standards. There were no great big stalls -maybe a portable card table, or hand-made blanket, laid out with food products on top, yet I was amazed at the variety and quality of vegetables and fruits that were offered.

I asked Jazz what part of the island had most of the farmland and she looked at me very strangely. "We really don't have farms so to speak. We just grow our food." And she was right. As I opened my eyes and looked around I saw that the yard in every house had its own garden. They were not huge gardens. They were of the size that could be grown in any of our row houses here. The system seemed to work that you fed your family first, shared and traded with your neighbors, and then the rest went to market -to sell or to barter.

This spring I attended a professional culinary conference in Chicago and sat in on a session with Michael Ableman, a well-known philosopher/farmer, and a "Man on a Mission." Ableman has been farming since the 1980's. He's the guy who stopped a land grab by developers in southern California and managed to preserve Fairview Gardens, a 100-year-old farm. Now a model of urban organic agriculture and surrounded by tract homes, it is an oasis visited annually by over 5000 people and it feeds 500 families. Michael, who is now farming in British Columbia, has studied traditional growing methods of communities from all around the world. He mused about farming, agriculture, and land use, but the biggest surprise to me came near the end of his talk when he said his dream, his vision, was for the day when the last farmer would be put out of business -when there would be no need for farmers because everyone would be once again growing their own food.

I am not Pollyannaish enough to believe this is anything that will happen in my lifetime. But it is important to remember that in the history of mankind, farming as we know it, is a relatively new invention. It is a mechanistic form of growing that has its pluses and minuses. Perhaps as the age of cheap fossil fuel wanes and we are left to our own devices to grow our own food and raise our own livestock (Yes right in Hamilton!) all this won't seem so far fetched. In the meantime I'll still put the dates for my save-the-local-food-economy meetings into my G-mail calendar because I really need the strength and the hope and the laughter of my companions.

We all need to come together -to talk, to dream, to bring others into our midst -And to hopefully spring into action helping ourselves and others to GROW!