At your next meal, analyze your dish, vegetable by vegetable, noodle by rice grain by sauce by canned or frozen food. How many miles did your dinner travel?
Who made your bread? Who churned your butter or margarine? Who handled your meat or fish or tofu? How many hands, how many work hours, helped deliver that protein to your plate?
As fresh market season begins in Wisconsin, it may become easier to answer those questions. We have the opportunity to meet farmers, smell the soil on our produce and taste pure, fresh produce.
Or we could just eat Twinkies. The choice truly is ours.
But evidence — overwhelming, powerful and motivating evidence — shows that eating locally grown and produced food is not only an epicurean and sensual treat but also might help to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Those problems — seen globally with recent riots over food shortages in Third World countries — are evident also in Milwaukee’s inner city, where it’s easier to find a bag of chips than an apple. Unbelievably, the fast food restaurants that populate our city are often cheaper and more accessible than preparing nutritious, wholesome meals at home.
The problem is not just one of food choices but of entire food systems. Though Wisconsin has a rich tradition of farming, its residents are dependent upon apples from Washington, lettuce from California and grapes from Central America.
As it journeys to our kitchens — often in refrigerated trucks — our food guzzles gas, exacerbating global environmental problems, and harms local farm economies.
The damage is personal, too. Ask an urban or suburban child where food comes from and the answer will likely be, “the supermarket.” Without a sense of our dependence on the earth, we are left slightly anemic, missing a crucial nutrient. There is simple beauty in fingers stained purple from picking blackberries and the warm juice of the season’s first tomatoes.
Farmer, photographer and author Michael Ableman analogizes that urban and suburban folk are like little birds sitting in nests waiting for mother bird to fly in with food from afar. “We’re in a new era of dependency,” he said during an interview last February in Milwaukee. He came to town as the keynote speaker at “Pollinating our Future,” an urban agriculture conference sponsored by the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute and Slow Food WI.
“It’s important to rethink the way food comes to cities,” he said. “[I] feel that a portion of food in cities should come from those cities.”
“The problem with the food system as it is today,” Ableman said, “is that one-and-a-half percent of the population is responsible for feeding the rest. So the rest feel that they don’t have anything to do with it.”
Ableman is working to be part of the solution. He is the founder and executive director emeritus of the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens, a non-profit organization based on an organic farm in southern California. He has started food gardens at the Santa Barbara AIDS Hospice, an 11-acre farm at the Midland School and a market garden at the Jordan Downs housing project in Watts in Los Angeles.
I met him just after a trip to Jamaica, where he is consulting with reggae music mogul Chris Blackwell. Their goal is to “rebuild the food system in a country that is totally dependent on exports,” Ableman said.
He also has written three books about food and farming, including his newest, “Fields of Plenty: A Farmer’s Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It” (Chronicle Books, 2005).
The urban agriculture movement is alive and well in Milwaukee. It takes the form of community gardens, but also aims to create sustainable farms that can provide income and increase food security.
Travel through Milwaukee and you’ll find many spots — old parking lots, slivers of soil under highways, rooftop hothouses — where people are digging their hands into the earth and making a slow but real difference.
“Most people think of food production as happening on a large scale … but the potential for small lots is incredible,” Ableman said.
One example can be found at 2000 W. Fond du Lac Ave. Some 35 urban farmers, most of them Hmong immigrants, gather every day during summer at the Fondy Food Market to sell produce that they grow in small plots of land, from five to 15 acres, mostly in Saukville or Germantown.
“These are real farmers,” said Young Kim, executive director of the market, in an article on the market’s Web site. “Everything is done by hand — no tractors or irrigation systems.”
The Fondy market is the centerpiece of the Fondy Food Center’s anti-hunger food efforts, which include live cooking demonstrations, a nutrition education program for middle school-aged girls and a program for farmers that provides agricultural education and marketing assistance.
The market is one of two in Wisconsin to accept Wisconsin QUEST Foodstamp cards. Fifteen farmers now accept food stamps using wireless handheld card readers.
For Ableman, farming and teaching are essentially Jewish work. But it took a cross-country journey to help him see the Jewish roots in what had seemed like a rebel’s pursuit.
While working on his most recent book, he drove with his adult son and father as the older Ableman talked about their family history. Michael learned about his great-grandfather, Abel Ableman, who fled Russia and set his roots in rural Delaware.
Because Jews were not allowed to own land in Russia, Abel “cherished his newfound freedom to take title as one of the greatest treasures of his adopted America,” Michael wrote in “Fields of Plenty.”
Abel bought little parcels of land and devoted himself to agriculture, later opening a store that sold, among other things, farm equipment and mules. In the 1920s and 30s, he helped young couples by giving them land, furniture, clothing and farm animals with no down payment and no interest. At the end of each harvest, the young families would come to town to make a payment.
Three generations later, something clicked for Michael. “Now, as I picture the chain of lives that my great-grandfather affected, I see that, unbeknownst to me, I was a link in the chain as well,” he said. “Thousands of miles away, with no knowledge of my past, I have continued his work, using a little bit of knowledge and experience to offer a model and a start to the next generation.”
To me, Michael’s story is a quintessentially Jewish American story. He rejected convention, seeking instead a simple, earthy revolution.
His is a story of chutzpah, creativity and reinvention — notions that likely have been among the tools of Jewish survival. And he is joined by Jewish farmers and innovators around the world.
One of those people is Eli Zabar, for whom innovation cohabitates with knishes and rugelach. Above the three-story brick complex that houses Zabar’s, his family’s iconic Manhattan food emporium, Eli tends to a serious and sprawling, half-acre rooftop garden.
Ableman described his visit to Zabar’s roof in “Fields of Plenty”: “My mind races at the prospect of farms on the tops of every building in New York. I consider how much food could be produced, how many people could be employed, how it could improve the diets of local residents, what impact it would have on the urban environment.”
Here in Milwaukee, there are little, meaningful steps we can take: Plant gardens, buy a farm share through a community supported agriculture (CSA) program, shop at farmers’ markets, pay attention to what we eat and where it’s grown.
And dump the Twinkies.
