Welcome to “Reaping” Substack Live Video Episode 7 with Dana DiPrima, the founder of the For Farmers Movement. For Farmers is a consumer-funded, volunteer-operated, totally grassroots system of connecting eaters to the small- and and mid-size farms that feed us.

Dana has devised an ingenious method of both elevating small- and medium-sized farmers so they’re seen, and funding them through a mix of individual and organizational donations. Individuals can nominate a farm they’d like to see funded, and famers can apply for grants and post online wish-lists of things they need to stay in business—everything from coffee to a pair of gloves or small equipment.

At “Reaping” one of our mottoes is that small, individual actions can make a difference, and Dana’s work is a testament to that. She’s also offering consumers an easy way to participate in food system change, and I know from my travels and experiences speaking to groups that people are hungry for actionable ways to drive change.

One word Dana says appears repeatedly among the majority of grant applications, like a melodic theme, is the word “community.” Where the rise of industrial agriculture hollowed out local economies and destroyed their sense of community, small- and mid-sized farms excel at reviving that precious ingredient.

The writer and farmer Wendell Berry has noted that a community is a shared place where people know each others’ stories, where neighborliness leads to trust in each other. That trust, in turn, gives rise to a system of mutual aid and strong local economies. Dana’s work is helping to revive rural economies through story telling, shared trust, and mutual aid. Hers is a solution that is right-sized to fit an alternative food system that’s shut out from the bloated, heavily subsidized, and environmentally and nutritionally destructive economies of the dominant industrial food system.

Dana is also host of the fantastic, top-rated “One Bite is Everything” food and farming podcast on Heritage Radio Network, and you can find her on Instagram at xoxofarmgirl.

Please give our chat a listen, and if you’d like to read the transcript, just click on the “transcript” button at the top right of this screen. As always, if you like this conversation, please like, follow, and subscribe to “Reaping.” It means a lot to me!

Next week, “Reaping” will be back in print form, with an article on the book Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods. I interviewed one of the book’s two editors, the dynamic Liz Carlisle, and it’s going to be a super-interesting read, so stay tuned!

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Hello Readers!

This week “Reaping” takes us into the principled, idealistic world of no-waste, climate solutions restaurants. It’s hard enough to run a conventional restaurant but when one of your core goals is to reduce food waste and upcycle it into delicious food, that’s a whole other order of magnitude of hard.

But the idea of a no-waste restaurant sounds a little preachy and maybe not that delicious, right? The genius of Kayla Abe and her partner, chef David Murphy’s Shuggie’s in San Francisco was that it defied all preconceptions of what a do-good, no-waste restaurant would feel and taste like. Their Mission district gathering spot for jazz and “trash pizza” was day-glo, mod-colored, brimming with communal joy and the energy of a house party, brought into focus by David’s, punchy, brightly seductive and wildly creative dishes. When Shuggie’s opened in 2022 (the name is a term of endearment the couple use for each other) it earned places on both Bon Appetit and Esquire magazine’s best new restaurants lists.

I write about Shuggie’s in the past tense because after a glorious four-year run, the restaurant closed in July. In part the reason for writing this is to mark the loss of a true original in a city full of great restaurants. A large portion of them would probably tell you they believe in local, seasonal, and sustainable, yet have not embedded those ideals into their DNA the way Shuggie’s did.

As Kayla described in this farewell post, theirs was a climate-solutions restaurant that valorized waste streams. She DIY-ed her vision for a social and environmentally just and sustainable future into reality through an interplay storytelling, food, and design. Shuggie’s broke down preconceived notions of what food is “good” and what is “trash.”

Three Generations of Farm Roots, Growing up in San Francisco

I caught up with Kayla at this in-between moment in her life, where she reflected on what she and David had achieved, and looked forward to new adventures in climate action, food, and hospitality. In the eco-conscious Bay Area, it was not much of a stretch for Kayla to become interested in environmental issues at a young age. She took on the role of no-waste watchdog for her own family.

A Yonsei, or fourth generation Japanese-Chinese American, she is one generation removed from three generations of Japanese American farmers based in the central coast farming hub of Salinas, California. This background, she says, perhaps gave her a “generational awareness of farming as a public service and all the work that goes into food systems.” Her Chinese American mother was the family cook and a successful entrepreneur, who once ran a fish market next to Chez Panisse that supplied that and other restaurants.

A 2014 internship with the organization that runs the San Francisco farmers markets, Cuesa, now called Foodwise, turned into a post college job managing fundraising events, donor communications, and graphic design. She then joined Oatly for its U.S. launch. The Sweden-based company tasked her with “making oat milk big” in a country that had barely heard of it. “I had a backpack full of oat milk and pedaled around the city trying to grow the coffee community’s interest in oat milk. Everyone thought it was goat milk or oatmeal,” she recalls.

It was an education in marketing a corporate sustainable product, and provided a glimpse into American industrial food supply chain, which had pushed oat production into Canada as American farmers switched to large-scale, more profitable corn and soy farming. Oatly worked with individual farmers in the U.S. to test oats as a cover crop, but ended up sourcing mostly Canadian commodity oats. As readers of the grains chapter of my book Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System know, creating or re-regionalizing a defunct grainshed is hard work!

A First Foray: Upcycling Bruised and Imperfect Produce

To support some farmer friends of theirs, Kayla and David opened their upcycled produce business Ugly Pickle Co. in 2018. “They had bumps in harvest or cosmetically irregular stuff, so we decided to help them out,” she says. The couples’ pickles-and-spreads side hustle grew into a full-blown business, its products eventually carried in 250 stores along the West Coast. But the arrival of the pandemic and the rise in cold storage and glass costs in 2020 wiped out their margin. They needed to pivot.

Although Kayla’s mother, who had briefly owned a restaurant, cautioned her to stay clear of that business, for David, it was the only world he knew, and had ever wanted to be in. He wanted to find his way back in to a restaurant kitchen. Kayla saw it as a way to continue her climate-solutions work and immerse herself in the local agricultural network. “At a certain point with the scale of our pickle company, we had outgrown all of our partners. Once we got into co-manufacturing we were working with bigger farms.” It was the smaller farms she wanted to reconnect with, who had opened their eyes to the problem of food waste, and had no income stream for that portion of their harvests. So in 2022 they opened Shuggie’s Trash Pie + Natural Wine

Building Shuggie’s

Kayla and David developed a network of more than 50 small farmers and ranchers, and were able to make it work because they were at the farmer’s market every week to pick up. “We had to juggle. If people were out of things, we had to change the menu. But that uncertainly and that level of agility were baked into our initial concept. It’s not a challenge of the job, it is the job,” she adds. “David is inherently so creative when it comes to menu building and so adept at it, it could happen on the fly.” What they loved most was that “these farmers we had shopped with for many, many years were part of their community. Our propriety supply chain was us going to the farmers market and talking with these people we really love.” You can check out a sample menu, the last that Shuggie’s put out, below.

They learned that for any premium product, there was a corresponding waste stream. So it was not hard for farmers to channel that waste stream to them in exchange for an income stream they would not otherwise have. For the first several years, Shuggie’s “trash pizza” was their main menu item and draw, the vehicle to explain both the problem and one solution to food waste. The dough was made from upcycled oat flour from Renewal Mill, a byproduct of oat milk manufacturing. (Thus Kayla upcycled her previous work experience at Oatly as well as a grain processing byproduct.) David used whey from his own cheese-making process (when discarded it’s a major polluter of waterways because of the way it suffocates aquatic life), which enhanced dough elasticity and texture. Toppings were a rotating cast of upcycled ingredients.

The Décor: Not your Scandi Japandi Usual

The counterpoint to David’s, bold, spice, acid, umami and heat laden food was the orange and green, sultry and super-bright décor, lined with vintage lighting, glitter countertops, and ‘70s-era accents, either of their own making or thrifted. “We knew from the outset that we couldn’t make it into this beige box, no Scandinavian design, nothing inherently ‘environmental,’ or what people conceive of as environmental,” Kayla says. The mural of the lady in mod boots holding a martini glass, created by Kayla herself, channels Mexican folk art and ‘70s graphic design.

Some guests were drawn by the design and the live jazz music, some by David’s cooking. “A

Really big pocket of people came because they loved our mission, and were excited to see the idea of food rescue in real time. Some came because it was a really good community of local people. They loved the way it felt, they knew they would run into friends whenever they came by, or make new friends. That was a new realization for me, and an enduring warm spot.”

Shuggie’s 2.0

Last September, in order to have more flexibility in upcycling whatever became available, David and Kayla took pizza off the menu in favor of a bigger variety of composed dishes to be shared, changed the name of their restaurant from Shuggie’s Trash Pie + Natural Wine to just Shuggie’s. The change allowed them to riff on a wider variety of proteins, such as the full tuna skeletons they would break down: bones draped with unctuous meat, served with its marinade and a variety of toppings. “It’s a very visceral table side experience, and a great example of what we do,” Kayla says. In addition dishes like David’s tuna rib crudo, they upcycled invasive species such as scorpion fish, “things not found on a typical menu because there’s no marketing campaign for them.” Beef cheeks, sweetbreads, and a constellation of offcuts were also grist for the kitchen. “Each dish had like five things that were upcycled,” Kayla notes.

Deciding how much explaining of Shuggie’s philosophy should be done table side was an ongoing conversation. “We didn’t want to force this educational mission down peoples’ throats as they’re trying to have a fun time out,” says Kayla. “So we led with the positive experience, being out with friends, having a great meal. That has to be the leading takeaway. But we’re buying people’s attention through their stomachs.” In many cases the deeper mission would sink in, and guests would began to pay attention to the little menu details that tell the upcycled story. But there was also pushback, from customers who wondered why they were paying good money for a “trash” pizza or other upcycled ingredients, who suggested the restaurant was dumpster diving. Most guests, however, got it. “Fortunately we hit all of this at a moment where food waste was becoming more of a mainstream concern,” says Kayla.

Another talking point the staff would convey is that sourcing and breaking down upcyled ingredients is “exponentially more work than just operating a normal restaurant. We’re internalizing all of the R and D—that’s not even factored into the costs. And just the actual labor of processing some of these ingredients is higher because we’re not getting giant chicken breast cutlets. When things are bruised, it takes more effort and more time to fab[ricate] things down.”

End of the Shuggie’s Era

The community was vibrant and real, but the cold hard financials were even more real. “Yes, we have a big community of people and we were busy every weekend,” says Kayla. But weekdays could be slow, and all of the specials and events and live music, and changed hours could not overcome a highly challenging time for San Francisco restaurants. Kayla and David saw so many of their peers close. There’s also the current political climate, she adds, “where climate matters are not a priority anymore.” They finally conceded to those realities in July.

Kayla still thinks upcycling in a restaurant or café concept is doable—as long as there is a dedicated staff member willing to go to the farmers markets every week, the chef can creatively flex with whatever is on offer, and the kitchen team can process those ingredients with ease and speed. A fine dining restaurant with deeper resources could do it more easily, but for Kayla and David, bootstrapping the entire way, it was a journey of problem-solving and pivoting that eventually ran its trail-blazing course. “Our goal was to be like the most extreme example of what a food rescue restaurant could look like, and then inspire others to use these ingredients,” she says.

As part of the 2023 James Beard Foundation Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Program, Kayla learned a lot about cost analysis frameworks and capital budgeting, and got to speak to members of Congress at the White House about restaurants and climate change. Along the way, Japanese corporate investors expressed an interest in bringing Shuggie’s and it’s climate-solution ethos to Japan. But endless talks in the end broke down because the couple couldn’t commit to living there full time.

Future Facing

Kayla and David plan on staying on their course of climate education-meets food and design. It might take the form of events catering, where they can craft a climate solutions narrative, or supporting other companies in this area with branding and fundraising. Having done branding, illustration, design, and interior design for Shuggie’s, Kayla adds, another one of her desires is “to just do more art.” But she adds, “It’s scary. In the back of my mind, I’m like, maybe I just need to go get a corporate job—I don’t know!”

Perhaps the future will be in some way recapturing the best of her experience at Shuggie’s. One aspect was helping their farmer and rancher community monetize food waste in a significant way. The other is more intangible. “There’s so much lead up to every single day: getting ready for service, and running around after things that weren’t ordered, or were ordered and they never came, or dealing with call-offs (no-show employees) and all that,” Kayla explains. “But once service started and we had a full dining room, and everyone was eating and happy and having a good time, just knowing that we aided in creating this moment for people was such an incredible feeling.”

Next week, I have a great Substack Live video chat planned with the amazing Dana DiPrima, the dynamo behind the For Farmer’s Movement, the “One Bite is Everything” podcast, and who posts at xoxofarmgirl. Our exact date and time is TBD, as some family issues have recently disrupted my carefully planned schedule. Please stay tuned for details!

As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Other News and Notes:

Land consolidation in California is a huge problem, and getting bigger as small farmers face another existential threat: falling victim to decades of unsustainable groundwater pumping and attempts to limit access to it. Read this report from the California Alliance of Family Farmers (CAFF), and some fresh reporting around the issue from The Los Angeles Times.

AI-generated images on wildfires and other extreme weather events are spreading misinformation, anxiety and fear, as this CBC News report details. “Influencers” are telling lies for profit, incentivized by content monetization programs on Meta, X, TikTok and other platforms. Often, they’re pinning the blame on humans—arsonists—for example, ultimately becoming another form of climate disinformation.

Thank you to Public Books for including this laudatory review of Reaping What She Sows in its July roundup of recommended books! I’m flattered and grateful.

Species loss and Japanese food culture meet in this item on endangered dishes from around the world from Intrepid Travel. Narezushi, or specifically its subset funazushi, the salt- and rice fermented fish from Shiga Prefecture, is now threatened by changing tastes and the dwindling population of Lake Biwa nigorobuna carp, from which it is made.

Stay safe, everyone, and stay strong, Canada!

Welcome to “Reaping” Substack Live Video Episode 6, with a woman who is a pioneer in re-thinking school lunches. She’s overseen farm-to-school lunch programs in California and Virginia, worked with an array of experts to usher in scratch cooking, food and nutrition education in schools, and a variety of culturally appropriate foods, from yakisoba in Oakland, enchiladas made with local chiles in Texas, and kelp meatballs in Maine. Sandy now serves as program manager for the Culinary Institute of America’s Healthy Kids Collaborative project.

For those of you who prefer to read rather than watch it, please click on the “transcript” screen at the top right of the screen to view it.

As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

I’m just back from a week in Vancouver, British Columbia, where endless sunny days are delighting tourists and provoking anxiety among those concerned about the ongoing wildfires in the province’s interior. For me, being a participant in the global tourist economy and exulting in the beautiful weather while knowing that much of the world burned pressed my face up against a glaring truth of modern life in the developed world: We are all complicit in climate change, and the weather events and wildfires it is amplifying. Once we understand that, it’s up to us to live as sustainably and regeneratively as possible, and help tilt the world toward climate mitigation and adaptation.

Reaping What She Sows is a roadmap to doing so through our food choices. I was delighted to be able to meet up in Vancouver with one of the heroes of chapter six of my book, “Women who Harvest the Sea.” Sonia Strobel is the founder and CEO of the Vancouver-based CSF (community-supported fishery) Skipper Otto. If you’ve read Reaping, you’ll recall that Sonia turned her maternity leave project of finding customers for her fisherman father-in-law Otto and a few of his friends into a 7,500-member strong CSF, which delivers across Canada and is now in its eighteenth year of operation. The business runs on the same principle as the CSA, or community supported agriculture model selling direct to consumer to keep prices low and transparency and dollars in producers’ pockets high.

Over an iced tea at a café below the Skipper Otto office in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver, I caught up with Sonia. Here are some of the highlights of our conversation:

· The Port Alberni, Vancouver Island fish harvesters that you met in the chapter—all members of the Tseshaht First Nation—had a great fishing season this year. The one fisher Sonia had been hoping to recruit, Melanie Fred, is now a full-fledged Skipper Otto producer. The truck crane—which Sonia, on our visit to Port Alberni in May 2024, told the group she had landed a grant to purchase—has made a huge difference in the Skipper Otto fish harvesters’ lives. Where once they had to vie with buyers for use of the single off-loading station at the wharf, the provincial grant, worth nearly a quarter of a million dollars, allowed them to create their own mobile offloading station. It’s streamlined the multi-step process of getting fish from ocean to processing plant, and brought a new sense of ownership to the CSF harvesters. [You can see it in action in the video linked below!]

Sonia told me about one member, Willard, who now walks the dock with the confidence of a buyer, because the crane has flipped the previous power dynamic between fisherfolk and buyer. “They all feel like we’re on a level playing field now, not like we are lesser. There’s just such pride,” she said.

· Sonia’s two sons, Oliver 18, and Lyndon, 14, are now both fishing for Skipper Otto, along with Sonia’s husband Shaun. In order to onboard a new marketing team for Skipper Otto, Sonia has temporarily returned to that department. She’s calling the new department’s first 30 days “the listening tour,” a period in which they absorb as much about the operation as possible before they touch any aspect of the business. To give them a full picture of the fish harvester’s day and week, from the minute they leave home to the moment they offload the totes filled with fish at the processing plant, Lyndon made this four-minute video.

· Setting a goal to get the crane, targeting the grant, and then landing it is a good example of Sonia’s disciplined approach to business: “Being deliberate and really thinking, ‘What do we need and how do we get it? Where is the money coming from?” She added, “It’s so easy to get distracted from those long-term project, to lose your momentum. It takes discipline to say ‘no’ to another shiny object or marketing cross-promotion request. I want us to do fewer things more deeply: if we’re going to do a campaign, I want detailed reporting so that we can learn from it.”

· To make those decisions easy, as part of Skipper Otto’s three-year strategic plan, Sonia has pared down the organization’s mandate to three items. “We call them our three bets,” or the three things that will best allow her team to succeed. The first is membership growth and retention. The second is to sell more fish. And the third is operational excellence. If a request or an action they’re contemplating does not support one of those three bets, they’re not likely to proceed.

It’s an approach that’s made Skipper Otto profitable, with an 88 percent subscriber retention rate, two points short of its goal, and growth in the dollar amount each member is spending on fish.

· One of the personal goals of Sonia’s that we talked about during our visit two years ago was to engage in more mentorship and policy advocacy. She’s moved forward on both of those goals. A mentorship program that she and Skipper Otto chief operating officer Chris Kantowicz pitched to the Local Catch Network is now in its third year and has been renewed for a fourth. So far the two of them have mentored a dozen different community- supported seafood systems throughout the U.S.

· The Local Catch Network mentorship starts with a February site visit to the community-based seafood business, the setting of goals, then virtual meetings every two weeks throughout the year to help the organization solve problems and reach sustainability. “We don’t change the world with one business. We change the world with a diverse network of values-based people and businesses,” Sonia explained. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel on everything. That’s the power of a mentorship program.”

She added, “What we do at Skipper Otto and what all these businesses are doing is systems change. It’s about solving for systems problems. Seafood happens to be the content area. It’s really about identifying where values are not matching up with the outcomes that the system is designed to produce.”

The seafood businesses she’s mentored have different complexities around their logistics; where their customers are located; whether their seafood can be frozen or not. But the underlying goal is the same. “There are a lot of systems processes that we can cut and paste: meeting structures or financial system pieces. There are best practices that people can be up-skilled in. Some of it is creative problem solving together.

“In other cases,” Sonia added, “we can introduce businesses to each other, and they can share learning and build a peer mentorship. One business on the east coast had scallops, and another was looking for scallops for their members, so we connected them. One of my mentees in California talked to another mentee in Hawaii, and realized that buying fish from Hawaii for their customers in California was a more direct and transparent seafood supply chain than a lot of the seafood they were getting from ‘mystery’ sources.”

· On the policy side, with the aid of a grant from a philanthropist member of Skipper Otto, Sonia is now working with Ecotrust Canda on strengthening local fisheries on the west coast. The idea behind her project, the BC (British Columbia) Fisheries Transition Readiness Accelerator, is to create policy parity with east coast provinces. There, provincial governments mandate that control of local fisheries stay in the hands of people who are actively fishing their waters, instead of being aggregated and placed in the hands of foreign and/or corporate ownership. BC does not yet have such a policy. Sonia is working with legislators to usher in that policy change, and with local harvesters to prepare them for swift action once more robust support for local fisheries is in place.

Making that policy change a reality is hard, Sonia explained. “There’s a real power imbalance here because the vast majority of licenses and quotas are owned by investors, processors, or the people who buy the fish from them. There’s an incentive for that power structure to stay the way it is,” and a lot of misinformation that needs to be debunked.

· To help keep her mentorship and policy work from bleeding into her Skipper Otto duties, she devotes Mondays and Fridays to those projects and works from home. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays she works on Skipper Otto matters out of its Kitsilano office.

· While finding and keeping good employees is a constant struggle in some industries, for Skipper Otto that’s a non-issue. “Every single person who works here can see how the work that they’re doing is connected to fish fishing families and to consumer families, that they’re executing a vision that’s really powerful,” Sonia told me. “And that’s directly connected to worker productivity; they are connected to the vision and the mission of Skipper Otto.”

Sonia has also implemented alternating four- and five-day work weeks. “In some business circles people have been skeptical of that. But my team produces more on an alternating four-day, five-day work week than a lot of other teams where they are technically on a five-day work week, but they’re taking their doctor’s calls on the side This way, people are getting all of their life admin done on those days off.”

I felt that Sonia and I only scratched the surface of new developments at Skipper Otto and the vast potential of empowering sustainable local fisheries. Yet it was a heartening talk amid a lot of bleak environmental news. I hope you’ll find your local sustainably fishery (click on Local Catch’s “Find Seafood” tab to search in your region) and support it!

As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Other News and Notes:

What does regenerative fashion look like? You caught a glimpse of it in my Substack Live chat with food and fiber farmer Brenda Hsueh. This Atmos article, “The Ecosystems Woven Into Our Clothes,” looks more deeply into the textile and fashion industry leaders and farmers who are driving a less extractive and more holistic approach to clothing. It’s one that nurtures the entire ecosystem—from soil, microbes, and plants to apex predators—that clothes us.

In his “Heatmap”newsletter introduction to this article on this year’s El Niño phenomenon, Robinson Meyer wrote this: “Since late 2023, political discussion of climate change has decreased. This isn’t a phenomenon limited to any one faction of the Democratic Party … but it is a clear trend. The American media’s coverage of climate change has declined during the same period. This “climate hushing” is not because politicians stopped caring per se, I think, but because nobody is sure how to talk about the issue in a politically useful way anymore, especially after the “climate = jobs” rhetoric that underpinned the Biden administration’s policy failed to retain voters in 2024.”

I found this statement distressing because it accepts that without a “politically useful” way to talk about climate change, who wants to bother raising the issue? Politicians, governments and corporations have backed down from addressing climate change, which is unbelievable given how it is more in our faces than ever. For a publication so in the weeds on climate change (Heatmap, that is) to make this statement came as a reminder that everyone has their own agenda when it comes to climate change. It is up to us, grassroots citizens, climate activists, environmental groups and the people that support them, to push for change on the ground. Sorry, there’s a paywall to the article but you can sign up for the very informative Heatmap newsletter for free here.

To end on some positive news, Food Tank’s Dani Nierenberg is high on the potential of black soldier fly larvae to drive the development of a more sustainable circular economy. Listen to her conversation with Dr. Abdou Tenkouano, Director General for the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology at icipe (Tropical Insect Science Institute) on the great potential of insects to help both the land and we humans who live on it.

P.S. Sorry, I had some camera issues, so the Substack Live me is missing from this video. But I /was/ on the other end of the conversation!

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I’m at a beautiful cottage on a lake northeast of Toronto, thinking about what it means to be “rooted in the land,” whether it is the Grey County, Ontario landscape where farmer Brenda Hsueh and her partner Skyler Radojkovic raise sheep; Saratoga Springs, NY, where Brooke McConnell oversees the 166-acre Pitney Meadows Farm; or Humboldt County, CA, where for five generations, one family has stewarded Lone Star Ranch.

These are all farmers and pastoralists I have written about, who are living exemplars of what plant geneticist and biologist Wes Jackson and philosopher, educator, and writer Bill Vitek advocate for in their 1996 book Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place. In this, and other collaborative projects, they have argued for building polycultures over monocultures, emphasizing community health and wellbeing over maximizing profits, and for humility, care, and attention over hubristic one-size-fits-all tech solutions to our problems. By being rooted in the land—which involves getting to know it intimately—we can join the effort to regenerate it, and begin to repay the ten thousand-year carbon debt that humankind has accrued since the first farmer began tilling the soil.

Wes Jackson and The Land Institute

Wes Jackson, as many of you may know already, is the visionary co-founder of The Land Institute (TLI) in Salina Kansas, whose mission is to develop perennial grain crops that offer a far more climate smart, sustainable, and regenerative way to farm. Instead of annuals, which require yearly tilling that disturbs the soil and impedes both biodiversity and carbon storage capacity, perennials are nature’s way of taking the long view. They abide over many growing cycles and seasons, establishing broad and deep root systems. They co-exist in complex symbiosis with their diverse ecosystems, and prioritize longevity over seed production. Perennials play a major role in paying down that carbon debt I referred to earlier. (The 2025 PBS documentary Prairie Prophecy does a good job of encapsulating Jackson and TLI’s work.)

I write about TLI and Jackson’s work on the perennial grain Kernza in my book, Reaping What She Sows, yet only learned about Vitek and his body of work with Jackson recently, through one of my book promotion trips. It was my third visit to Middlebury College in Vermont, at the invitation of the college’s fantastic Japanese Club (J-Club to members). I was there to give a talk on Japanese craft sake, and was looking forward to seeing some students I’d met last year who were either graduating seniors this year, or in one case, a graduate who had stayed on in the community to work.

J-Club and The Knoll

This time, though I wanted to be in touch with another cohort of student life: students involved in The Knoll, a magical place that serves as a hands-on educational garden for students and helps feed the college community. It features an outdoor meeting place for labyrinth walking and pizza making, and a spiritual center anchored by a large stone bench blessed by the Dalai Lama himself. I ended up doing two talks, one on craft sake, and another on Reaping What She Sows.

On my first afternoon in town, J-Club president Claudia Lopez (a Texas Latina who speaks and translates Japanese texts!) introduced me to Megan Brakeley, the associate director of The Knoll who seemed to embody a rootedness in both Middlebury’s land and community. She introduced me to numerous students who were preparing beds for vegetables and tiny pots for new seedlings. We were on land that, since time immemorial, has served as a meeting and exchange site for the Western Abenaki people. Part of the garden’s harvest, I learned later, goes to the Nulhegan Food Security Programs of the Abenaki Nations.

In a 2023 essay marking the 20th anniversary of the founding of The Knoll (Growing With the Knoll: Twenty Years in the Garden, available here for free download), Brakeley wrote, “If we approach soil and land as teachers, even as kin, how do we act in reciprocity and serve as actors of regeneration? When we talk about connected human histories on the land, how far back do we go—and whose stories count?” It was touching to me that in addition to a place where students can put their hands in the soil and learn skills that can feed and sustain them for a lifetime, they were also learning to honor the land and the generations that had so faithfully stewarded it before them. The spiritual dimension of the afternoon expanded as we began our tour of the grounds—green and gleaming under a bright spring sun—with a meditative walk through the labyrinth.

Brakeley, a 2006 graduate of Middlebury who went on to earn an MA in environmental management from Yale, guides Knoll interns and oversees all programming, as well as the educational garden. One program she especially wanted me to know about was the New Perennials Project, which, like Rooted in the Land, sprang from the collaboration between Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson.

The two men met in 1991 when Vitek was teaching philosophy at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. He had moved from pure philosophy to adopting a more practical approach, teaching medical ethics then agrarian ethics. He read Aldo Leopold, learned to milk cows, and became enamored with what he calls “the working landscape.” For an environmental ethics class, he invited the environmentalist, activist, and author Bill McKibben to speak at Clarkson and for the same speaker series, Wendell Berry. Berry could not make it, but recommended his close friend Wes Jackson.

The New Perennials Project

The philosopher and the plant geneticist began a conversation that has lasted for 35 years, and given birth to a series of close collaborations, including the books Rooted in the Land and The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (2010). The day we spoke, Vitek pointed out that it was Jackson’s ninetieth birthday. The New Perennials project is their latest effort together. It’s funded by a Rockefeller Family Fund grant they received in 2018 to integrate the concept of perenniality—emphasizing roots and relationships and shifting from short-term annual to long-term perennial thinking. The Middlebury project also dovetails with The Land Institute’s Perennial Cultures Lab.

The New Perennials Project, in a fashion that turns out to be typical of Wes Jackson, involves nothing less than rethinking education itself. In a 2010 conversation with him, Vitek recalls Jackson saying to him, “We need to rethink the college curriculum; it’s all geared to making us into people who take from the earth, extractionists.” Vitek said to his friend, “What part of the curriculum?” Jackson’s reply was, “all of it.”

“That’s how he thinks,” Vitek says. “Wes says his work is focused on trying to solve the problem of agriculture. Not “problems in agriculture.” And he believes that both the agricultural and educational systems were misguided from the beginning and still are, and need a complete overhaul. He might say the same about our food system. Not that we have to eradicate the one to allow the other to exist; we have to put great effort into nurturing the alt food system, which requires young people who have received a perennial education, who think in terms of resilient, interdependent polycultures, not monocultures, and the greater good of the community rather than the enrichment of the few.

At Middlebury, the New Perennials Project works to flatten the teacher-student hierarchy, offers a horizontal rather than vertical learning experience, and cultivates reciprocity, interconnection, intergenerational learning, and community. Nature becomes both teacher and classroom, and walking—that slowest and most essential form of travel—shows the way to the creation of deep-rooted interconnectivity between people and place.

Grading is kept to the bare minimum. Instead, students and faculty work and walk and think together as they consider the question “What does perenniality look like, and what must it become, outside of agriculture? Beyond the classroom students work as New Perennials interns, publish their writing, and participate in a community roots fellowship program that has placed students in jobs at the local newspaper; a hand-operated press devoted to promoting civic engagement and democratic ideas; an elderly or a teen service organization, a land trust; or a community theater, to name just a few options. New Perennials is also a publishing platform that has issued a series of terrific pamphlets, books, anthologies, and videos.

Vitek and his colleague Marc Lapin designed a course called the “Perennial Turn,” exploring agriculture and culture, encouraging students to engage with the natural world, put down roots, and harmonize with the rhythms of place. Vitek has created additional winter term courses called “Walking Body, Walking Mind, Philosophy on the Hoof,” “Plants are Us!” and “Get Radical!: Pamphlets and Broadsides Past and Present.” The ever-present question is “what does perenniality in the classroom mean?” One answer is de-emphasizing rote “reading, writing and arithmetic,” instead focusing on deep roots and relationships, and emphasizing regionalism over globalism. Where annuals are the loners of the garden, beginning life over again each year, perennials are the ancient sages of the meadow, deeply interconnected with all living microorganisms in their orbit.

What is the classroom equivalent of the perennial grove that has “ninety seasons, or four thousand, or the aspen grove that has been alive for eighty thousand years?” Vitek asks. It begins with an invitation for students to slow down and take a break from the competitive pressure cooker of the rest of their academic lives. Vitek wants them to know that at about the two-decade mark in years they know a lot. They, too, can be teachers. And their teachers aren’t just humans. In the Perennial Turn course and over a 12-week term students identify and spend an additional two hours a week outside of class with a non-human “interlearning partner,” a tree or a plant or a place. This helps erase the notion that only humans can be the teacher, or expert in the open-air room. You can learn more about the learning philosophy of the course and the interlearning exercise here

In the New Perennials Spring 2026 newsletter, a student in the Perennial Turn course observed, “Perenniality is no longer just a botanical and agricultural term. Food sustains us, and perennial agriculture will help in that regard. However, I’ve realized that it is perenniality itself which sustains life with rootedness, longevity, community, material minimalism, deep thought, and joy.”

After its first eight years of life at Middlebury, the New Perennials Project philanthropic backers have extended its funding for another two, and Vitek hopes that there might even be a few years more beyond that. But by definition, this period of setting down roots must eventually take on a self-sustaining life of its own. The perennial seeds he and his colleagues have planted have become seedlings. “The hope,” he adds, is that “they will take their roots deeper ” and will continue to grow and thrive.

In the meantime, I’m confident students will still be tending and learning from the land at The Knoll. Brakeley, in her 2023 essay, wrote of the “infinite starting points for people to engage with The Knoll … it’s a place to learn about geology, environmental justice, and scything (while knocking out a physical education graduation requirement!)—and it is also a place to gather a handful of flowers for a beloved, to lose oneself in the labyrinth, to remember to lie in the grass and be held by the earth, listening to the rustle of poplar leaves overhead.”

The great thing about this, and all farms, is that, as she points out, “All of these points of engagement are equally valid, significant, worthy, and honored.”

As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Other News and Notes:

Next week at noon EST on August 5, I’ll be bringing you my next Substack Live video with Atlanta, Georgia’s own Chef Kevin McGee. He’s a plant-based chef and founder of the food sovereignty organization Urban Oak Initiative and its shared commercial kitche The Food Studio.Please stay tuned for that!

I highly recommend this Planet Money podcast titled “Big Lettuce Meets Small Intestine.” No doubt you’ve heard about the massive Cyclospora outbreak that’s affected more than 11,000 lives in the Midwest. The show details the perils of the Big Lettuce, and all Big Produce supply chains. Regulations that are still being written, lack of FDA enforcement, and a simple dearth of knowledge about how harmful microbes end up on produce makes all of us vulnerable. AND they are a huge incentive to buy as local and low-input as possible!

Focusing on agriculture-related environmental issues is an important way to win votes, especially in Iowa, where the country’s high and climbing rate of cancer has been linked to nitrate run-off from chemical fertilizer. For more, check out this Politico article, “‘Cancer Doesn’t Care What Party You Belong To’: Poisoned Water Is Turning This Rural State Bluer.”

Marion Nestle, an icon of the good food and nutrition movement, has come under attack by MAHA, despite being a champion for reaching out across the political divide to find common ground with the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.-aligned movement. Many have leapt to her defense, but Raj Patel’s was the first I’ve read that points out MAHA’s fascist turn. He advocates “rejecting MAHA in toto,” noting that this is where he parts ways with Nestle. Perhaps he’s right, and we can find other means of coming together, as with the Iowa farm run-off and cancer fight. But it saddens me to see this argument—well reasoned and compelling as it is—put forward. I’m curious to know where you stand on this issue; please let me know.

In the meantime, stay safe, all, and see you next week.

I’m back, this time with one of my occasional sake articles. Please crack open a container of your favorite refreshing beverage and settle in for this read!

Some of you may know about my previous book, Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice, Water, Earth (which I co-wrote with Michael Tremblay). You may have even heard me explain how I view it as part of my agricultural/ food system writing. Sake is brewed from rice, that ancient, beloved Japanese staple. It has been a cornerstone of Japanese food and drink culture, its spiritual life, and economy for millennia. It’s exported globally, and continues to grow in global popularity

On my recent visit to the Hudson Valley I was lucky enough to be able to combine my visit to the CIA for the Menus of Change Symposium with a tour of nearby Dassai Blue. This is the American outpost of Dassai, the most famous brand of premium sake in Japan and around the world, as well as an example of how Japanese makers are planting their flag in the west and shortening supply chains for domestic sake lovers. I know many American Dassai fans are thrilled to now be able to buy Dassai Blue’s freshly pressed domestic junmai daiginjo nama, or unpasteurized sake. The rest of Dassai Blue’s sakes are pasteurized only once, instead of twice, imparting that extra bit of character and freshness that shorter travel distances are better able to protect.

I’d been reporting on the coming of Dassai Blue for at least a decade, since the CIA first approached the brewery to propose a partnership. We included a section on the new brewery in our book, Rice, Water, Earth, yet I hadn’t had the chance to visit until this year.

Dassai Blue president Shohei Yamane and a personable guide named Alex Witherspoon were on hand to greet us and guide us on our tour of the modern 55,000 square-foot brewery. Housed on the site of a former Stop & Shop grocery store, it is massive, yet still dwarfed by the production volume and staff of the Yamaguchi Prefecture mother ship. Dassai Blue employes 10 kurabito (brewing staff) compared to 220 brewers in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi, and produces 50 times greater volume of sake than Hyde Park.

After exiting the main building, we passed a large warehouse where the rice is milled, or polished to the signature Dassai, 23, 35, and 50 percent milling ratios. It takes three days to polish rice grains down to 23 percent, we learned, so we can only imagine how long it takes to polish the rice used to brew Dassai Blue Beyond, polished down to 19 percent and priced at $1,200. By pricing it in the upper echelons of the drinks market, the brewery’s hope is to shift international drinkers’ notion of sake and put it in league with some wine and whiskies’ collectible status.

Our brewery tour took the form of dozens that I have taken in Japan and North America, with a few notable exceptions. One is the air shower, which is kind of like a full body hair dryer that blows potentially polluting microbes off your body before entering the brewery. This follows the obligatory scrubbing of hands, donning of lab coat, hairnet, and shoe covers. The air shower matches the one at the company’s 12-story flagship brewery in Yamaguchi Prefecture. But the two breweries differ in other ways.

Over time, Hyde Park brewing staff has transitioned to completely local hires, and all of its rice is sourced from Isbell Farms in Arkansas. (To learn more about the Isbells, check out my two-part post here!) “It was a bit of a process,” Witherspoon says of the rice sourcing transition, involving head production staff and Chairman Hiroshi Sakurai coming to Hyde Park to oversee it. The Japanese main brewery is so particular about its Yamada Nishiki that every year it holds a competition for the best crop in Japan. This year’s winner was from Shiga Prefecture. Another difference between the two campuses is that while the Yamaguchi brewery presses its sake using a high-tech centrifuge machine, Hyde Park uses a more conventional hydraulic press.

Showing us the rice storage room, Witherspoon encouraged us to pick up and feel the Yamada Nishiki polished to 23 percent. Round and small, the grains were still coated with a little rice powder that will be washed off. The rice is placed in bags and soaked in 39 degree Fahrenheit water, timed precisely so it absorbs just the right amount of water. In the seventeenth-century Edo period, experienced toji, or master brewers, would have don’t this by touch, feel, and years of experience.

Today, the guesswork is taken out of the process. Before washing and soaking, a sample of each batch of rice is analyzed using a small machine the size of a tiny scale that applies heat and measures the amount of moisture released in an enclosed space. The resulting reading will tell brewers how long the rice needs to be soaked. Fifteen kilo batches are washed for two minutes, drained for two minutes, and then soaked for approximately 15 minutes. Small batches allow for maximum precision and control. Dassai calls this combination of high-tech equipment and small-batch, hands on brewing method tema (手間, labor), where time, labor, and the human touch do not preclude embracing advanced technology.

The local water used for washing and soaking is partially filtered through a reverse osmosis process, while preserving the mineral composition of the Hudson Valley water. Its profile is a bit harder than the water of Yamaguchi Prefecture, according to Witherspoon.

After the rice is steamed in clothed covered tanks, it’s transported to either the koji room, the tanks where the shubo, or starter is made, or to the koji room. In the latter, the freshly steamed rice is placed on flat tables, mounded and swaddled until it reaches the desired uniform temperature, then smoothed flat. A kurabito stands next to each table with a small shaker, and in rhythmic unison, each shakes out the invisible mold spores. The careful choreography ensures that the koji spores land on their target. In temperatures that rise to about 116 degrees, the koji mold spores grow and spread over the rice, emitting a sweet chestnut-like aroma.

We passed on to a much larger room housing fermentation tanks. Witherspoon invited us to try our hands at mixing the moromi, or mash, with a long wooden paddle. It’s much harder than it looks. Our exertions were rewarded with tastes of the mouth-puckeringly astringent mash, alive with yeast, amino acids, and enzymatic frenzy. Next came a room filled with Yabuta hydraulic presses, then the bottling and labeling area.

Dassai Blue makes nama versions of both its 23 and 50 percent polish sakes, as well as a 50 percent sparkling nigori. The latter is made by adding some of the un-pressed and unfiltered moromi (including live yeast and partially digested sugars) into a completed tank, so that once bottled, the sake undergoes a champagne-style secondary fermentation that yields soft and delicate bubbles. Intriguingly, the brewery is also experimenting with some kimoto starter method techniques. Not to create a new kimoto-style sake, but to impart more complexity into its existing lineup.

Through a combination of temperature variations and mashing of the starter, small batches are allowed develop naturally occurring lactic acid (rather than the addition of a commercial version). Yet yeast is added as would be done in the sokujo method.

During our tasting session, Yamane-san talked about the kind of healthy competition that Dassai President Hiroaki Sakurai once told me he hoped to foster between the Yamaguchi brewers and the Hyde Park brewers. For the most part, the Japanese brewing team is still stronger, he said, but there was one area in which the American product outshone the Japanese: the sparkling sake category. Dassai Blue’s was cleaner and more delicious. After some investigation, the two teams realized that it was because the Dassai Blue facility was brand new, pipes, tanks, everything. And while the Japanese brewery was perfectly hygienic and in working order, over time, the inevitable accumulations of microbes and wear and tear led to a dulling of the fresh taste of the sparking sake. “After that, in Japan, they changed all the pipes and tanks,” Yamane-san said. That did the trick.

Although we were unable to try Dassai Blue junmai daiginjo side by side with Dassai junmai daiginjo from Japan, we all agreed the sparkling nama 23 was a favorite for its punchy energy and acidic bite. It’s a little bit brash and likely to hit with Americans eating burgers and barbecue.

Although it was the Culinary Institute of America that first approached Dassai and suggested a brewery in the Hudson Valley, the anticipated synergies have yet to be fully realized. The brewery has hired CIA grads, and at least one student did her externship at the brewery. But further collaborations, for example in a sake service and brewing component in the CIA curriculum, have yet to happen.

The brewery has nevertheless provided new jobs to the community, and opportunities for locals such as Witherspoon. He grew up in Hyde Park and came to Dassai with no prior knowledge of sake. But he found that the master certification in coffee that he’d earned at Arizona State University stood him in good stead in parsing the subtleties of sake grades, aromas, and tastes. “The skills are very transferable,” he told us. From entry level trainee, he is now one of Dassai Blue’s 10 brewers, and a knowledgeable tour guide.

I asked Yamane-san about something that Dassai Chairman Hiroshi Sakurai said at a recent reception in Iwakuni for the 250^th Anniversary of American independence. When people observe that he always pulls himself back up after a lifetime of setbacks, he replies, “I’ve already fallen for the eighth time and I still haven’t gotten back up for the ninth.” This is a reference to the popular Japanese proverb nanakorobi yaoki (七転び八起き), or “fall down seven times get back up eight, “ a call to perseverance and refusal to buckle under difficult circumstance. Dassai’s origin story has been told many times, and is even enshrined in manga form in The Challenge of Dassai: From the Mountains to the World. Illustrated by Iwakuni-born manga artist Kenshi Hirokane, it details the 34-year-old Hiroshi Sakurai’s take over of the failing company in 1984. The first chapter is titled “Rock Bottom.”

But Chairman Sakurai added, “That eighth fall for me, is our brewery in the United States.”

It’s surprising to hear the chair of a corporation be so frank. But Yamane-san explained that Dassai Blue has so far reached less than 20% of its total production capacity: that’s a fall Chairman Sakurai feels he has not yet overcome. Yamane-san pointed out that sake accounts for only 0.2 percent of alcohol consumption in the U.S. and that it’s still hard to get westerners to elect to drink sake with western food. “People only drink sake with Japanese food, sushi, or ramen.” Although sake and oysters is a fantastic pairing, few westerners will pick sake over white wine or champagne at an oyster bar.

At the local restaurant Shadows on the Hudson, the sommelier is a big fan of sake, and keeps Dassai Blue on the menu. But most guests will still order white wine to go with their oysters or fish, out of habit or being unaware of what sake could do to enhance their dining experience. When that changes, and westerners are ordering sake to go with their burgers and pizza (both great pairings!) Dassai Blue’s production will begin inching toward its peak production volume.

So please sake fans, whether you’re drinking at home or at a restaurant, order that glass, carafe, or bottle of sake to go with whatever you’re eating. You’ll be surprised at how well the pairing works.

As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Next week at noon EST on July 22, I’ll be bringing you my next Substack Live video with the Canadian-born Chinese farmer Brenda Hsueh. She farms agroecologically and raises pastured sheep for food and fiber at Black Sheep Farm in Grey County, Ontario. Please stay tuned for that!

Other News and Notes:

I’ve recently finalized plans for some fall and winter speaking engagements! I’ll be appearing at the Albany Book Fair on September 27; at a panel discussion at the Toronto Public Library on October 10^th; at the Tennessee Local Food Summit in Nashville, Tennessee on December 5: and at the Oxford Real Farming Conference on January 7. More details to come.

Here’s a fantastic story on Matt Sampson, founder of Sway Brewing + Blending in Bailey’s Harbor, Wisconsin, from the Artisan Grain Collaborative (AGC). Through his brewery and cafe, Matt, a chemist-turned beer brewer, is connecting with so many different players in the Midwest regional grainshed, from local AGC grain growers, maltsters, university researchers, chefs, and bakers. His is a model of how to grow the alt food system.

This fall, the University of Vermont is launching a fully online Masters of Science in Agroecology degree program. This is in keeping with the state and university’s position in the vanguard of agroecological thinking and practice, and a direct outgrowth of the school’s Certificate of Graduate Study in Agroecology,

Here’s yet another example of states stepping up to fill the void left by Trump administration federal cuts: California threw small farmers a lifeline by keeping the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program operating for another year. These programs are a win for both small “specialty crop” farmers and school children who can get farm fresh produce in their lunches.

Mapping Joy in the Food System, is an important aspect of growing the alt food movement, and so a program by the same name from the University of Vermont’s Institute for Agroecology caught my eye. Check out the joyful map of revelatory food moments here, and contribute your own!

I hope you’re reading this from a deck chair at the cottage, on a camping trip in the mountains, or while lying on your couch doing nothing. I mean the kind of nothing that Stefan Geyer writes about in Zen in the Art of Permaculture Design, the kind of nothing “that is pregnant, full of potent potential.” It’s in the “Nothing-space,” he explains, where we shed pre-conceived ideas and assumptions and view “a panorama of possibilities.”

This installment of “Reaping” is filled with ideas and information gleaned last month at the Culinary Institute of America’s (CIA) “Menus of Change” (MOC) summit in Hyde Park, New York. It was the 14^th edition of the gathering, which is co-sponsored by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and examines nutrition, health and sustainability in the foodservice and hospitality industries. This year’s theme was preparing for 2035 amid the changing landscape of climate change, AI optimization, and increasing automation.

The Highlights

• The setting: The 70-acre CIA campus, nestled as it is on the eastern bank of the glittering Hudson River, feels like a cross between a monastic retreat and a culinary-themed resort. Housed in the red brick-clad buildings of a former Jesuit seminary, it features on-theme landmarks such as the asparagus-and-artichoke adorned Mitchell gate, Lake Velouté and Île Flottante pond. The CIA’s Roth Hall houses 57 kitchens, three fine-dining restaurants, a bakery staffed by students and open to the public, and a gothic, Hogwarts-like dining hall that was once the chapel of the seminary.

• Health and nutrition are always a big part of the symposium, and this year’s coverage reflected our fraught times. At a session on food politics and the 2026 dietary guidelines, Christopher Gardner, director of the Nutrition Studies Research Group at Stanford, described the work of the 20-person Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) that he was part of. Among the recommendations of the 400-plus-page document it issued were to an emphasis on whole foods and “an intentional focus on health equity.”

  

• The DGAC urged looking at health and nutrition through an equity lens to address the lopsided incidence—between rich and poor, and non-Asian people of color and white people—of nutrition-related chronic diseases and poor health outcomes. Yet in a highly unusual move, the report was dismissed by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, which like the rest of the agency, has been reshaped under its leader, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A hastily convened second group came up with the much-maligned guidelines and inverted pyramid released early this year.

• Although Gardner and his DGAC colleagues agree with the official guidelines’ advice to reduce intake of highly processed foods, they disagree with much more, including the way the report ties America’s overall unhealthiness solely to these foods. Whole grains and beans, peas, and lentils, which the committee recommended prioritizing, were demoted to the bottom of the pyramid, and meat and dairy elevated. Gardener also disagrees with the new inverted pyramid’s elevated protein recommendations, of 1.2 to 1.6 kilograms of protein per kilogram of body weight. “You don’t need more protein,” he said. “The U.S. eats more meat than any other country in the world.”

• The DGAC’s recommendation to substitute plant protein for meat protein, as well as its recommendation to eat less salt and sugar were also buried. Luckily the DGAC’s report is still available on line.

• Harvard nutritional epidemiologist Walter Willet was also scathing in his debunking of the USDA’s inverted food pyramid. “Any two-year-old knows this is not going to stand up very long,” he cracked. Instead, he sounded the alarm over the “massive consequences” of climate change on health, quoting a joint editorial of medical journals that name it “the greatest threat to global public health.”

• To address both climate and dietary concerns, he espoused the minimally processed, plant-forward Planetary Health Diet, which performs the twin duties of reducing the risk of premature death and slowing the process of climate change. If humans ate more grains and fed less to animals “it would take pressure off the global trend of chopping down forests to for cattle ranching and the growing of animal feed, he noted. “The Amazon has transitioned from being a carbon sink to a carbon emitter, and that is a really big deal.”

• Blue Foods were the main topic of day one. These include sustainable wild and cultivated seafood, finfish, shellfish and crustaceans and aquatic plants, all of which are one solution to threats to food security and nutrient density. One frequently raised topic, which I always find hard to remember or credit, is the aversion/fear/ignorance so many people apparently have toward seafood.

• Not only do food leaders need to demystify the buying and cooking seafood for the home cook, they need to move their own and consumer behavior away from the apex predators of the ocean (carnivorous salmon, tuna, sea bass, and yellowtail are a few) to species lower on the Blue Foods chain (shellfish and small fish like sardines and anchovies). The reason: the huge variability of the environmental impact and benefits of various species.

• Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor at NYU’s environmental studies department and a data scientist, noted that seafood’s carbon-friendly image is “a bit of an exaggeration” and that in fact fin fish and crustaceans’ greenhouse gas emissions land somewhere between that of chicken and pork. His hope is that the fish meal that makes up much of apex predator feed (“fish in fish out”) will over time shift toward more sustainable forms of protein such as insect protein.

• Jennifer Bushman, executive producer of the docuseries Hope in the Water said, “The last twenty years were about bringing plants to the plate. The next chapter is about bringing water to the table” in the form of Blue Foods, taken from oceans and fresh water. About 600 million people rely on the Blue Foods economy for jobs. Yet the 70 percent of the planet covered by water is in danger, she noted, which in turn jeopardizes the 3.2 billion people who rely on food drawn from water daily.

• Many speakers, including Bushman and Sam Garwin, director of market development at the regenerative ocean farming organization GreenWave, emphasized the connection between land and water ecosystems. “Anything applied on land eventually ends up on the ocean,” Garwin noted, touting kelp’s amazing ability to absorb excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous that run off agricultural land. This kelp superpower allows GreenWave farmers to cultivate their crops with zero inputs and produce crops that feed humans and animals or are put back on the land as bio stimulants.

• Brandon Gottsacker, CEO of Superior Fresh, America’s first fully land-based salmon aquaculture company, discussed the challenges of getting through the policy and permitting system to build the fish farm. A completely circular model, it recycles 99 percent of its water, captures 100 percent of nutrients, and produces salmon with three times more omega 3 than other salmon on the market. Superior Fresh also upcycles fish waste into fertilizer to grow leafy greens in its aquaponics program. Its practices stand in contrast to the high concentrations of fish waste, polluted water, and widespread incidence of disease and parasites of many large ocean-based salmon aquaculture operations.

• Yet many speakers at MOC, like Hayek urged that we all eat lower on the seafood supply chain, whether we’re consuming farmed or wild seafood. Julia Mason, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, spoke of the massive redistribution of ocean biodiversity that is occurring as oceans have absorbed heat. As waters in tropical zones become too warm to sustain their native fish, clams and cold-blooded animals, they are moving north. Populations that most depend on these species are losing them.

• Top imports, meanwhile, are being further redistributed to wealthier nations. Applying a nutrition lens to seafood, Mason added, we know that over a third of seafood nutrition has been lost globally. She urged a bigger investment in cold storage technology, and finding creative use for off-cuts. Just as aquatic creatures are adapting to climate change, she urged chefs and home cooks to adapt with them, learning to love underutilized species. Teresa Fung, a professor of nutrition at Harvard, recommended eating more Vitamin D-rich aquatic greens, sardines, anchovies and trout.

• It was inspiring to see how these messages were being acted upon at schools. Leah Botko, director of food and nutrition for Maine’s Old Orchard Beach school district, described a program to serve underutilized gulf of Maine Species and capture heretofore wasted nutritional potential. Cafeteria cooks served 35 million pounds of species such as dab, monkfish, and dogfish, generating $23 million in revenue and leaving $85 million worth of more high-value fish in the water.

  

• Australian chef Josh Niland recounted his fascinating fish journey from the point at which he was a chef who was about to have to close his lauded Sydney seafood restaurant, St. Peter, or become insolvent. Scared witless, he had to come up with a solution that didn’t sacrifice his high standards. The answer: He needed to become a fish butcher. “Anything a meat butcher has done to meat I’m going to hijack that and affix it to fish,” he said. “So I started making mortadella, sausage, and terrines with fish. I’m responsible for the fish eye chips and ice cream everybody laughs at.” Another revelation to me was how Niland came to see that the way fish were being caught, cleaned, and stored needed an overhaul. To prevent rigor mortis and bruising, he asked the fisher people he bought from to use the ikejime method of fish harvesting or something similar, then pack them in one layer balanced on their bellies. Following this method rigorously, he discovered, would preserve a fish’s taste and freshness so that “mackerel tastes like bluefin.”

• There were many more interesting discussions at MOC, which I hope to tell you about in future “Reaping” articles, but this is more than enough for this one! See you again next week for my first live Substack Video, with the charming fisheries scientist, educator, and content creator Emily De Sousa

Other News and Notes:

One thing you’ll learn from reading Reaping What She Sows is how big a force corporate consolidation is in our broken food system. Effective crusaders against today’s ascendant monopolies and oligopolies give me hope. Alvaro Bedoya, former Federal Trade Commission commissioner, is one of these. You can read his account of how he became a populist in this New Republic story, and listen to him expand on his views in this Brian Lehrer interview.

I gave a virtual presentation at last week’s Naturally Informed Women’s Wellness event put on by Whole Foods Magazine and the Industry Transparency Center last week. You can watch my session (“Ecosystems Regeneration in the Women-Led Alternative Food System: What Eating Enjoyably, Regeneratively, and Ethically Looks Like Today”) and all the others by registering here.

The fight to build an alternative food system is a two-steps-forward-one-step-back revolution, as this Civil Eats story on the dismantling of food policy councils illustrated. Read about the important work these councils do, and why we need to protect them.

An ICE shooting in Minneapolis in January gave birth to a gesture of radical hospitality that’s still going strong today. Read about the free and donation-based Post Modern Times restaurant in that city in this free New York Times link.

Only 2 percent of all philanthropic funding goes to the environment. If you’re interested in learning how to change that, Climate Farm School (whose founder I interviewed here) and Wally Farms in Ancram, New York are partnering on this 2.5-day workshop, “Funders on Farms: Investing in Resilient Food Systems.”

I’m happy to bring you Episode 2 of my “Reaping” video interview series with folks who are working to grow the alternative food system. I’ll be covering every link along local and regional food supply chains, bringing insights that will speak to you whether you’re an eco-conscious consumer who wants to understand where your food comes from, a small producer looking for solidarity and insights, or you’re interested in working in the local and regional alternative food system.

This week I’m delighted to welcome Alana “Laney” Siegner the founder and executive director of Climate Farm School, based in Sebastopol, California. Climate Farm School grew out Laney’s Ph.D. dissertation research at U.C. Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group. Her topic was sustainable food systems, agroecology, and climate change education.

She developed the concept of a farm-based education program for kids and adults to learn from farmers, put their hands in the soil, and actively engage in land-based climate solutions work. Laney piloted her brainchild in the fall of 2021 with the online climate action platform Terra.do [pronounced “Terra dot DO"] and has been growing the program across a network of host farms ever since. The program has operated more than five courses per year since 2022 at host farm locations in the U.S. and Europe.

I met Laney back in March when I visited Green Valley Farm & Mill and did an event with grain Farmer Mai Nguyen and diary farmer Aubrie Maze of Brambletail Homestead. Laney and her family as it turns out, live on the same cooperative farm! I had heard of CFS before, but was curious to learn more.

Enjoy your listen, and please check out this great TED Talk that Laney gave called “The Power of Soil Literacy.”

Transcript:

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So Laney, it’s great to finally sit down with you and do this “Reaping” video interview.

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Welcome.

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Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

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It’s so great to be sitting down to this virtual meeting together as well.

(00:00:13.306):

So I know Climate Farm School grew out of a chapter

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in your Berkeley PhD dissertation, but can you start by talking about

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when you began thinking about climate education in the first place

(00:00:25.739):

and why it was important to you to situate the school on farms.

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Yeah, of course.

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So for me,

(00:00:35.142):

learning about climate change,

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my journey with climate education started very personally with my learning about it

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as a student in college.

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And it was actually through a course I was taking called Environmental Justice and U.S.

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Literature.

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and I read some books,

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fictional and non-fictional stories and started to learn more about climate change

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in my environmental studies curriculum.

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And it was like this revelation to me that I was like,

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oh, my God, how have I never heard about this before?

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How have I never learned about this in school?

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This is like so big and so, so important.

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And I was just sucked in to like my own learning, all radical curiosity and

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After college,

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I became a middle school teacher through a teaching program called Citizen Schools.

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And I really learned in that program that I love teaching.

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It’s super hard.

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Hardest thing I ever did was teach eighth grade.

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But it was also so rewarding.

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And I was like, OK, well,

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if I want to teach,

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I actually want to teach something that I am passionate about,

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not just like math and writing, but life skills for eighth graders.

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That was a whole trip.

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But something like environmental science and climate change.

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And so on one of my last days teaching middle school,

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I asked one of my students if they’d ever heard of climate change.

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And one of my students said to me, yeah, I’ve heard that word before.

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And I feel like it’s something really important that we all need to know about,

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but I actually don’t know what it is.

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And I was kind of like, oh, my God, like.

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you’re me when I was in eighth grade and like you’re everyone right now

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in K-12 schools like we’re not it’s so rare still to formally learn

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about climate change and meanwhile we’re all there’s many of us who are adults

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who didn’t learn about this in school so I had that moment

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as I was entering graduate school at Berkeley where I was like what I really want

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to do is resource myself in how to teach about climate change and

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then teach other people I was thinking kids at a time about climate change

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But just the way my dissertation and my PhD work unfolded and

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the opportunities available to me afterwards it became about starting

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with teaching adults and I had the opportunity also during my PhD years

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in grad school to work and intern and apprentice on farms mostly on the west coast

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and some on the east coast and for me that became another part

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of my learning laboratory about climate change was like

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What are farmers doing about this?

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And actually there was so much that they were doing and so many hopeful solutions

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to me that felt,

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I don’t know,

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somehow more actionable than like buying an EV or installing solar panels

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on your house.

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Like I didn’t have a house and I didn’t really have a lot of agency over my travel.

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So I was like, oh,

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but we can eat food from our local farmers and eat and think about growing

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and consuming food in a way that’s reversing this problem of climate change

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and dealing ecosystems.

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So for me, when I started to think more about

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like post graduation, post grad school, what I wanted to do in climate education.

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It had to be on farms and it had to be centering the work of farmers.

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And it also felt like just uncovering another invisible thing that like not a lot

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of us see where our food comes from.

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So I became very invested in marrying these two worlds of food production

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and farming and climate change education.

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So probably a lot of people listening will maybe want to enroll in Climate Farm School.

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For those who don’t,

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can you explain why an adult professional,

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for example, would want to spend time working on regenerative farms?

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And also, are there any particular professional audiences that you’re focusing on?

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Yeah, yeah, definitely.

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Well, so I sort of created the program originally and at the pilot stage in 2021.

(00:04:17.306):

for like for like the younger me,

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someone who is interested and curious about sustainable food systems

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and agroecology,

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but like hadn’t grown up on a farm,

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hadn’t had those moments of connection to where food comes from,

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had spent some time maybe in farmers markets or grocery stores trying

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to read food labels.

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But it’s like

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that’s a little bit less fun than what I had the privilege to do,

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which is like learn and be directly in farming communities with farmers.

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So I wanted to set that up as a space that,

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you know,

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either graduate students or adult professionals who had that interest

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and hadn’t been able to sort of satisfy it could come in

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a really like low stakes way that you don’t need a background,

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you don’t need to know how to farm.

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but living community on a farm,

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work with farmers,

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have the educational slash personal container built in there for you.

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And I was thinking,

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you know,

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maybe people whose work touched food or maybe teachers who wanted to be teaching

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about this with their students,

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you know,

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to have come and have this kind of experience would be the right kinds

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of professional audiences.

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And I think interestingly, where we started when we were part of Cara.few,

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is it was like just post pandemic like just gathering at all was kind of exciting

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to people and we tended to attract a little bit more of a tech

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and finance audience um through the online learning on climate

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that Tara was offering but mostly all the rest of the learning

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and courses were online mine was a little bit online but mostly on the farms

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in person and so we had a lot of tech and finance people coming and

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that was super fascinating a lot of people that wanted to transition careers

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or bring more mission and values alignment to their day-to-day their day jobs um

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people starting climate and sustainability teams or working groups in their companies.

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And that was super rewarding.

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And as we started with kind of anyone and everyone all are welcome.

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And then we started to see like healthcare professionals and doctors

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and people working in funding and venture capital and

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You know,

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people wanting to start up their own regenerative food businesses

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and source directly from farmers,

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but they needed to build those relationships first with the farmers.

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So we’ve seen a lot over the five years we’ve been doing this.

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And most currently now we are having a moment of leaning into engaging

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a health care audience in coming to our farm based programs.

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I think there’s more that we haven’t seen yet that are related to these roles

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in healthcare settings and institutions that have somewhat more of a say

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in how patients,

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people coming in with acute and chronic illnesses

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or inpatient hospital settings can access the food that’s actually most healing

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and nutritious for them.

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and a lot of them,

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these healthcare audiences,

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are wanting to see the value in building relationships with the farmer

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and sourcing food for people that are consuming it in

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a way that’s not also continuing to make people sick from the ways

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that we produce food and the chemicals and labor practices involved.

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So I think there is a lot of hope around regenerative agriculture

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and food systems change,

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a lot of things that it can do and that I’ve seen it do in the farms that we work

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with.

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So yeah, the healthcare audience is an interesting one.

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We’re just starting to engage more and thinking about what can be the implications

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of actually coming to a farm-based programming for education

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and relationship building and trying to create systems change together.

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Yeah, again,

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you’re making really important connections,

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food, medicine, health and farming and climate change.

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I mean, they’re also connected and we’re hearing so much more about food as medicine.

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I want to do more on that topic.

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So I’m glad you brought it up.

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By the way, I think you’re in downtown Sebastopol right now.

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Is that right?

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Okay, so this is a very weird word.

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It’s a very weird word.

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I should be on the farm.

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Right, okay, you’re not on the farm.

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You’re in a nice rural town, but this is a very real world, everyone.

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We’re not doing in this studio, obviously.

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Can you give me a few examples of the kind of work that graduates

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of Climate Farm School have gone on to do?

(00:08:17.934):

Yeah, so yeah,

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so like maybe I alluded to this a little bit before,

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but people coming in with the idea of wanting to build something.

(00:08:26.179):

A few folks have gone on to build a Korean bone broth company,

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Indian chickpea pancake,

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a tea last mix company with regenerative resource chickpeas.

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a local pasta company started by two women who teamed up and wanted

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to source regional locally milled grains for a fresh pasta.

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And then we’ve also just had people sort of like in transition,

(00:08:52.216):

like leaving their jobs and trying to map out and figure out what’s next.

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sort of find that opportunity landscape of like, what are my skills and interests?

(00:09:00.212):

People have pivoted from more traditional like VC finance

(00:09:04.535):

into food systems based philanthropy, like Soil and Climate Alliance.

(00:09:11.139):

Someone’s now working at the Rockefeller Foundation Food Team.

(00:09:14.101):

So I think we see a lot of people in transition who are using this time

(00:09:18.023):

to help form their next steps.

(00:09:21.525):

Yeah, and I think for doctors,

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we’ve seen some doctors come back to us and say,

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we want to bring our larger healthcare team.

(00:09:26.630):

So kind of an advocacy and partnership to bring a larger portion of

(00:09:32.575):

a specific audience like to the farm with another.

(00:09:35.517):

Reaping What She Sews,

(00:09:36.378):

my book is all about building every link in those supply chains that are going

(00:09:40.442):

to really create this alternative food system.

(00:09:42.824):

And the examples you gave are so many different links and pieces and

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and parts of that alternative food supply chain.

(00:09:51.055):

So it’s really exciting.

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So finally,

(00:09:53.836):

one last question for those in our audience who are interested in working at

(00:09:58.358):

the intersection of climate solution,

(00:10:00.078):

regenerative farming,

(00:10:02.019):

climate mitigation,

(00:10:02.839):

what advice would you give them other than to,

(00:10:05.281):

of course, immediately sign up for Climate Food School?

(00:10:10.022):

Yeah, so I think that’s a great question.

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I really think that this ecosystem needs

(00:10:16.723):

like all of us.

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And so whatever reflective process of like thinking about, like,

(00:10:21.666):

I love Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson’s time and fan diagram of like,

(00:10:25.028):

what are you good at?

(00:10:26.709):

What is the role of need?

(00:10:27.590):

And if you’re focusing on the sort of climate change and food system space,

(00:10:30.872):

like we get those answers out there.

(00:10:32.953):

I can help provide them.

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Many other people can help provide them.

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Your book can help provide them.

(00:10:36.548):

But doing that activity for yourself and thinking about what you can bring in

(00:10:40.269):

and having an eye out for me right now,

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specifically,

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I’m like,

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where are the ecosystem builders who are going to help make this work easier

(00:10:45.772):

for everyone and help create convenings and spaces where the different links in

(00:10:50.333):

the food supply chain can start to rebuild and reconnect around each other.

(00:10:53.815):

Because when you’ve seen people start new companies,

(00:10:56.376):

maybe, or new businesses, trying to source regeneratively,

(00:10:59.701):

Some of them have also run into major issues of like, okay, we can’t sort the moms we want.

(00:11:03.603):

We can’t pay the farmers the prices we want.

(00:11:05.585):

We’re being pushed out by everything else around us.

(00:11:07.726):

And so it takes a lot of regional coordination to create food hubs

(00:11:11.688):

and like distribution networks and farmer owned cooperatives and like all the things

(00:11:15.771):

that are going to make different links work together.

(00:11:18.592):

So specifically,

(00:11:19.313):

if you have ecosystem building skills and want to apply them to this space,

(00:11:23.155):

it is very welcome.

(00:11:24.896):

And I think there’s just like no end to

(00:11:29.172):

creative problem solving in this space.

(00:11:31.153):

So just start talking about it with other people and build your own local community.

(00:11:39.695):

I see a lot of hope in the farm that I’m in even.

(00:11:42.076):

It’s just like a cooperative.

(00:11:43.476):

And so there’s a lot of conversation and it’s linking not just on the farm,

(00:11:48.138):

but to the preserving kitchens,

(00:11:50.118):

the commercial kitchen spaces,

(00:11:51.139):

the food businesses that want to support sort of what’s happening on the land.

(00:11:56.472):

Yeah, that’s perfect.

(00:11:57.717):

Thanks so much for your time, Lainey.

(00:12:00.066):

And I look forward to connecting sometime in another place and time.

Hello Readers!

I’m delighted to report that I’m finally back in one place for a whole month, a record of sorts during an intense year of book travel. Yet in my head, I’m still on the road. I’ve loved reviewing my notes and transcripts from a hugely uplifting swing through the Midwest in late April.

Before visiting Granor Farm in Three Oaks, Michigan and Elawa Farm Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, I spent a lovely few days in Oak Park, Illinois, where my stellar tanka poetry team and I gave a talk on By the Shore of Lake Michigan, the English translation of my grandparent’s 1960 book of Japanese tanka poetry. I also did a Reaping book talk with the inspiring women-coffee-grower champion Stephanie Welter-Krause of Swelter Coffee Roasters at the charming independent Dandelion Bookshop. Thank you, Jamie!

Granor Farm: Linking Land, Farming, and Redefining Farm-to-Table

Three Oaks, Michigan is less than 90 miles from Oak Park, but I discovered you have to drive through Indiana to get there. So you can visit three states in a a short cruise. Walking up to the greenhouse dining room at Granor Farm, at first what looked like an out-of-control lawn revealed itself to be a “Prairie in Progress.” The meadow mimics pre-agricultural Michigan, planted with native pollinator seeds as well as buckwheat and rye. It’s just one of a number of pollinator strips throughout the farm that support soil health, better drainage and beneficial insect populations, not to mention food for passing pollinators.

Granor Farm Culinary Director Abra Berens, a chef and cookbook author I’ve long admired, gave me a brief tour of the farm and the green house before our book talk. I’ll let Abra introduce you to the farm in the video below.

What started as a 10-acre vegetable and educational farm in Southwestern Michigan in 2006 has evolved into a 400-acre diversified farm growing 100 different types of organic and heirloom vegetables, herbs, flowers and grains, a large CSA program, and a flour mill and distillery to add value to its grains, along with cooking classes and educational workshops.

As is often the case at my book talks, this one was attended by a fascinating mix of people: environmentalists, farmers, journalists, good food system advocates, people concerned about heavy pesticide use in the areas they live in, and those who come because they know they’re in for a transformational straight-from-the-farm meal prepared by an exceptionally talented kitchen team.

Granor Farm General Manager Jayme Marsh and Chef Alex Skrzypczyk noted that theirs was a fully women-led kitchen and dining team. Alex gave a shout-out to the three women farmers who had a hand in growing the food we were about to eat, including parsnips and spinach from Granor’s own farm, under the direction of agricultural director Johannah Frelier; blueberries and raspberries from third-generation Southwest Michigan farmer Abby Schilling of Mick Klüg farm and her fourth-generation farmer husband Mark; and potatoes, watermelon radish and watermelon from another Southwestern Michigan farm run by Nicole and Tim Frillman.

Many of their products showed up on the plate in preserved form, which the kitchen excels at: a deliciously tart blueberry agrodolce that spiked the parsnip soup, pickled watermelon rind accenting a spinach, watermelon radish, and chèvre salad. There was a brilliant dish of asparagus and morel (the mushrooms spotted on property by a non-farming staff member) dish with lemon aioli, charred allium salsa verde and pea shoots, and a stunning pork ragu with polenta and spring herbs. The entire dinner was outlandishly delicious.

The founders of the farm, Rob Buono and Liz Cicchelli, intended Granor to be an educational farm and to connect people to the land through immersive farm and food experiences. I feel especially lucky to have visited the farm when I did. Abra told me she and her husband were planning to start a culinary school in Traverse City Michigan. Just a few days ago Granor announced that its spirits will be sold at the school when Abra launches her new project. Named Everyday Cookery it will be a teaching kitchen for home cooks. I already have it on my “to-do” list.

Elawa Farm Foundation: A Center for Hands-on Learning, Food Hub, and Intellectual Epicenter of the Local Alternative Food Movement

On my second Midwest farm visit and talk (truly fantastic!), at the 600-acre Elawa Farm in Lake Forest, Illinois, executive director Laura Calvert took me on a tour of the grounds, which have the feel of a stately English manor. Long before the farm was built, members of the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi tribes stewarded 30 million acres of oak-studded tallgrass savanna that stretched like a vertical band across the central US, only a pristine micro-portion of which remains today.

In the early 20^th century, meatpacking heir A. Watson Armour and his wife Elsa created the farm, outfitting it with Georgian style buildings and formal gardens. It was a hobby, or “gentleman’s” farm rather than a working farm. Today, those original buildings and gardens have been handsomely restored to form the nucleus of the public-private partnership between Elawa Farm Foundation and the city of Lake Forest. Like Granor, it has become a center for hands-on learning, a food hub, and the intellectual center of the local alternative food movement.

Laura and I strolled through what in a few months would be a teeming vegetable, fruit, and herb garden, a market and store, kitchen, and café. The large, restored hay barn is the site of public events, and was where our book talk and panel discussion took place. And what at talk it was! Members of the Artisan Grain Collaborative came out in force, including executive director Alyssa Hartman; Jill-Brockman Cummings, mill manager and miller at Janie’s Farm and Janie’s Mill in east-central Illinois; and Sandy Boss Febbo, co-owner and co-brewer at Bang Brewing Co. in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Alyssa and Sandy both appear in Reaping What She Sows; please check out the grain and regenerative beverage chapters for their stories!)

Here’s a brief recap of our talk, which followed a bountiful buffet of beautiful food featuring Janie’s Mill flour and many other types of local produce and beverages.

· Jill described the founding of Janie’s Mill by organic farmer Harold Wilken. In 2015, while driving a semi-load of grain from central Illinois to eastern New York state to sell for chicken feed, it suddenly hit him: “Why am I driving fifty thousand pounds of grain across the country when we have a network of Midwestern people who we can provide delicious, organic stone-milled flour to?” As Jill noted, “It was a lightbulb moment.” An organic farmer, Wilken was growing a variety of small grains as cover crops, yet hadn’t thought about their potential for human consumption; that’s how far local milling had fallen from public sight and consciousness. At that moment, the idea of building of a stone mill began to take shape in his mind.

· Jill also described how the mill and AGC grew up together. “Millers, bakers, chefs, distillers, brewers, university researchers, all these people need to find one another” to build a grain value chain and grow the local grain economy, she said. Over the last decade, AGC has been midwife to that revived chain. “All of you eaters, you home bakers, we need you. We’re not going to be able to do this if you’re not investing in and buying our products,” said Jill.

· Alyssa described the founding of AGC by a group of sourdough bakers in Chicago. Midwesterners consider their home to be the breadbasket of America, yet the bakers were frustrated that they could not easily buy local flour. Anonymous flour from commodity supply chains that did not align with their values dominated. Those concerned with environmental conservation and land stewardship were frustrated by how the industrial farming of commodity corn and soybeans dominate the land. They realized they could solve both problems by bringing back the local grain economy. They were the eager end users of a supply chain that they needed to build, one that would provide them with organic whole grain while improving regional soil health and water quality.

· “That was the foundation I walked into in 2019,” Alyssa said. There were thirty-five members, then, many of them bakers, but also farmer/miller Harold Wilken and Janie’s Mill. “Now we have about two-hundred-and-fifty members,” she noted, including more than a dozen millers. AGC includes malt houses, and a network of brewers and distillers. The scale of food system change that they are trying to accomplish is so big, she noted, that “no one business can do this alone. We’re trying to rebuild a whole infrastructure for how we grow our food, move it around, and get it into our bodies--and no one individually can do that. There’s a lot of creativity and ingenuity and hard work that this community has done.”

· Sandy Boss Febbo recounted the story, which I include in Reaping, of starting an organic beer brewery with her husband Jay Boss Febbo, and the process of forging relationships and networks in order to source all-organic ingredients for their beers. In January of 2017, when a Minneapolis chef asked them if they would be interested in brewing beer with the perennial grain Kernza, they were ready for the challenge. The small grain, developed from a grass native to western Asia and central and southeastern Europe, grows very long roots and offers numerous ecosystems services.

· The conversation led the Boss Febbos into collaboration with research teams at the University of Minnesota and The Land Institute (TLI) , and they had a deadline: to brew an organic Kernza beer for the Land Institute’s annual meeting in 2017, a little more than six months away. Patagonia Provisions had earlier released a 15% Kernza beer made by Hopworks Brewery in Portland, Oregon, but it was only available on the west coast.

· Bang’s Kernza arrived from University of Minnesota research fields and from TLI. “It was being cleaned and hauled by PhDs and delivered to us in the back of somebody’s car--this was just truly something new,” Sandy said. “We saw that each time the beer was slightly different, and the only thing that changed was the Kernza. The long roots of this grain deliver a sense of place like you cannot believe.”

· The breakthrough the Boss Febbos made was they didn’t want to make a hoppy pale ale that would disguise the taste of the Kernza. So they created a lightly hopped blonde ale that would allow the grain to show its complex character. Despite fears on the part of the researchers that the beer would be too grassy, the Boss Febbos were confident.

· When they unveiled their “Gold” beer at the meeting, Sandy said, “the collective response in the room was, it works, it’s delicious, it lends itself really well to beer. To have that opportunity was really something special, and shows how process-based we are.”

· Laura Calvert described the work of Elawa Farm Foundation, which increases access to the local food system through its market, café, and catering operation. Pointing to the farm’s network of more than 50 local farmers and producers, she explained that Elawa has given these partners so much business, not to mention connections to nearby restaurants, that sales can now justify weekly deliveries to Elawa.

· Like other farms and food hubs I’ve visited, Elawa hosts weddings and other private events, an additional high-margin revenue channel that helps aggregate demand.

· For my final question, I asked each panelist to offer audience members suggestions on individual or collective actions they can engage in to help move the local and regional food movement forward.

· Sandy summed up her advice with “small changes, big impact.” Though facing the whole food system can be overwhelming, she added, “it’s really empowering when you think about your actions …every dollar you spend, everything you choose to support enables something else to move forward. So the little things are the big things.”

· Jill noted, “every single opportunity that you have to buy local, whether it’s flour from Janie’s Mill, or you’re a bakery that buys flour from us, or you’re buying fruits and vegetables … it’s going to be more delicious.” She added, “For the average food product you buy at the grocery store, fourteen cents of every dollar goes back to a farmer. When you purchase from a local business like ours, that number is so much higher, and you’re also supporting the people who make it possible for the farmer to get that product to you.

· Alyssa called out the Illinois’s Local Food Infrastructure Grant, which allows farmers to apply for funding to add equipment, facilities, transportation and delivery logistics. “In this this lopsided system, power is really concentrated with large agribusinesses. Small farmers have to do the work of getting the physical machinery and equipment on the landscape to even be able to try to compete,” she explained. The goal is to have this piece of legislation automatically added to state budget every year so that it doesn’t have to be reauthorized. She encouraged audience members to call their representatives and urge them to support the grant.

· Laura noted that Elawa has applied for the grant, stressing how important such appropriations are. They allow farmers to purchase often “game-changing” key pieces of infrastructure. She also urged consumer to “be aware of your consumption because consistent demand for local products is the stepping stone to a better system, a system that existed for our grandparents, but which we’ve lost in just a generation or two.”

There was so much more to our rich discussion, including many perceptive questions and comments from our highly engaged audience. But I will end my account here. If anyone is interested in hearing more from our talk, just let me know. Stay tuned for next week’s “Reaping” Substack video, which will feature the inspiring Laney Siegner, founder and executive director of Climate Farm School, based in Sebastopol, California.

As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Other News and Notes:

Civil Eats just released its summer 2026 Food and Farming Book Guide. As always, it’s filled with the best crop of new books in this class, and I can’t wait to begin reading through the list.

I did recently read Ben Goldfarb’s Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. It’s a book that offers another way of seeing the world, first through the 40 million miles of roads that enclose the world in a net, and then through the increasingly dense network of human-made wildlife crossings that allow sundry creatures to avoid roadways and death. You’ll also become hyperaware of the carnage and biodiversity loss wrought by the “cat’s cradle of asphalt string” that is our global road system. Highly recommended!

I’m saving my Vermont dispatch for another post, and giving you a little preview of it here, in the form of this link to a wonderful series of audio pamphlets from Middlebury College’s New Perennials Project. You can also download the pamphlets in print form here. I loved this first episode “Local Food, More Hope,” by historian Kathleen Smythe. Applying Thomas Paine’s words from “Common Sense” to the industrial agricultural system makes so much sense! I encourage you to read or listen to the entire pamphlet.

I’m launching a new video interview series with folks who are working to grow the alternative food system. I’ll be covering every link along local and regional food supply chains, bringing insights that will speak to you whether you’re an eco-conscious consumer who wants to understand where your food comes from, a small producer looking for solidarity and insights, or you’re interested in working in the local and regional alternative food system.

My first guest is Teresa Ish, who’s working in a largely unseen and unsung niche of the blue foods (a.k.a. sustainable wild and cultivated seafood) supply chain, where institutional and personal investors come together with producers to help fund their vision for climate-smart food businesses. Teresa is a principal consultant with Denver-based Squaretail Strategy, where she serves more as a strategic matchmaker than a fundraiser, creating the infrastructure and the right environment for capital providers’ and producers’ visions to align. This sounds much easier than it is in fact, and we get into the challenges involved. (Check out her mention of Catch Together, which has come up with a brilliant way of protecting local fisherfolk in an age of oceans financialization!)

Before joining Squaretail, Teresa spent a dozen years with the Walton Family Foundation (which she references in our convo) working to empower fishing communities and help them leverage the power of seafood supply chains.

If you enjoy our chat please “like” this installment and subscribe to “Reaping.” I’d also love to hear any suggestions for future guests on my video series!

Transcript:

NM:

So, should we just jump in?

TI: 0:0

Let’s jump in. Yeah,

NM: 0:10

Thank you all for joining out there. This is our first Substack Live, which it turns out is neither Substack or live, it’s very fake. My first guest is Theresa Ish, and we had an adventure trying to get it to work. We’re doing Zoom, and then it’s going to go to Substack, but I would like to introduce Teresa. She’s based in Denver, and she’s with me today. Teresa is a principal consultant at Squaretail Strategy. For more than 20 years, Theresa has worked in sustainable fisheries, blue foods, and ocean resilience, including supply chain intervention, market-based strategies, and cross-sector partnerships across industry, civil society, government, and fishing communities. She listens first, and when she understands the local context, she designs an approach that will match promising ideas with market and funding sources, and she says she likes to work in the “messy middle,” where science, markets, and human dynamics collide. All of that sounds really fun and satisfying to me. So, welcome, Teresa.

TI: 0:10

Thank you so much for having me.

NM: 0:56

So this is an experiment we’re going to try to do about a 15 minute Q and A, just so that people know who you are and know what your work is. So I know your work centers on ocean-based food solutions, and I’m wondering, what drew you to marine science and sustainable blue food solutions in the first place.

TI: 1:44

Thanks, I’ve always really been interested in resource management. I think it’s this really interesting place where you’re both trying to like protect and sustain these ecosystems that we really care about, and also depend on for livelihoods, for food, for resources, for all these other human reasons. So I thought I was going to go into forestry, but then I started surfing, and I was like, I have to live by the ocean, and now I’m in Denver. So that didn’t pan out so well, but I definitely stayed in the oceans space, and you know, I initially came to this work through a lens of ocean conservation, but as I, as I continued on my career, I realized that most people, the way that they interact with the ocean on a daily or weekly basis, isn’t being physically in the water, it’s not being at the beach, it’s through the food that they eat, and people experience the ocean through seafood. Whether you live in Denver or you live in Maine, you probably spend more time consuming fish on average than cooking fish and thinking about the food that you’re eating than you do actually in the water, unless you’re extremely lucky and can really put a lot of time out on the water, and so that really solidified this need to work on ocean conservation and feeding people together to think about climate resilience, nature, and food as issues that are in tension, but also ways that you can, they can mutually support each other when we do it well and do it sustainably, and think about the long-term health of the planet and long-term support of the people who produce our food.

NM: 3:32

That’s very cool. It’s such holistic thinking coming from like just loving surfing and wanting to eat under the water, and really a systems thinker. So, correct me if I’m wrong, but your work is really matching institutions and individuals looking for funding with investors, and you mostly work, as you’ve said, with ocean-based sustainable food businesses, and these funders could range from philanthropies to individual impact investors. Can you expand a little bit more detail on how you do this work and what the biggest challenges are in doing this work?

TI: 4:08

Yeah, I’ve spent most of my time really thinking the flow of capital from the other direction. Right after 16 years at the [Walton Family] foundation, my job was to be a capital provider to different projects that meet the strategies that we had at the foundation, and we see the same thing happening with impact investors and investors, they have strategies and they’re looking for projects and pipelines to invest in, and so helping on a strategic level, not a fundraising level, to work with people who have great ideas to think about how does this fit into the broader ecosystem of things that capital providers are working on. How does a seafood company and an entity donor that’s interested in, say, school lunches, how do you bring that together, so the strategies align, and so I would consider myself more of a translator and a strategic matchmaker than a fundraiser, but I think that strategic matchmaking is a really important piece of fundraising too, because if you’re talking to an audience who doesn’t understand why what you’re doing is important, it’s really hard to get them to provide the support that they need, and it’s really hard to get them to understand that you actually have a shared mission and a shared approach to creating solutions for conservation, food, people, nature, climate resilience.

NM: 5:38

You know, that’s so interesting, because you’re kind of this key part of the sustainable seafood supply chain, and yet I think most people don’t think about it, because you’re in that translator role, you’re trying to, you know, fit the square peg into a round hole and make things match, and I, in my book, Reaping What She Shows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System, we see over and over in the stories I tell, how in order to forge these alternative sustainable food supply chains, these small producers, they need upfront investment, and that’s often what is crucially missing. They don’t have access to large government subsidies, crop loans, insurance, all the things that industrial scale farmers and ranchers benefit from, and yet they don’t know how to access these people that you’re sort of in communication with, these international finance corporations, which have you, as you’ve explained to me, they rarely move less than 100 million, even 5 million, totally in a different league. So, for these small producers who kind of don’t know you exist and say they’re not in oceans, you know, what are.. what are the answers?

TI: 6:56

I wish.. I wish I had the answers for people. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

TI: 7:01

but as a translator between individuals and between capital providers and capital stewards and projects and investors and policy makers, one of the things that I have really found is that people care deeply about the thing they work in, and in order to connect what they care about to what they need or who they’re supporting, we really have to get better at translating between what our needs are, what someone else’s needs are, so that we can meet in the middle, and I think it’s really challenging for small producers, because they’re right, they’re producing the food, they’re doing the business planning, they’re doing the marketing, they’re fundraising, they’re, you know, planning for three years down the line, and they’re planning for tomorrow, and it’s, it’s a lot, and so figuring out how to create the space for them to work with partners, people in similar fields, so you can bundle projects to seek out the technical assistance that’s needed. There are some donors that will provide technical assistance to get these entities business ready, so they can receive loans or provide cooperative structures, so they can get those bigger dollars. You know that time to translate what these small producers need to what meets the needs of the capital stewards, I think, is really where there’s a lot of opportunity for better communication. I think what I hear from investors all the time is, “Oh, well, there’s not enough pipeline. Well, there is. It’s just not in the form that you’re looking for, and I hear from producers, “Oh, well, there’s not enough money out there. Well, there is, but it’s not in the form that you’re looking for. So, how do we build that piece in the middle, so that what the capital providers need and what the producers need actually starts to align, and that’s not something you do like one farm or one fisher at a time. You do that by figuring out what the infrastructure is in the middle that allows those connections to happen. And in the fishery space, we’re seeing a lot of really exciting models start to emerge that that help do that, but they’re still new, and you’re building comfort from the producers, who you know they want to make sure that they’re not buried in paperwork, and they don’t lose their own brand, and their values are not kind of co-opted in order to serve this bigger need, and the investors need to see that this exists, this model works, this model will help them meet their needs too, so I think we’re in an experimentation phase on trying to build those connections to the two between the two ends of the spectrum.

NM: 9:48

I mean, I think it’s just great news to a small producer, even to hear, oh, that money exists, those people exist, you know, because it just seems so scarce in the spaces that I’m writing about, but you mentioned the word bundling, and I know when we were chatting--I met Teresa last week at Menus of Change at the Culinary Institute of America, and there was a whole big Blue Foods day, which was very exciting--but you mentioned the idea of bundling, and you gave me a really good example, and that’s very exciting, because as you were saying, people don’t want to lose their identity, yet they do want to access maybe larger scale funding, and how does that work? Can you give us some examples?

TI: 10:32

Yeah, so there’s this great organization in the US called Catch Together, they, they represent fishing communities around the country, and the US has a management system called catch shares, which essentially assign quotas to fishermen and allow them to fish, and it keeps the catch limit, keeps the stock healthy, and in theory it was supposed to help the fishermen who had quota be more financially stable, better predict their business, but what happened was the quota itself became an asset. It was bought and sold and traded out of communities, and the communities really lost access to their fish. So, Catch Together is working with these community associations to help purchase quota when it hits the market and let it be retained and owned by these communities, but the big change in the, in the bundling. Well, there’s two levels of bundling. One is now, instead of individuals having quota that they can sell out wherever, the community associations hold it with the input from all of the fishermen in the community who are part of this association, and they make the decisions together around how to use it, when to fish it, when to sell it, when to buy more, and then it all sits under this catch together umbrella, which helps consolidate across different communities, so if New England is having a bad year and Alaska is having a good year, the finances between that can balance out, so investors don’t just see fisheries as a risk, they see it as this portfolio across the country, and that bundling at these different levels, where you still have community representation, but also you have the diffused risk across a larger area, makes it more attractive to investors, because you’ve got your social needs met and you’ve got your financial needs met.

NM: 12:27

That is an amazing idea. I really love that. But then, how does the funding side work? Who are these people? How much money is involved? You know, I’d like to hear more about that side of it.

TI: 12:39

Yeah, and you know, again, getting investors comfortable with novel things is, is always really challenging. However, we have seen foundations increasingly have investment arms. There are a few full foundations that invested into Catch Together, and then I think the other thing that’s really special is there are community development finance institutions, they are committed to investing in their region, in their community, and programs like Catch Together have been able to secure regional financing as well, and I think this idea of capital coming from the community to support these valuable food producers in their community starts to get us at this, like, right size, and I think, again, importantly, the aligned goals. If you really care about the Hudson Valley, where we were last week, you know, investors from the Hudson Valley are going to be the best sources of capital to producers in the Hudson Valley, because they have shared community, shared interest, and I think that that is an area that’s really ripe for development, and we haven’t gotten there in fisheries, we’re still looking at the same big oceans investors who are investing around the world, but there’s an opportunity to think about what local investment looks like, and if you care about working waterfronts in your community, you should be thinking about how do you, what are the mechanisms for you to invest in the fishermen who support these working waterfronts,

NM: 14:23

Yeah, it’s really about widening the investor’s point of view and sort of enlightening them. When a producer group of producers are trying to balance profit, they’re also building climate resilience and also balancing that with food production rather than a single-minded focus on profit. Return on investment is inevitably going to be lower for the funder, but is that part of your job to explaining this to potential investors, and, and how hard is it to, you know, you said there are more people emerging like that, but I just don’t see a lot of it, and I’m wondering, like, where, where you see that? It,

TI: 15:01

I think that return on impact is an important part of the conversation, right. It’s not, return on investment is not the only ROI we need to be thinking about, and I think you’re right, the pool of investors is still small who are putting money in, but like anything, you have to cultivate and grow this community, and again, my experience is really in oceans. A lot of the ocean investment funds were very focused on tech interventions in the ocean, impactful, and also really different kinds of investments. It’s, you know, you’re looking at 10x return, and what we started to see is like, oh, the nature side of this, investing in protecting nature and the communities that rely on it, is not a tech investment, they have different returns, and I think the few times where we saw people try to apply these tech returns to seafood businesses, the investments failed, and some people said, “Oh, well, it’s just.. it’s not a good investment, we shouldn’t do this, and other people said, “Oh, let’s relook at this model and think about what we’re actually trying to do, and the way that I.. I think that the framing that we need to consider here is, you want your farms and you want your fisheries to be productive for 100 years. You don’t want 10x growth, right? That’s how you destroy soil health, that’s how you overfish fisheries. You know, the short-term extreme growth is not part of a stewardship model. What you want your fisheries and farms to do is to produce profit revenues over the long term in a steady and sustainable way, and so when investors are thinking about how they should be allocating their resources, sure, put money in the tech, stop, you know, the tech impact full positive ag tech projects that’ll get you a 10x return, that’s your investment. And then you also need your savings account, right? You need something that you’re going to sustain in the long term, and it’s going to produce modest returns without volatility for a very, very, or with less volatility for a long time, and I think our, our next step here is really showing how do you make production, food production less volatile, and I think some of the work that that you do, Nancy, and communicating stories about producers’ relationships to their communities helps, helps even out that volatility, because that relationship between producer and consumer is stronger than trying to compete on a commodity market where prices are going up and down, and it’s a more fragile position for the producers to be in.

NM: 17:56

Yeah, I love it. Sort of goes to the point that we discussed the other day, which is all different size and types of investments, are good, and when you sort of frame it in sort of like the picture of a balanced portfolio, you can have the 10x and you can have the regenerative investments that are bringing back impact return on investment. So I love that sort of very inclusive and holistic vision of how this all can work, so finally I think we’re running out of time, but what advice would you give the small organic or regenerative producers who are seeking funding and really don’t know, like how they can plug into this really exciting sort of paradigm shift that you’re talking about, you know what, what should they do?

TI: 18:42

I think talking to other producers in their communities are really important. That’s an important first step. I met a young woman at Menus of Change last week who came from a business background and started a farm and was actually, is actually bootstrapping her farm and is now able to receive financing, and so I think a lot of people fall in love with the production side, but also building out their business acumen, so that they can talk to investors, so that they are ready to receive investment, is a big part of it, and I actually think that’s very common across a lot of sectors, right, if you’re a doctor and you love being a doctor, but then you go into practice and you don’t actually know how to run a business, it’s really challenging to sustain your practice, and I would say if you’re a farmer or a fisher and you really love farming and fishing, building up that skill around how do you actually do the finances so that you can have a conversation, even with your local bank or your extension agency, on how you can access financing. I think it is one of the big challenges that that I’ve seen working with fishermen, and then I’ve heard from investors, with far investors into farming, talk about their small farmers, that that business side is important. As important as the farming and the production side, and it’s a skill that can be developed. You don’t have to go get an MBA, but you know, know how to put together a balance sheet, so that you can translate what you’re doing to the audience that you’re trying to reach. And I would say the education has to go on the investor side too, right? If you’re an investor who really cares about investing in fisheries and investing in agriculture, get to know what the farmer and fisher’s needs are, so that you can figure out what that matches. The translation shouldn’t just go one direction.

NM: 20:31

Yeah, so that’s a great final message. Both sides, do your homework, be prepared, learn the skills that you need to actually communicate with each other.

TI: 20:39

Yeah, and I think there’s a big space for that on the investor side to teach investors about what these systems that they’re investing in actually look like and what they’re, what they need, so that we can actually do that matchmaking in the middle.

NM: 20:53

This has been so cool and so hope giving, so hopeful. Usually it’s all the scarcity mindset, but talking to you is really sort of opening doors for me, and I’ve spent a lot of time in this space, sort of looking at this very difficult side of it. But thank you so much, Theresa. It was great to talk to you, and thank you for being my inaugural guest.

TI: 21:14

Happy to be a guinea pig!

I’ll be back next week with my regular bi-weekly print dispatch. See you then.

Welcome to summertime with “Reaping”! I’m in the Hudson Valley this week, attending the Menus of Change symposium at the Culinary Institute of America, and fresh from a tour of the impressive Dassai Blue sake brewery in Hyde Park, N.Y. You’ll be reading about my adventures here in a future “Reaping.” I’m also bringing you the second installment of travels to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. (You can read Part I here.), and the amazing collaborative food system work going on there.

Lending a Helping Hand to Local Shellfish Cultivation

• If you’re a fan of the mighty bivalve, you may know what powerhouses of nutrition, ocean habitat regeneration and sustainability they are. Most important, they are delicious. So if you’re looking for an alternative food system job that you can feel extremely good about, few get better than Emma Green-Beach’s.

• She’s the executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group (MVSG) founded a half-a-century ago to preserve and enhance the island’s shellfish hatcheries and culture. MVSG incubates seeds and grows shellfish stock for six areas of the island, each of which has its own “shellfish constable” (a title straight out of a Richard Scarry picture book!) to keep shellfish matters humming smoothly. MVSG also conducts research, promotes innovative aquaculture technology, and works on shellfish habitat restoration. Thanks to MVSG, residents of Martha’s Vineyard can happily engage in seasonal recreational clam, oyster and bay scallop harvesting. Some of the group’s production goes to commercial shellfisheries as well.

• I toured the first and oldest of thee hatcheries MVSG runs on the island, a jury-rigged, three-story pile of that looks like a safehouse built by underfunded hippies. It’s not far from the truth. The organization was offered a small scrap of town property on the Vineyard Haven waterfront, where an all-volunteer team of fishermen, locals and staff members erected the building and its small dock.

• Fresh seawater is piped from water 15 feet beneath the dock up to the hatchery. Solar panels help heat the water, which “conditions” the broodstock shellfish into thinking its mating season. On occasion, says Green-Beach, “We play some love music.” Two days earlier was oyster spawning day. More than 100 million eggs released by female oysters were fertilized. In another tank, quahog clams collected by the shellfish constables are conditioning, gorging on microalgae as they are warmed by the greenhouse effect of the large-windowed room.

• Green-Beach shows us a beautiful ring she’s wearing, silver with two round flat button inlays of shell in a wavy purple and cream-colored pattern. The shell is wampum from the Quahog clam, displaying the unique color variation highly prized by the Wampanoag Nation for bead and jewelry making. Wampum has become increasingly rare in local quahogs, so MVSG is conducting research on occurrence and production of the color pattern, trying to determine what might be lacking in its environment and diet to cause the change. On top of providing food and jobs and cleaning the waters around the island, quahogs and especially its prized wampum, Green-Beach says, represents “the cultural aspect and artistry” of the Wampanoag people’s shellfish stewardship.

• In order to maintain a healthy population of shellfish, MVSG is also conducting eelgrass restoration initiatives around the island and at its larger hatchery and research station in Oak Bluffs. The underwater grass provides a key habitat for bay scallops, mitigates storm damage, and is a huge carbon sink. But an overabundance of nitrogen, from waste water and fertilizer runoff has depleted stocks alarmingly. For a host of reasons, “seagrasses around the world are in steep decline,” says Green-Beach, including rising temperatures, nitrogen run-off, and coastal development. “We’re trying to help bring them back.”

• One of the things Green-Beach would like to do is to organize a group of women in aquaculture, partly because there are so many, and they lack a forum to share ideas and community. Female oyster farmers and hatchery workers predominate, she notes. Most of the shellfish departments on Cape Cod are led by women, and women make up the majority of natural resources officers as well. As older generations have aged out of the fisheries, women are often their successors; aquaculture is a more regenerative and less physically demanding way of being on the water. In her own family, she notes that her husband Isaiah Scheffer (the shellfish constable of Chilmark), recently lost his father; it will be his sister Martha who takes over the family oyster farming business.

The Vineyard’s Alternative Food System Linchpin: Island Grown Initiative

• As I witnessed on Maui, island economies known for their beautiful beaches, expensive real estate, and glittering society often hide an underbelly of food and housing insecurity that lodges among the ranks of year-round residents. Martha’s Vineyard is no exception. As on Maui, there is a strong network of farms, social service, healthcare organizations, restaurants, chefs, and non-profits that is filling in the gaps. Island Grown Initiative is a linchpin in that network. Its programs include at 42-acre regenerative farm, the Island Food Pantry, farm-to- school education programs, and mutual aid from dozens of partner agencies. It helps support more than one-in-five year round residents, up to 500 clients per week at peak demand.

• The day I dropped by the pantry in Oak Bluffs, it was food pick-up day. As pop music blared from the radio, volunteers sang along and scurried to and fro, packing bags of groceries that clients had ordered online. I recognized several who attended our panel discussion at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society the night before; in the afternoon, high school volunteers would show up. Fresh produce, dairy, dry goods, and even prepared food from IGI’s commercial kitchen are available to clients. Merrick Carreiro, the pantry’s food equity director and Vincent “Vinny” Padalino, food pantry manager, showed me and my guide, Lucy Grinnan around. The drive-through pick-up model keeps the small space from being overwhelmed, they explained, and allows clients to shop from the comfort of home. Another 50 bags or so will be delivered to shut-in clients.

• When I asked Merrick if demand had gone up with the rise of grocery prices and the uncertain economy, she replies. “It never went down after Covid. It stayed high, and just when we though we were going to see a decrease, SNAP benefits were cut.” So the pantry relies on food from IGI’s farm, 7,000 pounds a week of procured at reduced cost or for free from the Greater Boston Food Bank, an additional 8,000 pounds once a month, as well as local meat, seafood, produce and other products donated from island farms.

• There are other signs of island and regional producers stepping up: We see eggs from Morning Glory Farm, which were purchased by Slough Farm, one of the sponsors of my trip; carrots from Red Fire Farm in Granby; and frozen hake from Fisherman’s Wharf in Gloucester.

• Caroline Pam, IGI’s co-executive director, has joined our group, and notes “At least a third of what is grown at the Island Grown Farm is distributed through the pantry, along with products from our other food partners.” Taking advantage of the growing Food as Medicine movement, she adds, IGI is also able to offer CSA shares to clients who have prescriptions for them from their healthcare provider.

Race, Gender, Class and Making the Island More Equitable: a Conversation with Chef Ting

• Next, Lucy and walked around the corner to call on Chef Ting at Black Joy Kitchen, a restaurant, events space, catering operation, and community hub for the Black diaspora. Another participant in our panel discussion the previous night, Chef Ting (aka Alessandra Bradley-Burns) is a tall, commanding presence, as quick to laugh as to call me out on inconsistencies in my book’s characterization of enslaved Africans (mea culpa, chef!). She’s also uniquely qualified to tell the story of “the way that the food of melanated people has influenced food in so many places, starting with African royalty sourcing spices along the Silk Road in 560 B.C.” In the restaurant, there is a wide-mouthed vase filled with 167 wooden spoons, representing the 167 women of the diaspora who have taught her recipes from their home countries. Needless to say, dining here takes you on a journey.

• But that’s only part of what Chef Ting does. A Black, a Jew, and a queer woman with a large mixed-race family, she is one of the co-founders of the BIPOC Chef Collective, aimed at uplifting BIPOC chefs on the island. Though some may feel the group excludes others, she pointed out, “The truth is that if we don’t form a unit, much like mutual aid societies, we don’t exist. We don’t get seen, we don’t get invited, we don’t get included.” When she’s invited to do an event, she’ll bring members of the collective, and tells them “brand yourself, let people know who you are.”

• Invoking Dr. Bettina Love’s distinction between being an “ally” and a “co-conspirator” Chef Ting says she’s looking for co-conspirators, people who will take a risk and put their privilege on the line to further BIPOC causes. In her world, those co-conspirators are the White chefs who will volunteer their time and show up BIPOC Chef Collective event to work.

• Chef Ting grew up in mixed-race family in Boston. Her mother saved $2 a week for their vacation fund, allowing them to spend a week each summer in their camper van on Martha’s Vineyard—at the time one of the few New England recreational areas where mixed-race families could safely vacation. Over 50 years, during careers in medicine and corporate strategy, she saved for a house on the Vineyard.

• Today, she, like everyone else, worries about the unsustainably high cost of living on the island, which causes locals to vacate their homes during the summer months—either sharing cramped quarters with other year rounders, or camping in their cars or outdoors in order to be able to afford to fund the rest of the year’s expenses.

• A large Portuguese-speaking Brazilian population sends money back home. Large numbers of this population live under one roof, sharing childcare responsibilities to ease the burden on individual families. There are also stories of exploitation and the modern equivalent of share cropping, even among family members: the immigrant paying an exorbitant fee to park his car on his cousin’s lawn, without even the privilege of using the cousin’s bathroom. Or the business owner whose employees end up owing him money at the end of the year, after all the charges levied on them come due.

• There are hopeful signs: a new ADU law, more affordable housing units on the horizon, Chef Ting’s ability to house some of her employees on in an extra unit she owns. She adds, “The elephant in the room is the belief that people who don’t own homes are different. They don’t care about the grounds, the neighborhood, they’re transient, just passing through. That’s one of the biggest barriers. There’s some truth in that, but there is also a way in which we could welcome people and make them feel a part of the community.”

• To bridge these and other divides, Black Joy Kitchen holds monthly family meals during the “islander” or off-season. At our panel discussion, she said, “All island families are invited to the pay-what-you-can event. “Some people pay twelve dollars for a family of 12. Some people pay four hundred for a family of four. That is a beautiful thing … it’s not just about the food. I grew up in a community where the people around me went out to dinner all the time, and my family could not afford it. I remember the shame that I felt because I didn’t know what that experience was like. It is about the food, but it’s also about a sense of confidence and feeling like you belong.”

Saké and Skewers at Slough Farm with Chef Charlie Grandquist

The closing event of my packed visit to Martha’s Vineyard was a very fun saké talk and pairing event I did at Slough Farm. Chef Charlie Grandquist did a deep dive into yakitori technique and preparation, and even bought a beautiful new hibachi grill for his skewers. Saké sommelier Haru Zenda of Rosewater Market and Spirits, provided a stellar roster of sakés, and everyone had fun. Chef Charlie’s yakitori skewers were fantastic!

As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Other News and Notes:

Exciting news! Starting next week, you can expect a “Reaping” in your inbox, once a week on Tuesdays. Every other week I’ll do a “Reaping” live with a fascinating alt food system guest, and every other week you can expect the print edition. In my next “Reaping” article, I’ll tell you about my last road trip of the spring season, which took me to Illinois, Michigan, and Vermont!

The latest report from IPES-Food, which stands for the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food System, could not have stated one of Reaping What She Sows’s key messages with more urgency. Titled “The New Geopolitics of Food,” its message is this: “Trade wars, conflicts, climate change, aid cuts, and political tensions are fueling price volatility, worsening hunger, and strengthening corporate control. This turmoil is exposing just how fragile food systems built on global dependence and just-in-time supply chains have become.” The solution: “Governments must shift towards resilient self-reliance: strengthening domestic and regional food systems, reducing dependence on volatile global markets, and investing in agroecology, public food infrastructure, and fair, cooperative trade.

If you’re like me and you’ve dreamed about living in a community that shares a regenerative farm check out Agrihood, a mixed-income, multigenerational community in Santa Clara, California, which combines affordable and market-rate housing with a 1.7-acre urban farm, open spaces, and local retail.

If you enjoyed Chapter Two of Reaping What She Sows, “The Whole Grain Mavericks Rebuilding Our Local Grain Economy,” you’ll be interested in this Civil Eats story “Betting on Whole Grain Baking,” about the growth of the movement.

Our feeds are full of doom and gloom about the effects of AI, but here’s a hopeful story that combines an AI-assisted technology and the power of the sun to purify water and offer a potential answer to the two billion people who lack safe drinking water. On a backpacking trip to India when she was 14, Slovakian scientist Diana Virgovicova saw rivers black with pollution and the resulting sickness it caused. She resolved to solve the problem. Today she’s the CEO of the Toronto-based startup Xatoms, maker of a powder that, when added to water and exposed to sunlight, reacts with the water and attacks contaminants, rendering it drinkable in minutes. The key to the discovery: quantum chemistry aided by AI to find the elusive purifying compounds. Her story is a testament to the power of individual actions and ideas, and promises to vastly improve the lives of women and girls around the world who spend a combined estimate total of 200 million hours a day searching for clean water for their families.

Stay safe, readers, and see you in a week.

Hello Readers!

As we approach the official opening of the summer season, I hope the pace of life has slowed a bit for you, and you’re able to enjoy the late spring flowers and maybe even the beginning of patio season. I’m in Egypt now, floating downs the Nile toward Luxor in 115 F-plus temperatures. Keeping warm is not an issue here, yet this article has transported my thoughts back to the chillier, early spring visit to Martha’s Vineyard that I’m going to tell you about.

The timing of my visit, before the annual influx of summer residents and visitors, meant that the Vineyard I saw was not the summering ground of old and/or moneyed New England. Instead I parachuted into a fantastically rich tapestry of food, farming, and food equity work being done by year-round residents. The island is small, with a little more than 20,000 year-round-residents, compared to the summer population of close to 100,000.

As with my visit to Maui, another island economy, I became acutely conscious of the vast inequities in access to food and affordable housing, and the need for a more self-sufficient, robust local food system. I also got to meet many of the scores of people who are working toward that goal. Thanks to Slough Farm Foundation and the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society for hosting me!

What I Did on the Island

My three-day visit was packed. I participated in an energizing and uplifting “Women in the Island Food System,” panel discussion anchored by the themes of my book, Reaping What She Sows: How Women are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System. Lucy Grinnan, the Ag Society’s program and outreach manager, kindly gave me a tour of beacons of the interconnected local food system including the regenerative Beetlebung Farm, kitchen, mill, and bakery ; The Martha’s Vinegar Shellfish Group; the food system building organization Island Grown Initiative’s (IGI) food pantry, and an inspiring chef and community builder named Chef Ting. I finished off my visit with a fun saké lecture and pairing event at Slough Farm with Chef Charlie Grandquist. It was grounding and energizing to see the dozens of people who are working toward the shared goal of a more equitable, healthy and climate adaptive food system. I’m bringing you Part I of my highlights and takeaways here!

Women in the Island Food System Panel Discussion

• One of the things that became clear during our discussion, sponsored by Slough Farm and the Agricultural Society, is how hungry this small local food system is for opportunities to share ideas and connect. Chef Ting, executive chef and founder of Black Joy Kitchen, where the food tells the story of the African diaspora, noted that in the five years that her catering company and then restaurant have been open, she has unsuccessfully searched for farms willing to be gleaning partners. One ingredient the restaurant uses a lot—readily available on the island as most cultures do not cook with it but maddeningly hard to source—is pumpkin leaves. By the end of our talk, though, that gap had closed: Chef Ting connected with a fellow panelists and an audience member who could make those gleaning opportunities happen.

• One of contacts was Grace Palmer of Morning Glory Farm, the other was Caroline Pam, co-executive director at IGA. This community connection was also a perfect example of the “counternarrative” to the story of farmers aging out and unable to find successors that Pam pointed out during our conversation. “There’s a young generation of farms and fisher people here who are committed to growing food for their community, and want to be able to stay here and continue that tradition,” she noted. Grace, when she offered to partner with Black Joy, talked about how “incredibly motivating” our event was, and wondered how to make such discussions happen again. It’s these kind of connections that make the work I’m doing so meaningful.

• Alexis Moreis is a member of the Chappaquiddick Tribe of the Wampanoag Indian Nation and a director of the island conservation collective Pôhshutupuhk 8 Midnight Land Collective, led by Chappaquiddick and Aquinnah Wampanoags. She spoke of her people’s 12,000-year stewardship of the land, and their vision of a holistic process that connects land health and the health of her people with efforts toward land rematriation. “At the level and rate of the commodification of Wampanoag lands,” she notes, “it’s incredibly hard to keep our farming families and fishermen here … it takes bylaws and people voting in local town elections—we really can limit what size homes are built, and what’s developed.”

• Alexis also read from a 1773 document from the Wampanoag people to a British English judge noting that an agreement made between the inhabitants of nearby Edgartown and the tribe—for protection of their woodlands and payment for animals were routinely ignored. Pointing to existing federal laws that grant Indigenous people rights to fish, harvest, forage and hunt on traditional off-reservation sites, she said “The big picture is for the island to realize that it is a privilege to live in a space where the First Nations people are; we should be the primary voice being heard and uplifted.”

• Emma Green Beach, director of the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group explained that the 50-year-old organization was launched as a way to ensure the islanders had easy access to sufficient food during the lean winters. Today it does restoration work, and aids in research projects. One of the strengths of the island food system, she pointed out, was the very thing that restricts it: its geography and separation from the mainland. “Islanders have always had to rely on themselves and each other. At our core, we know how to provide for that and our neighbor and barter and trade and make sure that everyone’s going to have what they need—that’s deep in our spirit.”

• IGI, a non-profit devoted to strengthening the local agricultural system through its regenerative farm, food pantry and farm-to-school education, is now working toward increasing local institutional procurement of island-grown food, by aggregating information on crop availability. Although Vineyard schools already source and buy a large amount of locally grown food, explained Caroline, this would streamline the local supply chain in a major way, and cut down on the amount of food procurement from large industrial food suppliers.

• Here’s a good write-up on our panel discussion from The Vineyard Gazette. Thank you to writer Haley Sandlow, and photographer Jeanna Shepard for sharing your work!

My Tour of Bettlebung Farm

• Inspired by the regenerative agriculture movement, Amy Weinberg, along with a group of investors, opened Bettlebung Farm in 2018. Local grain conferences and the regional grain work going on at Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture inspired her passion for bringing back local grain growing, milling, and baking.

• She assembled a strong team, including chef Mirra Sims baker Matt Pontarelli, and several ex-Stone Barns employees, including former farm manager Kate Woods and Mara Flanagan, business manager for the entity that owns Bettlebung.

• Mirra, a Culinary Institute of America grad who spent time in the kitchens at well-loved restaurants including Gramercy Tavern, Untitled at the Whitney and 232 Bleecker in New York before arriving at Beetlebung in 2024, thinks of her work as being a mouthpiece for the farm, the best expression of the flavors that the land is producing.

• The farm’s store, bakery, and its Saturday suppers are all points of engagement for the community. She’s proud of a recent edition of the supper that featured tamales, which reflect her own cultural background, as well as masa made with Bettlebung-grown corn; a molé amarillo with carrots from nearby North Tabor Farm; and turkey from The GOOD Farm. “That’s what gets me excited,” she says. Despite this pride in the farm’s practices, she says, it also makes an effort not to preach to its customers, who have varying budgets, cultural backgrounds, and beliefs about the food system.

• Matt Pontarelli, who before arriving at Beetlebung had mostly baked conventionally in Chicago-area bakeries (Publican Quality Bread was an exception), says that initially he was a skeptic. “I loved the ethos behind (whole grain baking) but I wasn’t totally sold on it, and whether I could make it work consistently. But I got here and I was blown away at what we’re able to produce. It’s turned me over; I can’t imagine now that I was ever baking a different way.” To further his grain education, Pontarelli spent time at Vermont local grain movement pioneer Elmore Mountain Bread.

• Today, Bettlebung is part of an impressive local grain network, which includes Whitesfield Farm in Hardwick, Massachusetts; local heritage grain farmer Dan Sternbauch of Lost and Found Grains; and Heather Pepper, a local baker, farmer, and grain educator. Pontarelli also sources from Ground up Grain, and Seneca Grain & Bean.

I’m cutting this article short here so I can get back to life on the Nile, but in my next installment, I’ll tell you about the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group, Black Joy Kitchen, and our fun Slough Farm saké pairing event. Please stay tuned. As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Hello Readers!

My non-stop travels have continued, the latest taking me to Granor Farm in Michigan, and Elawa Farm Foundation and Dandelion Bookshop in Illinois for some fantastic talks on Reaping What She Sows. I also had the great pleasure of presenting with my colleagues Mariko Aratani and Kyoko Miyabe on my tanka poetry translation By the Shore of Lake Michigan at the Nineteenth Century Charitable Association in Oak Park Illinois. I capped off the trip with an inspiring and joyful weekend visit to Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont and its beautiful farm, The Knoll to talk about both Reaping and Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake. But I’m saving all that for a later post! This one is all about sake, which I remind you is an agricultural product.

Recently over sake with friends at Ototo in Los Angeles, Genki Ito, founder and CEO of one of America’s largest sake retailers, Tippsy, told me about a re-brand of the business he had the works—one that would allow him to bring in fresher, higher quality sake to the U.S. and charge less for it.

This was exciting news to me for many reasons. First, obviously, because who doesn’t want better quality namas (unpasteurized sake) at prices closer to those you would pay in Japan? But the most nerdy and self-serving reason was that the way Genki plans to do this is by making the craft sake supply chain shorter, more direct, and more transparent, a topic close to the heart of “Reaping.” We care deeply about questions like, “How do we disrupt the dominant supply chain to get unique products of merit from small producers to consumers?” Often this involves creating alternative supply chains.

So I’m pleased to tell you that today’s post is one in which two of my books—Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System, and Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice, Water, Earth—collide.

When Tippsy introduced the soft launch of Palate Project exactly a week ago, the company entered the second stage of its mission to make more sake available to the American public. For the past seven years, Genki and his team have built Tippsy’s impressive 500-plus label product line. (Enter the wayback machine to read my post about its founding here.) They’ve also invested a lot of time and web pages in educating consumers about the basic categories and styles of sake, introducing breweries, and offering lots of tasting guidance.

Now, Genki is turning his attention to overcoming key barriers to growing the sake market: the power imbalance between large distributors and small breweries; the complexity of U.S. alcohol regulations; and the multi-layer supply chain that has resulted. These factors drive up prices for consumers, result in long lead times and suboptimal shipping and storage conditions. Sake that arrives in a compromised state, or that spends a year on an unrefrigerated shelf negatively colors consumers’ perception of sake as a category.

Genki’s solution to these problems is to become an importer and bypass those barriers. He’s teamed up with the third largest food and beverage distributor in Japan, Kokubu, to grow sake into the much larger category he believes it has the potential to be. By bringing in fresher nama sake and carefully documenting its end-to-end cold storage he will test his belief that “great taste transcends culture.”

Allying with Kokubu—which has been in business for more than three hundred-years, is still family owned, and believes in long-term strategic thinking rather than the typical short-term profit-driven cycles—matches Genki’s goal of building relationships and streamlining the supply chain. “They look at the supply chain from rice field to restaurant and retail,” he says.

Palate Project will launch with 60 to 70 labels selected from Kokubu’s 700 or so small- and medium-size breweries, working directly with them instead of the many middlemen who now complicate the supply chain. The project’s Sanchoku (fresh from the brewery) releases are packed in ice and shipped from the brewery via refrigerated container. Here’s how the first release was documented: consumers can see their bottle from end of tank fermentation to bottling, labeling, and entry into the cold storage supply chain.

Drilling Down: How Sake is Distributed Now

The current sake landscape is dominated by three large players, Mutual Trading, JFC, and Wismettac (where Genki worked for 10 years marketing sake), which distribute Japanese food, drink, and restaurant supplies. Yet because liquor import laws vary from state to state, there are only nine states to which they can directly import sake. To sell to the others they must work with a network of liquor and wine sub-distributors. Sub-distributors are generally not very interested in selling sake, or educating buyers about the nuances of the drink. And not only do all these middlemen add layers of cost to the sake, the large distributors offset the very thin margins they take on competitively priced commodity products such as rice and fish by taking very high margins on categories such as processed foods or sake. The result: sake priced as much as 300 to 500 percent above what it costs in Japan.

When Tippsy launched in 2018, there was a dearth of quality retail outlets for sake. The company had to navigate the fragmented and complex distribution networks, buying from the large distributors and their sub-distributors. With the help of a third-party logistics company Tippsy became the sake equivalent of wine.com, offering a wide selection of sake to most U.S. states. Through its extensive consumer education and sales of more than half a million bottles of sake, Genki has helped build a more educated sake drinking public.

Now, he says, “We don’t just want to be a retailer anymore. We want to be the supply chain. Not necessarily disrupting it, but streamlining it for our customers.” Doing this will enable Palate Project to sell a junmai daiginjo that formerly sold for 45 dollars for 26 or 27 dollars,

Sake Taste Profile Descriptors for a Post-Classification World

His seven years of selling sake to Americans has also led Genki to rethink the ways that the company categorizes and describes sake to consumers. This too, he wants to simplify to lower the barrier to sake enjoyment.

Most customers, he learned, are not able to articulate the type of sake they like, or understand descriptors such as “fruity” when applied to a bottle of sake. Showing the sake meter value or acidity level of a bottle is too technical. A taste education has to take place, but employing easy-to-understand terms and visuals. An added reason for coming up with a better way of communicating a sake’s taste and aroma profile is that the current tokutei meisho shu system of classifying sakes by milling ratio (gingo, junmai ginjo, tokubestu ginjo, daiginjo, etc.) is an outmoded system on its way out. We need a new way of delivering information that will allow the consumer to zero in on the type of sake they’re going to be happy with.

Working with a team of professional sake tasters in Japan, Palate Project came up with this simplified tasting chart that buyers can consult to guide their choices. It will be interesting to check in with Palate Project in a few years to see which direction American sake tastes are skewing!

Genki is not averse to one day thinking about exporting American sake to Japan, either. He saw the long line of eager Japanese sake fans waiting to taste Brooklyn Kura imports recently at the Wakate no Yoake 2025 (“Dawn of Young Brewers”) festival in Tokyo. There’s another sake market to keep an eye on as worldwide sake culture evolves.

I’m off on vacation tomorrow, but I’m planning to bring you a dispatch from my Martha’s Vineyard trip in my next post, so please stay tuned. As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Other News and Notes

One of the cool things about traveling the continent to talk about Reaping What She Sows is meeting so many parents who tell me their daughter or son is interested in working in regenerative ag and food system change. I tell them that among other things, my book is a great introduction to the many different kinds of jobs one can do in this ever-growing and fascinating field. One guest at the Granor Farm dinner, Peter Boerma, sent me a link to the Essex Food Hub in Westport, NY. Check out this great infographic that shows how the hub strengthens and grows small farms and food businesses by adding infrastructure and distribution, and bridges affordability and wage gaps to make a more equitable food system. Thanks, Peter!

In case you missed it, “The Last Days of Butter Ridge” is a beautifully done, heart-wrenching piece on the winding down of a Pennsylvania diary farm that’s been in one family since before the Civil War. Here’s a free gift link to the story.

My fellow New York Society Library member Ashley D. Farmer has written Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore, a compassionate and compelling biography of a woman we all should know more about. It connects to Chapter One of Reaping, which details the history of mutual aid societies and cooperative enterprises of the post-Emancipation South. Moore’s father was a member of the Société des Jeunes Amis, a New Orleans mutual aid society that helped keeping the Creole community strong and intact as Jim Crow laws and racism shifted race and class lines.

As faithful readers of Reaping What She Sows will know, one of the major problems with global supply chains is that they are insidiously opaque. This recent New York Times story, “The Untold Story of Sushi in America” traces the rise of True World, the wholesale fish distributor founded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. It distributes to thousands of restaurants ranging from humble neighborhood joints to high-end omakase restaurants like Sushi of Gari. Though the story focuses on succession wars in the family and pays no attention to sourcing or working conditions on the fishing fleets that feed this massive supply chain, you can bet that tracing the source of True World’s catch, which supplies 70-80% of high-end and mid-range sushi restaurants, is nearly impossible to do. Thank you to James Mandiberg for bringing this to my attention!

Stay safe, readers, and see you in a few weeks!

Hello Readers!

Recent travels have got me thinking about the many challenges of small island food economies. I was on both Maui and Martha’s Vineyard in April, two very different island cultures, yet with much in common. The third island food economy on my mind is Tenerife in the Canary Islands, which came up at a fascinating wine event I took part in here in Toronto.

All must grapple with higher food costs than their mainland counterparts, anywhere from 80 to 95 percent dependence on imported foodstuff (even though their indigenous predecessors did pretty well feeding themselves for millennia), and a high rate of food insecurity among year-round residents of the islands.

In this latest dispatch from the road, I’ll focus on my visit to Maui, saving Martha’s Vineyard for a future “Reaping” edition. I was grateful to be invited by the University of Hawai’i Maui College. Although it was my official host, I realized my visit was the result of a community wide effort; the college, community organizations, and local government in many ways work as one on the island. At the beautiful Nisei Veterans Memorial Center I chatted with executive director Deidre Tegarden about Unforgotten Voices of Heart Mountain which I co-wrote with Joanne Oppenheim. I did another talk and tasting for the college faculty and staff on Japanese craft saké. And there was lots of time for investigations into the budding food sovereignty movement on the island.

I visited the Maui Food Innovation Center, the Kauluwehi Biocultural Garden, the WaiPono aquaponics and hydroponics program, and savored a delicious farewell lunch at the student-staffed dining room, hosted by UH Maui College Chancellor Lui Hokoana. The fine dining room is operated by the college’s culinary arts program. I also had the chance to chat with Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen. I’m bringing you some highlights from those visits here.

Maui Food Innovation Center (MFIC)

• Somewhere from 80 to 95 percent of all of the food consumed on Maui’s three islands, Maui, Molokai, and Lāna’i is imported. The high cost of food, along with recent flooding and wildfire disasters and the Covid-19 pandemic have all brought home to residents that they need a more sustainable and local food system.

• Yet farmers are aging out. State Representative Kyle Yamashita came up with the idea of a food innovation center and incubator that would focus on growing the value-added food industry through training, technical expertise, a fully equipped manufacturing facility, and assisting food entrepreneurs in bringing their products to market.

• Showing me a table filled with products that have come out of the center, from an ulu (breadfruit) macadamia nut hummus to sugar cane falernum and a cultured coconut cream. Karen Hanada, director of the MFIC, described the $13.5 million for building, equipment and federal and county grants the center has received. The next step in fostering a stable, closed loop island food economy—exporting—requires capacity building and manufacturing. Plans for a manufacturing facility are underway.

• Licensed journeyman, millwright, and machinery specialist Darryll Naeole showed us MFIC’s research and test kitchen facility, filled with juicing, dehydration, and blast freezing equipment, a vacuum tumbler, and micro-shredding and bottling machines. Small entrepreneurs, says McKenna Lickle, program manager of MFIC, can “test out equipment to determine what makes sense for them to invest in, because it is expensive equipment. If it doesn’t dramatically change your production, why spend eighty thousand dollars until you really need to?”

• In one kitchen production of Maui Bone Broth was underway. The venison bone broth contributes to reduction in the large number of Axis invasive deer that have taken over the island. Mayor Richard Bissen called this a “win-win”: not only does it create a value-added income stream, it also reduces a species responsible for the overgrazing that—by stripping the land of important ground cover—exacerbated topsoil loss in the recent flood disasters.

• When I asked McKenna what it will take for Maui to get closer to its original form of native food sovereignty, she said, “One of my theories is that preference has to change. Humans have evolved to this high level of preference in our food system. We don’t want Caesar salad unless it’s made with romaine lettuce. Yet you can have a Caesar salad with many types of lettuce! It’s about going back to what’s available, rather than thinking in grocery store terms. We’ve made everything so available. And as farming and agriculture phases out, there’s more and more food being brought in.”

• Another barrier to local food sovereignty, says McKenna, is cost: “The cost of products and food being produced here makes it so the average person that lives and maybe was born and raised here can’t actually choose the value-added option, even though it’s more nutrient dense. It may be made locally and checks all the boxes, but the cost is high.”

• Efforts are underway to fix this. Maui County has issued a 55-page Food & Nutrition Security Plan: 2025-2030 offering a road map to local food access, local food production and the fostering of local food economies and careers.

• Mayor Bissen, himself the grandson of pig and taro farmers, acknowledged the need and the desire of many to return to ‘ike kūpuna, or ancient knowledge, the days of “seeing the land as part of our family” when “the ocean was our refrigerator.” He pointed out that Maui is the only county in the state with its own agriculture department, and he highlighted programs that are rebalancing the ecosystem.

Maui Nui culls Axis deer and markets their protein-rich meat to groups including NFL teams. Mahi Pono, or “Responsible Farming” has transformed 41,000 acres of former sugar cane plantation land into diversified, sustainably farmed land aimed at boosting food sovereignty by growing crops such as citrus that have traditionally been imported from off-island. The farm also makes micro-lots available to individuals who want to grow their own produce.

A Visit to Kauluwehi Biocultural Garden: “A Place for Beautiful Plants to Thrive”

• I found the horticultural counterpart to these efforts to diversify and localize the Maui food system at the college’s Kauluwehi Biocultural Garden. Ten years ago, this floodwater retention basin was redesigned to meet the demand for more green space on campus. Since then it has turned into a case study for bringing back the original dense, biodiverse agroecological planting methods of native Hawai’ians. Here, program manager Nicolette Van Der Lee and agroecology technologist Robert Tada are working to preserve native trees, medicinal plants, flowers and ferns and create a learning site and community engagement hub.

• Nicolette, a soft-spoken, self-taught horticulturalist who also serves as Maui College’s workforce program manager, showed me Hawai’i’s native palm, the lo’ulu, with its large fan-shaped leaves that burst from its crown like fireworks. Now endangered, Robert has taken on the task of saving them. He’s propagated 200 young keiki, or offspring, from this one tree. The noni tree we stopped to look at is one of a dozen “canoe species” that came to the islands with the original Polynesian settlers. Prized for its medicinal power, every part of the plant is used, including its pungent-smelling fruit. There are endemic evergreen ‘ohi’a lehua, the first to spring forth after a lava flow with its fiery red and yellow bottle brush-like blossoms; the endemic deciduous wiliwili, known for its exotic coral-colored flowers and red berries; and of course ulu, the protein-rich breadfruit trees.

• Following the devastating 2023 Lahaina fire—intensified by highly flammable invasive species that had been allowed to grow unchecked on former plantation property—the college set aside space for an indigenous, endemic, and introduced plants nursery to repopulate the area in a more ecologically resilient manner. The garden donates plant starts to fire victims, and, aided by government grants, has partnered with the non-profit Treecovery to help restore the island’s natural landscape following the fire.

High school and college students have taken part in the efforts to map over 7,000 trees and plants across partner sites, and the program provides free trees and plants to Lahaina residents who are relandscaping after the fire. A student-launched rain garden—aided by kukui trees, palapalai ferns, plants, and deep root systems—meanwhile, captures, treats and infiltrates storm water, preventing pollution from affecting downstream ecosystems.

I came away from my visit filled with awe and wonder at the natural beauty of Maui, a solid sense of its food system challenges, and great admiration for the countless ways that the local ohana (a lovely term that encompasses blood, adopted, and intentional family members) are coming together to find solutions.

In my next post, I will take a short break from my on-the-road dispatches to tell you about an exciting new saké rebranding that promises to add new depth and choice to the U.S. domestic market! Please stay tuned. As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you like Reaping What She Sows, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Other News and Notes

As the tragic and foolish war the U.S. and Israel are waging on Iran extinguishes more lives, military hardware, and GDP, it’s a good time to read this IPES Food story, “How We Are All Paying to Keep Our Food Systems Hooked on Fossil Fuels,” and remind ourselves why we need to keep focused on growing the alternative food system.

This recent New York Times op-ed “Why the Kids Won’t Farm” (free gift link here) by American Farmland Trust’s Brooks Lamb debunks the notion that kids don’t want to farm; they just can’t get into it because of the high cost of land and the consolidation of the industry under fewer and fewer mega-farm operators and private investors. If we want to give aspiring alternative food system farmers a chance we need structural reforms that lower the barriers to access. Hear, hear!

I just finished Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, and highly recommend it. It’s a nuanced, jaunty, and fun account of the development of our modern cold-chain and its unforeseen, positive and negative consequences. The most exciting chapter, from “Reaping’s” point of view, is that in which the author visits Rwanda to show how entrepreneurs there are creating a sustainable, culturally appropriate cold chain that does not replicate the mistakes and excesses of the developed world. Cultural colonialism does not have to extend to the cold chain!

The past week-and-a-half has set a new “Reaping” travel record. I spent a glorious week in Hawai’i, four days on Maui and three on Oahu in Honolulu. On Maui I was hosted by the innovative University of Hawaii Maui College community as well as the Nisei Veterans Memorial Center. During the Honolulu portion, my cherished By the Shore of Lake Michigan colleagues and I gave a panel session on the book at the annual conference of the Association for Asian American Studies. Twelve hours after an overnight return trip to Toronto (with a transfer in Vancouver), I was back at the airport to head to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts for a visit with the Slough Farm Foundation and the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society.

But I still have more to tell you about my last trip, so I’m filing the second in what for now will be a series of dispatches from the road. I want you to meet the regions, farmers, and food system experts from whom I’m learning so much! Again, I’m giving you the Cliff Notes (SparkNotes to many of you) bullet point version, which I hope better fits into your busy schedules – we’re all overloaded with too much to read and to watch these days.

I’ll pick up where we left off, beautiful northern California. Not my native half of the state, but one I love dearly for its natural beauty, ample agricultural lands, and the passionate people doing important food system work.

Green Valley Farm and Mill, Sebastopol, Sonoma County

• Heritage grain Farmer Mai Nguyen and dairy and apothecary farmer Aubrie Maze and I had a terrific conversation. Topics included everything from the power of transformation throughout our work to California’s unsavory history of exploitation and exclusion of Chinese, Japanese and other diasporic farmers.

• Green Valley Farm and Mill is composed of 172 acres of collectively owned land located just 20 minutes from downtown Sebastopol. Yet the deep valley and surrounding mountains, so lush and bright green on the weekend of my visit, felt far more remote and unspoiled.

• Farmers Mai and Aubrie and their families live on the property, along with other small businesses, makers, and growers. The farm is also the home of Dr. Laney Siegner, founder and executive director of Climate Farm School, a unique program of farm-based education for kids and adults. I look forward to telling Laney’s story in a future “Reaping” article!

• Grains and dairy are unusual specialties for first-generation farmers, who tend to more often be vegetable farmers—a sector with a lower financial bar to entry (no animals, smaller equipment, little land necessary). Yet in Mai and Aubrie’s cases grain and dairy farming spoke to them in a deeply visceral way. For Aubrie, it was “the intimacy of having your arms wrapped around an animal, milking her, the smells and tastes” that awoke a deep sense of, “my people have been doing this for a long time.”

• Mai’s question to me was, What induced the women subjects of Reaping What She Sows: How Women are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System to take up the calling of transforming our food system? One motivation I saw early on during my reporting in this field was families who had suffered illness as a result of their heavy exposure to glyphosates and other chemicals used in fertilizers and pesticides.

For Mai and Aubrie, the inverse, the healing aspect of their way of farming, is one reason they’re so committed to their work. Mai recalled her early days as a grain farmer, learning that peoples’ challenges digesting wheat can be related to glyphosate or gluten. Organic wheat and the long fermentation of unsifted whole grain flour aids the pre-digestion of bran and gluten, and often allow people with intolerances to wheat to enjoy bread again.

Yet, even knowing that, Mai added, it took having their “milk monster” dairy-loving daughter suddenly waking in the night in pain, and learning that she was lactose intolerant to learn a parallel lesson: that milk from heritage breed cows, unmediated by pasteurization and homogenization, was a much better non-industrial version that her daughter immediately took to. Upon joining Aubrie’s milk share program, it became clear that Mai’s daughter had no issues with raw milk filled with active enzymes that aid in digestion. Figuratively smacking her head, Mai said, “Duh, I grow these heirloom grains, why didn’t I think heirloom cows might be part of the key to having more digestible milk for my child?” Mai later told me “Both factors—heirloom and whole—I think are notable in our respective wheat and milk.”

• Not everyone comes to the world of land regeneration and agroecological farming from a desire to farm. Aubrie is one such farmer. “I didn’t set out to be a farmer,” she told the assembled crowd. “I was interested in community and food sovereignty, and the questions of how do we take care of each other? How do we rebuild our systems?” She and Mai both spent time in UC Berkeley cooperative housing, where they shared a house with up to 30 people. It was a comfortable situation for someone Aubrie, who deals with social anxiety. “Not having to do superficial small talk, but instead sharing everyday life with people, putting meals together, doing homework together, it awoke something really deep and old in me that felt meaningful. It’s about remembering how to live as humans,” she said.

Experiencing serious illness as a teenager strengthened her interest in the healing power of nature, and the call she felt to live on the land. Raising goats, then dairy cows, and adding a healing herbal apothecary became the basis for Bramble Tail Homestead, which Aubrie runs with her life partner Scott Kelley. They run pasture-based cows on 40 acres of grassland and grow more than 100 different medicinal plants for their 0.6 acre apothecary garden. Their dairy and herd share programs, apprenticeship program, workshops, and tours allow community members to enter into a relationship with the land in numerous ways.

• Spurred by Bekki of Gonzalez Siemens Family Farm’s comment about how California’s regional grainshed lags behind others, I asked Mai to comment on this. It goes all the way back to the start of the newer state of California, she explained. “California’s central role in the global flow of goods means that we haven’t had to create a regional grain economy, unlike regions that need to be more self-sufficient.”

Thus there wasn’t as much of an original regional grain system to return to, as has happened in the northeastern U.S. grainshed where June Russell led the effort; in Maine, led by the vision of Amber Lambke of Maine Grains; and in the Midwest, led by Artisan Grain Collaborative’s executive director Alyssa Hartman. The California grain economy is still deeply intertwined with international trade of commodity, Mai explained. Grain travels both in and out of the region through the railroad lines and international ports that helped make California the fruit and vegetable basket of the world.

California also still lacks the diverse ecosystem of small organic maltsters, beer breweries, and bakers that fill out the grain value chain in the northeast and helps balance supply with demand. Another thing: the supply of small-scale equipment for California’s regional grain economy is actually shrinking not growing. More than a decade ago, when Mai started farming, she said, “There were ten different grain cleaners across the state” that could handle the needs of a small scale, 150-acre farm like hers. “Now there is only one,” she reported, with the rest of the machines geared toward 20,000-ton, single-variety cleaning jobs.

And finally, there is the barrier of the dauntingly high cost of land in California. Farmers are more “real estate parents than farmers,” said Mai, meaning they’ll grow whatever is most profitable and allows them to maintain cash flow. When she was hunting for land to farm, she recalls two listings for farmland on each coast: a 10-acre farm in Nevada City for $5 million, and a 30-acre organic farm in upstate New York with a house, for $325,000.

Yet there’s one advantage California has that the northeast does not, Mai learned during June Russell’s recent visit to the farm: the ability to grow a variety of supremely tasty heritage breeds, as Mai does, such as her Chiddam Blanc de Mars and Wit Wilkoring, which simply don’t yield enough to pencil out for most farmers. Regional differences bring diversity back to our grainsheds, and knowledge-sharing through visits between grainshed movement leaders and participants helps grow the movement.

• On a tour of the farm and mill, Mai described the work that she and the California Grain Campaign are doing, to grow out seeds to make sure there are enough for local farmers around the world; workforce development to increase the less than 2% percent or so of people involved in farming and also the 2% of all farmers who farm organically; and land rehabilitation, transforming over-grazed, nutrient-depleted hard pan into microbial rich fields of perennial grains.

• Because almost all of the oats consumed in America are commodity oats from Canada, Mai has started farming a small amount of oats so her customers don’t have to buy oats grown from Monsanto seeds. “It’s a wonderful passion,” she said.

An Important Word from Vineyard Manager Brenae Royal

• On the UC Merced leg of my Northern California trip one of my super-dynamic co-panelists was Brenae Royal, founder and CEO of Violet’s Paradise Wines in Sonoma. A highly respected industry veteran, she champions diversity in the soil microbiome as well as in the wine-making community, where some of the most exciting work is being done by BIPOC and LQBTQ+ folks. Yet if access to farmland and partnerships are hard for white farmers, it is triply hard for women of color. Please take a look and listen at this word from Brenae. And if you know of vineyard owners who are ready to retire but want to keep their land in agriculture, please let Brenae know. Land access is one of the keys to success for winemakers of color, and it’s not happening fast enough.

In my next “Reaping” I’ll report on my visit to Hawaii. As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you liked the book, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Other News and Notes:

The Iran war, the recent spike in oil prices, and the Trump administration’s full-on dismantling all moves toward clean energy bodes ill on so many fronts. But what it is doing to deep-sea life is heartbreaking. Jeffrey Marlow explains in “How to Poison an Ocean,” in The New Yorker.

It’s been gratifying to receive lots of interest in Reaping What She Sows from the UK. The latest interview I did there was with the podcast of The Royal Horticultural Society which featured me recently. The focus is on the home gardening, the ultimate short food supply chain and the best form of food security!

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Hello Readers!

I’ve just returned from an extended stay on the west coast, a mix of work, family, and vacation time. In this “Reaping” I’m trying something new: giving you just the highlights of the last leg of my trip, a swing through northern California and the Central Valley to talk about Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System. In each of my four talks, I was in conversation with some truly amazing food system leaders so I’d like to shine the spotlight on them. To keep it brief and breezy, I’m opting for that favorite format of skimmers and speed readers, the bullet point list. And I’m breaking it up into two parts. Let me know if you like this format, prefer a leisurely narrative journey, or don’t really care!

Part I, San Francisco to Merced, California

March 17, FAACTS Food Action Summit Kick-off event

• I wish every city had a FAACTS (Food and Agriculture Coalition Toward Sovereignty), whose mission is to create a “just, connected, and community-led food system that ensures every San Franciscan has access to nutritious, culturally relevant, and sustainably grown food. For this event, I was in conversation with Shakirah Simley, executive director of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center (BTWCSC), a multi-service nonprofit and one of San Francisco’s oldest Black-led organizations.

• Our conversation centered on the potential of cross-cultural alliances—especially Black-Asian allyship—to further food sovereignty. We discussed past examples of such mutual support: Yuri Kochiyama and Malcom X and Grace Lee and James Boggs.

• Part of our talk was inspired by the wonderful anthology We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black & Asian Feminist Solidarities. Among the pressing issues it brings up: Asian Americans’ risk of becoming complicit with white supremacy by playing into racial hierarchies and the model minority myth. In an essay titled “We Will Not be Used,” Mari Matsuda writes, “the middle can dismantle white supremacy if it refuses to be the middle, if it refuses to buy into racial hierarchy.”

• Instead, we agreed, let’s look to form alliances, such as African American’s support of Japanese in San Francisco during World War II, or friendships and solidarity between Japanese and Black Americans in Los Angeles to model ongoing mutual aid and collaboration. It’s in this way that we create social change.

  This inspiring kick-off event was held in San Francisco’s Chinatown at Moongate Lounge, located above and operated by the proprietors of Mister Jiu’s, Brandon Lee and Anna Chet Jew Lee. Shoutout to Anna Lee for providing us some great dishes to fortify us during our talk!

• If you’re in the Bay Area, FAACTS’s 3^rd Annual SF Food Action Summit it taking place March 25-26 at UCSF Mission Bay Rutter Center; please attend if you can.

March 19, UC Merced “Women Who Nourish” panel

I was honored to be part of this panel celebrating women shaping the future of food, farming, and wine. Rancher Rizpah Bellard of Nova Farming both moderated and was a panel participant, along with me, fourth-generation farmer and regenerative pioneer Benina Burroughs Montes; TomKat Ranch shepherd Mukethe Kawinzi; and winemaker Brenae Royal, founder and CEO of Violet’s Paradise Wines.

• 

  Both Rizpah and Brenae talked about overcoming the barriers of structural and systemic racism. Rizpah described watching her dad, a first-generation rancher, denied loans and barred from buying land, and how she overcame these barriers in part by selling her meat products to institutional buyers, including the Central California Food Bank. Brenae expressed frustration at generational landowners who express a progressive mindset until it comes down to actually partnering with a highly qualified woman of color.

• Mukethe shared what led her to seek a life as a pastoralist on the land: the desire to be closer to both animals and nature, and her vision for a future in which the entire continent is crisscrossed with regenerative grazing corridors that deepen resilience and link ecosystems.

• Benina expressed the plain logic of working with nature rather than treating it like the enemy with an arsenal of toxic weapons. “For every one bad bug, there are seventeen hundred good ones,” she said. “If we could just focus on the seventeen hundred good ones…the ecosystem will work itself out.”

• UC Merced’s Executive Chef Mitchell Vanagten, who brought us all together also had the brilliant idea of recreating recipes from two great women cooks, Edna Lewis and Alice Waters. So we feasted on Edna’s spicy collard greens and Alice’s potato and celery root purée among other tasty offerings. Thanks, Chef Mitch!

• Another highlight: touring UC Merced Experimental Smart Farm with research specialist Kat Corti and Chef Mitch. Kat showed us a human-following robot that can help with hauling produce harvests; trials on mycelium as a “super material” that can replace materials like Styrofoam; and groundwater recharge experiments that could help smallholder farmers compete with large landowners by creating their own replenishable underground reservoirs in a time of increasing drought pressure.

In my next “Reaping” I’ll report on my last two stops on the tour. As always, if you like this article, please subscribe to this Substack, and if you liked the book, by all means please leave me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!

Other News and Notes:

I highly recommend this LinkedIn post from Pamela Hess, “The Strait of Hormuz Runs Straight Through American Agriculture.” The war on Iran directly affects American farmers, and underscores yet another reason we need to move away from commodity agriculture’s total dependence on fossil fuel-based nitrogen fertilizers.

I’ve been talking about this Civil Eats article to a lot of people, because it’s so hopeful in a dark time for agriculture and the world in general. The idea: state governments are much better suited to create their own Farm Bills rather than relying on Congress for its four hundred-plus billion dollar version. It makes sense that states create their own farm bills to foster robust local and regional foodsheds. Who needs a bloated, pork-filled federal bill that props up an outmoded form of agricultural ruled by commodity oligarchs?

Shoutout to Merced’s own Jim Cunningham, whose family has ranched in the region for generations, and who, along with his wife Carlene, has been instrumental in the founding and support of Merced College and UC Merced. After I spoke in our panel discussion about my family’s history in the World War II government prison camps, he came up to me to tell me what a shameful chapter in the country’s history that was, and urge me to see the Merced Assembly Center Memorial. Like so many of these giant, inhumane, pre-prison holding pens, it was housed on the site of the local county fairgrounds (cruel irony). I did visit it, Jim, and was deeply moved. Thank you.

A bonus of my Central Valley trip was my visit to the legendary Koda Farms, where I met third-generation co-owner Robin Koda. My hat’s off to her for the heroic work she does caring for the family legacy and for her elderly mom. Here’s a little synopsis of my visit.

I’m heading to Hawaii next, for a talk on By the Shore of Lake Michigan at the Asian American Scholar’s Conference with my esteemed colleagues. I’ll also be visiting the island of Maui thanks to an invite from the University of Hawai’i Maui College. I’ll be speaking on sake and the Nikkei incarceration. I hope to bring back some interesting sustainable food system news, too!

Stay safe, and see you soon.

As many recent inspiring and catchy posts celebrating International Women’s Day attest, it is so often women who are leading ecosystems regeneration and food system change. Yet this latest installment of “Reaping” reminds us that there is still a lot more that needs to be done to empower women farmers so that they can step into leadership roles.

There are still too many parts of the world where women do the hard labor of cultivating the land with none of the rights to agricultural education, land ownership, and credit. This is true in Kerala, South India. Historically the communities in Kerala were matrilineal societies where women owned property and wealth was passed down to female, not male successors. Today, thanks to colonial land reform laws, the opposite is true: women are not allowed to own land even though they provide much of the manual labor of farming for no pay; it is considered family labor.

This came up in my recent, fascinating conversation with May Jacob, whose education, work, and research spans continents as well as so many aspects of food, agriculture, culture, and ancient spiritual healing practices. She sees connections between the past and the present, and possibilities for both reform and holistic healing through collective forms of self-sufficiency.

May’s work experience and interests stem from her global background: born in the south of India, she was educated in Dubai, in the Indian capital city of Delhi, and in the U.K., where she completed her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. Later she worked on both the east and west coasts of the United States. Her expertise in data analysis and community development led to her work creating sustainable communities and cooperatives around the globe.

In her current position as director of research and projects for the Kerala, South India-based Agronature, she has helped create self-sustaining agricultural communities around the world. One current project is working with farmer co-operatives in Kerala, and farmer producer companies and organizations where the farmers are members. The state is well known for spices such as pepper and cardamom, and the cooperative movement is strong in this part of India, where many have created remarkable grassroots support systems for farmers. They’ve created credit programs and access government funds for marketing purposes or to create value added products or e-commerce sites.

All of this sounds like a dream to those in the for-profit-based western model, yet there are problems in this system, May adds. The grassroots support systems the cooperatives have built are now being threatened by climate change, mostly in the form of rising temperatures, an aging farmer population and outward migration of youth. In many states of India the caste system creates a huge barrier to equality of access for farmers.

One successful example May cites is one of the oldest, and best-known cooperatives in India, Amul, the Indian Milk Cooperative founded in 1946 in the state of Gujarat. The 1976 Hindi feature film Manthan skillfully tells the story of its rise despite the obstacles of class, gender, mistrust of outsiders, urban folk and scientists, and lack of infrastructure. There, too, as in the direct supply chains I describe in Reaping What She Sows, building an equitable supply chain took creativity and grit. Manthan was India’s first crowd-funded film, financed by 500,000 dairy farmers, who each chipped in 2 rupees, the equivalent of about 100 to 200 rupees in today’s currency, or about one to two U.S. dollars. Can you imagine someone making an award-winning film about the rise of the Organic Valley cooperative, crowd-funded by dairy farmers?

Lest you imagine that India has no systemic agricultural problems like North America, May says there are plenty. The government heavily subsidizes chemical, urea-based high nitrogen fertilizer, which has led to its indiscriminate use. As in North America, this has in turn led to widespread soil depletion and leaching of nitrous oxide into waterways and air. There is a deep sense of distrust toward the establishment, most often the Government sector, private agriculture companies. In many cases agricultural officers and the establishment are seen by farmers as not fully invested in the success of their farming operations. “There are so many conspiracy theories floating around, and multiple competing political interests,” explains May. This too, is depicted in Manthan: Gujarati dairy farmers had been exploited for so long by the local cartel that they were unwilling to trust the rare person and organization that had their best interests at heart.

The 2024-2025 Indian farmers’ protests that erupted globally and sparked massive rallies in Toronto, where I live, stemmed from Punjabi farmers’ protest of government deregulation. Aimed at strengthening private sector activity in agriculture, it tilted the balance of power even more in favor of corporate interests. In a country where more than 400,000 farmer suicides have been documented over a 23-year period due to high debt, rising input costs, climate-change related crop failures, and the complex web of caste and familial relationships, farmers wanted minimum price support measurements and loan and debt relief.

Renjith Rajendran Bharippil, founded Agronature in 2009 to help create self-sustaining and commercially viable agricultural communities based on the Swaraj (literally “self-rule” or self-governance) model popularized by Mahatma Gandhi beginning in the 1920s. It focuses on decentralization—people -led, non-governmental, and sometimes voluntary work organizations. It is a philosophy very much in line with the alternative food system that Reaping maps.

May’s role at Agronature is to do the field work, studying targe communities closely to figure out what interventions will work best, then create the project design and a detailed project report, then align those with key performance indicators that can be achieved and managed collectively. She offers the hypothetical example of a women-dominated rice farmer producer group. She might suggest adding a rice mill, which the women could operate, an e-commerce platform, agritourism, and a training program that would take into consideration language disparities, who the trainer(s) will be, and how they will get to the community.

This is the type of supply chain building that the women in Reaping must figure out through information exchange within or without their local or regional network, peer-to-peer learning, or through education and research. Often they must do this on their own, or if they are lucky, with the assistance of non-profit and/or philanthropy-backed groups like the Artisan Grain Collaborative in the Midwest or GrowNYC in New York. May’s community-based work in the U.S. too, notably with the Hayward Promise Neighborhood in Northern California, has made her aware of systemic problems in even the most well-intentioned local community building programs. She points to the cumbersome administrative structure of disbursing aid in the $25 million project, which she felt undercut its effectiveness. Another chokepoint was that while her data collection exposed clear gaps and needs in communities of color, what was lacking was not more data, but the political will to implement clearly outlined solutions.

May points to other roadblocks in the areas of education, community health, and food systems self-sufficiency that are concerning to her, namely our profit-driven capitalist system and its massive public and private-sector support of energy guzzling AI data centers. Yet she sees hopeful signs, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s willingness to address the problem of food insecurity and his commitment to universal childcare and early education. “I think it will take a lot of pressure off parents, and also help children think about community, the environment and food in a totally different way,” she says.

More recently, her move back to India in 2018 has led her down another path, that of documenting the many different forms of spiritual healing practices across southern India, with plans of turning her studies into a book. There is Ayurveda, perhaps the best known form, but there are many different parallel holistic and indigenous systems that draw on ethnobotanical knowledge, and tenets similar to those of biodynamic farming in the way they incorporate moon and sun cycles to help understand plant potency. Siddha medicine, for example, is the Tamil Dravidian system of traditional healing, which employs a mix of herbs, mineral and metal treatments as well as energy work used to strengthen immunity and balance the body’s elements and humors. Animal extracts and snake venom are also used in treatments. While not exactly religious practices, May calls these approaches a type of “faith modality” similar to some Native American or South American healing systems, which can only be passed on to students who have proven their worth through study and apprenticeship.

With his book project, she hopes to both document these modes of healing, and use the knowledge to help readers put their bodies back in balance with the natural world. In Ayurvedic practice, she notes, if you have too much heat in the body, one remedy is to bathe in the full moonlight and listen to music that contains certain harmonies, such as traditional Indian ragas. Indian doctors will also dispense practical nutritional advice, something she believes is sorely lacking in western medicine. “I grew up in the eighties and nineties. In India, if you went to a doctor with a fever they would tell you, ‘Now you need to eat light foods. You can’t eat a lot of meat and very heavy foods because your digestion is weak.’ These are Western medical doctors, but they would give you nutrition advice,” something she never saw an American doctor do in the decade she spent living in the U.S. Thankfully this may be changing as the mixed bag that is the current administration’s department of Health and Human Services agenda moves forward.

Yet May is clear that alternative healing modalities should stay alternative, and that public health should be built on sound empirical evidence. “ We should take on alternative therapies at our own personal risk, something that we can approach exactly like that, alternatively,” she notes. “We need to build a real, natural, spiritually oriented system that can replenish humanity in the true sense, not through a mass market spiritual system.”

Other News and Notes

I am on an extended trip to the west coast, tending to family, friends, and work. Book events included a fun and energizing pop-up at the Sunday Santa Monica Farmers Market alongside Bekki and Jasper Siemens of Gonzalez Siemens Family Farm. Their social media guru Caitlin Santiago created this seven-part series of short interviews with us. Thank you, Catilin, and thanks to all you friends who showed up! Two other wonderful events were book talks at my mother’s assisted living facility in Los Angeles and with UC Santa Barbara Assistant Professor Liz Carlisle’s Food, Agriculture and the Environment class. A return trip to northern California is next on my tour.

To celebrate International Women’s Day and the International Year of the Woman Farmer, Civil Eats offers this fantastic compilation of its most important stories on women farmers in recent years. Thanks to the editors for including this profile on me and Reaping.

I just finished Austin Frerick’s Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, which is an excellent and searing indictment of the unchecked consolidation of our food industry, currently controlled by a handful of barons: beef barons, berry barons, coffee barons, etc. The Gilded Age overtones are deliberate, and Frerick ends the book with a rallying cry to attack these powers at the source. And I’m excited to have just received my copy of Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods, edited by Liz and Aubrey Streit Krug The Land Institute. Please stay tuned for more on that in a future “Reaping” article!