The Garden documentary

The Portland International Film Festival has been going on for about two weeks now and I had the pleasure of seeing a great documentary this week called The Garden.















A couple years ago I was traveling around the country, on tour with a documentary about infoshops that I had made with my friend Courtney. One of our stops was in LA and the people we were staying with mentioned that we should definitely check out the South Central Urban Farm while we were in town. It was one of my favorite things from the entire trip and really got me started thinking about the possibilities of urban agriculture as an act of resistance that yields tangible results and can really bring a community together. While we were there (early 2006) the farmers were already in a battle against the developer who eventually won and was able to bulldoze the land. At the time though, it seemed like the farmers would probably prevail. Seeing this oasis right in the middle of a warehouse district was incredible.

The documentary describes the history behind how the garden started in 1992 after the LA Riots, the work the community put into turning desolate industrial land into an urban farm capable of feeding over 350 families, and the battle to keep the land in the hands of the community. Despite wide-spread support, including by some prominent Hollywood actors, the land was eventually bulldozed. I won't go into detail but the documentary argues that there was a corrupt closed-door deal between the develop and the city, along with another community leader who was apparently motivated by greed. The details on what really transpired to allow the land to be bulldozed isn't quite clear at the end, but whatever happened, it is a tragedy.

On a brighter note, some of the South Central Farmers have gotten new land and are farming on it. If you live in the LA-area they are running a CSA that you can subscribe to.

Where to Buy Food?

I am continually looking for new places to buy my food. Living in Portland there are so many choices. When I first moved here I ended up living in a house across the street from Fred Meyer (i.e. the Northwest's version of Kroger). Because of this I ended up doing most shopping at this horrendous semi-localized version of Wal-Mart. The only good thing: using the self-checkouts to charge myself the conventional price for organic food. They actually had a really good organic/natural section of food. But the shopping experience was soul-killing. I also did some of my shopping at Trader Joe's for about the first 6 months- 1 year of living here.

At first Trader Joe's seemed like this amazing cornucopia of good food for really cheap prices. Little by little I realized that the majority of the food isn't that great. Sure, Trader Joes is good for things like a big jar of (mediocre) olives or the occasional bag of walnuts. But it's not a good place to do your regular weekly grocery shopping.

In the past I had always lived with one or multiple roommates who worked at Wild Oats or (since the merger) Whole Foods. Enjoying a 20% discount and not cooking at home very much, these specialty natural grocery stores didn't seem very expensive to me. Now Whole Foods seems insanely expensive. So, that is pretty much out of the question. Also I am getting more and more skeptical of Whole Foods and the corporate-industrial organic/natural food world. Industrial is really the key word here.

I am reading a book called Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California by Julia Guthman. I highly recommend it if you are interested in the way that organics went from being a radical social movement to becoming an industry. I'm also reading The Way We Eat: Why our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. Although Singer's writing has a tendency to annoy me because I find him a bit patronizing, it has made me think (again) about food choices and the politics of eating.

I moved about a year ago, away from the Fred Meyer to a neighborhood with a Safeway that is two blocks from my house. It's wonderful having a closeby grocery store and I really appreciate it since so many urban neighborhoods are food deserts, but I despise this Safeway. It is overpriced (products seem to be outrageously marked up at this location for some reason), bad selection, lots of expired stuff, lots of out of stock products all the time, and they never have enough people working so you end up standing in line forever!

In the warm months I try to go to the farmer's market once a week because a.) i enjoy the atmosphere and experience and b.) i like supporting local farmers using sustainable farming methods. But what to do in the winter? You might have read my last posting on CSAs - I'm thinking of doing that this spring. But I actually have found two amazing local grocery stores to shop at recently.

The first, Uncle Paul's Produce Barn, bills itself as a "year-round farmer's market." They sell only produce and (for the most part) local produce. Prices are very reasonable and the quality is always great. It is basically a tent (not an actual building) which is probably one reason they are able to keep prices affordable. I've been shopping there for about a year now.

More recently (a few weeks ago) I discovered the wonderful Sheridan Fruit Company. Less than a mile from my apartment and probably my favorite grocery store I've ever found shopped at. It is a full-service old-school grocery store with a deli, a good wine section, a decent beer section, mostly local (yet mostly affordable) produce with quite a bit of organics. Also a giant bulk section with all kinds of dried beans (one of my weaknesses), dried fruit, grains, etc. Also lots of specialty ethnic products like every shape of pasta you can think of. I love this place. Why aren't there more places like it? How do they survive? How do they manage to keep prices affordable? Shopping here is enjoyable, there is a sense of place and a sense of history (they've been in business since 1916). Anyway, I've finally found my grocery store.

Joining a CSA

So, I'm doing some research about direct marketing and trying to decide whether or not I should get a share in a CSA (community supported agriculture) this spring. A csa is a relationship between a farm and a group of community members/shareholders. The members buy a share of the farm upfront, before the growing season, and assume some of the risks that are inherent in farming. They pay for the operating costs and labor ahead of time. Then the farmer distributes the crop throughout the growing season.

It provides garunteed financial support to farmers when they need it most and the customer knows exactly where their food is coming from and how it is grown.

I've been considering Helsing Junction Farm:
http://www.helsingfarmcsa.com/about_us.php

It's owned by two women in Washington and for a small share it is only $25 a week for a big box of produce. That seems like a great deal to me for fresh produce. We'd have to pick up the box less than a mile from where we live, every Wednesday. Plus the farmers seem like people who put a lot of thought into their farming practices, including treating their workers fairly.

Portland Food Carts

One of my favorite aspects of Portland is the abundance of food carts throughout the city. This is a phenomenon that I never experienced in Denver, aside from the occasional hot dog vendor here and there. I don't know why Denver doesn't have them or how Portland came to be such a hot spot. Portland has all kinds of food carts including those that cater exclusively to vegetarians, a Belgian frites cart that is open until 3am, a Waffle cart, and your more runofthemill hotdog vendors.

My friend Peter finished his Masters in Urban and Regional Planning last spring. For his final project he and a few other people put together a research project looking at the significance of Portland's food carts in terms of "street vitality and neighborhood livability." Not surprisingly, they found that food carts offer many benefits to the areas they are located in.

As they say, "The findings indicate that food carts have significant community benefits to neighborhood livability by fostering social interac􀆟ons, walkability, and by providing interim uses for vacant parcels. Addi􀆟onally, carts provide good employment opportuni􀆟es for
immigrants and low-income individuals to begin their own businesses, although there are significant barriers to con􀆟nued stability and success."

If you are interested in reading the full study, the document can be found here:
Food Cart Study

Interested in reading food cart reviews for Portland? Check out this Blog: Food Carts Portland

Farmers Market Haul October 4, 2008

As you can see, we got an amazing haul from the farmers market a couple of weeks ago. Our ritual is to go every Saturday that we can to the Hollywood Neighborhood Farmers Market in Northeast Portland. I like it because there are still a ton of vendors but it isn't quite as crowded and overwhelming as the PSU/Park Blocks Saturday Market.

Book Review of Whose Hunger?: Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid - originally published on Feminist Review

By Jenny Edkins
University of Minnesota Press

Global food insecurity has garnered plenty of media attention within the last few months as food prices continue to skyrocket. The recent crop of hunger-related articles have portrayed the cause of this problem in terms of drought, blight, flooding, effects of war, and the increasing use of farmland to produce biofuel depending on whether the crisis is happening in Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, or any other number of countries currently facing a food crisis. The solution, of course, is to call for international humanitarian aid. Before reading Jenny Edkins' Whose Hunger?, I probably wouldn't have noticed the way that hunger is routinely depoliticized in mainstream discourse. Published in 2000, this work continues to be relevant, offering a seldom heard critique of the way that systems of international aid and concepts of famine are produced and reproduced.

Whose Hunger? is a thought-provoking postmodern critique not only of international practices of humanitarian aid in response to famine, but to modernity as a whole. Edkins draws attention to the ways in which the concept of famine has been depoliticized and constructed as a technical problem that can be investigated and solved by so-called experts using the scientific method. Edkins offers a scathing indictment, deconstructing mainstream discourse on famine and aid as a "product of power relations" in which powerful, benevolent, wealthy, first world "experts" and powerless, uneducated beneficiaries in the "underdeveloped Third World" subjects are produced and reproduced.

This is a very academic read that relies heavily on the work of Foucault, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, and other critical and postmodern theorists. For a reader unfamiliar with this theory, Whose Hunger? is likely to be a challenging read, in spite of the background information Edkins provides. If you are like me and love a good dose of deconstructive analysis, you are in for a treat.

Although there are points where Whose Hunger? is in danger of becoming overly theoretical, Edkins brings the work back down to reality and makes it more understandable by providing examples from her own original research on food for work programs during the Eritrean famine in the mid-1990s. One of the most fascinating (and sadly short) aspects of Edkins work is her discussion of media images of famine victims and the consumption of these images as a kind of voyeurism akin to the consumption of pornography. She also makes brief mention of the common use of women's bodies in such imagery, specifically the emaciated woman with the child she cannot feed at her breast. I wish she would have delved into the dissection of images more thoroughly.

A reading of Whose Hunger? would benefit NGOs worldwide and international aid workers above all else by providing a critical perspective of work that is usually taken for granted as inherently good. The book whet my interest in taking an alternative look at the way in which NGOs, nonprofits, and aid agencies contribute to the reproduction of power relations rather than challenging them.

Review by Liz Simmons