NURF book club at Bookends and Beginnings
On Monday, May 8, Morgan, Ali, and I sat down with Beth Dooley, author of In Winter’s Kitchen (2015) and various cookbooks based on local food sourcing in the Northern Heartlands.
One of Beth’s main creeds is that we are disconnected from our food. The nature of our food system is to grow and process our food out of our sight, which doesn’t allow us to know the practices used to bring sustenance to our stores and plates. She was also critical of policy that provides commodity price support, which only supports farmers that only grow a whole lot of cash crops like corn, soy, and wheat. Many farmers would rather not be using tons of chemicals, but in some cases the government only supports them if they can intensively grow more and more of those crops.
One story Beth told that stuck with me was about a carrot farmer outside of Minneapolis. He grew enough organic carrots to provide for all the Whole Foods stores in Minneapolis, Chicago, and more on a fairly small plot of land, but he needed to expand. His neighbor, who grew wheat and was subsidized by the Farm Bill, allowed him to use a couple of his acres. But then the generous neighbor lost his subsidies because carrots aren’t one of the subsidized crops, and he was growing carrots on the same land as wheat.
Some good steps moving forward might be to get rid of commodity price support, add actual costs of conventional agriculture into consumer food prices (making organic more competitive), and to get more connected with the food we buy. Of course, an important ongoing conversation surrounding Native American land rights and agricultural practices pervades these issues as well. The conversation continues; please feel free to let us know if you have any thoughts!
Here are some movies that Beth recommended:
“Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry” (Jef Sewell, 2016)
“Fresh” (Ana Sofia Joanes, 2009)
“King Corn” (Aaron Woolf, 2007)
“First Daughter and the Black Snake” (Keri Pickett, 2017)
