>Oregon Local Foods part 2: What’s for dinner?

>Cassava root. Salmonberry. Black Republican cherries.
Never heard of them? There’s probably a reason for that – they are all edible plants native to the Willamette Valley here in Oregon. At one time, native Oregonians (from the Kalapooia and other tribes) ate cassava like we eat French fries today. Berry bushes in hundreds of varieties provided a wild harvest to anyone who knew how to tell a delicious snack from a bellyache. The black Republican cherry tree was introduced as a commercial crop in 1860, producing a plum-like fruit that was known throughout the Northwest.
Today, the cassava is protected as one of the few remaining indigenous plants in the area, our berry diet is limited to the two or three varieties that accompany peanut butter in sandwiches, and the words “black Republican” only bring to mind awful jokes.
But the irony is more immediate than that. Faced with a food culture that has been completely commodified, stripped of all regional identity and packed into neat little boxes (salmon burger, anyone?), chefs and food aficionados around the Willamette Valley are scratching wildly, looking for dishes that we can claim and incorporate into a distinctive local cuisine. I feel their pain – the lack of “American” food, leave alone Oregonian or Pacific Northwestern food is something I’ve long failed to understand. Once, a friend and I brainstormed an entire afternoon trying to think of something to cook for Saudi Arabian friends coming over for an authentic American dinner. We ended up making enchiladas. Close enough –as long as our guests never find their way south of the border.
It’s not that we don’t have material to work with in this region. Heirlooms like the black Republicans, including apple, pear and nut trees, as well as a varieties of beans, vegetables and berries, have been cultivated here since the first white settlers set up camp. The sense of local pride that has evolved around these crops is revealed in some of their names: Gramma Walters bean; Oregon Champion gooseberry. Because they are for one reason or another not commercially viable (delicate fruit, short shelf life, inconsistent production), many are in danger of extinction. Today, only a few, very old black Republican trees survive in the Eugene area and nowhere else, according to a book compiled by Gary Paul Nabhan, a well known ecologist and localization writer. The loss of heirloom varieties would be a blow to local agriculture, not just for cultural reasons but also because locally adapted crops tend to be hardier, better suited to the climate and soil conditions and thus less likely to need chemical inputs to thrive.
Anyway, anyone trying to establish a regional cuisine in Oregon has my full support, especially given some of the difficulties involved. Salmon is no longer an obvious choice for any of the Pacific Northwest. Gary Nabhan splits North America into distinct bioregions based on indigenous food traditions, and names this corner of the continent Salmon Nation. I support the idea behind this effort, but wish we could move beyond this beleaguered fish for its basis. One species is limited as a basis for an entire cuisine, and nobody with an ounce of ecological awareness would (or should) be caught dead eating anything but wild-caught salmon, whose numbers are swiftly dwindling anyway. In addition, any food trend that might eventually filter its way down to the masses (ie broke college students who find cooking an enjoyable form of productive procrastination) must be affordable, but most restaurants that attempt to differentiate their fare from that of Seattle or Portland tend to be in the price range of middle-aged urbanites with real jobs. In this economy, that leaves out roughly half of the population. (Really, though: the poverty rate in the Eugene area is higher than the state average, and Oregon is now has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation.) Although the efforts of local chefs to get us to eat seasonally and locally with braised lamb in wild mushroom sauce are admirable, they aren’t the American’s South’s cornbread and grits. That is, you won’t see many of us switching from ramen-based diets anytime soon. As I mentioned in the previous post, the industrial food system has gotten most people used to food made from two or three major plants plus meat. It’s cheap and childishly easy to prepare (or pick up at the drive-thru window). Some serious re-education is in order before we can even think about preparing regionally based foods.
That said, I do see some adventurous farmers and blogger/cooks in the area making steps in these directions, first making the food available and then showing people that it’s not rocket science to put it together. Farmers near Corvallis are making serious efforts to reintroduce bean and grain production in the Willamette Valley; one Eugene-based blog has a recipe for black bean brownies. Is that the smell of synergy baking?
I’m not suggesting that Oregon farmers abandon all commodity crops for fields of waving cassava and garbanzos. After all, grass seed production generates $1.6 billion in economic activity in the state, and how else would every suburban home be able to cultivate an overwatered green monoculture without these farmers? Plus, other forms of agriculture are just way too much work, and since there simply aren’t enough illegal immigrants to go around, who will do it? On the other hand, small, organic farms have been shown to provide more ecosystem-like benefits while being more productive per acre than huge operations. And aren’t we facing something like a global food crisis? Wouldn’t it make more sense to give up just a few of those acres for diversified food production rooted in local traditions that we can all take pride in?
It’s all too confusing for me. I think I’ll just head to the kitchen to see if I can make black bean brownies that look as good as the picture on that blog. I only wish I had some black Republican cherry ice cream to put on top of them.

>Food fights in Bangalore

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[This post is from two weeks ago, when I set off for Bangalore for some travels in the area. Bangalore is the capital of Karnataka, home to at minimum 7 million people and growing. It also hosts number of NGOs and other groups working directly and indirectly on sustainable agriculture and development issues. My first stop is a two-day seminar on small-scale agriculture in the city itself.]

The journey from Sirsi to Bangalore – despite taking ten hours over bumpy roads – was actually quite comfortable thanks to the wonder of sleeper busses. Like sleeper cars in trains, these public transportation marvels feature narrow bunks surrounded by thick curtains, behind which the traveler may pass out for the duration of the trip. Within an hour of boarding, the financial news (which I have a sick fascination with, like a car accident) coming through my ipod lulled me into dreams of credit default swaps and naked short sellers.

The only unnerving part of the trip was the “rest stop” at 2 AM– most of the travelers were men, forcing me and my full bladder to dash across the darkened highway alone, flashlight in hand, to find a bush, all the time trying not to imagine the many ways I might die or, worse, miss the bus as it pulled away. In record time, I took care of business and climbed back into my bunk, none the worse for the wear.

When we reach Bangalore, it’s the tail end of a ten-day long holiday, so traffic isn’t bad. It’s raining, though, making the sight of the abject poverty – families living under tarps, mothers with young babies begging for change, streetside vendor after vendor selling the same unwanted wares – all the more depressing. It’s my first real encounter with a major Indian city, and the Malnad region where I work is by comparison very well off. I’ve come across probably two beggars in Sirsi. To the best of my ability, I put up a mental wall and worried instead about how I would locate Sunita in this enormous place.

Luckily, the conductor had assumed correctly that I would not recognize my stop name when he called it out, and jabs a finger in my direction when I am to get off. I stumble down the aisle with my overstuffed backpack and Sunita is waiting just outside, as promised (she’s already been here in Bangalore a couple of days). We get in the rick and zoom off to the NIAS campus.

On the way, Sunita explains that NIAS stands for the National Institute of Advanced Studies, one of the more prestigious universities in the country. It was actually founded by the same man who created the Tata empire, India’s largest corporation. Tata is similar to GE in the states, with holdings in auto manufacturing, housing, media and just about anything else they can think of. The seminar Sunita and I are attending is entitled “Farmers, Livelihood and Trade” and is focused primarily on increasing the market share of small organic farmers. It’s actually being put on by GREEN (Genetic Resource Ecology Energy Nutrition) Foundation, one of the major agricultural NGOs in the area.

On arrival, we are given one of the guest rooms that NAIS has set aside for conferences such as these. In the walled-off campus with security guards at the gates, I can almost pretend I’m back in Sirsi. The biggest difference is nobody stares at me here – they’re all used to foreigners.

At the elaborate breakfast provided, I meet Dr. Vanaja Ramprasad, the surprisingly approachable and grandmotherly director of Green Foundation, who has been dedicated to improving the livelihoods of farmers for decades. An hour later (only half an hour behind schedule!) the conference kicks off with a lecture by Devinda Sharma, a journalist and expert on genetically modified crops and agro-politics. I’ve been given the intern’s honor of taking notes for the next two days, but I would have been riveted anyway: this guy is pretty incensed about the state of agriculture and India’s farmers.

Most of Sharma’s talk relates to the WTO and its liberalization of international markets. Pre-WTO, India’s GDP was 25% of the world total. It was a net exporter of food, meaning it shipped out more spices, grains and produce than it bought from other nations, and it didn’t rely on any of them to feed its population. 80% of Indians were employed in the agricultural sector.

Under the WTO, however, the balance began to shift. Heavily subsidized grains from the US began flooding the market, and all the nations who couldn’t compete were told to focus their agricultural production on exports to keep up.

The result was predictable. As Sharma put it, “Importing food is importing unemployment.” Today, India is headed down a path to attain a similar socioeconomic profile to the US, where less than 1% of the population (and dropping) grow agricultural products and a farmer living in Iowa would starve if his local grocery store suddenly ran out of supplies (due to, say, a fuel shortage) because he’s surrounded by a thousand miles of inedible corn and soybeans. The only difference is, there are simply too many people and not enough land for this system to work in India. Somewhere, something or somebody has to give, and I saw those somebodies outside my bus window on the way here. Most of those millions of homeless people are refugees from villages, where they’ve given up on the agricultural life because they can’t afford it (and because it doesn’t provide the glitzy lifestyle they’ve been watching on TV). People in the cities prefer cheap white rice and imported wheat, and crops grown for export must meet standards only attained through chemical inputs (large size, consistent color and texture, perfect skins). Farming using chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides requires economies of scale unattainable by the average small land owner.

As Sharma and the other speakers at the seminar explained, organic farming is supposed to be the antidote to all this mess, but it lacks the government backing to really make it work. Commercial, “conventional” agriculture (using chemical inputs) is, of course, subsidized ever since the WTO arrived, which makes it very competitive in domestic and international markets. Organic farmers receive no such help. In fact, they have to pay for organic certification by often-sketchy certification boards, who in classic Indian style create a tangled network of bureaucratic procedures and paperwork. The farmers, on the other hand, are usually not the corporate-world dropouts who usually take up organic farming in the States. They’re simply trying to sell produce that has been grown the only way they’ve known how for centuries – without outside inputs and with minimal impact on the land.

Although I’ve been studying this stuff for a while, hearing it again and talking to the people who are running against these problems in real life left me feeling disheartened. The second day involved more group discussions with farmers and other interested parties, including one incident that was sort of the highlight for me: an organic farmers vs. biochemical company representative throwdown. This fellow actually had the gall to get up in front of the entire room of 100-some organic farmers and declare that organic food doesn’t taste as good as conventional. In true Indian fashion, he was quite straightforwardly told to shove it. We didn’t see him the rest of the conference.

Despite that happy episode, I left the conference feeling frustrated and a bit hopeless, not only because of what I’d heard, but also because of what I hadn’t heard – an actual solution or at least a plan. Sure, in our air-conditioned haven with meals provided every four hours, we’d come up with a list of “policy recommendations” for the Indian government. But after witnessing during the last few weeks the clumsiness of India’s bureaucracy and the ease with which it is ignored by most citizens, I have my doubts that policy recommendations will have any impact at all. In fact, many of the policies we’d recommended – like setting up farmer-owned organic brands and providing subsidies to organic farmers – already exist, they just aren’t working. While it’s nice to have neat summations of the problems, their solutions, I suspect, are hiding somewhere else.

Next stop: Navadarshanam, a collective just outside Bangalore that’s too natural for organics, where I’ll learn how to find the best ants for eating and become part of the best International Team since the Special Olympics.

>About Vanastree & a lot more before lunch

>“Loss of genetic diversity in agriculture is leading us to a rendezvous with extinction – to the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine. To simplify the environment as we have done with agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world together. Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious.”
– Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney, Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity

Vanastree, the organization that has taken me on as chief cook and bottle washer (ie, intern), is one of many NGOs tackling this issue of genetic diversity in agriculture. Basically, thanks to the “green revolution” of pesticides and hybrid crops, India’s agricultural land is in danger of becoming a giant, Monsanto-owned rice paddy, susceptible to disease and chaos and not coming near to providing enough food for its constituents. By decentralizing the food supply and reducing the heavy dependence on chemical inputs, food security (both in terms of safety and availability) becomes a much easier task.
Vanastree’s mission is to promote biodiversity in cultivated plants, which means it’s involved in a variety of activities. Documenting the infinite varieties of rice, vegetables, medicinal plants and food-producing trees in the region is a major task. We also organize farmers into seed-exchange groups, and get people started in home-based, conservation-oriented businesses (ie drying bananas for sale or hosting ecology camps).
And who does all this work? Well, there’s the collective of farmers that make up Vanastree’s 80-some member base. They keep the seeds, comprising a regional seed bank that uses the landscape itself instead of some subzero vault in the arctic. Then there’s Sunita, who basically does everything else from the organizational standpoint. Sunita started the organization in 2001, and is probably the most dedicated person I’ve ever met outside of my workaholic family. Burnout is not in her vocabulary. (Luckily, she also has a great sense of humor and knows how to take a break.)

So far, my job as an intern has been to get Vanastree up to date, technology wise (Sunita jokes that she’s the only Indian without computer skills), complete a bunch of background research for myself so I can get some grasp on the issues, and do photodocumentation of farms/home gardens and food processing. This last task has been the most fun and interesting, and not just because I’m out in the field. As a journalism student, I’ll take any excuse I can get to stick a camera in someone’s face.
This Tuesday, I got one of those opportunities – a trip to the coast to tour home gardens with a partner NGO. Except that at six in the morning when Sunita politely asked me to get up already, I was not ready to be a dutiful intern. Neither was I relishing the thought of the 16-hour day ahead. Having been awake half the night under mosquito assault, I wondered if economists had ever tried to calculate the lost GDP due to bloodthirsty insects. It would probably be enough dough to swathe the entire country in mosquito netting.
Nonetheless, here’s a rundown of the day:

Our driver, Mushtaq (the same one who picked me up from the airport), arrives just on time; that is, ten minutes early. I grab my camera and climb in the van with Sunita and Manorama, a Vanastree trustee who not only takes care of her farm and family but also does much of the organization’s documentation work – she probably could identify hundreds of local vegetable varieties by sight, along with their ideal growing conditions, pest management techniques and preparation methods. With her quiet yet inquisitive manner she pulls data out of even the most secretive gardeners.
Mushtaq throws the van into gear and we go bumping off down the road. I’ve been on a few trips now with Mushtaq at the wheel and have gained an appreciation for both his skillful driving and his sense of style. Like many young Indian men, he typically wears clothing flamboyant enough for an American preteen girl: rhinestone-studded jeans embroidered with colorful patterns; tight, brightly colored t-shirts emblazoned with brand names; chunky shoes. His van has just as much personality. A gold plastic tablet with text from the Koran (Mushtaq is part of the large Muslim minority here) hangs from the rearview mirror; on the side mirror, pink text instructs the viewer to SMILE.

Anyway, after climbing up and down hills for nearly two hours, we arrive at the coast. Our guide to the home gardens today is Rekha, a woman from the NGO Sneha Kunja. Sneha Kunja is a health organization that runs a hospital combining traditional (Ayurvedic, naturopathic, etc) and conventional (Western) medical practices. They also have several outreach programs, and promoting good nutrition through home gardens is one of them. We meet up Rekha for a quick breakfast of chai and dosas – thin pancakes made from rice flour –and head out to the first garden.
This part of the coast is home to the Hallaki Vokkal tribe, a unique but swiftly diminishing group that has farmed and fished here for thousands of years. Although they never had the bureaucratic clout to gain official tribal status from the government (a process that takes time, negotiating skills and money), the Hallaki Vokkal maintain their distinct appearance and way of life. The women traditionally wear a backless sari topped with thick layers of beaded necklaces, and men perform work according to their caste – the family we visited specializes in carpentry.
After admiring the patch of tall white okra plants and a thorny cow fence, we head down to the house where the vegetables for home consumption are grown. The greenery is flourishing despite what seem like impossible conditions – a whopping 13 feet of rainfall per year (most of it in the last three months) and soil that resembles reddish gravel. We stop inside the house for a few minutes to eat some surplus bananas; with different varieties ripening all year round, it’s a tough job in these parts, but somebody’s got to do it. We also get our foreheads dusted with red and yellow powders, a ritual performed on all guests to traditional households. Then we head back to the van, wake Mushtaq from his nap, and hit the potholes to the next garden.
On the way, we make a tender coconut stop. Tender coconuts are a fleshy, green cousin of the usual brown-husked coconut, mostly prized for their juice. Not only does they contain salts to replenish your ever-depleted sweat glands, but tender coconuts are also a guaranteed pathogen-free source of hydration. The roadside vendor sells them for about eight rupees (20 cents) each, and uses his machete to lop off the top. Then you pour the cool, slightly tangy juice down your throat and hand the empty coconut back to him. He makes a series of cuts to slice it in half and fashion a spoon out of the hull, which you can then use to scrape out the thin layer of gooey innards. That part is a bit too mucousy for me but the liquid was refreshing. We toss our coconut shells onto the large mound next to the vendor’s stand. They’ll dry there and be used to fuel someone’s fire. Because the coast is so densely populated, wood is hard to come by – the forests are as free of leaf litter as a well maintained city park – and any burnable scrap is valuable property.
While Sunita and I were getting coconuts, Rekha had made a few phone calls and discovered that there weren’t any more gardens for us to visit that day. We decide instead to take a look at Rekha’s house and then go to an island hosting a sustainable fishing village.
At Rekha’s house, I pet a cute calf and get more powder rubbed on my forehead. From there, it’s a short distance down the road to the river.
The river is the Aghanashini, one of four main rivers in this district. It’s one of the few rivers that hasn’t been dammed in India and as a result still feeds a huge estuary, rich with birds, fish and other wildlife. The island we’re visiting, Aigalkurve, is in one of these backwater reaches.
When we get out of the van, the boatman is waiting to ferry us to the island. He pushes the wood canoe across the estuary using a long stick – this is shallow, completely still water. I stick my hand in and half wish for a swim. The rains have been receding and I’m discovering how hot the sun here can get, even when behind a layer of clouds. The high humidity makes even a trace of heat magnified a thousand times. But the lush jungle on either side of the river promises shade and it’s a short ride. I still have no idea what’s on the island, but I have a feeling it will be interesting, if only because it looks like I’m entering the set of Lost.
I check my watch. It’s 11 am. I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen so many different things before lunchtime.

To be continued…