Mark Winne's Blog

I am proud to announce the publication of my fifth book The Road to a Hunger-Free America: Selected Writings of Mark Winne (Bloomsbury). This announcement is likely to provoke a follow-up question which is why write another book at the age of 75? One answer might be that writing is a better game for me to pursue than either golf or pickle-ball. Another response comes in the form of a diagnosis suggested by Juvenal’s quote, “Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing….” But then there is the less than humble thought — offered from the heart as much from the mind — that I still have something to say that deserves to be heard.

And what I have to say is what I’ve learned over the course of 56 years as a food activist and writer. If we are to end the scourge of hunger in the U.S., in other words, advance a just and sustainable food system, such an effort demands an eagle eye on people, places, and actions. Further, and within those three groupings, I have discovered that success is keenly related to a fundamental application of justice, an active imagination, a clarity of focus on needs and solutions, and effective leadership. What I mean by all this is made visible by the stories and analyses found in these selected essays gleaned from nearly 20 years of writing.

Get it Cheaper, Get it Sooner

Buy The Road to a Hunger-Free America directly from the publisher, Bloomsbury, and save 20%. Go to The Road to a Hunger-Free America: Selected Writings of Mark Winne: Mark Winne: Bloomsbury Academic – Bloomsbury and use the discount code GLRBD8, and you’ll be on your way to owning a classy piece of literature!

Appearances

Want it even cheaper and faster? Come to Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey on October 15 and buy the book, at some ridiculously low price, between 11:30 and 1:30. Since I’ll be there in person, you’ll get the added bonus of a signed copy. I’ll be in the Institute for Food and Nutrition and Health building on the Cook College campus at 61 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, New Jersey (parking is nearby and fairly easy). Besides saying hello and buying a book, you’ll have a chance to enjoy this beautiful, state-of-the-art “green” building complete with a 3-story “living wall” alive with 5200 plants, and the delicious and hopelessly healthy Harvest Café.

Can’t make it to Rutgers? Then go to Paterson, New Jersey on October 16, World Food Day, where I’ll be hanging out at A Better Market while yakking, selling, and signing.  The market is the inspiration of Shana Manradge, a community activist who is featured in the book. Word has it that Paterson’s mayor is going to stop by so that he can have his photo taken with me! I’ll be there from 12 until 3, and the market is located at 215 Rosa Parks Blvd in Paterson, which by the way, is one of the east coast’s great historic cities.

Endorsements

I’m deeply grateful for the words of my book’s endorsers. Not only are they often touching, but their comments also illuminate my purpose and identify the most appropriate audience. Tricia Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Urban Food Systems at Kansas State University, said, “This collection provides a more nuanced account of alternative food movements and food justice than any lecture, peer-reviewed publication, or textbook chapter I could offer to my students.”

Cathy Stanton, Teaching Professor at Tufts University, wrote “Mark Winne’s latest book is grounded in theory and tested in practice to present a clear framework against American food injustice.”

And Christopher Bosso, Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Northeastern University made me feel really old when he said, “Mark Winne is a legend in the food movement, and his insights are particularly relevant today.”

Who am I to argue with these Professors! It never got me anywhere when I was in college!

But just as important as the words of academics are the words of the people you’ll read about in The Road to a Hunger-Free America. When Jo Argabright in Kansas says, “I’m tired of watching my town die,” or Maria Alonso in California says, “This is my community, and I hear from the gardeners all the time how the ‘garden makes me feel better,’” I hear two women giving voice to their passions, and just as importantly, the needs of others in their respective communities. Leaders like Gabe Pena in West Virginia describe how to bring economic vitality back to ex-coal mining towns through food and farming, and Dr. Namali Fernando in Virginia recounts her extraordinary efforts to refocus the practice of pediatrics on nutrition and dietary health.

From the other end of the country, you’ll read about the Herculean efforts of a food bank to stem the tide of hunger in Seattle, and then how the quiet university town of Missoula, Montana made food and farming a ubiquitous part of their community. The list goes on and touches on examples from all over the country. But these aren’t just news stories you’d find in your daily newspaper. They and the book offer an analysis set against a backdrop of social justice theory and a history of good practice. Together, they contain lessons for anyone interested in really ending hunger.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love writing stories about people, places, and actions that are changing the food system for the good. But as enamored as I am by their details, I’m equally passionate about passing them through the sieve of theory and my own decades of experience. In this selection of essays, complemented by some of the great thinkers of our time, I’ve tried to give you the best of both worlds.

The Trump dictatorship announced yet another effort to conceal information from the American public. Herr/Hair Trump’s USDA will terminate the annual measurement of the prevalence of food insecurity (hunger) in the United States. Vital research data that has been used for over 30 years to guide the actions of food activists, advocates, policy makers, and the general public will be “disappeared” by the Orange Man’s Gestapo. In the best tradition of dictators throughout history — Mao denied the death of millions by famine in the early 1960s; Hitler hid death camps from the eyes of so-called “good Germans;” Stalin banished discussion of the Soviet Ukraine famine that killed upwards of 10 million Ukrainians — American citizens who suffer from a lack of adequate nourishment will no longer be counted.

Why does this matter? First off, the survey found over 47 million Americans, or 13.5 percent of the country, were food insecure in 2023 with a subset of 5.1 million experiencing very low food security. This is reason enough to pay attention to and work for national policies, like the SNAP program to mitigate these conditions.

But at the local and state levels, this annual data is critical to both motivating and focusing the work of activists and policy makers. For instance, my food work in Hartford, Connecticut overlapped with a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when researchers from the Food Research Action Center (FRAC), Cornell, and Yale were developing these measurement tools and survey methods. They were not just trying to give credence to anecdotal claims that hunger existed in America, they also wanted to know which demographic groups were at greatest risk and what conditions existed at a household level that contributed to food insecurity. Indeed, the term food insecurity, in use for many years in the international arena, was generally unused in America. Hence, the vague and somewhat misleading word “hunger” served to cover all manner of food and nutrition deficiencies—a lack of refinement and specificity that only served to undermine efforts by those who wanted to carefully target necessary resources.

Once the tools were assembled in the laboratories of talented social scientists, they were field-tested in real places of known poverty. Using the title “Community Child Hunger Identification Project” (CCHIP)—the model for the U.S. Household Food Security Module—the survey was piloted in New Haven, Connecticut and later in Hartford. The results in Hartford were staggering and seized the front page of the Hartford Courant the day after the report’s findings were released. Over 76 percent of the city’s lower income children were identified as food insecure according to the study’s measures. Hartford’s mayor immediately responded with shock and a resolve to do something about it. Among other things, the resulting Mayor’s Task Force on Hunger recommended the creation of the Hartford Advisory Commission on Food Policy, now the nation’s second continuously operating food policy council

The political impact of the annual food security report is often bi-embarrassing. Regardless of which party is in power, it has evoked both shame and pride based on the annual results. If the number of hungry people goes up one year, the party in power has some explaining to do and hopefully some action to take. If the number goes down, the sitting President and his Secretary of Agriculture will puff up their chests and strut their stuff.

But one of the most valuable and often disheartening features of the annual survey is the state rankings. Depending on where I was living and working at the time, I would immediately turn to the report’s  appendix where an alphabetical list of states included their respective food insecurity percentages as well as their percentage of “very low food security” people. Perhaps because the USDA staff who performed the analysis didn’t want to embarrass certain states, the list was not really a ranking—you had to “rank” yourself by picking your state and then tabulating who was higher and lower. Call me weird, but I can remember pouring through the data and lists with as much fervor as a baseball enthusiast parses major league standings.

While in Connecticut, food advocates were shocked in the 1990s by how high our food insecurity levels were—largely a result of high poverty rates in the state’s cities. A concerted effort by state government and non-profit groups, spurred in part by these humiliating numbers (ironically, Connecticut as a whole had the highest per capita income in the nation), significantly reduced the state’s prevalence of food insecurity as the 21st century dawned. Similarly, when I moved to New Mexico in 2004, the annual USDA presentations of the nation’s food insecurity rates revealed that we toggled back and forth with Mississippi for the dubious distinction of being the hungriest state in the nation (more than one wag suggested that the “Land of Enchantment” slogan on our license plate be changed to the “Land of Hunger”).

But everyone recognized that the abysmal state of New Mexico’s food security was no laughing matter, including then governor, Bill Richardson. Following the 2003 release of food security survey which listed New Mexico as the most food insecure state in the nation, Richardson appointed a task force to make recommendations and even implement solutions to reduce the level of food insecurity. Progress was slow, political leadership was anemic, and the task force’s members grew frustrated. But over time, and through several iterations of organizational engagement from both the private and public sectors, New Mexico made significant progress rising from the absolute bottom to somewhere in the middle nationwide.

The value of measurement is that it is part of a feedback loop that tells us what’s working and what’s not. It also tells us who’s hurting and motivates us to reduce that pain. One problem with Trump that infuses his politics is that he doesn’t care who’s hurting. “The still, sad music of humanity”, pain, suffering, ill health, and hunger do not fall within his domain of interest or concern. In the “hangry” tone of one who missed breakfast that morning, USDA’s ejaculatory announcement on September 20th said “These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger. For 30 years, this study [sic]—initially created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments—failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder….” Dictatorships cleanse the media of any adverse news, scrub scientific research of any opposing data, and treat the reverent accumulation of human knowledge as nothing more than a waste can that needs to be emptied regularly. The goal is to leave the people blissfully ignorant; their minds becoming nothing more than a blank slate to be etched on by the tyrant.

I have known many of the people both in and out of government over the years who have developed, implemented, and refined the measurement of food insecurity in the U.S. They are gentle, highly intelligent souls whose only wishes are to uphold the highest standards of their profession and place their talents in service to the cause of reducing human suffering. Their impact with regard to the annual food security study, in collaboration with a myriad of local and state advocates, has been immense. My examples from Connecticut and New Mexico are only two of thousands from across the country where determined individuals, eager for information, have leaned on these annual studies to fight a condition that should never, ever exist in this country.

Dictators depend on a passive citizenry. Unless we act now, Trump’s lies and low regard for the human condition will metastasize further, and in the case of food security, make our country a hungrier place. Please be in touch with your Members of Congress and let them know that you are opposed to the elimination of the U.S. Food Security Report. The Food Research Action Center (FRAC) has made that easy to do. Please go to this link ACTION NEEDED: Tell Congress to Reinstate USDA’s Food Security Report and share your beliefs with your federal officials. If you are part of a food bank, food pantry, or other organization with many volunteers and supporters, share this post and the FRAC link with them. Don’t let the tyrant have the day!

I’ve turned my attention lately to the subject of famine. Not a cheery topic I know, but one that, like the proverbial Doomsday Clock ticking down to midnight Armageddon, seems more real than metaphorical. What prompted this grim look into the future was a deep dive into the past that included a reading of Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine (Hachette Book Group, 2025) by Padraic X. Scanlan. I only had to get to page three before I was reminded that the starvation of one million of my ancestors and the forced emigration of another one and a half million between 1845 and 1851 were less the potato’s fault than the oppressive regime of Britain’s Irish colonial rule.

My reading of Scanlan also coincided with a recent lecture I attended by Dr. Kyle Harper, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma. The thrust of Dr. Harper’s presentation was a seat-squirming comparison between the fall of the Roman empire and today’s world roasting and drowning from climate change. Add in current events like Israel’s attempt to starve the Gazans from their own land, and the maniacally undemocratic, anti-science perspective of the Trump Junta, I found myself pushing the hands of the Doomsday timepiece several seconds closer to oblivion.

Three years ago, I was staring out the window of one of those cushy-seated tour buses at the oh-so green western Ireland countryside. I noticed that there were stonewalls running straight up the face of passing hills. Every agricultural wall or fence I’ve ever seen also stretched horizontally across a slope to enclose livestock in neat rectangular paddocks. These vertical walls, however, ended a couple of hundred feet short of the summit, un-intersected by a horizontal barrier, allowing even the stupidest of sheep to find their way around them. As if sensing my confusion, our bus driver, whose knowledge of local history far exceeded the skill required to maneuver a bus down narrow country lanes, informed us that these weird stonewalls were the result of make-work projects designed by British landlords. Irish people in the 1840s, with one foot in the grave from hunger, were paid a pittance to build these walls to nowhere. What they earned bought them enough food to barely stay alive.

The Delaney and Lawlor sides of my family can be forgiven for not saluting the Union Jack. The horrors of rotting potatoes and the pitiful relief efforts that—as Scanlan lays out in gut-churning detail—followed free market principles and the denigration of the Irish people. This left them gaunt, fleeing for Australia and North America, or moldering in a shallow Kilkenny grave. But their unnecessary sacrifice offers similar lessons learned by ancient Romans, British-ruled Indians, 30 million-plus Chinese who perished from hunger under Chairman Mao, and today’s Gazans wasting away under apparent genocidal intent in a region surrounded by ample food abundance and relief workers willing to risk their lives.

The lesson is one that has repeated itself time and again over two millennia, and was best articulated by the Nobel economist, Amartya Sen: “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” That statement has been supplemented over time by Sen and others to include the need for a free press, opposition parties, and non-authoritarian leaders. Sen noted that “What makes a famine such a political disaster for a ruling government is the reach of public reasoning…to protest and shout about the ‘uncaring’ government (The Idea of Justice; 2009).”

For example, assuming Israel remains a functioning democracy, at least when its blood-thirsty, right-wing zealots leave the room, its people, clinging to remnants of a diverse free press and opposition parties, and pressured externally by a rising tide of disparaging global opinion and internally by their innate moral sense, may yet save Gazans from mass starvation and find a peaceful solution to their longstanding conflict with Palestinians.

Scanlan’s Rot is a deeply researched look at one of history’s better known and much studied famines. Phytophthora infestans (p. infestans) originated in Mexico and was imported into the British Isles where it found a hospitable ecosystem in Ireland. Facilitated in the 1840s by global trade—a pre-cursor of sorts to today’s accelerated movement of pathogens around the world—p. infestans turned potatoes to mush. While modern agricultural science would have found work arounds, Ireland was harnessed to Britain’s colonialist yoke which included a slavish adherence to capitalism and the market. Ireland’s many impoverished small landholders and shareholders were monocropping potatoes, often only one variety, partly because it was a nutritious food that’s easy to grow and store, but largely because Britain’s economic structure dominated imports, prices, exports, and crop selection. When p. infestans struck with a sickly vengeance, the system couldn’t bend to find alternative solutions, and catastrophe followed. As Scanlan puts it, “When there is no escape from the market, it eats the weakest first.”

While Ireland’s fields were infected with blight, British relief efforts were infected with a deeply prejudicial attitude toward the Irish and a moral economic fever that guided their relief efforts. The blight, a natural disaster, did not have to be a death knell. According to Scanlan, it was British “colonialism and capitalism [that] created conditions that turned blight into famine…. There was always enough food; the obstacle was a stubborn insistence that private merchants deliver food to the hungry; and that the hungry pay for it with money or labour.” Hence, those walls to nowhere.

Echoing Britain’s profound faith in the righteousness of their economic system, no less a statesman than Edmund Burke admonished against “breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and, consequently the laws of God.“ It was an article of faith among the British elite that overly generous food relief was a moral hazard for the Irish, even though it would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and surely dampened the Irish diaspora. In short, without being forced to work or pay for food, the Irish, thought by much of the British leadership to be dissolute, would be firmly set on the road to perdition. As Scanlan sees it, “…the Irish poor needed relief from the market, not relief through the market.”

Let me turn for a moment to the present-day Republican Congress for a contemporary American expression of British famine morality. The Republican members and their sanctimonious leader, Speaker Johnson, controlled by a President, who unlike Burke, couldn’t have a credible conversation with God if his life depended on it, have recently imposed work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid recipients, and hollowed out the federal public health and research infrastructure as well as our disaster response capacity. Should another version of p. infestans (bird flu?) or COVID-19 strike, and it will; should climate change cook or cool the crops to perilously diminish their yield as they have and will, our current government will have neither the tools nor resources to assist our struggling people.

Not only has America returned to a mean-spirited form of 19th century British conservatism, subjecting everyone, including the most vulnerable, to the whims of a highly competitive marketplace, it has, even more disturbingly, reverted to a parsimonious, even racist approach to social welfare characteristic of the latter half of the American 20th century. It was then, in the 1960s, at the birth of the food stamp program, that Congress made the poor pay for their food stamps. The so-called “cash purchase” requirement was eventually phased out, but its roots remained, firmly anchored in racist assumptions that Black people could not be trusted with some form of unrestricted cash welfare; hence food stamps and not “basic human need” stamps. Even then, after grudgingly accepting that starvation just wasn’t tenable, elected U.S. officials ensured that the quantity of food stamps granted to any household was never sufficient for an adequate diet. Add in various attempts to impose cumbersome work requirements on food stamp recipients, we have a 21st century U.S. Congress acting toward the nation’s most vulnerable citizens like a 19th-century British Parliament acted toward the hungry Irish.

What also rises to the top in the review of famine’s larger history is Sen’s codicil to democracy=no famine postulate, is the need for a free press, opposition parties, and non-authoritarian leaders. Free press is a stand in for the lack of information about the risk of hunger in any given region, which, if known by public officials, relief organizations, and the general citizenry would provoke a response sufficient to prevent or at least mitigate a pending famine.

Sen (The Idea of Justice) provides an example in the form of India’s last famine which occurred in 1943 near the end of the British Raj (Scanlan provides several examples of additional famines throughout the 19th and early 20th century when India was under British rule). Food shortages in the State of Bengal, caused in large part by their crops being siphoned off to feed the British army’s Asian war campaigns, were responsible for a growing number of starvation deaths. A British-imposed reporting ban had silenced the press, even as Bengalese were dying at the rate of 26,000 people per week. These state of affairs were known by British officials in India, but several months elapsed before a full-scale relief effort was launched (there was no Indian parliament made up of elected Indians to hold the British colonial government accountable). As Sen tells the story, it wasn’t until Ian Stephens, the editor of the British-owned, Calcutta newspaper The Statesman ignored government censorship and ran the news of the growing Bengal disaster. At that point, it was too late for the 678,000 who died over six months of famine, but not too late for the thousands who were saved by The Statesman’s reporting and the government’s tragically late, but ultimately effective intervention.

If one wants to explore the gruesome depths to which governmental negligence, no information, and authoritarianism can drive humanity, there is no better nor chilling source than Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine—1958-1962 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) by Yang Jisheng. Mao’s iron-fisted grip on the people, non-existent free press, suppression of dissent, and a state-mandated, one-size-fits-all approach to food production left 36 million people dead from starvation and an estimated 40 million children not born due to maternal fertility disorders from extreme malnutrition. (My full review of the book can be found at Famine | Mark Winne). When I think of food insecurity in America, I’m always emotionally drawn to one indicator, that of parents skipping meals so that their children can eat. Yet China’s great famine brought people to an unimaginable level of desperation, where, Yang Jisheng tells us, parents, driven mad by hunger, ate their own children.

In case I haven’t provided a sufficient number of lessons from the past, I’m going to take one giant step backward to the Roman Empire with the help of Dr. Kyle Harper whose breathtaking lecture I attended this June Kyle Harper – Climate Change and Contagion – Complex Crises Past and Present. As a paleoclimatologist, Dr. Harper examines human history—in this case, the written records of the Roman Empire—and climate history through such specimens as tree rings, ice cores, and microscopic particles found in ocean sediment off the southern coast of Italy. These writings and samples allowed him and his colleagues to assemble enough data to present an accurate profile of life during the periods that we refer to today as the Fall of the Roman Empire (there were several “falls” from about 250 to 550 Common Era).

What was learned? What contributed to the falls?

Food crisis, famine from climate eventsClimate events: Volcanic explosions “veiled” the sun for over a year causing a mini-Ice Age and steep temperature drop around 540 CEInvasion and defeat from outside forces (“barbarians”)Monetary crisis, breakdown in financial structureLegitimacy crisis, fragmentation of political and governance structuresPlague of Cyprian (around 250 CE): “The disease grew severe and indescribable, having struck Rome (and) Greece …. The scribes in Rome registered 5,000 or even more dead (who succumbed to the disease) every day.” Dexippus of AthensPlague of Justinian: about 541 CE; the worst health event of the first millennium and the pre-cursor to the Black Death

Dr. Harper drew two powerful conclusions from this catalogue of events. The first suggests a positive outcome is possible. When climate catastrophes occurred, if political stability was the order of the day, the negative impacts, such as famine did not happen. Today, we call this resilience. Likewise, when political instability rules the day, severe climatic events and pandemics, often accompanied by other social, political, and economic challenges, are more likely to lead to famine. I view this as complementary to the research of Padraic Scanlan and Amartya Sen.

The second conclusion offers less hope. Rome and the rest of the world up until about 1900 had one advantage we don’t have today, they didn’t suffer from nearly 2 degrees increase in global temperatures. Up until that moment when the anthropogenic effects of carbon-based energy took over, the earth’s temperature rarely varied by more than half a degree. Devastating and unprecedented floods, hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, and other climate events, including wildfires, are cascading upon us so rapidly that scientists and those who monitor that activity can barely keep up, let alone analyze it. For instance, “The First Street Foundation, a private risk-assessment firm, concluded that floods previously considered to be one hundred-year events have become, on average, sixty-two-year events.” (The New Yorker, 7/28/25).

Dr. Harper concluded his lecture with this slide: “Scary thought: we can also probably handle a lot of climate change, until our constitutional system disintegrates, the dollar collapses, the US splits into two, the next COVID appears, and worldwide crop failure happens simultaneously.” The average ancient Roman lived to about 30 years old compared to today’s developed countries’ average lifespan of about 80. The two biggest causes of that vast difference in those lifespans, according to Harper, are vaccines and basic public health advances such as clean water. Gazing up at his last slide, Harper remarked, “all of this doesn’t feel as remote as I’d like it to be.”

I would say that it feels eerily close given Trump’s sacking of science, universities, health research, nutrition programs, economic wisdom, ethical standards, and everyday common sense. The barbarians are no longer at the gate—they are inside the walls!

Though this example might seem like small potatoes compared to the rotting potatoes of 1846, our food policy council in 2001 discovered that 6000 women, infant, and children had been inadvertently dropped from the WIC rolls in the City of Hartford, Connecticut. This was due to some bureaucratic bungling that city government is, unfortunately, heir to and can easily act indifferently unless advocates scream at them. The negligence was severe enough to send a strong bolt of food insecurity into the lives of the city’s most vulnerable people. The food policy council marched into the mayor’s office threatening to go to the media if these WIC clients weren’t restored to the program immediately. The problem was fixed in two weeks.

Yes, we need more and better food policy councils to be the informed and active citizenry that holds both the ignorant and the malicious accountable. As Scanlan says, however, at the conclusion of his book, “famine in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth, is a disease of modernity—of war, of ecological accident, of climate change, of the vicissitudes of markets acting on the vulnerable.” Yet, looking at today’s events in Gaza and back at Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, I also can’t help but think that there is something unremittingly dark at the core of the human soul capable of making plausible arguments for death by starvation. The only plausible answer must be, “where there is a functioning democracy, opposition parties, and a free press,” despots, both here and abroad will one day fall like so many cabbage heads into a hand-woven basket. And with the good sense of a democratic people, and the compassionate hearts we are all born with, catastrophes will not mean famine and starvation.

According to my Word Press counter, “Strawberry Fields Forever?” is my 200th blog post since I began markwinne.com in 2007! I don’t honestly know what to do about that other than to simply make my readers aware of what I guess is a milestone. I thought about honoring the occasion by sending out refrigerator magnets or meme coins, but my marketing staff said we don’t have the budget for it. I guess we’ll just have to celebrate by offering these posts for free. They are free already, you say? Well, now they’re even freer! Happy 200th!

Driving north from Dulles International Airport, you soon leave behind the roar of jets bound for London or Rome and cross the waters of the historic Potomac. It’s somewhere in that passage from northern Virginia into Frederick County Maryland that the scenery makes a radical shift. Highways with enough lanes to land a bomber squadron give way to meandering state roads, while Disneyesque shopping centers and office complexes recede to rolling farm fields. Transitioning from the bombastic to the bucolic, you feel the day’s travel tensions drain from your shoulders. You’re refreshed by green landscapes dotted with historic houses, some of which may have once boarded Generals Lee and Grant, though probably not at the same time.                                                                                                                                                                                                    What’s notable about this open landscape is its proximity to the bourgeoning metropolis of northern Virginia and Washington, DC, which are not much more than a cannon ball shot away. But beauty and its preservation in such places are no longer the sole province of nature. They are, in fact, the product of two competing impulses. The first is to protect as much open space as possible for multiples of reasons including aesthetics, privacy, investment, ostentatious displays of wealth, food security, environmental benefits, recreational, and the sheer comfort of knowing that the world’s teeming masses are not breathing down your neck.                                                                                                                                                                          The second, nearly diametrically and dialectically opposing impulses, is the need for housing, preferably affordable, and development that provides for businesses that create well-paying jobs as well as amenities (e.g., supermarkets) that offer necessary goods and services. While the tension between growth and no-growth often pits people with diametrically opposing viewpoints and interests against each other, the resolution of that tension is a dialectical one often stretching out over decades and generations, especially as both public and private interests clash in the marketplace.                                                                                                                                   “About 47 percent of Frederick County is agricultural land,” said Michelle Caruso who is the Chair of the Frederick County Food Council (FCFC), an all-volunteer organization that promotes a strong local food system and food security. While Frederick and Maryland are national leaders in land conservation—the state has already protected 30 percent of its land area for agricultural, conservation, and recreational purposes How Maryland Hit Its 30×30 Goal – The New York Times—the development pressure remains immense. “Frederick is the state’s fastest growing county,” Michelle tells me. “But the pressure isn’t just from people moving here, it’s also from giant data centers in Loudon County, Virginia that want to locate here. It’s also from overhead power lines that reduce both farmland and the overall aesthetics.”                                                                                                                                                                                                            In all respects, Frederick County is at the cutting edge of the push and pull between conservation/preservation and what constitutes smart growth. How that struggle plays out over the next couple of decades will also have food security consequences for the county’s 300,000 people. That’s why, as Michelle sees it, “There’s an opportunity for us [the FCFC] to be a leader in the smart growth arena.”                                                                                                                                                                                                              Part of that belief stems from the area’s richly diverse and unique qualities, including a supremely robust food and farm scene that draws people to both the county and the city of Frederick. “People who live here love it,” says Michelle, “we have an adorable historic downtown, wonderful restaurants, and an inclusive community which is part of the reason we have the biggest gay rights festival in the state. And people really care a lot about farmland!” For those reasons and more, there are literally scores of organizations—private, public, for profit, non-profit—engaged in various facets of food system work, from volunteer, faith-based food pantries, to commercial composting operations, to an Office of Agriculture housed within Frederick County government.                                                                                                                                                                                                          A big part of how the Food Council sees its job is coordinating the efforts of food system actors and promoting better communication among them and the larger community. But that is a formidable task when you have as many cats to herd as you do in Frederick. Looking over the abundant landscape of the county’s food system playing field, it would be easy for a food activist from Mars to become envious. Take just the Common Market (retail food) Coop (a FCFC member, Alison Wexler, is the Coop’s board president), for example. It started out in the usual hippie-dippy way in the early 1970s and has blossomed into two large store locations serving 10,000 member/owners and thousands of non-members. To have two attractive, well-merchandised locations in the city of Frederick, population 85,000, is a comparatively substantial feat for a food coop. The opening line of its mission statement not only anchors the coop in the most fundamental values of the food movement, it tends to speak for most of the food and farm groups I’ve met in the area: The Common Market exists in order to achieve…[a] just, prosperous, and vibrant local food economy that connects local consumers with local food sources.                                                                                                                                                                                                  Moon Valley Farm and its dynamic owner, Emma Jagoz, are the tip of the entrepreneurial farm spear, one adorned, albeit, with the ribbons of social justice and community engagement. Emma, a single mother of two young children and first-generation farmer runs a variety of production, distribution, and educational activities from her 70-acre farm in Woodsboro, MD. I attended a bustling Moon Valley strawberry festival one beautiful day in May that saw people pawing through fields of strawberries, their children’s faces flushing from pale to pink to rosy-red as they chomped their way through fistfuls of berries. Besides operating their own CSA, Moon Valley serves as a food hub for other farms doing a brisk trade with school cafeterias throughout the region (as of this writing, Trump’s cuts in some USDA programs have curtailed Emma’s food hub distributions). The vagaries of federal funding aside, a partnership between Moon Valley and the Judy Center (a comprehensive, early childhood intervention based in Maryland’s public schools) in Frederick is bringing the benefits of local produce to the Center’s participating families.                                                                                                                                                      It seemed like everywhere I turned in Frederick, people and programs were taking an inclusive approach to food and farm initiatives. Marcy Taylor and Kirk Druey are also members of the FCFC and volunteer with “Farm to School,” a project that uses local food to fill over 1000 back packs weekly for lower income Frederick school children. Kirk said the service is based on the fact that about 20 percent of the public-school children are food insecure. Marcy told me that “when you get good food into the hands of people who really appreciate its health value, you know you’re making a difference.”                                                                                                                                                                  In a somewhat different form of inclusivity, both the City and County of Frederick have made food and agriculture core government functions. The City’s Office of Sustainability runs a curbside compost collection program (2024 IMPACT REPORT BROCHURE) while the County’s newly established Office of Agriculture integrates food and agriculture into the county’s overall economic development and tourism promotion efforts. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that the county has 188,000 acres of farmland and 1300 farms, but it amplifies those gifts by noting a wide diversity of food, beverage, and farm opportunities for consumers to take advantage of, including 13 farmers’ markets and 13 CSAs within the county limits. The Ag Office website paints a community food system canvas the likes of which I’ve never seen from a local government agency From Idea to Impact: Celebrating One Year of the Frederick County Office of Agriculture – Homegrown Frederick.                                                                                                                                                                                          As the Frederick County Food Council sees it—and as I have experienced it nationwide—the sheer number and diversity of food and farm projects in a given area may look like a rich banquet upon which we all can feed but in reality, is not enough to end food insecurity.  Several indicators, including results from recent surveys support the Council’s concern. One of them is a Frederick County United Way Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE) study that found 32 percent of Frederick’s residents don’t earn enough to meet their basic needs, including housing, food, and health care costs (2024 ALICE Report | United Way of Frederick County).                                                                                                                      While federal nutrition assistance programs like SNAP can help meet basic food needs, the Council’s Michelle Caruso said there is a potentially large, so-called “SNAP gap” in Frederick whereby people earn just enough to not qualify for SNAP but not enough to meet their household’s basic needs. And with the Trump administration and Republican Congress wreaking havoc with various federal assistance programs cuts, that gap could balloon.                                                                                                                                                      Perhaps the Council’s best piece of evidence that all the county’s food cats aren’t well connected is their 2024 Food Insecurity and Food Pantries in Frederick County Study (b7daa0_ed595aaf090b442bb0d1b9e78b5481e6.pdf). In brief, the study found that there was insufficient client outreach and information about the pantries’ locations and hours of operation. In fact, the numbers suggest that only 12 percent of those who fall within the ALICE category utilize the county’s 18 or so food pantries. As Marcy Taylor said, “When we asked pantries how they get the word out, they told us they put up a poster in a church. That’s not enough.” The results also seemed to indicate that there is very little peer-to-peer communication between managers of the different pantries.                                                                                                                            This kind of siloing among not just emergency food providers, but from many community food system actors, both the public and private sectors, is all too common. We pursue and sometimes compete for the same funding; we build our own brand and seek community-wide recognition and praise; and we focus on our organization’s mission without taking time to embrace a larger vision for our wider community. It’s the Council’s hope, indeed their mission, to become a hub of sorts for this sprawling food system network that is working toward one shared vision. As Michelle said, “I think there is a huge opportunity, if we do it right, for our council to become a legitimate place to solve some of these problems because nobody else is doing it.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                          To both verify these assumptions as well as more accurately target the county’s food needs, the Council is putting the finishing touches on a Community and Agriculture Resilience Audit Tool (CARAT). This is an assessment device now being applied in dozens of communities across the country that uses a carefully selected set of questions to gather and analyze information from actors across the entire local food system. By interviewing dozens of such stakeholders, the Council is getting a grounds-eye view of local strengths and weaknesses. A secondary benefit is the chance to engage people and organizations along the way who may become a part of their growing network.                                                                                                                                                                                                                If I was to draw one conclusion from my review of Frederick’s food and farm work, it would be this: Everybody’s doing the right thing, they just aren’t doing it together. Granted, working together—true collaboration—is hard work. In the case of Frederick, it’s also possible that their robust food and farm scene—many farms and lots of protected farmland, a bustling and beautiful historic downtown, an engaged public sector, and numerous food organizations and businesses—suggests a food system oasis which may breed a kind of collective complacency. Beyond Frederick County, it should also be noted that the State of Maryland has a history of progressive social and economic actions that, among other things, led to the creation of the Maryland Food System Resiliency Council, effectively a state food policy council. And partially as a result of the State’s interest in food security, Maryland now has 11 county-level food councils, proportionally one of highest number in the nation.                                                                                                                                              In light of this organizational and policy abundance, the question then becomes: Is all of this enough to cope with Frederick County’s multitude of internal and external hungers? As the Council’s members made clear, local food insecurity is real and the combined costs of food, housing, and health care often put those items out of reach for many residents; the county’s lower population density, open land, and affordability, at least relative to Washington’s and Baltimore’s close-in suburbs, make it very attractive to those looking for more for less; and like Sesame Street’s cookie-craving Monster, businesses, data centers, warehouses, solar farms, and so on have an unquenchable appetite for land, land, land! And speaking of Sesame Street (PBS), food system planners and advocates must now take into account the Axer-in-Chief sitting only 50 miles away, his only likely legacy 10 million acres of new golf courses and at least an equal number of hungry people.                                                                                                                                                                                                      If this is the reality facing the people and place you care about, you want to have the best team, that is well-coached, drawing on a deep bench of talented players, going to bat for you. That is why I continue to argue for strong, community-based food policy councils as the most likely hub for collective action.                                                                                                                                                                            My Moment of Zen                                                                                                                                                                                                  I was contemplating the opportunities and challenges facing Frederick at the same time I was wiping the juice of my 10th, maybe 20th Moon Valley Farm strawberry from my chin. The pleasure was intense and the beauty surrounding me seductive. Yet the thought that thousands might be denied such joys by the socio and economic forces acting upon them, or that this God-given land and its irreplaceable soil might be trashed by a new datacenter infuriated me. At times like these when pain and pleasure collide in my mind, I sometimes find myself meditating on the Zen koan about a woman being chased by a tiger. Trapped at the edge of a cliff with nowhere else to run, she lunges for a branch sticking out of the cliff’s side. She clutches it desperately as the tiger looms above while hungry tigers circle below. Considering her predicament, she sees a beautiful ripe strawberry dangling within arm’s reach. She picks it, eats it, and decides that it is very good.  The end.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  I would like to thank Theresa Yosuico Stahl and Michelle Caruso for their assistance in researching this article.

When I found out that Ken Regal, 65, was retiring at the end of June from a nearly 40-year career at Pittsburgh’s Just Harvest food advocacy organization, I knew I had to interview this man before he disappeared. I’ve known Ken off and on over the course of 30 years, sharing conferences, ideas, and woes as local food groups battled for community food security. He had always stood out in my mind as one of the more passionate, thoughtful, committed, and even humorous people I’ve worked with. Driving directly from the Pittsburgh airport to the Fireside Pub in the city’s Bakery District, I caught up with Ken to eat and drink our way through three hours of food movement history and deep reflection. What follows has been edited for length, clarity, and an attempt to maintain a PG-13 rating.

L: Ken; R: Mark

Mark Winne. Before we start, I want you to know we have just one ground rule: Say whatever you want.

Ken Regal. That shouldn’t be a problem.

The Early Years

M. Aside from the first 10 years of your life growing up in Brooklyn, most of your personal and professional life is rooted in Pittsburgh. What’s the rest of your early life story and who and what got you into the food justice world? In other words, who do you blame?

K. The first thing to know is that I didn’t seek out anti-hunger/food justice work. I wanted to do left-politics work, and I needed to earn a living—two things that don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. My politics didn’t come from my father who told me once the only reason he didn’t vote for Richard Nixon all five times Nixon was on a national ticket was because he was too young to vote the first time [1952].

M. I hate to confess this, but the only President’s hand I ever shook was Nixon’s when he spoke at a rally in my New Jersey town when I was 10 years old

K. Your secret is safe with me! My mother had more liberal politics and paid attention to current events, but my politics were largely shaped by Jewish social values. I was brought up in a moderately observant household; I was very involved in my synagogue’s youth groups, and over time, I became more religious than my parents.

M. Why?

K. Because unlike them, I believed what they taught me.

M. What else encouraged you to make a turn to social justice?

K. The earliest memory I have was when my grandfather took me to the United Nations when I was seven. I loved it because I was taken with the notion that all these nations could get together to make the world a better place. But as we left the building we were confronted with a giant anti-[Vietnam] war demonstration. I remember seeing long-haired hippies for the first time. They were mocking the U.S. as if a peace settlement had just ended the war. But I was seven and didn’t get the joke. After I got home, I was so upset when I discovered it wasn’t true.

M. What about Pittsburgh?

K. There was a very bitter teachers’ strike at my high school in Pittsburgh, and a friend of our family and member of our synagogue was an English teacher and a member of the union’s negotiating team. She wanted the students to be supportive of the strike, so recruited me, at the age of 17, to organize a student picket line. That was my first action ever.

My synagogue was small in a not-very-Jewish community. In fact, I was the only Jewish kid in my high school graduating class which was frustrating since there was a layer of antisemitism. It was based on ignorance more than hatred, but it gave me the lived experience of being a minority, something that I found helpful as the organizations I worked for waded into DEI issues.

M. It’s interesting that you weren’t what we might call a natural “foodie”, that your work trajectory took you down other social justice roads. How did the transition to anti-hunger and food justice work occur?

K. Well, I do like food a lot! Everybody should have some! But after college I had been working in various community, labor, and political organizing jobs around Pittsburgh including ACORN (Association of Community Organizations Now) and a city council campaign that elected someone who eventually become the first “out” elected official in the Pennsylvania State Legislature. I even applied for a VISTA position, but I was literally in the middle of filling out an application when President Reagan pulled the plug on the program.

M. I wonder how many young people are having the same experience today under the Trump/Musk regime!

K. In 1985 I heard about a part time fundraising job at a Pittsburgh organization called Hunger Action that I applied for and got. But within a year, the organization split into two factions that each had very different ideas about our direction. Being a little mercenary, I tried not to take sides hoping I might get a full-time job once the dust settled. My plan sort of paid off when Just Harvest, a new non-profit with a strong food policy and advocacy mission emerged from the fray. I was hired as one of three co-directors at the starting salary of $8.79 an hour, more money than I had every made before. More importantly, I’ve been getting a steady paycheck from Just Harvest every two weeks for the past 38 years!

M. But three co-directors for a small non-profit…how the heck did you make that work?

K. Since we had strongly held leftist principles, the only way we could conceive of running such an organization was with a flat, non-hierarchical organizational structure. We all had different job titles, but we all held the rank of co-director. It might sound confusing but sometimes it worked out well, like when we’d get a call from someone who asked to speak to the director. Depending on who they were—whether we liked them or not—we’d either say, “speaking” or “they aren’t here right now, can I take a message?”

The other co-directors were Anne Conley and Joni Rabinowitz, a person I admired greatly. Anne left for another position a year later, but Joni and I continued as co-directors until 13 years ago when she retired. I’ve been the sole director since then. But everything I learned in this work I learned from Joni. I never could have done what I’ve done at Just Harvest without her.

And as far my “early years” go, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

M. It sounds all too familiar to many of us who decide to make a career of social justice work and in the non-profit field. Organizational shake-ups and disagreements over mission have roiled many groups I’ve worked with, especially in my early days. But at least your starting salary beat mine—I began in Hartford at $8 a hour!

Food Justice Advocacy

M. Once Just Harvest found its footing, what kind of issues did you tackle?

K. School breakfast. Like school lunch, USDA reimburses eligible school districts for the cost of serving breakfast to lower income students. But unlike school lunch, serving breakfast first thing in the morning at schools had largely been considered optional, partly because of the additional logistical problems associated with eating at school at the same time school begins.

The Pittsburgh school district and the independent school districts (43 altogether) in surrounding Allegheny County were among the few large metropolitan areas in the country that did not offer school breakfast in 1985. It was a good and winnable issue for us. We had a number of allies including a group called “Women in an Urban Crisis” who ran a Black Panther-like breakfast program at one of the city’s lowest income schools. We listened to the people and parents, but the Superintendent of Schools, our main adversary, listened to the finance and business office, school bus people, and principals. It was hard work but we eventually won. As a result, tens of thousands of children across Allegheny County can now get a free breakfast at school.

M. Today, looking back on campaigns like that, it’s hard to imagine that things like decent food for school children was something that public officials once resisted. Our current food assistance battles with the Trump administration remind us not to take our gains for granted.

Are there any other highlights from that period that come to mind?

K. My co-director, Joni Rabinowitz, was a radical Marxist but well respected by local leaders of all stripes because she told the truth, was frank, stood by her values but was never an asshole. She was personable and could sit down with someone who radically disagreed with her and talk about their hobbies for 20 minutes! But a week before we were scheduled to meet with the most conservative school board in the county about breakfast, the Pittsburgh newspaper ran a profile of Joni that, among other things, asked her who she’d most like to have dinner with. She answered Fidel Castro! Not surprisingly, we got red-baited like crazy at that school board meeting because of that article! But before too long, children in that district were eating school breakfast.

M. Looking back over 40 years with Just Harvest, I bet you have a number of other best moments, and perhaps some low points as well.

K. Sometimes it’s hard to separate “best moments” that were good for my ego from those that were good for Just Harvest and the community…

M. Maybe you should look at those ego moments as partial compensation for low pay—a kind of fringe benefit!

K. Well, I admit it’s really fun to see yourself on TV; it’s really fun to have important people thank you for running a successful fundraising campaign; it’s really fun to be quoted in the newspaper (back when there were newspapers). And it’s really fun to be the recipient of significant gifts from Bruce Springsteen and hear him talk about Just Harvest on stage! When he performed in Pittsburgh in the late 80s, it was the first time he gave money to food organizations, something he started doing everywhere he performed across the country [my organization, the Hartford Food System, received major support from Springsteen on at least four occasions. He continues that practice to this day]. In Pittsburgh, he supported the food pantry run by the United Steelworkers Local 1397 whose members were hurt badly by closing steel mills.

M. How about bad times?

K. As the fundraising director, I knew when we didn’t have enough money to cover the payroll in two days. Then there was the Wednesday morning staff meeting the day after Trump’s 2016 election when I had to rally a very depressed group of young people. Just as bad was the election of a Republican Pennsylvania Governor who must have searched the country high and low for the most draconian Secretary of Human Services possible, a true hero of the Heritage Foundation! He took great pride in seeing how many people he could kick off Medicaid.

But here’s a good moment without ego. On the first day my son (he’s now in his 30s) started elementary school, he brought a flyer home that told parents how to sign their children up for school breakfast. As I’m reading it, I realize that thousands of parents across the city and county are also getting the same flyer. That was because of my work!

M. Is there a lesson there?

K. It’s a reminder of the power of public policy advocacy. If we had taken all the money we raised and used it to directly feed poor kids, it would have lasted a week. Instead, we now have a federally funded program that has fed hundreds of thousands of children millions of dollars of meals over several decades. School breakfast is now normal; it’s just one of those things that’s in the world.

Movements, Justice, and a Philosophy of Social Change

M. Let’s turn from the local to the national, and from the practical to the philosophic. Having heard you speak on a variety of topics in the past I’d love to hear your views on topics like the food movement and social justice, including DEI. On the last topic, we’ll ask the restaurant to turn up the music in case MAGA operatives have bugged our table.

K. The struggle for food justice has been creative in good ways. If Just Harvest has any particular skill, it’s been in stealing really good ideas from organizations all over the country. There is a sense of experimentation and idea sharing in the food movement that is really valuable. What we as a movement haven’t mastered to our detriment is the art of building a mass movement capable of taking mass action.

M. Why have we come up short? Is it because the food movement has spoken powerfully and eloquently on hunger, equitable food systems, and sustainability but failed to cohere around a central message and organizational structure?

K. Unlike the labor movement, civil rights movement, or the welfare rights movement, the food movement quickly devolved into lots of organizations with separate missions, albeit echoing similar themes, but never coalescing around one powerful message and action.

M. I’m wondering about the relationship to funding and how it influences the evolution and breakdown of movements. The movements you mentioned were largely self-funded while the thousands of organizations that made up the food movement were and are dependent on a nearly infinite number of funding sources in the usual non-profit way.

K. That’s exactly right! The self-funded model is a very important part of what can make a mass movement work. Even though the civil rights movements received support from the United Autoworkers, the Ford Foundation, and mainstream white churches, there was a deep, personal commitment.

M. As evidenced by the woman in the pew of a Black church who dug deep into her purse when the plate was passed to sustain the marches and marchers.

K. Right. It also goes to how affluent people think about poverty and rights in fundamentally different ways. They see the path of least resistance to address hunger as direct food assistance through food banks. This of course solves an immediate problem, but it prevents the kind of movement-driven resources from being generated, the kind of movement capable of promoting fundamental change.

Even organizations like Just Harvest that address underlying root causes inevitably require mainstream money. A big chunk of our budget comes from government; a small chunk comes from affluent individuals who attend the galas we put on, and an essentially non-existent fraction comes from people who are poor. The last time we took up a collection at a neighborhood meeting in a church basement was almost never!

M. How about leadership and participation by lower income people, and people with lived experience?

K. We have not had much success in building long-term leadership among those members of the community, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. We tested and ran [organizing and training] model after model. We ran a leadership development project for low-income women that only produced one graduate. She did go on to organize a Black women’s advocacy organization, and in the process, overcame the same hardships—her son was killed in a gang shooting—that the other participants faced but couldn’t overcome. They disappeared as soon as we stopped paying them to attend meetings.

M. It sounds like you did everything you could.

K. Leadership development required more resources than we could commit as well as more resources than we could find from funders, especially when the payoff from that kind of investment takes a very long time to achieve, if ever. I worry about the future of our movement if it can’t create mass power for working class and poor people. No revolution has ever been won without that.

M. Let me push back on that for a moment. Wasn’t the goal of the food movement to deliver more resources, primarily in the form of healthy and affordable food? You’ve done it with your work on school breakfast and other Just Harvest campaigns and projects. SNAP delivers over a $100 billion in food assistance annually; 60,000 food banks and pantries do the same; thousands of community farmers’ markets and food production projects make the commitment to local food security visible.

K. I wonder if we suffer from lack of ambition. Some of my staff at Just Harvest want us to be more militant. They want to work on securing a basic living wage and good jobs for all. I point to the Poor People’s Movement and similar efforts over the years. Many weren’t genuinely made up of poor people—they were mostly young, disaffected anarchists. We tried it 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and it never worked then, why do you think it will work now.

The closest we came to a mass movement was the welfare reform campaign during the Clinton Administration, but it started to decay when people said they were too busy working to attend the rally! Are you fucking kidding me! Nobody said that in Flint in 1937 [a 44-day labor dispute that was a groundbreaking victory for unionization]. The labor organizers were breaking balls if you didn’t show up to the union meeting after working a 16-hour shift!

M. I guess what we lack in terms of class consciousness and the fire in the belly, we try to make up for in our affinity for smaller scale, community-based food projects; mostly white, highly educated liberals who defend SNAP; and thousands of affluent, mostly white, often retired volunteers at food banks who call their members of congress when asked to. But I agree, these are largely not poor people nor do they constitute a mass movement.

K. I love those food projects too because what they bring to the table is a moral and symbolic clarity. What they don’t bring to the table is economic impact. I’m still a Marxist and the thing that influences everything else is the economic relationship between the owning class and the working class. And if the working class doesn’t have class consciousness, it will never win.

DEI, Red and Green Chile, and Moral Obligation

M. I don’t want to forget about DEI. I’ve been known to remember weird stuff, and one of those times was in 2000 at the Community Food Security Coalition’s annual conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico which you attended. During a heated plenary session, several participants accused the conference organizers of not doing enough to ensure a greater diversity of attendees. It was also Halloween, and several people were wearing costumes including two women dressed as chiles—New Mexico’s iconic pepper—one as a green chile and the other as a red chile. You spoke up during the debate to say that the conference had done a good job to ensure diversity, and jokingly, referred to the fact that we had both red and green chiles present! Do you remember that?

K. I remember most of it including feeling pissed-off at the over-the-top PC-ness of the diversity challenge when, in fact, there had been an aggressive and successful effort to raise money for low-income scholarships as well as simultaneous Spanish-English translations in the workshops, something I’d never experienced before at a conference. And, yes, you’re probably right about my chile joke!

M. How do you see DEI in the food movement today?

K. I sometimes joke that everyone more radical than me is insane and that everyone less radical is a sell-out. I worry that my own sensibility on the anti-racism agenda is like that too—anyone more anti-racist is just guilt tripping, and anyone less so is in denial as to how pervasive structural racism is. I’ve been to anti-racism trainings—some good, some bad, some really bad! The best ones acknowledge that we all have different identities, and we code-switch between them. For me, I’ve led a life of privilege as a white, straight man, but I’ve lived my whole life as a member of a minority religious group that has been oppressed for thousands of years. The most emotionally meaningful thing I do each year is gathering with my family for the Passover Seder where, among other topics, we talk about being descendants of slaves. If not for the intervention of the Almighty, we’d still be enslaved. That gives us a moral obligation to care about the well-being of other people.

M. In a recent Pittsburgh NPR piece about your pending retirement, a local activist by the name of Dave Coplan said you are an exemplar of “moral leadership.” How do you apply both a moral obligation and moral leadership to your work?

K. Well, Dave’s a very generous guy! But as I said earlier, what I learned from Jewish social values is the need to approach the systemic nature of poverty. If you heed the Torah’s commandments, particularly with regard to food, you are commanded to leave the corners of the field unharvested and to leave the gleanings for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. You may own the field, but you don’t “own” the corners, the poor do. We’re not told to do it as an act of charity, it’s not optional; it’s a commandment.

M. That’s not charity?

K. No. It’s not a “good deed,” you’re not getting an award for being a good philanthropist, you’re not getting a tax deduction. That’s all bullshit! By setting aside those corners you are in fact “paying your taxes.” I refer to this as history’s first “entitlement program.”

M. How would you instruct younger people interested in entering the social justice field?

K. I want to get them out of the mindset that all we have to do is give poor people some food and we’ve done our job. I remind them that over 100 years ago, entire cities would burn to the ground because all we had were volunteers manning a bucket brigade. Today we pay for professional fire departments, and we don’t lose cities or even neighborhoods.

M. I sense a lesson here for the Republican majority…

K. You’re right. When Republicans say we’ve spent a trillion dollars feeding people but we still have hunger, I remind them we still have fires which is why we pay for fire departments. Because we have federal food programs today, nobody starves to death in America.

M. To circle back to your earlier thoughts, we need those corners of the field—those programs—because our capitalist system doesn’t work for everybody; its failures are legion, and they leave vast sections of the country clinging to the edge of a cliff for their lives.

K. These are the kind of questions and arguments I ask students when I’m trying to get them to think.

M. Well, you got me thinking, but it looks like we’re the last people in the restaurant which is why we’re getting a dirty look from our server. Before we go, what are your plans for retirement?

K. I want to spend more time gardening. I also plan to hang out at the New York Mets spring training camp in Florida; probably spend more time with my NYC family members. Beyond that, probably sleep late and smoke dope all day. Don’t print that last part!

(With thanks to Callum Robinson and his wonderful first book “Ingrained”)

My gardening hands have a way of forgetting from one season to the next. Some of this stems from being out of practice—winter’s dormancy and frozen ground had forced a pause in my outdoor activities. Forgetfulness is also brought on when I skip the planting of a particular vegetable for a year or two (such as when I acknowledge that I never really liked Brussel sprouts). This occasional planting hiatus makes me think twice about its precise seeding and cultivation requirements when I do try again. Of course, I can always consult the back of the seed packet or a gardening book, but at this point in my life I prefer feeling my way through a task rather than thinking about it. After all, the more you’re in your head as opposed to trusting your hands, the more you’re out of touch.

I must concede that some of this lapsis in my manus is age-related. The words of an eighty-five-year-old Kansas farmer I once interviewed come to mind: “Every year the ground gets a little further away from me.” Also, the curmudgeonly farmer in Connecticut who once explained to me his strategy for reducing the impact of aging on his farming: “The corn don’t grow so good around the edges, so this year I ain’t planting any edges.”

My digital dexterity, which once happened without premeditation, is partially thwarted by arthritis that has invaded several knuckles. This becomes particularly apparent when I start indoor seeding. From late winter into early spring, I will fill cardboard containers with potting soil then soak it with water, pressing my finger tips to the surface to check for the appropriate degree of sponginess. The first seeding of a container is always clumsy—the seed sticks to my palm, disappears between the gaps in my fingers, doesn’t fall correctly onto the soil, or lands too closely to the previous one. As I gently shake the packet, too many seeds may spill out, or they adhere to the inside envelope leaving me with too few on the surface. Rather than rely on my stiff fingers to capture the errant seeds, I’ll blow into the packet to dislodge them. Too often, however, this causes a helter-skelter scattering of seeds, leaving one or two “planted” up my nostrils.

But by the time I reach container number seven or eight, the feeling that came to me last spring as easily as the “leaves to the trees,” begins to return. The tendons and joints become pliable as they remember sensations forgotten from neglect. Even the tension from the seeping spread of arthritis gives way to motions formerly latent. The hand catches the seed, the other hand’s thumb and index finger pinch them one at a time to be laid softly on the potting soil; spare fingers press them to the proper depth—knuckle deep for peas, to the lower part of the fingernail for tomatoes, to the top of the finger nail for lettuce. Fifty years of my fingers transporting information to my brain which processes it and sends it back again in a micro-second tells me if everything is okay or if adjustments are required.

I’ve often held my hands up to the New Mexico sun hoping that the intense light would illuminate the bones like an x-ray. I do this more out of wonder and respect for these two divine instruments than to better understand the mechanics of each one’s 27 bones. But oh, the things they’ve done over the years without me asking, like that foul ball at Fenway Park that magically passed through two dozen outstretched hands before landing in mine. I remember admonitions from basketball coaches to “dribble with your fingertips” that allowed me to make that turn around jump shot at the age of 17. Arcing over the hands of opponents, the ball fell gracefully through nothing but net, a goal that won our intra-mural league championship. Now it’s those wonderful few hours spent shooting baskets with my grandson. The hands retain the feel of the ball, its resistance to the ground and the bounce against the backboard, even when, like the Kansas farmer’s receding ground, the basket seems to get higher every year.

How about lovemaking? The manner in which your hands wander across the body of your lover—knowing when to wait, when to proceed, how to caress, squeeze, stroke, or even pinch—is important to all relationships. How long did it take you to get it right (did you ever)?

What about the writing and related technology I’ve had to master to bring these words to you? My first letters, words, and sentences were brought to life with a Number 2 pencil. I can still remember Mrs. Robinson, my third-grade teacher, guiding my hand to make the loops and curves that would become the building blocks of “my letter to the world.” Other than the addition of a pen, not much would change until the typing course I took in summer school seven years later. Over the course of 20, hot and humid un-air-conditioned days, I would say goodbye to hunt and peck as I touch typed my way to 30 words per minute! When I look back on 19 years of education, that may be the most important course I ever took (other than drive ed). Following a progression of manual and electric typewriters, giant desk top computers, laptops, tablets, and smart phones, my fingers would prove adaptive even though my brain resisted the ceaseless pace of change with every cell of its being.

Often my hands are the messenger of my carelessness. Thinking my bare paws are capable of grabbing and holding anything regardless of its size, weight, or level of risk, from cigarettes to firewood to skillets, my stinky, splintered, and blistered hands remind me that there are definite limits in my pursuit of cool.

Our sense of touch is the least utilized of our senses. Most of us see and hear all the time. Though not as robustly as our canine friends’ powerful schnozzes, the human nose is regularly sizing up an array of atmospheric scents, or our mouth is enjoying (or not) a host of tastes. But touch, though we do it all the time, is frequently relegated to everyday functionalities like grabbing the doorknob, pulling our pants up, or judging the temperature of a can of beer.

But for the sake of sheer sensuality, I’ve never found anything that revs up the potency of touch like gardening. Blindfolded, I can plant garlic cloves in the fall by finding the tiny root hairs with the tip of my finger, point the clove downward while nestling it snugly into the soft earth just above my second knuckle. Pulling a weed tests the hand’s strength which in turn tells me that it needs help from the other hand, or maybe we give up and use the trowel. Passing a hand across human skin is divine and often erotic, but gliding your finger tips over the skin of a vine-ripe tomato can be a close second. For the sensuous gardener, a brief caress of the vegetable nearly mature on the plant in the sun’s heat stimulates the taste buds and conjures up a recipe or two. Even the offending tomato hornworm, rapacious in its path of destruction, has a silken, fleshy feel as it’s pulled from the plant stem and terminated with extreme prejudice between two bricks.

Our gardening hands have grown lazy and forgetful from a winter of disuse. It’s time to plunge them once again into the moist, cool spring soil. That will wake them up, and I hear tell that the dirtier they get the more they’ll remember.

“Stuff the dried leaves gently between the burlap and the tree. Work them into the branches but be careful not to break any branches. There are more leaves over there near the river. You hold the burlap open while Mark stuffs the leaves in. Yes, that’s good. Don’t skimp on the leaves; it gets cold here in the winter and fig trees need plenty of insulation. Now wrap the burlap tight. Don’t leave any gaps.”

That’s more or less what I remember from that November day sometime in the late 1990s. Dr. Joan Dye Gussow was directing the three visitors she had invited for a “working lunch.” We were tromping around the sodden backyard of her home perched on the Hudson River’s left bank, just upriver from the Tappan Zee Bridge. If you stood at the very back end of her lot—the rear edge of a long, narrow yard saturated with a helter-skelter horticultural extravaganza of which the fig tree was only the latest addition—you could kneel to the ground and thrust your hand into the fast-flowing waters.

We three “guests” had suspected all along that this would be no free lunch. As we were all working hard to keep up with Joan’s instructions, I recall spontaneously breaking into some improvised lines “I ain’t gonna work on Joan’s farm no more….” But with the tree finally wrapped snugger than a new-born infant lashed to her mother’s chest, we proceeded to pick up our tools and scraps of materials expecting to now be fed. We should have known better. The work portion of the morning’s activities would be followed by a mini-ecological lecture that was as wide-ranging as Joan’s capacious mind. We learned more about the life of the Hudson, the risk to flooding her backyard (which would happen soon), the history of a newly developed, nearby community garden, and the infinite complexities of and reasons-why she chose the fruit and vegetable varieties she did.

Not content to stick with the abundant natural classroom that surrounded us for our lessons, she seized on another teaching moment. Upon spotting my untied shoelace, she said, “Here, let me show you a new way to tie your shoes. Do it this way (she bent over and made some complicated twists and turns with my laces), and they’ll never come loose again. Now you try.” I kneeled, tried manipulating the laces in a similar fashion as Joan’s interceding digits corrected my mistakes. Never finding the same configuration as her, I finally said with exasperation that what I learned when I was four years old was good enough. “There’s always a better way!” she cajoled me with a teasing grin.

As with the way we keep our shoes secured to our feet, so it was with our food system. As far as Joan Gussow was concerned, once she had turned her prodigious intellect to the issues of food production and consumption, she knew there had to be a better way. Her research, analysis, and warnings were compiled in her 1980s and 1990s books including the Feeding Web, The Nutrition Debate, and my all-time favorite, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce, and Agriculture: Who Will Grow Tomorrow’s Food? It’s an oeuvre that both guided and inspired the food movement by making connections between health, nutrition, agriculture, sustainability, and the corporate food culture that was then sending it slimy tentacles in every direction. When I would hear her speak at the many food and farm conferences that were then gaining popularity, I couldn’t help but compare her to Paul Revere sounding the alarm—instead of Redcoats, however, it was the industrial food system that was coming and we had better be prepared to take up the appropriate arms. And if there was a notion that propelled Joan into the saddle of her mighty steed faster than any other, it was a headline like this one from a 1980 New York Times article: “Outwitting Nature to Produce More Food” (as quoted in Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture).

As a woman of science in an era when science was still not comfortable with women, Joan brought the rigors of her training and education to the one niche where women dominated—nutritional science. But she wasn’t buying the better living through chemistry mantra that the industry was putting out, and that women like my mother were lapping up faster than an electric can opener could shear the top off a can of beans. She’d rail against the Disneyfication of our food supply best expressed by Epcot Center’s “technological paradise…where the plants are held up by mesh rather than messy dirt…and the air filtered and sterilized to prevent the introduction of insects and disease.” This would lead to her “spread[ing] the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm” that two USDA scientists, Marin Rogoff and Stephen Rawlins, had deployed a nightmarish biotechnology process that would bypass natural farming practices of raising chicken with a laboratory extrusion of sun, CO2, water, and cellulose. Dr. Gussow would label this technology and the descent from nature-based food production as “Chicken Little.” She warned that, henceforth, our food supply would be Pharmed, not farmed.

The role that Joan the Scientist played in spotlighting the shift from real to ersatz food is perhaps less important than the role that Joan the Teacher played. As I was starting my career in the 1980s in Hartford, I would increasingly run into people who were or had been her students, those that had read her books, or referred to a talk of hers they had just heard. They always impressed me as among the most passionate and committed of the colleagues I would work with, people with the most fire in the belly. The number of Joan’s acolytes grew over the decades, and like a million butterflies, set off on a mission of pollination across the land. Providing nourishing instruction was Joan’s great gift, and she bestowed it generously and lovingly, whether you were a student of hers at Columbia Teacher’s College or a plodding practitioner like myself patching together food projects in a crumbling city like Hartford.

We did eventually have lunch that November day. Joan’s creation was as lively and tasty as the conversation that ensued. Subsequent photographs of her garden that I’ve seen strongly suggest that the fig tree is flourishing, no doubt the result of the less than willing workers that folded one dead leaf after another into its proper cavity.

During the course of a sporadic email correspondence with Joan over the last few years, I never noticed a flagging in her interests, insights, and intense desire to be helpful. As she was marching toward her mid-nineties, I had asked her for an article “Women, Food and the Future” that she had written in 1985 for some research I was doing on food and gender roles. Not being available online, it took her some considerable effort to find, copy, and mail it to me. In the article—a kind of manifesto that could have been titled “Feminism My Way!”—Joan strives at some length to affirm the traditional nurturing role of women, not to deny them access to the same opportunities as men but to assert that the threats to the planet, including the food supply, require the kind of eco-feminist attention that women are well suited to provide. “Women are told that in order to ‘make it’ they have to be more like men,” Joan wrote. She went on to say that, “I find the idea that women should try to join the male world terrifying….[T]he earth is not in crisis for lack of technologists but for lack of nurturing. I know that the food system and the society are in trouble…[But] I do not believe that things will be remedied by women learning to fit into the existing system, but by working with men to change the system to a more sustainable one.”

If the 1960s idea of Earth Mother is still relevant today—and not only do I believe it is, but we may also in fact need it more than ever—Joan Dye Gussow sits astride that throne like the true nurturing matriarch she is.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.William Butler YeatsPress ReleaseWashington, DC. February 10, 2025. To ensure the safety and well-being of America’s Billionaire class, the Trump Administration announced today a series of measures to reduce the cost of the country’s runaway, fraudulent, corrupt, and weaponized food and nutrition programs. Sub-comandante Elon Musk said, “As the Duke of DOGE, I proclaim that all federal food programs will return immediately to their 1969 spending levels.”President Trump pronounced that from here on in, participation in food stamps, WIC, and School meals will be based solely on merit. “Merit” will be judged upon the successful completion of a new 57-page form that, among other things, requires applicants to write a 3,000-word essay describing in vivid detail why their current state of misery and overall worthlessness as a human being justifies receipt of the crumbs generously awarded by His Majesty.Additionally, participants will sign a pledge prohibiting them from using federal benefits to purchase food from companies with DEI policies. This prohibition extends to the purchase of any “trans” (transgenic?) food. The Administration is awaiting further guidance from the Secretary of Agriculture concerning the meaning of “trans.”All participants over the age of 6 and under the age of 90 will be expected to work at least 20-hours per week in one or more Trump or Musk-owned companies, or any other approved billionaire run facility for little or no pay.Gender extremism among children participating in school meal programs will be firmly and resolutely terminated. Children showing any ambivalence as to their gender identity will be subject to an unannounced inspection on the premises. School meals will be denied to any individuals or persons expressing “radical” and “extreme” political views considered contrary to being a patriotic, God-fearing American. Children coming from Evangelical homes will be given twice the amount of food at half the price charged to non-Evangelicals.The Thrifty Food Plan, a sick and communist-inspired action of the Biden Administration, will now be based on the price of a loaf of bread and gallon of milk in 1969. Alternative measures for lowering the benefit levels will be developed that include determining the minimum amount of food that can be fed to an adult before severe hunger pangs set in.###

Think this is joke? It may not be for long if the Trump/Musk Administration gets their way. Eviscerating the nation’s most essential safety net programs, the ones that nourish people—SNAP, WIC, School Meals—would be their way of turning their noses up at America’s most vulnerable people while steering hundreds of billions of “saved” dollars into more tax breaks for the country’s wealthiest individuals. It’s Godzilla run amok; Attila the Hun pillaging the countryside, and Hitler’s Panzer divisions eating up Europe. Yes, the barbarians are at the gate!

The nutrition safety net—complicated but largely effective at keeping hunger at bay—began to weave itself together during the 1930s with federal food coupons, designed to help starving Dust Bowl victims as much as struggling farmers. Good nutrition would find itself institutionalized as federal policy when Harry S. Truman created the national school lunch program shortly after World War II. Multiple innovations and diversifications would follow over time leading to school breakfast, after-school snacks, farm-to-school initiatives, a dramatic improvement in the quality and health of school meals, and community eligibility which is gradually making good school food free for all.The food stamp program, later known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would come to life in the early days of John F. Kennedy’s administration. It too would undergo a number of diversifications and alterations in the decades to come. The last major weft in the nation’s nutrition weave would appear through the addition of the Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) program enacted in 1972 under Richard Nixon. It would bring infants, children up the age of 5, and pregnant and breastfeeding mothers into a healthy cocoon of local care.Always an easy target for those who want to denigrate government and snip the safety net’s strands, SNAP in particular has been accused of every form of chicanery that the flesh is heir to—a repository for lazy, filet mignon-eating welfare cheats who’d rather rip off Uncle Sam than put in put in an honest day’s work. Little to no evidence is available to validate any of those claims, of course. But the evidence does show that out of SNAP’s current 42 million recipients, the largest category is comprised of children (36 percent) trailed closely by those over 65 years of age (11.5 percent). For those who claim SNAP’s caseload is riddled with illegal immigrants, fully 82 percent of its adults and 97 percent of its children were born in the U.S. And if you’re a red-state Republican from the South (which is most of the South), you might be concerned that 40 percent of all U.S. food stamp recipients live in your region). What the data says about food stamps in the U.S. | Pew Research CenterWhen you add in the WIC and School Meal programs—some mothers, but the vast majority infants and children—these federal nutrition programs are more than a safety net, they are the cornerstone to the healthy development of tens of millions of America’s lower income young people. I dare anyone to identify a better public or private investment in our nation’s future.Arrayed against those receiving nutrition assistance are America’s billionaires including a President who, with his minions, demonstrate a sensitivity to the needs of others akin to Pol Pot and Josef Stalin. They are already eviscerating U.S.A.I.D., thus elevating the level of hunger and even starvation worldwide. Let’s not be subtle with our analysis: every dollar taken from the mouths of children or from an agricultural development program for small African farmers is another dollar available for tax cuts for the rich.Sadly, all of this is in keeping with the ever-widening economic gaps in the U.S. where 20 percent of all individual income (and 35 percent of capital) goes to less than 1 percent of the people. In 1913, near the end of the Gilded Age, 19 percent went to the 1 percent. But through progressive government policies and rising national equality, that number had been chopped down to 8 percent for the 1 percent by 1976. Not only has our march to equality gone terribly backwards since then, we are now seeing the realization of what the economist Thomas Piketty predicted in his award-winning book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), that an inequitable concentration of wealth not only means that the rich get richer, they also become more powerful politically. Welcome to America 2025!With a kind of macho zeal associated with tattooed bikers, the Republican members of Congress are vying to see who can be the biggest bad-ass when it comes to taking food from children. They are throwing around proposals to cut billions of dollars from SNAP, alter the Biden-revised Thrifty Food Plan that gave SNAP recipients a long-over-due 23 percent boost in benefits, and cut $12 billion from Community Eligibility which has worked miracles increasing participation in school meals. These proposals are mindless, heartless, and soulless! If you think so too, let all your members of Congress, both your representatives and senators, know that we invest in our children and those who need a helping hand (think LA fire victims for whom SNAP has come to the rescue) to ensure a better future for everyone.If you’re involved with a food pantry or food bank, you better ratchet up your advocacy efforts right away before the thousands of new hungry mouths show up on your doorstep. The Food Research Action Center (FRAC) has one way for you to be in contact with your lawmakers. Here it is: FRAC Federal Nutrition Programs Update. Be sure to get on their mailing list so that you can stay apprised of further developments. (As a footnote, FRAC might consider finding alternatives to Facebook and X for obvious reasons).I go back to the days when Ronald Reagan began to scythe down the programs and services that were finally lifting people out of poverty. He began his demolition just about the time that America was getting a handle on economic inequality (see above). But even then, there was the vestige of a morality that put guardrails on policies and displayed a modicum of care for others. With Trump, his self-centered Silicon Valley frat boys, unqualified sycophants taking cabinet posts, and 1600 pardoned, cop-beating “brown shirts,” there is an unprecedented disregard for who might be harmed, the rule of law, and moral boundaries. The American people are far better than that. They will not accept the unprecedented cruelty being heaped upon their brothers and sisters, both here and abroad. They are willing to fight for the well-being of others, unlike those who only care for themselves.

“Work and learn in evil days, in insulted days, in days of debt and depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Azteca Food Center Planning Committee, Laredo, TX

I’ve used this quote from Emerson before, and I bet you can guess when—November 2016. Yes, after Trump’s first presidential victory when the atmosphere positively reeked of doom and despair. In that post I urged others to do as I was determined to do myself—don’t wallow in defeat but stay focused on the good work we are all doing, especially that which serves others. Besides protecting the more vulnerable among us and developing a sustainable and just food system infrastructure, we must also hold all levels of government accountable for these same purposes, to which I will add preparing for the next election.

I must admit that Trump 2.0 is taking as much grit as I can muster—and the occasional Triple-X Margarita—to not drown in the trail of slime that oozes from him and his cronies. The prospects of the soon to be Felon-in-Chief running what I used to believe was the best nation on earth has awakened my once-dormant irritable bowel syndrome that even a double-dose of omeprazole can’t quell. Nevertheless, I will resist his chicanery, gird my loins for battles to come, and set my sights on 2026 and 2028. As exhausting as it can be, democracy is a job we must work at every day.

Laredo, Texas
But to live I need joy too! Kamala Harris gave me a shot of it for which I’m grateful. The kind of joy I’m talking about, however, is what I got on a recent trip to Laredo and New York City where good food, good community, and good projects were the best medicine I could get. Laredo, Texas, about which I’ve written before (Laredo Shows the Way to a Mending Wall | Mark Winne) engaged my services and those of Susie Marshall and her organization, Grow North Texas, to assist with the development of a small food store in the city’s Azteca neighborhood.

Azteca is an unusual area to say the least. Not only is it an old neighborhood of small, densely built homes, many dating back to just after the Civil War, it is largely lower income, partly due to the impact of NAFTA. Being not much more than an avocado throw from the Rio Grande and Mexico, Azteca was cut off from the rest of Laredo when the brand-new Interstate-35 came roaring across the river from the Puente International Bridge. Anything in its way was crushed or displaced including hundreds of Azteca residents. As a result of NAFTA, Laredo is the biggest inland port in North America. Millions of tons of fresh produce from Mexico pour into the U.S. without a single pound benefiting Laredo’s residents. Spiraling downward conditions sent Azteca’s last grocery store fleeing which left the neighborhood as an official food desert. Hence, the residents have expressed a fervent desire for a grocery store.

About 20 residents showed up at Canseco House, a beautiful neo-classical community building that was also the sight of a well-tended, half-acre urban garden showcasing late fall (South Texas) cabbages, okra, and collards among other veggies. Since most of the participants only spoke Spanish, we relied on simultaneous Spanish-English-Spanish translation. Our highly-able translator was quickly overwhelmed as the excited gathering unabashedly shared their food, hence, stocking preferences, management and ownership ideas, and options for how to divvy up the space—an abandoned 1,000 square feet-plus building owned by the City of Laredo. Their energy was sustained by a delicious catered lunch provided by a couple of cottage food vendors.

Three hours of hard work produced clear sets of preferences for the mercadito—local, organic, fresh food; no candy, chips or tobacco! Most of the space would be dedicated to a small, high-quality food store with a small space reserved for a prepared food kitchen and meeting area. And ownership tastes leaned toward using an existing non-profit organization with a strong community advisory board. As productive as all their work was, I was buoyed by the energy in the room and the people’s desire to never settle for the status quo. Nothing can stop an ignited and united community!

New York City
The journey continued on to New York City where I strolled down memory lane while taking in the present-day sites and scenery. I began the morning of my first day knoshing a toasted sesame bagel with smoke-cured lox and cream cheese at Russ and Daughters on East Houston. It was a bagel so perfect, so unlike anything I could buy in New Mexico that I nearly fell to my knees in gratitude.

My next stop at the Union Square Farmers’ Market netted scones, pears, apple cider, beeswax candles, and a bottle of “locally grown” Rye Whiskey from Orange County. New York. The market’s atmosphere and the vendor vibes were warm and friendly in spite of the December rain. By contrast, some 30 years ago, I can remember Tony Manetta, the market manager, sternly warning the men to carry their wallets in their pants’ front pocket because the market’s pick pockets were the best in the city. A few minutes later he was scolding a pair of elderly matrons who had lost control of their two pedigree dogs which were about to tear each other to shreds. Through Tony’s muscular intervention, he held the snarling animals apart with a leash in each hand. Call me twisted, but sometimes I miss those rough and tumble days.

Maritza Wellington-Owens and Me

This brings me to my initial reason to be among “The City’s fiery parcels all undone.” It was to celebrate the retirement of one of my all-time favorite food organizer heroes, Maritza Wellington-Owens to whom I dedicated two-full pages in my first book Closing the Food Gap. Starting in 1993, Maritza, in a state of benign ignorance regarding farmers’ markets and fueled by a hard-edged passion for justice—receiving a meager amount of assistance from me—started one of the New York’s first farmers’ markets largely dedicated to serving its impoverished communities. Until then, the world-famous GreenMarkets (now “GrowNYC”), of which Union Square was their first (1975) and still flagship market, was dedicated to providing profitable direct marketing opportunities to the then shrinking numbers of the region’s farmers. Although noble and worthy intentions, that goal left out giant swaths of the city’s low-income neighborhoods imprisoned in food deserts. Maritza’s vision, embedded in the non-profit she founded, Harvest Home Farmers’ Markets, eventually led to the creation of 21 farmers’ markets later consolidated to 14 markets operating today in places where people need them the most.

Several farmers made a two-hour trek on a rainy New York night to the retirement party’s venue just south of Union Square. I spoke with Joe Morgiewicz, who with his two brothers and mother, drove in from Goshen, New York where they’ve operated their family farm for five generations. Joe told me they have been working closely with Maritza for years now and distributing some of their 400-acres worth of produce at Harvest Home markets as well as into New York State’s farm to school programs. When I asked what role subsidies play in New York City sales, he said, “They’re huge. Well over half our sales at Harvest Home markets are WIC, senior, or Health Bucks (New York City’s SNAP coupon program that incentivizes healthy eating).” His brother Don gave an eloquent toast in Maritza’s honor noting humorously that “we’ve had our disagreements which we’ve always managed to work out. In spite of those moments, we are strong supporters of Maritza’s mission, after all, she actually spent time at our farm to learn how we produce food!”

But one conversation reminded me of what makes Harvest Home stand out. Helen, a Black woman in her 60s, had been volunteering at one of the markets. Inevitably, she started buying, learning how to prepare, and eating a lot more local fruits and vegetables. “For the first time in years, I recently got off my medications. Eating well was my new ‘medicine’,” she proudly told me, and with a grin and a twinkle in her eye said, “I told my doctor I don’t need him anymore!” When access to healthy food is provided; when the means are available to purchase; and when educational support is part of the package, many small miracles happen. That’s what Maritza started, nurtured, and is now being sustained by Harvest Home.

I had a few moments to chat with their new executive director, Johann DeJesus, and the board president, Patrick Holder, who’s an architect when he’s not volunteering with Harvest Home. Both of them acknowledged the extraordinary leadership and courage that Maritza had demonstrated over the years to make Harvest Home the second (GrowNYC being the first) largest farmers’ market network in the city. But both of them know that simply walking in her footsteps is not enough, and that they are excited by the upcoming opportunity to reimagine and reinspire Harvest Home’s work, especially in light of the ever-soaring dietary health needs of New York’s large lower income communities. To that end, they used the evening’s celebration to launch the “Maritza Wellington-Owens Legacy Fund” as a way to broaden and enhance Harvest Home’s work. I would urge anyone who’s passionate about supporting people-of-color-led organizations that target the most challenging community health needs to seriously consider contributing to this fund MWO Legacy Fund — Harvest Home Farmers Markets.

As the evening was drawing to a close, and apparently not knowing that I was half Irish, I was asked to give a toast. Besides heaping richly deserved praise on Maritza, I stressed two things. The first, which could be said for the Azteca residents as well, is that “in insulted days” like we are rapidly approaching, we must protect the most vulnerable among us and ensure that their needs are met. And secondly, as much as we must see to the first task, we must hold our government accountable, never let them off the hook, don’t back down, and insist with every ounce of strength we have that social and economic justice is done.

Under “a cloud of arrows,” however, we found our joy. The locally sourced dinner lovingly prepared by Touchef Coupet, accompanied by some good New York wine, set the stage for speechifying and dancing. As the DJ brought the music up and found the right mix, people worked their dance moves, synchronized their steps, and found a common beat of celebration. “Beauty is a defiance of authority,” said William Carlos Williams, and the beauty of people yearning for healthy food and communities is unstoppable.

Just in case you were thinking I took the summer off, let this post assure you that I’m still kicking. The astute among you, however, may gauge my temporary absence as something more than choosing beach diversion over writing immersion. And you’d be right.

No, I’m not quitting, at least not yet. And in spite of numerous offers from the NFL, I’m not putting on the shoulder pads this season. But once again from atop Mount Muse, the Sirens have beckoned me with a book deal. While the title won’t be known until the day before it goes to press, one contender is “The Old and Rejected Works of Mark Winne.” Fortunately, more upbeat options are in the offing since my plan is to select and assemble some of my essays, articles, and posts going back 20 years. They will be thematically organized in hopes of taking a fresh look at their content as well as reflecting on their current relevance. My publishing partner in crime is Bloomsbury Press, that venerable British book maker who probably views this project with as much anxiety as the generals who witnessed the evacuation of Dunkirk.

I don’t intend to forsake this platform for too long, however, nor will I pass up an opportunity to occasionally give voice to some story that’s just screaming to be told. But I do have to put my nose to the grindstone to complete my contractual obligations—or else!

Southwest Colorado

As a small token of my appreciation for your loyalty, and with the hope that you won’t abandon me in the meantime, I offer some observations from a recent road trip up the western-facing spine of the Rocky Mountains. My route out of New Mexico took me into southwest Colorado and the San Juan Mountains. It was selected in accordance with my remembrances of food, farms, and places past. The landscape ripples with mesas, escarpments, and sweeping meadows whose lush summer grasses are slowly munched into protein by small herds of black angus.

This is also a region replete with innovative small farmers, ranchers, and food system activists as well other members of the creative food classes. My past farm visits to the region include a fruit farmer near Grand Junction who not only grew the best peaches I’d ever eaten, but also invested heavily in farm worker housing. The small homes on his property were giving his workers affordable, high-quality year-round housing, but also the opportunity to settle themselves and their families into the community.

But far and away the most unusual farm “transaction” I’ve ever encountered came from a western Colorado vegetable and poultry farmer who operated a CSA. He had been diagnosed with an operable form of brain cancer, but like too many farmers, he didn’t have health insurance. Fortunately, and generously, one of his CSA members was a brain surgeon who accepted a year’s produce share in return for a very successful tumor removal. As it turns out, the doctor felt he got the better deal!

Though wilderness, dark forests, and wildlife abound, there is little to fear in this rugged part of the state, other than perhaps the politics. You see, crossing Colorado’s southwestern border means that you are entering the Lauren Boebert Zone, better known as Colorado Congressional District 3. Fortunately for her constituents, the gun-toting, trash-talking congresswoman of uncertain intelligence only has a few months left. Her margin of victory in 2022—546 votes, the slimmest of all federal races that year—presented too big a risk for her to run again against her Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch. But for a woman who never says never, her and her carpetbag slipped over the Rockies one night to become the Republican congressional candidate in the state’s more solidly Republican eastern 4th District. She’s up against a tough Democratic opponent, Tricia Calvarese who may save the good people of eastern Colorado from the stigma of being represented by Boebert. As the Colorado cowboys say, “No brain and no shame, cause nothing but pain.”

My path takes me into the town of Durango (population 20,000, with a margin of error of +/-2%) whose robust food scene far exceeds its size. Set amidst stunning scenery and with a downtown core that retains much of that Old West charm, its ever-expanding edges are overly encrusted with uninspired growth that exists mostly in service to motor vehicles. Nevertheless, Durango’s popularity persists driving up the number of new settlers by 20 percent over the past decade. Native Americans and growing Hispanic communities also continue to deepen and enrich a culture that had, until recently, remained largely white.

Follow the road north through Durango for about 12 miles on a course that parallels the narrow-gauge scenic railroad and you’ll reach James Ranch. In the universe of foodies, James Ranch is the citadel, some might say the holy temple of local agricultural perfection, a place so in harmony with both community and nature that one could be forgiven for thinking that it was the original blueprint for Eden.

I’m sitting in the outside patio at the James Ranch Grill and Café with Jim Dyer, a long-time Durango food activist and small farmer, taking in a multi-million-dollar view. Stretched out before us is 400-acres of one of the best managed cattle grazing lands in the West. The cows eat for short periods on sections of no more than 2 or 3 acres at a time before they are moved to a new location. This is a process I witnessed during a previous visit to the ranch where one person adjusts a few electrified strands of wire fencing, then slowly moves the herd to an adjoining section of pasture. The whole process of moving the cattle took no more than an hour. This low-intensity form of ranching is easy on one’s body and lifestyle, makes for no-stressed animals, and produces the highest quality grass that the earth is capable of.

Blocking out a few bloody scenes that are a necessary part of cattle raising and meat eating, Jim and I enjoy a perfect, grass-fed, totally organic burger smothered in cheddar cheese also hatched from the same grass. Under far less brutal circumstances, the cheese comes from another branch of the ranch’s bovine community, Jersey cows. Milked in small numbers at the ranch’s New Zealand style milking parlor, the cheese is then made and aged on the premises. As David James, the ranch’s pater familia told me, “We buy our Jerseys from New Zealand, and boy, do those cows know how to eat grass!”

In keeping with one of the ranch’s major postulates of reducing labor to promote a sane and happy agricultural life, the cows are only milked once a day (two to three times a day are the factory dairy norms) and they are “rested” (not milked) in the winter when the pastures are covered in snow—animals, people, and nature take a much-deserved break. “This is how you get your children into farming—reduce the labor,” said David. By emphasizing quality of life over production and profits, David and his deceased wife of 59 years, Kay, have kept four of their five children on the farm as active managers of different parts of the operation.

Speaking through his billowing white beard that he jokingly says catches enough food for his next meal, Jim reminds me that James Ranch has diversified far beyond livestock. A very large market garden keeps CSA members well supplied and the café and their retail outlet adequately provisioned. The small retail market sells not only their meat, cheese, and vegetable products, but also the products of area farmers and ranchers. Since the ranch doesn’t grow potatoes, the grill buys 40,000 pounds a year of Colorado potatoes to keep it supplied with hand-cut French fries. A quirk of climatic fate allows the garden to sustain fresh pea production from late spring until late summer, far beyond the normal range for the region. Education and community outreach extend the Ranch’s production related focus for beyond the realm of most business enterprises. Classes of chattering students are a pleasant and regular presence throughout the different activity centers. During a previous visit I listened in on a lecture by one of David’s children for visiting students from Dine (Navajo) College.

The near perfection of James Ranch is almost enough to distract you from the fact that Durango and surrounding La Plata County have challenges and other imaginative folks. As we’re polishing off our burgers and a pint of local beer (not James Ranch), Jim shares an admirable list of community-based actions that are transforming the area’s food system.

Soil Outdoor Learning Lab opened at the Riverview Elementary School as the result of a science teacher who had a vision for real hands-on learning experience. There are now 24 education garden beds and 50 community garden beds at the school. That represents the completion of Phase One with four more phases to follow including expansion to more schools.

Good Food Collective has set about the task of “building a just and thriving food system” that is focused on using locally grown to increase access to healthy food. To that end, they bought $230,000 of food from southwest Colorado producers that found its way to schools, food pantries, and healthcare facilities. Not content to only distribute food, the Collective does advocacy and food policy work which included passage of the Colorado “Healthy Food for All” act.

Durango Farmers Market is a vibrant, Saturday local vendors market, mostly food and farm products, that infuses downtown Durango with the kind of social energy, zest for authenticity, and joie de vivre that everyone expects from a farmers’ market. Here’s an interactive map of vendors that shows you where to find the who’s that make the market a big what.

Southwest Producers Directory helps you find new and maturing growers, a positive trend that Jim Dyer notes should ensure the sustainability of local food production. Maybe more importantly, he was delighted that the producers took over this task of maintaining the directory!

James Ranch | Sustainable Beef, Cheese, Pork, Raw Milk, Fresh Eggs, and Produce in Durango, CO is the place that has raised the bar on locally produced food and eating to new heights.

Zia Taqueria has a strong community orientation and is one of the very best restaurants for sourcing local food and investing in local producers.

Garden Guys is a Colorado public radio show hosted by Colorado University Extension agents Tom Bartels and Darrin Parmenter.  They also produce some great “how-to” videos that you can find at the Grow Food Well website.

Durango Farm to School  is a robust connector of farms and schools that includes such local giants as James Ranch and Cross Creek Ranch which supplies wagyu ground beef.

Old Fort Lewis provides an agricultural education and incubator program that includes a Native American focus (almost half of the college’s students are Native American/Alaskan).

Karlos Baca is a local Southern Ute Chef who spotlights Native cuisine and food production. Learn more about their collective here.

Pueblo Seed & Food Company, run by Dan and Nanna, moved their farm to just west of Cortez recently. Their work on chiles, garlic, seeds, grains, and how to use them is well worth checking out.

Durango and much of Southwestern Colorado are a special place, loaded with natural beauty and imaginative, hard-working food actors. And in my humble opinion, based on my career and travels back and forth across the country, there’s no reason why your place can’t be (and may very well be) a dynamic food place as well.