Food is a choice. It’s just not always an easy one.
Nobody knows this better than journalist Nancy Matsumoto, who has spent years writing about the trillion dollar agriculture industry, commodity food chains and the giant, global and extractive food system. That industry is heavily subsidized, shaping and manipulating the choices we make about the food we eat.
But there are alternatives, many of which Ms. Matsumoto highlights in her recent book Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System. Ms. Matsumoto wrote the book after interviewing hundreds of women working to build transparent, direct and local food systems.
“What [these women] are trying to do is the opposite of the big food and the big agriculture commodity food chain, that, for better or worse, we’re basically all living and breathing in,” said Ms. Matsumoto at a Tuesday event at the agricultural hall.
During a panel sponsored by Slough Farm and the Agricultural Society, Ms. Matsumoto joined women representing different sectors of the Vineyard’s food system — from agriculture to shellfish to restaurants — to discuss challenges, successes and the future of the Island’s food system.
“Most of us don’t really understand that we’re being manipulated, and our choices are very much controlled and constrained by this giant food system,” said Ms. Matsumoto.
That’s partly a matter of subsidies, said Lucy Grinnan, communications director at the Agricultural Society, who facilitated the panel. Grinnan noted that big grocery chains have an advantage of over local farmers due to the abundance of government subsidies.
“The reason that things are cheaper in the grocery store is because they are being subsidized and your local food is not,” Grinnan said.
Ms. Matsumoto used the phrase “Dana versus Goliath” to describe how the food system prioritizes monocultures and using heavy chemicals to produce cheaper crops.
The Island is not immune to these issues.
“We are bound by the water, everything has to come and go by boats, so we have challenges with economies of scale,” said Emma Green-Beach, executive director and chief biologist of the shellfish group.
Cattle growers, for example, must send their meat off-Island to be butchered because there is no meat processor on-Island.
What is encouraging about the Island’s food system, panelists said, is a new, energetic generation of farmers — many of whom sat in the audience Tuesday night.
“There’s a young generation of farmers and fisherpeople here who are committed to growing food for their community and want to be able to stay here and continue that tradition,” said Caroline Pam, co-executive director of Island Grown Initiative. “This is sort of a counter narrative to what’s going on everywhere else, where farmers are aging out and are not finding successors.”
The Island prizes providing for itself and caring for its communities, said Ms. Green-Beach.
Chef Ting of Black Joy Kitchen agreed, highlighting her monthly pay-what-you-can meals for Island families. She also has an open-kitchen policy for her staff, where they can take home ingredients at the end of a shift instead of relying on “Cumberland Farms” to feed themselves late at night, she said.
But collaboration and sharing among Islanders is not always equitable, said Alexis Moreis, tribal historic preservation officer for the Wampanoag Tribe of Chappaquiddick.
“At the level and rate of the commodification of Wampanoag lands, it’s making it incredibly hard to keep Wampanoag families here, to keep farming families here, to keep fishermen here,” she said.
Panelists pointed out the importance of using local food in school cafeterias, and raising children to value local food systems.
“What the schools buy — that’s our tax dollars, that’s our money that we are investing in our schools to feed our children,” said Ms. Green Beach. “What a better way for that money to be spent, but to go back to the community?”
Ms. Motsumoto agreed.
“I would love to see every elementary school, middle school and high school incorporate food education as part of their curriculum. I’d like to see gardens in every school, and kids participating,” she said. “ I’ve seen firsthand when it happens at the middle, high school, college level...the importance of locally grown food becomes very apparent to people and it becomes a way of life.”
Supporting the local food system can be even simpler — individuals can share recipes to use what’s in abundance on-Island, panelists said.
“There’s lots of black sea bass around here now, right?” said Ms. Green Beach. “If you’ve got a great recipe for a species or for a vegetable that you figured out how to grow really well, share it. It’s just teaching the next person how to take advantage of something.”
Last year, Chef Ting ran a weekly food program for Island elders, preparing a menu filled with ingredients people often don’t know what to do with. Pig feet, chicken feet, certain types of fish and parsnips are a few examples, she said.
“I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, parsnips were an old woman food...and they were terrible,” said Chef Ting. But add cream, saffron and smoked salt, and it becomes a “phenomenal product.”
“We made it and then the elders in the food program all wanted parsnips,” she said.
It’s about connecting the entire food system, from the farmers who grow food to the chefs who know what to do with the hundreds of pounds of green tomatoes, zucchini and black sea bass in abundance on Island.
Chef Ting said that poor communication across the sectors of the food system is a barrier to those connections, especially during the busy summer months. Other panelists agreed.
By the end of the event, Chef Ting had connected with Ms. Pam and Grace Palmer of Morning Glory Farm about gleaning pumpkin leaves to use in Black Joy Kitchen’s recipes. Leo Sedlock, propagation manager at Beetlebung farm, talked to Merrick Carreiro, IGI’s director of food equity programs, to donate extra plant starters to the food bank.
“We have a lot of dreams combined, but there’s all this overlap,” said Ms. Green-Beach. “I love opportunities like this [panel]...We’ve all got so many ideas of how we can work together to help each other achieve little bits of each other’s dreams.”
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