New Food
Activists, authors document the farmers and innovators behind the movement to change America’s food system
By Liz Pacheco
Spring 2011
City Slicker Farms is more than a Saturday farm stand. The Oakland, Calif. nonprofit grows high-nutrient, high-yield crops, raises chickens and produces honey, sold on a sliding scale to give residents of all economic backgrounds access to healthy, sustainable food.
And this farm is no exception in the food movement as authors Daniel Tucker and Amy Franceschini illustrate in their book, Farm Together Now: A Portrait of People, Places, and Ideas for a New Food Movement. Filled with interviews, photos and drawings inspired by the authors’ activist art backgrounds, the book documents 20 farms changing the way America produces and consumes food.
“We’re not activist farmers, we’re not community organizers…so there are limits to what we can do,” Tucker says. “We wanted [the book] to be a document of the social movement, but also a prod or push in new directions.”
- Farm Together Now documents 20 farms changing the way America produces and consumes food. It’s available for $27.50 at chroniclebooks.com.
The authors talk with farmers from all corners of the country: urban areas, desert environments and forested cooperative communities. The farmers grow vegetables, harvest grains, raise bees and save seeds. Their work is both centered around food and the communities in which they’re located. Using an interview style, the book collects oral histories and explores food politics so as to give farmers a voice to talk about their work, the risks they’ve taken, the successes they achieved and the plans they’ve made.
“[…] If we’re all involved in this world-changing, economy-changing, social relation-changing [food] movement,” said Tucker, “we need to now who each other are and acknowledge all of our contradictions and diversity and figure out a way to talk to each other.”
With a foreword by Mark Bittman, a food journalist and author, and photos taken by Anne Hamersky, who specializes in portraitures and agriculture, the book is a source of information and inspiration as well as a catalyst for challenging the American food system.
EJ Magazine caught up with co-author Daniel Tucker at his Chicago office to talk about the book. Tucker is an organizer and documentary maker who until recently edited the journal AREA Chicago, which discusses art, education and activism in Chicago.
EJ Magazine: Where did the initial idea for Farm Together Now come from?
Daniel Tucker: “One thing we talked a lot about when we started the project was that there was an incredible array of food-related literature out in the world that was describing the problems of the food system and creating an analysis. We felt like our contribution could be more. Even if there are occasional articles or spots in a documentary that highlight different sustainable farming practices, there wasn’t really a documentary project that profiled a wide range of people and gave a sense of the diversity and complexity that make up this emerging social movement around food. We’re not experts, we’re not people who can necessarily provide you with the best analysis of what’s wrong with the food system. We felt like this could be like a complement to their work rather than some attempt to reproduce it.”
EJ: Previous work you’ve done hasn’t been directly tied to the food movement, so why write about food?
DT: “Amy and I would answer that question very differently. Amy grew up on a farm and both her parents are farmers. Her father is a large-scale industrial almond producer and her mom is a small-scale back to the land organics producer, both in California. Amy’s life story is very much wrapped up in food politics. Mine is much different. I grew up in cities and I’ve always had a fairly conventional relationship to agriculture in that I’m not very connected to it. So, for me, the question is really about what are the most exciting and inspiring, challenging, hopeful social movements that exist in this country right now.
“One answer to that is that food justice, food sovereignty, even slow food [movements] bubbling up across the country are certainly part of an international trend that I look to and I see as undeniably important right now. So, for someone who studies and documents social movements of all varieties—both the unsuccessful ones that are still interesting and worth looking at and the more emerging and vibrant and, lets say, more successful ones—it made sense to orient around a really exciting field, like food activism, that’s happening right now.”
The authors visited farmers from all corners of the country; the map shows their travel routes.Photo courtesy of Anne Hamersky, Farm Together Now photographer
EJ: You both obviously brought something very different to the project. Can you talk about that relationship and how that worked?
DT: “Amy’s family background is in farming and she has been working for the past several years in San Francisco around a lot of urban agriculture policy in the city. So she’s very involved in activism and policy work and it dovetails with her art practice. That’s what is unique about Amy and I doing this project. We both have a fair amount of experience in publishing, but we are not people who went to an environmental journalism program. We have art backgrounds and sort of activist art backgrounds. That’s a unique thing in terms of our combination.”
EJ: How did you, based in Chicago, and Amy, who is based in San Francisco, decide to collaborate?
DT: “In terms of how we got together, it’s more in terms of these activist art networks and less related to food. But, like I said, Amy is deeply connected to this subject matter in her personal history and I had done little bits and pieces around food politics in Chicago for several years.”
EJ: Are there any places you had wished you had visited, but didn’t?
DT: “We did the best we could with our limited resources, but there are so many places not in the book that it’s hard to pin down. But definitely one place I was curious to go to was Miami. My understanding is a lot of the urban agriculture work happening there is closely connected with activism around fighting evictions. People are making an interesting link between affordable housing and using open space for food production that I think is an unusual mix. A group called Take Back the Land is basically taking back houses that people had been evicted from and putting [those people back] in houses. Then, [Take Back the Land] said if we’re doing stuff around urban land use, then we should also be talking about other things people need, which includes food. And so, they started squatting, taking over empty land and growing their own food. That seemed really exciting to me and I’m sad that we didn’t get to go down there, but their work, in terms of food production, was just starting to take off when we started working on the book.
“Then, definitely West Texas or the Dakotas, Montana, certain plain states, I feel like that’s a big gap in our book. They’re also places I’m unfamiliar with, so I would just be curious. I’ve since met some really interesting activist farmers from that area who are part of the National Family Farm Coalition. A great woman named Dena Hoff, who works with the group Northern Plains Resource Council, spoke on a panel I put together in Washington D.C. a few weeks ago and blew my mind. She should’ve totally been in the book.”
EJ: Why did you decide to use the interview format?
DT: “The interview format felt particularly important because we were looking at people experimenting with solutions to the broken food system and we wanted to present their voices as directly as possible. I also personally just love interviews. I’ve done a lot of big interview projects, it’s a format I’m really comfortable with and interested in too. We felt like [the interview format] would also be the most acceptable to people who may or may not have a lot of good experiences with journalists. There’s a lot of fear of being misrepresented…especially among the people who are taking on huge fights, have dedicated their lives to this work, and have risked a lot along the way. That’s a concern I think is shared among a lot of different practitioners, but that I encountered certainly among the people that we interviewed. We felt the interview was a way we could make them most comfortable with the process.”
EJ: What was the editing process like?
DT: “Amy and I did about 10 interviews each, so there are slightly different styles we had to account for in editing to make them seem like they were sort of done in a unified voice. We had 20,000- to 50,000-word transcripts that were amazing documents that I hope sometime we can present excerpts from on our website. The way to make decisions was really to look at the book as a whole. We had to map out the book in terms of issues and key words we felt we had to have in the book. If we felt like there were redundancies across the interviews, then we would eliminate those. Even though we wanted the interview to stand alone, we wanted it also to be a complete project that felt integrated. Really the limitation for us is part of our interest in the way different people in different contexts use different language to talk about very similar things. That was one of the things we were able to experience as authors, but that didn’t come through as much in the book.”
EJ: When I first looked at the book I immediately saw it as a piece of journalism — it was in an interview format, presenting stories through the voice of individuals and photos. However, in the introduction you refer to it as an “exhibit.” How do you interpret the project?
DT: “I think that the ‘exhibit’ language comes from our background in art. I think in those terms, and so does Amy, as a way to compose a set of ideas. We have a lot more experience making exhibitions than we do books. There is a curatorial perspective on it. I ultimately feel like this is a documentary about an emerging social movement. It was really important to show the differences and the contradictions as well as the similarities. It’s not constructive for anyone who’s involved in this work to have something that just affirms everything they think and feel and is totally uncritical. By presenting those contradictions across the movement and its diversity, we’re presenting some challenges that if we don’t address and find ways to talk about constructively, then we’re just going to stay as fragmented as ever or become more fragmented.”
EJ: You have decided to do something very interesting with the proceeds from the book. Can you explain the idea?
DT: “We know that we couldn’t have done this book without working with a pretty big publisher that was able to give us an advance. And we know those kinds of opportunities don’t happen for everyone and might not happen for us again. There needs to be resources available for smaller projects, so we decided to set up a fund with half of the author proceeds from the book. The fund is called Agricultlore, a name we came up with about stories on farming and agriculture. Once we get enough money together, which will probably be at the end of this year, we will give either one grant or a few smaller grants to different projects across the country that are somehow working in a similar tradition as how our book did documenting food activism. We’re talking about a few other things, but it’s hard to say at this point because we don’t know how much money we’re talking about. We also definitely are already thinking about a sequel to this book, but we’re not there yet.”
To find out more on Farm Together Now and to read about the Agricultore Fund visit www.farmtogethernow.org.
Liz Pacheco is a first-year master’s student studying environmental journalism at MSU. Contact her at: elizabeth.d.pacheco@gmail.com.
