We are all (at ~7pm, about 10 of us) about to head from Town Hall Brewery to Kafe 421, over on the East Bank:
421 14th Avenue SE Minneapolis, MN 55414 (5th st and 14th ave, in Dinkytown) and you are quite welcome to join us there!
Dinner! (Thursday / Friday) Hello all, it was wonderful to meet you, and I like the idea of meeting up for further discussion / meals while at least some of you remain in town.
As promised, I’m posting a bit of information about that:
Tonight (Thursday), it sounds like people will try to find each other after the main plenary — and either do something like head to Cafe 421 in Dinkytown or something else over there (it’s the student quarter, and the corner of 4th St. and 14th Ave nearby has a number of good eating places — Loring Pasta Bar, Camdi, and a good Chinese place around the corner from Loring).
Tomorrow (Friday), we thought we’d meet when people get back from the food site visit — perhaps around 5pm at the Town Hall Brewery for a beer? (Please post an alternate plan here — that’s just right next to the Holiday Inn if a lot of folks are staying there.)
I promised I would post a few other local places with great food: (and if you’re online to read this, I’m assuming you can look up how to get to them, so I won’t post directions):
Birchwood Cafe at 25th St and 31st Ave is SE of the U, and a local nexus of food politics and good cafe food (local sourcing / etc.) (and a nice walk down the West bank of the river) (good with veg / vegan / gluten or dairy free options)
Sen Yai Sen Lek is at Central Ave and 26th, a few miles NW of the U, and an amazing source of locally sourced Thai food (really fantastic) (also veg and vegan food and very community engaged)
Brasa is also at Central (at Hennepin) (walkable) and is locally sourced barbeque with great side dishes (meaty, although veg side dishes)
and if people are venturing further afield or more upscale, Alma is west of the U (on the east side of the river) — high end local, very nice (same owners as Brasa, which is much more affordable); Craftsman is down at Lake St. on the west side of the river, and Heartland (perhaps my favorite) is in lowertown in downtown St. Paul (next to the farmers market, if you’re staying for the weekend — a VERY highly recommended visit — with not only local sourcing, but also a deli for which they’re making their own cured meats, with, often 3 or 4 different kinds of pork — total food nerddom.)
Maybe some others who’ve lived here longer can also weigh in! Hope to see many of you tomorrow, and sorry I can’t join tonight.
Hi everyone,
I’m just checking in now, so I’m sorry to be quite late to posting this information. As a new graduate student I’m in a slightly different place than many people in our group. I’ll do my best to answer Kathleen’s questions.
Like many in our group who have posted so far, I came to issues of food from a mix of personal and professional motivations. When I first moved to New York City and was living in the Bronx, I had a hard time finding healthy affordable food. As a vegetarian, my options were even more limited. A friend of mine invited me to be part of her mixed-income Community Supported Agriculture group since my income at the time qualified me for a subsidized share. Through my involvement in the CSA, I began to think more about food access and justice issues in general. I also became more educated about our current food system and this awareness provided a new frame for understanding my own family’s relationship to agriculture and food. My subsequent work in the Parks Department connected me to a number of community activists, many who were eager to use their parks as places where food issues could be addressed. Food distribution was a central feature in many community events designed to bring neighbors together to reclaim public space and counteract negative activities like drug abuse and crime. Furthermore, I had a number of municipal colleagues equally passionate about these issues who were happy to find ways for community activists to creatively use the parks to improve their quality of life. As a student of Landscape Architecture, I look forward to exploring this issue further through public scholarship around community gardens and parks.
As for my own experience as a student, I am looking forward to classes that involve hands-on partnership with Syracuse community groups. Currently my studies are focused on skill-building around basic drafting and design. Outside of classes, I’ve been looking into volunteer opportunities. I recently spent a Saturday preparing a space for a public snacking garden organized by a local Syracuse Permaculture group.
It looks like our group members are involved in some great projects.
See you later today,
Catherine
For the Food Summit work:
-your motivations for having done the work
my main motivation was frustration with the current state fo the food system in Florida. As I continuously interacted with the community and the campus food system and reflected on the steps that led one of the major agriculture states in the country to lack the infrastructure or connections necessary to foster food security within its borders.
-your expectations going into it
My expectations were mainly that it would be hard work and that I would learn a lot and be working with people not at all like me. I also had the expectation that things might move more quickly than they did and that the links in the system were not quite as broken or unformed as they were. I
-your modes of engagement (how you conducted your public/engaged scholarship, for example: stakeholder sessions, focus groups, interviews, etc.)
Stakeholder meetings, facilitated discussions, surveys, trainings, collaborations with faculty and community groups
-unforeseen implications or ramifications of the project.
Unforseen implications have mainly been positive…new connections built and partnerships I would not have expected.
-your motivations for having done the work
Motivations for pursuing my research about the history of food distribution and city planning were shamelessly personal and self serving—I needed a dissertation topic. I sought to find one that could combine my academic field of historic preservation with my fledgling interest in the food system, which was itself a nascent subject of academic inquiry in the early 2000s. At that time, it was possible to read the entire contemporary literature about domestic food system planning in less than one day. As the research progressed, I became convinced that the historic preservation movement has been overly preoccupied with the design of buildings, the appearance of historic places (in itself, not a novel finding). Using the food system as a lens for my historical inquiry, I began to realize that there were many opportunities and several turning points in the past, when preservationists did sometimes take initiative to preserve the functional aspects of historic places—how they were used, for what, and by whom. I tended to find these examples in the form of protests and advocacy to preserve the historic uses of public food markets between the 1960s-1980s in the United States. I am trying to turn these findings, and other similar observations of historical attachment to place, traditional use, and neighborhoods to articulate a different way of approaching historic preservation that considers more than just the appearances of physical artifacts, landscapes, and buildings.
My first research in this area was also profoundly inspired by two early food system planning articles by Kameshwari Pothukuchi and Jerome L. Kaufman: “The Food System: A Stranger to the Planning Field,” Journal of the American Planning Association 66,no. 2 (2000); and Pothukuchi and Kaufman, “Placing the Food System on the Urban Agenda: The Role of Municipal Institutions in Food System Planning,”
Agriculture and Human Values 16, no. 2 (June 1999).
I wondered, was it possible, as they asserted, that planners had with only a few exceptions been historically absent from 20th century matters pertaining to food? I began digging in reports and archives, and found that, in fact, food was among the top concerns of the planning movement in the early decades of the profession’s development.
-your expectations going into it
Several: 1) That I was examining a highly esoteric topic that few people would ever care about, inside or outside academia. (My advisers in a department of City and Regional Planning told me in 2003 that “food system planning” was not a PhD minor, and the subject would be entertained as a curiosity by my future colleagues, at best.) 2) That the research questions would not be well defined by an existing body of scholarship, beyond simply trying to find any mention of planners concerned with food over the course of the 20th century.
-your modes of engagement (how you conducted your public/engaged scholarship, for example: stakeholder sessions, focus groups, interviews, etc.)
Like Tracey, my research is mostly archival, though recently I have begun finding and reaching out to those who, through my research, I consider to be some of the early food system planners or their heirs. For example, I’ve been carrying on a year-long correspondence, mostly by postal mail (!), with William C. Crow, Jr, son of William C. Crow, the Director of the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service for decades in mid-20th century. He was known to his colleagues as “Mr. Produce Market,” and, in my analysis, was a key figure in designing the modern food distribution system we know today, and producing the analysis that justified its creation.
As stated in my abstract for this conference, I also consider researchers studying and implementing food system interventions today to be my “stakeholders,” in a sense. I see them as one of the potential audiences for my research. I also find myself drawing research questions from their work; ie: what is the historical basis for the “market failures” they are seeking to correct?
I would also like my research to have more direct connections and collaborations with the public, or various publics, but I am 1) not exactly sure how; and 2) not sure I have the time to do so given the tenure imperative I have to publish a book about this research in the next three years. Publically-engaged scholarly, as I know from my work that deals more directly with traditional matters of historic preservation, takes a lot of time and is sadly undervalued by most of academia, despite rhetorical emphasis that might suggest otherwise.
-unforeseen implications or ramifications of the project.
Most unforeseen when I started researching this topic about a decade ago was the exponential growth of interest in all maters food related. What I once thought was VERY esoteric historical research is now considered somewhat relevant to contemporary food system issues and debates—I now regularly read about topics directly related to my research in the New York Times. I am often invited to lecture to, or participate in, food system symposia that have nothing to do with historic preservation or the history of city planning. This, I could never have predicted. Again, the ramifications of this development seem mostly personal at this point. On the hand, I’m delighted “my topic” has become “relevant.” On the other hand, I feel somewhat ambivalent about being one researcher among many in what has become a crowded field of inquiry. This is both exciting and a bit anxiety inducing.
Some references:
“The Power of Community,” film
“Teaching Whitney to Cook,” Julia Corbett (attached)Teaching Whitney to cook – High Country News
motivations
I am motivated to work with “food” because examining “food” invites ecological thinking. To think ecologically is to consider the complex web of relationships among physical, biological, and social systems, and to understand, that indeed everything is linked and also in flux. Ultimately, the practice of landscape architecture necessitates ecological thinking. Accordingly, “food” becomes an appropriate concept for landscape architecture students to study.
I am also motivated to work with “food” because I live and teach in a region characterized by rich soil and rolling hills draped with wheat. Investigating “food” in the context of “region” becomes a way to deeply explore place and human relationships to place.
Lastly, I am motivated to work with “food” because food connects us (or disconnects us) to where we are.
expectations
When working with landscape architecture students, my expectations are that students will use”food” as a way to reflect upon their everyday lives as a designers and global citizens and eventually understand their roles as designers and global citizens more broadly. With this broader vision, I expect that students will be able to better grasp the complex web of relationships among physical, biological, and social systems and consider how the concepts of “interdependence,” “reciprocity,” and “change” can inform their work and values.
Regarding my scholarly pursuits, my expectation (and hope) is that I will effectively and evocatively convey stories about how people cultivate connections with their local landscapes.
engagement
In the courses that I teach, modes of engagement vary. In studio contexts, students interact with clients and/or stakeholders, conduct informal interviews, and research the multiple perspectives on the given ” food” issue/question. Final design work is publicly presented. In the lecture courses “theory in landscape architecture” and “ecology and design,” “food” makes cameo appearances throughout the semester and may take center stage for one or two lectures.
In my creative/scholarly work, my mode of engagement has been immersion. I visit households that produce a majority of their own food or that practice permaculture, and I am an observer and an agent. I witness and I initiate, immersed in and responding to domestic activities: harvesting fruits and vegetables, feeding animals, constructing garden beds, digging ditches, building soil, processing food, maintaining composting toilets, etc.
unforseen implications
“food” = yielding.
On a country road you come to a yield sign at the intersection. To yield here, you must wait and assay traffic conditions before joining the community of moving vehicles. Yielding requires that you give way to others.
Obtaining a yield from a garden or a homestead or a city plot similarly requires ongoing assessment of shifting conditions, giving way, or making space, for other life to thrive and evolve.
Motivations
When I began my project examining the emergence of supermarkets, I was driven by my longstanding interest in the history of capitalism and the history of women and gender. I wanted to make consumer culture material, embed it in structures and institutions and politics rather than the abstract and often immaterial descriptors often attached to it. I also wanted to focus on women’s consumption as labor—labor that mattered structurally—during a period (1919-1968) when women are conventionally seen as relatively apolitical. This all came from frustration with the way that gender so often got ignored in discussions of political economy, and the ways that political economy and structures were ignored in feminist scholarship and discussions of gender (this was, I should point out, a long time ago).
Original Expectations
My expectations were in some ways rewarded. I did very quickly discover the links between the rough-and-tumble world of profits, price competition, and political economy and the performance of (and claims on) gender normativity. It was clear that the everyday work of grocery shopping was a way of participating in, upholding, and also resisting larger racial, ethnic, religious—and economic– systems.
Modes of engagement –
The project was archivally based and largely ethnographic. Of course I hoped that it would speak to larger and contemporary debates, but I don’t know that one could call it publically engaged by design. In the course of finishing it I was increasingly asked to speak publically about grocery stores. Also, over time, I grew more interested in the opportunities for and possibilities of historical scholarship that spoke to contemporary issues. Indeed, it is precisely that that has driven my interest in new projects on contemporary food provisioning and on the politics of high-end, gourmet eating in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Unforeseen implications or ramifications of the project.
The largest unforeseen implication of my first project is that I was able to articulate to contemporary food issues; so much current debate and discussion is about remaking food systems that I find it useful to remind participants that we don’t actually fully understand the variables that shaped it in the first place, nor the politics that undergird it—but we do know that the current structure isn’t inevitable or natural.
Also, I had not expected to see the state as explicitly present in stores, and as crucial to the creation of large, top-down supermarkets, as I found it to be. This really spoke to me about the possibilities of large policy in shaping consumption.
Finally, I was surprised by the false starts and fragility of chain stores and large supermarkets. Many went bust, backed off of strategies that seemed sure-fire bets, or struggled to meet new requirements of the state.
We think of mass retail and supermarkets—for better or for worse—as reflecting human nature and demand. What I found was stores that reflected the contingencies of the moment—the laws, social systems, or financial pressures that businesses were negotiating. What people actually wanted was something else entirely.
Motivations:
Broadly speaking, my interest in teaching and using community-based theatre forms stems from a desire to empower students to think of themselves as “citizen artists” and to use their artistic skills as a mode of participation in civic dialogue. Similarly, I use theatre practices as a form of investigating and generating embodied knowledge and for building empathy and awareness. My primary interest in developing a performance about food production and distribution systems came from a place of personal interest—I wanted to know more about local and national food issues myself, and to share my passion for growing, preserving, cooking, and eating good food with my students.
Expectations:
My expectations for the project were based very much on past experiences with similar projects. I expected that students would struggle to accept some of the information that challenged their assumptions and worldviews, that there might be a period of hopelessness as they grappled with the size and breadth of the issue, and that our interactions with the community would be eye-opening, and would require a good deal of debriefing as we worked to integrate these new perspectives into our paradigms.
Modes of engagement:
As a group, we interviewed four different people connected with food systems in Spokane, and individually students conducted additional interviews for individual research topics. We presented our show (“disseminated our findings”) at a public performance that was free and open to the public at our local museum (an easily accessed and well known community institution).
Unforeseen Implications or Ramifications:
One of the most interesting (to me), positive aspects of our project came to light in a conversation I had with a colleague from our biology department, who had been simultaneously teaching a similar class for biology students. After our performance she admitted that she was stunned to see that the theatre students had found some hope amidst all the “discouraging evidence,” as her biology students had concluded that there was little that the “average citizen” could do. I believe this had to do with the interviews we conducted and the desire of the students to leave our audience with a sense of hope. Otherwise, this project had some of the usual bumps and rough spots—a “blow up” moment during the devising process, a miscommunication about which parts of the space we could use and a subsequent need to re-write part of the show, a lot of sleepless nights wondering if we were going to get it together in time for our performance date. I would also add that I ultimately failed to find us an interviewee from the other side of the issue. To learn about the perspective of corporate farming, we largely depended upon internet sources, which are not only often unreliable, but in terms of creating a show, are less impactful.
motivations
Based on my interests and experience exploring and facilitating contests between competing land uses (the motives for which were often invisible or silenced, and that could be much better engaged by being made more explicit), I felt that I could help facilitate dialogue between people who had a lot of interest in and a lot of knowledge about (and personal investment in) different parts of the food system, but who tended not to engage well, either because they don’t have opportunities to encounter each others’ perspectives or because their stances on changes needed in the food system tend to set them against each other without necessarily having good tools to engage in dialogue despite differences. (I’ve noticed that food’s personal *availability* appears to make everyone an expert, and especially around issues that people may not have known much about until they became concerned, they often bring tremendous moral fervor, which is both awesomely passionate and also often really challenging to keep engaged with competing fervors, which are also fanned and distorted by powerful interests who wield food and feeding moral metaphors and power relations very skillfully.) I was particularly interested in the contrasts between personal interests in asserting more varied *values* (e.g. social, environmental) via the food system and infrastructural aspects of large scale food provisioning systems – two levels of analysis and experience of food systems that tend to clash and not account well for each other.
expectations
Because this project was very self-consciously and assertively “citizen-led,” I expected to be able to collaborate with the public partners who invited me into the project (in ways that have been difficult to maintain momentum for – we’ve ended up moving very slowly). I also hoped that we might be able to collectively move somewhat beyond repeatedly complaining about and cataloguing food system problems to focusing on potential change points and places where we could muster power – and assess what is being done and has been done in ways people are satisfied with.
modes of engagement
unforeseen implications or ramifications
Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.