Podcasts

Rethinking the folk history of American agriculture Earl Butz is not the central villain of the piece

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:07 — 25.9MB)

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Remember Farm Aid, which launched in 1985? A lot of people do, and they tend to date the farm crisis in America to the 1980s, triggered by Earl Butz and his crazy love for fencerow to fencerow, get big or get out, industrial agriculture. And of course, land consolidation is inevitable, because if you’re going to invest in all that capital equipment to make your farm more efficient, you’re bound to buy up the smaller farmers who weren’t so savvy. Those “facts,” however, are anything but. They’re myths, on which much of the current criticism of American farm policy is built. There are others, too, and they’re all skillfully eviscerated by Nate Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki in a recent paper.

nixon and butz
One villain or two?

And here’s another thing. That first Farm Aid concert apparently raised $9 million. You could presumably help a lot of poor old dirt farmers with that kind of cash. But Farm Aid wasn’t actually about poor old dirt farmers, it was about people like Willie Nelson. He lost $800,000 the year before Farm Aid. Nine million dollars doesn’t go too far when individual people are losing that kind of money.

Notes

  1. The paper is The Butz Stops Here: Why the Food Movement Needs to Rethink Agricultural History, by Nathan A. Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki.
  2. John Biewen’s wonderful story about the Wise Family Farm in his series Five Farms tells the story of one black farmer in context. The family also featured in Biewen’s series Seeing White, all of which makes for disquieting and valuable listening. Gravy, the podcast from the Southern Foodways Alliance, also did a great episode on black land loss and systematic racism in the USDA.
  3. I plundered various online archives for the clips of Jimmy Carter, Earl Butz and Willie Nelson.
  4. I owe a real debt of gratitude to Jonathan Kim for helping me to get a good clear recording of Bryce.
  5. When you want photographs of rural America in the 1930s, you turn to Dorothea Lange, so I did.
  6. Under no circumstances should you visit this page to see the utterly reprehensible use that popular culture made of Butz’s “gross indiscretion in a private conversation” which “in no way reflects [his] real attitude”.

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Extra Matter

Organic hydroponic non-shock

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There’s been a lot of fuss recently over the decision of the National Organic Standards Board in the US to allow crops not grown in the ground to be certified organic. The main counterargument is that it somehow contravenes the “spirit” of organic growing, but that got sluiced away almost as soon as organic certification became a thing.

Certification is a substitute for the relationship that once upon a golden time existed between the people who grew food and the people who ate it. It’s a substitute for trust, but if people knew about the myriad exceptions that make most organic certification schemes leakier than a rusty colander, they’d see that their trust is wholly misplaced.

Hydroponics are good for all sorts of reasons, making use of space otherwise unsuitable for growing food and, often, better for the environment. They could promote those virtues with their own PR campaign — which would cost money, take time and require charging more for their products. Instead, the canny hydroponic growers have hitched a ride on the coattails of the organic movement and charge their higher prices that way.

And the public seems none the wiser.

Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 065

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30 October 2017

  1. From the antibiotics front
  2. Apple breeding — science, art and persistence.
  3. The true cost of food, as seen in two pieces earlier this year:
  4. I couldn’t work out why there’s been such an outpouring of where-when-and-how-did-kale-come-to-dominate-our-lives stories. Maybe it’s because it’s 10 years since a landmark article. Amazingly, or not, it doesn’t mention the woman who claims to have created Big Kale. Or did she? (It’s a podcast, and it isn’t that easy to sample.)
  5. For the reference shelves:
Podcasts

Ireland’s apple collection A visit to the Irish Seedsavers Association yields history and modern science

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:21 — 20.0MB)

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Nobody knows when the first apples were specifically selected in Ireland. The earliest written record dates to 1598, “when a writer discusses the fruitful nature of Irish orchards and the merits of the fine old Irish varieties contained in them”. (A brief history | Cider Ireland) The next couple of centuries saw a blossoming of native Irish apples, as farmers and landowners selected varieties that suited their conditions. In the middle of the 20th century, however, those myriad varieties began to be lost as consolidation and uniformity took hold.

JGD Lamb (“informally known as Keith”) was one of the few people who worried about this loss. Lamb obtained his PhD in 1949 with a thesis entitled The Apple in Ireland: Its History and Varieties. In the process, he collected 53 old varieties, creating vigorous new trees by grafting them onto suitable rootstocks. These new trees formed the basis of the national collection at University College Dublin. Lamb also sent duplicates of many to the main apple breeding centre in the UK at Brogdale and it was just as well that he did, because some time later the UCD collection was grubbed up and destroyed. Whether by accident or design, nobody knows, but if it hadn’t been for the safety duplicates much of Lamb’s work would have been in vain.

In the early 1990s, Anita Hayes, founder of the Irish Seedsavers Association, launched a public hunt to recover the varieties Keith Lamb had collected and any that he missed. The end result was a restored national collection, the Lamb-Clarke collection at University College, Dublin, and the start of the Seedsavers own apple collection, which now numbers about 180 varieties. That includes 70 of Irish origin and the rest collected in Ireland but originally brought from elsewhere. And the hunt goes on. Roughly 50 Irish varieties that were documented in the past have so far not shown up.

photographic apples
Eoin Keane adding to the apple documentation

Documentation is probably the hardest part of keeping a collection of apples (or any long-lived food) alive. Names change with time and place, memories fade, identities are appropriated and forgotten. DNA testing can tell you whether two samples are in fact one and the same, but not, as yet, any more than that. Meticulous, ongoing record-keeping gradually adds to the sum of knowledge but – as Eoin Keane explained in the podcast – sometimes it is a chance encouter that provides a vital bit of information that fleshes out an apple’s story. Unknown J, the apple I tasted and found so delicious, is no less delicious because we know nothing about it. But how much more would I like it if it had a romantic history to relate?

Notes

  1. I highly recommend a visit to the Irish Seedsavers Association in Scariff, County Clare.
  2. Tommy Hayes’ Apples in winter is “a celebration of the Irish apple in music, song, dance and film”. If I had my way I’d be enjoying it with a good russet and a sharp Cheddar, but that’s just me.
  3. Photos by me. The small one is Anita Hayes’ mystery medicinal apple.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 64

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16 October 2017

  1. Everyone else seems to have gone to town on Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize and how his research can help people choose healthier diets. So I’ll point to The Economist’s very thoughtful analysis of the link between land reform and prosperity.
  2. A lovely listen, as Laurie Taylor hears about the history of restaurants and restaurant critics on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed.
  3. Nebraska gives New York a licking in the great Reuben sandwich origin war. For reasons I can’t quite articulate, this piece made me very happy, although I have yet to try Ken Albala’s deconstructed Reuben noodle soup.
  4. How do you deal with modern food marketing if you eschew modern technology? A cracking story about Amish workarounds.
  5. And another one on a farmer in western Georgia who “has now reverted to ways that his grandfather might recognise,” not least by giving up on sub-therapeutic antibiotics.
  6. Shameless self-promotion: I went to town on one defender of antibiotics in agriculture.

By the way, I hope those Economist links are available. Please let me know if they’re behind a paywall for you.