Oregon Local Foods part 2: What’s for dinner?

Cassava root. Salmonberry. Black Republican cherries.
Never heard of them? There’s probably a reason for that – they are all edible plants native to the Willamette Valley here in Oregon. At one time, native Oregonians (from the Kalapooia and other tribes) ate cassava like we eat French fries today. Berry bushes in hundreds of varieties provided a wild harvest to anyone who knew how to tell a delicious snack from a bellyache. The black Republican cherry tree was introduced as a commercial crop in 1860, producing a plum-like fruit that was known throughout the Northwest.
Today, the cassava is protected as one of the few remaining indigenous plants in the area, our berry diet is limited to the two or three varieties that accompany peanut butter in sandwiches, and the words “black Republican” only bring to mind awful jokes.
But the irony is more immediate than that. Faced with a food culture that has been completely commodified, stripped of all regional identity and packed into neat little boxes (salmon burger, anyone?), chefs and food aficionados around the Willamette Valley are scratching wildly, looking for dishes that we can claim and incorporate into a distinctive local cuisine. I feel their pain – the lack of “American” food, leave alone Oregonian or Pacific Northwestern food is something I’ve long failed to understand. Once, a friend and I brainstormed an entire afternoon trying to think of something to cook for Saudi Arabian friends coming over for an authentic American dinner. We ended up making enchiladas. Close enough –as long as our guests never find their way south of the border.
It’s not that we don’t have material to work with in this region. Heirlooms like the black Republicans, including apple, pear and nut trees, as well as a varieties of beans, vegetables and berries, have been cultivated here since the first white settlers set up camp. The sense of local pride that has evolved around these crops is revealed in some of their names: Gramma Walters bean; Oregon Champion gooseberry. Because they are for one reason or another not commercially viable (delicate fruit, short shelf life, inconsistent production), many are in danger of extinction. Today, only a few, very old black Republican trees survive in the Eugene area and nowhere else, according to a book compiled by Gary Paul Nabhan, a well known ecologist and localization writer. The loss of heirloom varieties would be a blow to local agriculture, not just for cultural reasons but also because locally adapted crops tend to be hardier, better suited to the climate and soil conditions and thus less likely to need chemical inputs to thrive.
Anyway, anyone trying to establish a regional cuisine in Oregon has my full support, especially given some of the difficulties involved. Salmon is no longer an obvious choice for any of the Pacific Northwest. Gary Nabhan splits North America into distinct bioregions based on indigenous food traditions, and names this corner of the continent Salmon Nation. I support the idea behind this effort, but wish we could move beyond this beleaguered fish for its basis. One species is limited as a basis for an entire cuisine, and nobody with an ounce of ecological awareness would (or should) be caught dead eating anything but wild-caught salmon, whose numbers are swiftly dwindling anyway. In addition, any food trend that might eventually filter its way down to the masses (ie broke college students who find cooking an enjoyable form of productive procrastination) must be affordable, but most restaurants that attempt to differentiate their fare from that of Seattle or Portland tend to be in the price range of middle-aged urbanites with real jobs. In this economy, that leaves out roughly half of the population. (Really, though: the poverty rate in the Eugene area is higher than the state average, and Oregon is now has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation.) Although the efforts of local chefs to get us to eat seasonally and locally with braised lamb in wild mushroom sauce are admirable, they aren’t the American’s South’s cornbread and grits. That is, you won’t see many of us switching from ramen-based diets anytime soon. As I mentioned in the previous post, the industrial food system has gotten most people used to food made from two or three major plants plus meat. It’s cheap and childishly easy to prepare (or pick up at the drive-thru window). Some serious re-education is in order before we can even think about preparing regionally based foods.
That said, I do see some adventurous farmers and blogger/cooks in the area making steps in these directions, first making the food available and then showing people that it’s not rocket science to put it together. Farmers near Corvallis are making serious efforts to reintroduce bean and grain production in the Willamette Valley; one Eugene-based blog has a recipe for black bean brownies. Is that the smell of synergy baking?
I’m not suggesting that Oregon farmers abandon all commodity crops for fields of waving cassava and garbanzos. After all, grass seed production generates $1.6 billion in economic activity in the state, and how else would every suburban home be able to cultivate an overwatered green monoculture without these farmers? Plus, other forms of agriculture are just way too much work, and since there simply aren’t enough illegal immigrants to go around, who will do it? On the other hand, small, organic farms have been shown to provide more ecosystem-like benefits while being more productive per acre than huge operations. And aren’t we facing something like a global food crisis? Wouldn’t it make more sense to give up just a few of those acres for diversified food production rooted in local traditions that we can all take pride in?
It’s all too confusing for me. I think I’ll just head to the kitchen to see if I can make black bean brownies that look as good as the picture on that blog. I only wish I had some black Republican cherry ice cream to put on top of them.

Academia, meet Blogosphere

As I sit at my laptop after a long, hard, weekend of procrastination, trying to decide whether it’s justifiable to write a blog post rather than work on my environmental studies thesis, I am suddenly struck with a brilliant idea. Why not break down my thesis, which examines food system localization as a route to sustainability in the Eugene area, into blog-able chunks that would help me develop my ideas and keep this space from looking completely dead?
I’ve worked around the issue of food policy for a while, and I think most citizens are now aware that our system of growing, processing, distributing of food is convoluted, irrational, and above all, unsustainable. It’s detrimental to the environment and our bodies, a path to almost certain disaster.
But it wasn’t always that way. Just prior to the industrial revolution and continuing through the middle part of the last century, farmers actually grew crops that people could eat (not acre upon acre of cow food) and sold them in local markets. Most housewives kept gardens. People knew how to cook and enjoyed tastier, more nutritious food.
The idea for my thesis topic came out of my work on food-related issues in India and a question I’ve been working around in my head since returning: is it really possible to recreate a localized food system like we used to have here and that “developing” countries like India still enjoy? How do we incorporate current food distribution and consumption modes – Walmart superstores, Taco Bell, processed cheese – into that model? Obviously, we’re not going back to a 19th century ideal here, where everybody lives on their five acres, grows their own food, and knows what to do with it. There’s not enough land to go around and most people aren’t interested in getting their hands dirty (farmers currently make up less than 1% of the entire U.S. labor force). Still, there’s an interest in at least mimicking this model, and the proliferation of farmers’ markets, restaurants advertising locally grown ingredients, and general public awareness about food issues says something. The question is, even if all of us give up Italian noodles and Australian wine, can individual locales – counties, states, regions – really feed the people who live there?
It depends on the place. Luckily for me, the Willamette Valley (the area between the Cascades and the Coast range in Oregon) has at least the potential to feed its own population. We have an abundance of small, organic farms and some systems in place to get that food to local consumers. Unluckily, no matter how progressive we like to think ourselves to be, we’re no different from the rest of America. We (especially college students) shop at Safeway, enjoy the occasional Dairy Queen stop, and indulge ourselves with January strawberries. And there’s good economic reason for those decisions. Yes, there’s a strong backing for local foods, but it’s still a niche market, with produce available only at high-end grocery stores and natural food marts with reputations (founded and unfounded) for being expense. Also, there are the frightening prospects of bulk bins and soy cheese to drive away most mainstream food buyers.
If the underlying goal in revamping our food system is to achieve greater sustainability – a slippery concept, but to summarize four pages of my thesis, the ability to continue on the current course for many generations to come – we might have to reexamine if local is actually better. For example, let’s take wheat, which almost everyone buys in some form or another. Soft white, the kind used to make pastas and tortillas, is grown in huge quantities in the Willamette Valley, and with a better system to store and process the grains, we could be enjoying a completely local supply. But, because of the global wheat commodity market, it’s a lot easier to sell that wheat at top dollar to a distributor who will ship it to Asia or Europe, which is what currently happens to 100% of the wheat grown in the Valley. Buy a bag of noodles anywhere in Oregon, and there’s only a miniscule chance the wheat came from anywhere within a 100-mile radius.
Is this a bad thing? It depends what you value. A network of small, independently run grain mills and storage facilities in the Willamette Valley might sound perfectly utopian, but is it really more efficient? It would probably require complicating the already dizzying web of producers, distributors, processors and retailers even further, involving huge amounts of effort and organization. Compared to this, a system in which all the wheat grown goes to a central location, is processed and re-distributed to where it’s most needed (ie where the price is right) sounds almost logical.
So that’s my thesis topic in a (lengthy) nutshell. Stay tuned for next week, when I’ll sniff out where food is being grown in my vicinity and who is actually eating it.