Partisan Gardens

This month, Partisan Gardens is all about the banana. Second only to the tomato as the most consumed fruit in the world, the banana has thus far only been made available in temperate regions through a violent extraction process led by multinational corporations. Attacks against this colonial system likely began at least as early as the 1870s, when bananas were first imported to the US.  Corporations such as United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit became notorious for their repression against workers and opponents. In one such crackdown, which came to be known as the Banana Massacre, the Colombian Army murdered as many as 2,000 striking workers at the behest of the United Fruit Company in December 1928.

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Nowadays, United Fruit is called Chiquita International, and Standard Fruit has rebranded as Dole. They continue to hold sway over national governments and rule over large swaths of territory. Today we bring you two different stories of people working against the banana plantation and its world, who are trying to destitute Dole in one way or another. First we’ll hear a reading of an essay published on Inhabit: Territories by opponents of plantation-style agriculture in Louisiana.  They are preparing for climate change by encouraging decentralized banana production within multi-species food forests, as an alternative to monoculture.

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Next, we hear from anthropologist Alyssa Paredes about struggles in the Philippines for chemical justice by residents of Mindanao’s ‘banana belt’. The talk is entitled We Are Not Pests: The Campaign for Chemical Justice in Mindanao's Banana Belt.

In it, the author describes her time with some of the people living alongside big monoculture banana plantations in the Philippines, and explores the multi-species chemical and political interactions at play in the struggle against toxic aerial spraying.

Paredes is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in the human, environmental, and metabolic infrastructures of transnational trade. She uses multi-sited, multi-scalar, and multi-lingual methods to carry out immersive and socially engaged fieldwork in the Philippines and Japan.

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You can read Hadley's piece, After the Flood, the Forest, as well as view the graph he describes on today's show. In the piece, he cites Parades's Chemical cocktails defy pathogens and regulatory paradigms, which you can read at The Feral Atlas.

Professor Paredes' talk was initially broadcast in June 2021 as part of the Multi-species Salon, a project of Multispecies Justice, a lecture series which can be found at Multispeciesjustice.space.

The full talk, along with the Q and A, is available on Youtube.

On this autumn episode of Partisan Gardens, we’re sharing skills for preserving our harvests and thoughts on the significance of food preservation and food sovereignty. First, Ren, a local grower, speaks with Tom, who has launched a biodiverse and integrated homestead in the Adirondacks.  Tom discusses the variety of ways that they’ve learned to preserve their food crops. He walks us through some basic tips for getting started with preserving food: from wet canning, to dehydration, fermentation, pressure cooking, and cold storage. Afterwards, Laura and Emily interview Sandor Katz, who has worked tirelessly to revitalize popular interest in fermentation.  He is the author of several accessible and fascinating books on the topic.

Today, he speaks to Laura and Emily, to share insights into his work. These include a range of amazing fermentations, specific preservation challenges, fermentation as a lens on the world, the potential for communally-scaled fermentation, and Sandor's path to writing about food.  Laura is a writer, a garlic farmer, a small scale kimchi producer, and co-founder of Common Home Farm outside Bloomington. Emily is a local farmer, home gardener, and a food and fermentation enthusiast.

We’d like to shout out the recent seed saving episode of Propaganda by the Seed, which gives detailed advice on harvesting and saving, and propagating your seeds. You can listen to it here.

Thanks to Ren, Tom, Laura, Emily, and Sandor for sharing their conversations with us.

The USDA canning resource guide is here.

This month on Partisan Gardens, we are sharing a presentation by Kristin Ross, author of the landmark book "Communal Luxury: the Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune." She delivered the lecture to the 2019 Antipode American Association of Geographers Lecture in Washington DC and gave another version of the talk here in Bloomington that same year. Titled the 7th Wonder of the ZAD, Ross goes beyond an account of this successful anti-airport struggle, which called itself the Zone to Defend, to offer a powerful framework for understanding contemporary movements. She argues that anti-development struggles are not merely environmentalist or NIMBY, but rather an opportunity to defend the conditions for life on the planet while also building new relations amongst people and other organisms. The process of defending land calls into being new forms of sharing and coordination, and has, in the Americas, propelled indigenous movements for cultural resurgence.

In 2002, while fighting I-69, an interstate destroying farmland here in Indiana, farmers shared food they grew within the proposed route at huge community harvest meals. In order to defend the Wedzinkwa River from a gas pipeline in so-called Canada, indigenous people from the Wet'suwet'en nation recently built both blockades and a cabin to live in through the winter, directly above a ceremonial pit house. You can find out more here.

Contrary to any NIMBY framing, these defensive struggles often create surprising spaces and far flung connections, and not just on the ZAD, which Ross first visited in order to discuss the 1871 Paris Commune. In Atlanta, Georgia, the movement to defend an urban forest has become an anti-racist, abolitionist struggle in the wake of the George Floyd Uprising last year, since the forest is slated to be destroyed to build a vast police training center. You can find out about the fight against "Cop City" here.

We are grateful to Antipode for sharing this with us. This presentation was the 2019 Antipode American Association of Geographers Lecture, delivered by Prof. Kristin Ross on April 4th at the AAG Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography is a leading critical human geography journal established in 1969. It is owned by the Antipode Foundation, a UK-based non-profit which, among other things, stages lectures at international academic conferences.

For our episode this month, we spoke with Ken Asmus, the founder of Oikos Nursery.  From 1982 till earlier this year, Oikos was one of the most important sources of rare fruit trees and other non-commercial perennial food plants.  Ken recently retired from the nursery business in order to better pursue his research into food-bearing plants for an era of climate change, as well as to contribute to large-scale public orchards and other biological reserves.

We asked Ken to go in depth on the origins of Oikos and his plant development approach, which stresses enriching plant populations rather than breeding specific, named cultivars.  He explains the importance of the Tree Crops vision to his work, the role of indigenous knowledge in understanding the range of acorn uses, and the contributions of grassroots plant breeders like Miguel Marquez in starting him on his journey towards developing easily-edible oaks.  Most importantly, Ken discusses how others can take up his work, contributing to a decentralized process of perennial crop development.

Sarah Mason's ethnographic work on indigenous and traditional practices for oak and acorn use can be found here.

The book they refer to, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, can be found here.

 

For this episode, we interviewed urban farmers across Chicago, along with a mutual aid organization that stocks its sidewalk fridges with fresh produce from some of these same farms.  Their work is not only meeting urgent needs, but is helping to sketch out a horizon for another kind of life, grown inside the shell of the metropolis.

The history of urban farming Chicago is the history of disinvestment and resistance to disinvestment. At the turn of the last century, much of the land on the South Side was still farm land. Over the next forty years, dense housing for European immigrant workers employed in the steel industry spread across the land, while a half million Black people migrated to Chicago fleeing racist terror in the south. White Chicago homeowners responded to the Great Migration by installing neighborhood racial covenants, and banks denied Black people mortgages and loans in certain neighborhoods in a racist practice called redlining. Once these practices were challenged by neighborhood groups and held up in court, white flight began to drain the South and West sides of infrastructure and capital.  Over the next half century the city of Chicago concentrated development and investment on the Loop and the affluent north side, while neglecting the south and west sides.

Years of disinvestment, mass incarceration, deindustrialization, and the foreclosure crisis led to the demolitions of thousands of homes and buildings. Much of this land was seized by the city, and today, Chicago owns approximately 10,000 vacant lots, heavily concentrated on the south and west sides. Many of these lots have sat vacant for 20 years or more, until a movement of Black and Brown farmers began to remediate and heal the land.

The practice of urban farming challenges the priorities of the city’s political class, who keep awarding the Chicago Police Department more and more funding while so many residents suffer from food apartheid. Grassroots and autonomous food production not only reclaims the land, but facilitates community survival, organization, and future struggles.

First, we speak with Alberto from the Reclaiming Our Roots garden in Gage Park. The garden sits on a parcel of formerly vacant land located two blocks away from the Amazon DIL3 delivery warehouse. Parcels are how the government makes land legible for taxes and commodification. Gardening without permission is illegible to the city, and supports a set of values inherently at odds with the world of Amazon and Chicago’s city government structure.

Next we interview the Love Fridge, a mutual aid project that supports locally stocked and accessed refrigerators on Chicago sidewalks and in people’s front yards. Several urban farms regularly stock the Love Fridges with their fresh organic produce, and we talk to Velma about why that’s so important.

Next we talk with two farmers from Otis Farm in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. We’ll share more of their interview in a later episode, but they talk to us about the challenges of accessing water to sustain the project of growing fresh healthy food in the city.

And finally, we interviewed Catatumbo Co-op, an emerging immigrant, queer, gender non-conforming, workers’ cooperative farm located in South Chicago, the city’s most industrial neighborhood. We appreciate them being willing to talk to us while running farm errands and prepping their CSA!

This episode was produced in collaboration with Jennifer Bamberg (@gremlina333), with additional reporting contributions from Susan Carlotta Ellis. Special thanks to them both for their interviews and research.

This week, we speak with a group of grassroots labor organizers formerly employed at No Evil Foods, a socialist-themed vegan foods company.  They describe their efforts to organize a union at the company's Asheville manufacturing plant, and No Evil's subsequent efforts to bust the union - leveraging the COVID crisis - and eventually outsource their work in order to close the factory.  We include a response from No Evil as well.

This experience highlights the contradictions created by progressive, market-based efforts to reform the food system.  It also reveals the advantages employers have secured for themselves in the 21st century economy, in which labor needs can be rapidly outsourced and troublesome work forces rapidly laid off.

Further, employers practice "management through crisis" in which the permanent crisis we all now inhabit - and COVID-19 is only the most recent and severe expression of this crisis - can be used to justify permanent restructuring and precarity.  This unfavorable balance of power inside the factory has pushed many away from workplace organizing and towards strategies based on attacking economic circulation, such as the mass farmers' blockades in India.

In spite of these disadvantages, though, food workers and others are necessarily experimenting with new forms of workplace organizing as they suffer harsher conditions and diminished living standards.  These new forms of labor organizing have borne increasing fruit over the past few years, and workers have found novel ways to reverse power dynamics on the shopfloor or in the fast food franchise, as demonstrated by the wave of walk-offs and workers quitting en masse. In a landscape defined by precarity and decentered industrial production, the lessons of the No Evil Foods unionization campaign will certainly be of use to future workplace struggles.

This month's Partisan Gardens is all about the Farmer's Almanac, specifically the 2021 Earthbound Farmer's Almanac. Our listeners are probably familiar with the old farmer's almanac, with its planting charts, weather forecasts and random tidbits of folksy wisdom and jokes. It's an artifact of an earlier time, probably not the first place our listeners go to decide what to plant or when to plant it.

The Earthbound Almanac, on the other hand, is situated in the present moment. We'll let it speak for itself- here's the book's back cover:

"This is a Farmer's Almanac for the end of the world. Growing food used to be a lot more straightforward, when you'd plant your okra the same time every year like your grandpa did. Now we've got to be ready for anything – late Spring freezes, freak heat waves that bring plants out of dormancy too early, fire season longer every year, the polar vortex – and if that wasn't enough, we've also got to contend with the fallout from breakages in the global supply chain, when millions of gallons of milk get poured down the drain and mountains of potatoes are left to rot. It's a world that calls for a new kind of Farmer's Almanac.

Today's crisis has roots in the earliest moments of land theft against native peoples, a process that has continued alongside hundreds of years of slavery and colonization. The way forward out of this mess, will mean grappling with past wrongs as well as charting a new course guided by black and indigenous knowledge, creative experimentation in food production and paying attention across generational and species divides."

So for today's episode we're taking you on an audio tour of the almanac - less like an audio book and more of an interpretation and an exploration based on the almanac. We'll bake a dessert recipe from the Almanac, talk with some of the farmers about the pieces they wrote for it, hear the writers reading their own words, learn about the Louisiana Lumber War, and more.

You can access the PDF of the entire 2021 Earthbound Farmer's Almanac here.

You can get a hard copy of the book here.

They made a mixtape to go with the almanac, which you can find at tinyurl.com/earthboundmixtape.

Also in the almanac, you can learn about foraging wild mushrooms, read your 2021 horoscope, read about access to good food in prison, and so much more. Thank you to all the contributors who sent in and read their pieces from the almanac for us.

 

 

 

 

For today's episode, we spoke with Antonio Roman-Alcala and Spirit Mike.  In 2011, Antonio released the powerful documentary In Search of Good Food, which carefully traced the crises built into the food systems in California's Central Valley, which is the source of most vegetable and many tree crops across the US.  Antonio reflected on the film and addressed exciting new possibilities for building food sovereignty and agroecology in the Central Valley, against the grain of powerful structures of exploitation, racial exclusion, and environmental devastation.  Likewise, Antonio speaks to the emerging connections between urban agriculture and movements like the George Floyd Uprising.

Next, we talk with Spirit Mike, an urban farmer in Tampa, Florida, who was pushed to grow food for his neighborhood by the massive logistical failures at the start of COVID.  He goes into the strategic moves necessary to overcome barriers to urban agriculture and how growing food led to his own explorations of a food system in crisis and of the possibility of autonomous alternatives.  From the Central Valley to Florida, the country's breadbaskets are also home to some of the starkest contradictions - whole towns of immigrant workers can be denied potable water which is instead directed to almond orchards, and in which urban communities can be wholly cut off from any control over their own food.  Yet, in both these regions and across North America, people are building food sovereignty and the potential for a revolution.

The pawpaw is an incredible, temperate, semi-forgotten fruit.  It's existence is a real exception on many levels: it is the only member of a tropical genus to survive this far north in most of the continent; it is nutrient and protein rich beyond most fruit; and pawpaws are exceptionally fragile, pushing them outside of economic distribution.  Their skin and flesh is much more easily bruised than that of a banana, making them basically impossible to ship and sell in stores.

In turn, this has left pawpaws substantially neglected by commercial and academic research, and most of the work to produce improved varieties has been left to grassroots breeders, sharing their results with each other via fruit growers clubs and informal networks.  Jerry Lehman was a leading figure in this emergent process - a committed pawpaw and persimmon grower in Indiana's Wabash Valley, who developed dozens of varieties, while pioneering new ways to process and enjoy these native fruits.  Today, we highlight a lecture he gave at the Overlook, a DIY hub in here in Bloomington, Indiana.  Jerry has since passed away, but his work is being continued by his friends and collaborators, including Mark Hildebrand who you will hear later on during this show.

Thanks to their work, and to the efforts of many others across the eastern US, there are now diverse options of excellent wild pawpaw stock and improved cultivars to grow.  Nobody has succeeded in breeding a durable pawpaw- but perhaps this is a good thing.  Instead of a commercial crop, the pawpaw can remain an abundant, seasonal fruit, contributing to wild richness and the riotous bounty of neighborhood food forests, available for common harvest.

In this episode, we are trying something new by collaborating with the excellent podcast, Propaganda by the Seed, hosted by Sole and Aaron in Maine.  We start off with a conversation between folks from the two shows about pawpaws- how to grow them, what makes them unique, and their appealing (and not so appealing) characteristics. We also share  an archived lecture given by Jerry Lehman prior to his passing.

Thank you to Mark Hildebrand, Jerry Lehman, Aaron and Sole for their contributions to this show, and to Lyn Rye for the music.

You can listen to Propaganda by the Seed here.

You can listen to Lyn Rye here.

 

The global pandemic has exacerbated an already-simmering crisis of food insecurity, itself rooted in growing populations pushed outside of formal labor markets.  This exclusion, often implemented along racial lines, leads to precarity and a struggle for survival, which has only grown more bleak with the pressures of COVID-19.  The economy simply cannot produce enough jobs, and even those existing jobs deemed "essential work" during the pandemic are often precisely low-waged AND dangerous.  In response, a constellation of existing food distribution hubs, mutual aid projects, and food sovereignty efforts have had to rapidly adapt to the pandemic and the crisis.  Their work is simultaneously manual and critical, as many hands collaborate to pack and deliver relief boxes, while thinking together about the sources of food insecurity and who is suffering from it.

We share stories today from three of these projects:  a food distribution & meal delivery service in Atlanta, Georgia, a free kitchen, or comedor, in Tijuana, Mexico and a food pantry in Bloomington, Indiana. All three projects are informed by an understanding of the importance of sharing food together in defining a better way of life. All three existed in some form before COVID, and each underwent major changes as they grappled with the challenge of  addressing hunger without spreading the virus. For the "Food For Life" project in Atlanta, it meant scaling up and inviting hundreds of new volunteers to participate and experiment.  For the Contra Viento y Marea Comedor in Tijuana it meant reducing the number of days serving to make more time for staff to clean and stay protected themselves.  For Bloomington's Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, it meant scaling back on some of the wide range of gardening and nutrition programs they normally run to address the root causes of hunger and inequality, while still serving hundreds of people a week.

To learn more about each of these projects, check out:

Food For Life

Contra Viento y Marea Comedor

Mother Hubbard's Cupboard

For more background on mutual aid in Tijuana between the twin crises of climate change and COVID-19, check out this article.