Our sustainable table

258 Pages·2017·1.553 MB·English

by  Clark, Robert

$16.95 Cooking O Our Sustainable Table
Our Sustainable Table u
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Edited by Robert Clark
In this collection of thirteen provocative essays, Wendell Berry discusses the u
pleasures of eating. Gretel Ehrlich describes her struggle to produce clean, s with an introduction by
lean beef on her ranch in Wyoming. Frances Moore Lappe sets forth her vi- t
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sion of a system that is environmentally, economically, and culturally sustain- Mary Berry
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able. Wes Jackson condemns the shortsighted bottom line goals of modern n
agribusiness. Alice Waters recounts the early days of her famous Bay Area a
restaurant's painstaking pursuit of a supply chain of reliably good ingredients, b
and Gary Nabhan discusses food, health and Native American agriculture. l
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They are joined by Bruce Brown, Edward Behr, Paul Gruchow, Mark Kramer,
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Anne Mendelson and Will Weaver.
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In this remarkable collection, these essays link a decline in the quality of food b
with a historical deterioration of the quality of American farm life, while l
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making it clear that "food that tastes good and is good for you is not just a
private indulgence but a force for sustaining families and communities."
First published by The Journal of Gastronomy, it is a pleasure to see this seminal,
groundbreaking anthology back into print, now with a new introduction by
Mary Berry, founding director of the Berry Center. E
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Robert Clark’s first book, The Solace of Food: A Life of James Beard won d
the Julia Child IAACP award. His other non-fiction books include River of b
the West, a chronicle of the Columbia River, and My Grandfather’s House, a y

memoir that was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in R
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biography. b
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Essays by
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CouNtERPoINt ISBN 978-1-61902-789-3
51695 Edward Behr, Wendell Berry, Bruce Brown, Gretal Ehrlich,
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West Paul Gruchow, Frances Moore Lappe, Anne Mendelson,
9 781619 027893
Jacket Design: Cherlyn oto
Gary Paul Nabhan, Alice Waters, and Will Weaver

Our Sustainable Table

Our Sustainable Table
Edited by Robert Clark
for The Journal of Gastronomy
Copyright © 1990 by The American Institute of Wine & Food
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First published in 1990 by North Point Press
Published in 2017 by Counterpoint
This volume is the result of the kindness, labor, and commitment of many people,
and in particular of the writers who so willingly agreed to contribute to it. The
following individuals were also indispensable in conceiving Our Sustainable Table
and in seeing it through to publication: Alice Waters; Kirsten Bolin, Greg Drescher,
K. Dun Gifford, and Nancy Harmon Jenkins; and Jennifer McDonald and Jack
Shoemaker of North Point Press.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA [original
edition]
Our sustainable table / edited by Robert Clark for the American Institute of Wine
& Food.
p. cm.
Originally published as the Journal of gastronomy, v. 5, no. 2, summer/autumn
1989.
ISBN 0-86547-444-3.— ISBN 0-86547-445-1 (pbk.)
1. Agriculture—United States. 2. Diet—United States. 3. Food. I. Clark, Robert.
II. American Institute of Wine & Food. III. Journal of gastronomy.
S441.A483 1990
630’.973 — dc2o 90-34729
ISBN: 978-1-61902-789-3
Cover design by Cherlyn Oto
Interior design by Megan Jones Design
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction  Mary Berry ..............................................vii
Preface  Robert Clark ..................................................xv
OnE
Remember the Flowers  PaulGruchow...............................1
The Gleaners  WillWeaver............................................ 19
A Sense of Place  EdwardBehr....................................... 41
TWO
Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Apple and the American
Agrarian Ideal  Anne Mendelson ................................. 63
Food, Health, and Native-American Agriculture   
Gary Paul Nabhan .................................................... 87
The Last Columbia Salmon  Bruce Brown ........................105
Are Farmers an Endangered Species?  Mark Kramer ...........123
Growing Lean, Clean Beef  Gretel Ehrlich ......................137
The Farm—Restaurant Connection  Alice Waters ..............147
ThREE
The Pleasures of Eating  WendellBerry..........................165
Making Sustainable Agriculture Work  WesJackson...........177
Food, Farming, and Democracy  FrancesMooreLappé.....193
Contributors....................................................................219

Introduction
M
y home is farm country in north central Kentucky. I
have lived and farmed here all of my life, first by birth
and then by choice. My great-grandfather said, after the first
and only trip he ever took in his life, “I didn’t see anything I
like better than the field behind my barn.” I am his true heir.
While I am grateful for the traveling I have done and the places
I have seen, nothing has tempted me away from the beautiful,
maybe unremarkable, and now threatened landscape of my
home country. Even now when this country so familiar to me
is also strange to me it remains the only place I want to live.
I know that it is strange to my husband, a lifelong farmer
and a descendant of generations of farmers. I know from my
father’s writing and my daily conversations with both of my
parents that they feel the strangeness of it everyday. But here
we stay.
Farmland and farming communities all over this coun-
try are in decline or have been swallowed up by our indus-
trial economy. In that we are tragically the same as other
rural places all over the United States—and, I suppose, our
vii
world, although my travels haven’t been that extensive. A
difference here is that our decline in my part of Kentucky can
be directly tied to the loss of the Burley Tobacco Program.
The program ended in 2004, which gives us twelve years
to see what happens to a farm culture when its economy is
removed. The Burley Tobacco Program defended a crop that
turned out to be indefensible, and so, I believe, the program
and its principles have been quickly forgotten. It was the
only farm program—a price support, never a subsidy—that
served the people it was supposed to serve, the small family
farmers. Because it limited production of a high-value crop,
it protected farmers and the farms from over production and
encouraged a pretty highly diversified farm economy from
1941 until the program ended. For a while we had a fairly
stable farm population that supported the little towns in our
part of the country. We had a farm culture of shared work.
Differences in political and social issues didn’t matter much
when our economy was stable but they now matter abso-
lutely. The community is polarized because we have lost our
shared culture. In spite of thirty years or so of a “local food
movement” and our close proximity to urban markets, we
are losing farms and farmers at a terrifying rate.
Our Sustainable Table was first published in 1990,
a year I remember very well. My youngest child, Tanya,
was born in February and my grandfather, John Berry, Sr.,
turned ninety the following November. He would die the
viii our sustainable table