The Rake Magazine

Tag: food

  • Subaru, Turducken, and Other Strange Birds

    A long time ago I was fired from the Byerly’s business (and later restated) for taking a picture of a model holding a Turducken. I depicted this Scandinavian babe in a Bergmanesque pose tortured by existential angst over what to do with the strange aviary object.

    Tres Lund, apparently, did not prefer realism in his supermarket. I can’t be sure, however, that he has ever tried to cook on Turkey Day. After all, what is one to do with a chicken that’s been stuffed in a duck then stuffed in a turkey? (or vice versa?)

    I am told the ad did end up selling quite a few birds.

    Which brings me to Subaru. The recent buzz on the company is the last second hiring of Carmichael Lynch–by all accounts, a great advertising agency. Subaru is going to need one, considering the inexplicable oddness of its new car line.

    For years, Subuaru was a proud and inconoclastic car maker . They claimed, rightly, that their cars were "inexpensive and built to stay that way." They were a poster child for fighting car-based commonism.

    That’s all changed. Their vehicles are now expensive for the money and downright ugly on the eyes. It all started when someone got the weird idea that Subaru could really fly high by paying homage to their history as an aircraft company. This resulted in the Tribeca B9, a bland beast with a grille that reflected their aircraft roots.

    It appears here that they were aiming for the elegance of an Alfa Romeo but ended up with a modern day Edsel

    Subaru’s strange behavior has now reached its zenith in the new WRX–-till recently their "halo" car. I’ve blogged about the previous generations of this car so much that I won’t bore you with the details. The latest generation of the WRX, however, looks like the designers have been overdosing on tryptophan.

    The photo here to the right is not a Mazda 3 or some other econobox but instead the once-sporty-but-now somnambulistic WRX. Hatchbacks never have and never will be true sports cars. Its as if someone told Subaru that all the gung-ho boy racers have matured into grocery-getters ready to put away their childish things. It looks bloated and over-stuffed and the road tests are exactly lofty either.

    Its time Fuji Heavy Industries (Subaru’s parent company) stopped thinking about airplanes and cooked up something like the previous generation WRX. It looked uncommon and flew like a bat out of you know where.

    Which is more than I can say for a Turducken.

    Or these Subies of late.

     

     

     

  • Food and Sex. . . Hungry?

    There’s nothing new about the link between great food and sultry sex. It’s been around since the era of the ancient Romans, then flagged during repressive periods such as the Dark Ages and the 1950’s, but went through a glorious renaissance right around the time I was born.

    Gael Greene, an outrageous and perversely reed-thin journalist began writing about food for New York Magazine in 1968 and subsequently launched the so-called "forkplay" genre. Her novel Blue Skies, No Candy, was like Erica Jong meets Julia Child — one big orgy, slippery with sauces and peaks of whipped cream. Body secretions and wine; kissing, tasting, and swallowing. Sating every hunger, those located in one’s stomach and those located between the legs.

    Now in her late 60’s, Greene is still writing. Last year, her memoir Insatiable came out, in which she detailed (and I do mean detailed) her sexual encounters with Elvis Presley, Clint Eastwood, the chef at Le Cirque in 1977, and a porn star named Jamie Gillis. In an endearingly sharp turn from haute cuisine and personal erotica, Greene also founded Citymeals-on-Wheels, a charity organization that
    delivers more than two million free meals a year to New York City’s elderly
    shut-ins.

    Now, I’m no Gael Greene (for which my husband is thankful). But I recently wrote a novel about the life of an "accidental" food critic, sent it off to my agent, and received his feedback this week. Great sex, he said. I want more. The food’s important but that can slip into the background. All that hot, post-dinner lovemaking, that’s what we want. White Bordeaux, the sticky steaming meat of braised artichoke hearts, sandwiches of salty little capers with smoked salmon and lemon mayonnaise. Then to bed: taut naked skin, slick contact, whispered words and hard effort, the scents of garlic, wine, and dark chocolate still wafting through the room.

    I’m working on all that.

    Meantime, right here in Minneapolis, there’s a new generation of Greene-style food writers, including Alexis McKinnis who writes a sex column for vita.mn and an about-town foodie blog called Girl Friday. She’s been featured on Kare 11 and elsewhere, but the focus has been entirely — or so it’s seemed to me — on the salacious aspects of her life. And she’s been portrayed as some brand-new species of food writer, rather than someone who’s following in the tradition (fairly well, I might add — McKinnis’s blog is always current and well-written) of food-and-sex journalists from nearly 40 years ago.

    Others are simply trashy, a mess of string bikini odes, scatalogical tales, and gluttony. What Greene understood, and I think McKinnis does, too, is that there’s a delicate balance between sex and food. You have to deliver a vicarious thrill, then back off and leave just a touch to the reader’s imagination. . . .or experience.

     

  • When Harry Met Betty

    One of life’s great truths—one that we desperately seek to avoid with proverbs and catechisms and even magazine articles—is that beneath its surface lies complexity. Our beloved fictions of heroes and villains crumble with scrutiny, leaving only convolution, shifting meanings, and unstable realities. The same is true of things. Even the simplest object has its hidden history of longing, love, and despair. Take, for example, cake. Chiffon cake.

    Ask someone who lived through the 1950s to name the icons of that era, and chances are that—along with the ’57 Chevy, Lucy and Ricky, and the cul-de-sac rambler—chiffon cake will make their list. The recipe was introduced by General Mills in 1948 with a major marketing blitz that featured Betty Crocker, another 1950s icon. Betty, of course, is the fictional marketing persona invented in the 1920s by Marjorie Child Husted, a General Mills executive who sometimes posed as her creation. With Betty’s help, chiffon became a nationwide sensation. Billed as “the first really new cake in a hundred years,” thanks to its “mystery ingredient,” chiffon was light and fluffy like angel food cake, yet also rich and moist like butter cake, and it rapidly became a favorite of housewives from Syracuse to Oceanside.

    Even today, the towering tube cake conjures a Kodachrome image of Mother, in lipstick and swing skirt, offering up love via food: the idealized feminine of mid-century America.
    But just as the post-war feminine mystique had its dark, unspoken places, so, too, had the chiffon cake. The real mystery lurking beneath its lemony glaze is not a secret ingredient, but the secret life of its reclusive inventor: the appropriately named Harry Baker.

    The shorthand version of his history, repeated in a thousand cookbooks, notes that the insurance-salesman-turned-baker invented the cake in Los Angeles in 1927. He baked his chiffon cakes in his apartment kitchen in the Windsor Square neighborhood and sold them to the glamorous Brown Derby restaurant, where they pleased the palates of Hollywood’s studio stars. In 1947, Baker sold his closely guarded recipe to General Mills for an undisclosed sum—“because,” as one General Mills publication quotes him, “I wanted Betty Crocker to give the secret to the women of America.”
    The complete version of Harry Baker’s life is more complicated, and you won’t find it in any cookbook, or anywhere else for that matter. “Just to mention his name was forbidden,” said his granddaughter, Sarah Baker, who is an attorney in Portland, Oregon. “I remember, maybe about 1964, my grandmother had a tea party for one of her sisters,” she recalled. “I had gone down to the kitchen to help her. She had her back to me, getting dishes out of a china cabinet, when I asked her, ‘Whatever happened to Grandfather Baker?’
    “She whirled around faster than I knew she could move, looked at me absolutely furiously, and said, ‘We don’t talk about him.’ ”

    Although it was wildly popular in the 1950s, the chiffon cake had been figuratively gathering dust for decades by the time I discovered the recipe in the late 1990s. It was the tail end of the glorious dot-com boom years and I, a hopeless liberal-arts kid from way back, had landed a job, mainly out of curiosity, at a prestigious design firm in downtown Minneapolis. Visions of John Cheever and Darrin Stephens launched my wife and me into a sardonic but passionate craze for everything retro-1950s. Dressed for cocktails, she would greet me at the door after work, martinis in hand; during one such happy hour, while browsing in our 1956 edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, I stumbled upon the recipe for chiffon.
    The job, the dress, the quest for fifties kitsch: forgotten. But my Betty still falls open to the creased and batter-spattered pages with the step-by-step photo directions for chiffon cake because, symbolism aside, it makes a truly splendid dessert.
    Before chiffon, there had been but two types of cake. Foam cakes, like angel food, contain no shortening and rely on eggs for leavening; while butter cakes rise with baking powder. Chiffon combines the two, relying on both eggs and baking powder, and, the clincher, adds Harry Baker’s secret ingredient: vegetable oil (or, as it was called in those days, “salad oil”—another General Mills product, as it happens). The recipe calls for seven eggs. Their yolks are mixed with flour, sugar, leavening, and the oil to make a batter, which is folded into their whipped-hard whites.

    The result delivers on every one of Betty Crocker’s promises: Chiffon is simple, virtually foolproof. Light, moist, rich. And above all, “glamorous.” The lemon version (the only one I make) speckles starry citrus against a snowy sky of sweet, voluptuous crumb. Never dry, never cloying, never dull, it is, in short, the perfect cake. And the rave reviews earned by my first attempt brought me back to it time and again. Members of our extended family bring pies to Thanksgiving dinner. I make chiffon.

    I had been an enthusiastic baker of the cake for some time when one day, drooling through back issues of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, I chanced upon an article on chiffon by food writer and Joy of Cooking contributor Stephen Schmidt. If you’ve read Cook’s Illustrated, you’ll already know that Schmidt tinkered exhaustively with the original Betty Crocker recipe to end up with something just a little better. (So he claims. I stick with the original.)

    What caught my eye, however, was a sidebar article about Harry Baker. Schmidt repeated the standard biography: insurance salesman, 1927 discovery, service to the stars, etc. But he also uncovered some new details. For one thing, he noted that Baker, during his Hollywood heyday, shared his apartment “with his aging mother.” And the sale of the recipe to General Mills took on a new twist in Schmidt’s telling: “Having been evicted from his apartment, and fearing memory loss, the usually reclusive Baker trekked uninvited to Minneapolis to sell his recipe,” he wrote.

    Every one of us is blessed with curiosity, and there are those among us who can keep it at bay. I’m not one of them. Taken together, these few scraps of information hinted at a story. One thing led to another, and eventually it turned out that I spent five years, on and off, chasing the elusive Hollywood inventor of my beloved chiffon cake.

    In 1923, Paramount released Hollywood, a silent film that follows the misadventures of Angela Whitaker, a hapless girl from “Centerville” who can’t land a film part in the land of dreams come true. The film is laced with nearly eighty cameo appearances by virtually every star of the silent era: Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Pola Negri, Cecil B. DeMille, Will Rogers.

    That same year, tycoons who owned the Hollywoodland Real Estate erected an enormous sign to advertise their corporation. Years later, Peg Entwistle, a real-life Angela Whitaker, would throw herself off the four-story “H.” Eventually, the Hollywood chamber of commerce toppled the last four letters of the sign and it’s been an icon of American dreams ever since.

    1923 also saw the arrival of Harry Baker in Hollywood. He, too, came from Ohio. He was forty years old. Behind him he’d left his wife, Mary, and two children, Harry Jr. and Mary. His insurance business had gone sour. He was broke. Looking for a new source of cash, he turned to his lifelong hobby: fudge. A confectioner in the tony Wilshire neighborhood bought it from Baker for fifty cents a pound. It was enough to afford him a living.

    Harry also began to tinker with cake recipes, and he would have put Cook’s Illustrated’s Stephen Schmidt to shame. He devised more than four hundred different recipes in his quest to bake a sweeter, moister angel food cake. He varied ingredients, measurements, and the baking time and temperature. Nothing satisfied. In later years, he described the eureka moment that led him to salad oil in almost mystical terms: It was, he told a reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, a “sixth sense—something cosmic” that revealed his secret ingredient. And it worked.

    During the time that Harry Baker was handing out experimental cakes to his neighbors, a handful of entrepreneurs pooled resources to launch a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. The Brown Derby opened for business in 1926, in a building shaped to match its name. Two years later—call it another cosmic twist—Harry Baker walked in with a sample of his unbelievable cake. It became one of the Derby’s signature dishes.

  • Trust But Verify & Serve With A Light Burgundy

    A few weeks ago, Twin Citizen waking up to their coffee and toast were surprised to hear that one of our beloved local bakeries, the French Meadow, had been raided by federal agents. Was the French Meadow aiding and abetting terrorists with its awesome vegan lunch menu? Or was its name a tip-off to general anti-American sentiment and brioche? No, the feds seized thirty thousand loaves of bread. The problem, they said, was that it was mislabeled as “wheat-free” spelt bread. Spelt, they argued, is itself a species of wheat. Thus, according to the linguistics professionals at the Food and Drug Administration, spelt bread cannot be marketed as an alternative to wheat bread. It all turned out to be a bit of a misunderstanding, but it publicized an important and timely issue: As food and food marketing become more complex, how do we know for sure that we’re eating what they tell us we’re eating?

     

    And it’s not just new-age foods for new-age allergies. In a manner of speaking, food labeling predates the Holy Bible. Last May, a few sharp-eyed customers in Super Target stores were no doubt surprised to see the little “OU” symbol on packages of pork tamales manufactured by St. Paul’s El Burrito Mercado food company. The OU symbol—it’s called the heksher in Yiddish—is affixed only to foods that are certified kosher by an organization of orthodox rabbis and professional food scientists. You don’t need to be a rabbi to know that a heksher on a pork tamale is farblondget (seriously screwed up).

    Increasing numbers of people want to know precisely how their food is grown and processed. More than ever before, they see a trip to the grocery store as an opportunity to examine their diet and their values, and to practice a kind of consumer activism. They want food that jibes with their ethics, lifestyle, and dietary preferences; they may be worried about potential side effects of genetically modified organisms; they may wish to eat foods produced only in accordance with the current foodie zeitgeist. Perhaps they adhere to religious dietary requirements, or have any number of food allergies. And food producers today are answering the demand with a movement, a marketing angle, and a range of technologies. It is called “Identity-Preserved Processing.”

    The modern food-supply chain is an amazing and efficient thing. A fresh hamburger at a local pub, for example, was probably still on the hoof less than seventy-two hours before landing on a bun on a plate in front of your lunch date. As accelerated as that history might be, it is nevertheless a history: Was the animal a two-year-old Angus steer, or was it a ten-year-old Holstein, retired after a long career as a high-butterfat milker? Under what conditions was it dispatched? How was it treated and what did it eat while it was alive? Did it receive antibiotics or hormones, and if so, what kind and how frequently? (Indeed, the provenance of beef is an especially developed science, thanks to the numerous bio-hazards such as E. coli and BSE that have evolved as a result of modern agri-business practices.)

    There’s a history in your coffee mug as well. Although the sign on the air-pot behind the counter reads “Fair Trade Organic Ethiopian Sidamo,” how do you really know that it came from Ethiopia, much less that the coffee grower was paid a fair price for his effort? Or did the same guy who labeled the kosher pork tamale certify the coffee beans too?

    According to Dr. George John, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, a sizeable international trend is under way. That idea is to take traditional food commodities—non-specialized, mass-produced items like wheat, corn, hamburger, milk—and de-commoditize them, not by adding features or changing the taste, but by identifying and preserving information about the way in which they were made and processed. Since verification of this information naturally becomes key, particularly to the end user, identity-preserved processing portends a revolution in food marketing. (Coincidentally, this is happening at the same moment that non-commodities like accounting and journalism are being commoditized and outsourced to call centers in India.)

    The process of kosher designation is an illustrative example, but the real glamour and profit margins of IPP are more easily observed at work in the world of fine wine. The alpha example of IPP, says John, is the value that quality vintners extract from their wine labels. “With wines,” he said, “especially European wines, there have always been geographic appellations. Unless a wine is grown in the right area, you can’t call it a Burgundy.

    “Now that companies have the ability to preserve identity in other areas of agriculture, they sense that IPP is going to be the big marketing opportunity going forward, because agriculture wants to become less commodity oriented.” John explained that if you take a regular worldwide commodity like coffee or cocoa and you start emphasizing its provenance, you begin not only to distinguish it from all the other commodities in its category, but also to insulate it from general market fluctuations. “The commodity prices have crashed, so instead producers try to differentiate themselves. How do they do that? By micro-branding commodity products on the basis of geography, micro-climate, ancestry of the seed, and other non-observable traits.”

    To do this, producers need some way to track and trace products throughout the maze of farmers, processors, transporters, and retailers that make up the food-supply chain. It’s that sort of micro-branding—not just red wine, not just Burgundy, but the detail provided down to the vineyard, the grape variety, and the year the grapes were harvested—that makes fine wines so different and so much more profitable than other goods.

    “Based on new technologies coming on line within the food-production industry,” said John, “it is now possible to provide consumers conceivably everything they could ever want to know about the way the food on their plate was grown, processed, and cooked.”

  • The Life-Giving Secret of Bees

    The long, pointed whisker stands out sharply from the undulating mass of curious bees beneath the Plexiglas. Next emerges a lonely ear. And finally the whole, unmistakable outline of the tiny skull: a common field mouse. It is completely lacquered in something dark, sticky, and resinous. Just three days earlier, this little skull—not much bigger than a quarter—rested in the rather undignified open-air coffin of a petri dish atop the desk of Marla Spivak, a University of Minnesota entomologist and a national leader in honeybee research. Spivak—trim, suntanned, short-haired, and outdoorsy in a way more revealing of her work in the hives than in the hallowed halls—discovered the mummified skull in one of her bee colonies on the St. Paul campus about a year ago. She fished it out for a closer look.

    An experienced beekeeper would recognize right away what had happened: A mouse had gotten into the hive, and it was killed. But rather than letting the intruder fester and breed bacteria and potential disease, the bees covered the corpse with something called propolis.

    Propolis, or bee glue, is resin that bees collect from the leaf buds and bark of some trees. Though relatively unfamiliar in the United States in all but a handful of co-op grocery stores, apothecaries, and health-food shops, it has been used in folk medicine since antiquity. Propolis has long been credited with healing powers by people throughout Eastern Europe and parts of South America, where it is widely used for a host of minor health and skin ailments. In those areas, propolis products are as commonly available as are echinacea and chamomile in the United States.


    But the mouse mummy captured Spivak’s imagination. “It was just so weird, I couldn’t stand to get rid of it,” she told me. So this bizarrely hygienic partial cadaver remained, perfectly preserved, through five seasons in Spivak’s Hodson Hall office. There, it bore distant and unlikely witness to the thrilling frenzy that ensued when, over the course of last year, an interdisciplinary team of university researchers, working with Dr. Phil Peterson of the medical school, synthesized and wrote up their remarkably promising findings from dozens of lab trials testing propolis against HIV. “Actually, it all started about five years ago,” said Spivak, “when Dr. Genya Gekker, who was working with Phil Peterson on lab trials with various substances against HIV, came down with a cold.”

    Gekker, originally from Lvov in the Ukraine, grew up using propolis to fend off life’s bothersome viral miseries. And she might have picked up a propolis-based remedy from the Wedge, or from Present Moment Books and Herbs in South Minneapolis. But instead, she went to the Minneapolis farmers’ market looking for raw propolis. There, she visited Bob Dressen, owner of Cannon Bee Honey and Supply, who was selling his wares, including propolis.

    “For several years we would have requests for propolis from Russian immigrants,” Dressen told me. “Finally, I brought some to the market packed in two-ounce plastic bags and I thought, Now I’m ready for them.” Dressen says he doesn’t normally have raw propolis on the display table. “We do have capsules displayed and ready for sale, but the raw propolis isn’t that appealing. We do sell it when it is asked for. The raw propolis I sell comes off of the hives’ bottom boards, which I clean in the spring. Other propolis I gather is from the scrapings of hive bodies, and this is sent to processors to be made into other propolis products like chewing gum and toothpaste.”

    With a little alcohol, Gekker extracted a tincture from Dressen’s raw propolis, and began treating her cold. And that’s when the unbidden thought struck: We’ve never tried propolis on HIV. Gekker set up the trial, and it worked. Propolis killed HIV.

    “The testing went on for about three years. It was difficult work,” said Phil Peterson, who heads the university’s Division of Infections Diseases and International Medicine, and co-directs the Center for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology Translational Research. As a clinical investigator, Peterson has been especially interested in infections of the brain. “And HIV attacks the microglia of the brain—that’s where the virus grows when it gets in the brain cells. Its other main targets are T-lymphocytes, specialized white blood cells that effect immunity. And we found, lo and behold, that when you put this propolis in a cell culture system, it has potent activity against the virus in both microglia and T-lymphocyte cell cultures.”

    Spivak supplied the propolis samples for the many lab trials that followed Gekker’s first serendipitous test. Every propolis sample the team tried (sourced from three sites in Minnesota, three in Brazil, and one in China) killed HIV in lab cultures. Even better, the propolis also appeared to at least partially inhibit HIV’s ability to enter cells—an elusive and sought after property in potential HIV treatments.

    Perhaps best of all, propolis is a cheap, natural substance. “We know that of the forty million or so people affected by this virus, ninety percent of them are living in the developing world, where they can’t afford retroviral drugs at ten thousand dollars a year,” said Peterson. “Propolis, by comparison, is available for pennies. And it’s been used with relative safety for medicinal purposes for five thousand years, since Biblical times at least, all over the earth. We know it has activity against many bacteria, fungi, viruses—it’s a warehouse of antimicrobial activity. Because of propolis, a beehive is one of the most sterile places on earth. I have much greater respect for bees than I ever did,” he said. “They’re very clever beasts.”

    Gekker and Peterson, with some input from Spivak, wrote up the results of the HIV-propolis study last year, and it will be published this fall in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. But a propolis-based HIV therapy is a long way down a steep and twisting road. Cheap and natural propolis from the co-op cooler is more like a prototype, or a proof of concept. Science needs more detailed evidence.

    “There are major obstacles,” said Peterson. “Propolis is very potent in regard to its anti-HIV activity, but would I recommend that people take it for HIV? No. Because you have to see that it works in humans. You have to see whether, when taken orally, it’s absorbed and works against the virus in a live person. And in order to do that, you have to address safety, and this batch-to-batch issue. With the FDA, batch variability is not going to be tolerated. Think of the challenge with propolis, when the bees collect it from all these different trees. There are at least three hundred compounds in propolis, and maybe as many as a thousand. So we haven’t really pursued it, because we’re not set up to identify the needle in the haystack.”

    Peterson was referring to the arduous process of identifying and isolating the active HIV-inhibiting component or components in propolis. “Right now, we don’t have the right people to pursue it. I’m not a separation chemist or a medicinal chemist. Over in the school of agriculture they have a lot of terrific scientists, but no one with the particular skills we need for this task. You could say the project is on hold. We’re in a position right now where we’re trying to figure out the best strategy to take.”

    With any luck, the journal article will spur some fresh excitement. “My hunch is that other people are going to take an interest. Certainly there’s been work with propolis itself, looking at the various aspects of it, especially in the field of ethnopharmacology. But I’m sitting here in the Center for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology Translational Research, and, as the name implies, our goal is to translate this stuff into the humans who suffer these diseases. Our mandate is to pursue answers to the questions.”

    At the current pace, it will be years before someone who is HIV-positive might walk into the pharmacy and fill a prescription for a new drug based on this team’s pioneering propolis research—if it gets that far at all.

    Meanwhile, as the gears of medical research grind laboriously onward, Spivak is turning her attention back to the source—the bees. She’s focusing on the function of propolis in the colony. What exactly is this mysterious substance, anyway? How does a bee locate a source of propolis? How does that bee recruit other bees in the colony to collect more of it? If it can kill HIV in human cells, what good might it do for the bees themselves? Such questions take on considerable weight in light of the well-publicized scourges that have afflicted U.S. honeybees for the last several decades. Few people realize that our honeybee population has dropped by half since 1950. Lately, it’s the Varroa mite—a vicious beast about the size of a grain of sand—that’s been wreaking havoc on commercial beekeepers’ stock. In the past few years, these mites have gained resistance to the only two effective conventional chemical treatments. Spivak estimated that losses in the winter and spring of 2005 slashed the number of honeybees in Minnesota by up to a third.

    The national picture is similarly dismal, and “dismal” is not too strong a word considering that honeybees are responsible for the pollination of about one-third of all U.S. food crops. The main thrust of Spivak’s work is to preserve the honeybee population by breeding honeybees that can fend for themselves. “I think it’s sad that these bees have become so utterly dependent on humans to administer various forms of chemical management.,” she said. “They’ve lost the skills they need to fight for their own survival.” Since 1993, Spivak and her assistant, Gary Reuter, have been painstakingly breeding queen bees to propagate a new strain of bees with the genetic instincts to protect themselves. They carefully select and breed queens who demonstrate the “hygienic” genetic traits that will promote survival. It’s simpler than it sounds. Basically, a bee with the right hygienic tendencies will literally sniff out and eradicate (by eating or hauling out of the hive) diseased and mite-infested brood in larval cells before the colony suffers major damage. Spivak’s program is no quick fix—but over time, her specially bred bees have been proving their merit in a variety of working apiaries.

    Now Spivak wonders if or how propolis might be used to further her honeybee cause. Could manipulating propolis somehow help fight deadly bee infections and parasites? Spivak finds early signs encouraging, especially when checking into variations in propolis from other hives. For instance, she found that one tropical propolis sample was as effective as a conventional antibiotic in lab trials against American foulbrood (the most dreaded bee disease of all, until Varroa mites were inadvertently introduced into the U.S. in 1987). “Our local propolis didn’t work,” Spivak said, booting up the computer in her cool, cinder-block Hodson Hall office. “But this tropical stuff did. Here, this is the tropical sample next to the antibiotic.” On the monitor are images of two petri dishes, each with an essentially clear circle surrounded by dots of defeated bacteria; the tropical propolis attacked the bacteria as aggressively as the chemical pharmaceutical.

    Would propolis exist if not for bees? Scientists aren’t sure. That’s because it’s not clear whether propolis is unadulterated resin simply collected and stored by bees, or whether the bees somehow transform it—perhaps via glandular secretions—during or after the gathering process. “We have so many questions,” said Spivak. “We know the bees use propolis to seal cracks in the hives, and for other purposes—like embalming invaders—but there’s a lot we don’t understand. And it’s challenging, because propolis is not like nectar or pollen, which the bees are collecting all the time. Propolis is different. They don’t collect very much of it, and not all of them are that interested in it.” She sighed.

    “This is behavioral research. If you want to observe bee behavior with propolis, then you have to induce them to collect it repeatedly and reliably to get sufficient data, right? And how do you do that?” Spivak explained that the matter of observing propolis collection for behavioral research is entirely different from collecting propolis for human health studies. To collect clean, pure propolis for human use, commercial plastic traps are used in full-size colonies. But these traps simply don’t work well in small observation hives. “That’s the question I was wrestling with when a visiting beekeeper from Mexico said, ‘Put a cadaver in the hive. The bees will embalm it in propolis.’ Of course! I thought immediately of my mouse skull, which was already embalmed, but I thought, ‘Why not? Maybe they’ll keep working on it.’ ” Spivak asked a graduate student to return the mouse skull to an observation hive on a scorching Thursday morning in late July, just as she finalized her presentations and loaded her car for the drive to the summer meeting of the Minnesota Honey Producers Association in Fergus Falls.

    Three days later, on a sweltering Sunday morning, Spivak was back at the bee lab, checking to see how the bees were reacting to Thursday’s uninvited guest. Specifically, she wanted to see if they were adding more propolis. This colony lives in a hive inside an observation shed near the bee lab on the U of M’s St. Paul campus. Spivak and I crowded together into the shed—about the size of an outhouse but blessedly air-conditioned—looking for the skull. A few bees zigzagged around us. “Don’t worry about them,” she said, pressing in to get a closer look inside the colony. Suddenly she pointed. “There it is. That’s the whisker, right up there.” Her finger rested on the upper left corner of the Plexiglas plate. “Hey, look, they’re really interested in this guy,” she said. The bees appeared to be concerned about the mummified mouse head—which was at first hard to see amid the bees, but which became obvious once Spivak identified the resin-coated whisker. Several worker bees crawl over and around the skull again and again. “I don’t think they like it,” said Spivak. “Hey, wow, look at that!” She pointed again. “They’ve added more propolis to the ear. And look here: The whole bottom part is attached now to the frame. It’s stuck down with propolis.

    “Well, that’s cool,” she said, laughing. “That’s very cool.”

    Chances are, if you see a honeybee in your garden today, it’s because some beekeeper within a mile of your home is keeping that bee alive with chemicals. The once-thriving feral bee population in the United States was composed entirely of descendents of the first honeybees—the ones that went native after escaping from hives hauled over by colonists in the 1600s. But feral bees were pretty much wiped out in the 1990s by Varroa mites. “There essentially are no feral honeybees left in the United States,” said Spivak. “There’s some talk of a comeback, but it’s hard to know where that will go.”

    When it first arrived, the docile European honeybee, Apis mellifera, adapted well and thrived in North America. Escaped swarms took off as far as the Great Plains, often outpacing colonists on the trek westward. Feral honeybees couldn’t cross the Rockies, but by the 1850s they were shipped into California. So ubiquitous was the honeybee that the Native Americans called it “the white man’s fly.” Many of the farm crops that now depend on honeybees for pollination have also been imported since colonial times. Today, pollinating insects are responsible for every third bite of the food we commonly eat—including apples, blueberries, broccoli, cauliflower, cherries, cucumbers, melons, pears, pumpkins, soybeans, squash, and cranberries. Indirectly, pollinators affect the dairy industry, too, since alfalfa and clover—both insect-pollinated—are important components of dairy cattle feed.

    Insect pollination begins, as does most of life, with hunger. As the bees forage among flowers, gathering food in the form of nectar and pollen, they spread the pollen (which, like propolis, they carry on their back legs) from one flower to another, thus promoting cross-pollination and increasing production of fruit and seed.

    Maybe early colonial beekeepers recognized and appreciated the good luck of this inadvertent pollination all along, or maybe they didn’t, but at some point, people caught on and started placing beehives purposefully in fruit orchards and gardens. From there, the management of honeybees slowly evolved to what it is today: a specialized commercial activity that still produces most of its revenue through honey sales—worth an estimated 250 million dollars annually—but deriving an increasing proportion of income from contracted pollination services. As the general bee population declines, pollination services may face even greater demands, especially in California, where hundreds of thousands of acres of almond trees greatly depend on honeybees for pollination.

    All this pollination means a lot of bee migration, which is actually nothing new. The earliest beekeepers in ancient Egypt followed the blooming flowers by floating their clay-covered wicker hives down the Nile on reed boats. (They also used propolis to embalm the bodies of the pharaohs, a trick they presumably learned from the bees.) In the U.S., many beekeepers migrate their bees—and frequently their families—thousands of miles across several large-scale migration routes in pursuit of both nectar and pollination work.

    The coordination of beekeepers, farmers, and consumers through pollination, crop management, and honey sales is no less strange and complex than the bee dance itself, and it offers a fascinating glimpse into the delicate partnership between biological science and market process.

    To a common city slicker, Sundberg Apiaries looks just like any other farm. There’s a house, some fields and outbuildings, a swampy undeveloped area, and a large pole shed with a few semitrailers parked beside it. There is also a patch of lawn with an impressive collection of antique cars. You wouldn’t guess it was a bee farm by driving by, unless you slowed down to read the faded blue metal sign hanging from a slender post on the roadside.

    Situated in Fergus Falls, three hours northwest of the Twin Cities on Interstate 94, Sundberg is a large commercial beekeeping business, managing seven thousand hives. The main honey house is across the road from an expansive cornfield. In the third week of July, these wind-pollinated cornstalks stand high and shimmer in the heat, providing a picturesque backdrop for the bumper-to-bumper cars and pickups flanking Sundberg’s long dirt driveway.

    Tonight is the barbecue social for the hundred or so members of the Minnesota Honey Producers Association who are gathered in Fergus Falls for their three-day summer convention. Twice each year, this group comes together so members can connect with others involved in this unusual work. Formal presentations are held in town at the Best Western, where throughout the convention Spivak has been networking with the beekeepers who’ll attend her slide-show presentation tomorrow morning. The association donates ten to twelve thousand dollars annually to Spivak’s research program. Spivak, in turn, donates twenty inseminated “Minnesota hygienic” queens from her breeding program to the association. Spivak’s queens, with their desirable genetic traits, have the influence to change behavior in the hive. On the open market, they’d sell for two hundred and fifty dollars apiece. Here at the convention, they are auctioned off for cash, which is funneled straight back into association’s general funds. Eventually, it funnels out again in the form of the association’s annual grant toward Spivak’s research. In essence, Spivak’s queens are given freely to the beekeepers in return for the financial support the university has received from the Minnesota Honey Producers for decades. “I started donating the queens in 1997,” Spivak said, “when the beekeepers asked what they were getting for their research dollars. Somehow, I knew the right answer wasn’t ‘research.’ ”

    But donating the queens also furthers Spivak’s work, since it enables her to propagate and monitor her selectively bred bees in working apiaries. Generally, that has gone well. Dave Ellingson and Darrel Rufer are two outspoken beekeepers who’ve been working with Spivak’s bees for years. Neither Ellingson nor Rufer suffered large-scale losses during this last devastating spring season. “It’s been mostly good,” said Spivak about her queens in the commercial apiaries, “though not always. There have been some disasters.” That kind of straight talk has, after twelve years, earned Spivak the beekeepers’ respect. “It’s taken time,” she admitted. “They weren’t sure at first that I could do this.”

    Spivak says the afternoon’s roundtable discussion on pollination at the Best Western was especially good. But after this year’s tough hits, there’s a certain din of commiseration in the buffet line as the beekeepers inch up to the Elmer’s Texas Bar-B-Q and au gratin potatoes. Spivak lets the rush die down while she guides me through the Sundberg honey house for an abbreviated tutorial on the extraction process.

    Everything here is a little sticky. Evenly spaced along the inner wall of the large room are vintage posters splattered with countless years’ worth of all things bee. Faint line drawings of various beekeeping tasks are explained in brief captions such as “Weighing packaged bees for shipping and shaking swarm into hive.”

    “Wow,” said one beekeeper passing through Sundberg’s extraction room with a cold beer. “This equipment is getting ancient.” What would a more modern system look like? “Basically the same, just newer,” said Spivak. Both the process and the equipment used for honey extraction are remarkably simple, and largely unchanged since the first wave of mechanization. In simple terms, the frames of honeycomb are freed of their wax seals, then loaded into a cylindrical chamber and spun at high speeds until the honey is extracted by centrifugal force. The honeycomb remains intact for reuse in the hives, and the extracted honey is sold to commercial food producers across the country for use in cereals, baked goods, barbecue sauces, and, of course, jarred honey. At one time, all honey was packed by the same beekeepers who produced it. But in the years since World War II, specialization has set in, and most bee farms no longer package their own honey. Darrel Rufer’s bee business experimented with packaging in the eighties, and, as he put it, “That just wasn’t my deal.”

    “Darrel is a character,” Spivak confided. “He’s colorful and outspoken. That’s why I like to have him using the hygienic bees in his apiaries. If he thinks it’s working, he’s going to spread the word and he’s going to be heard.”

    Broad and darkly tanned with gray hair and a mustache, Rufer was dressed in a leather vest thickly decorated with Victory Bikes insignias. His father kept bees not far from Fergus Falls, in Tintah, Minnesota. “The best bee country in the world used to be right here, in the Red River Valley,” he told me. Once carpeted with clover and alfalfa, Rufer’s childhood stomping grounds are now heavily planted with other crops—corn, soybeans, barley, and potatoes—meaning less clover and less bee pasture. These days, his main focus is not honey or pollination, but selling bees to other apiaries. “We sell queens all over the country,” he said. “They’re daughters of Dr. Spivak’s artificially inseminated queens, and they have the traits we’re looking for. Dr. Spivak and I have been testing her stock in my apiaries for three years now. The goal is to use less chemicals, softer chemicals.” He stopped short and looked toward the horizon. “Beekeeping,” he concluded, “was a lot easier in the past.”

    So it was. And as a result, beekeeping as a way of life has dropped off substantially since the 1950s. At first, the shift was fueled by the transition to an industrial economy and the loss of land to subdivisions and highways. But in recent years, price competition from imports teamed up with the spread of disease and parasites in a double whammy that’s driving a lot of U.S. beekeepers out of business. Between 1976 and 1990, the estimated number of commercial beekeepers in the U.S. dropped by almost half, from 212,000 to 125,000. And things have only gone downhill from there.

    Bonnie Woodworth, a petite blond woman with a perfect manicure, presides over the North Dakota Beekeeper Association. Bonnie married into beekeeping in 1972, and since then she’s seen all manner of unbelievable change in the bee business. “It used to be so easy,” she said. “You had feed, labor, and trucking. Now we spend more on medication than on feed. Just keeping your bees alive is an insurmountable task. If you let your guard down for one minute, something will take you out.” Bonnie has watched the number of new beekeepers entering the field dwindle and disappear. “It’s too hard a life, it’s back-breaking work, and then there’s the moving back and forth . . . as far as the money, well, there is none. It’s just not there.”

    Woodworth said the bee business she owns with her husband practically went broke last year due to Varroa.” We lost more than half our bees and had a bad honey crop,” she said. “It was disastrous, just disastrous.” Furthermore, Bonnie is truly saddened by the onslaught of imports and imitations sidling up next to the real honey on grocery shelves. “It’s threatening the whole industry,” she said, handing me an article on the imitations. “It’s so fraudulent. Everyone loves using the name ‘honey,’ but the actual ingredient is corn syrup instead. Do Honey Nut Cheerios have any honey in them? Very little.”

    With her very next breath, Bonnie renewed her pluck as if, by sheer force of will, she might reinvigorate an entire dying way of life. “Beekeepers are tough,” she said. “Life hasn’t been easy, but it was never boring. It takes a lot to get a beekeeper to quit.”

    That’s true. Beekeepers, not surprisingly, tend to maintain a certain “getting stung’s just part of the job” mentality. But is there an eventual breaking point? What would happen to the honey market, to the pollination of crops, to the propolis research—what would happen to it all if the last of the beekeepers quit tomorrow, and the colonies all flew free?

    “About eighty percent of the current bee population would die off fairly quickly,” said Spivak, “if beekeepers stopped chemical treatments cold turkey. But the survivors—those ten or twenty percent left behind—would propagate a whole new, tougher breed of bees with the traits they need to take care of themselves.”

    Essentially, that’s what happened in Brazil and most of South America when Varroa struck, primarily because the beekeepers there couldn’t afford chemical interventions. “Now their bees are resistant,” said Spivak as she rummaged through the bee suits, searching for one my size. She handed me a wide-brimmed, veiled hat. “Let’s adjust that,” she said. “I think it’s a bit loose.” She snugs it in a notch and we’re set to visit the hives. “You won’t be able to write with the gloves,” she warned. “But you need to take them anyway, because it’s really important that you’re comfortable. Just don’t put them on unless you need to.”

    The sun was white hot in a clear sky as we entered the apiary through the chain-link gates that enclose it. A few paces away was the university’s soccer practice field, which explained the number of cars parked along the apiary fence. “They have no idea what’s sitting right here,” said Spivak. “Few people do. But we like it that way.”

    Spivak has a smoker (it looks like the Tin Man’s oil can) to calm the bees before she opens up hives—which are actually wooden boxes painted in pastel pink, blue, green, yellow, and white to help the color-driven bees find their way back home. “We probably wouldn’t really need the smoke,” Spivak said, and I wonder aloud whether this is because the bees are in a good mood today. “These bees are always in a good mood,” she said. This morning she was checking in on some artificially inseminated queens she recently introduced to her colonies, and some from stock sent by a friend in Vermont. “He doesn’t use any chemicals, not to be organic per se, but for his own reasons. He’s sort of an oddity.” She fished around on the frame with her bare hands, oblivious to the bees crawling between her fingers. “There she is—see, she’s marked. Blue 51,” Spivak said, releasing the inseminated queen with the blue numbered tag on her back from her containment cell. “Come on, sweetie,” she cooed. “She looks great. I can tell the bees like her. She’s looking for something to eat right away, so she’s fine.”

    In one colony after the next, Spivak checked on the queens. “Blue 52 is doing well,” she said. In fact, all but one of the queens had been accepted by the workers. “Uh oh,” she said, sifting through another colony. “That’s a shame. I don’t see any eggs. I don’t think she’s here. We’ll have to go to the queen bank and make a withdrawal.” All around us, bees were flying and buzzing. One landed on the veil right in front of my eye, and stayed there for a good while. When Spivak shook the frames, there was an angry roar to which she was seemingly oblivious. Getting stung, she said, is a given. But it’s not as bad when you’re used to it, because you know exactly how much it’s going to hurt, and for how long.

    This must be true, or people wouldn’t keep bees. There are many reasons beekeeping is in decline, but stings are not one of them. “Oh, I know they say beekeeping is a dying art,” said Spivak, “and times are tough. But I’ll tell you what I think. Beekeeping will never disappear, for one simple reason: Some people are drawn to bees. There’s this peculiar relationship that exists between bees and certain individuals. It’s primal and ancient. There are rock paintings of the interaction between humans and bees in Europe, Africa, and Asia from 8000 to 2000 B.C. That’s how far back this goes. What’s the likelihood that’s going to change—now or ever?”

    Spivak has seen all she needs to out here; the heat is too thick for dawdling. But she’ll be back soon. She is, after all, pulled by the bees, with whom she undoubtedly shares the enigmatic bond she so passionately describes.

  • Can Organics Save the Family Farm?

    Thor Heyerdahl’s classic adventure story, The Ra Expeditions, has a lesson for agriculture. Heyerdahl wanted to prove that ancient Egyptian sailors could have reached the New World in traditional boats constructed of bundled papyrus stalks. He and his crew studied fresco paintings, three to four thousand years old, on the tomb walls of pyramids for instruction on the size, shape, and style of the crafts. In the paintings there was one rope represented, from the stern’s curled-in tip down to the afterdeck, for which they could discern no purpose suggested by modern physics, and in the ensuing construction it was left out. Ra I collapsed in mid-ocean for lack of that rope. Their second attempt, Ra II, with the newly appreciated rope in its assigned place, completed the voyage without a hitch.

    In the story of agriculture’s transition from the traditions of the past to the realities of the present, there is a missing element that is the rope’s equivalent—an unappreciated detail without which the worldwide agricultural system will eventually fall apart.

    That crucial element, found in healthy, viable dirt, is called “soil organic matter.” In the mid-1930s, organic farming arose from a recognition of the vital importance of this soil ingredient. Some farmers saw the undesirable changes in their soil and the diminished health of their livestock that followed the shift to chemical farming in the twentieth century. Their appreciation for soil organic matter was reborn. They realized that they needed to return to pre-chemical practices, and improve them if possible, rather than reject them in favor of chemical shortcuts. They believed this was the direction they needed to go if the health of the soil, the health of the produce, and the health of the human beings consuming the produce were to be maintained. Some of their improvements to old methods included more successful methods of compost making, better management of crop residues—the leaves, roots, or stems that are left after harvest—and adding mineral nutrients, where necessary, in their most natural form.

    The organic pioneers wrote and spoke about their realization that the farm is not a factory, but rather a human-managed microcosm of the natural world. Whether in forest or prairie, soil fertility in the natural world is maintained and renewed by the recycling of all plant and animal residues which create the organic matter in the soil. This recycling is a biological process, which means that the most important contributors to soil fertility are alive, and they are neither farmers nor fertilizer salesmen. They are the population of living creatures in the soil—whose life processes make the plant-food potential of the soil accessible to plants—and their food is organic matter.

    The number of these creatures is almost beyond belief. It was often said that a teaspoon of fertile soil contains at least one million live microscopic organisms. Hard to believe as that may be, that number is now considered far too conservative. Once you begin to understand that the soil is a living thing rather than an inert substance, a fascinating universe opens in front of your eyes. I once watched a specialist on soil creatures perform a minor miracle. He held the rapt attention of a roomful of teenagers by showing slides and telling tales of the endlessly interrelated and meticulously choreographed activities of these creatures. The students were entranced because the subject matter was like a trip to another planet. They were peeking into the secret world of nature.

    The idea of a living soil nourished with organic matter also helps cast light on the difference between a natural and a chemical approach to soil fertility. In the chemical approach, fertilizers are created in a factory to put a limited number of nutrients in a soluble form within reach of plant roots. The idea is to bypass the soil and start feeding the plants directly with preprocessed plant food. In the natural approach, the farmer adds organic matter to nurture all those hard-working soil organisms. This approach is usually called feeding the soil rather than feeding the plants, but what it’s really doing is feeding the soil creatures, and that’s why it works so well. The idea that we could ever substitute a few soluble elements for a whole living system is a lot like thinking an intravenous needle could deliver a delicious meal.

    Through the years, as organic farmers have worked with this world of nature, they have developed harmonious farming practices that are outstandingly productive. The general level of expertise today among the best organic growers allows them to equal chemical agriculture in yield while far surpassing it in quality. Coincidentally, they discovered that this approach to farming could save not only their soil, but the family farm itself—especially from the crushing onslaught of petrochemical agribusiness.

    Since the 1930s, organic farming has been subjected to the traditional three-step progression that occurs with any new idea directly challenging an orthodoxy. First the orthodoxy dismisses it. Then it spends decades contesting its validity. Finally, it moves to take over the idea. Now that organic agriculture has become an obvious economic force, industrial agriculture wants to control it. Since the first step in controlling a process is to define (or redefine) it, the U.S. Department of Agriculture hastened to influence the setting of organic standards—in part by establishing a legal definition of the word “organic”—and the organic spokespeople naively permitted it.

    Wise people had long warned against such a step. Almost thirty years ago, Lady Eve Balfour, one of the most knowledgeable organic pioneers from the 1930s, said, “I am sure that the techniques of organic farming cannot be imprisoned in a rigid set of rules. They depend essentially on the attitude of the farmer. Without a positive and ecological approach, it is not possible to farm organically.” When I heard Lady Eve make that statement at an international conference on organic farming at Sissach, Switzerland, in 1977, the co-option and redefinition of “organic” by the USDA was far in the future. I knew very well what she meant, though, because by that time I had been involved in organics long enough to have absorbed the old-time ideas and I was alert to the changes that were beginning to appear.

    When you study the history of almost any new idea, it becomes clear how the involvement of the old power structure in the new paradigm tends to move things backward. Minds mired in an industrial thinking pattern, in which farmers are merely sources of raw materials, cannot see beyond the outputs of production. They don’t consider the values of production, or its economic benefits to the producers. While co-opting and regulating the organic method, the USDA has ignored the organic goal. And since it is the original organic goal, and not the modern labeling requirements of the USDA, which I believe can save the family farm, we need to know the difference. To better convey this difference, I like to borrow two words from the ecology movement and refer to “deep” organic farming and “shallow” organic farming.

    Deep-organic farmers, after rejecting agricultural chemicals, look for better ways to farm. Inspired by the elegance of nature’s systems, they try to mimic the patterns of the natural world’s soil-plant economy. They use freely available natural soil foods like deep-rooting legumes, green manures, and composts to correct the causes of an infertile soil by establishing a vigorous soil life. They acknowledge that the underlying cause of pest problems (insects and diseases) is plant stress; they know they can avoid pest problems by managing soil tilth, nutrient balance, organic matter content, water drainage, air flow, crop rotations, varietal selection, and other factors to reduce plant stress. In so doing, deep-organic farmers free themselves from the need to purchase fertilizers and pest-control products from the industrial supply network—the commercial network that normally puts profits in the pockets of middlemen and puts family farms on the auction block. The goal of deep-organic farming is to grow the most nutritious food possible and to respect the primacy of a healthy planet. Needless to say, the industrial agricultural establishment sees this approach as a threat to the status quo since it is not an easy system for outsiders to quantify, to control, and to profit from.

    Shallow-organic farmers, on the other hand, after rejecting agricultural chemicals, look for quick-fix inputs. Trapped in a belief that the natural world is inadequate, they end up mimicking the patterns of chemical agriculture. They use bagged or bottled organic fertilizers in order to supply nutrients that temporarily treat the symptoms of an infertile soil. They treat the symptoms of plant stress—insect and disease problems—by arming themselves with the latest natural organic weapons. In so doing, shallow-organic farmers continue to deliver themselves into the control of an industrial supply network that is only too happy to sell them expensive symptom treatments. The goal of shallow-organic farming is merely to follow the approved guidelines and respect the primacy of international commerce. The industrial agricultural establishment looks on shallow-organic farming as an acceptable variation of chemical agribusiness since it is an easy system for the industry to quantify, to control, and to profit from in the same ways it has done with chemical farming. Shallow organic farming sustains the dependence of farmers on middlemen and fertilizer suppliers. Today, major agribusinesses are creating massive shallow organic operations, and these can be as hard on the family farm as chemical farming ever was.

    The difference in approach is a difference in life views. The shallow view regards the natural world as consisting of mostly inadequate, usually malevolent systems that must be modified and improved. The deep-organic view understands that the natural world consists of impeccably designed, smooth-functioning systems that must be studied and nurtured. The deep-organic pioneers learned that farming in partnership with the natural processes of soil organisms also makes allowance for the unknowns. The living systems of a truly fertile soil contain all sorts of yet-to-be discovered benefits for plants—and consequently for livestock and the humans who consume them. These are benefits we don’t even know how to test for because we are unaware of their mechanism, yet deep-organic farmers are aware of them every day in the improved vigor of their crops and livestock. This practical experience of farmers is unacceptable to scientists, who disparagingly call it mere “anecdotal evidence.” The farmers contend that since most scientists lack familiarity with real organic farming, they are passing judgment on things they know nothing about.

    It is difficult for organic farmers to defend ideas scientifically when so little scientific data has been collected. However, the passion is there because the farmer’s instincts are so powerfully sure of the differences that exist between organic and chemical production. I often cite an experience of mine in an unrelated field—music—in defense of the farmer’s instincts. Twice I have been fortunate to hear great artists perform in an intimate setting without the intermediary of a sound system. The first was a saxophonist, the second a soprano. The experience of hearing their clear, pure tones directly, not missing whatever subtleties a microphone and speakers are incapable of transmitting, was so different, and the direct ingestion of the sound by my ears was so nourishing (that is the only word I can think of), that I remember the sensation to this day. The unfiltered music was like fresh food grown by a local, deep-organic grower. That same music heard through a sound system is like industrial organic produce shipped from far away. Through a poor sound system, it is a lot like chemically grown produce.

    Like most other farmers I know, I am sensitive to the reactions of my customers, especially young customers, as evidence of the advantages of organic farming. Children are notorious for hating vegetables, but that is not what I hear from parents in the neighboring towns in response to the vegetables we grow on our farm. We have been told that our carrots are the trading item of choice in local grade-school lunch boxes. We have been told by stunned parents that not only will their children eat our salad and our spinach, but that they ask their parents specifically to purchase them. I put great faith in the honest and unspoiled taste buds of children. They can still detect differences that older taste buds may miss and that science cannot measure.

    Lately, there has been a lot of talk alerting us to the takeover of many organic labels by industrial food giants. But to anyone who wishes to eat really good food, I say the sky is not falling. These takeovers only involve industrial shallow organics. They only involve those companies large enough to attract takeover money. Most of these companies sell processed foods, which are substandard nutritionally, whatever the provenance of their ingredients. When the organic version of the Twinkie eventually appears, it will be immaterial who controls it. Some of these companies do sell staple foods, but they only meet the shallowest of standards, thus ignoring those valuable production practices that only family farmers seem to care about anymore.

    For example, I don’t buy organic eggs from the grocery stores. Merely feeding organic grain to chickens, without giving the animals honest access to the outdoors, does not make a free-range hen or produce truly edible eggs. The yolks of these eggs are pale and, being mass-produced somewhere far away, they are not fresh. I purchase eggs from a neighboring farmer who runs his chickens on grass pasture where the sunshine, green food—and a host of unknown factors—produce eggs with deep orange yolks and awesome flavor. I don’t buy organic milk from the large producers who keep thousands of cows in confinement and who claim their milk is special because they feed the cows organic grain. As if preventing access to grass is not bad enough, these producers then ultra-pasteurize the cows’ milk so they can ship it nationally—thereby destroying the amazing natural cultures and enzymes in uncooked milk. I buy milk from a very successful local raw-milk dairy where the cows eat grass outdoors (as they were designed to do) and produce milk that studies have shown is far richer in many important nutrients due to the grass diet alone.

    In other words, the only organic companies that have been bought out are those whose quality is so dubious you don’t want to buy their food no matter how many times they can legally print the word “organic” on the label. Real food comes from your local family farm, run by deep-organic farmers. These farms won’t be bought out because they are too honest and too focused on quality over quantity to attract the takeover specialists. The good news is that small, committed, organic family farms are the fastest growing segment in U.S. agriculture today. Old-time deep-organic farming will save these farms because there will always be a demand for exceptional food by astute customers who can see past the hype of the USDA label and realize the importance of making their own fully informed decisions about food quality.

    ***

    How did deep get turned into shallow and good food revert to mediocre? It is a logical result in a world blind to the elegance of natural systems. Humans think in terms of more milk rather than exceptional milk, cheaper eggs not better eggs. Since modern humans tend to consider nature imperfect, they focus on improving nature rather than improving the function of agriculture within nature. Humans want to change the rules rather than try to operate more intelligently within them. A recent advertisement from a biotech company reinforced that idea by highlighting the phrase “Think what’s possible.” It’s true that these companies think they have the power to remake the parts of nature they don’t understand. However, if they understood them, they would realize they don’t need remaking. It is our human relationship with the natural world that needs remaking.

    Family farms thrive when they operate as participants in nature’s elegantly structured system. Take my own farm. I have visited organic vegetable farms across the U.S. and Europe, and I believe ours is fairly typical. We augment the fertility of our soil with both homemade compost and green manures to provide all-important organic matter, plus locally available organic residues (in our case from the fishing industry). We grow thirty-five different vegetables year round, both in the field in summer and in greenhouses in winter. We use no pest-control products because we have no pest problems that need to be controlled. Fertile, healthy soils teeming with beneficial life grow vigorous, healthy plants. Rather than depending on product inputs, we have created a knowledge-input agriculture where biological diplomacy and management skills replace war mentality and chemical weapons. Our aim is to cultivate ease and order on our farm rather than battle futilely against disease and disorder. When we have had problems (low soil fertility, plant stress) we dealt with them by correcting the cause so the problem would no longer exist. If, instead, we had treated the symptom, then that treatment would have been required again and again unless the cause went away on its own.

    If we view modern society through the lens of this agricultural model, the parallels are striking, and the potential for deep-organic farming to transform more than just the family farm becomes obvious. It has the power to transform the world. Our present economic infrastructure is focused on selling treatments for symptoms, rather than finding inexpensive ways to correct the causes. For example, the medical profession, under the influence of the drug companies, peddles pills, potions, and operations rather than stressing alternatives to destructive Twinkie nutrition, over-stressed lifestyles, and toxic pollution. The economists push conspicuous consumption as a panacea, despite the fact that alternatives to hollow lives, addictive behavior, and meaningless work would bring us far more satisfaction. The government colludes in preparing for conflicts and then waging them (symptom treatment), rather than committing our country to permanent resolution of differences through diplomacy (cause correction). Although deep-organic farmers demonstrate daily the existence of a successful parallel universe where cause correction rules over symptom treatment, the significance of that option is unknown and thus unheeded. If its implications were fully known, deep organic farming would certainly be suppressed, because it exposes the artificiality of our symptom-focused economy and, incidentally, explains why society’s most intractable problems never seem to get solved.

    So what is the future? If you want to eat really good food, support your local deep-organic farm. Committed growers are engaged in a quest to grow better food because they understand that real food makes an enormous contribution to human well-being. In the food world, family farmers are the last link maintaining the old-time values of quality rather than quantity, of the deep satisfaction from meaningful work rather than the shallow return from excess consumerism. The values of caring farmers were once so common, so basic to human existence, that they did not need to be expressed. In today’s world these values have been so overwhelmed by greed and shoddy thinking that they now very much need to be put into words. When pronounced, those words seem quaint and idealistic. Just as organic foods have become the last refuge protecting eaters from GMOs, rBGH, and food irradiation, so have family farmers become the last refuge protecting the values of the early organic pioneers against the onslaught of the industrial organic hucksters. I cast my vote for quality and for idealism—and for putting the rope back in place.