Laura Hess’s Posts

• Erring on the side of 'heirloom'

  Greenwashing our vegetable modifiers 3

  Posted 1 year, 1 month ago

  A few weeks ago, I was having dinner at a renowned restaurant in San Francisco, when I noticed something a bit troubling on the menu. According to the description, the "Heirloom Tomato Salad" was made with a mix of Sweet 100 and Sungold tomatoes -- both of which are hybrid varieties.

  OK, big deal, they made a mistake. Well, two weeks later, I stopped at a farm stand advertising heirloom tomatoes, and sure enough, the alleged heirlooms were hybrids.

  All this falsity in advertising has me wondering if the term "heirloom" is becoming just another one of those previously meaningful… Read More

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Laura Hess’s Recent Comments

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  Re: the point about access to land

  In the five years I've spent working at the Yale Sustainable Food Project, I've come to know many farmers who grow food sustainably.  They fall into three major categories:
  

  1. Those who farm on inherited land: the third-generation apple grower, the third-generation dairy farmer.
     
  2. Those who derive income from another profession / the dual-careerists: the lawyer-farmer, the psychologist-farmer.  This category also includes the landscape-architect-turned-farmer and the investment-banker-turned-farmer, who bought land and started farming in middle age.
     
  3. Those who manage farms owned by rich people.

  What all three categories of farmers have in common--save a few intrepid deviators I didn't include--is that they didn't buy their land with money they earned farming.  Unlike in many other gainful occupations, the pay scale in farming doesn't increase a whole lot as one becomes more capable.  Which is a central problem Zoe Bradbury touches on: you need land to grow food, and land costs money that aspiring young farmers don't have, unless they want to be investment bankers for a little while beforehand.  Of course, land in the Northeast is more expensive than land, say, in Nebraska.  But, with all due respect to Nebraskans, I want to farm in the place that is home to me.  An artist friend once said to me, I don't want to raise babies in a place without art.  Well, I don't want to raise babies in a place without farms.

  I--and many of my friends--would like to be farmers, and we have degrees from fancy schools like Yale which do us absolutely no good in this endeavor.  To Ron Steenblik: when I was in school here, never once did I hear a professor mention in even the most hypothetical of terms that a student might go on to work in some capacity, ANY capacity, related to agriculture.  Message: Yale students do not become farmers, or agricultural researchers, or what have you.  There's your systematic devaluation.  And I majored in Environmental Studies, so it wasn't my department.
  On Much depends on finding a new generation to put dinner on the table posted 1 year, 6 months ago 10 Responses