“Don’t forget it. Use your voice.”
— Patti Smith at a live performance, Toronto, Ontario, March 7, 2013
According to web designer, speaker, and writer Brad Frost, every day 822,240 websites are created, 499,680 WordPress posts are published, and 144.8 billion e-mails are sent. Four and a half million photographs are uploaded to Flickr, 40 million are uploaded to Instagram, and 300 million posted to Facebook. Five hundred million tweets are tweeted a day. Four billion things are shared on Facebook. And every minute, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. In 2003, there were 300,000 books, each with a unique International Standard Book Number (ISBN). By 2012, there were 15 million ISBNs. Ten percent of the 130 million books ever made were published in 2012. IBM has stated that 90 percent of the data ever created was created from 2011 to 2013.
It is against this continuous cacophonous barrage and background of information that it’s now, more than ever, paramount to develop and support deft and agile storytellers. Storytellers who watch and listen. Who collect and distill the noise into the elements and narratives that connect us.
To effect change around food systems, we need the stories that ignite, cajole, create empathy, and evoke compassion. The “protagonist” locally grown, the “antagonist’” agribusiness, and everything else in the continuum all have direct and indirect consequences on the health of a mind, body, and soul. The story of food can be as provocative and compelling as ancient Greek myths or classics of literature, seductive as Nabokov or Austen. But it needs to be told well and deliberately, so it can be heard, felt, and understood. And in the midst of the cacophony, a story needs good stewardship; otherwise it will get lost.
In conferences about regional food systems, in workshops around the farm bill, in donors’ meetings deciding the allocation of funds, there is a call from these places to tell the stories of farmers, ranchers, fishermen, of food systems, of food-related policies and public health. Common and ancient threads of storytelling help connect the cold, hard statistics of food-related diseases and lack of access to fresh, healthy, responsibly raised foods, to reality and to us, the people.
So speak out. Promote good work, keep informed, listen, learn to tell stories, hold a poetry workshop, publish your writings, and use the media. Stories connect us to our food. Food connects us back toward one another. It is a most delicious dynamic and nurturing relationship. Especially when home-cooked and shared.
Mariana Chilton, a professor at the Drexel University School of Public Health, is an antihunger advocate and activist profiled in the documentary films A Place at the Table and The Same Heart. She appears to have put her master’s degree in ethnography to good and practical use in the project Witnesses to Hunger, which puts cameras in the hands of people experiencing hunger. It put a human face on the statistics of hunger and food insecurity for the policymakers in Washington, D.C.
The idea behind this program, which started in Philadelphia in 2008, is that real experts on hunger are the mothers and other caregivers of young children who are in need of food and resources. The Witnesses to Hunger program asks the caregivers to use the cameras to show what is most important to them.
The photographs cannot be denied. They speak directly to the heart and humanity of the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the people we should be taking care of.
Witnesses to Hunger is a project of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities (centerforhungerfreecommunities.org).
“No social movement in history has achieved victory without significant leadership from the people most affected by the problem. There is no way we can end hunger and slash poverty in America unless low-income Americans, who have experienced the problems themselves, play a central role in the movement.”
— New York City Coalition Against Hunger
Read about the Witnesses to Hunger project in Philadelphia. Could you imagine such a project in your own community? Do you have pictures to take, words to share? Do you see others whose voices you’d like to hear? What are you a witness to? How else could you express what you witness? Moreover, how can you include the people who are most affected?
The Hunger-Free Communities Network (hungerfreecommunities.org), hosted and administered by the Alliance to End Hunger (alliancetoendhunger.org), has collected free guides and tool kits from a number of resources. Look for these as leads: “A Positive Partnership: Advice from Witnesses to Hunger on Engaging Your Community In Advocacy” (published by Drexel University for Hunger-Free Communities) and “Stepping Up to the Plate: Healthy Food Access and the Anti-Hunger Community’s Response” (published by MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger).
Howcast (howcast.com) produces short, basic instructional videos for everything from how to fix your car radiator to how to play chess to how to visit Vancouver. Its “How to Use Social Media” series explains (especially for those who didn’t grow up with it) the basics of how to use social media sites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. There are also tutorials on using Skype — from setting up an account, to determining your privacy settings, to how to do conference calls, make presentations, and set up chats.
Whether it’s for an organization you’re part of or just an organization whose aims you’d like to help promote, consider these different ways to publicize good work.
“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
— Edward R. Murrow, journalist
Cooking Up a Story (cookingupastory.com) is an online television show and blog about “organic food, sustainable agriculture, food politics, ranchers, farmers, backyard gardening, cooking, recipes, and more.” I troll this site for video stories in the series Food.Farmer.Earth and interviews like the one with the CEO of the Oregon Food Bank, Rachel Bristol. Cooking Up a Story also features talks about industrial farming, sustainable fisheries, and more by such dignitaries as Temple Grandin (author and consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior), Paul Hawken (author and environmentalist), Carlo Petrini (founder of the Slow Food movement), David Korten (author of Agenda for a New Economy), and Deborah Madison (cookbook author).
Create a Google news alert for topics, organizations, and people in the world of food whom you are interested in following. Keeping up-to-date helps inform your own storytelling. Here are few people, podcasts, organizations, and topics that I’m following now:
“I’m an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art . . . just like a graffiti artist where they beautify walls, me, I beautify lawns and parkways. I use the garden and the soil like a piece of cloth. And the plants and the trees, that’s my embellishments for that cloth. You’d be surprised what the soil can do if you let it be your canvas.”
“Stop it already. Enough.” A farmer I know was letting me have it. “Farming is hard. It sucks, frankly. And you’re making it look pretty. You need to stop.” Chastened, I listened. He was the one farming, not me. All I did was write about it, and he had a lot to say about that.
His point landed hard. He felt that I, that is, the media, “all of it,” romanticized farming. In the magazine I edited and co-own, Edible Vineyard, I did my best to take a well-rounded approach to the content. I tried to be unprecious and unpretentious yet authentic in voice. The magazine’s aesthetic was to use untouched, unfussy photography. Yet in that farmer’s view, it still created too much pretty attention, putting farmers and farming on a pedestal.
His criticism made me think: How does our food movement use language and imagery? How do the words and images best serve the issues? Do they break down or fortify existing barriers? Do they integrate values, vision, and best practices of what can be, without degrading, excluding, or simply being too precious?
Jean-François Millet’s 1857 oil painting The Gleaners sympathetically depicts peasant women harvesting crops. It romanticizes them as well, in soft light, compassionate tones. Yet the French elite of the time forbade the painting from view.
More recently, there’s the Cesar Chavez–inspired public art that adorns the walls of migrant farmworker centers and the street corners where workers wait today for their bus rides out to the fields. Have you seen the local food movement’s quintessential image? It’s a photograph of outstretched hands (calloused, dirt under the fingernails) cupping a clutch of farm-fresh blue and green chicken eggs as if they came from the House of Fabergé’s cloaca, thoroughly bejeweled and speckled with henhouse litter. (Mea culpa. I published a version of that image, too. If memory doesn’t fail me, there was even flannel involved.)
In their own way, such images uplift and reveal. Backlit by a photographer’s golden hour, they give dignity to the mostly unnoticed and the quiet, by paying homage to nature’s sublime and wonderful miracles. We do need to shed light, and the lighting is nice. But how much romance and soft focus is too much? What messages are we sending to whom? Is there a place for all of it? What do you think?
“Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful.”
— Amy Goodman, founder and host of Democracy Now!
I think radio is a beautiful medium. It floats through the air and lands without a trace except in the listener’s imagination. No mass mailings of pounds of paper that will likely end up in landfills. To me, good radio is visual. I can smell, taste, and feel it on my skin when it’s right. With no images, I get to fill them in myself, led by the storyteller’s words, sounds, and narrative. I’ve heard other radio lovers say they won’t eat crunchy foods during their favorite programs so that they won’t miss a word. I know exactly what it means to put down that chip while On the Media and Latino USA are on the air.
With its mix of voices and ambient sounds, radio — despite all the new innovations in technology and the Internet — is one of the most basic and accessible points of entry to tell the stories about your local food systems. And as Jay Allison says, “The equipment required to get broadcast quality is inexpensive and readily available, and basic recording and interviewing skills are easily mastered.”
“I want to make radio/audio for listeners . . . [to] make them look at their home in a new way or help them understand their own role in re-imagining where they live.”
— Zak Rosen, Transom.org
Elspeth Hay admits that when she started The Local Food Report on the public radio stations WCAI (Cape Cod and the Islands) and WNAN (Nantucket), she had no idea what she was doing. That was years ago. Since then she’s interviewed fishermen, farmers, teachers, cooks, and more, all from her local food community. She also writes the blog Diary of a Locavore. Here, Elspeth writes about entering the world of radio, the local food movement, and what it means to her.
When I approached Jay Allison and Viki Merrick about doing a radio show on local food, I had never held radio gear. I had no idea what ProTools was, or mixing, or levels, or fades. I knew that I was passionate about local food and encouraging people to connect to place and community through the meals on their tables, and I knew that I loved to write. Somehow, it did not occur to me that radio would be any different.
My beginning lessons were in recording. The first time I brought in audio from the farmers’ market Jay told me that it sounded like I was standing several states too far away. I understood what he meant — instead of just one farmer’s voice, I got the noises of every passing car, the slightest rustle of a shopping bag. Uncomfortable at first, I inched my mic closer and closer. I began to get over being shy about noises and feeling like I was invading people’s space, and I found that the more comfortable I got with my gear, the less anyone else seemed to notice it.
In fact, the hard part turned out not to be recording everyone else, but recording myself. When I listen to the first few shows, I cringe. Do I really talk that high, and so monotone? I’ve had to work a lot with Viki in the recording studio. She tries to get me to lower my voice, but keep my energy up — a balance that, for me, requires constant thought. One day, I came in wearing corduroys and square-toed boots, and we discovered that with my hands through the belt loops, I could almost channel John Wayne. Now I try to wear my corduroys every time I record my narration. I’ve also had to learn how to vary the way I read my sentences. I tend to read every phrase the same way, with my voice starting low and rising up and falling again at the end. Viki has me read each sentence a different way, changing my inflection several times before moving on, and it always surprises me later which ones I like best — often not what felt natural to me.
I’ve also had to work on my writing. I had assumed, having majored in writing, that this would be the easy part. But I’ve discovered that writing for radio is different from writing for print; I’ve had a hard time toning down the style and formality of my usual essays for the ear. I’ve ended up resorting to writing radio scripts from the more relaxed screen of my blog and copying them later to Word documents. Somehow, switching screens changes my frame of mind.
When we first started the show, everyone’s biggest worry was that there wouldn’t be enough material to carry us through the winter months. Happily, that is becoming more and more impossible every year. The local food movement has exploded on the Cape since we began. When we started the show, there were summer farmers’ markets only; this year, winter markets opened in Plymouth and Marstons Mills. There is a growing coalition of young farmers and more and more people focusing on the fringe foods — things such as meat and grains and beans and dairy that have been so hard to get locally. The notebook I keep taped up with newspaper clippings and e-mails and notes scribbled down from farmers’ markets and meetings gets fatter every day.
With each show, it’s exciting to see new local food connections spring up. After a show on a young college student learning to raise grass-fed chickens in hopes of reviving his family’s Truro farm, I got three e-mails from people well connected in the local food world wanting to help get him off the ground. After a show on a woman who inherited an orchard — and with it the dream of someone she’d never met — we got an e-mail from a local book group wanting to invite her to join them. They were reading The Orchard by Adele Robertson, a story about another woman’s struggle to save her family apple trees, and they wanted to hear the perspective of someone who’d done it herself. Both sides left thrilled.
Connections like these are a good reminder that it’s the local nature of the show that makes it work. I love that we can do a show on a certain kind of lettuce or tomato sold by only one vendor, and that listeners can seek it out at the farmers’ market next week. The show may be part of a national movement, but it’s the local stories that bring it home.
— By Elspeth Hay
Treat yourself. Get going by attending a storytelling workshop. Here are a few options.
Attend an eight-week residency at the Transom Story Workshop (transom.org) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to learn the art of storytelling. Students produce five original and different types of radio segments over the course.
The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies (salt.edu) in Portland, Maine, offers workshops in writing, radio, photography, and new media.
Located in Jonesborough, Tennessee, the International Storytelling Center (storytellingcenter.net) envisions and manifests the art, preservation, and performance of storytelling, to enrich the history and culture of place. Its National Storytelling Festival is a yearly event held in the fall.
Eulogies are a particular kind of story we all will be called upon to tell. One of the best I’ve heard yet was for the musician Maynard Silva given by his friend, the storyteller Susan Klein. Her words settled his memory in my heart. Though I recall no specific quotes, Maynard, the man, his memory, and his music lives on for all of us who knew him and heard Susan’s story. And now I get to tell you about him.
Listen to the podcast HowSound for insights into radio storytelling, hosted by Rob Rosenthal.
The award-winning radio producer and founder of the NPR stations WCAI/WNAN, Jay Allison, first wrote up “The Basics” of radio broadcasting in the 1980s, and another version was published in the Whole Earth Review in 1991. The 2013 update, from which this is excerpted, is available on the wonderful website Transom (transom.org). Give credit and make radio!
If you are unsatisfied with the way your public radio system portrays life as you know it, consider doing the portraying yourself. What is going on where you live? What are the important stories? Whose voices should be heard? Consider taking on the role of Citizen Storyteller, and working on a grassroots level to make public radio more truly “public.” . . .
One advantage to working in radio is that you are low-impact. When setting up interviews by phone, remind your interviewees you are not a film/TV crew. It’s just you and a tape recorder — non-intimidating. (They’ll still ask you what channel it’ll be on.)
— Excerpted with permission from Jay Allison, “The Basics”
“The key to getting good quotes from people is not making them forget you’re there, but making them interested in the fact that you’re there, making them an intimate acquaintance, if only for half an hour.”
— Bill McKibben, “The Pen Is Easier than the Mic,” Transom (transom.org)
As Julia Wierski of the Prometheus Radio Project (prometheusradio.org) has said, the “expansion of LPFM stations means that hundreds of nonprofit organizations, schools, unions, and other community groups have a unique and low-cost opportunity to develop programming to meet their local and issue-based needs.” In addition to Prometheus Radio, here are some other grassroots groups supporting community radio, with its “truly local” news:
“We used to tell long stories in poetry, and over the years the novel and film co-opted all the territory of poetry,” says poet Campbell McGrath. “But I don’t think poets have to stand for that.”
I was at the 7-11
I ate a burrito.
I drank a Slurpee.
I was tired. It was late, after work washing dishes.
The burrito was good. I had another.
I did it every day for a week.
I did it every day for a month.
To cook a burrito you tear off the plastic wrapper.
You push button #3 on the microwave.
Burritos are large, small, or medium.
Red or green chili peppers.
Beef or bean or both.
There are 7-11’s all across the nation.
On the way out I bought a quart of beer for $1.39.
I was aware of social injustice
In only the vaguest possible way.
— Reprinted with permission by Campbell McGrath, from his collection Capitalism
At Edible Vineyard, we sponsored local farmers to attend a poetry workshop and write about their livestock, especially chickens. This event was initiated by local poet Samantha Barrow and was another kind of offshoot from the humane mobile poultry-processing trailer that rolls through our farming community. Barrow was inspired by and curious about another poet (though some would say not-poet) named Nancy Luce, who lived in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, from 1814 to 1880, with her birds. Apparently quite literally. She wrote poems and eulogies about them, and today, her gravestone is decorated tenderly with all sorts of bright plastic chickens.
Everybody had something to say about poultry and our evening’s local patron saint. It wasn’t long before chicken tales started flying: stories of roosters jumping rope, inheriting chickens in strange ways, children’s experiences with the slaughter and of course, new reasons why She crossed the road.
— Samantha Barrow, poet, director of humanities in medicine at Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education, City College of New York
The farmers had a blast at the workshop. It was a perfect midwinter gathering, and local chicken stew was served, of course. In the end, we published some of the farmer-poets’ work in an article by Barrow in Edible Vineyard.
You could also organize a poetry slam or a storytelling fest focused around topics such as access (Clint Smith), cooking (Campbell McGrath), and farm animals (Howard Nemerov). Barrow offers these tips:
April has been National Poetry Month since the Academy of American Poets launched the concept in 1996. Schools and libraries, publishers and poets celebrate all month with special readings, festivals, and other events. Connect your food group, school, farmers’ organization, or food-related concern to celebrate poetry every day in April, bringing light to what T. S. Eliot called “the cruelest month.” For more, go to the American Academy of Poets (poets.org) and/or the Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org).
Submit your original poems and writings about food-related subjects to one (or more!) of these publications.
The journal Alimentum, which began in 2005 as a print publication and continues now online, is dedicated to the arts and ideas of food. Submission guidelines are found at alimentumjournal.com.
Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, a quarterly academic journal published by the University of California Press, covers wide topics from art and culture to food history and politics, long form to poetry. The issues are collectible. Follow submission guidelines online (gastronomica.org).
Edible Communities magazines are locally owned and independently published magazines specific to a locale. With any luck, you’ll find them in stacks outside your grocery store, in your public libraries, at restaurants, and supported by various other local and national businesses. (Full disclosure — as of this writing I am the co-owner of one of these, Edible Vineyard.) Edible publications focus on the growing and cooking of seasonal foods and local and regional culinary traditions and can be a resource for finding farmers’ markets, restaurants, and co-ops. For more information and inquiries, go to ediblecommunities.com.
The InsideOut Literary Arts Project (insideoutdetroit.org) places professional writers into Detroit public schools to help students write poetry and learn that they, too, are poets. In an interview on the PBS News Hour, U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey recounted her experience with the project at the Marcus Garvey Academy: “It was a sense of power that they [the students] have from being able to imagine, and to create, to name themselves, to speak for themselves.”
The school’s principal, James Hearn, had expected neither the huge popularity of the program nor the positive impacts it would have on the middle schoolers of Marcus Garvey. “Poetry really gets them truly motivated and excited. And I’m talking about my football players, my athletes, my basketball players want poetry,” Hearn said with a huge smile.
Imagine the power of such a program themed around food, cooking, memory, mealtimes, and the potential to unleash youngsters’ confidence, voice, and imagination. InsideOut has been doing this for almost 20 years in Detroit. They’ve got wisdom to share, no doubt.
— From “Young Detroiters Unlock Their Inner Poets, Claim Authorship of Their Experiences,” PBS News Hour
Clint Smith, a teacher and poet from Maryland, said in an interview with Yvonne Brown (yvonne-brown.com) that poetry provides a unique opportunity to tell the stories of those who are not given a voice. It can also give insight into our common humanity by contextualizing each of our lives relative to those around us. It’s a dynamic art form that challenges our perceptions and continually allows us to think outside of ourselves. That’s what I love most about it — it is a medium that enhances our empathy. Smith’s performance of his spoken poem, “Place Matters,” excerpted on the following page, is the best definition of what a food desert really is. You can see his live performance on the web at clintsmithiii.com.
These are my students. My warriors.
Fighting a battle against an enemy
They cannot clearly see.
These kings and queens
Meant to feast, not to fester,
But their zip code has already told them
That their life expectancies are 30 years
Shorter than the county seven miles away.
I can see the faults of my own ancestry
Shaking in their eyes.
Diabetes and high blood pressure run through the
Roots of my family tree.
Heart disease is as much a part of my history as
Shackles and segregation.
So from my father’s kidney transplant to Olivia’s asthma,
These things are more than mere coincidence.
Both grew up in places more accustomed to
Gunshots than gardens.
So tell me place doesn’t matter.
That the neighborhoods that are predominantly healthy
Aren’t the same ones that are predominantly wealthy.
Because when you’re not choosing between buying
Your medicine and your groceries,
Health doesn’t have to be a luxury.
Doesn’t have to be an abstract concept
Presented in academic journals and policy briefs.
My students overcome more every day
Than I will in my lifetime.
They are the roses that grew from the concrete.
The budding oasis in the heart of the desert
And their lives are worth far much more
Than the things that this world
Has fed them.
— Excerpted with permission from Clint Smith, the 2013 Christine D. Sarbanes Maryland Teacher of the Year
Factors that impact the average life expectancy of any of us include the public health environment in which we live, economic circumstances and forces, and gender. The delineation is stark and it cannot be denied how disparate these factors are amongst us.
— Copyright 2013. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Used with permission from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
These days, there are a lot of ways to send your letter to the world.
Build a website for your blog with tools such as Squarespace, WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogspot. Commit to updates. Include a link to your blog (or publication or radio show) on your e-mail signature. Cross-post new entries on your other social media sites, such as Facebook or Twitter.
Storify (storify.com) is a free multi-platform tool in which you can embed story elements from social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Facebook, as well as audio. The word on the street is that Storify is all the rage to use for anything from making radio to writing autobiographies.
The Public Radio Exchange (prx.org) is a dynamic and democratic wellspring and archive of radio stories. Designed for listeners, producers, and radio stations, this online marketplace allows you to publish your radio program, search for stories, connect to other publishers and stations, and download audio for your programming. Anyone can upload and license a story; any station can download one. Producers are paid through the exchange.
The two big choices these days are YouTube and Vimeo. There are lots of cute baby animal YouTubes, and not so much on Vimeo, where there’s less fluff and the videos are more narrowly niche oriented and organized, with fewer advertisers popping in and out. Vimeo also has password protections available. But if it’s purely hits you’re going for, and you’ve got a goat that can sing backup to Taylor Swift’s song “I Knew You Were Trouble,” then your YouTube video just might go viral and get over a million views.
Instagram, like Twitter, is another stream of information, only a visual one. There’s room for captions, and the filters make even the worst photographer’s picture look cool. I know this from personal experience. Hashtags (#) apply, searchable by topic and by user. Examples include #YouHaveEverythingYouNeed and #VoteFood.
Films are a great way to pique peoples’ interest, tug at their hearts, and motivate them to action. Films that might leave people feeling depressed or helpless are best followed up with a discussion about how to pitch in, how to organize, how to make effective change.
It’s relatively easy to find the producers of an independent film. Read the credits, Google them, go to their websites. They want their films seen, so they may very well come to your viewing. It helps them and you. As for the fees? You won’t know until you ask.
Microcinema is the short of the shorts. A microcinema film might be a mere 3 minutes long, so those 180 seconds have to be compelling. A microcinema theater may seat only 50 people. Like microbatch ice cream or beer, microcinema (whether it’s the film or the theater) tends to be do-it-yourself, low budget, and indie. With advances in video and film technologies and camcorders more accessible to actors, commentators, directors, editors, writers, and producers (which in this case may likely be all the same person), microcinema is a relatively new niche. These films are often distributed over the Internet, viewed in microcinema festivals, or screened in small (sometimes movable) venues. Get small. Be focused. Cut right to the bone. Search: microcinema + food and farming.
Looking to start a food film festival? Here’s advice from the founder and executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival (tmvff.org):
Here are a few short, award-winning online movies to kick off your film festival.
