This article was originally slated as a book review. The book I was going to review, “Food Margins” by Cathy Stanton of Wendell, cried out to be moved to the Food & Farms page, however. Instead of reviewing the book, then, I interviewed the author and asked for a recipe.
“Food Margins” (University of Massachusetts Press, 240 pages $26.95) is subtitled “Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer.” It uniquely and brilliantly combines autobiography, history and analysis. It may change the way you think about and practice grocery shopping. It certainly changed the way I do.
The book chronicles the history of Quabbin Harvest, the food cooperative in Orange, which started in 2009 as a seasonal fruit-and-vegetable-purchase club. It also discusses Stanton’s own history with the co-op. She was on the board for many years and is currently the treasurer.
It places those stories within a much larger context: that of the grocery business as it has evolved in the United States.
Stanton is an anthropologist who teaches at Tufts University in Medford. She didn’t set out to work at Quabbin Harvest. She was recruited because the board of the co-op was desperate — and because she is the sort of person who wants to do good in the world.
When we spoke a couple of weeks ago, she admitted that Quabbin Harvest has always lost money, more at some times than at others. It has been sustained by enthusiastic fundraising and by the belief of people like Stanton that it matters.
The store matters in large part because it operates on the margin of the industrialized grocery system, a system Stanton describes (fortunately never with jargon) in her book.
That system relies on underpaid labor, much of it overseas, and on the model that bigger is better. Food isn’t just something that keeps humans alive today. It’s an industry.
Even large supermarket chains don’t make a lot of money on the foods they sell, Stanton posits. They make money because they sell so much food that the pennies they make on each item add up. Meanwhile, as most of us in the Pioneer Valley know, a lot of food goes to waste.
A small store like Quabbin Harvest struggles constantly. It tries to purchase as much local, high-quality food as possible. Ironically, local food can be more expensive than food raised far away because the far-away farmers often have lower labor costs and a higher volume of production.
Cathy Stanton can — and does — explain the conundrum better than I. The key, as she says in the book and told me in conversation, is “the idea of markets.”
Relying on “the market” to raise and distribute food de-emphasizes food’s role as a necessity of life and can lead to a counterintuitive system in which food is relatively affordably priced but still not available to everyone. The market doesn’t care about equity, Stanton points out.
The former Minute Tapioca Company building in Orange, now the Orange Innovation Center, is a potent symbol of the food system Stanton describes. It was in fact the original location of the co-op.
The building housed a factory that processed tapioca into instant pudding from the 1890s to the 1960s and employed many local workers … until it didn’t. Stanton tells its story with gusto and sympathy.
“It shows the trajectories of industrialized food,” she explained of the tapioca company. “You get bought by a big corporation, and they get bought by a bigger corporation, and then they move.”
I asked Cathy Stanton how she does all that she does, working hard for the store she believes in and still commuting to the eastern part of the state to teach.
She told me that she finds that her life fits together in a remarkable way.
“When I first got involved with the co-op, I compartmentalized,” she recalled, noting that she originally saw her academic life and her volunteer/personal life as distinct.
She has increasingly taught and written about food systems, however, and the two parts of her life have merged. “There’s a wonderful symbiosis between this kind of engagement and the teaching,” she noted. Her work with the co-op has helped educate the young people in her classes.
“With this generation of students, they know they have to save the world,” she elaborated. “They want to do it, but they don’t have that sort of realistic knowledge often, and they listen. I have really come to feel like these two things are linked, and that energizes me.”
She admits that she would like a little more time to spend in her garden, but she generally enjoys her complicated life. She takes inspiration from some of the colleagues — heroes, really — she mentions in the book.
One hero is Nalini Goordial, an immigrant to this country who established Quabbin Harvest’s prepared food section by producing recipes that added fabulous, sometimes unusual flavors to the store’s healthful products. The kale salad recipe below was developed by Goordial.
Another is Dean Cycon, the founder of Dean’s Beans, who has advised the co-op board over the years and who presented it with an example of operating outside the conventional food system with his fair-trade coffee company.
“He’s not afraid,” Stanton said of Cycon. “He relishes the fight. I think that’s something I have learned.”
Cathy Stanton will speak about “Food Margins” on Monday, June 10, at 6:30 p.m. at the Greenfield Public Library. Books will be available for sale at her talk.
She also has upcoming appearances at the Athol Public Library (June 26), the Montague Center Library (Aug. 21), and the Forbes Library in Northampton (Sept. 28). For more information, visit https://cathystanton.net/food-margins.
Ingredients:
4 cups fresh kale, washed, stemmed, and chopped medium-fine
1/2 cup grated carrot
1/3 cup dried cranberries or dried cherries
1/2 cup red pepper, diced in 1/2 inch pieces
1/2 cup red onion, diced in 1/2 inch pieces
1/2 cup tart apple, diced in 1/2 inch pieces
1/4 cup sunflower or pumpkin seeds
1 to 2 garlic cloves (to taste), grated or minced
at least 1/4 cup oil (canola, olive, or a mixture)
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
1 to 2 tablespoons maple syrup (or more to taste)
salt and pepper (to taste; the store uses generous amounts)
Instructions:
Toss all the ingredients together thoroughly. (Don’t mix the dressing separately and then add it to the other items; the method here makes it easier to adjust the seasonings, according to Stanton.)
Test and adjust for balance of seasonings. This is a very flexible salad, and you can easily swap in other chopped vegetables and seeds if you wish.
The measurements given for the dressing are approximate. Start with those and add more oil, cider vinegar, and/or maple syrup to taste. The kale should be completely coated but not drenched. Keeps well for several days.
Serves six to eight.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.
