tianna kennedy from catskills agrarian alliance on food sovereignty
GrowNYC workers are unionizing, Curbed follows NYC's compost to the end of the line, the Brooklyn Beer fest is this weekend, and I ask where the heck they stored all the tomatoes.
Welcome to the Knife Bloc!
This week’s edition comes to you in a slightly different format: instead of a reported local news piece, we have an interview with Tianna Kennedy, one of the co-founders of Catskills Agrarian Alliance (CAA). She spoke to me about food sovereignty, how farmers can leverage local mutual aid networks to gradually edge out exploitative monopolies, and what it’s like to go from one precarious industry (art, without generational wealth) to another (agriculture, not for real estate speculation or a tax break).
(Though, recent events would suggest that it is late capitalism that is precarious, not any particular industry.)
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this in a past newsletter, but I too hedge my financial future by going back and forth between two precarious industries: in my case, journalism and farming. Before moving to NYC (and when I went home last summer) I worked on small, mixed-vegetable, organic-ish farms during school breaks. At the start of the pandemic, I even ran my own little weekly veggie subscription box out of my childhood home. Since moving to NYC, I’ve become involved with Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project on Metro Baptist Church’s roof, which grows fresh produce for the nearby food pantry.
I ended up working on farms after a series of cosmic accidents (TL;DR: my best friend put me up to lead the wrong volunteer trip), and these experiences led me to discover the types of stories that I want to tell as a journalist, namely about labor, food systems, climate and ecological collapse etc. etc. etc. Kennedy has been talking about these issues on social media for a long time, and as a result, she has been on my list to chat with for years now.
Tianna and her farm partners / Via Catskills Agrarian Alliance
With that, I hope you enjoy today’s dispatch. Check out this edition’s links for an update on the LES Trader Joe’s union drive, Curbed follows the Smart Bin compost truck to the last stop, and “the Bush” opens in Bushwick.
INTERVIEW WITH TIANNA KENNEDY OF CATSKILLS AGRARIAN ALLIANCE
Artist Tianna Kennedy got into farming after an altercation between her and a friend’s large ram ended with a broken wrist and medical debt. Even though Kennedy had very little previous experience on farms, she managed to find a (rare) full time position on a nearby farm. She liked the work, and found it “grounding” after her time in the NYC art scene.
Today, she works with her team of partners and co-founders of the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, a multi-farm, grassroots food-hub dedicated to mutual aid and food sovereignty. CAA’s projects include the 607 CSA (a weekly or bi-weekly veggie box subscription), farm-to-institution work (supplying produce to schools and hospitals), and Star Route Farm, an agroecological farm dedicated to mutual aid.
I first heard about Kennedy’s work through a food sovereignty Discord server run by Chris Newman, a Chesapeake Bay-based rancher. In November 2022, Newman interviewed Kennedy and her team about CAA’s relatively rapid expansion, especially at the height of the pandemic. Briefly, as the pandemic ravaged supply chains, the state made significant resources available to local growers. Many used these funds to expand their operations and build out local mutual aid networks. CAA went from 17 partner farms to about 40, and its CSA maxed out at over 800 members. They’ve since scaled back to around 700 members, to more comfortably balance trucking and labor costs. Now, as the state continues to insist that the pandemic is over and these resources disappear, many mutual aid networks and food justice orgs, CAA among them, are trying to figure out how to keep their communities fed.
In recent years, the term “food sovereignty,” first used by peasants’ rights coalition La Via Campesina in Latin America, has steadily gained popularity in North America. For La Via Campesina, “food sovereignty” originally meant resisting neoliberal land reforms that threatened to displace peasants from the land they occupied and cared for. Here in the United States, the term is usually used to build on the concept of “food security,” which seeks to ensure that there is “enough” food for everyone in the community but might not be as concerned that that food is accessible to the entire community. Food sovereignty asserts that communities should have a say in how their food is distributed, preserved, packaged, harvested, and cultivated.
Food sovereignty is an attempt to acknowledge and rectify the fact that most of the existing alternatives to industrial agriculture (also called “Big Ag”) are extremely expensive and inaccessible to most people, particularly those who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, poor, elders, undocumented, and/or disabled — anyone for whom supporting their local farmer’s market or shopping at Whole Foods are simply not reliable long term options.
Kennedy and her partners at CAA are trying to figure out how organizing together, consolidating costs, and sharing profits can allow them to make more and better food available to more people — in a way that benefits the farmer, workers at all points of the supply chain, and the broader community.
Like most things, building a better food system resists sexy silver bullet solutions. More often than not, it’s in the logistics. It’s fairly compensating people for their labor and sharing profits. It’s figuring out how to make decisions and distribute profits collectively. It’s figuring out when and why to collaborate with state actors. It’s also making sure you have places to put all the tomatoes (more on that later).
There is a persistent idea in American culture — likely an extension of socio-cultural imaginaries about the intrepid pioneering homesteader — that “farming is one of the most difficult jobs in the world.” Farmers and farm workers often face brutal working conditions, crumbling infrastructure, the effects of climate change and ecological collapse, all of which make growing food a very hard job.
It’s refreshing to talk to people like Kennedy, who have the creativity to reject the notion that said difficulty is an inextricable, even virtuous, aspect of the profession. Listening to her speak, it’s easy to believe that a better way of growing food is possible. It’s easier to believe that a better way of distributing, sharing and enjoying food is possible — perhaps, even, that a better world is possible.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Chrisaleen Ciro: By the way, I just want to start by saying, I love CAA’s definition of “food sovereignty.” Particularly the one you use in your 2022 Year in Review. It’s so simple, just a single dependent clause: “a community is in control of its food.” I took a class on food sovereignty last semester and left wondering, “is this language serving us anymore?” We’ve just taken it so far out of its original context.
Tianna Kennedy: I agree — it’s complicated.
CC: Your definition gives me some hope there might still be some value in the term. Could you maybe elaborate on what food sovereignty looks like in practice at CAA, especially for anyone who might not be familiar with the term?
TK: So, this isn’t my idea, but Sheryll Durrant’s — Sheryll works with Kelly Street Gardens and has done a bunch of other projects in the Bronx for decades, she is just a real badass amazing woman. She talks about the difference between “emergency food relief,” which is what we were all doing during the pandemic and what kick started many of these sorts of mutual aid projects, and “food sovereignty.” In her mind, education is the key component. People need to be in control of their local means of production. Otherwise, the faucet can get turned off, as we saw with the USDA food box program.
This is why we’re trying to take a holistic approach and have land access be part of our project — so that we aren’t dependent on some outside force to decide when the community is done needing support. If we create opportunities for communities to be involved in their own food system, then that's food sovereignty. But that’s just really hard, when, especially in the City, communities don't have control over their own land. As you know, urban communities may get access to public lands in one way or another, but it's always really insecure.
CC: Absolutely. Alright, so, could you give us an overview of your tomato sauce program (last year, CAA partnered with 12 school districts to replace the tomato sauce used in cafeteria lunches with one made using locally sourced ingredients) and maybe elaborate a bit on how farm-to-institution work fits into CAA’s model?
TK: Yeah, so that was our first experiment with farm-to-institution work and using these state grants. We contracted some of our partner farms to grow tomatoes for school lunches, like 11,000 pounds, and then basil, and garlic, and other ingredients. Then we worked with SUNY Delhi’s culinary program and their students to prep the ingredients and develop a couple of different recipes from the ingredients, then we did a taste test at some local schools.
The kids unanimously chose one of the recipes, and so now we're in production. This year we'll be replacing 12 school districts’ [about 27 schools] tomato sauce with all locally grown and produced tomato sauce.
The money from the state helps kind of subsidize the difference between what the farmers needed and what the schools could afford. And it also covers a lot of the distribution and recipe development — staff time and all of that.
But none of that money came through when we got the grant last May. We didn’t get the money before the project started. So we had to pay everybody we had already contracted, especially the farmers to grow the food, because they already had the tomatoes in the ground. So we ended up having to like, pay out of pocket for all this and then we were really screwed this winter. We worked on starvation wages all winter because we had paid for all these tomatoes.
We finally got the grant a couple of weeks ago, and now we're finally getting reimbursed. So it’s a happy story. This is the first time we’ve really worked with institutions at this scale, so I didn't anticipate it being all that great. But all of our project partners bent over backwards to try to get us a little money to help cover the costs and everybody has just been volunteering their time, so it was a great first effort.
I don't know how sustainable it is because we were definitely maxing out our storage in the various schools. So it was a good experiment about, like, what our capacity is, and what we feasibly can do.
CC: I remember when you told this story at the event last year — I felt silly because all I could think about was: “Wait, where are they storing all those tomatoes?”
TK: Just like oh my gosh, like stashing freezers all over the place. And we also had to get a bunch of U-Haul trucks to move the tomatoes because our van was too small. We were just like, “Wow, 11,000 pounds of tomatoes is a lot of tomatoes!”
It was like just weeks of pallet after pallet. But we did it. We were able to stagger it a bit, so luckily it wasn't all at once, but it was a couple of months of processing.
CC: Well, even that demonstrates like one of the chronic issues of our food system — even though we live in a climate where we know tomatoes are only available for a certain amount of time, we still expect them year round.
TK: It was intense. Lesson learned — don’t do anything until you have the money in the bank.
CC: Could you talk more about the role that mutual aid plays in your model?
TK: Yeah. We’ve been doing mutual aid since 2020, so for a couple years now. It's shifted over time based on who has money when, but the general idea is, we send our wholesale list out to clients, including restaurants and vendors, but we prioritize our mutual aid groups so they can order whatever is most relevant or interesting.
We worked with them to figure out a weekly budget, we fund raise, they fund raise, and then they order and we just treat it like a wholesale account. But then, when we ran out of money last year, and then some of those groups managed to fundraise their own money so then they would just purchase the food at a wholesale cost, which was great. So for years we were donating and then they were buying from us when we needed help. In a way, you know, that kind of reciprocity is really great, too.
CC: Yeah, it is truly “mutual.”
TK: Yeah!
CC: CAA, specifically Star Route farm, works primarily with mutual aid groups in Brooklyn (East Brooklyn Mutual Aid, Wat Buddha Thai Thavorn Vanaram, Comida Pal Pueblo, Bushwick Emergency Relief Fund, Nuestra Mesa BK). Why does Star Route prioritize culturally relevant foods?
TK: The groups we work with in Bushwick are primarily Latino, but then there's also a large Asian community there, too. We've been working with them to grow whatever they want and when. So because our Star Route is primarily a mutual aid farm at this point, we're just like, “what do you guys want to grow,” according to people's budget, which I thought was gonna be super diverse, but you know, as it ends up being familiar things like garlic and cabbage.
But yeah — tell everybody to sign up for the CSA and to donate to our mutual aid. It helps us subsidize our distribution costs, especially now that trucking is so expensive.
ENJOY A BALANCED [MEDIA] DIET
The results from the April 19/20 LES Trader Joe’s union election are in: and sadly, they lost by one vote, in a tie, 76-76. On the same day, workers at an Oakland, CA Trader Joe’s voted 73-53 to unionize. The full statement is linked blow:
The Times reports that GrowNYC workers, the labor behind the City’s farmers markets, are trying to unionize. They cite long and irregular hours, limited benefits, low wages, and a lack of concern for workers’ safety, as their reasons for unionizing.
Hell Gate reports on the over-policing of an unregulated market in Sunset Park.
Not explicitly food related, but if you somehow missed the drama at the Rent Guidelines Board Hearing, read read all about here. Tenants took over the meeting, protesting proposed rent increases in rent stabilized apartments.
Eater visits a self-described “Dyke Bar for Queers” that opened in Bushwick last month.
Curbed follows the Smart Bin compost truck to its last stop. For more about the political economy of NYC’s waste, read this beautiful photo essay in the Village Voice from a while back about the City’s waste picking community.
All the Cool People™ are talking about this drama brewing in the olive oil industry, which started, of all places LinkedIn.
Finally, the most important news of all: Will Poulter loves to cook. This profile in the Cut, which partially takes place in a cooking class taught by an Eritrean refugee named Helen, is a pure delight.
FOOD JUSTICE EVENTS IN NYC
The Bronx Night Market starts May 27.
This is hardly food justice oriented, but honestly, the Brooklyn Craft Beer Fest this weekend looks like fun. If nothing else, it will be good people watching.
Visit Brooklyn Grange’s first open house May 21 — there will be a plant sale, tours, free compost drop off, a kid-friendly natural dye workshop, and an opportunity to grab some early season veggies!
If all else fails, check out this Gothamist round up of free events you can do in the City.