A walk on the wild side with a few fries and Dick’s burgers thrown in

That cute rabbit that was sacrificed outside one of Spokane’s premiere eateries is one of the reasons I appreciate my status as storyteller. It was a gem of a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) story as the bunny went limp under the female author’s avocado green Birkenstock.

The entire episode of taking that rabbit and giving it a quick death so some Spokane foodies could get on with their $40-a-ticket gig was classic foodie lore-making. Here were these 30 people waiting to learn the tricks of skinning, cleaning and butchering their own rabbits. The out of town celebrity author, Novella Carpenter, needed rabbits still encased in their hides so the foodies could learn, step-by-step, how to “gut it” out, so to speak, with the whole animal in their grips.

Though not always including a tearjerker death of a rabbit, these are typical scenes of the slow food/sustainable food/organic cooking culture Spokane has been gestating for more than a decade. With entire classes on how to prep and cut up that whole organic free-range chicken, or on-site workshops focused around building and maintaining backyard egg-laying hen coops or urban bee hives, these are the signs of changing times.

Back to the Future?

Much of this interest in cooking, growing, prepping and establishing self-sufficiency comes from rampant globalization and the thought of fuel prices going out the roof, along with the food that is the by-product of that fossil goo. Our food and what Wall Street hucksters call “commodities” are so expensive now to both the average person living in developing countries and the poor people in this society that it has taken on this inflated value – worth its weight in gold. Yet, hunger is such a growing social problem, one that upsets all kinds of security issues, internally here in the U.S. and outside, that food will be the topic of the next decade or two—or from hereon out, according to experts in food, famine, hunger, drought and resource “wars.” Put the strains and stresses of climate change in the mix, and, well, food is the defining issue of our age.

The food bills of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) increased five- or six-fold between 1992 and 2008. Imports now account for around 25 percent of their current food consumption. These countries are caught in a vicious cycle. The more they are told to rely on trade, the less they invest in domestic agriculture. And the less they support their own farmers, the more they have to rely on trade. This is according to Duncan Green, Head of Research for Oxfam GB and author of From Poverty to Power.

That local class covering  “everything rabbit” was put on by the Main Market and hosted by Jeremy Hansen, chef-owner of Santé. This continuing education course (and so many others) speaks volumes on where Spokane and other small and not-so-small cities have been going with this theme of a community food culture.

Food culture means knowing the farmer who grew or produced the food. Food culture is the concept of fighting hunger, which in the past three years in the U.S. has skyrocketed. Food culture isn’t just a Sunset Magazine story or Julia Child book.

Bad eating and hunger tie into what many in the organic food and locavore movements want to shape into state and national policy, ramified by First Lady Michelle Obama’s edicts to have this country eat better. Spokane’s Second Harvest has seen demand for emergency food double in the past 20 months. People are showing up who had never been in line for food bags – people with college education and degrees.

Melissa Cloninger, director of community and corporate relations for Second Harvest, sees food security in our community and throughout the country as the underpinning of any definition of food culture. Young people need to know how to eat healthy, she insists, and Second Harvest is helping inculcate the art of backyard gardening. Food culture for her and others in Spokane is promoting community-based gardening, which should be good news to Pat Muntz, a Spokane master gardener and community outreach specialist with Spokane County, who helps Spokane develop community gardens and systems of distribution.

The reality is food culture as a single overall concept or definition is impossible to codify in this multicultural society where the roots of growing and cooking are lost arts, and as we’ve become more and more a world dominated by scientists at corporations who are using recombinant genetic technology and other bio-technological processes to “change the very nature of nature.” This is accomplished by doing such things as genetically altering salmon with the genes of a freshwater bass species or putting mold (poisons) into the DNA germ plasm of corn, soy, wheat and cotton to withstand regular drenchings of Roundup Ready pesticide.

Despite huge pressures from international business interests, under the weight of homogenization, and under the principle of pushing out small farmers from national farm policy decision-making, Spokane’s food culture includes folk like Lazy R Ranch’s Maurice Robinette, the non-profit Washington Sustainable Food and Farming Network, and some faculty at WSU who are taking on the Goliaths of the agro-seed bio-tech industries.

The roots of small farm principles and civil society’s push for social justice when it comes to the “right to food” and food culture are rippling throughout Spokane, the state and the globe. On any given day in Seattle, a person could be hearing the principles of food justice explored in-person with people like Michael Ableman, expert in bio-intensive agriculture (On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm), or Anna Lappe, author of Diet for a Green Planet, or even “vegan punk” author Sarah Kramer (La Dolce Vegan). In fact, those three superstars and others have just recently shown up in Spokane to help realign what it means to germinate and grow a food sense or food culture.

Changing City Codes for Nigerian Pigmy Goats, Guerrilla Gardens, Egg Layers

What is this concept of a “food culture” author Novella Carpenter was trying to express at Santé when she was showing locavores and other foodies the ins and outs of raising not just massive amounts produce in a confined back yard space, but how to tend animals and then use them in their recipes?

Her book, Farm City, covers her eight years of “gardening” in the broadest sense of the term: taking over a vacant lot in West Oakland called Ghost Town Farm, and turning it into a farm with vegetables, goats, rabbits and, invariably, a pig or two.

For Carpenter, Sante’s Hansen and many other area food experts, growers, chefs and consumers, a food culture means many things, from low-on-the-food-chain healthy eating using fresh whole foods grown without the use of pesticides, to a multiple-course and gourmand-titillating explosion of foods like cured meats, chocolate-infused cheeses and fresh-from-the-land fungi, veggies, legumes, herbs and fruits prepared at any number of quaint-looking places.

The future of Novella’s Ghost Town Farm is now in question, especially during this day and age of corporate control of our food. Oakland city officials hinted the farm might have to close for this hypocritical reason: Carpenter sells too much produce to be deemed a family garden and will need a costly permit to continue. “It seems ridiculous,” she says. “I need a conditional use permit to sell chard?”

Spokane municipal codes allow four beehives, four hens, unlimited front and backyard “hobby” farms/gardens on average private city lots.

Old School – Know Your Local Meat and Veggies/ New School – Lower Your Footprint

One of the reasons Hansen came back to Spokane after schooling at Le Cordon Bleu—formerly Portland’s Western Culinary Institute—and work in various locations, including Portland, Seattle and New York, was “to give something back to my community . . . engage in changing the culture to a healthy, sustainable eating mindset . . . and promoting knowledge on how to buy food and cook it right.”

What’s evolved in his case is a farmer-to-chef connection that enables Hansen and his staff to take heirloom products, including an entire pig, and turn them into tasty foods that have the added value of supporting local economies and, in one slight sense, lowering the carbon footprint by guaranteeing the beef and pork come from a 150-mile radius around Spokane. The goal is to cook seasonally, what the area and the seasons can provide. It’s a tough row to hoe in the Inland Northwest.

He also wanted to “flip around” his own working class roots and make good classy food for what he and others see as a quintessential Spokane palate and belly, which are all “gummed up” by fast-food sewage.

That is another food culture delineation, in a sense:  the “fast-food nation” with its automobile-addicted distracted citizens looking for more convenient, cheap and easily gulped-down food. The salt, sugar and fat extracts and those multi-hyphenated chemicals listed on the sides of packages developed in flavor and texture labs and food factories have created an entire generation of consumers, rather than diners.

The reality is that all those people supporting the Spokane Farmer’s Market, the Community Supported Agriculture boxes from Fresh Abundance, or all those vegan choices at Huckleberry’s Market, make up just a small niche, a fraction of America’s food culture.

Many readers probably have seen the movie, Supersize Me, but the more informative source, Fast Food Nation, a book written by Eric Schlosser, speaks of the American diet as a turbo-charged assembly-line kind of inspired trip through a horror movie set. We spend more on fast food in the U.S. than we do on higher education, personal computers and new cars; more on those Happy Meals than the combined purchases of magazines, newspapers, videos and recorded music.

There’s no getting around it – the health-inspired, small farm-sourced, organic-grown, carbon footprint lowering diets that some in the new food culture in Spokane subscribe to are only a micro-slice of the food culture pie in the U.S. Yet, it’s becoming a popular game in town, in terms of turning around obesity, cutting the high rates of diabetes and preventing all the ailments, including cancer and heart disease, linked to this “modern” assembly-line diet.

As Schlosser states in the book: “What people eat (or don’t eat) has always been determined by a complex interplay of social, economic and technological forces. The early Roman Republic was fed by its citizen-farmers; the Roman Empire, by its slaves. A nation’s diet can be more revealing than its art or literature. On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant. During a relatively brief period of time, the fast food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce and popular culture. Fast food and its consequences have become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a day, try to avoid it or have never taken a single bite.”

Succulent Sustainability

In his early days, three years ago, when the restaurant was struggling to get the big numbers of diners in, Hansen and I collaborated on ideas about sustainability, organic foods, the value of vegetarian and vegan menus even in a place that is known for pâtés (charcuterie is Santé’s specialty), Lapin Au Vin and Duck Confit (with a vegan option like Lentil Du Puy). We talked about the role of a small restaurant like Santé in advancing the state of food literacy in Spokane. What can one inspired chef-owner do to make a mark in Spokane’s addiction to that double-patty, triple-cheese-encrusted, bacon-wrapped burger?

His philosophy is to make sure the food he sources is tied to the farms and ranches, like Rocky Ridge, that help get the raw ingredients to his kitchen, so that culture of food is tied to community building. Hansen’s idea of sustainability dovetails with other folks’ definition of food culture.

Jennifer Hall, formerly the Main Market’s community food builder, takes her hospital administration background from Cornell University and applies that to her community development sense to harness the power of Spokane’s and the state’s food culture. She believes in the value of farmer-fisher-chef-restaurant connections, having worked with various organizations looking to strengthen local economies with sustainable harvesting and farming.

For Hansen and Hall, under their own separate operating modes, food culture is about recapturing taste and looking for the old ways of producing anything. It could be white currants with ancient leafy sun flavors, or those Rocky Ridge farm Berkshire pigs that help him replicate the textures and smoky tastes of old European hams.

This blending of environmental, slow food, old school philosophies helps to define a food culture that is quasi-prudent in that the food is about keeping it local, using every bit, piece, slippery thing from the beast, and then making sure that the food is orgasmic and organic, or thereabouts.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Hall, working with her on a variety of community events, as well as thumping for her in my published news pieces and radio shows for some of her own Spokane River Slow Food-inspired events. Hall’s been a part of making connections to soil, farmer, enterprising producers and processors, chefs and people in academia and non-profits to develop a food culture tied to the umbrella ethos called sustainability.

The Spokane food culture includes collaborations with WSU’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, and propelling deep activism tied to supporting rural economies and enterprising food growers and producers coming up with the delicious beginnings of these meals made at places like Mizuna.

If we were to plumb Hall’s brain over a meal, say, prepared by Bon Appetité chefs in the middle of a Reardan field of no-till wheat—which I did with her and dozens of others as part of a Food in the Middle event put on by Shepherd’s Grain and Stone Buhr Flour Company a few years ago—we’d see Hall’s approach to food and culture is more than holistic and synergistic: it’s spiritual, family-binding and ecologically-centered. More important, acculturating food means enjoying straightforward delicacies as well as benefiting from mental and physical healing powers food and food growing generate.

Many of the food innovators in Spokane—like David Blaine of Latah Bistro, the women who started Mizuna, Keith and Janice Raschko, owners of the now closed One World Spokane Café; Pete Tobin, culinary arts instructor at Spokane Community College, and many, many others—look at the eviscerated traditions and lost arts of both cooking and cultivation as proof of a nation in decline, or one hooked on fast-food, quick and easy high fat, salt and sugar processed meals and fewer hours in a given week spent with people sharing meals, something also known as “breaking bread.”

Hall knows the alternative to a health-inspired food culture. Bright Spirit, of Fresh Abundance, gets what the consequences might be if food culture is scripted and dictated by fast-food marketers. Hansen sees it daily with customers at his restaurant who offer effusive compliments on his style of cooking. Countless others in the food culture building movement – environmentalists, those in the medical profession, and regular business folk and students of every stripe – face almost daily the reality of a broken food culture or food system.

We spend $167 billion a year to treat obesity-related health problems. Another $116 billion in health care goes toward treating diabetes, and hundreds of billions a year are plopped down to deal with cardiovascular disease and a myriad of cancers, all linked clearly to our Western food culture.

“But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform,” says author Michael Pollan (Botany of Desire). “To put it bluntly the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high fructose corn syrup.”

Spokane’s new food culture adherents and cultural innovators are trying to put some real teeth into farm policy reform, fighting the bad food marketing of those deadly food purveyors, and changing how school lunches are served and what’s in them. Like Pollan and the rest in the movement, it’s about diversifying local economies, creating regional food policies and tamping down an out-of-control globalized food system that has put many people at both ends of the proverbial economic ladder in harm’s way.

“It’s got to taste good and be something diners look forward to understanding,” says Hansen, “and, I think we need to make sure that food is something people do not take for granted. We have to make eating both good for the economy and good tasting; something people can go away from knowing they are part of a bigger picture of this food culture.”

Paul K. Haeder worked in Spokane as a community college instructor and journalist  for over 10 years.