Eat Mendocino Revisited
Ten Years Later, a New Take on an Old Challenge
by Gowan Batist
In Fall 2012, before Fortunate Farm was born, I was managing a farm-to-school program on the coast. (Noyo Food Forest is still going strong, bringing education and local food to teens and the wider community.)
I was preoccupied with the issues that I saw with the gentrification of local food, and its growing inaccessibility, versus the ethic that I had grown up being taught by my grandparents. Children of the Great Depression, they would literally buy bags of dented cans and roll the botulism dice, while growing, foraging, and fishing the most amazing local food. I was raised on a mix of the worst industrial discards and the best fresh homegrown produce. But back then, what both staples had in common was that they were affordable.
I was watching local food become fashionable, and therefore inaccessible. I knew that my vision of local food in Mendocino County was not a puff of microgreens on a salad served to a tourist. I loved the artistry and appreciated the financial importance of such products, but I wanted our local food to stick to our ribs, too.
I had always known that the homesteader ideal of self sufficiency was colonial propaganda, and that agricultural communities have always, when they have been anything, been deeply interdependent. I had been away from my home for years going to college, returning in 2011 to farm. I remembered the tight knit farming community of my youth, but I didn’t know the new faces and systems.
I was young and full of hubris and determination, and I decided that I would find where the safety net was by throwing myself into it. I wanted to understand with my body what we as an agricultural community could do, and what I could do with my relatively abundant free time and very low budget. I decided to spend a calendar year, January to January, eating and drinking only from the foodshed of Mendocino County. Oils, grains, spices, sweeteners—everything. This meant giving up coffee. The resultant coffee hangover was so bad that I have never gone back to it. My point was not to scold anyone about their own diets, or even to promote local food necessarily, but to offer myself as an experiment and a canary in our collective mine. I wanted to celebrate our strengths and truly feel our shortcomings, uninsulated by the anonymous food I would otherwise buy to fill the gap.
Eat Mendocino was given its name by my friend Sarah. I was picking up her lemon tree from her chilly Mendocino deck so it could spend the winter in my greenhouse. She asked if I was still going to do my local food project. I said yeah, I was. She casually decided to join me. That decision, made as we heaved her potted lemon tree into the back of my ’95 Dodge Dakota, has largely defined the last decade of my life.
In Fall 2012, I was stocking my pantry and freezer. I was picking the last clinging tomatoes on the brown vines and splitting them in half for my dehydrator, the old Excalibur that I’m still using now. I was canning in a water bath canner in the shade house at the farm, because it wouldn’t fit on my tiny home stove and took up too much kitchen territory in my shared rental.
I am doing all the things that I’ve been doing since 2012, now, in Fall 2022. Yesterday we packed a dozen quarts of tomatoes away, the days before two dozen of salsa, the weeks before pickles, and gallons of pressed cider and leaching acorns are sitting in my cooler. Sarah’s old lemon tree is alive and well, its lemon juice and zest are tucked on a shelf in my big freezer.
I always knew that I wanted to repeat the project ten years later. The change in the county’s agricultural infrastructure in the last decade has been immense. We have had many new farms open and some close. We have lost beloved elders, and beginners have become mentors. We have tools and resources that I did not have when I prepared for this project ten years ago. We now have Sarah’s project, the non-profit Good Farm Fund, which she was inspired to co-create to build capacity for local farmers after her experience with Eat Mendocino. We have a greatly expanded Farmers Market Association, with EBT matching funds. We have the School of Adaptive Agriculture, our own local wool mill, and very significantly to me, we have the MendoLake Food Hub. The Hub is a non-profit that aggregates distribution for local food through a website, strategically placed coolers, and a truck route. They have been essential during the pandemic for getting food to people who need it and have expanded to home delivery and the general public rather than solely being available for sales to institutions like restaurants and grocery stores. We have sent probably tens of thousands of pounds of food and flowers all over the county and beyond, even as far as San Francisco, via the Hub network over the years.
Our farm on the coast hosts one of the distribution nodes for the Hub. This is just a big cooler, but what forms around it is the capacity-building that makes farming work for many of us. Twice per week, trucks pick up and drop off in the cooler. Farmer friends bring their products, restaurant owners pull up to pick up, and many, many vehicles are kept off the road by consolidating the transportation of the best of the coast farms to inland, and the best of the inland farms to the coast. Our farm stand serves as a coastal retail site for the collaborative nature of this project; we are proud to offer our partner farms’ peppers and melons alongside our cool climate crops. I love getting to say hi to farmer and restaurateur friends coming and going from our place to pick up and drop off.
What this has meant for me in the last season is seeing boxes, filled by my friends’ hands with the words “Eat Mendocino” written across them, showing up in the node. Ten years ago this time, I had to seek everything out, and we drove hundreds of miles in search of ways to fill the jars in the pantries beyond what I could set aside for myself on the small farm I was tending. Now it gets delivered to my farm, which is a good thing. I have more responsibilities than I did in my early twenties, less free time, and gas is much more expensive—but a bunch of kale is still $3. The fact that I consider the practical implications of my big philosophical leaps of faith now is also evidence that I’m ten years older.
As I prepare, I’m not replacing my non-local pantry items when they run out, I’ve weaned myself off of caffeinated tea, and I’m double-stocking my kitchen, body, and mind. The work that is solely subsisting off of local food that needs to be gathered, harvested, prepared, stored, fermented and dried, frozen and thawed, and plucked and cooked is immense. I have a community around me that helps lift the load and offers their expertise and loaned equipment, unpicked apple trees, and grandma recipes.
Doing a project like this now is fundamentally different than it was ten years ago in a social sense. Demographically, farmers in their twenties have been rising in recent years, but in their thirties they sharply fall off. There are many reasons for this. An abusive system of agriculture nationally that pits idealistic small farmers against the low commodity prices made possible by oppression of workers and corporate subsidies on industrial farms is one very good reason. Many of us start as interns who deeply believe and are willing to work for little or nothing and sleep anywhere, but who, after hopping from farm to farm as an intern without any possibilities for longer term better paying work, become disillusioned. Many of us get injured, or need dental work, or have one major disaster like a county fine for a hoop house, or a broken tractor, or a fire, or just fall in love and realize they would like to work less than 80 hours per week while caring for children.
I’m now in my thirties and I’m part of this trend, to an extent. The pandemic’s financial impact on our farm requires off-farm income; on-going complications from old injuries in my hands make repetitive tasks like planting, weeding, harvesting, and bunching impossible for long stretches of time; and elder care responsibilities mean that I am farming less now than I ever have before in my career. “Just” two acres of mixed pumpkins, squash, flowers, and my sheep flock. There are many other exciting things happening at Fortunate Farm, but not managed by me.
The first seeds I planted on this farm, which we purchased in 2013, during the year I first did Eat Mendocino, were a blue Hubbard type pumpkin called Sweet Homestead. They were recommended by the old farmer who had lived here before us. This year’s pumpkins are curing in the field now and were the first seeds I planted this season, too. That’s unusual. Typically there would be a whole round of cold season greens and roots. The first season I was still farming at Noyo Food Forest, and was just getting started in our farming at Fortunate and needed to plant something simple and sturdy that could stand having my attention split. This season I was caring for my mother and needed to plant something simple and sturdy, too. The crops we turn to when times are hard and when times are full and hectic are the ones that mean the most to me. They have our backs when we need it, in celebration and in grief.
Only some of the folks who started farming in Mendocino around the same time I did are still farming now, and I see in them the combination of grit, luck, smarts, and resources that it takes to make that long haul. I feel every day of my ten years since Fall 2012, most of them spent doing hard labor. When we were young, we wrote some big checks with our hopes and dreams that we have cashed with our sore bodies and our lost sleep. I made some big, audacious statements about the world I wanted to see this time ten years ago, at 24. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I was a kid with just enough information and skills to get into trouble with.
I am not the same person that I was then, but I made a big, ridiculous promise publicly to do this local food project, and I made that promise come true. I also said I would do it again in ten years, when I had my own farm. I am now going to make that come true, too. Preserving local food now, in the peak of the fall season, is a love letter to the future days that are short and cold. Fulfilling oaths made when I was younger is a love letter to the past and the days that were new and full.
If you’d like to follow along, Eat Mendocino will be active on social media, and I’ll be sharing exclusive writing on my Patreon: patreon.com/GowanBatist.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.