This Feeds Me Hungry Musings of a Gastronomic Gypsy – NC-based freelance writer Victoria Bouloubasis

Photo and flyer design by Peter Eversoll.

This Sunday at Fullsteam Brewery, we’ll be thanking farmworkers at a community potluck, sharing a meal with migrant farmworkers who spent the 2012 growing season planting, tending and picking local crops– all the sweet potatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, watermelon, blueberries, apples and any other North Carolina-grown fruit or vegetable that made it from the field to your table.

This is not a fundraiser. It’s a day of food, fun and, above all, an opportunity to give thanks to the farmworkers who have provided us with a year full of fresh food. FREE. Just bring a dish to share.

Live music by farmworker band “El Cora y Sus Diamantes”
“La Lotería” (Mexican “bingo”) called by Durham luchadora La Sirenita de Tijuana.
Photography exhibit by Poder Juvenil Campesino.

Food graciously donated by community members, farmworker families and the following restaurants:
La Superior Carniceria – Super Taqueria
The Palace International
Old Havana Cafe
Piedmont
Dos Perros
Respite Cafe
International Delights

This dairy-sensitive kid can enjoy pizza again. My contribution for the DISH pizza issue: a review of three Triangle vegan pies.

Photo by Eric Waters.

The City of Durham and local food advocates are pushing for reform that will allow for more lenient rules on growing food within city limits. Last night, Durham community members gathered at 801 Gilbert St. for a public information session provided by the Durham City-County Planning Department and community group Durham Food Prosperity Council.

As agriculture spreads throughout developing and revitalized American cities, Durham is among the leaders in urban food movements. Current zoning regulations, however, restrict how food can be grown and distributed within city limits.

Read the full story at Indy Week’s Big Bite blog.

[In the photo to the right, farmhands help wash just-harvested produce at Homegrown City Farms. Under a new city proposal, urban farms could not sell on-site without obtaining a $1,700 permit. Photo by Eric Waters.]

Cinnamon rolls prepped at Bread Uprising Bakery, a community-supported baker's cooperative. Photo by D.L. Anderson.

Two years ago, the group politely declined this journalist’s request for an interview in order to focus on their mission. At the time, you happened upon them only by accident or by word of mouth. Sometimes you would bump into them in public spaces, like at last year’s NAACP Historic Thousands on Jones Street march in Raleigh, where they gave out French baguettes. Otherwise, they stayed under the public radar.

“We saw what was happening with food in Durham. It was a really trendy thing and it was moving really quickly,” Stallmann says in retrospect. “And it seemed that there were a lot of people who would read our story as like a gourmet bakery or as a sort of trendy CSA. We wanted to figure out different ways to tell the story that felt a lot more grounded, and also figure out, with the entire bread team and membership, ways and structures that made sure we kept foregrounding people of color and low-income communities that we want to be rooted in.”

Read the full story.

Farmer Foodshare is a local nonprofit dedicated to providing fresh food to families at risk for hunger through direct purchasing from farmers through the organization and community consumers. Farmer Foodshare also collaborates with other organizations to create a healthy food and economic system in the fight to eradicate poverty. North Carolina ranks among the top ten states with the highest household food insecurity rates. In an effort to highlight the issue of local hunger,  Farmer Foodshare is sharing stories of Triangle families facing food insecurity. I wrote a profile on a family in Siler City, Chatham County. Click here to read. 

Alicia Fernandez's homemade Chilean empanada. Photo by D. L. Anderson.

When Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, he made a promise to his people: “Ours will be a revolution Chilean-style, with empanadas and red wine.” His comment was interpreted as a promise of nonviolent revolution, a robust commitment to his country.

Treasured, homemade empanadas are the centerpiece of the Alicia and Antonio Fernandez’s annual Chilean Independence Day party, which they hold in their Durham backyard each September.

“We start eating the typical, traditional food—the empanada, a little bit of good, good red wine—dance, talk about football, and we remember Chile. We begin to talk about things that unify us, our Chilean roots and traditions, and that’s really nice, no? For one day out of the year, we spend a lovely afternoon.”

Read the full story here.

Chef James Naquin punctures freshly made bratwurst with a specialized tool to prevent tears in the natural casing. Photo by D. L. Anderson.

“Hold the knife like you’re about to stab somebody.”

For this Covert Kitchens piece, Guglhupf charcuterie chef James Naquin took me into the kitchen for an intense chat over bratwurst. Read the full story here.

Photo taken from Steph Stewart and the Boyfriend's Facebook page.

Sometimes, my immensely talented friends let me write their professional bios for them. While it’s not about food or farming, that’s exactly how I met Steph, of Steph Stewart and the Boyfriends. She was one of the Crop Mobbers a couple years back who I met while doing a story on the group. A few years later, we’re eating homemade chicken pot pie in her lovely dining room with her fiancee, Steven Horton. (They also met at that same Mob!) Steph’s got a beautiful talent for music, among many other things. Check out Steph Stewart and the Boyfriends on Reverb Nation and listen in. I’m partial to Coal – so moving. She also once did a live, banjo-picked rendition of The Knife’s Heartbeats that blew me away. Bio below.

Artist Bio
Rooted in memories dancing to Johnny Cash with her grandfather as a kid in North Carolina, Steph writes about place and the transient idea that is home. Personalities reflect her inspiration: the plight of a coal miner, the defiance of a cross-dressing, Victorian cowgirl, the scorned lover. Together, Steph and her boyfriends deliver a haunting sound both unique and strangely familiar, fusing old Appalachia and top-shelf Americana.

Her ethereal twang feeds an audience, easing into the gut like honey, accented by hoppy banjo picking. Other songs—the more tragic, emotional ones—unleash a piercing moan that hits harder, like a cast iron pan dropped on the kitchen floor, throttling with a resounding pulse long after the music is over.

Burlington, Mebane and 11 other towns are located in Alamance County, an area notorious for harsh immigration laws and practices.

“You coexist with people that may not understand you,” says restaurant worker and soccer player Cesar Arturo Flores Valadez. But on a day of a soccer game, he adds, “nothing bothers you. You wake up in the morning at ease, like nothing can bother you.”

Read the full article. 

Photo by Jeremy M. Lange.

Happy cows—the images of which have been popularized by clever marketing—depend on their ability to wander free in the pasture. Ethically produced burgers, steaks and cheeses are available only if these cows graze on alfalfa grass. And the alfalfa can’t sprout without the help of honeybees.

“Our life would be much less rich [without bees],” says Debbie Roos, Chatham County agent with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension. “Bees are responsible for pollinating every third bite of food we eat. Even beef and dairy are indirectly related to bee pollinations, because cows depend on alfalfa.”

Read the full story.

A typical, cloyingly sweet frozen snack at Raspados Elenita. Well worth the cavity. Photo by Sam Trull.

This week’s INDY is a DISH special issue. The theme: ice cream. I wrote about Raspados Elenita, a cool little truck serving Latin-American ices in North Durham.  Read the full story, and check out the slideshow by photographer Sam Trull.

With a flimsy plastic drinking straw pinched between his thumb and index finger, Luis Rodriguez pokes through crushed bits of ice mounded high in a Styrofoam cup. Under the draping shade of a tree, he recalls a time in Guatemala when this was his summer gig.

“As a young kid, I worked with my uncle to scrape the ice by hand so he could sell the raspados,” says Rodriguez, who now lives in Durham. “I always, always, wanted the pineapple flavor.”

In front of him, a neon-green truck beams with a looping script that reads “Raspados Elenita.” The Spanish term raspados comes from raspar, meaning “to scrape.” Popular in most Latin American countries, they are a quintessential summertime treat of shaved ice (in the modern version, ice is crushed by machine) packed into tall cups and deluged with viscous syrups. A mélange of topping options include fresh-cut mango, homemade marmalade, rainbow sprinkles, chili powder and squirts of lime juice.

Rosa Elena Ochoa prepares raspados in Durham. Photo by Sam Trull.

John T. Edge Photo by Lou Weinart

Celebrated food journalist and Southern Foodways Alliance Director John T. Edge is in town tonight to promote his new book, The Truck Food Cookbook: 150 Recipes and Ramblings from America’s Best Restaurants on Wheels. He’ll be speaking at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop, with OnlyBurger (featured in the book) parked out front and Fullsteam Brewery pulling locally-brewed pints.

“There’s nothing I can tell y’all about Durham’s scene,” he told me. “Y’all know it. You eat it.” Read my column here. 

It was, of course, a delight to interview Mr. Edge. But I was equally thrilled for the excuse to dig up one of my favorite food stories of 2011, Rapping About Tamales and Deportation,  written by Edge for the New York Times.

ON a dark, lonely street corner, a man in sunglasses leans against his car and waits.

“It’s ‘bout to go down,” he says to his cellphone, as an ember-red Chevy Monte Carlo with cattle horns on the hood pulls up. Out steps a menacing-looking fellow in ostrich skin boots and a black Stetson.

“Señor Bling,” says the man who was waiting. “The streets is fiendin’ for it.”

Up pops the car’s neon-rimmed trunk to reveal foil-wrapped packages of “it.” Bricks of marijuana? Kilos of cocaine? No, tamales plastered with the logo of the Mexican-American rapper Chingo Bling.

Tamales and masa, their cornmeal base, may not have the street cred of drugs, but Chingo Bling has tried to do for them what Tony Montana did for cocaine.

Seriously. Golden.

In all its glory. Photo by D. L. Anderson.

“We’re creating the future of Raleigh, and I kind of love that it’s being done over a Woking Machine—a fucking washing machine with a turkey fryer in it—and good drinks and good food.” – Laura White, bartender at Foundation

In an electric downtown food scene, an adrenalin-charged undercurrent — made up of line cooks, baristas, bartenders and bakers — keeps it amped up. Meet some of Raleigh’s service industry professionals as they gather around their makeshift Woking Machine.

Full story in this week’s INDY.

Peking duck for a Monday night. Photo by D. L. Anderson.

An undying love. Kim Hammer of bittycakes. Photo by D. L. Anderson.

“In Burma, I lived in a village. Life is so risky inside a Burmese village,” Pa says. “Here, we can go to any area. We are free.”

All ethnic Karen refugees at Transplanting Traditions Community Farm were farmers in their native Burma, but there they grew food primarily for their families. Here, they’re selling the fruits of their labor, grown in the stubborn clay soil that requires an extra bit of muscle. They have found a four-season climate that is often unreliable, killing the lemongrass they planted on an unseasonably warm day in February. They begin working in the fields in the late morning after working a third-shift housekeeping job and before going to English-language classes.

Read the full story and photo journal here, accompanied by 18 beautiful images by D.L. Anderson.

Photo taken by a farmworker youth in North Carolina. Courtesy of Poder Juvenil Campesino.

Last Wednesday, Human Rights Watch released a 95-page report entitled Cultivating Fear: The Vulnerability of Immigrant Farmworkers in the U.S. to Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment. Interviews were conducted with North Carolina workers, many of them minors. I wrote about it for the INDY, which you can read in detail here.

Regardless of whether farmworkers possess legal working visas or are undocumented, they represent a labor class acutely susceptible to the violation of their human and workers’ rights. Another report released earlier this year, conducted by a team of public health researchers at Wake Forest University, revealed violations in migrant housing, an area for which the North Carolina Department of Labor is responsible.

What does any of this have to do with food? Here in North Carolina, a powerful, thriving, dominant agricultural industry is tightly interwoven with and hugely dependent on migrant labor.

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