Nathalie Bouffe

Florida Finally Finds Sustainable?

There is a point in every teenager’s life when the components of their growing bodies—noses, limbs, ears—lose the harmonic symmetry they displayed as children and spend some time in awkward disarray before eventually, if they’re lucky, realigning. 

The city of Miami is currently enduring its phase as a graceless teenager.   Signs of maturity can be spotted, haphazardly strewn around the city’s body, in the elegant cheekbones of the new half-billion-dollar opera house complex downtown, the debaucherous weeklong contemporary art festival that draws collectors from around the world, and the greening of several important corporate offices.  Other aspects of Miami’s coming into itself, however, lag behind.

Its upscale food scene, for instance—surprising in a city so replete with world-class hotels.  It’s hard to blame anyone; the food in Miami often serves as backdrop, just for show (in a cocaine-fueled city of supermodels, who eats?).  There’s Bed, a restaurant where the food is served, of course, in bed.  There’s the new “beautritional cuisine,” served at Afterglo, where you can buy a “Beauty Pill” made of salmon, mango and broccoli sprouts.  And now the hottest gimmick of the moment—sustainable—has finally come to town. 

South Carolina's Farmers of Something More Than Veg

“It’s like that song, you know it?”  asks Shaheed Harris, who is wearing a black Trix are for Kids T-shirt and New Balance sneakers.  “We was country before country was cool.”  His soft voice peals with laughter. 

Boy, is he right.  Shaheed’s family, the first farmers in South Carolina to become organically certified, turned back to work the land at a time when doing so was nearly unheard of, and less than recommended. 

The decision was made out of necessity more than any conscious choice.  Shaheed’s father Azeez Mustafa, who’d worked at DuPont doing assembly-line work, was laid off right before Shaheed was born.  “My job title was ‘Group II,’” he recalls.  “Back in the 70s, DuPont was the highest-paying job around.  Actually, it was the only job around.  Either you got a job at DuPont, or you went north.  Farming would no longer support a family.” 

When Azeez was laid off, the family lost their house, their car, their everything.  He built a trailer house out of a box, and the family moved into it.  They lived by lamplight, wood fires and a kerosene stove, and became strict vegetarians, often eating raw or Dumpster-salvaged food.  “Stress of mind brings expansion of mind,” says Azeez, shrugging.

Tennessee, Transgression, Bluegrass and Ribs

Todd Meade, world-traveling fiddle player, tucks into his barbecued pork with gusto.  “I grew up listening to my great-grandpa Uncle Charlie fiddle,” he says in his gentle, dimpled drawl.  “He lived to be 101, but died when I was seven, and I started playing after that.  Here, try this barbecue sauce.  I’m so glad you drink and smoke!” 

Todd began fiddling during weekly Tuesday lessons with teacher Scott Gould, and after five years had learnt nearly 200 songs—he can read music, but prefers to pick up tunes by listening.  He attended Tuesday-night jam sessions in Bristol, the alleged birthplace of country, Friday-night jams in Bluntville, and raise-the-rafters Saturday-night jams at the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons.  “Back when I was growing up, it was just me and a bunch of old men,” he reminisces.  “Now, there’s a lot more interest in roots music.”

In high school, Todd was asked to put a band together to fundraise for the National Honor Society (“I wasn’t in the honor society,” he specifies, grinning).  The band, Twin Springs, composed of classmates and relatives, was such a success that they recorded a CD.  It wasn’t long before bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, one-half of the duo often credited with inventing modern bluegrass music, came knocking.  Devotees speak of Stanley, who with his brother Carter made a series of seminal bluegrass recordings between 1949 and 1952, in hallowed tones, citing him as the best banjo picker in bluegrass music.  The Library of Congress has named Stanley a Living Legend, and he was the first recipient of the Traditional Music Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Although his brother died in 1966, Stanley, who is now in his late seventies, has continued to tour the country nearly 200 days a year for the past half-century, and appeared on the Grammy-winning soundtrack to the 2000 smash cinema hit O Brother, Where Art Thou?  Needless to say, when, shortly after Todd’s eighteenth birthday, he handed over Todd twelve CDs and said, “Learn these,” Todd hastened to. 

“The first time I played with him was in front of a thousand people and a bunch of cameras,” Todd recalls.  “I was so nervous; he’s such a legend.”  Shortly after, however, scenes like these became old hat.  “We were away for 250 days that year.  The first week I was on the job, he said, ‘Pack your bags, we’re going to California for two weeks tomorrow.’  It was my first time ever on an airplane.”  Traveling became old hat, too.  “I’ve been to every state in the continental U.S.; if I haven’t played there, I’ve driven through it.”  But he adds, wistfully, “We didn’t do much other than play, though.  I didn’t see states so much as interstates…”

Georgia's Black-Farmer Advocate and Appreciator of Ironies

The rural South has long been a tangle of contradictions and inequities.  Kindnesses and loyalties run deep; so does tension.  Old-fashioned values still preside, but they are slowly sinking into the swamps as young people flee to the cities, desperate for a living wage.  Change may happen slower down here than it does in other parts, but if the southern 20th century has seen one overarching theme, perhaps it’s been the sluggish, painful giving up: of land, of traditions, of hope.  Rural poverty is at a twenty-year peak, and black farm ownership has plummeted from 15 million acres at the turn of the century to 4 million today, from one million farmers to a minority of 50,000.  “I think things are changing,” says Amadou Diop, his lilting voice optimistic.  “The KKK still has a presence in the next town over, but now it has a black female mayor!” 

Amadou started his walk into the woods in Senegal, where he was born and raised on a small farm.  He studied agricultural science in Tunisia, then did his first master’s in animal science in Montpellier, France.  After a few years back home running the family business, he came to the Tuskeegee Institute in Alabama for a second master’s, this time in agricultural and resource economics.  Along the way, he’s picked up Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Wolof, Pular, Mandingo and Serere.  If only a few of those come in handy in the rural South, his other skills, luckily, seem to come in multiples too. 

Mississippi's Pint-Sized Potato Producers

Winston County, Mississippi sits nestled amidst an unprepossessing, flat, auburn pine-tree-lined landscape.  Its main attractions, after the Choctaw Indian mound allegedly used continuously from the time of Christ until after white contact, include the oldest continuously operated water mill in the US, still grinding corn six days a week, a private collection of antique fire engines belonging to the local industrialist made good, and a chamber of commerce built in 1851, situated on Louisville’s Main Street, which according to a local brochure, offers a “home town atmosphere, friendly faces & welcoming smiles.”

Louisville’s population of 7,000 has been dropping over the past ten years, but circulation of the local newspaper, the Winston County Journal (slogan: “What’s 113 years old but new every week?”), continues to rise.  The paper’s publisher Joseph McCain is optimistic about its future.  “Newspapers all over the country are having trouble, because young people just get their news for free, over the Internet,” he says.  “But we’re blessed with an older population that keeps growing, so our subscriptions are up!”

Arkansas' Grass-Finished, Slavok Zizek-Spouting Farmer

Ragan Sutterfield embodies all kinds of unexpected juxtapositions: semi-professional birdwatcher, poststructuralist theory enthusiast, agrarian thinker, Arkansas pig farmer.  Might there be something funky in the local water?  Ragan leases land from a Berkeley astrophysicist, a Rockefeller, and a neighbor who makes the podium speakers used at the U.N.  What’s going on in Morrilton, Arkansas?

Morrilton is emphatically not a hippie enclave in the mold of Asheville or Missoula.  The road signs are ridden with bulletholes, the trailers look like—and might contain—meth labs, illegal cock fighting abounds, and allegedly, land mines and grenades safeguard acres of marijuana in the Ozarks, not far away.  There’s only one grass-finished, Wendell-Berry-spouting meat farmer for miles around, and it’s Ragan. 

In high school, Ragan and a few of his friends used to get together on weeknights at the Waffle House and discuss philosophy; reading John Dewey inspired them to write a manifesto against education.  All of them left Arkansas after high school, but nearly all of them have or plan to come back.  “In high school I developed the communitarian ideal,” says Ragan, thinking back on the philosophical discussion group.  “But it wasn’t until college, when I started reading Berry and Wes Jackson and what they’d written about becoming native to a place, that I started considering farming.” 

Louisana's Cajun Dancers, Drinkers & Contemplators of the Stars

The music—syncopated drumbeats, a swinging fiddle, the asthmatic whine of an accordion—sounds like an echo from the darkened parking lot, a mimicry of a tinny, distant amusement-park ride.  Indeed, the recreated Cajun village through which one passes to reach the music, its eleven houses built from mud walls and hand-hewn cypress timbers, does nothing to disabuse the notion; what feels strange are the people in modern clothing, not everything else. 

Approaching the stage, the speakers begin to rumble one’s insides.  A group of unexpectedly young people onstage rock out; one saws away furiously at a fiddle, another bangs feverishly on drums.  A mild-looking kid hems and haws passionately at an accordion, his face contorted with feeling.  Music tumbles out of f-holes and voice boxes and amplifiers, cresting and crashing, waxing and waning, and the crowd responds accordingly, dancing to the bouncy tunes and musing to the ballads. 

Even a visiting writer, road-weary and alone, can’t help but be drawn in.  Night’s breezes wick off the day’s sweat, wafting at once coolness and warmth, like a whisper blown sweetly into an ear.  I spend the first few minutes standing around awkwardly, as everyone else seems to have come with friends, until it occurs to me that being a reporter is the world’s best excuse for talking to strangers, and I hasten to.

Texas Organic Mexican Jews for Jesus

“I actually like weeding,” says Noemi Alvarez, who is a week away from being fifteen.  “And nobody likes weeding.  But I don’t like picking green beans.”  Everything coming out of her mouth sounds normal, but life is nothing but for this young lady. 

This will all be very confusing unless we back up a couple decades.  Noemi’s parents, Sylvia and Miguel, are both Mexicans who came to America as teenagers.  Sylvia studied teaching in El Paso, and Miguel—well, Miguel was just a tourist, spending a few days in America when he saw some boys playing football, a sport he’d never seen before.  A few minutes after joining in, he scored a fifty-five-yard field goal.  A scout signed him nearly on the spot, and he played for the Oilers for a few years before starting a small dump-truck business in Austin. 

1n 1984 Miguel and Sylvia, having added a small boy and a baby to their assets, bought ten acres of land in Lexington, a quiet landscape of neatly tilled fields and clouds of dust stirred up by pickup trucks.  The soil was sand; the space was almost entirely wooded.  “You can grow watermelons here, some black-eyed peas maybe,” old-timers told them.  “Don’t hold your breath for much beyond.” Sylvia remembered warm milk from her grandparents’ farm in Zacatecas and home-grown honey.  She planted a little garden for the summer: tomatoes, peppers, squash.  Surprisingly, they grew.  The soil is sandy as ever, but they manage to coax a surprising abundance of produce out of it. 

Each year the view out the kitchen window changes; this is a trial-and-error family. They milked goats for a while; they raised cattle; they had a few hives of bees for mesquite honey and to pollinate the squash.  They tried raising broiler chickens, and they attempted quail and turkey.  Last year they grew grapes, which they won’t be doing again.  They made strawberry ice cream and brewed Compost Tea.  Harlequin bugs chomped on their arugula leaves; deer meandered in and munched all the broccoli; hawks swooped down and plucked off chickens (“It was beautiful to watch, actually,” says Miguel.  “Then it was like, Oh NO, my chickens!!”).  Unfazed, they reviewed their mistakes and corrected them, planting ‘trap crops’ like early arugula to distract the harlequin bugs, building taller, electric fences to keep the deer out, and stringing together an elaborate overhead spider’s web of cables beribboned with red flags to divert the hawks. 

New Mexico's Crusaders for Colonias

Las Cruces is a friendly, if fast-growing, 70,000-person town at the southern border of New Mexico, cradled between the mountains and the mesas.  If perhaps it lacks the romantic air of Taos or the turquoise tint of Santa Fe, it does boast psychedelic sunsets smeared across an infinite sky and a terrific burrito bar, the family-run Chihuahua’s on Mulberry and Solano, where the flour tortillas are doughy and light to the point of ethereal.  Most of its complacent, unassuming citizens (university-affiliated, army or retirees) would never guess that only a few miles south—and east, and also north—teem over thirty colonias, rural subdivisions inhabited by landowners, up to 18,000 in one community, who might lack potable water, wastewater systems, passable roads, or safe housing. 

The Colonias Development Council (CDC) has known this for a while.  The group has gone through as many names as it has self-conscious incarnations: beginning as the Farmworker Organizing Project (operating by means of the Catholic Social Ministries), morphing into the Colonias Organizing Project, a more radical social activist group, and finally, twenty years later, identifying as the CDC, a now stolid, methodical group most of whose nineteen members are younger than thirty.  Some of them are completing a GED, associate’s or bachelor’s degree at the same time. 

If the CDC has transmogrified over the years, the problems they attack remain much the same.  Mexican farmworkers—some legal, some not—have been living on small colonia lots in some cases for decades.  80% of them fully or partially own the land on which they live, as compared with the 64% state average.  But the parcels of land they painstakingly purchase from developers, who subdivide a sixteen-acre square into increasingly tiny bits, often lack basic amenities, easy access and septic tanks.  The real estate contract fees are exorbitant and predatory, since residents often lack a bank account or credit history and make too little money to apply for loans, and those who miss even one payment are at risk of having their property seized, nullifying years of disbursement.  The developers, for their part, claim that extortionate practices like a 15% interest rate simply “minimize risk.” 

Utah's White Mesa Willy Wonkas

“This is Hubert, our VP of sales and marketing,” says Lickity Split Chocolates CEO Andrew Dayish, of a ten-year-old boy wearing a Grim Reaper Halloween mask.  “I am not. I’m a dead guy!” retorts Hubert, before running off for another piece of cake, a cape flapping in his wake. 

All of Lickity Split’s owner-operators straddle corporate titles and Halloween costumes, paperwork and cake equally comfortably.  The fifteen children managing the tiny chocolate factory at the edges of Blanding, Utah are a boisterous mix of the rural community’s Navajo, Mormon, Mexican and Anglo populations.  Although set deeply within one of the nation’s largest and poorest counties, the only one in Utah with a Native American majority, where thirty percent of people live below the poverty line and less than 1% of the businesses are Native-owned, Lickity Split’s children, nicknamed in one article the “White Mesa Wonkas,” have sold nearly $30,000 during their three years in business.