Food and Farming Themes in Four Seasons on My Family Farm by David Mas Masumoto

“Dinner unites us all” Marion Nestle states in her introductory comments to Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (p. 7).  The origins of all those dinners, the access to enough food for dinner, the nutritional quality, and what consists of dinner differs from place to place and family to family.  Food serves as a basic requirement of life, and can also be a metaphor and actual feature for nourishing community-building and identity-building. David Mas Masumoto’s book, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on my Family Farm works as a multi-cropping of stories about practicing ecological citizenship, honoring and learning from community and family history, and explaining what it is like to be a less-valued part of food regimes and food systems. I briefly will cover each one of these themes to get at the blending of identity, social awareness, and the struggles of a farm and farmer to transform toward more ecologically responsible methods during the four season timeframe of the book (pertinent to this seasonal shift in which we now find ourselves).

Before getting to those themes, Masumoto (1995) presents several less-often considered ideas in the course of his book. I will move from thought-to-thought here in a rapid non-sequitur fashion. For example, in many cases, the farming year begins in autumn not spring. Food, a fruit, can become “obsolete,” when it does not meet the shelf life or outward aesthetics set by food brokers and marketers (such as his Sun Crest peaches). Being an organic farmer takes resources, money and the security to gamble.  Farmers can identify, rather than be at odds, with farmworkers, especially when that farmer has experienced racialized discrimination or when that farmer reflects on having a history of family and community oppression. Ecological citizenship consists of a journey of learning that requires rethinking some very taken-for-granted notions, such as changing the definition of weeds as the perfect process for ridding your fields of weeds, for suddenly those plants are no longer classified as weeds (p. 31).   Additionally, this book made me think about how farmers, farmworkers, and gardeners across the world hold commonalities and knowledge that can help bridge social gaps.  This is evident in the commonalities drawn between the Wisconsin farming of Marcy, Masumoto’s wife, and his own family of origin.

Masumoto works a family farm that was passed down to him from his father (a shorter generational history of a family farm because state Alien Land Laws prevented first generation Japanese in the U.S. to own land).  That farm provides a home place as well as a workplace though the farm is not the main source of income for the Masumoto family at the time of the book’s publication.  Masumoto is an environmentalist who [tries to] work for a living (White, 1996). Remembering and honoring those that came before him occurs in the book and on the farm, as well. “Bad timing and the wrong face.” (p. 107) His family, experienced incarceration at Gila River Internment Camp during World War II, and one family member died while in the U.S military. He writes, “As I dream and plan to make the farm my own, I have inherited this family history as my legacy, part of the baggage that comes with my land.  After hearing these stories, I can’t help but be aware of them each year and each season.  They have become part of the farm landscape.” (p. 109).  This family social history lives on the farm alongside the ecological inhabitants.

A farmer, especially an organic farmer, pays close attention to all the living neighbors of many kinds that have positive and negative impacts on his grapes and peaches and other crops.  Masumoto honestly recounts how he learns to adjust to this new approach of handling and interacting organically with the land, plants, insects, and animals, at times not living perfectly to the organic standard.  He adopts an attitude of learning and a view to “accumulate impressions” that bodes well for ecological citizenship (p. 37). By ecological citizenship, I am referring to ways of viewing belonging to a place and to the world at large in a responsible way, accounting for both the big and small other-than human beings and inorganic matter as well.  The connections to those life forms and life-supporting forms are recognized, formed, and cultivated.  It is very much the precautionary principle of doing the least harm, but in a way that still is productive. A crop is planned, tended, grown, harvested and sold (ideally) all in concert with a “chaotic” (in contrast to some styles of farming) and dynamic ecology and up against a powerful attitude that not being able to exert control means one has failed (p.64). Excerpts from the book exemplify this approach.

In the section, “As if the Farmer Died,” Masumoto (1995) writes,

I use to farm with a strategy of un-chaos.  I was looking for regularity, less variability. Ignoring the uniqueness of each farm year. But now…wildness is tolerated, even promoted. The farm becomes a test of the unconventional, a continuous experiment, a journey of adaptation and living with change.  I’ve even had to change my ways of counting. It’s no longer important how many pests I have, what matters is the ratio between good bugs and bad bugs.  I try to rely less and less on controlling nature. Instead, I am learning to live with its chaos. (p. 37)

This then opens up a whole new world that has always been around him, but that he suddenly has the time and lens to see as indicated in the following excerpts:

I’m trying to listen to my farm. Before, I had no reason to hear the sounds of nature. The sole strategy of conventional farming seems to be dominance. Now, with each passing week, I venture into fields full of life and change, clinging to a belief in my work and a hope that it’s working.

As I recall the past spring from my porch, the ringing of the furin [Masumoto describes this as a particular bell chime with a long flowing paper ribbon attached] helps me understand as it flutters in a subtle breeze.  For the first time in my life, I see the wind. (p. 66)

I read of a Japanese wood craftsman who spoke about freeing the soul of a tree. Like a sculptor, I too labor to free that soul.  But the souls of my trees and vines are alive and they respond to my actions. I live with them daily. (p. 76)

The human farmer may work as part of non-human “nature,” not separate and outside of an ecological setting.  The entire book gently interrogates the tidy separation of “wild” nature and the built environment, especially in a section that describes wild flowers that Masumoto plants, but that are seen by passers-by and neighbors as wild, the outcome of organic farming techniques.  The farmer’s life and work (as well as the larger food regime dictates and farming policy) leaves imprints on the landscape, and the wildflowers become one of the many metaphors of the inextricability of human labor, aesthetics, and cultivation within the parameters of ecological agency (meaning the ecological beings and elements take their own particular courses of action as humans take theirs).

A last theme of the book to unpack relates to the basic food supply system (also called a food regime) that impacts our everyday life and food choices. Masumoto writes graciously but critically about a system that he finds himself in, mourning the system that renders his Sun Crest peach fruit and orchard “obsolete,” at the same time he exerts his agency or individual decision-making or action plan to find ways to “save” and sell his poetically delicious peaches.  Though having a peach with a short shelf life and “wrong” coloring for mainstream markets, he finds upscale markets, such as a hotel, and an exclusive baby food market (giving him a one-time contract) which will provide profits for his peaches (Masumoto never covers up or romanticizes that he is running a business). This arrangement forced by market parameters does make this food product inaccessible to those with everyday incomes.  This brings home (literally) the idea that our food sources, our food system consists of more than the assumed personal choices made on a shopping excursion, but those foods on the grocery shelf  link back to the (made invisible) influences of businesses, markets, rules and regulations, and profit-motives that actually encourage a very limited pool of food choices and rules out the ability of low and even some middle-income homes from accessing healthy and high-quality food. (And this is just pertaining to the U.S., a whole series of issues arise when referring to other connected global contexts.) These peaches are not only organic, but can be considered in more current terms “locative foods” at least in reference to the area that surrounds the Masumoto Farm (Solomon, 2005, October 1).  Locative foods[i] or the eating of local foods have been described as an important approach to eating for some eaters (and maybe this approach can be more affordable for low-income families) (see Gary Nabhan’s Coming Home to Eat (2002) about local foods).

This book brings farming, ecology, and food regimes into an Ethnic Studies arena.  It does, however, require a discussion about representations of Native Peoples, as brief references occasionally are made to Native Americans throughout the book. In summary, after reading this text, one desires to revisit certain passages of the book and while doing so might visit a peach and grape family farm; certain seasons as lived out in Central California; a history and current account of racialized discrimination and its present day consequences; cultural presences and self-identified cultural meanings, and to visit certain questions about the connections of sources of food, family, belonging, history, ecology, and identity.

What food or food supply issues have been on your mind, or what food issues does this blog entry bring to your mind?

                                                                      References

Masumoto, D. M. (1995). Epitaph for a peach: Four seasons on my family farm. NY: Harper Collins Publishers.

Nabhan, G. (2002). Coming home to eat: The pleasures and politics of local foods. NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Nestle, M. (2007).  Dinner for six billion. In P. Menzel & F. D'Aluisio (Eds.), Hungry planet: What the world eats (pp. 7-9). Napa, CA: Material World Books.

Solomon, D, (2005, October 1). All I really really want is locative food. Retrieved March 20, 2010 from http://culiblog.org/2005/10/all-i-really-really-want-is-locative-food/

White, R. (1996). “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?”: Work and nature. In W. Cronon (Ed.), Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature (pp. 171-499, notes pp. 500-501). NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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[i] Locative foods are described as “food that tells me where I am and where it’s from by it’s [sic] very name and nature (without the use of an RFID tag). And all I really really want is to have one major train station and one major airport in one country that sells food that is not created by food product [sic] designers but by local people from local ingredients and reflecting the diverse local food culture already present.” (Solomon, 2005, October 1). Solomon’s blog contains interesting overviews of issues that actually fit into food studies.

Comments

[Tammy]

Fascinating review, Margaret. I've already shared the link with a graduate student interested in pursuing a project about Food and the Environment. Your list of references is a great primer.

[Ramin]

Linking food to ethnic studies is a great idea. Our science department will be teaching a course titled energy and the environment. Organic farming can be included in that course as well.