“We have it all here.”— Jerry Leimenstoll to us participants at the Design, Art, Technology Symposium (DATS) 2008 discussion, “How Does Your Object Speak to Us about Transformation in the Triad?”
Alice Waters Will Come to Greensboro
I’m not a food enthusiast (a “foodie”). But I am excited to hear from Betsy Grant, director of the Greensboro Children’s Museum, that Alice Waters will come here (September 24, 2009) and officially break ground on a children’s edible garden that will sit on the museum’s grounds right in the heart of the city. Waters, a progressive voice in American cooking, long ago championed locally raised food and has gained national attention as she has sought to change how children are fed through school lunch programs, insisting that fresh, healthy and nutritional meals be part of a child’s education and a cure for nationwide obesity. This is her first venture outside of California and we should feel honored that she’s chosen to lend her support to our community.
It seems that we in Greensboro are always searching for symbols to validate our community and Ms. Waters’ visit may be seen as one more instance in which it takes an outsider to approve of what many of us are thinking and doing before the rest of the community buys into it. No other place I’ve lived in has so feared change or craved outside approval as a precondition for action, has so regularly ignored community voices in favor of expensive, outside consultants, or allowed creative solutions die on the vine for lack of official approval or funding. And no other place I’ve lived in has done so much hand-wringing about its identity and wondered why comparable cities seem so much more livable, desirable, hipper, cooler, and funner places to be.
But I think Ms. Waters’ visit is not more hollow symbolism. For decades, different local groups have been working diligently on issues that are now coming together. These groups are made up of energetic young professionals and established old-timers their parents’ age. One sees such types at the Greensboro Curb Market and Green Bean, the region’s new Commons. But you can also see them at ethnic markets like Super G or Dynasty or Kashish, shopping for Thai okra or paneer. Their food interests have lead them to investigate the source of their food, its safety, impact on the local economy, land development and sprawl. And because the area is now visibly multicultural, it has encouraged them to learn about their Vietnamese, Mexican, Hmong, and Montagnard neighbors’ gardening, shopping, cooking and eating habits. The economic downturn gave many permission to do what they’d secretly schemed but resisted doing in the face of Triad conformity: they dug up large portions of their suburban yards and replaced ornamental plants with vegetable plots. And by this small act and others like it some have begun to wonder about the established order, safety and mediocrity they’d grown up with and accepted as normal and unchanging. Perhaps we’re on the verge of real change here in the Triad, the sort not based on regional white papers and leadership committee meetings, but built on the work of many small groups and the pressures of looming unemployment. Ms. Waters might be coming just at the right time to the right place.
A Food Culture Movement
Broadly speaking, what is happening can be described as a Food Culture movement here in the Piedmont. It is not about the pursuit of private gastronomic pleasures or arguments about the difference between a two- and three-star Michelin restaurant or the Hendersons’ last visit to Tuscany and their raves about the food and wine. The movement is not unified nor does it reflect a single platform. There are vegans, vegetarians, organic, certified organic (there’s a difference), and plenty of all-American meat-eaters. There are do-it-yourselfers, Hell’s Kitchen cable-TV fans, and sustainability advocates. It’s about the rediscovery of the importance of food to one’s individual and communal life and food’s connection to personal and public health, history, social institutions and commerce. Its members believe societal order, responsible for delivering safe and healthy food, is amiss, threatened or broken and they’ve chosen to act —sometimes individually and modestly (installing rain barrels, for example) or by banding together (local producers and consumers coming together to create a vibrant farmers’ market, for example). The most exciting part of the movement is that it reflects the interests of so many people from so many walks of life, not all of whom are communicating with one another or orchestrating their activities, but together are changing the way in which we understand and consume food in Greensboro. This trend crosses race and class and ethnicity. In fact, it stands to bring people together who’d have little reason to interact with one another. By and large the movement tends to reflect libertarian, left-wing activist sentiments (Obama’s visit was a big hit at the Greensboro farmers’ market) but the picture is more complex and dynamic, drawing in independents and right-wingers who only need to take a bite of local goat cheese or drink at the local microbrewery to overturn a lifetime’s consumption of Velveeta and Bud.
Of course the latest arrivals are the professional and upper classes pressured by the economic downturn and faced with shopping at Walmart, a significant admission of their downward fortunes, or raising their own garden veggies, shopping ethnic, and surviving the downturn with stylish responsibility and their social standing intact. The significant fear of the Food Culture movement has been that safe and healthy food would only be bought by Whole Food/Earth Fare shoppers and leave out the poor and working class.* The economic downturn has turned that fear into an opportunity, a reason for inert consumers to morph into active participants. Whoever thought so many people — grandparents, mothers, fathers, and kids — would ever get up early Saturday morning in Greensboro and flock to Yanceyville Street? Whoever thought so many poor, ethnic and working class gardeners would suddenly become the focus of interest because of their old time, “sustainable” practices?
Food at DATS?
Does the area’s Food Culture movement intersect with DATS 2010? For those who advance the argument for the creative class, innovation, visionary leadership and technology in the Triad, are they looking in the right places and thinking about the right things? Or are they dreaming about more inspirational seminars and workshops with big names, trendy mall shops (like the Apple store) and manufacturing plants (like Dell) as the region’s future? Because as arguments for the region’s future these actions have been weak and unconvincing. A typical DATS audience is bulked out with students from the host campus, their professors (checking attendance?) and a tiny smattering of professionals. As a venue it has no brand. The documentation is thin to nonexistent. I think this blog is the only public record of our 2008 discussion. In contrast, I’ve interacted with a far more diverse group of individuals with interesting ideas and in-progress projects every Saturday morning standing by Dan’s Nimby Gardens veggie stall than anywhere else in the city. These folks each have a unique knowledge base and they’re interested in working across specializations and sharing time and resources. Over a couple of weekends I met with the region’s blueberry expert; a high school art teacher who’s teaching at Newcomers School, our school system’s unique transitional program for newly arrived immigrant and refugee kids; a developer who is converting a decrepit building into artists’ studios, a young ESOL volunteer with a public health background; an old retired Irving Park guy, a passing acquaintance who wondered if I knew when our neighborhood coffee shop would reopen. A young couple had just come back from Will Allen’s workshop on urban farming. Allen had just been featured in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. The couple were part of Urban Harvest’s plan to put an organic farm right in the middle of Greensboro. Some people knew one another, others wanted to be introduced so they could follow up. Some were young, some were old. Nobody was carrying laptops and cell phones were safely stowed in pockets and purses. The agenda everyone was pursuing was What are you doing? How can I join in and help? and Let’s talk some more real soon. This is the kind of energy everyone would love to see at DATS. Should we ask why it isn’t happening?
Much of the innovation-and-creative-class rhetoric circles around economic development and definitions of a thriving healthy regional economy. There’s oohing and ahhing when the latest symbol of technology (think iPhone, the one-laptop-per-child, the solar panel, the electric car) is shown off and the usual conventional-wisdom blather rehashed. The comments and exchanges are sometimes insightful but often uninformed or banal. And why wouldn’t they be, since most of these issues and the technologies’ actual creation and manufacture are several steps removed from the audiences’ professional or personal lives? Unlike food, most participants are unfamiliar with high tech except as consumers. There is a tiny handful of people like myself who do game design in the Triad — not because we’re brilliant but because there’s no area demand for our specialized services. Games represent a fraction of high tech culture and innovation but it looms large in the minds of local policy makers and funders because of its potent symbolism. Our oldsters have plenty of theory—the region has sprouted several college departments that have just begun teaching game technology— and the youngsters have plenty of energy and desire. But the knowledge- and experience- gaps and disconnects remain significant.
We Have It All Here
DATS should be about bringing together boatloads of disconnected professionals, entrepreneurs, established business men and women, employers and learners, much like the Greensboro farmer’s market brings together those in the Food Culture movement. But past DATS venues are not returning the kind of synergy and year-round dialog for the time and energy invested. High tech culture and its familiar symbols such as the iPhone and electric car are foreign to regional history in ways that the Food Culture movement and its interests are not. Yet we persist in chasing a dream that we, too, could be more than consumers of technology. That we, too, could find some purpose and economic future by replicating a game industry already firmly established in the Triangle or planting an RTP in the Triad and waiting forty years for it to bear fruit. Arnold Pacey’s Technology in World Civilization firmly roots invention and technological dialog in culture. We in this region don’t know cloud computing, iPhone apps, or intellectual property law. But we seem to be very good in small, grassroots organization, growing stuff, experimenting with and adopting best practices in crop fields and inventing new models of food business. And we have enthusiastic young people ready and willing to take risks. And the historical connections between food and technology run deep, from water mills to the selection and promotion of plants and seeds, development of irrigation systems and more recently the invention of very efficient cooking stoves and super-crops.
Jerry Leimenstoll hit the nail on the head when he said we have it all here, a statement which I first thought was too cosy and unlikely to cause anyone to change. Now I hear it differently. Grafting outside technology, modes of thought developed elsewhere, and entrepreneurial endeavors onto the local environment isn’t going to work, no matter how much we try.** Let’s look past the usual assessments of this area, past the Jugtown pots, dying textile and furniture manufacturers, those obvious bastions of the past. When you look past the official (and rather boring) narrative of the region’s history, you start picking up useful, truly interesting nuggets. That is, pieces of ideas, native trends, and talents that one could use to build the future. Depending on where you look, we have it all here. Depending on your willingness to step away from unpersuasive prescriptions, we have it all here.
Before I or another critic forward a prescriptive plan for DATS 2010, I propose a simple question: What is the symposium worth to the region and how much is anyone prepared to pay for it? If it’s valuable then I’m all for it. As much as I want this region to thrive in the innovation, design, art and tech sector (my bona fides: I’m a game designer, artist, designer, and sometime educator), I haven’t heard a compelling explanation.
Actually, I will venture a prescription for DATS 2010...
I propose that it invite the foodies, CSA farmers, corporate food suppliers, slow food fans, urban gardeners and farmers, green-everything enthusiasts, sustainability advocates, fast food franchisers, ethnic food producers and distributors, neighborhood associations, area health, food, and nutrition experts, social workers, medical establishment, etc. to discuss how Design, Art, and Technology can promote our region’s identity as a place of food culture and innovation. For a Chinese-American like myself for whom food and culture are inseparable***, this is a no brainer. This is a big tent item that brings reality and relevance to our city and does so on a national stage, an important plus for those in leadership positions who must attract publicity. Biotechnology, medicine, logistics, manufacturing, health, and the arts — the area’s supposed fields of growth — have no powerful symbols that connect them to the public. And while high tech is replete with symbols of change and progress, they don’t resonate here.
But food? Everyone’s an expert. Everyone has an interest. Everyone knows the connection.
—September 7, 2009
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The Food Disconnect
*“If there’s no place in the food movement for low- and middle-income people of all races, says Tom Philpott, food editor of Grist.org and co-founder of the North Carolina-based Maverick Farms, “we’ve got big problems, because the critics will be proven right — that this is a consumption club for people who’ve traveled to Europe and tasted fine food.”
—Street Farmer by Elizabeth Royte, NY Times Magazine, July 5, 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05allen-t.html
Technology and Culture
**“... In one respect it may be right to envisage ‘blockages’ which could limit development of technology in some cultures as compared with others, because with many techniques there is a limit to the improvements that can be made by craftsworkers’ methods... Techniques were traditionally adjusted quite empirically... however, empirical development along these lines could reach a stage where further progress was blocked by lack of theoretical understanding.”
—Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand Year History by Arnold Pacey, MIT, 1991
“Mr. Littlefield’s workshop helps illuminate differences in war strategy. The Germans favored big, complicated tanks in part because they could always transport them to a factory for repairs. The Americans, fighting on battlefields an ocean away from home, built smaller, easier-to-repair tanks from standardized parts...Dave Marian, the foundation’s curator, explains that ‘Germans solve problems in Germanic ways. A Panzer tank had probably eight times more parts than a [U.S.] Sherman tank.’”
—For Big Collector of Tanks, Panzer Was Last Hurrah by Stephen Miller, Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2009 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123395854437558427.html)
Food and Culture
“Growing community, independence, justice -- and food” , a story about local CSA teacher and ELT teacher Daniel Woodham’s approach to combining farming and English lessons for refugees appeared in the Greensboro News-Record, September 13, 2009.
***Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives by K.C. Chang, Yale, 1977
