Not-So-Fun-Fact: Black Farmers Own Just One Per Cent of US Farmland

Plus: burnt bagels, chicken broth and rice, my beloved Mitchell

The Black Farmer Fund team. Photo courtesy Black Farmer Fund

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Wednesday, as you know, is Food with Mark Bittman day, and we’ve got an important one for you this week.

New York State has 57,000 farmers, but only 139 of them are Black. And nationally, Black farmers own just one per cent of farmland.

My partner (in life, not business) Kathleen Finlay, President of the Glynwood Center for Regional Food in Farming, joined me as co-host this week (Kate is back next week), and we talked to Karen Washington and Olivia Watkins, founders of the Black Farmer Fund.

Karen is a native New Yorker, a farmer, activist, and the founder of Black Urban Growers. Olivia has made it her goal to build a resilient food ecosystem and community investment fund to better support Black farmers — yes, the Black Farmer Fund.

This is a relevant, even critical conversation, and I’m really glad to share it with you.  

“We started to say that this food system is not for us, or by us. And if we're going to wait for the knight in shining armor, and we're going to wait for capital to fall from the sky — we already know the negativity and the racial injustice when it came to the USDA, in the past, when it came to working with Black farmers — this is something that we have to do on our own.” — Karen Washington

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Mark Recommends and Remembers

Well, both Tom Verlaine and my friend Mitch died in the last few days. Since so much fuss has been made about Tom – I’m not quite sure why, even after reading those stories (try as I might, thirty years ago, I could only get into one Television song: See No Evil) – I’m going to make a little fuss about Mitch.

But first, a couple of diversions. (Also, have you read Kerri’s piece about ‘fry-stirring’? Check it out.)

When Stir-Frying Feels High Maintenance, Try Fry-Stirring

TAX $ FOR HUMAN FOOD, NOT ANIMAL FEED

A survey found that Americans would rather subsidize food for people than food for animals that are then being eaten by people. Moving in that direction would change everything, of course. I’m not sure, though, how “Americans” can express that preference (other than through surveys) if we don’t force politicians to tell us how they want to handle the broad subject of food. Leaving most policy up to the USDA and the Farm Bill has not gotten us to a good place.

A STATE AROMA?

Photo: Getty Images

On a lighter note, New Mexico (where I happen to be as I write this) is considering making the scent of roasted chiles the state aroma.  Sadly that only happens a few weeks a year, but when you think of what state aromas might be elsewhere, it’s pretty great.

TO ROBOT OR NOT TO ROBOT

I found this piece about robot sushi makers (“chefs,” though that seems just wrong) astonishing. As usual, it makes perfect sense to have robots performing repetitive tasks, and – as usual – it raises the question of “How are people supposed to make a living?” Universal Basic Income, anyone?  

All right. I’m on to mourning, and you can bear with me or go listen to our super podcast … “see you” soon.

MITCH

My friend Mitch died Friday. He left life in a moonrise over the mountains:

Taos, NM. Photo: Mark Bittman

This is the first death that made me realize – am I an idiot? – that we either die before our loved ones or we get to mourn them. (Or maybe I forgot. It’s a pretty painful thought.) So I’m mourning Mitch.

There’s more love in my life than ever before; I can’t complain for a second about that. I can barely “complain” about Mitch’s death: I knew him for 64 years, and appreciated and loved him for most of them – sometimes we drifted apart, but not for long – and he’s been sick for so long, and never expected to make it this far, so I can’t even feel particularly robbed of his presence. I could never have enough “Mitch” in my life, but it had to end sometime.

Mitch and me at Grand Central, some time in the 90s

There were a thousand things today that made me think of Mitch, starting with Bobby Darin (whom I never liked much but Mitch thought an underappreciated genius) and ending — well, not ending: the day isn’t over yet. But much of what I remember of him and our times together becomes trivial, or perhaps too personal for this place, so let me switch to food.

Although we sampled many then-exotic foods together for the first time, on our nightly jaunts to the Village, the Lower Lower East Side, Chinatown, and elsewhere in Manhattan south of Fourteenth Street and (generally) east of Hudson: Chinese crullers and pork bao; zeppole; empanadas … street food, basically. I grew up to crave those kinds of “foreign” foods, while Mitch seemed to become disinterested. I remember a visit to a Chinese restaurant not long ago when he ordered chicken broth and white rice, then dumped the second into the first. Nothing wrong with chicken and rice, but that was dinner. Meanwhile I was eating smoked tofu and celery in chili sauce. But the important thing is that we were eating together.

One food Mitch was very particular about were his bagels. We’d go into a coffee shop, and he’d say, “A toasted plain bagel, please, and burn it.” And if it came back lightly or even well browned, he politely sent it back for burning. Often that was all he ate.

I could tell you a million other things, or literally five hundred; it doesn’t matter. A human I knew very, very well, has left us and I’ll miss him. Who will I ask about Jerome Kern? Who will force me to listen to the backing vocals of early Marvin Gaye tracks or that incomparable Bobby Darin version of “I’m Beginning to See the Light”?

Photo: Getty Images

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