🍂 Fall
November 2024
Hey folks, Will here. It’s my first time writing the opening letter for this newsletter, and man, what a time to be doing it.
I’ve been thinking about the election, but that’s not what I want to write about. I’m not prepared to add to that conversation yet. I’m still processing, grappling, listening to teachers, listening to marginalized people. My fears are existential, while others in my community fear for their bodily health and freedom. I worry that I sound glib. I am a paragon of American privilege: a white-skinned, straight, homeowning man. It’s hard for me to imagine what marginalized people are feeling right now, but I’m trying.
Instead, I want to write about my kid and my dog. Phoebe is the kid, and she’s 18 months old. She is our first. She’s just learned to twirl. She blows kisses at the garbage truck, and they honk back at her. Last week, after the rain, we took her outside and she toddler-danced in the driveway to the rhythm of water dripping off our gutters. How can I keep from being joyful?
She climbs all over her brother, Sully (he’s the dog). He’s a Heinz 57 of unknown origin, probably 10 or 12 years old. He has a pitbull jaw, tiny bat ears, a barrel of a body, and spindly legs that seem woefully inadequate to haul his 75-pound bulk on and off the couch. We say he’s made from spare parts. He’s jet black except for his white belly and white toes. Did you know that black dogs get adopted less often? A woman at the rescue said it’s because they don’t photograph well. People don’t connect with them.
Phoebe connects with him. She climbs all over him, shoves her stuffed reindeer in his face. Other than shooting me the occasional sidelong glance - “You planning to do any parenting today, Will?” - Sully doesn’t mind. He likes having her close. She touches her forehead to his big blocky head to tell him that she loves him, and I feel like my heart is going to burst. How can I keep from being joyful?
When our collective future is so unsure, and we face so many challenges at once - social, environmental, global - I feel strange writing about joy. But acknowledging beauty isn’t the same as ignoring ugliness. In fact, when I root myself in joy, I think I make myself a stronger advocate, a better problem solver, a more present parent, a more empathetic human.
As Seed Change wraps up our first year, I've been reflecting on the joy I find in this work. It’s a privilege to be of service to badass practitioners around the country, to be a connector as we work together to make sense of the complexity of food systems and our roles within them. As the days get shorter and colder, we wanted to share some of the things that are bringing us comfort this fall - toddlers, pups, biscuits, music, and perhaps above all, being together in community. Thanks for being a part of it!
Your friend, Will
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Hey World, meet our new pal Charlie
Hiya, I’m Charlie! I hail from Lincolnton, NC, enjoy writing in first person, and currently live in Raleigh, NC with my wife, Allison, and our two pups, Ranger and Morticia. Outside of Seed Change, I recently wrapped up an AmeriCorps role and have a position in NC regional government, running a food council and working with economic development, tourism, and food system practitioners in anywhere from 5-17 counties depending on the project.
Why food systems? What motivates you to do this work?
While at UNC Chapel Hill, I realized that so many of the principles I had been raised on, like frugality, were intertwined with concepts I was learning at an institution of higher learning, like sustainability. This intersection is where I want to work. Being from a rural, agrarian area, I’ve got a heart for farmers and small towns. Being a human being, I also have a heart for ensuring people rise well above their basic needs and are afforded the opportunity to thrive. Systems thinking not only ties so many of these things together, but bridges them, strengthening each through their relationship to one another. Finding joint solutions to multiple problems, like how SNAP Double Bucks at the farmers market give a customer twice the buying power while also putting twice the dollars in farmers’ pockets, really get me going. It’s EXCITING, and it’s NEEDED.
What’s your superpower that you bring to this work?
In both my personal and professional life, I think I’d liken myself to (or perhaps aim to learn from) J’onn J’onzz, aka the Martian Manhunter. Due to his powers of shape-shifting, malleability, and regeneration, J’onn is described as the “Swiss Army Knife of superheroes.” I’ve found that my role in different circles changes depending on the needs of the group and who I’m working with. Sometimes I need to listen and take notes. Other times I need to be the Chatty Kathy who’s cracking jokes. This is also how I’m different from J’onn, who is emotionally and expressively restricted. I believe that candor and personability are valuable in their own right, and both are necessary for people to trust that you’re actually trying to help them, which is what superpowers should be used for after all.
What’s on the Horizon
Elizabeth: Something we’ve been reflecting on a lot this month is that we sure feel gratitude that we get to engage in meaningful work with a ton of brilliant, passionate, creative people dedicated to making this world a little bit better. One of the greatest parts of our work this year has been serving as the backbone for the Eastern Food Hub Collaborative (EFC), a growing network of 15 food hubs on the east coast. Will was serving as the managing director of the EFC before Seed Change Strategies was even a twinkle in my and Ellie’s eyes. Since we joined forces, we had a ton of fun supporting this network. We get the whole band together each month for a full network meeting and in the in-betweens we’ve got four member-led working groups that meet monthly, focused on Food Access & Policy, Compliance, Tech & Trade, and Communications. And throughout the year we’ve been continuing conversations around membership, governance, and decision-making.
In the last few months we’ve led research with EFC members as well as food hub networks and some other brilliant food hub nerds about the impacts of food hub networks and why collaboration and cooperation is particularly important (and challenging!) in this sector. Through interviews and surveys with hubs and hub networks we hope to particularly explore the ins and outs of hub-to-hub trade. This research will explore hubs’ motivations for pursuing trade, characteristics of thriving trading relationships, what makes H2H challenging, the positive impacts on growers and hubs, and hubs’ vision for the future of this work. We want to hear about the conditions under which H2H is happening successfully and then we want to put all of this analysis together into best practices and recommendations that help everyone make better, more strategic decisions about H2H collaboration.
Initial findings will be shared back with EFC members when we get everyone together here in my very own Durham, North Carolina in early December for the EFC’s annual convening. (Shout out to USDA and Southern SARE for making this convening possible!) But the three of us will be working to fully analyze findings and recommendations to synthesize into a final report this winter. So stay tuned!
What We’re Cooking Up - Comfort Food
Well folks, we’ve reached it - the season of comfort foods. Sure, we lose a lot of our favorite fresh produce when fall starts to turn towards winter, but boy oh boy what we gain back in baked goods, day-long cooking projects, soups, and other hearty stick-to-your-ribs fare. Here are a few of our absolute favorites - to grace your holiday table or simply brighten up your week.
Charlie’s “Generic Apple Pie That’ll Make Your Granny Proud” : I really wish I could say this is a family recipe or even one that I’ve made more than once. Truthfully, this is an opportunity for me to show you a picture of something my wife and I are really proud of- a reality I previously believed exclusive to Betty Crocker fairytales.
Preheat the oven to 400. Butter the bottom of a pie pan BEFORE placing a floured crust (ours was store-bought) inside (that way you don’t have to dump it all back out after remembering right before putting it in the oven). Peel and thinly slice some apples. Couldn’t tell you how many or if the kind really matters. One recipe we looked at called for Granny Smith, but the apples we used were red and gleaned from a farm then given to us. How you like them apples? Try to eyeball the volume of the pie pan to establish how many apples you might use. Always better to have more apples than less. Mix those sliced apples in a bowl with half a cup of granulated sugar, half a cup of brown sugar, 2 tablespoons of flour, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, ⅛ teaspoon of nutmeg, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice. Toss all that in the pie pan (that already had the bottom crust in it). Then, you can either take the coward’s way out and just slap the top crust on and cut a few slits in it, or you can buck up and cut the crust into strips and weave the dang things together on top.
Brush the top of the pie with an egg wash, cover the rim with foil, then pop it in the oven for 25 mins. After that, take the tinfoil hat off and turn the temp down to 375, letting it cook for 30-35 mins longer. We saw that you’re supposed to let it sit for 3 hours but we dug in about 15 mins after it came out.
Elizabeth’s Cathead Biscuits: If I have a “secret recipe,” dear reader, it is this. I share it with you now with the (extremely southern) belief that the world gets just the tiniest bit better every time someone gets to eat a truly excellent biscuit.
600 grams (5 cups) all purpose flour | 4 grams (1 tsp) kosher salt | 24 grams (2 tbsp) baking powder | 7.5 oz (1.5+ sticks) cold unsalted butter | 484 grams (2 cups) buttermilk.
Preheat the oven to 400. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. In a large bowl, sift together flour, salt and baking powder. Put this in the freezer while you cut the butter into small cubes. Use a pastry blender or your hands to combine butter and flour mixture. Be careful not to overmix. The key to good biscuits is keeping the butter cold, so stick the bowl back in the freezer if the butter is getting too soft.
Make a well in the center of the mixture and add buttermilk. Use hands to gently combine. Fold dough into a lightly floured counter and press into a one-inch thick square. For a flakier biscuit. Fold and press the dough a few times and then refrigerate for 12-20 minutes. Cut biscuits into 2.5-3 inch circles or squares. (They’re called “cathead biscuits” because they’re the size of a cat’s head. So don’t shy away from making ‘em real big.) Refrigerate for another 15-30 minutes. Brush with egg wash and bake until golden brown, 20-25 minutes.
Ellie’s Cauliflower Salad: I feel like most of fall eating tends to be about comfort and things that are tan/brown (see my lovely colleagues’ recipes as evidence). Don’t get me wrong- some of my favorite foods are brown! But, in order to balance out the creamy, roasty, beige energy, I love a salad that still highlights the best of fall, but won’t make you feel like you’re living in the sad, middle part of Little Women. This raw cauliflower salad from Smitten Kitchen does what all my favorite recipes do- it takes familiar, friendly ingredients and puts them together in an interesting, inviting way. It’s got excellent texture and color, and feels like a lighter, snappier complement to the cozy stuff. This is a nice Thanksgiving side, and also goes great on toast with a fried egg the next day. Eating while watching your preferred Little Women movie (I’m a 2019 version gal) is optional but recommended.
Songs for Dark Mornings
Will: These days, the sun doesn’t rise until after 7am. We tend to rise a lot earlier. There’s a particular kind of darkness to a fall morning. The sky isn’t black, but a dark blue; morning twilight draws everything in silhouette; and there’s a stillness, a before-ness, that goes pretty great with a hot coffee. Regardless of what’s going to happen afterwards - getting the kids ready for school, working through a stressful inbox, engaging with the news of the day - this playlist has some of our favorite songs for the dark mornings beforehand.
Learning Corner Fantasy Books!?
Ellie: Seeking joy is one part escapism, one part refueling, and one part inspiration. In moments of chaos, fear, and exhaustion, I turn to what I resolutely call “magic books.” This is a broad category that includes just about anything that couldn’t happen on this planet as we know it. As the brilliant adrienne maree brown says, “All organizing is science fiction - that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.” This framing helps turn what I saw as a pure coping mechanism into something useful. The point of a good “magic book” is to tell us something about ourselves or the world around us through a new lens. So, here instead of doing a normally scheduled programing of a review of Big Hunger by Andy Fisher (which is very good and very much worth reading), instead I give you some recent favorites that will do just that, or at the very least, give you a nice long mental vacation.
The Adventures of Amina Al-Sarafi by S. Chakraborty
A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark
The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Thanks for reading!
Elizabeth: In a month focused on gratitude, we sure do have a lot to be thankful for. This week Seed Change Strategies (unofficially) turns one year old and we are still pinching ourselves at what an incredible, fun, and successful year it has been. So thank you for being a friend, a comrade, a colleague, and a supporter of this work.
If you’ve made it this far, you really are a friend, so I offer you this. Two pictures of my greatest source of joy right now - my new puppy Bela. And a clip from Lord of the Rings that I have watched probably one dozen times since the election.
See y’all in the new year!
