Hopedance

Need some inspiration to get out and grow some food or, heck, start a farm? A compilation of 12 farmer’s stories (and one market manager’s), Jenny Kurzweil’s Fields that Dream: A Journey to the Roots of Our Food, is basically a letter of appreciation to the small-scale, sustainable vendors from Seattle’s University District Farmers’ Market. Though only a couple of the profiled farmers make the career sound easy, they all express a sincerity, passion and work ethic that will make the reader wish all jobs were as rewarding and vital.

Kurzweil first realized the absurd immensity of the global food distribution system while working as a line cook in Vermont. They received carrots from Salinas, strawberries from Watsonville — both a stone’s throw from her native Pacific Grove 3000 miles away; the chef told her that when he worked in a Caribbean restaurant they got strawberries from Watsonville, too. Upon moving to Seattle, she fell in love with the farmers market, became friends with the vendors, and concurrently began to learn more about how food is grown and distributed in the United States.

The bountiful stands of colorful, organic produce and the personal interactions at the market provided a measure of hope for Kurzweil as she delved deeper into the intricacies of corporate monocrop agriculture. The stories she shares reflect this, striking a healthy balance between the bad reality and the good one. So as the reader learns about Jeffersonian democracy, inhumane dairy farming, Hmong refugees, the history of mobile home parks, the WTO, GMOs, farm subsidies, topsoil loss, radioactive soil, fast food, the politics of Mexican immigration, and the illusion of diversity in corporate “organic” farming, Kurzweil never fails to offer the sustainable counterbalance. The future of food looks better after reading about a program that gets homeless teenagers horticulture jobs, a dairy on Bainbridge Island where the goats are named after characters from Jane Austin novels, multi-generational Hmong families kept together through ties to the land, a prosperous sprout farm operating out of a mobile home, and a several other diverse, inspiring true tales.

My only complaint is that I don’t live in the fertile valleys of Washington. These farmers are exemplary of the burgeoning movement towards eating local, but they are not the faces I’d see at Cambria’s Vet’s Hall parking lot Friday afternoon, or Thursday night in downtown SLO. We need our own local version—profiles of Hunter Francis and SARC, Clark Valley Farms in Los Osos, the vibrant CSA boxes coming out of Santa Rosa Creek Road, and the handful of other organic farmers stewarding the agri-lands of this Central Coast bioregion. Need a thesis topic, anyone?


Katie Renz is a regular contributor to HopeDance. Go to the home page of this website, type her name into the site search box, and you will locate a number of her articles. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .