Women and the Alt Food System

We’ve had the privilege of counting on Nancy’s support for many years—advising and guiding the early days of our Peasant and Indigenous Press Program, and helping us nurture and grow AGCs media ecosystem. Convinced that narrative change is vital to food systems transformation, Nancy has long amplified the stories and voices of those at the frontlines of the food sovereignty movement.

An award-winning freelance writer and editor, she specialises in regenerative agriculture, food, sake, arts and culture. Her latest book, Reaping What She Sows, honours the women fighting against the industrial food system, and celebrates the power of community-based alternatives.

Other worlds are not only possible, they already exist. Nancy’s book reminds us of this truth, now more than ever. In conversation with Ale Bautista, AGC staff member and author of Para el Alma, Nancy offers an intimate look at her creative process, the stories that shape Reaping What She Sows, her visions of the alternative food system and how we can sustain it, her fascination with sakė, and what gives her hope for the future.

*This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Ale: Can you tell us about your creative process and the conception of this book? Why did you decide to write about women and their roles in agriculture?

Nancy: I’ve been writing about agriculture, agroecology, and food sovereignty for many years now. I’ve done so many stories where a small producer, whether it’s an organic farmer, market gardener, or rancher is facing the same hurdles: the niche meat producer can’t find a local processor, or the small organic farmer can’t find a small combine because all of those things have disappeared with the industrialisation, consolidation and corporatisation of our food system. Instead, everything is super-sized and centralised, and part of a very long food supply chain. I wanted to show that “organic,” regenerative” and “farm to table” are really about building short, direct supply chains.

On the one hand, you have the Big Agriculture, Big Food, the globalized, extractive system. You don’t know who your producer is, what their growing practices are, you don’t know how workers and animals are being treated, you don’t know how many middlemen there are along the way, taking a cut. Everything is opaque. So the idea was to do a book where I pit the industrial food system against the one that the women in my book are part of, what I call the alternative, or “alt food system.”

It’s shorter and more direct. There’s more transparency and equity at every step of the way; you, as a consumer, have more information. You know who’s growing your food, how long that supply chain is. So in every chapter of the book—which covers a variety of food sector categories including produce, grain, meat and poultry, dairy, seafood, and seed saving—I explain how women are building these short, transparent supply chains, and what, by contrast, the commodity supply chain looks like.

Building this alt food system is very hard work. These producers are not only trying to shorten supply chains and make them more equitable, they’re also restoring ecosystem diversity. They’re regenerating land that has been stripped of nutrients, oceans that have been over-fished and polluted, beginning to unwind decades of ecosystem destruction. The industrialised food system has spewed these “externalities”—costs extracted from nature and from consumers in the form of air, water, and soil pollution, chronic illness and malnutrition. Those are the invisible costs that make commodity goods so cheap. The women producers in my book are doing the work of reversing all that.

And then, why women? Globally, women make an average of 20% less than men. In the agriculture industry, unless you go back to matriarchal societies, men are leading the way. They’re the owners, they have better access to farm credit, to loans, to agricultural education. In many pre-historic societies, it was women who saved seeds and held important roles in the production and distribution of foods. Today, women are more likely relegated to the margins and the sidelines. And this tends to be where innovation takes place, not at the powerful center of an outdated system where the tendency is to stubbornly hang on to power. Women are often more cooperative in nature, too. As one of my sources told me, “When women control the finances of a community they share the wealth. People do not go hungry, children are fed, and everyone gets a fair shake. It’s about cooperation not about competition.”

In the first chapter of the book, I write about cooperatives and mutual aid societies, and how their example can lead the way for the alternative food system. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives was founded in 1967 during the Civil Rights movement as a way to empower Black farmers, who were systematically shut out from all forms of federal assistance. Today, the entire leadership team consists of women, an example of women gravitating to models that are more equitable.

You really do cover so many areas of the food system, and there’s a lot of research put into this book, clearly. From fisher folk to cacao farmers, the dairy industry to grains. Has any story in particular stayed with you, or perhaps a place from all of the research that you’ve done?

I had so many wonderful adventures along the way, and it’s too hard to list them all. But, for example, I tell the story of the direct-to-consumer organization called Skipper Otto, founded by a woman in Vancouver, British Columbia named Sonia Strobel. She married into a fishing family and learned how the corporatisation of the fishing industry had made it all but impossible for small, independent fisherfolk to compete. She had never had good fresh seafood, because what you bought in Vancouver had likely been caught locally, shipped to Asia for processing and packaging, then shipped back, frozen. As a maternity leave project, she helped a small group of local fishermen to quickly process their catch and distribute it directly, creating what she calls a direct-to-consumer seafood CSF (community supported fishery).

When she began seeing disputes in Atlantic Canada between non-Indigenous and Indigenous fisherfolk, she made it a priority to build relationships with women fisherfolk from the nearby Tseshaht First Nations on Vancouver Island. As one of them told me “Once we controlled one hundred percent of the fishery,” yet today they are completely marginalised. Sonia has brought a number of tribal members into her fisher fold. I got to visit the Tseshaht First Nations, and learn about a modern style of line and net Indigenous fishing. To see the relationship that Sonia had built with this community was very moving to me.

I also loved meeting two women mezcal producers in Puebla, Mexico, Fabiola “Faby” Torres Monfil and Diana Pinzón Moncada of Zinacantȧn, who are committed to regenerating the land in an industry that relies on monocropped agave plants and is highly extractive.

I also wanted to ask you about agave, because it is at the heart of the mezcal boom and in your book, you warn that something similar could happen with kelp or seaweed farming. Why are these “booms” so dangerous, and how can we steer away from these models of production?

You know, 90% of Mezcal comes from Oaxaca, and it’s all vast fields of monocropped agave. Agave is a keystone species, meaning that a lot of other species rely on it for their sustenance. Agave monocrops are so destructive because they require a lot of agrochemicals to thrive, which then pollute soil and waterways. In Puebla, people are suffering from rashes that Faby and Diana thought might be due to the extractive mining that goes on there.

We know that the loss of biodiversity seen in agave cultivation, and heavy use of chemical inputs is bad for our health and ecosystems. When you take away food for birds, for insects, you’re destroying habitat and losing so many species, you’re losing complexity. People hundreds of years ago understood this; what’s happening today is making our land less climate resilient, hastening climate change and increasing extreme weather events. It’s going to make drought worse because you’re taking away the ability of the soil to retain water by having no deep root systems in it. There is a cascading effect of bad things that are unfolding.

As for the boom and bust cycles, these are the hallmark of a commodity system, where the market is king, and is supposed to keep supply and demand in balance. But we’ve seen over and over that that doesn’t happen. No one stops oceans from being overfished until the fishery collapses, or cacao prices from skyrocketing, only to crash at some point.

It’s happening to coffee, it’s happening to matcha, so many things are sort of blowing up, it happened to quinoa. So what can we do? For starters, you can choose to not support extractive brands. In mezcal, look to brands like Zinacantȧn which is distilling mezcal regeneratively. Stop buying industrially caught fish and look for organizations like Skipper Otto. All of the producers in my book are examples of types of businesses that you can find all over the country and world if you look around for them. Wherever possible, if you have the choice of an alt food system product over the commodity product, you can make a difference by supporting that alt system producer. Try to learn more, so you know you are supporting regenerative businesses and practices, whether it’s in distilling or farming or fishing. Individual actions can move the needle on positive change.

I found it fascinating that you dedicate a whole chapter to wine and spirits, because I rarely think about their role in food systems’ transformation. Can you tell us more about why you decided to dedicate a chapter to them and how regeneration is transforming the industry?

It’s a good question. Most of us don’t connect agriculture to so many of the things that we consume. I remember that light bulb moment early in my career, understanding that beer, wine, sakė, all are agricultural products. Think of how big the wine and spirits market is, and how we can make change in those industries by supporting regenerative practices. So I included a chapter on regenerative beverages, which covers beer brewed with the perennial grain Kernza in St. Paul, Minnesota; a completely regenerative winery in Santa Barbara County, California; and Zinacantȧn in Puebla, Mexico. When I co-wrote Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Saké: Rice, Water, Earth, one of my goals was to show agricultural roots, and the importance of farming practices in Japan.

With climate change and horrible heat and drought going on in Japan, there’s a huge rice shortage. It’s a catastrophic situation for sakė brewers. Table rice is now being imported into Japan to make up for domestic shortballs. This is the kind of instability we’re going to see more and more of as climate change spreads.

When you look at how huge the global wine industry is, that’s a lot of land we’re talking about. The more that people turn to sustainable and regenerative practices, the more you’re helping to mitigate climate change, the more you’re building soil resilience, the more you’re restoring ecosystem biodiversity and balance. All the same good things that are happening, whether it’s in vegetables or meat or in fisheries, are happening in the world of regenerative beverages.

Maybe 20 years ago or even earlier, people started talking about organic practices for winemaking. But there are many parts of the world where winemakers never abandoned them; people are going back to traditional ways of winemaking, but with a lot more technical knowledge—it’s a very hopeful and exciting movement.

When we talk about food sovereignty, a lot of it comes down to the power of choice. Some might say that supporting the alt food system is also a matter of who can actually access it. So, how can we close the gap between the alt food system and people who don’t have the purchasing power to participate in it, because of higher prices?

I think we have to adopt a much more communal approach to things, and I’ve seen this happening in different farmers’ markets. I did a story on a wonderful farm in Fairbanks, Alaska called Calypso Farm and Ecology Center. They have developed such a strong community of followers that they instituted a sliding fee scale, so that if you have money and can afford it, you pay a certain price, and by doing so, you contribute so that everyone in the community can access vegetables from them.

Many of the producers that I work with also feel very committed to that kind of equitable system, where not everyone is paying the same amount. In the book, I also talk about a wonderful group of women in Hartford, Connecticut, who are working on equitable food access. One is a community activist who has been lobbying to get a full-service grocery store in one of the worst food deserts in Hartford. Another works in a large health network that is piloting a program that involves food-as-medicine vegetable prescriptions, peer-supported lifestyle and behavior change, including things like regular exercise and forest bathing, and another is a food policy person who is working on the policy level to make change.

Growing your own food is one way to reclaim food sovereignty, too. There are people like Karen Washington, a Black American urban farm leader. She lived in a food desert in the Bronx and saw a vacant lot that belonged to the city. She started a community garden, growing culturally appropriate food to the large Caribbean population. There are examples of this all over the country, all over North America, where you have food insecure areas that are creating their own gardens so that they can feed themselves and feed themselves really healthy, wholesome food.

There are many ways you can help the food sovereignty movement in your community, and starting by looking at community gardens, food policy councils, and food pantries are a good place to start.

To wrap up our conversation, I also wanted to know, what is the biggest takeaway that you want readers to keep with them after reading your book?

Change is possible, individual actions do matter. Sometimes you hear people say, oh, you know, voting with your fork just won’t make a difference. I disagree. It’s not just where we put our food dollars, but how we live our lives. Every choice that we make makes a difference, and is setting an example for other people. We can send out these little ripples, whether it’s at our school, or at our workplace, or through our food co-op. Try to figure out how you can amplify individual actions by plugging into networks of people who are working for system-wide change. Aggregating knowledge and power and persuasiveness is one of the best tools.

I hope that people become more active at a grassroots level, try to put more pressure on the levers of power, make their voice heard, make their vote count. Especially in this political climate, being a really engaged person, and not sitting back and being perpetually horrified and appalled, or wanting to just unplug, which I think a lot of people are doing. I totally get that, but there is more power in joining collective efforts to make a difference. Even small efforts add up.

In your last chapter, you highlight both Indigenous women and diasporic women. Why is it essential to talk about them when describing what the alt food system is?

I feel like Indigenous women are so central to my message. We’re talking about the ancestral inhabitants of the lands that we’re living on. I’m in Canada now, and we’re talking about millennia of knowledge of the land and ecosystems. We’re also talking about a knowledge that was disrupted for a generation or two because of the horrible history of residential schools separating children from their families, language, and culture. This is why the immigration crisis and the separation of children at the border resonated both with Indigenous communities and with Japanese American and Japanese Canadian communities—my people went through that too, during World War II. There is a lot of traditional ecosystems knowledge in both Indigenous and diasporic cultures that we have to listen to.

Especially in my last chapter on seed-saving, but throughout the book, I tried to bring in Indigenous voices. In the case of diasporic communities, these too, are often people separated from their home country by trauma: war, political repression, gang activity, or climate disaster.

Seed sovereignty is also a huge alt-food system versus big food system issue, because we have a handful of companies that are controlling and locking up the right to these seeds behind patents, which is so counter to the way nature works. Seed savers are so important because they’re saying, no, these seeds are part of the commons, the public domain, and we want to keep them that way. If you are a Vietnamese or Palestinian refugee or descendant of one, we want the fourth and fifth generations to know what the traditional foods of their culture taste like, and be able to grow them in their adopted countries. That’s so powerful.

I wanted to end on with this chapter because it is a hopeful one about protecting future food sovereignty.

What excites you for the future, and do you already have any new creative cravings after having this journey with Ripping What She Sows?

What excites me most is the women in my book, and introducing their stories to as big an audience as possible. These are women who are choosing the most difficult path possible for the field they chose. And the reason they’re choosing this path is they’re driven by passion, love of their land and animals, and by the conviction that this is the right thing to do. The work is hard, but they’re nourished by the sense of community that they build, and the joy they find in the work itself, and in their customers, and in educating people. I am in awe of all of them. So I’m very excited about that.

I’m continuing to tell the stories of small producers, and people who are into any form of ecosystem regeneration in my Substack publication, “Reaping.” I don’t have any concrete plans for the future, but I have ideas! I also write a lot about my Japanese American culture and history, so I’m thinking about new topics in that area.

Where can people find your book? How can they access it?

Luckily, anywhere where books are sold, including online. Of course, I give a shout-out to your local independent local bookstore, because that’s part of the alt system. We want to support local, we want to keep our community vibrant, keep our money in our community. Reaping What She Sows, How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System is from the independent Melville House Publishers, and they distribute through Penguin Random House: ask your local bookstore to order it if they aren’t already carrying it!

To celebrate the launch of her new book, Nancy brings you three recommended reads!

1. Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Worker in Canada, by Gabriel Allahdua, Edward Dunsworth, an honest look into the hardships and indignities of a migrant farm worker.

2. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, classic work on what it means to grow up as a Black man in America.

3. I was so impressed with my friend Katy Chang’s podcast series “Batch and Scale,” which looks at local food systems from so many different points of view, and includes inspiring examples of Washington, D.C. based food solutions that are replicable and scalable.

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