Vernalruminations

Northern Harvest: Twenty Women in Food and Farming Https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/northern-harvest JODY DOTSON HAYDEN Jody was born in southern Arkansas with the southern tradition of home cooking, and when the family moved to Iowa her mother continued the tradition including gardening. “I only knew a few other people who were really committed to gardening like my mom was. We always had fresh vegetables. . . . I remember for show and tell when I was a young girl my mom sent me to school with a kiwi. All the other children would take toys, and I arrived with a kiwi.” What shaped Jody’s future life was a graduate school year of fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, living with indigenous Mayan farmers . “I got to see it firsthand, what was happening in places like Chiapas.” The farmers were being exploited, the money going to intermediaries, and very little to the actual growers. With her then husband, Chris Streeter, Jody founded Higher Ground, one of the firs

Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming https://www.waynesupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/northern-harvest MARTHA RYAN Martha has done so many things in the food business that I found it almost impossible to decide into which of the different rubrics in my book to place her story.   Her biggest venture was to open her own restaurant in Suttons Bay, Martha’s Leelanau Table, which celebrated its tenth year in 2018. About her experience serving as the food service director of Leland Public Schools where she had to be creative on a very small food budget and at the same time to push back against pre-prepared foods and/or government surplus, she gave this example: “I had a sense that I should not be buying apples shipped in from Washington, when there were apples sitting in Leelanau County that were fresh and grown in Leelanau County.” With respect to her own childhood experience with the kitchen, she said of her mother: “She took a lot of pride in

Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming https://www. waynesupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/northern-harvest DONNA FOLGARELLI While Julia really is chapter one in Northern Harvest , Donna’s story is chapter 13, but I’m offering these mini-blogs as samplers, the way you would choose from a box of chocolate truffles, preferably from Grocer’s Daughter’s Chocolate, but that’s chapter 6. When I listened to Governor Cuomo’s daily pandemic briefing last Sunday, the takeaway was his nostalgic evocation of Sunday dinner at his Italian American grandfather’s house.   His memories reminded  me of Donna Folgarelli’s story about Sunday dinner at her Italian American grandmother’s house.   “Every Sunday morning without any discussion in anyone’s life you went to church in the morning, and you were at grandmother’s house by ten thirty in the morning. That’s where the cooking began. We were in the basement and we were making gnocchi and pasta and learning how to rol

Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming JULIA BRABENEC Before starting my book I didn’t know Julia, but when I was interviewing other women in the food world they told me to go talk with her.   When I first met this beautiful woman it was shortly before her 90 th birthday. I was blown away.   A home builder and a fruit grower, Julia is also a singer and a gifted poet. Also a believer in do-it-yourself! She and her husband planted, by hand, 1100 fruit trees to produce peaches and apples.   They built their own home.   In fact, Julia told me, “ We built all the homes we lived in .” When they first settled in Leelanau County, “We lived pretty primitively for a while with kerosene lanterns. We had a well where we pumped our water for all the water needs.   . . . We bought a little wind generator and attached it on the roof of our house . . . and we had some batteries which we bought used from the telephone company, and now we made our own power.”