KAYTE YOUNG: From WFIU in Bloomington Indiana, I'm Kayte Young and this is Earth Eats. 

EMILY WALLACE: Like hot dogs have so much personality to me, that adding a face, or some legs, or something doesn't seem that far off. Like they're already so expressive. 
KAYTE YOUNG: This week on the show we start thinking about road trips and roadside food, the carbon costs of European travel and how we might offset that and help coffee farmers in the process. We share a vegetarian chili verde recipe and we hear from black farmers in Kansas about what the new federal funding means to them. That's all coming up in the next hour here on Earth Eats, so please stay with us. 
I'm Kayte Young, thanks for tuning in to Earth Eats. We'll start with some food and farming updates from Renee Reed. Hello Renee.
RENEE REED: Hello Kayte. Millions of rural residents across the Midwest are at risk of nitrate contamination in their drinking water but might not know it. Harvest Public Media's Dana Cronin reports on the lack of testing in rural well water. 
DANA CRONIN: The few surveys that have been done to test for nitrate concentrations in drinking water have been alarming. Some results in Illinois came up with up to 9 times the safe drinking water standard. That's according to a new report from environmental nonprofit  Prairie Rivers Network. Katie Greg helped write the report and says excessive nitrate levels can have severe human health impacts. 

KATIE GREG: We just assume it's all safe, but nitrate has no taste, no smell, no color. There's nothing other than actually testing your water that can tell you whether it's contaminated or not. 
DANA CRONIN: Nitrates mostly runoff of fertilizer laden agricultural land making rural areas particularly vulnerable to contamination. I'm Dana Cronin, Harvest Public Media. 
RENEE REED: Increasingly in Oklahoma are allowing their covid-19 emergency declarations to expire. That means additional assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP has gone away. Melinda Craigs-Ingram is a SNAP outreach manager for the Northern Illinois Food Bank. She says with unemployment numbers still so high decreased benefits will be a shock to many snap recipients. 
MELINDA CRAIGS-INGRAM: The impact that we've experienced since covid has not subsided and if we can reference the last recession it took about three to five years for it to recover. And I can anticipate it'll be in about the same time frame that we will be looking at. 
RENEE REED: She also says the cost of food has increased during the pandemic and that monthly allotments won't go as far now as they did a year ago. A five person household will lose an average of $240 per month when the emergency declarations expire. Thanks to Harvest Public Media's Dana Cronin for those reports. For Earth Eats I'm Renee Reed. 
(News theme)
KAYTE YOUNG: While many of us aren't quite ready to get on an airplane yet, some of us are hitting the open road this summer. In 2019 Josephine McRobbie spoke with writer and illustrator Emily Wallace about her book Roadsides documenting quirky attractions along Southern roadways. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Across from a tire store and next to a coin laundry in Smithfield North Carolina, stands Hills of Snow, a tiny building shaped like a bright blue snow ball. Snowballs - those colorful shaved ice concoctions, aren't really in high demand on a Monday morning in October, so they're closed. And I'm here by my lonesome, checking out the endless list of flavors. 

[Listing flavors] Maui-wowie, papaya, peach daiquiri, peanut butter, peppermint, pineapple...

Wild strawberry was Emily Wallace's flavor of choice when she was growing up in Smithfield. But Hills of Snow is more than a place to get a sugar rush. The audacity of the shape of the building would prove to have a big impact on her. 

[Listing flavors] Sour blue raspberry, sour watermelon, spearmint, tamarind, tooty-fruity...

Emily Wallace: It's just amazing. It's funny how much I think about it. You know I definitely didn't realize it at the time, but I think it just showed me a... sort of, what was possible and... you know, with your imagination, in a otherwise kind of rural spot where we didn't have like you know a giant museum to go and see all this artwork, that... you know, you could create. We had a giant snowball stand, and that meant a lot to me and it still does. 

We're upstairs in my sort of studio office space. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Today Emily is a writer and illustrator whose work focuses on southern food - it's traditions, culture, and histories of labor and industry. 

EMILY WALLACE: Yup, these are little macaroni people, macaroni and cheese people. It was for a feature in Triple A magazine that they had done about...

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Her new book is titled Roadsides: an Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South. It's an A to Z guide with each letter of the alphabet focused on a concept and corresponding place. Chapter Z for example is about Zealot's (unable to verify spelling). She knew she had to talk about barbeque. But rather than wade into the style wars of her own home state, she visited Franklin barbeque in Austin Texas. 

EMILY WALLACE: The have people that line up there for five or six hours to wait, for a tray of barbeque. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Chapter B for billboards looks at south of the border. The Mexico themed roadside attraction on the state line linking the Carolinas. It advertises via nearly 200 billboards on interstate 95. The tourist attraction was founded by a man who used a lot of stereotypical imagery, but also supported racial integration during Jim Crow. In Emily's words it holds a lot of meanings all at once. 

EMILY WALLACE: South of the Border kind of... has long straddled this place between being kind of forward thinking in some ways, and backwards in others, or family friendly in some ways - like they have these fries for children, and then you know, has... or had some illegal gambling places. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: For chapter D - that's directions, Emily visited the Florida welcome centers, another state's traveling phenomenon with a surprising history. 

EMILY WALLACE: A lot of folks that work there hung on for 30 or plus years. And just have these amazing stories of how they helped travelers. They give out a free cup of 100% Florida orange juice, but they also have to pass this... I think 167 question test about Florida history; you have to be able to read a map upside down. 

And the stories... you know, from people who have worked there for a long time were just kind of amazing about giving people directions, or helping deliver a baby, or helping a man who got bitten by snakes in the parking lot. That was really surprising. I hadn't thought about... you know, just the number of people that were in and out of there a day, that these people come into contact with, and the ways that they help way beyond just offering directions. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Emily can trace her interest in representations of food all the way back to when she was a kid, when she would draw and write stories with her grandmother. 

EMILY WALLACE: She made a cookbook, like a little spiral down cookbook, that she gave to my cousins and me. And I was flipping through it a few years ago, and there were so many drawings of the foods that I feel like I write about and draw now. That was kind of funny it, I was like "Oh, of course you already did this." Like she'd drawled in a mini cheese sandwich and written like "Cheese, Emily’s favorite." She beat me to it and I didn't even realize, like... you know, I was kind of refashioning this in a way. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Emily's mother was an English teacher and her parents also owned a farm equipment retailer in Smithfield, which was a bit of a local gathering spot. She grew up with a love for storytelling. After studying creative writing and studio art she went on to pursue a master's degree in folklore. She was interested in music history but her life shifted dramatically when she took a class on food writing. 

The students were tasked with documenting a certain person or place. 

EMILY WALLACE: And I choose this little pimento cheese factory that was about 30 minutes from where I went to school. And just realized how many stories you could tell just that one food. And fell in love with the process and that was specifically about pimento cheese. And I was thinking about the ingredients and followed those down different paths, and then I've just kept going from there. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Emily's illustrations have both the frank documentary composition of a William Eggleston photograph and the warm whimsy of a hand painted carnival sign. Her imagery covers southern dining icons; Duke's Mayonnaise, doilies, grits. Some items like hot dogs or pickles lend themselves to a certain cartoon style. 

EMILY WALLACE: This is gonna sound hokey but in some ways they just... like hot dogs have so much personality to me, that adding a face, or some legs, or something doesn't seem that far off. Like they're already so expressive. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: Recently she's been drawing one of her own favorite roadsides. 

EMILY WALLACE: NAB crackers, the orange sort of square, sandwich crackers. That's two cheese crackers and peanut butter in the middle. I love them. 

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE: I asked Emily how many miles she put on her car while she was doing research for the book. 

EMILY WALLACE: That's a good question. Probably don't want to know how many miles... a lot of NABs were consumed. 

KAYTE YOUNG: That story comes to us from producer Josephine McRobbie. 

(Jazz music)
Kayte Young Here, this is Earth Eats. Listeners you've heard me talk about the Earth Eats Digest, it's our weekly newsletter keeping you up-to-date with the show sharing recipes thoughts and sometimes stories. If you have subscribed to the digest first of all thank you, and if you haven't been receiving it lately there's a good chance it's going to your promotions folder or your junk folder. Sometimes that happens with email filters would you mind checking and may be redirecting it so you don't miss an issue? Thanks again, and if you haven't subscribed to the Earth Eats digest yet you can do that quickly and easily at EarthEats.org.
Next we join Chef Arlyn Llewellyn at Function Brewing for a vegetarian spin on a classic dish from Mexico.
ARLYN LLEWELLYN: We are making a jackfruit and white bean chili verde, and I'll show you at the end how to make turn that in two enchiladas if you want. This is something we normally do here. At Function Brewing our menu is primarily soups, salad, appetizers, and dessert. I sort of describe it as light bistro food. So I missed sandwiches, wow! So, soup, salad, sandwiches, appetizers, and desserts, and obviously beer. But in this particular situation I was preparing this dish for the Community Kitchen Brunch Fundraiser. They do them about once a quarter, every three months. And they have a bunch of different local chefs making different courses. You choose the item you would like, and you get a nice three course menu, paired with Cardinal Spirits Cocktails. The whole thing is $50 and all the proceeds go to Community Kitchen, everything is donated. 

This is a brunch dish I came up with for that. I was asked to make a vegetarian entree. I was thinking about how to make chili verde be vegetarian, and then I turned that into an enchilada. I served it with some sauteed peppers and spinach on the side and then topped it with a poached egg. There was a course before it, and a course after it but in and of itself as a standalone meal in terms of getting all of your nutritional touchpoints in. Typically chili verde is made with slow simmered pork. It's a really rich delicious stew, the pork fat balances out the acidity of the tomatillos.
I wanted to make a vegetarian version of it. I think the biggest component is to make sure that you're capturing the fat that would be coming from the pork normally, so we're going to be doing this with butter. 
We will start with the vegetables that need to be roasted. Tomatillos are these goofy looking green tomatoes, that come in a very strange looking paper packaging. What you do want to feel for is that you have a nice firm tomatillo beneath the paper. If it's mushy, just like a regular tomato, you're not going to want that. 
KAYTE YOUNG: You'll want remove the papery hull, and wash the fruit well. It has a sticky residue that you need to remove. 
ARLYN LLEWELLYN: We're gonna cut these in half, onto a cookie sheet, baking sheet. Either you can put parchment on it or grease it, but you will want something to the tomatillos are going to put out some liquid, which would get pretty sticky. And we're just gonna put the cut side down on the sheet. 

So a poblano pepper, cut the top off and then we're going to cut it in half lengthwise, and pull out the interior portion with seeds and ribs. Also put those cut side down. We're gonna put them in an oven that's been preheated to 400 degrees, and let them roast until the tomatillos start to brown and the skin puffs up off of the poblano peppers. I would start checking it about twenty minutes. 
KAYTE YOUNG: After roasting for 20 minutes at 400 degrees, Chef Arlyn pulled tomatillos and poblanos from the oven. 
ARLYN LLEWELLYN: The tomatillos give up a lot of liquid, and that's great, we'll capture all of it. We're gonna use the whole component. And then the skin has started to brown. And then some of the skin on the poblanos has popped off. So any portion where it has popped off, we'll just go ahead and peel it off. Don't stress about it, if you can't get it off the whole pepper not a big deal. We're also just gonna roughly chop this up. We will be blending this later. 

So we're gonna start with a whole onion. We're gonna dice them up, don't worry about it being perfect, again it's gonna be blended later. We just want them to be in small enough pieces that they're gonna cook thoroughly. So we're gonna put these onions in a soup pot with three tablespoons of butter. And I started out at medium high, but once it comes up to temperature, we're gonna lower it down to medium to maybe medium low. We are not trying to caramelize these onions, we want them to be fully cooked, fully translucent, but without that caramelized flavor. 

So if we started out our onions with the butter, we are going to add to this our tomatillos and our peppers. We're also gonna add two cups of water. We're gonna loosen up the onions from the bottom of the pan. And then we're gonna put a cover on this and just let this simmer, medium to medium low heat until everything gets really tender, and then it starts to reduce a little bit. While this is simmering away, we're gonna chop up a cup of cilantro. 

While this simmers away, and starts to reduce a little bit and everything gets tender, we're gonna go ahead and add the cilantro to it, and we're going to go ahead and blend this up. I'm using an immersion blender but we could transfer this in batches to a blender and do it that way. 
(Sound of immersion blender whirring)
KAYTE YOUNG: Blend until you reach a nice salsa texture, no big chunks but it doesn't need to be velvety-smooth. 
ARLYN LLEWELLYN: To this I'm gonna add some Jackfruit. I'm using canned Jackfruit, you can buy a whole jackfruit in the grocery store or you may need to go to a specialty market but I don't recommend it for the faint of heart. Based on whether or not it's less ripe versus more ripe to get an entirely different product that can be very fussy to process down, and you also end up with a very large volume cause Jackfruit are not tiny. I personally prefer to just pick up a can of Jackfruit if I'm just making something get home. Jackfruit in a can is typically pretty minimally processed, in this case we just have Jackfruit water, salt and lime juice in this can. 

KAYTE YOUNG: At this point you might be asking what is jackfruit? Jackfruit is a large tropically grown fruit typically used in South and Southeast Asian Cuisines. It has a thick rough outer skin and the inside can be soft and fruity when it's very ripe, or firm and more neutral tasting when it's under ripe. 

ARLYN LLEWELLYN: And it's become popular in the last several years because it has a relatively neutral flavor, but it has a very chewy meaty somewhat stringy texture which is a great textural substitute for pork or pulled chicken. If you put it in a dish that has a very strong flavored sauce like barbecue or in this case chili verde, it's a great substitute for meat. The interior texture of it reminds me a little bit of canned bamboo, and the exterior gets more into these little fine shredded feathery pieces, that definitely look very much like pulled pork for pulled chicken. 

So you're gonna drain the can. It has a very delicate flavor, it's a little tart from the lime juice in here. Kind of reminds me a little bit of a canned artichoke or hearts of palm in texture and in flavor. Brands do vary in terms of how tender the jackfruit is in the can, so you do wanna try it. If it's still very firm then you're gonna want this to simmer a little longer. So in this case I'm gonna let this simmer for about 10 minutes in my Verde sauce. So once we've chopped it down to a nice porky looking texture, we add that to the Verde, we're gonna let this simmer until we get a desired texture, which you want the water to feel like it's really cooked off and it has similar to a texture of a chili. Kind of hold together a little if you put it on a plate. So we're gonna simmer it with the lid off until we get that texture.

Once we have the texture we want, we're gonna take it off the heat and add our last few components. So we want to add some white beans. Obviously you could cook these from scratch yourself, in this case I'm just using a 15 oz can. With canned beans you do want to make sure you drain them and rinse them. We're gonna stir that into our verde, and we are going to add 3 tablespoons of garlic powder and 2 teaspoons of salt just to finish it off. We'll stir this altogether and maybe let it hangout in heat for a minute or two just to fully warm through.
KAYTE YOUNG: We've got the full recipe for Jackfruit Verde on our website, EarthEats.org. And later on in the show Chef Llewellyn will show us how to turn this into some tasty enchiladas, so stay with us.

(Guitar chords)5
The pandemic isn't over by any stretch of the imagination, however in places where vaccination rates are high many aspects of life are returning to something close to normal. Thank you to everyone who's getting vaccinated. After more than a year of holding steady in place, many of us are itching to travel again. Here's a story about travel, climate change, and philanthropy from 2020, just before the pandemic when we had no idea what was coming. Keep in mind when you hear "last year" in this story it's referring to 2019, not 2020. 
(Guitar plucking song played, wistful)
KAYTE YOUNG:  Some of you avid public radio listeners out there will be familiar with our next guest, Rick Steves. He's best known for his show Travel with Rick Steves on public radio and on public television. He's also the head of Rick Steve's Europe; a U.S. Based European Travel and Guidebook company. 
RICK STEVES: What I do is I teach Americans how to travel in Europe that's my beat, and I see Europe as the wading pool for world exploration. And I work with over a hundred people here in Seattle and our mission is tuned by our Americans to venture beyond Orlando, to get out of our comfort zone and to come home with a broader perspective. And our radio show is carried by I think 400 stations around the country in public radio, and the main way I make money by taking people to Europe on tours, we took 30,000 people on over a thousand tours last year. We have well over a hundred European guides that we employ, and this is an exciting way for Americans to be able to connect to smartly and efficiently and economically with Europe. 
KAYTE YOUNG:  We're talking with Rick Steves here on Earth Eats this week because of the new climate smart commitment he's launched. I’ll let Rick explain this initiative and what's behind it. 
RICK STEVES: The whole passion I have for inspiring Americans to get out there and travel is to deal honestly with challenges confronting us, and there's a lot of challenges. America has never been so fearful and ethnocentric, and there's a lot of fearful people that don't have a passport, that think that everybody's scary out there and the world's a dangerous place, and we should build walls, and I find that the more you travel, the more you realize the world's a beautiful place and we could work with the family of nations, and deal smartly with the challenges confronting us. 

A big challenge of course is climate change. When you travel you realize it's here. You can see it in just kind of silly ways, for fluent travelers, not to be able to ski in the summer, there's no air conditioning in Germany because they didn't use to need it, now they do need it. There's so many ways that you can see that things are changing in the climate and but that's just kind of little annoyances for wealthy people. I find in my travels that it's the poorest countries, and the poorest people in the poorest countries that are impacted most severely by climate change. And when you travel you gain an awareness of that. And I think you when you fly home you realize "Yeah, we gotta get on boarded, and help stop this". 

So one thing that I’ve done lately is our climate smart commitment. We've given ourselves, basically a self-imposed carbon tax. Something that I feel very committed to is helping my company travel in an ethical way when it comes to climate change. In the last year we took 30,000 people to Europe, and frankly I made too much money because I didn't have to pay for the carbon we generated by flying those people to Europe and back. And I wish our government made us account for that in an honest way, but here in the United States our government just wants to have the short-term economic prosperity with no honest concerns about sustainability in the long term. Well, I just don't think that's ethical. So, I gave myself a self-imposed carbon tax. 
There's a consensus that when an American flies to Europe and back, they generate about as much carbon as you typical American generates by driving their car for six months. And you can solve that by not traveling, but I think, I wanna travel, and it's fun. As in the world's a fun place to explore and it's just very constructive to get out there and have a broader perspective. But if we want to travel, we can travel in a way where we can mitigate the carbon we produce by investing in organizations that are fighting climate change. 
And again this is consensus among the scientific community, that if you spend $30 smartly, you know investing in geos that are fighting climate change, that creates enough good to mitigate the bad you create when you fly to Europe and back. So, I thought I'm taking 30,000 people to Europe, let me pay $30 for each of those people in a smart way, and we can create as much good as we create bad and we can then fly essentially carton neutral. So, $30 dollars times 30,000 people is $900,000 dollars, rounded up to a million dollars, and our annual tax is a million dollars. I took it out of our profit. 

I'd like to do it in a way that is kind of a two-fer, that helps people in the developing world, because I know that half of humanity is small, older, family farms trying to live on $5 dollars a day. We decided to choose ten companies that are doing good work, and we give them a million dollars that's an average of a $100,000 each. And each of them are doing their work, we're empowering them, and that gives us the joy and the peace of mind knowing that we're flying to Europe ethically. 

It's nothing heroic, I'm not doing anything extra, it's simply ethical. I should not be able to run my tour business without covering my carbon costs and I want to support farmers in the developing world. And I also wanted to support advocacy organizations that are lobbying for the environment in our government in Washington D.C. to educate and encourage our legislators to be ethical when it comes to having government policies that fight climate change rather than maximize our economic environment in the short term. So, when I support an advocacy organization, I'm supporting lobbying for the environment, lobbying for poor farmers south of the border, lobbying for sustainability. You know that's the advocacy agenda that I'm supporting with this self-imposed carbon tax. 

KAYTE YOUNG: I really appreciate that some of the funding that you're providing to these advocacy organizations because I think a lot of times an individual's initial response to what can I do about climate change is turn down their thermostat, or recycle or something, and it the impact that you can have is so much greater if policy changes. 
RICK STEVES: You know that's such a good point, Kayte that's a very important point to me, personally, the lion's share of my philanthropy goes to advocacy organizations when it comes to economic justice and environmental issues and so on. I really believe that well I know, that all of the charity and philanthropy and hard work by NGOs put together, when it comes to fighting poverty, doesn't amount to much at all compared to the impact of government policies on those same issues. As a philanthropist, it's just fun for me to support organizations that resonate with me. 

(gentle guitar music)
KAYTE YOUNG: That was Rick Steves, talking about his climate smart commitment. After a short break we'll hear from someone involved with one of the organizations that his self-imposed climate tax is supporting. Stay with us. 

(Transition Music)
(Calm piano music) 

I'm Kayte Young, you're listening to Earth Eats. Before the break we were talking with Rick Steves about his climate smart initiative. His travel company has selected ten organizations to support this year, as a way to offset the impact of his company's overseas air travel. One of those organizations is Food for Farmers. I spoke with Janice Nadworny, a cofounder of food for Farmers. They work with coffee farming cooperatives in Latin America on building community food security. When they started in 2010, they were interested in a different development model then what they'd been seeing in coffee producing regions. 
JANICE NADWORNY: Often the NGO comes in, or the organization comes in, the consultant comes in, without ever really asking the community "What are the core issues at the heart of this problem?" Food insecurity looks very different in communities around the world, and it's caused by different factors. And so, what we decided to focus on was the diagnostic. That's where we sit down and ask the community and at different levels, we ask the board, we ask the staff of the cooperative, we ask families who are members, individually and collectively, what is affecting their livelihoods, their quality of life. And so through focus groups and surveys and conversations, we get an understanding of what is at the heart of this problem, what does food insecurity look like, what are the challenges to livelihoods?
And so often times you'll find that the cause of food insecurity is not lack of food, it might be depleted soils or lack of reliable water throughout the year, it might be no electricity, no roads, importation of processed packaged foods that are very unhealthy, people are not cooking, they've lost their traditional recipes, they've lost their seeds. And so before we could design a strategy, we asked those questions of everyone in the community. 
And then we work with local partners, and cooperatives, and families to develop strategies and set goals and then together we co-design a long-term plan for food security. And then we find expertise locally from partners who can teach families and the coop how to implement those strategies and manage them independently. So, our role becomes guide and auditor and teacher and connector. 

KAYTE YOUNG:  I asked Janice if she could explain the goal of cooperatives in coffee producing communities. 

JANICE NADWORNY: I'd say 70 to 80% of all coffee is produced by small scale farmers, who own farms of less than 10 acres, a lot of them own farms of about an acre. So, all of that beautiful specialty coffee that people love, is produced entirely by hand by families all over the world. And with very little land. And because coffee's a cash crop it's a way for people to earn money to send their kids to school, buy clothing, all the things they can't do in a barter economy. And because the promise of coffee prices has been so strong, and demand has been so strong, the people have put most or all of their land into producing coffee. 

And over time, at the same time, they stop producing food, so they've been using cash from their coffee crop to buy food. So rural areas now which were agricultural, producing food, have now become food desserts. And so food is now brought in trucked in, or flown in, from the city or from other countries, maybe even the U.S., and people are consuming really unhealthy processed foods. So, you'll go to very remote communities and people will be drinking coke and eating Fritos, and they're not growing it anymore. 

So small-scale farmers, because they produce so little coffee on their one acre or five acres, even if they put all of theirs and into it, they have no pricing power, they have no ability to determine the price for their coffee, so they grew together into cooperatives. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Okay. 

JANICE NADWORNY: Coffee cooperatives, they're membership organizations, it's a business. It's coffee growing business. And what they do is they aggregate all of the coffee from their members and sell it in larger volumes so they can get a better price. Some cooperatives are small, 90 or a hundred families, some are, in Africa they tend to be larger, they could be 100,000 families. In Latin America, our partners range from 200 to 5,000 families depending on where they are. They grow their coffee independently, they get support from the cooperative, technical support for growing coffee, and then the coop collects and sells their coffee. So, the cooperative is a membership and it represents small families. And that's who we work with. 

KAYTE YOUNG:  And what are the countries that your organization works in? 

JANICE NADWORNY: We work in Mexico, in Chiapos, in Guatemala, with two organizations there, in Nicaragua, and in Colombia. And three of the coops we've worked with are indigenous, three are led by women. I think all of them are fair-trade, they all produce organic coffee as well. 

KAYTE YOUNG: You were talking about the food security issues in these communities because they're not growing food anymore. And so, what is your organization's role in that, in dealing with the food insecurity?

JANICE NADWORNY: We're walking into a situation where they're are decades of kind of food policy, and agricultural policy has really promoted chemical inputs, fertilizers, pesticides, all of that, monoculture, all of those policies now have degraded the soil that they're farming. They've graded the environment around the farms, and at the same time small producers have been pressured to grow organic. To grow Rainforest Alliance, other certifications that will give them a premium over their low coffee prices. And so, the focus has been on coffee, improve the quality or productivity or coffee, and you'll get more money and you'll be okay. 

And they're not okay. Poverty is worse than ever, coffee prices have dropped 29% the last 10 years, food prices are up anywhere from 40 to 70% over the same time period depending on the country, and so people have been leaving their farms for years to find work. And then typically go to the city, or immigrate north like they are now, when prices are low, and they can't sustain through farming. Women are left to farm. There's no investment available for making their coffee quality better. 

So, when we come in, they're already things going on in the community that are working and really exciting. Somebody's keeping chickens, somebody's selling eggs, somebody's keeping bees, and cacao, that's another strategy. So, there are things already going on that is already an asset that could be expanded. So, we come in, we look at farms from the farmer's perspective, not necessarily producing anything to meet the buyer's needs, but what will help sustain them, and helping them look at all the different markets they can sell to. They can sell locally, or nationally, or in their own country, they could export. And then we look at the farms and see ways to diversify those farms, restore environmental health through composting, organic practices, soil restoration, water systems that will allow people to grow vegetables. We look at each farm as a food hub, and then we help each family develop plans for their own farms and help the coop tie those plans together through a strategy. 

So if the community chooses organic home gardens so they can produce food, what we found is for example that they're growing organically, they're diversifying their farm, they're supporting pollinators, they're expanding the agro-forestry system in by planting native trees to shade their veggies. We also work with communities to help them bring back traditional recipes, traditional seeds, so that they can maintain the biodiversity of food farming thorough Latin America. 

So, depending on the community the strategies will look different. Cacao is something we're doing, basic grains, maize and corn. Organic vegetables, eggs, but it depends on first what the community is interested in, and second what's feasible. 

KAYTE YOUNG: It sounds like it's messy, and complicated, and individual to each family or each farm, or each cooperative, like it doesn't sound like you just have a plan and go out and implement it. Like it sounds like it that messy complicated kind of work. 

JANICE NADWORNY: It is and each case, I have to say, each of our programs - there are now six. Six community partners, whatever we planned at the beginning, I assure you it's changed drastically since we developed our long-term plan. Because things go wrong, somebody finds a wonderful new opportunity, things just change. And so, I think the challenge and the exciting part of the work is that you go with it. And so, there are things that happen at each place that were unanticipated that have made the project so much better and so much successful. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Can you give an example of that, that comes to mind? 

JANICE NADWORNY: We had started a program with the Soppexcca coop in Nicaragua. They wanted to develop their organic brand for food. So Soppexcca produces very high-quality organic coffee, and we had a home garden program, and they wanted to start a women's organic farmer's market. All women growing organic fruits and vegetables and selling at this local market cause there was no healthy organic produce readily available. So, we worked on training, women were growing beautiful crops, they were very entrepreneurial, excited, energized to get going. And then in April 2018, the political unrest in Nicaragua stopped everything. There were protests over I think it was social security retirement benefits, great increases, there were student protests that expanded throughout the country. It became very dangerous and violent over the next several months, people couldn't leave their homes, they couldn't travel. 

And so, what happened was the coop food security coordinator couldn't get to the villages where the women lived, to help them. They couldn't bring their produce to market, they were stuck, and everything stalled. And so we were concerned that it would stop and we wouldn't make progress and they wouldn't make progress, but what happened was, because people were stuck at home, they couldn't go out to buy foods, so all the families that had these gardens, that had this produce, were able to get through the 4 or 5 months when this was going on and feed themselves, and then they had enough food to sell or give to their neighbors so they got by as well. It became their safety net, their only safety net. 

There's been so much immigration because of the lack of opportunity for food, that people were leaving when they could. Lots of people fled Nicaragua. These families stayed and they helped their neighbors through it, and my co-director was just there last week, and the market is thriving, they’re adding a third day, they want to go to five days a week, it was packed, produce is beautiful. Women are selling, and they’re becoming powerful small business women, and have so many ideas about how to grow this business, but that worst case scenario that we saw as a huge problem, ended up being a benefit, a really key benefit of the work. 

KAYTE YOUNG: I asked Janice to talk about Food for Farmers and climate change. 

JANICE NADWORNY: Coffee and other crops like it are hugely impacted by climate change, and they also impact climate change through monoculture and chemical inputs. And so if you look at the number of small scale farmers that are growing coffee, moving them away from chemical inputs and monoculture, to diversified agricultural farms, these organic practices, conserving soil, conserving water, increasing biodiversity, that has a huge impact on climate change. The farmers change their practices. 

Not only their farming practices though, it's what is happening with the food systems globally. Where you look at the rural communities, now if you know, before there were producing food, now they're getting food shipped to them from halfway around the world. Through food aid, through general market trends, and dietary trends. They're getting their unhealthy processed food shipped in from other countries. They've lost their food traditions, their health is deteriorating, malnutrition looks like obesity and diabetes and heart disease now. 

So by growing food locally, and organically, they're improving their health and diets. They're reducing all those transport costs, and processing costs of unhealthy food, and they're also impacting climate change in that way. So thirdly is that if they become thriving food hubs themselves, then everybody in their communities can have access to healthy food. Everybody in their communities can have locally produced foods. And so, the cost of transporting all of that food, goes down drastically as well. So, we feel that we definitely have a direct relationship between the climate smart commitment and our work. 

(Somber piano music)

KAYTE YOUNG: That was Janice Nadworny cofounder of Food for Farmers, an organization that works to build food security in coffee growing communities in Latin America.

[TO JANICE] Thank you so much for speaking with me Janice, I really appreciate it. 

JANICE NADWORNY: Thanks, anytime. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Food for Farmers is one of the recipients of funding from the Rick Steve's Climate Smart Commitment. You can hear more about these projects on our website, EarthEats.org.

(Relaxing guitar plucking)
We're back with Chef Arlyn Llewellyn, and her verde is complete.
ARLYN LLEWELLYN: This is the finished product, a nice thick verde with white beans and the Jackfruit already incorporated into it. You can just serve this as is, in a bowl with maybe some rice, avocado, or cheese but we're gonna make some enchiladas with it. So onto a greased baking sheet, or a parchment-lined baking sheet, I'm going to place a couple of tortillas.
KAYTE YOUNG: And these are flour tortillas?
ARLYN LLEWELLYN: They're flour tortillas. So obviously traditional enchiladas are made with corn tortillas, but there are a lot of things that are not traditional about this recipe. We've already deviated from the traditional pork chili verde. 

Visually we're taking maybe a quarter of the surface of the tortilla with a mound of Jackfruit. So we're adding some shredded pepper jack cheese into the tortilla. Now we're going to roll it up as tightly as we can, so we take one half over, and we just try to push the feeling up against it. We tuck the tortilla in and just roll it as tightly as we can. And then we're gonna top it with some more cheese, because who doesn't love more cheese. 

Because I want that crispy texture, I don't want to pack them into a pan which is what you would typically do with enchiladas. You would dip the tortilla in a sauce, you'd fill it, and then you'd bake like a lasagna style pan 13 x 9in baking pan, and just pack them with enchiladas. So in this case I've got to two tucked together cause they're gonna be served together. 

We're just gonna pop this in an oven, 375-400 degrees, I'd start looking in at about 10 minutes as to whether or not they're done. So the cheese is nicely browning, and the interior filling is starting to simmer in bubble a little bit. So that is what we're looking for. This chili verde its completely mild, because it just has the poblano peppers, it's perfect for somebody doesn't like that much heat. For those of us who do enjoy the heat I definitely recommend hot sauce. We have some pickled jalapenos here with some hot sauce and should dig in and see what we think. 
Yeah it's really bright. You get a lot of acidity from the from the tomatillos, a lot of body from the beans and the Jackfruit, richness from the cheese. I feel like it's kind of vegetarian dish that meat eaters would still enjoy because it definitely feels very rich and satisfying and savory. And in reality is in fact it's a vegetable-based. 
KAYTE YOUNG: That was Chef Arlyn Llewellyn of Function Brewing in Bloomington Indiana, sharing her recipe for Jackfruit Verde enchiladas. Find the details at EarthEats.org.
The federal government plans to start sending payments to Black Farmers this summer in recognition of how it denied them loans and assistance over generations, effectively transferring farm land to their white neighbors. Yet as David Condos of the Kansas News Service reports, the money comes too late to reverse the decades of damage caused by discrimination in farming. 

DAVID CONDOS: JohnElla Holms walks along the edge of a field of golden wheat, near the northwest Kansas town of Nicodemus. 
JOHNELLA HOLMS: And so this section right here...

DAVID CONDOS: She heads the Kansas Black Farmers Association and back in 1877 her great-great-grandfather joined the wave of homesteaders who staked their claims here. 
JOHNELLA HOLMS: All of this was black owned at one time, 6 x 6 miles, black owned, black settled and I wanted you to just see just how vast it is. 
DAVID CONDOS: Nicodemus is the last remaining town out of many that were settled by formerly enslaved people who migrated from the south to the Western frontier. Kansas alone had about a dozen black farming colonies. 
ANGELA BATES: When you think about farming in the historical context of African-Americans and migration, what you see is the land is the draw. 
DAVID CONDOS: Angela Bates is another descendant of those Nicodemus settlers. She runs the town's Historical Society. At its peak she says the land here was home to nearly 150 black farmers, but today...
ANGELA BATES: No one's farming in Nicodemus right now.
DAVID CONDOS: There's a few black farmers who live in neighboring towns, but not many. It's a pattern that's repeated across the country. A hundred years ago Kansas was home to up words of 150,000 acres of black owned farmland, that number is now closer to 10,000. Nationwide about 90% of the acres that were once black owned has slipped away. 
THOMAS MITCHELL: If something is not done in the next few years, the next generation meaning, like 30 years from now, we could literally be talking about there's only a few hundred black farmers left in this country.
DAVID CONDOS: Thomas Mitchell is a law professor at Texas A&M University and a member of the Land Lost and Reparations Project research team. He says systemic discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture drove one black farmer after another off their land.
THOMAS MITCHELL: This wasn't the exception to the rule, this wasn't a bug, this was a feature of the system.
DAVID CONDOS: By the government's own admission, many black farmers couldn't get money to buy land, or operate farms because they were denied credit for bogus reasons. And when the farmers filed complaints the USDA often did nothing. So now the federal government is offering around $4 billion dollars to make amends, paying off loans of farmers who survived despite racist policies. But Mitchell says his team's preliminary research puts the actual amount of wealth black farmers have lost at $300 billion.
BERNARD BATES: I got something I wanna show you. 
DAVID CONDOS: Bernard Bates, Angela's cousin, was one of those farmers. At his home west of Nicodemus he thumbs through a stack of faded color photos from when his farm was foreclosed on nearly forty years ago. 
BERNARD BATES: That’s when they loaded up my machinery. They sold our machinery first. Then they sold the land.
DAVID CONDOS: Among the papers on his desk sits an affidavit from a local loan officer. It says the Credit Association denied Bates the help he needed to keep his farm afloat deliberately to push him out of farming. His 950 Acres, the homestead, even the wheat he'd harvested were all taken away.
BERNARD BATES: My wife tells everybody if I’d had a gun, I probably would’ve shot somebody. I worked hard all year and then stood there and watched them steal wheat all night long. 
DAVID CONDOS: Bates was part of a landmark USDA settlement in the 1990's that was supposed to send billions to Black farmers who have been treated unfairly. But he says he's still waiting for that money.
BERNARD BATES: I haven't got a penny yet.
DAVID CONDOS: And now the new federal effort to help black farmers is already getting push back. Bates says they'll lose out on interest payments. White farmers have sued claiming discrimination because they don't have access to it. JohnElla Holmes the head of the black farmers group, says her organization has received threats over the payments. Yet she figures only 1/4 of the farmers she works with will even be eligible. And many of the farmers who do qualify are skeptical about signing up. But if the relief does help any black farmers hold onto their land she says it could be the first step toward making things right. 

JOHNELLA HOLMS: Do I want I just want handouts? Absolutely not. I just want to be treated fairly and put in a position where we can be at least on the football field. 

DAVID CONDOS: For the Kansas News Service, I'm David Condos in Nicodemus.
KAYTE YOUNG: The Kansas News service reports on health, the many factors that influence it, and their connections to public policy. Find more at KSNewsService.org. This story comes to us through our partners at Harvest Public Media. 
(Music)

I received the tragic news this week of the death of a beloved member of the food community here in Bloomington. Teresa Birtles of Heartland Family Farms was a devoted listener and had been a guest on her show a number of times talking about bringing farm fresh food to the IU campus or the importance of farmers markets in sustaining local food systems. Teresa is well known in our community for her farming wisdom, her warmth, her generosity, and her joyous laughter. She kept so many households well-fed and she will be deeply missed. Thanks for the good food Teresa. 
KAYTE YOUNG: That's it for our show this week, until next time, thanks for listening. 
RENEE REED: The Earth Eats team includes Eobon Binder, Mark Chilla, Toby Foster, Abraham Hill, Payton Knobeloch, Josephine McRobbie, Harvest Public Media and me, Renee Reed. 
KAYTE YOUNG: Special thanks this week to Emily Wallace, Rick Steves, Janice Nadworny, Arlyn Llewellyn, and everyone at Function Brewing.
RENEE REED: Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey. Additional music on the show comes to us from the artist at Universal Productions Music. Earth Eats is produced and edited by Kayte Young and our executive producer is John Bailey.