The Land of Long Island
In an essay on the commercialization of food, Alicia Kennedy wrote “Cooking with fresh food is your birthright, even if—in more places than not—time and ingredients must be fought for.” The disconnect between people and land furthers a societal alienation, where freedom is defined as an independence of responsibility for and accountability to the well being of each other and our surroundings. Bruno Latour wrote instead, “The more attachments [an actor] has, the more it exists. And the more mediators there are the better. […] From now on, when we speak of actor we should always add the large network of attachments making it act. As to emancipation, it does not mean ‘freed from bonds’ but well-attached.” Here Alicia Kennedy explores her experience at farmers' markets “in a place with great bagels and pizza as well as water you don't drink.”
Every land gives food of some sort; every land provides a culture. I share a home with nature now. Small animals come and go; lizards are sometimes in my shoes and birds often shit on the table where I work and eat. Tiny little sparrows sip from the dog’s water bowl, and I fear the discovery of a dead reptile, lifeless and leathery, between the suitcases tucked away in a makeshift storage closet.
They remind me of the squirrel I used to feed in my backyard growing up, tossing him bread and bananas until he got wildly fat and seemingly dependent on humans. I was sad not to be allowed to feed him anymore but this new arrangement now, where I’m not making myself responsible for the wild animals, is much more sensible. We coexist. “Oh hey,” I say to a bird who’s popped into the kitchen, the way I might upon noticing a visiting friend stumble in on me making coffee in the morning. Should I offer the bird some water? I wonder, with the same ease I’d exhibit pulling another mug down from the cabinet.
The home I share with the wild now is in San Juan, Puerto Rico—Old San Juan, to be precise, where the candy-colored colonial buildings are as far as one can get locally from nature. And yet still it persists. I’ve written much in the past about the agriculture of this colonized island, but now that I live here, I think a lot more about the island where I grew up, the place with the squirrels: Long Island, where most people don’t think very much about the local terroir, even if they frequent the vineyards during the summer. But despite its reputation, there is a there there. There is a culture, despite how endemic it is to mainstream American culture to believe that “culture” is something that happens somewhere else or a play you go see in the city.
What is the culture, though? Is it just Briermere pies at Thanksgiving and a Peconic Bay oyster at happy hour? Is it Blue Point Brewery lager and North Fork Doughnut Co.? Is it the most contaminated water in New York state flowing from the tap?
It’s all of this and more, if anyone cares to look. There is a richness rooted in the land and the many peoples who have tended to it, from the thirteen different indigenous tribes who had their land stolen from them to the many farmers who stock CSAs and local markets today. When I had a vegan bakery that I ran out of a commercial kitchen there from 2012 to 2013, I sold my cookies and cakes at farmers’ markets, getting up at 5 a.m. to haul the wares and set up the table and tent. My best customers were the sellers from Golden Earthworm Organic Farm, and in turn I bought their produce every week. One told me about his time spent as a cook in the city, when he used his one day off to work at a sourdough bread bakery to learn the craft for free; another told me about how she was freezing her breast milk—would that be vegan?
That moment in my life marked a shift. Not only was I vegan and running a vegan business, but I was becoming rooted to land I had thought of as barren, as fruitless—land that could never give me culture, which I would have to seek out elsewhere. But here was this land, showing off its fruits each week to me: People who not only cared about the terroir, but had their hands in the dirt. I cooked the food of my home; I roasted its potatoes, snapped its peas, and salted its tomatoes, and it was good. I was the child again but now not feeding the squirrel but living beside them, seeking a relationship beyond what was freely offered and easily seen in the world around me.
Every land gives food of some sort; every land provides a culture. Even when it’s stolen, and even when its water is contaminated. The frustration is that we have to dig, but that’s where the roots are—that’s the terroir; it’s everywhere.
Further Reading:
Stefanie Fishel, The Microbial State (University of Minnesota Press)
Alyshia Gálvez, Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico (University of California Press)
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford University Press)
Samin Nosrat, Salt Fat Acid Heat (Simon & Schuster, parent company ViacomCBS)
Alicia Kennedy is a writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She writes a weekly newsletter on food media and culture.