Cyclist/Foodie Ibti Vincent | Friendship Trays

Crossing country, teaching & learning about food

June 21 , 2010

A recent visitor to the Friendship Garden came back the next day to volunteer in the kitchen. And it turns out she's been farming and cooking and serving food in this way while bicycling across America.

Ibti Vincent, 33, above left, has been on the road for 14 months. She's been keeping a modern-day diary during her quest for the organic and the fresh and the joyous. The blog now carries a picture she took in the Friendship Trays kitchen on Friday, which was Day 419 of her journey.

She's written about an organic farmer going home to MIssissippi to create a CSA. She's catigated mega-retailers for their war on locally owned merchants, while praising the cleanliness of their bathrooms. She's written about random bacterial infections and the yearning for a hug on Christmas. She's had her arms covered in worm poop at WiIl Allen's Growing Power in Chicago. She worked the Yale Sustainable Food Project, and noticed that rain smells like wild onions. And in Ohio she met a farmer with "a curiosity akin to childlike wonder when it comes to trying out new vegetables."

On Friday afternoon she sat down after her stint ladling vegetables into trays, and talked about her journey.

Q What are you up to?

"I am bicycling around the country and working with organic farmers, people that are doing community gardening, school gardening and justice work. And policy work – people working on all different parts of the puzzle to try to get healthy, sustainable food to everyone. To make it accessible, financially and logistically.

"So I'm learning about how the food is grown, how people are getting it from the fields or the rooftops or, you know, different places, into restaurants, schools, hospitals.

"I worked with a farmer in Iowa who set up a partnership with a local hospital, sort of like here at Friendship Trays, where some of the produce from the garden is brought in for preparation of meals.

"I want to learn as much as I can and share as much as I can. In this country, specifically, and I've traveled fairly extensively abroad, it's particular to American culture, our disconnect with food, seasonality, health and the joy of preparing food."

Q What will turn the buyers of carrots sold in plastic bags into growers of carrots?

"Some of it is economic. Some people are getting into it because they are finding that it is more economical to grow the food themselves, and they have time. Some folks are in parts of the country or parts of the city where it's not feasible for them to get to food. There are these food deserts where people do not have access to produce at all. There were sections even in the [San Francisco] Bay Area that's a mecca of food. I volunteered at a Boys and Girls Town that had a small edible schoolyard grant so they were building a garden, and I went through miles and miles and miles of bombed-out buildings and the only thing that was open was a liquor store. Not even a gas station that had apples. There was nothing.

"So some of it is out of pure, this is the only we're going to get it is if we grow it ourselves.

"For some people it's kind of concern about how their food is being grown. They don't want a lot of chemicals or whatnot, so the only way they can know how it's grown is to do it themselves, or buy from their neighbors so they can see what's going on."

Q Who's thinking about where the labor for community gardens is going to come from after the recession and most everybody has a job again?

"I don't know that I've spoken to folks on that specific issue, but I know that there's a lot of concern about folks going into this new wave of farming on a smaller scale, much more diverse in crops and animals, and many of the operations are not at present entirely fiinancially sustainable, but also in terms of human energy: It's a lot more labor intensive to pull out weeds than to dump a bunch of chemicals that will suppress them from growing in the first place.

"It's much more labor intensive. I am exhausted harvesting carrots by hand, or hand-pulling a row of beets.

"I've been doing this for 14 months now. I would say probably almost half of my time on farms involved weeding of some sort.

"There are programs out there, and I came across a few of them online, that are lists of resources for young farmers – grants, equipment, people looking for farm interns, state or county level funding that you can apply for, to try and help with the financial piece.

"But in terms of encouraging people to go into this line of work or stay in it… we're getting there, but in the past two generations, from what I've read and heard, farming has gone from a profession that folks aspire to into something that, partly because it is so mechanized, and partly because it's so exhausting and not so high-paying, people are moving away from it.

"When kids are doing well in school – especially in the Midwest, I found – they're encouraged to pursue other professions, even though their family, for generations, had been in farming. A lot of farms are going into foreclosure.

"But even conventional farming can be such backbreaking work, and there's so much risk. In farming, you can do all these things, but then a hurricane comes through. Or a tornado. And you're DONE. You're wiped out. There's some farm insurance, but it's still really risky."

Q When the peach farmers have bad weather, the crop is terrible and they lose money. When the harvest is great and plentiful, the prices fall and they lose money.

"That's another argument for diversified agriculture, above and beyond the pest issue. There's a lower chance that everything will get wiped out if you have various crops."

Q In these 14 months how have you financially sustained yourself?

"I've been working mostly on the barter system. When I go into stores I pay for things. But on the farms I've been largely working out in the fields or milking goats or baling hay, whatever is being done on the farm – except for driving large machinery. Some of the machines make me nervous. But on organic farms there aren't too many of those anyway. Um, sometimes driving big wagons with horses makes me nervous!

"So working in exchange for a place to stay and food and access to the farmer, to kind of learn from them, mostly listen but also share if they have a particular challenge, and they say, 'Ibti, we're having this difficulty with irrigation, or this particular pest. In the farms that you've seen so far have you come across this? What do other people do?' And so I am not only listening to these stories and information and philosophies, but also I am able, to some degree now, share them and help put farmers in touch with some of the other farmers that I've worked with."

Q Did you set off on this journey with that intent?

"I did, although I wasn't sure how much I would be able to fully wrap my head around. I was thinking, share my joy of food and go in and cook for folks on the farm, at the end of the day, and cultivate the enjoyment of what they're producing. But the information piece – that wasn't necessarily foreseen. It was kind of a really awesome extra benefit. I still have a lot to learn!"

Q What in your background caused you to do this?

"I was raised in a nuclear family, and an extended family, that had a deep sense of food as a part of family and community: You nurture your loved ones through food. At all of our family gatherings, everybody brings what it is that they enjoy cooking. It's always these long meals. So many of my important decisions in life and conversations have happened over the dinner table.

"There's that piece, but also I was a classroom for a number of years, at a public high school first in New York and then I taught in D.C., and a number of my students would come in during lunch and hang out, or get tutoring or make up a quiz that they'd missed. I'd say you can come by, or bring your lunch and they'd say, 'Miss Vincent, have you seen what they're serving in the cafeteria? It's disgusting.' And I would go into the cafeteria and there was no working kitchen, food was trucked in, and it was fried stuff that you have to microwave, and you put this like slop sauce on it. It was like I could understand.

"And so I would bring in some extra. I would bake stuff, and use all sorts of funky ways to sneak like zucchini into my chocolate whatever whatever muffin, and try not to use a lot of sugar, and have these sorts of things so when students did come in, at least they knew – how are you supposed to learn if you have low blood sugar?

"And I would talk with my students. Not during class. I was teaching Steinbeck and grammar and whatever, but when I wasn't officially in class I would talk with them about life in general, and so much my own energy is focused on food, that finally when I decided to leave the school I was teaching at in Washington at the end of the term, it was partly because I felt like my calling is still education, but what I think I need to educate about is food. It is my life passion.

"So I set out, and when I told my students at the end of the term, 'OK, this is what I'm doing, I'm going to buy a bicycle and I'm going to go around and learn from people that know how, and are working on these different things, and then come back and teach about food – how to grow it, how to prepare it, how to sense what's in season when, what to do with these weird things like rutabaga; what do you do with a rutabaga?

"So I started a blog so they could follow along. And a couple times a week I'll post some pictures and a write-up of something interesting that a farmer has done or, I'll be writing up something on Friendship Trays for sure. I got some great pictures today!

"The blog is called A Bikeable Feast. I'm always trying to slip literary references in. My students that were paying attention when I was teaching Hemingway will recognize the reference to a Moveable Feast. There are entries like "For Whom the Dinner Bell Tolls," "White elephants only bigger." So it's mostly about food, but there are other things. I'm a new cyclist. Well, not new now. I've got 7,000-something miles under my wheels. But I learned how to ride a bike for this project…."

Q Were you an urban kid?

"I was born in Boston, then we lived in Virginia for a couple of years, then we moved to Kuwait for most of my elementary school years, then we moved back… I lived in Brooklyn. I taught off Flatbush Avenue."

Q And where is this Bikeable Feast leading?

"Ideally I would love to find an organization that exists, or help to create some sort of program, where I can do a combination of food education. So maybe something similar to here. I was just talking to [Community Culinary School of Charlotte] Chef Ron about working with, not just kids necessarily, but I've worked with elementary school kids and when I was in graduate school I taught undergrads. I'm comfortable with different ages, but I would like to do some combination of working with young people and food, maybe some more extended writing than I'm doing on the blog – I want the blog to be accessible to people who know about food issues, people who are totally new to it, people who cook a lot, people that burn water when they're trying to make macaroni, people that are into very active lifetstyles, people that have maybe never ridden a bike: 'Wow, this woman didn't learn to ride a bike as a child, and now she rode it around the country. So maybe that's a metaphor: Maybe I can do something that I never thought was possible.

"Maybe the cooking program could be connected with a garden. I like having my hands in, not only quiche crust dough, but in the dirt. You know there's something primally satisfying about having your hands in the earth and planting something and watching it grow, and going through the drama of checking to make sure there aren't rabbits or insects or, like, oh my gosh, there's storm coming so let me go out and make sure my tomato plants are going to be OK. It's so satisfying when you eat your own tomatoes….

"I really think education is the key to larger social change and constructive change. But it needs to be a dialogue, not just me talking at people, like 'You need to eat more fruit and vegetables. You need to eat things that are in season.' Like, OK, do the best you can."