Brittany ran away from home when she was eight years old to escape an abusive situation and has lived without a permanent home in Portland, Oregon for much of the time since. During these years, she resided under bridges, in yurts in the forest, in a self-governed encampment for people experiencing homelessness and even in a treehouse before landing in a community called Agape Village.
After just four months of living at Agape, Brittany, now 36 years old, transitioned into her own two-bedroom apartment.
“Agape Village gave me a safe space to just be me,” she says. “It showed me that I needed to really get a hold of my life. I had been in the wind a long time.”
Agape Village, located on the grounds of the city’s Central Nazarene Church, consists of 13 simple wooden huts. Sarah Chapman, outreach coordinator at Agape, calls them sleeping pods, but they are more like tiny homes — only without electricity or plumbing. “It’s rustic,” says Chapman. “A step up from camping, but definitely not like living indoors.” But to the people who live there, it is the community and the stability that are life-changing.
Getting people into housing quickly requires sufficient affordable housing inventory, something Portland lacks. Smaller, cheaper shelters like Agape Village help fill the gap. Credit: Hannah Wallace
Chapman refers to Agape Village as a “transitional housing village” designed to bridge the gap between homelessness and permanent housing. Typically, transitional housing consists of a conventional house or apartment and is accompanied by intensive case management and other services for addiction and mental health issues. These days, though, the term has broadened to include low-cost, low-barrier-to-entry shelters such as sanctioned campgrounds or certain tiny-house villages. The people who live in them say having a roof over their heads has allowed them to address the challenges that have kept them chronically homeless in the past.
Tiny homes, transformational community
Living on the streets or in unsanctioned campgrounds means risking having your belongings stolen or or confiscated by city officials who routinely sweep through to “clean up” such encampments. And though homeless shelters are warm and mostly safe from crime, they have their own downsides: a lack of privacy, risk of infection and strict limitations on belongings.
Two California women—Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law—have created the world's first archive of preserved cannabis specimens. I wrote about their project, Canndor, for Broccoli, the magazine for cannabis lovers.
Here's a short snippet of the article:
When botanists or naturalists need to identify a particular plant, they head to the local herbarium to cross-check existing identified specimens of the plant.Think of a herbarium as a library, only instead of books, it contains dried and labeled plant specimens. In the United States alone, there are hundreds of herbariums—from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s herbarium (one of the world’s most famous, with nearly 7 million specimens) to the one at Harvard University. Worldwide, there are more than 3,000 herbariums.
But until recently, there hasn’t been a single herbarium dedicated to cannabis.
When plant geneticists Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law launched their botanical identification company LeafWorks in 2016, they quickly realized the need for one.
At LeafWorks, Kuntz and Law do DNA sequencing tests for the natural products industry, which helps ensure accurate labeling and combats fraud. Herbal companies such as Traditional Medicinals will send small samples of herb particulate to LeafWorks be sure that it is what their suppliers say it is.
“If we’re going to do a test on ashwagandha or gingko, we’ll go to an herbarium and get vetted samples that occur throughout the plant range,” says Kuntz, who studied with renowned American herbalist Rosemary Gladstar. Through their connections at the Missouri Botanical Garden and Kew Gardens in England (where Kuntz interned for a summer), the two scientists are able to access fingernail-sized pieces of dried plant matter so they can sequence its DNA.(In some cases, herbariums have their own DNA banks, in which case they can share the plant’s sequence with LeafWorks.) Kuntz and Law then uses those samples as a baseline for future tests on that species of plant.
To continue reading, get your copy of issue #10 on newsstands now or download a PDF of my article here:
A stone’s throw from the blackjack tables, bison are grazing, beehives are buzzing, crops are growing — and nature is winning.
On the surface, Oklahoma’s Downstream Casino Resort looks like any other: lines of brightly lit slot machines snake past entrances to steakhouses and sports bars, while cocktail waitresses shuttle trays to craps and blackjack tables. A takeaway cafe serves gourmet coffee, and an all-you-can-eat buffet is stacked with prime rib on Saturday nights.
But beneath this familiar facade is a very different kind of system — one that applies traditional Indigenous food and farming principles to modern hotel operations. The Quapaw tribe, which runs the Downstream Casino Resort, operates seven greenhouses and two sprawling gardens that provide the hotel with 20 varieties of vegetables and herbs. The tribe also has an apiary with 80 beehives, as well as a craft brewery and a coffee roaster that supplies the hotel and casino. The Quapaw is also the only tribe in the United States with its own USDA-certified meat packing and processing plant, where it processes bison and cattle that it raises on open pastures, selling the bulk of it to the casino’s five restaurants. (The rest is provided to the two tribal-run daycares, the Quapaw Farmers Market, the Quapaw Mercantile and a few other tribally-run shops.)
Cattle grazing on pastureland behind the Downstream Casino Resort. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort
With all these businesses — plus a construction firm — the Quapaw Nation is one of the largest employers in this part of Oklahoma, employing 2,000 tribal and non-tribal workers, while paying above-average wages and offering a full benefits package to all full-time employees. It’s a business model that preserves cultural heritage while providing a profit.
Lucus Setterfield, director of food and beverage at Downstream, says 50 percent of the food served at the resort’s Red Oak Steakhouse comes from the Quapaw land. Even the mint in the restaurant’s mojitos is grown in the greenhouses.
“The Quapaw are one of the most innovative tribes in the country when it comes to food sovereignty,” says Maria Givens, the communications director of the Native American Agricultural Fund (NAAF).
Innovative as it may be, the Quapaw are essentially resurrecting a way of life — living off the land that sustained them before they were driven off of it by American settlers. Colonization — and the policies that created Indian reservations — deprived them of their traditional foodways of foraging, fishing and hunting and disrupted their long-established patterns of intense physical activity. Public health experts believe that these are two of the reasons Indigenous people have some of the highest rates of diabetes in the U.S. According to the CDC, Native American adults are three times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than white adults, and 1.6 times more likely to be obese.
With seven greenhouses and two gardens, the Quapaw gardeners harvest about 6,000 pounds of food per year. Each morning, the resort’s chefs stop by and place their orders. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort
By retrofitting a modern resort with a system of locally sourced, sustainably raised food, the Quapaw are reclaiming their food sovereignty and, at the same time, benefitting every guest who visits their resort, whether those guests know it or not.
Bringing bison back
It all started in 2010 when then tribe chairman John Berrey, a fifth-generation cattle rancher, had a vision to reintroduce bison to this part of Oklahoma. The bison is the state mammal, but it’s also a traditional food for the Quapaw people, who lived in Northeastern Arkansas and then western Missouri before eventually moving to Oklahoma.
That year, the tribe was given eight bison from Yellowstone National Park via the InterTribal Buffalo Council. Now, ten years later, the tribe has a bison herd of close to 200 as well as a herd of 385 Black Angus cattle. (The bison have been breeding, but the tribe has also gotten additional bison from other national parks.) Both are pastured on fields of native grasses and the ones that are headed for slaughter are finished on grains and mushrooms. The tribe processes only five to 15 bison per year and doesn’t slaughter until they’ve sold out of every type of meat: steaks, ground bison, chuck roast and bison jerky. “We use the whole animal,” explains Quapaw Nation grants coordinator Shelby Crum — even the hides, which a Quapaw artist decorates with tribal paintings and sells at the farmers’ market.
The 25,000-square-foot meatpacking plant, which opened in 2017, was designed to conform to renowned animal scientist Dr. Temple Grandin’s blueprint for humane animal handling. The Quapaw built the processing plant adjacent to the feeding facility to avoid the need for transport, which makes animals nervous. It also uses Grandin’s designs for curved chutes with high walls, which minimizes stressors, and the holding pens include extra crowd gates and bright colors. In addition to processing its own animals, the plant processes 50 to 60 head of cattle per week for nearby ranchers from Oklahoma and Missouri.
A worker processes honey from one of the resort’s 80 beehives. Photo courtesy Downstream Casino Resort
The meat is broken apart into different cuts, smoked, flavored and packaged right there at the facility, which also has freezers and coolers for storage. Most is sold at a discounted price at tribally-owned retail outlets like the Quapaw Mercantile, the farmers’ market, the Quapaw C-Store and the Downstream Q-Store. “The whole goal is to make it affordable,” Crum says. That said, anyone from any state can order the meat via the Quapaw Cattle Company’s online store.
An industry that often celebrates pushing through the pain is turning its focus to mental health.
When employees clock into work at Mulvaneys B&L, a popular farm-to-table restaurant in Sacramento, California, they’re encouraged to slip one of four color-coded cards into a cardboard box. The cards have faces on them: one is happy, one is angry, one is neutral and one is stressed (in restaurant parlance, that’s “in the weeds.”)
“It’s like the pain signs at hospitals,” explains co-owner Patrick Mulvaney. Though the cards are anonymous, they give employees a chance to assess their own moods and share them with the manager or the peer helper on duty. During the staff’s pre-service meeting, the manager can share how many angry or stressed employees there are that day and ask if anyone needs additional support, empathy, or patience.
The box, which was co-owner (and Patrick’s wife) Bobbin Mulvaney’s idea, is just one measure put in place by I Got Your Back, a year-old peer-to-peer counseling program that the Mulvaneys helped start in response to several suicides in the Sacramento restaurant community in early 2018. In May of that year, Noah Zonca, the beloved, larger-than-life longtime chef of Sacramento’s the Kitchen, where Mulvaney also worked, died by suicide. He was one of 12 Sacramento restaurant workers to die by suicide that year. A month later, the issue of restaurant industry suicides was thrust into the spotlight when celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain hanged himself in a hotel in Alsace, France.
Frankie Lopez, a manager at Mulvaneys B&L, and bartender Dan Mitchell. Photo courtesy Patrick Mulvaney
Even before Zonca’s death, the Mulvaneys had been having conversations with Sacramento chefs and restaurant owners, health care professionals, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, state senators and even Governor Gavin Newsom about how to tackle mental health issues in the hospitality industry. But the losses of Zonca and Bourdain added a sense of urgency. The final iteration of I Got Your Back came out of a design workshop at the Innovation Learning Network conference in October 2018. With the financial support of the James Beard Foundation and all four major area health systems — Dignity Health, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health and the UC Davis Medical Center — a pilot was launched in September 2019.
Restaurant workers are especially prone to mental health and substance abuse issues. As journalist Kat Kinsman, founder of the blog Chefs with Issues, has written, “People who deal with mental health and addiction issues are drawn to this work because it has always been a haven for people who exist on the fringes; restaurant jobs have brutal hours and often pay very little and don’t offer health care; there is easy access to alcohol and illicit substances; and workers have traditionally been rewarded for their masochism — shut up and cook.”
I wrote about Grandma's Hands, a new program in Portland where grandmothers are reviving cultural connections and reducing food insecurity for Civil Eats.
Laurie Palmer and Vanessa Chambers, two of the grandmothers in Grandma's Hands
On a recent Saturday night in September, Mildred Braxton did something she never thought she’d do: she taught 20 or so others how to make succotash and steamed collard greens over Zoom.
With the confidence of a Food Network chef, Braxton, a parent of five and grandmother of three, put a skillet on the burner, poured some oil into the pan, and let it heat up before throwing in some chopped onion, frozen corn, frozen lima beans (called butter beans in the South), and black-eyed peas, narrating all the while. After covering the pan and letting it all heat up, she added stewed tomatoes, okra, and seasonings.
“Okra is the last vegetable I put in because it’s easy for it to fall apart,” said Braxton, who hails from Mississippi. “Okra has a bad rap. I’m standing up for okra!”
This virtual dinner party is part of a Portland, Oregon-based program called Grandma’s Hands, a platform for Black grandmothers to share family recipes and food traditions with future generations. So far, the 12 grandmothers involved have prepared four monthly meals for 30 to 40 participants at a time. In addition to delivering the food they make along with a bag of fresh produce grown by farmers of color to the participants throughout the community, the program brings everyone together virtually to partake of the food while sharing recipes and tips.
Though the focus of Grandma’s Hands is to facilitate community engagement and reconnect community members with culturally grounded natural foods and agricultural practices, the program may also help reduce food insecurity by teaching the younger generation the economic benefits of cooking at home for their families.
“Our [modern] life is not conducive to being healthy,” says Chuck Smith, co-founder of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition (BFSC), which helps run the program. “Cooking as a regular family activity has been squeezed out of people’s schedules.” And yet, he stressed the fact that connection with food is a pathway to stronger identity in the Black community. “When your [diet] is consciously connected to your cultural identity, then you can be more intentional in selecting what you eat and how you prepare it,” adds Smith.
The idea for the series grew out of freewheeling conversations about sustainable food and food access that Willie Chambers and Lynn Ketch from the Rockwood Community Development Corporation (CDC) had with Lisa Cline and Katrina Ratzlaff, the CEO and advancement director at Wallace, a community health clinic.
