KARLA VASQUEZ, director of community programs at With Love Market and Café in south Los Angeles, takes a live-and-let-live approach to cooking and nutrition. In classes at the recently opened market—whose mission includes increasing access to affordable fresh food in an underserved area—she encourages people to try new foods. But the bottom line, she told Sojourners: “You don’t like kale? I will never make you eat it.”
Vasquez doesn’t teach a catechism of “healthy vs. unhealthy” foods. A community organizer with culinary training, she instead focuses on giving class participants tools for healthier, but realistic, eating: how to understand nutrition labels and cook those healthy ingredients, so they can have food that will work for them. So in a class on “guilty pleasures” Vasquez discourages the guilt, instead offering ways to gently alter beloved dishes to maximize flavor and make them more nutritious, rather than give them up completely. She calls a class on all-vegetable dishes “cooking the rainbow,” emphasizing the beauty and taste of dishes made vibrant with a variety of produce—because she knows if she used the word “vegan,” many of her students might balk. “They’d say ‘That’s not for us—that’s what hipsters eat!’” she says.
With Love Market (withlovela.com) is a for-profit business that promotes a social bottom line. Along with the food market and classes, there is a café and a community garden. With Love pays its staff an above-average wage and specifically recruits employees from the neighborhood, hoping to help long-time Latino/a and African-American residents stay despite the pressures of gentrification. And it tries to create a space where long-term and newer residents of all backgrounds, plus students from the nearby University of Southern California, feel welcome.
“Foodie” often has elite connotations. But the With Love Market could be seen as an example of how the best of “foodie” tendencies (such as an emphasis on the source and quality of ingredients and delight in flavors and beauty) are tied to broader justice concerns all along the food chain, as well as the environment. People are creatively digging into justice issues while celebrating food as a gift intrinsic to our biology, our cultures, and the world around us.
Feasting with generous simplicity
Two recently published cookbooks bring that spirit into home kitchens. One is a new edition of a classic that demonstrates that loving food while loving justice isn’t new, the other is an innovative, artful grassroots project published last year.
The More-with-Less cookbook was commissioned by Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a relief, development, and advocacy organization, and first published in 1976 as a response to global food crises. Its author, Doris Janzen Longacre, was a Mennonite who had served with MCC in Vietnam and Indonesia. She was deeply troubled by the disconnect between the industrialized West’s culture of overconsumption and widespread hunger elsewhere. She saw More-with-Less as a starting point for those wanting to live more simply, which she refused to equate with dour deprivation.
The first edition of More-With-Less sold more than 847,000 copies worldwide, ending up not just in Anabaptist households but in the kitchens of volunteer group houses, students, latter-day hippies, and frugal cooks of many creeds. It mixed heartland standards with recipes sent in by Mennonites and others from around the world. Longacre explained nutrition basics (including the evergreen advice to eat more fruits and vegetables and less fat, sugar, and salt), cooking from scratch, and ways to eat less meat. Most important, she eloquently explained hunger issues and the relationship between living simply and living generously—cultivating a deeper appreciation for the gift that is food and gratitude for having enough.
For Longacre, getting down to basics with food meant more joy, not more guilt. As she wrote in the preface of the first edition, “[Mennonites] are looking for ways to live more simply and joyfully, ways that grow out of our tradition but take their shape from living faith and the demands of our hungry world.”
Longacre died just a few years after the original More-with-Less was published, but her presence endures in the revised and refreshed 40th anniversary edition, out this fall from Herald Press. Updates by Rachel Marie Stone, author of Eat with Joy: Redeeming God’s Gift of Food, are gracefully blended into Longacre’s original text. The new preface by Stone notes that, while popular food culture has changed drastically since 1976, much remains the same. “[Longacre] could not have anticipated that eating locally and seasonally would become a mark of hipness, and that many people would begin to spend more time watching cooking shows than actually cooking,” Stone writes. “She could not have known that dietary fads—and global food crises—would always be with us.”
While new recipes have joined the mix, many reliable classics remain (with tweaks for contemporary techniques and ingredients). How often can you find one cookbook that teaches both hunger awareness and the importance of celebration, and includes recipes for German pork chops, English muffins, gado gado, and homemade cheese?
Reclaiming ancient methods
Milpa! From Seed to Salsa is part cookbook, part art book, and part apologetics for traditional agriculture. It too argues for sustainable values for global survival. But unlike the eclectic-but-European-leaning recipe roster of More-with-Less, Milpa! is utterly rooted in the specific foodways of the Indigenous people of the Mixteca Alta region of Mexico.
This region boasts a deeply rooted Indigenous culture. But it is also home to one of the highest soil erosion rates in world, due to unsustainable land-use practices, including chemical-intensive mono-cropping of corn, which became widespread in the 1980s.
“Milpa” is the ancient system, originating in Mesoamerica, of planting complementary crops together in a single field. In the classic combination of corn, beans, and squash, the beans fix nitrogen used by the corn, the beans climb the corn for sunlight, and the squash leaves discourage weeds. Through a locally formed agricultural/environmental organization, the Center for the Integral Campesino Development of the Mixteca (CEDICAM), local farmers have developed a milpa plan that produces up to 12 crops from the same plot, including corn, beans, green beans, squash, tomatillo, huitlacoche (edible corn fungus), wild greens, medicinal herbs, and forage. This approach stabilizes and restores depleted soil.
The essays in Milpa! are written by Phil Dahl-Bredine—who, with his wife, Kathy, has lived and worked on sustainable agriculture in the region for more than 15 years; the two of them were Maryknoll lay missioners—and by CEDICAM co-founder Jesús León Santos. They argue that shifting policies to support the milpa model of small-scale, diversified farming is a better answer to food scarcity than subsidizing monoculture industrial agriculture.
This could be dry stuff, but the writings on sustainability, seed diversity, and Mixteca culture and history are engaging and are combined with local recipes tested by Oaxaca, Mexico-based chef Susana Trilling and gorgeous photos by photographer Judith Cooper Haden. The words, images, and mouth-watering recipes together create an evocative portrait of the power of traditional cultures and what is at stake as they are pressed by climate change, international economics, and exploitive development.
Co-author Dahl-Bredine told Sojourners, “It may be that the values still inherent in the worldview and the communities of these Indigenous peoples ... are the very values on which the human family can build a viable future on the planet.”
Past and future meet at the table
It turns out that Vasquez, whose parents left El Salvador in the 1980s because of civil war, is planning a cookbook of her own, based on interviews with Salvadoran women about their cooking and memories. It would be “a conversation between future, past, and present,” she says. It might nudge out some culinary cultural imperialism—preserving and spreading recipes so that other descendants of Salvadoran immigrants (and the rest of us too) can know and celebrate a delicious heritage. As for the stories, Vasquez already knows that they often will involve trauma. But this too is a vital part of the conversation. Stories, even painful ones, sustain cultures as food sustains bodies.
As food-centered holidays approach, perhaps a suitable watchword for our prayers and meal planning is “enough.” Enough food access and education for all to creatively take charge of their health. Enough discomfort with the hunger of others to live differently. Enough respect for traditional communities that both milpas and fiestas can multiply. Enough space and time to break bread together, linger over the foods your great-grandmother used to make, and share stories about family, the good and the bad. Just enough. More than you can imagine
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