Setting the Table

Food is a powerful signifier of culture, telling the who, what, when, and where of our lives. Whether cherished in community or savored alone, each of us can name foods that hold personal meaning. For me, growing up in Nebraska meant eating chili and a cinnamon roll for school lunch and buying Czech kolaches from grandmothers at farmers markets.

The food culture of western Massachusetts has many stories to tell, serving up a delicious history. From the fertile soil on the banks of the Connecticut River to the boxes of microgreens in the produce aisle, western Massachusetts is straddling the past and future of food—and teaching us a thing or two about who we are along the way.

What is ‘food culture’?

Leda Cooks, a professor of communication at UMass, teaches a class called Food and/as Communication. Food, she says, is “one of the most powerful symbols that we have, because it’s so basic to human needs.”

Cooks uses food as a proxy for identity and culture. “It was really hard to get people to talk about race,” she remembers. “But I could get them to talk about food, and through food, I could get them to understand how power works.”

For example, much of what we think of as Southern cuisine has roots in Africa, influenced by the enslaved people who were the primary Southern cooks for generations. “Food is a vehicle for power,” she says. “It is basic to survival, but also controllable.”

What our food says about us starts with where we are. The soil and climate of the place we live affect the food that can be grown locally, and denizens and newcomers alike define what foods are bought, sold, and declared a local delicacy. My local farmers market sells foraged mushrooms from up the road alongside falafel and pierogies. So, what does the food of the Connecticut River Valley tell us about who we are?

Fed by glaciers, lakes, and rivers

Looking back—way back—the food story of Amherst really begins with moving water. Archaeological evidence shows that humans have lived in the river valley for at least 12,000 years, since the end of the glaciation that formed Lake Hitchcock.

When the waters of that lake receded, unusually deep topsoil was left. This nutrient-rich loam is the hallmark of the Connecticut River Valley's robust agriculture.

Indigenous people of the Pocumtuc Nation—specifically members of the Norrwutuck community—were the first known inhabitants of the land where UMass Amherst now stands. They stewarded the valley for centuries, cultivating corn, squash, and beans (often called the “Three Sisters”) in the rich soil. They hunted and fished, harvested fruits and nuts like serviceberries and hickory nuts, and used plants like slippery elm to treat coughs, colds, and other ailments.

The land where the Pocumtuc people once grew corn is today part of what we call “western Mass.” A lot has changed since then. Colonialism pushed out Indigenous practices around growing, eating, and sharing meals. And subsequently, globalization imported all sorts of new flavors to the region.

Ancestral flavors

Growing together

Just as rediscovering Indigenous food practices can be healing to Native communities, connecting with Indigenous growing practices can be healing to the land. Jen Santry has taught courses on sustainable agriculture at UMass for over 10 years, but only in the past few years has she begun to teach about Native food systems. Santry is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and is Sicangu Lakota, Mdewakanton Dakota, and Yankton Dakota.

“I did not grow up in my community and culture,” Santry says. “Boarding schools intentionally disrupted our kinship and cultural connections. It was later in life that I learned how my ancestors lived and thrived here, before colonialism, with food systems that were in relationship with the land.”

Most of Santry’s UMass students aren’t Indigenous. Her lessons are meant to invite students of all backgrounds to know their history, and to know the history of the land they live on—usually, that means understanding that they live and study on unceded Native land.

Many of the agricultural practices that she teaches—like interplanting complementary crops and using cover crops to return nutrients to the soil—are the same practices that are today called “regenerative agriculture” and “permaculture,” Santry says. By teaching about Native food cultivation, she helps students to understand the Indigenous connection to the land.

Both James and Santry spoke of foods that are native to the Americas. Many of them—like tomatoes, corn, and squash—I recognized as a regular part of our contemporary diet. But others—like chestnuts, acorns, amaranth, and chokecherries—rarely grace modern menus. It’s ironic—in a world of supermarkets with food from all over the world, most Americans may be more familiar with pupusas and kimchi than with the bounty in our backyards.

Back to the land

One local point of pride has never changed—and it’s plastered on countless baskets, tractor beds, and storefronts across our region: Local Produce!

Virtually every town along the Connecticut River remains a farming community—the land tended by the Pocumtuc for centuries is still feeding us today. On my commute from Northampton to Amherst, I pass more fields than I can count. Even UMass Dining is partnered with over 30 local and regional farms, bringing their produce straight to the dining commons.

And we love a good food party. Amherst is surrounded by a bounty of farm-based festivals: the Garlic and Arts Festival in the Quabbin area, Sunderland’s Potato Fest, and of course, Hadley’s Asparagus Festival. “It’s a call back to a time when people got together at harvest time,” Professor Cooks explains. “Like most events in farming communities, people gather over common crops, to celebrate and to help each other out when times are hard.”

The region’s fame as an asparagus capital owes its existence to that same rich soil found on the banks of the Connecticut. Sometimes dubbed “Hadley Sandy Loam,” it’s particularly suited to growing the delicious spring shoots that locals call “Hadley Grass.” In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Polish immigrants arrived in western Mass in droves. Many established successful asparagus farms in the region, and for decades asparagus production flourished, the European staple thriving in the local loam. Reportedly, Queen Elizabeth II even served our local “grass” at England’s annual spring feast.

Due to a nasty fungal disease and increased imports from abroad, the once robust asparagus farming has dwindled substantially from its peak in the 1970s, and production is now barely a tenth of what it used to be. But each spring, ample roadside stands still boast local asparagus, and the festival treats attendees to an array of surprising delicacies from asparagus fries to asparagus—flavored ice cream.

Roots and wings

From UMass’s roots as Massachusetts Agricultural College to today’s Stockbridge School of Agriculture graduates, alums continue to shape the food culture of the surrounding area.

Max Traunstein and Lilly Israel, both 2014 graduates of the sustainable food and farming program, recently took over Kitchen Garden Farm, based in Sunderland. Longtime employees of the farm, they credit UMass with their ability to step into this new role.

An interest-free loan from the UMass-run Lotta Agricultural Fund supported their purchase, and their studies at Stockbridge, plus ample experience at the UMass Student Farm, gave them the academic background to succeed in the high-risk business of a 21st-century farm.

Like Professor Cooks says, this is a place that is uniquely supportive of agriculture—particularly small-scale organic vegetable farmers like Traunstein and Israel. Fellow organic farmers form a strong community. They help each other out with equipment and share tips on growing food.

“We just don’t consider ourselves in competition,” Israel says.

One way that local farms have maintained this robust and friendly system of mutual support is by each carving out a niche in the vegetable market. Kitchen Garden has found two corners of the market to call their own: bitter Italian greens and hot peppers.

The Italian greens are thanks to the Italophile inclinations of Kitchen Garden’s former owners, Tim Wilcox and Caroline Pam. They bonded over a shared love of Italian cuisine, and, years later, many upper-crust restaurants in New York City rely on their farm to supply specialty greens like radicchio and puntarelle—a variant of chicory with dandelion-shaped leaves and a sea-creature shape. Cooks says that one of the defining characteristics of this cultural moment in food is that, at least in the United States, we have a wider variety of ingredients and cuisines available to us than ever before. And that means that one of America’s foremost suppliers of radicchio is just down the street from UMass.

The spice of life

The same forces of globalization that have made us less reliant on food grown in our gardens have expanded the American palate, and in particular, have brought international cuisines to our dinner tables. Food is a powerful ambassador, able to bring all walks of life together. Despite our differences, it’s pretty hard to argue with a tasty bite.

With greater access to all sorts of food, our collective access to flavors is broadening as well. Kitchen Garden Farm has gone all in on pushing the limits of our palates with about a hundred pepper varieties, ranging from the sweet but tongue-on-fire spicy orange habanero to the fruity, earthy Thunder Mountain Longhorn.

Kitchen Garden also produces its own hot sauces, salsas, srirachas, and giardiniera. It’s something that sets the farm apart—they manage every part of the production, from harvest to bottling, selling the products online and in stores across the country.

If you’ve been lucky enough to try it, you know there’s something undeniably delicious about food straight out of the ground—especially when that ground is some of the most fertile soil in the world. As Max Traunstein aptly put it, it’s “mind-blowingly good.”

Traunstein fell in love with farming through his love of food. “I remember the first winter I worked here, the first shift I ever was here, we were harvesting carrots—little tiny carrots out of a greenhouse,” he recounts. “They were the sweetest thing I'd ever tasted.”

“I don’t think I actually loved dirt naturally,” Traunstein admits. But it comes with the job description. Part of the requirement for USDA organic certification includes bolstering soil fertility with practices like crop rotation and cover cropping—the same practices this valley has appreciated for millennia.

Filling the next plate

Asking anyone to imagine the future of our relationship to food is like asking someone to predict the future of our relationship to place, identity, race, class, ancestry, colonialism, taste … in other words, it’s complicated.

But exciting visions also present themselves. Professor Cooks says that her “ultimate dream” is a culture where we “value food in all parts of the cycle, and food does not die or go to waste.” She has researched and written extensively about food waste and would love for a broader cultural embrace of food that isn’t aesthetically perfect.

Like the art in this article? Wondering how we set the scene using local foods? See how we did it in our “Food Processors” Extra Credit article.