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’?

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

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

Daniella James ’25, a student in the University Without Walls program, is an enrolled member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe and is Apache, Navajo, Mexican, and American. James, who identifies as two-spirit and uses the gender-neutral pronouns zhe/zher, has spent years trying to bring zher ancestors’ food practices to modern life.

James remembers older family members becoming visibly upset when asked about the food traditions of their Native American family. “You could see them get depressed, and put their head down, and want to cry,” zhe says. When colonists forced Native Americans off their land, they lost access to the ecosystems that had determined their diets for millennia. And after the violent loss of land and lives at the hands of settlers, generations of children were sent to abusive boarding schools that forcibly refused their community’s traditional food.

Eating Indigenous foods has been a visceral experience for James. “Blood memory” is a phenomenon in which certain kinds of memories—even tastes of food—can be inherited, zhe explains. When zhe tried acorn soup for the first time, James says, “I took a sip, and it was just like a whole world came into my life.”

“Preserving Indigenous food,” zhe says, is not just wild rice or chokecherry recipes, “but also, memories, identities, and sense of place.” Intent on learning the language and food of zher ancestors, James studied at San Carlos Apache College and is currently studying business at UMass, hoping to bring an entrepreneurial lens to this interest in Native foods.

James’s enthusiasm has led zher to travel the country to learn about Indigenous food and share all of zher learnings with zher community. In August 2023, zhe hosted a “healing meal” for Native children in Kirtland, New Mexico (a small town near the Navajo Nation).

“I learned about Native foods in adulthood. I wanted to start a project where youth didn’t have to wait that long,” James says. So zhe brought the kids and their families precolonial staples to taste, like beans and potatoes, alongside adventurous foods like raw cocao and crickets. Reactions varied—reports included spit-out crickets—but “every one of these kids had their own honest take on it,” James says. “We all got to learn and heal together.”

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.

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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.”

Virtually every town along the Connecticut River remains a farming community.

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.

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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.

One of America’s foremost suppliers of radicchio is just down the street from UMass.

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.

Food is a powerful ambassador; despite our differences, it’s pretty hard to argue with a tasty bite.

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.

Santry says she hopes that “food becomes more than a quick bite to eat.” She wants all of us to think of plants as our relatives. “We’re in community together, and we’re all related,” she says.

In all my conversations for this piece, climate change was a constant theme. Farmers are under constant pressure to adapt to a volatile climate—for example, in the summer of 2023, floods devastated crops throughout the valley.

The story of food is undeniably intertwined with our imperiled climate and growing conditions. But the good news is, we know what to do. So many of the food-growing practices that were developed by Indigenous people centuries ago are the same ones that will help us grow food on this planet for longer. “They have answers,” Santry reminds us, “especially with climate change.”

Israel got into farming in part because she felt like the world was in dire straits, especially in terms of climate change. “And then I started volunteering at the permaculture gardens at UMass and I felt hopeful,” she remembers.

“Everyone needs to eat food to live, and food is so culturally significant and has so much meaning—and can bring so much joy. Growing food in a good way can make you feel like you are not doing nothing,” Israel says. “You’re bringing joy to people’s lives—and nourishment.

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.