Farmer tills the soil of the 'pure food' movement
by J. DAVID SANTEN JR., The Oregonian
Sunday, November 13, 2005

M ichael Ableman is, at heart, an evangelist for local food grown without chemicals -- what he calls "pure food" that reconnects the farmer and the consumer to the land. As the founder of the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens, near Santa Barbara, Calif., he battled encroaching suburbia to maintain the farm as a way of life. That front secured, he moved to Salt Spring Island, B.C., in search of more farming and fewer municipal melees.

For "Fields of Plenty: A Farmer's Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It," his third book, Ableman, nearly 50, leaves the farm midsummer for the first time in 20 years, striking out in a 1989 VW van ("essentials" packed include a wooden fife and two blues harmonicas) with his grown son Aaron, leaving his wife and 2-year-old son behind to tend to his own fields of plenty.

This three-month, 12,000-mile journey across the U.S. seeks those who've stood against the monoculture of corporate agriculture, people who drive their own produce to market or to local kitchens, in the inner city and out the rural routes, who grow 22 kinds of eggplant or 56 cereals, from the Northwest through California, to New Mexico, Wisconsin, Maine, Delaware and back across, 25 farms in all.

Portland readers and farmers-market devotees may note some familiar faces: Greg Higgins and his downtown Portland restaurant; Anthony and Carol Boutard's famed Charentais melons from their place near Gaston; Washington state's only peanut grower, Horatio Alvarez, and his 85 varieties of peppers; "Potato Man" Gene Thiel of the Wallowa Mountains, who tasted the dirt he'd be growing his spuds in before buying his farm.

"Fields of Plenty" is part travelogue, part campaign trail and all Ableman, who clearly relates to the individuals he meets, but who also is inclined to point out those similarities every few pages, essentially showing readers his own dirt-stained hands as a reminder that he, too, is a "real farmer." Nonetheless, Ableman's perspective, culled from two decades of advocacy, is integral to the story.

The array of people and produce, the recipes and almost-lurid photographs that illustrate the fields Ableman visits and the meals he's fed, are almost enough to convert some of us pencil pushers out of the cubicles and back to the soil, despite the specter of economic failure that hangs over even the most exemplary small operations. As Virginia farmer Joel Salatin tells Ableman, "Man, I might not make much money, but boy, what an office!"

J. David Santen Jr. recently reviewed "Dream Boogie" by Peter Guralnick for The Oregonian.