Food, farming, and fiction for apocalyptic times

5 Questions for journalist and poet, Twilight Greenaway

People often respond first to her name. It’s Twilight. And yes, she did grow up in Hawaii with hippie parents. But there is nothing spaced out about this woman. She’s one of the most laser-focused, equity-minded human beings I’ve ever had the honor of sharing air with.

And we share a lot of air. Or we did, before the term “aerosols” came to mean potentially deadly droplets of virus, not the hairspray of my middle school coiffure failures. Our kids go to a Title I school together, where we are the minority as white moms, so we have lots of great conversations about that: how are we showing up? are our expectations fair? how are our kids?

We are also in a women’s group, and a wonderful, wandering text thread with two other moms who are also writers, where we dish on our favorite novels and lust after more writing time. I guess the best way to put it is that she’s become one of my traveling partners through life. And how lucky am I? She’s humble as hell, sometimes to a fault. She’s informed beyond most anyone else I know. And she’s kind—unfailingly kind and truthful at the same time. I knew she’d have a lot to teach us in this moment…

Courtney: You are the very first person who ever texted the words “social distancing” to me. Forget flattening the curve, you were way ahead of the curve! Why do you think you knew so much sooner than the rest of us how serious this thing was? 

The short answer is probably because I spend too much time on Twitter. But the long answer is that I’ve been following the climate crisis pretty closely for years, as well as the other intertwined crises we face with biodiversity, corporate consolidation, and money in politics for much of my adult life. I joke about having a prepper streak, and while I haven’t built a bunker (yet), I’ve had a deep-seated sense that many of the problems we've been watching in slow motion for a while would eventually pick up speed. I see the Coronavirus as part of that larger constellation. 

I hope this isn’t too dark to admit, but epigenetics also probably plays a role. My grandfather narrowly escaped getting sent to a concentration camp and lost most of his family by the time he turned 18. I grew up hearing about how his life had changed virtually overnight — so I’ve never taken for it granted that the relatively safe, comfortable life I have been lucky to live so far would go on indefinitely. 

You write a lot about food and farming. I know things are feeling pretty desperate for a lot of farmers right now. What are you most worried about that you're hearing/seeing? Anything we can proactively do as consumers to help? 

In the immediate term, I’m very worried for small-scale farmers, many of whom were already struggling to stay on the land. And while some have been able to make up for losing restaurant/institutional sales with a surge in community supported agriculture (CSA) subscriptions, many of those who didn’t already have a reliable mechanism for selling their food directly to consumers are scrambling to find ways to do that. 

On a larger level, we’re at this pivotal moment nationally where a lot of the small and medium-scale producers (those still farming at a “human scale”) are aging out. And farming is so high-stakes financially and land is so expensive that very few younger folks have been able to step up to take their places. As a result, we were already preparing to see large farms get even larger, more automated, less connected to the natural world, and less connected to what consumers want. A common refrain among many in the local food world is: “No Farmers, No Food.”

Unfortunately, that’s probably increasingly not true. It is becoming more and more possible every day to produce food with very few humans involved and that transition is making the system even more brittle and prone to collapse in the long run. As the Coronavirus plays out in the coming months, I’m bracing for the possibility that lot of older farmers could throw their arms up and retire. I wouldn’t blame them. And yet if they do that, it’s the larger operations (and the hedge funds) that will buy up their land, leading to a more industrialized food systems overall.

I'm also very concerned for food workers — everyone from farmworkers to meat processors, warehouse workers, GrubHub delivery people, and grocery store clerks. As they’re getting sick, the already-brittle supply chain is finding itself full of holes.

Signing up for a CSA in your neck of the woods is a great start, if you haven’t already. There are also some great opportunities to buy direct from farmers at farmers markets (which are still open in many states) and online. And they don’t all cost more than the grocery store either. In fact, SNAP users can get still their dollars doubled for produce sales at most farmers markets.

There’s been a lot of talk about how the air is cleaner since we all started sheltering in. Do you think there will be any long term positive side effects with regards to food? There seems to be a huge uptick in cooking and eating at home, which must have some benefits. 

Absolutely! As I see it, home cooking — or the lack of it — has long been a bottleneck when it comes to a wider-scale move toward more sustainable food. Buying local and organic food costs more, but that cost also goes down considerably if you’re cooking for yourself. Farm to table restaurants are (were?) great, but they’re not accessible to very many people. And at the same time our work-obsessed culture has made it very difficult for so many folks to prioritize cooking as a daily practice (and not just a bourgie IG-worthy hobby, like terrarium-building). 

Anyhow, some people will undoubtedly run screaming back to the first restaurant that re-opens in their neighborhood. But it also seems very possible that more people will feel competent and comfortable in the kitchen moving forward. And the huge rush of interest in home gardening — for those who have the space and time — is also very encouraging. I also think that if this goes on long enough people will start really think twice about wasting food, and that’s huge!

While I’m being hopeful, it would be great if more people started seeing animal protein in a different (dare I say more precious) light. Now that several large meat plants have shut down it’s not clear that cheap meat will be anywhere near as plentiful in the coming months and years as we’ve come to expect. And while that’s admittedly very tricky from a food security standpoint, it may have some positive results in terms of Americans learning to live with less than the average 200+ pounds of meat a year, and those who can afford it may be more likely to seeking out meat from local ranchers who raise their animals on pasture.

I think of you as someone who is extremely thoughtful about where you live and how you show up for others around you etc. How has sheltering in altered your relationship to your block or neighborhood?

Like most of us, I’ve been giving away and trading more food than ever before and it feels really good. I’ve always wanted to offer my neighbors the extra greens from my garden and my extra jars of homemade chicken stock, but now they actually seem to want them! I’m also enjoying trading things and running errands for other people around me. And it’s like this weirdly gratifying way to show people I care.

I’d like to do much more, and I’ve been inspired by friends and colleagues starting delivery and meal-prep programs (like my friend Maria Finn, who started a meal delivery program in Marin that has a sliding scale option).

You’re also a poet. Any poet that’s getting you through the pandemic that you would recommend to others? 

Going to grad school for poetry allowed me climb into language in a way that most people aren’t given the time or space to do — and I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world! But the realities of being a working parent (paying off that grad degree!) have quite honestly made it difficult to stay as close to poetry as I would like. Writing and editing articles has also often felt more useful for the world, in addition to paying the bills. And while I believe that poetry, literature — and all art— is just as crucial to survival as clear, cogent journalism and nonfiction writing is, the intensity of this moment means I haven’t been turning to poetry as often as fiction, which allows me a different level of escape from the passage of time. That said,  I’ve been heartened by the poems Maggie Smith and Ilya Kaminsky have been sharing; Rick Barot has a chapbook coming out about the pandemic that I am curious about; and I was brought to tears recently when my husband decided — out of the blue — to read some passages of Whitman’s Song of Myself to our 6-year-old. Oh and Audre Lorde is good for getting through most things.

Agreed. To follow Twilight, go here or here, and don’t forget to check out Civil Eats, where she is a contributing editor.