Transforming the system
A conversation with Kourtney Collum
One of the best parts of being the editor of COA is I get to spend time talking to my colleagues about the work they do at the college. What a gift, being forced to spend time listening to really smart, engaging people talk about their passions.
I loved my time as a college student—once I actually accepted that role—and I wanted to be nothing else. I spent many years getting my BA, many more getting my MFA… I would do it all again. The spaces where talking and listening and learning happen are charged spaces, magical spaces, (un)safe spaces. Spaces like that have always been a draw for me. COA is a space like that.
Enjoy the Reciprocity
—Dan
Lucian Vazquez ’25, left, and Charlie Nadeau ’26 attend to COA beehives.
When the subject of food apartheid comes up, I know I'm out of my depth. I'm talking with Partridge Chair in Food and Sustainable Agriculture Systems Kourtney Collum, thinking all is well until I'm suddenly swimming in a pool of uncertainty. So begins my (re)education into food politics and food justice that Collum brings to the table. To tell the truth, I've existed long enough in cities, towns, and rural America to understand the inequities of distribution, but the entire time I spoke to Collum I felt like I was arriving late to the jigsaw party, like I was a small part of a giant puzzle worked on by many, many hands. Collum teaches classes on the human dimensions of food systems and the cultural, social, political, and economic side of food in the United States. About a minute into our conversation she drops food apartheid…
The desert
Dan Mahoney: So… is food apartheid like food deserts? I know about food deserts.
Kourtney Collum: Food deserts are a thing, but we call them food apartheid now.
DM: No, we don't...
KC: Yes, we do, though some people still use the term food deserts... but the terminology change draws attention to the fact that a desert is a natural phenomenon, right? When we're talking about communities that do not have access to healthy food there's nothing natural about that; it's really due to inequality, economic oppression, and systematic racism.
DM: I see. Well, it’s hard to argue with that point.
KC: The USDA still uses the term food desert, but food justice activists say, no, this is food apartheid. If you look at the city, some neighborhoods have access to a bunch of grocers, farmer's markets, and Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, and in other parts of the city wholesale distributors will not deliver food... or there aren't sidewalks or streetlights… the infrastructure is crumbling.
DM: This is mostly a city sort of thing.
KC: Mostly a city thing, but rural food apartheid exists, too. Which brings me to Transforming Food Systems, a class I teach every year at COA. The class assumes that students come to college with a critical view on food systems. I haven't always approached the class this way, I used to begin by trying to convince students that there was something wrong with the food system and then we'd be able to get into it. But now they all come with critiques, they watch food documentaries in high school, they've read Michael Pollan, and they have a sense that there is something fundamentally wrong. That class is about how we create systematic change in the food system through social movements, policy change, and advocacy.
DM: My big question is, how do we create change in the food system while allowing me to have avocados in the winter?
KC: I don't personally have a problem with avocados, but I remember when I first got to COA there was an email war after a student asked where they could find avocados. Responses were all about the ecological footprint of crops and the morality of eating something not native to the area you live in... The next day in class I pointed out that this sort of individual shaming is part of the problem and how the entire system of neoliberal capitalist agriculture tries to convince us that change is made through individual choices. Vote with your dollar, right? The popular assumption is, If you care enough, you'll buy the good local produce. But by confusing consumerism with citizenship, we completely alienate people who can't afford to participate through the market.
DM: That's so good. It reminds of the graduation address Naomi Klein gave in 2015. She was talking about her book No Logo and how she'd hoped the book and her lectures would serve to rally people to petition governments for policy changes to protect workers, allow them to unionize, and reform global trading systems... She said at the end of each lecture she gave, the first question an audience member would ask would invariably be, Yeah, but what kind of sneakers should I buy? So, I guess the message folks were getting was if I have the right sneakers, I won't be shamed.
KC: Exactly. If we move away from individual shame, we can focus on the structural issue, how the structure works. But sure, if you can afford it and you care, buy the pesticide-free carrots, but realize that not everyone can do that. So, we look at policy. How can we lobby the government to change those regulations? It’s hard to get governments to do anything, how do you force them into action? Social movements. We look at La Via Campesina and other examples of movements from around the world that use collective action to transform systems.
DM: Klein said she thought she was building a movement and ended up becoming a shopping advisor. Which, I guess, buying the "right" thing is an immediate response to an existential problem, but it does get back to that confusion between consumerism and citizenship.
KC: Another tension in classes I teach is, how do you address immediate needs through things like emergency food systems, while doing the long work of creating structural change?
DM: It's hard to do both... Where does one begin?
KC: Many organizations can’t do both. But I encourage students to intern with nonprofits so that they have a more nuanced understanding of the challenges of changing systems while providing essential services. I try to partner with a lot of local organizations to fund internships. I 've been working with dean of institutional advancement Shawn Keeley ’00 and grant writer Kelly Dickson MPhil ’97 writing grants to fund internships with organizations that wouldn't otherwise be able to pay interns. [Shout out here to The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation for their commitment to this cause] One of the problems that nonprofits face is that their employees often need the very services they provide because the nonprofit cannot afford to pay competitive wages. Most students need to find funded internships to survive. They can’t survive a summer with no income. If we can write grants to help fund these internships, everyone benefits. We’ve had several students intern with Healthy Acadia in their gleaning initiative. The students go to farms in the community and collect the produce the farm hasn't had the capacity to harvest. The gleaning initiative takes what they harvest and delivers it to soup kitchens and food pantries in the area. This summer we’re funding an internship with Healthy Acadia’s Downeast Restorative Harvest project, which is a partnership with the Washington County Jail, Maine Department of Corrections, and a few other community partners. A goal of that community garden is to improve access to healthy, nourishing food for jail residents, and ultimately reduce recidivism through programing that helps folks attain agricultural skills and healthy relationships with their communities through food. It’s about recognizing healthy food as a basic human right and a source of dignity.
DM: I love the idea that healthy food is a basic human right. So simple when you think about it.
Mark McBrine from Mountain View Correctional Facility, photo courtesy Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.
KC: Another partner in the project working to transform carceral systems is an organization called Impact Justice. They are working in many areas of prison reform, including food. They just recently put out a big report on the state of prison food from around the country and documented truly terrible dining conditions: serving rotten, unhealthy food, sometimes not even meant for human consumption, and food that was not culturally appropriate... Basically, they found that food was being used as another form of punishment. Not surprising, really. However, they also highlighted the best programs in the country, some of which happen to be in Maine. Mark McBrine, the food services manager at Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine, will be coming to campus in winter term to talk to a class director of A/V services Zach Soares ’00 and I are teaching on the state of prison food.
DM: What is the name of the class?
KC: It's called Prison Food Systems: An Audio Production Course. McBrine's story about food reform is instructive. When he first started in the kitchen at Mountain View it was a lot of white bread, sugary baked goods, canned foods, and frozen egg products… in addition to being really expensive. Under McBrine, they cancelled their bread contracts and started making their own bread, bagels, and biscuits using flour milled at Maine Grains, and they also started growing organic produce across the street on six acres leased from the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. The result has been better, more nutritious, good-tasting food. And they’re running a culinary training program that places folks in restaurant jobs when they are released.
DM: Wow. That is something that makes a ton of sense and something I would have never thought about.
“Prisons function as out-of-sight food deserts, perpetuating patterns of poor health in communities that already experience profound inequities. The growing movement for food justice will not be complete until it reaches inside prisons and jails.”
The bees
DM: Let's talk about Bees and Society. I love bees.
KC: In that class we look at the human relationship with bees over time... We've been obsessed with bees for more than 10,000 years.
DM: Because bees are adorable.
KC: They are. They're very charismatic. That human/bee relationship is part of what we look at, and the other part is looking at bees in contemporary food systems. Our food systems are really dependent on pollination, primarily from domesticated honeybees. We do a lot of field trips and bring people in like Maine State Apiarist and Bee Inspector Jennifer Lund.
DM: There's a Maine state apiarist?
KC: Yep. Her job is to serve as a resource for every registered beekeeper in the state. Everyone who keeps bees in the state of Maine is supposed to register. COA has five colonies of bees which costs $10 total to register, so it is inexpensive. When a colony dies, Lund will come do a hive autopsy (really a necropsy) and diagnose why the bees died… it’s pretty amazing to see. And we'll also visit places like Swan's Honey, the biggest beekeeper in the state. Swan's has around 4,000 colonies—which is on the smaller side of commercial beekeepers nationally who sometimes keep as many 80,000 colonies.
DM: And are all those bees local to where their colonies are?
KC: It gets complicated in a hurry. Apis mellifera, the honeybee that was domesticated for crop pollination, is technically non-native. It’s a European honeybee, but they’ve been in North America since the 1600s. Most queens these days are coming from Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand. They get shipped out and sent all over the world. But there are also small-scale beekeepers who, in addition to selling wax or honey, will breed queens for extra income. So, if your colonies are in Maine, you might want a queen who was reared here, who has the genetics of bees who have successfully survived Maine winters. Someone breeding queens that have successfully overwintered in Maine can sell 20 or 30 mated queens for $50 a pop… that's good income.
DM: So many moving parts. It just seems nuts to me.
KC: Speaking of nuts, we go visit this amazing woman, Erin Evans in Portland... She is completely nuts in the best ways. Erin is the person who got me into beekeeping. She's always on the move, always has a new idea. At the time she was the controller for Allagash Brewing and now she’s the director of finance at Maine Audubon, but in addition to that she’s had a beekeeping business for well over a decade with around 100 colonies in her backyard in Portland. She lives along a row of power lines and when the power company came to clear one year, she talked them into removing the invasive plants and giving her the money to plant native plants. She’s created a permaculture oasis in this urban landscape where she could keep her bees. The power company agreed! Erin can talk anyone into anything.
DM: Fantastic.
KC: Now in addition to her bees she has goats and chickens. She's the former president of the Maine Beekeepers Association and a master beekeeper—which is a designation you can get that requires specific training. There are only a few master beekeepers in Maine.
DM: How did you meet this Erin Evans?
KC: I was finishing up grad school, living with my partner in Portland, and working with blueberry farmers who were dependent on bees for pollination, and I thought I should understand beekeeping, too, so I could better appreciate the problems these farmers were facing. When I reached out to Erin she said, "If you want to learn about bees you've got to keep bees. Come back on Saturday. You're gonna keep bees with me this summer."
DM: Learn by doing.
KC: Exactly. There's a group in Southern Maine who are training a whole new generation of beekeepers. They have open-hive demonstrations where you go do hive inspections with other folks so that you can see what kinds of problems they're dealing with, which helps you with your own bees. It's a dynamic system of mentorship; someone mentors you, you learn the skill, and then mentor someone else.
DM: Talk about gift exchange. That is living the life, right there.
KC: They are an inspiring community.
