Bluedot Living 2023 Late Summer

President Victoria Riskin

CEO Raymond Pearce

Editor Jamie Kageleiry, editor@bluedotliving.com

Senior Writer Leslie Garrett

Associate Editor Lucas Thors

Copyeditor Laura Roosevelt

Creative Director Tara Kenny

Design/Production Whitney Multari

Digital Projects Manager Kelsey Perrett

Digital Assets Manager Alison Mead

Social Media/Digital Projects Julia Cooper

Contributing Editors Mollie Doyle, Catherine Walthers

Ad Sales Josh Katz, adsales@bluedotliiving.com

Contributors, this issue Randi Baird, Irina Bezumova, Annabelle Brothers, Daniel Cuff, Jeremy Driesen, Sarah Glazer, Sheny Leon, Laura Roosevelt, Catherine Walthers

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“ Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. On it everyone you love .” –Carl Sagan

Dear Readers,

“The scent of wild blueberries, sweet and mingled with a humusy musk from the dirt that sustains them, wafting through the woods on a humid afternoon …” writes Laura Roosevelt in her ode to eating what’s grown in your backyard, or picked up at a nearby farm, for this issue dedicated to the bounty of Martha’s Vineyard. “Wild blueberries, like the ones my mother and I would pick together almost daily during that summer when I was eleven.”

I hope most of us have those memories: The burst of sweet summer corn in our mouths, an explosion of velvety tomato, a briny oyster, or fish right off the boat. Our Local Hero for this issue (who else could it be but Rebecca Haag, Executive Director of IGI?), says about food: “It is also love, it is family, it is community, it is tradition and history.”

We’re celebrating this abundance with the art of farms and food — gorgeous photographs by Sheny Leon of the sweet corn harvest at Morning Glory Farm; paintings and drawings from Martha’s Vineyard Hospital’s Permanent Art Collection (thank you to the hospital, and Monina von Opel for curating this); Randi Baird’s lovely images of oyster farmer Noah Mayrand visiting his beds in Lagoon Pond. That

story, by the way, was written by MV Regional High School graduate (and Bluedot Institute intern) Annabelle Brothers.

We love Jo Douglas’s Fork-to-Pork program: She collects food waste from Island restaurants, feeds her passel of pigs (sometimes with Back Door Donuts to their delight); then when it’s time for the pigs to become food, she brings, say, a pork loin, or a pork belly (or both) back to a restaurant. (See the recipe for Pawnee House’s Italian Porchetta on page 31.)

It’s a sweet, “righteous” circle of life, like so much of the food system on Martha’s Vineyard.

PARAMOUNT COW IN FIELD BY WENDY JEFFERS

COURTESY THE MARTHA’S VINEYARD HOSPITAL PERMANENT ART COLLECTION

(508)627-2928 | MV@oh-DEER.com

oh-DEER.com/locations/MV

Reader Jack Connell wrote about Mollie Doyle’s story on induction ranges: "I'm a bit of a blend of energy geek and marketing guy and try to refrain from offering advice unless I really like what I'm seeing — and Blüedot is a somewhat recent discovery for me. Thank you for all you're doing in bringing energy advice to everyone, residents, and visitors alike.

"It’s with that respect for what you’re doing that I might, from time to time, chime in with a technical correction if I think it’s important. The recent email article about induction stoves by Mollie Doyle was very well written and makes a very compelling case (we just replaced our gas stove with induction at home, before heading to the Vineyard for the summer). The statement, ‘My mom’s induction stove is fueled by the solar panels from her roof. If you install an induction stove but do not have solar, there is a good chance you will still be using fossil fuel-based energy to power your electric range.’ is partially correct, but makes it sound like induction is not a good idea without solar on one’s roof. In fact, our electricity on the Vineyard is, on average, produced by about 43% non-carbon sources so the conversion from LP to induction does help, a lot. (Ref: EPA eGRID Power Profiler for 02539)."

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Thanks, Jack! We invite anyone to write to us with corrections, ideas (or praise!). I’m at editor@bluedotliving.com.

We so appreciate our readers (subscribe here to have the magazine mailed to you: bit.ly/MVBluedotSubs), and our newsletter subscribers (you can sign up here for that: bit.ly/MV-NEWSLETTER) for continuing to support our mission to bring you local, solutions-focused climate stories. (You can contribute here: marthasvineyard.bluedotliving. com/become-a-member/)

Bon Appétit!

–Jamie Kageleiry

PEARS AND APPLES BY THAW MALIN COURTESY THE MARTHA’S VINEYARD HOSPITAL PERMANENT ART COLLECTION

– Laura Roosevelt

ANDREW WOODRUFF BY BRUCE DAVIDSON COURTESY THE MARTHA’S VINEYARD HOSPITAL PERMANENT ART COLLECTION

There’s nothing quite like eating a vegetable that was picked twenty minutes ago.

Art this page: “Tractor,” by Terry Crimmen

Art on opposite page: “Sunset Through the Barn,” by Thaw Malin, Courtesy of the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital

Permanent Art Collection.

19 A Climate Conversation With Bill McKibben

By Leslie Garrett

Upfront Find this magazine online at marthasvineyard.bluedotliving.com Subscribe! marthasvineyard.bluedotliving. com/magazine-subscriptions/ Cover photograph: Seneth Waterman at Morning Glory Farm, photo by Sheny Leon

During a recent visit to the Island, the longtime climate activist spoke to Bluedot editor Leslie Garrett about “Third Act,”

50 Noah Mayrand: He’s Farming Oysters to Feed an Island

By Annabelle Brothers

And helping make our ponds healthy.

38 What’s So Bad About Corn?

By Leslie Garrett

Local corn on the cob is the sweet summer perfect treat — just check out the crowds around the bins at Morning Glory Farm. But the glorious, sublime crop is also … complicated.

54 Saving Chilmark Pond

By Sarah Glazer

Abel’s Hill neighbors rally to reduce fertilizer use, and help create a blueprint for restoring pond health.

Departments

46 The Bluedot Kitchen: Dinner Salads!

Editor Catherine Walthers celebrates the bounty of Vineyard summer.

50 Garden to Table: Keeping Your Tomatoes Free of Pests

By Laura D. Roosevelt

Harvest now to eat all winter.

64 Local Hero: By Lucas Thors

We Nominate Rebecca Haag.

To the IGI chief, food is more than just nutrition: “It is also love, it is family, it is community, it is tradition and history.”

of the Day Sharing the Catch

Story and Photos By Lucas Thors

At the top of the list of all the attractions that draw visitors to the Vineyard from around the world — up there with the Island’s picturesque beaches and laidback, take-your-time atmosphere — is our seafood. It’s so fresh: A hungry market-goer looking for some lobster or scallops could arrive in Menemsha at the same moment the boat that caught the bounty is pulling away from the dock.

The Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen’s Preservation Trust (MVFPT) and the Martha’s Vineyard Seafood Collaborative are offering a new way for people to purchase fresh seafood directly from local fishermen. The newly established Community Supported Fishery (CSF) program is aimed at providing direct-to-consumer access to the freshest seafood available. At the same time, anyone who buys into the opportunity can be assured that they are bolstering the Island economy and significantly

reducing the carbon footprint caused by shipping fish off-Island. According to Phoebe Walsh, operations manager for the Martha’s Vineyard Seafood Collaborative, the project started

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Phoebe Walsh, left, and Adelaide Keene work at the Seafood Collaborative booth at the Farmers Market.

with a small winter CSF as a pilot to see how the community responded. “People were really excited, and we felt like a direct-to-consumer model would help bring in money to keep the [CSF] operation going,” Walsh says. She explains that the CSF initiative is based largely on the Community Supported Agriculture model — the up-front CSF fees help get the program going early in the season and enable the trust to buy fish from fishermen before the summer’s increased demand.

Of course, the CSF includes all the delicious scallops, bluefish, and lobster folks might want. But it also provides members with many other fish and shellfish species that are equally healthy and tasty, including sea bass, scup, and other finfish that are often underutilized in restaurants and family kitchens. “And that’s one part of the education component,” Walsh explains. “So much of this fish goes to waste because people might be unfamiliar with it.” During the planning phase of the project, the CSF team discussed how they could balance the price to make fish affordable and accessible for the Island, but also support local fishermen.

A summer membership can begin anytime June through August and includes three monthly pickups. A fall membership runs September through October and includes two monthly pickups. Seasonal memberships come in small and large sizes, priced at $345 and $675 for sum-

CSF bundles are a great option for people who aren’t very comfortable with cooking fish, since the MVFPT provides recipes and meal ideas to those who pick up. But the program is also great for the serious chef looking to try something new.

mer and $230 and $450 for fall. A large share includes sixteen to twenty servings of locally caught seafood per pickup (enough for four people to eat once a week, for four to five weeks, so between $11 and $14 per serving). A small share includes eight to ten servings of locally caught seafood (enough for two people to eat once a week, for four to five weeks, so about $11 per serving.)

Although it’s a sizable upfront cost, Walsh said she hopes people appreciate the value they get from the CSF program when they break down the membership on a per-serving basis. “Plus, look what you are getting — very high-quality seafood that is freshly flash frozen and caught by people right here on the Vineyard,” Walsh says. “At the same time, people who aren’t able to commit to that larger sum [can still] buy a little bit at a time and get some of the more affordable options like scup or sea bass.”

This is the first year that the MVFPT has been able to sell fish at a true retail location, and Walsh says the West Tisbury Farmers Market seemed like a sensible option. It’s more convenient for many Islanders than their home base in Menemsha, and it encourages seafood customers to also peruse the rest of the Market’s Island-grown wares. “People seem to really be enjoying it already,” Walsh says, “and it’s fun to provide that connection to food.”

She adds that CSF bundles are a great option for people who aren’t very comfortable with cooking fish, since the

MVFPT provides recipes and meal ideas to those who pick up. But the program is also great for the serious chef looking to try something new. “We have everyone from people who are brand new to cooking fish, all the way to professional, very experienced cooks that want access to high-quality fish in order to broaden their culinary horizons a bit,” Walsh says.

Shelley Edmundson, MVFPT executive director, says that

Striped bass ready to be processed, filleted, and flash-frozen.

BY SARA CANNON

during their normal operations in the wholesale fish market, a lot of seafood was being exported, and the economic advantage of selling fish locally was being lost.

“The idea of having a CSF kept surfacing,” Edmundson says. “We thought that was such a great way to get fresh catch to everybody, and to tell the story of the catch.” Although there were a number of regulatory barriers to work through and logistical challenges to conquer, Edmundson says that the effort was worthwhile, because getting fish directly to consumers isn’t something that fishermen can always do themselves.

The recent Farmers Market was a great test run, according to Edmundson. She calls the first CSF pick up a “major triumph” that proved the efficacy of their model and illustrated how much the community wants access to this kind of food. She also reiterated that the program will be running through the fall (with pickup continuing at the Farmers Market), so people should look into purchasing their fall shares soon.

Just as a fruit or vegetable that is an odd shape, size, or variety might get passed over in a grocery store, Edmundson says that some sizes and species of fish are often overlooked by everyday shoppers and culinary experts alike. “Oftentimes, a restaurant just wants certain sizes of everything, but that’s just not how it works when you fish,” she says. “It leaves this whole pocket of misfit sizes and species that are otherwise not sold or not consumed.” The CSF program hopes to find a place for all that good food, so it’s not wasted and the fishermen can have a market for their entire haul.

For Edmundson and the rest of the MVFPT, connection to food and people is key. At the farmers market, shoppers or CSF members have access to a wealth of information regarding the boat the fish is from, how it’s caught, and how to prepare a delicious meal. “We want to get people hooked on this kind of food and this kind of awareness, so they can go to another market or restaurant and make those same choices,” Edmundson says. At the same time, she adds, participants and buyers can know exactly who pulled that fish out of the net or off the line. “You might pick up your package and put it in your cooler and see that it’s fish from Johnny Hoy’s boat,” Edmundson says. Eventually, the MVFPT wants to have a page where folks can see all the vessels that sell to the program, and can read their stories. “Who is working hard to catch what you are eating? It all makes buying and making great food a little more magical.”

Visit mvfishermenspreservationtrust.org/csf for more information on pricing, schedules, and more.

To: Bluedot Living

From: Island Grown Initiative

Subject: IGI’s Reduced Tillage Project With American Farmland Trust

In February of this year, Island Grown Initiative was chosen to be one of eight New England farms in the American Farmland Trust’s new Farm-Led Innovations in Reduced Tillage project. This program brings together farmers who are working to grow food using organic methods with minimal soil disturbance, to support peer-to-peer learning and spread these practices across farms in New England and beyond.

Regenerative farming, which prioritizes both environmental health and abundant food production for people, is not a new idea. This is the traditional

approach to farming that many indigenous cultures across the world have practiced for millennia. But today in our country, there are very few mid-scale farms growing vegetables without relying on heavy tillage or chemical inputs to prepare beds for planting, reduce weed pressure, and transition between cover crops and vegetable crops. By reducing tillage and forgoing the use of chemicals, these farms help support

healthy soils, the foundation for nutrient-dense food and biodiversity on working farmscapes. Because few farms are engaged in these practices at scale, there is limited access to commercial equipment for

Low- and no-till practices produce healthier soils.

these growers, leading farmers like those at IGI to build custom tools or modify farm equipment themselves. There are also not many other growers to turn to workshop ideas, share challenges and successes, or spread innovations beyond individual farms. Enter American Farmland Trust, which put together this cohort of four Massachusetts farms and four Maine farms that now has been meeting regularly for six months. Each farm was granted $5,000 over two years to advance a reduced tillage project on their land. At IGI, regenerative farming consultant Andrew Woodruff customized a “zone tiller,” a machine that allows for minimal soil disturbance before planting. They are now using this equipment to plant fall brassicas, including cabbage, broccoli, and kale into cover crops with different types of field preparations to measure plant health and yields. They will be planting

into trial plots that have been prepared using tarps, rolled cover crops, compost applications, and organic fertilizer, gathering data about which practices work best to minimize soil disturbance while maximizing food production.

AFT’s aim is to help other growers

learn from these farmers’ innovations by hosting walking tours, publishing articles, and sharing videos. IGI’s walking tour will take place in early October. For more information, or to schedule a tour of IGI’s regenerative farm, please contact office@igimv.org.

Tim Connelly, IGI Farm Director, on a tractor with a zone tiller attachment built by Andrew Woodruff.

PHOTOS BY JEREMY DRIESEN

What. On. Earth. Pick of the Crop

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?

—Geraldine Brooks, Caleb’s Crossing

1. Percent of carbon emissions globally from agriculture: 24

2. Number of dead zones in seas around the world due to agricultural runoff: 405

3. Percent of fertilizer lost into the air from each application: 40

4. Percent of the Earth’s ice-free land that is used for agriculture: 34

5. Percent of the Earth’s ice-free land that is urban: 1

6. Percent of the world’s agricultural land that is used for beef cattle: 60

7. Percent of the world’s calories provided by beef cattle: <2

8. Percentage of CO2 emissions sequestered by Earth’s forests, farms, and grasslands: 25

9. Percent of rural American farms operated by families: 98

10. Number of people one U.S. farm feeds (domestic and abroad): 166

11. Percent of U.S. grown food that never gets eaten: 40

12. Number of acres Morning Glory Farm plants in corn: 27.45

13. Distance that would cover if planted in a single row: 57 miles

14. Number of acres of corn and pumpkins Morning Glory has in no-till farming: 23

15. Percent of acres of crops at Island Grown Intiative’s farm that is planted using regenerative practices: 100

16. Gigatons of CO2 or its equivalent that must be reduced (referred to as the emissions gap) in order to halt global warming at 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels: 23

17. Anticipated worldwide growth in acres in regenerative agriculture by 2050: ~900 million

18. Impact this growth could have on reduction of CO2 emissions in gigatons: 23.2 (thus closing the emissions gap)

BY JULES WORTHINGTON

BROOKSIDE FARM

COURTESY THE MARTHA’S VINEYARD HOSPITAL PERMANENT ART COLLECTION

Speciesism

Speciesism. Try to say that five times. Or once. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? While it might sound a bit like someone speaking with marbles in their mouth, in fact, speciesism is more about someone with a chunk of cow in their mouth, or perhaps chicken, or octopus.

Or … not exactly.

As defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, speciesism is:

• prejudice or discrimination based on species, especially discrimination against animals

• the assumption of human superiority on which speciesism is based.

Speciesism is a surprisingly new word — its first known use was in 1970. But speciesism as a concept has been around for as long as humans have, one surmises, and certainly for as long as we have felt ourselves superior to other species and therefore free to

eat, dominate, subjugate, or otherwise exploit them.

Indeed, speciesism is so ingrained in being a human that a word to define it hardly seemed necessary. It was just the way things were, integral to the survival of the one most equipped with tools and opposable thumbs, the one most hungry for a burger.

But speciesism is in plenty of people’s mouths these days — part of a philosophical discussion about our role in the planetary web, and the price the planet has paid for humankind’s domination. Perhaps no one has brought the concept of speciesism to public consciousness as much as Peter Singer, the moral philosopher and Princeton bioethics professor whose first book, Animal Liberation, published nearly fifty years ago in 1975, started a conversation around meat-eating and the farming of animals that hasn’t stopped since. (That book has been updated and reprinted; see below.)

His proposal was simple: Afford animals the same rights and consideration we offer ourselves. It isn’t so much the eating of animals that troubles Singer, it’s the suffering. And there’s no question that our industrialized farming of animals creates great suffering for them.

But while he thinks his views are morally correct, he doesn’t condemn those who don’t hold the same views. “I have lots of friends who eat animals,” he told a reporter for Vogue magazine. “You’ve got to accept that some people will be persuaded, and others will alter their consuming habits to some degree, but not as much as I would like. I don’t want to live in the ghetto of only people who think and act exactly like me.”

Rather, he urges all of us to think about what we put on our plates and how it got there, noting that “if everyone who now eats meat were to be genuinely conscientious, I would feel my battle on behalf of animals was 80 to 90 percent won.”

These days, with the recent publication of a new book, Animal Liberation Now, Singer’s motivations for encouraging a plantbased diet are no longer exclusively about animal suffering but also about the impact that eating meat has on our planet. If everyone on the planet replaced meat with plants for half the meals they eat, he wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “we would have fewer animals suffering, and a tremendously better shot at avoiding the most dire consequences of climate change.”

Leslie Garrett

spe·cies·ism 'spē-shēz-,i-zəm

CHARY CHICKEN, WHITING FARM, BY LYNNE WHITING COURTESY THE MV HOSPITAL'S PERMANENT ART COLLECTION.

dot

Dear Dot,

I recently read that grass-fed beef is not better than grain-fed for greenhouse gas emissions and, in fact, may be worse. What does Dot know about that?

—Robert, Chilmark

Dear Robert,

What Dot knows is that, many years ago, after four years of a meat-free diet, I decided to re-introduce beef, but only from humanely-raised, grass-fed cows. Research at the time indicated that grass-fed cows farted less because grass was better for them and, therefore, methane emissions were reduced. (Our lovely Bluedot copyeditor urged me to use the term “flatulent” but I believe my readers to be a hardy bunch. Besides, the word “fart” makes me giggle like a schoolgirl.) I was also deeply concerned about animal welfare and understood that grass-fed, pastured cows were typically happier and healthier. I found a local farmer who delivered grassfed beef to our home every few weeks. It cost more, but we ate less, which balanced our budget. And when I took that first bite, I moaned with pleasure and asked my husband: “Does this taste so good because I haven’t had meat in four years? Or is this just really good?”

He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “it’s really good.”

So, there’s that — our admittedly subjective assessment that grass-fed beef tastes better.

You reference research that concludes that grass-fed cows do not, in fact, produce lower methane emissions than grain-fed cows. It isn’t that grass-fed cows produce more belches or farts, but rather that grass-fed cows grow more slowly and are slaughtered at an older age; therefore, over a longer lifespan,

they produce more belches and farts than shorter-lived cows, emitting methane with each digestive eruption.

What’s more, comparing greenhouse gas emissions from grass-fed vs. feedlot cattle is just a part of the picture.

For one thing, pastures of grasses themselves absorb greenhouse gasses, which offers some mitigation. In a climate like the northern U.S., however, where grass only grows a few months each year, the carbon benefits are reduced.

For another, grass-fed animals, which eat and poop on the land, contribute to soil health. And healthy soil, a product of this regenerative farming, absorbs more carbon than less healthy soil.

Simon Athearn, CEO and farmer at Morning Glory Farm, says that soil health is a key motivation behind his dedication to grass-fed. “On a feedlot,” he explains, “the animals are on a hard, biologically dead surface, conglomerated together instead of spread out, and fed an aggressive diet of very high-density foods that process less efficiently in the rumen and create more flatulent gasses. A ruminant’s natural diet is grasses.” As well, he says, the grain industry has to produce the grain fed to those cows, often via a monoculture, which causes erosion and depletion of soil. And processing the grain creates a greenhouse gas trail: Grain must be harvested, processed, bagged, and distributed, generally by large machinery and trucks.

Athearn also touts the benefits of local grass-fed cattle. Much of what we see on

store shelves that’s labeled grass-fed comes from animals as far away as Australia and New Zealand. If it’s processed or inspected at all in the U.S., the label will look like it’s from the United States.

Which is reason number a kajillion why it’s important to get your food from a local farmer. Not because food miles have a significant impact on carbon emissions (they, surprisingly, don’t), but because it’s far easier to discern the agricultural principles of a neighboring farmer, and because it’s smart to support those with whom you share a community.

But remember, too, Robert, that because of the deforestation required to provide land for cattle, not to mention the loss of biodiversity, beef (no matter what it’s fed when it’s simply a cow) has an outsized impact on the warming of our planet. So, if you’re going to eat beef — grass-fed or otherwise — do so sparingly, and savor every bite.

Ruminantly, Dot

Dear Dot,

I’m looking for bed sheets that are both happy to sleep on, and aren’t bad news for our environment. What should I look for?

—Dawn

My dear Dawn,

Are you the same Dawn who wanted to deter pigeons from perching on your balcony (and pooping on your patio?), but only in a kind way? Or are all Dawns

Illustration Elissa Turnbull

gentle souls who want happy pigeons and happy sheets? I’m going to assume that’s the case and endeavor to help you find sheets that would be delighted to envelop you in slumber while being good news (or at least not bad news) for our planet, and while pigeons coo happily on someone else’s balcony.

Lucky for Dot (and Dawn), Bluedot has its very own sheet expert — our own Marketplace editor, Elizabeth, who makes it her mission to find the happiest, most earth-friendly sheets (and other products!) and bring them to our readers. Indeed, Elizabeth recommends sheets from Coyuchi, Boll & Branch linens, and Cariloha, all of which can be found on Bluedot's online Marketplace. And Bluedot’s Room for Change columnist Mollie Doyle, offers up a (ahem) cheat sheet, with an eye to only earth-friendly materials.

Let’s start with Elizabeth’s sage and sleepy advice: Let others do the work for you. She’s referring, of course, to certifications that give you a shorthand. Third-party certifications mean that peo-

ple and organizations with a (usually but not always) robust list of eco-conscious requirements have examined the product and assessed it according to (usually but not always) rigorous standards. I say “usually but not always” because not all third-party certifications are equally legit. Who can you invite into your sheets? Both Mollie and Elizabeth urge you to look for the following respected certifications:

Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS); Fairtrade; 1% for the Planet; Certified B Corporation; OEKO-Tex; Cradle to Cradle; among others. Mollie turns to the “About Us” section of companies’ websites to uncover information, looking specifically for how the materials for the sheets are grown, chemicals/dyes used in the manufacturing, a traceable supply chain, labor standards, water use in manufacturing, and how the products are shipped and in what packaging.

Of course, even if your sheets meet a scrupulous eco agenda, you want them to offer comfort and ease of use.

Dot, for instance, loves linen sheets and pillow cases. Linen is a low-impact fabric (environmentally), but Mr. Dot considers it a high-discomfort fabric so … no linen sheets in the Dot household, though our duvet cover is a lovely, rumply linen that I adore.

It’s pretty much a case of “trial and error,” Mollie Doyle says. “Bed linens are personal.”

Indeed. I’m not sure it gets any more personal than what we snuggle up against night after night.

Dreamily, Dot

Want to see more Dear Dots? Find lots here: bit.ly/Dear-Dot-Hub

Check out our new Daily Dot newsletter and get a Climate Quick Tip each weekday, and an answer from Dot each Saturday. On Sunday, Dot rests. Sign up here: bit.ly/BDL-newsletters

Sign up for the BuyBetter Newsletter here: bit.ly/BDL-newsletters

In a world of disposable goods, it’s hard to know which products are sustainable. At Bluedot, we do the legwork for you by selecting items made with regard for the planet and its people.

Climate luminary Bill McKibben hardly needs an introduction, but his new project does. Now 62 years old, having participated in numerous pivotal environmental campaigns over the past forty years, McKibben has created a new program called Third Act (thirdact. org) to mobilize 60-plus-year-olds to use their political and financial clout and stand alongside the young people fighting for their future. He’s optimistic about his generation stepping into this moment. “People,” McKibben says, “are ready to go.”

Bluedot Editor Leslie Garrett talked with Bill McKibben after he spoke to an overflow crowd at the West Tisbury Congregational Church in July.

Interview edited for brevity and clarity.

Leslie Garrett: You mentioned you spent time on Martha’s Vineyard when you were a kid. My editor would kill me if I didn’t get a bit more detail about your experiences here.

Bill McKibben: We’d come for a week every summer, every year for eight or ten years. There was a house … someone said it’s still there. Multi-colored panels, sort of halfway on the beach on Gay Head, nothing around within a mile or two on either side. It was the high point of the year.

LG: When you think back, what stands out?

BMcK: So many things that are familiar and unchanged. We would go to Menemsha to get bluefish in the afternoon. We used to love running down the dunes and climbing through the clay cliffs. (I sort of hope that they tell people not to do that anymore.) Mostly we just played in the ocean hour after hour. I got to go into the ocean yesterday, and it brought back many memories. I mean, I chose to live up in the mountains, and I love the mountains and the forests, but it was a powerful dose of nostalgia to be here. And very nice to see that, in certain ways, this place has changed less than other places.

CLIMATE CONVERSATION

with Bill McKibben

Interview by Leslie Garrett Photos by Randi Baird

McKibben spoke at the West Tisbury Congregational Church in July.

LG: From what I’ve read, it sounds like your childhood was pretty rooted in the natural world, including coming here. Do you trace that to the work you do now?

BMcK: Yes, my father grew up out west, loved the outdoors, and loved to hike. [The outdoors] was important to me growing up, but I didn’t think it was going to be my life’s work. I was interested in homelessness and other urban questions. A week after I graduated from college, I went to the New Yorker to write the Talk of the Town, a quintessentially urban thing. But in the late 1980s, when I was in my mid late 20s, reading the early science about climate change, I became convinced that this was the overwhelming story of my lifetime. I’ve been on it ever since. That first book in 1989 [McKibben’s “The End of Nature”] was … about climate change. It was excerpted in the New Yorker and came out in twenty four languages, and that sort of sealed my course.

LG: I came to climate writing through a social justice lens … and very quickly learned that companies that could care less about their workers could care less about the environment. Do you think people have made that sort of connection with climate? That climate issues include homelessness and racial injustice?

BMcK: Yes, people talk much more about climate justice now than they used to. And the basic understanding that the people who are suffering the worst did the least to cause it is an important revelation.

LG: The conversation taking place around the UN and the Green Climate Fund [the fund to help developing countries respond to climate change] … I’m immersed in it, yet it still feels kind of remote. It feels sort of like it’s happening over there.

BMcK: I don’t think our Congress will be quick to pay loss and damages to the rest of the world. But I do think there’s momentum building to at least make it easier for people in the Global North to finance the kind of work that needs to be done in the Global South.. Figuring out how to free up that money, take the risk out of those investments so people can make them at a reasonable rate — that kind of thing is really important. Your neighbor John Kerry is really leading the work on that.

LG: Where else do you see leaders right now?

BMcK: Young people. I think we were extraordinarily lucky that Greta Thunberg appeared when she did. And our first real climate rockstar was not a diva, she was a good soul. Happily, we’re now seeing a lot of older people stepping up to help. The growth of this work at Third Act has been much more explosive than we’d imagined. That’s a good sign, I think.

LG: I have young adult children. I see a lot of anger in young people.

BMcK: Rightly so. It’s the sense of having been abandoned to figure this out on their own. And anger that we got to live through a relatively easy period, and they’re not going to.

LG: And that was part of your thinking with Third Act — to say “we’ve got your backs?”

BMcK: It’s good for people to be able to say that, and for kids to hear it. It offers some relief, anyway. That sense of being abandoned is a difficult thing.

LG: You mentioned that people over age sixty lived through the civil rights movement. How does this fight feel different from the civil rights movement? Or maybe it doesn’t.

McKibben and Bluedot Living's Leslie Garrett.

BMcK: One way in which it’s easier now is that, at least in this country so far, people aren’t killing you or blowing up your churches. One way in which it was easier then is that ’there was no multitrillion dollar industry that depended on segregation. By the end [with civil rights], business was more or less on the right side. In this case, there is a trillion dollar industry using a huge percentage of its money to make sure it can continue its business model indefinitely.

LG: When you created 350.org, you gave a vocabulary to the climate issue. You literally gave it a number. What is the power of that?

BMcK: One of the reasons we did that was because we needed to organize globally. We were organizing demonstrations in every country except North Korea, and it would have been much harder if we’d been using English words. Arabic numerals cross linguistic boundaries more easily. But people said it was too depressing a number, because we’re already past 350 parts per million in the atmosphere. A point I took, but I think that’s actually been helpful. It’s like cholesterol: if your doctor says, ’Keep eating like this, and someday your cholesterol will be too high,” you just keep eating until your cholesterol gets too high … but if the doctor says, ’You’re in that zone where people have heart attacks, and you might have had a little stroke yourself already,’ then it’s like, ’What pill do I take now?’ Urgency concentrates the mind.

LG: You have said, “we become most fully human when we don’t put ourselves at the center of everything,” and that the most important thing an individual can do right now is not be such an individual. What do you want people to take away from that?

BMcK: Well, given the scale of the challenge, it’s not practical to imagine solving it one person at a time; it won’t add up fast enough. You need to figure out how to leverage your efforts, and the only way to do that is to find other people and form movements that can shift real power. If five percent of people

lived responsibly in their own homes, it’ would be good, but it wouldn’t really change the trajectory. But if you can get five percent of Americans really engaged, that will be more than enough to win most of these fights, because there’s so much apathy that five percent of people turn out to be a huge force — enough to stand up to all the money in the world. But we’re not there yet. We’re at about two percent.

LG: We’re such an individualistic society.

BMcK: And much more so than when I was growing up. The election of Ronald Reagan represented a decision to become hyper individualist. He said, ’government is not the solution, it’s the problem.’ Hence, working together was the problem. His theory was that markets solve all problems. We’ve now tested that rigorously, and the Arctic is melting.

LG: It’s also the case that when there is a natural disaster, people come out of their houses, pick up shovels, and help.

BMcK: There’s a wonderful book that Rebecca Solnit wrote called A Paradise Built in Hell, on just that subject. I think about it often.

LG: On an island, there tends to be a greater sense of interdependence. I don’t know how familiar you are with some of the work the Island is doing, but I’m wondering if you’ve seen things that you think we’re getting right.

BMcK: Clearly, land preservation is something that people have taken seriously and done well. Of course, it’s particularly hard to do in a place where real estate prices are as high as they are here, so that’s a really powerful step. And now, the Vineyard is poised to be playing an important role: the wind resources around here are

Continued on page 60

Overflow crowd on a July Sunday in West Tisbury.

My mother valued freshness and local-ness

above all else, skewing always toward homegrown vegetables, our own chickens or birds and game my father brought home from his shooting outings, honey made by a beekeeper in the neighborhood, eels or shad from the door-to-door fish monger.

is Local Eating Good Eating

Story by Laura D. Roosevelt

Photos by Alison Shaw

It was the summer of 1996, my first on Martha’s Vineyard as a year-rounder, and I was standing on the worn pine steps outside the kitchen door of a house in the woods of West Tisbury. I breathed in, and, all of a sudden, I was thrown back to 1970, the summer after my parents’ divorce. I was overwhelmed anew with all the feelings that had characterized that summer — sadness about my broken family, apprehension regarding my mother’s and my upcoming move to a different state, delight and relief at being again on Martha’s Vineyard, where we’d come for a month every summer since I was six. What brought on this bout of intense nostalgia? The scent of wild blueberries, sweet and mingled with a humusy musk from the dirt that sustains

them, wafting through the woods on a humid afternoon; wild blueberries, like the ones my mother and I would pick together almost daily during that summer when I was eleven.

My mother was a foodie long before the term was coined. She valued freshness and local-ness above all else, skewing always toward home-grown vegetables, our own chickens or birds and game my father brought home from his shooting outings, honey made by a beekeeper in the neighborhood, eels or shad that the door-to-door fish monger in Washington, D.C. told her he’d caught just that morning in the Potomac River. And she was a forager. We found blueberries together all over the Island. We’d be driving along, say, State Road between Vineyard Haven and West Tisbury, when, abruptly, she’d pull over

onto the shoulder, grab a couple of paper bags from the back seat (my mother was always prepared), and say, “Let’s go! I smell blueberries.” We’d head into the woods, where, sure enough, we’d find a swath of wild, low bushes, and we’d pick until our bags were bursting. The berries were small, blue-black or a dusty lighter blue, and packed with flavor. (The darker berries may actually have been huckleberries, I now suspect.) We ate them on our breakfast cereal, spooned over vanilla ice cream at lunch, and — my favorite — cooked up in one of her famous blueberry crisps for dessert after dinner, blue juices bubbling up around the edges of the buttery, sugary topping. That summer, my mother and I were staying in a rented house in Chilmark that came with access to a little beach in a deep cove. To my mother’s delight, the boulders that poked up from the water in that cove were covered in mussels. She taught me to pick only the largest ones (“Leave the smaller ones for next summer!”), and she had a theory that the ones growing below the low-tide mark were preferable (though I’ve since read that mussels that get exposed to air when the tide goes out are fine, too, since they hold water inside their shells to stay hydrated.) We’d take colanders to the beach with us when we were musseling, and then we’d bring our catch home, and she’d steam them in white wine, garlic, and herbs, and serve them alongside a cup of melted butter for dipping. They were deep orange, flecked with green bits of parsley, and they tasted like little pillows of ocean-ness.

My mother’s daughter in more ways than I ever imagined I’d be, I’ve become just the kind of foodie she was: local and fresh are my guiding principles. I have a tennis-court-sized vegetable garden at my home in West Tisbury, and for the past two years, I’ve been growing with a view to preserving my garden bounty so that I can eat my own, home-grown produce as much as possible year-round. (See my Garden to Table columns here:

Blueberries and strawberries at the Farmers Market.

summer when I was eleven.

bit.ly/Garden-Table) I freeze peas, beans, grated zucchini, and pesto; pickle and can tomatoes, beets, cucumbers, and carrots; store onions, garlic, and butternut squash on shelves in my basement; and keep cabbages, kohlrabi, and daikon radishes in the fridge, where they last for many months.

But despite the environmental and pocketbook benefits of eating one’s own canned tomatoes in February, there’s nothing quite like eating a vegetable that was picked twenty minutes ago. Arugula fresh out of the garden is an entirely different green than what you find in stores — so peppery it’s almost hot. Justpicked asparagus are so sweet, juicy, and crisp that my husband and I eat them raw, usually while the rest of dinner is cooking. And a big, pink Brandywine tomato still warm from the sun? Slice it, throw it on a piece of garlic-rubbed toast with some fresh basil, a sprinkling of salt, and a drizzle of good olive oil, and you might as well be in Italy. Or maybe Heaven.

I almost never visit the produce section of the grocery store during the months

The scent of wild blueberries, sweet and mingled with a humusy musk from the dirt that sustains them, wafting through the woods on a humid afternoon; wild blueberries, like the ones my mother and I would pick together almost daily during that

when my garden is yielding its gifts; rather, I plan meals around what’s ripe at the moment. But I don’t grow everything, and some years, certain crops don’t do well for one reason or another. That’s when I visit the Island’s farms. Rusty at Ghost Island Farm has managed to extend his tomato season on both ends using greenhouses, so I’m a regular at his farmstand when he’s got tomatoes and I don’t. Last summer, when an explosion of chipmunks ate more of my tomatoes than we did, I frequented Ghost Island all summer long to make up for my shortfall.

I gave up on growing potatoes after a few years of worm-ridden harvests, so now I get my potatoes from Morning Glory Farm. Their purple potatoes are my favorites, for both their eye-catching color and their nutritional content (as a rule, the darker the vegetable, the higher it is in nutrients.) Our favorite way to eat potatoes comes from my friend Injy, who twice-cooks them to crispy, decadent perfection. First, she boils them until they’re tender. Then, she smashes them into thick little pancakes with cracked edges, puts them in a baking dish with some generous glugs of olive oil, and bakes them until they’re crunchy on the outside but pillowy soft on the inside. I could live on those.

many other people believe the opposite), but that turns out to be a myth: Corn color is caused by the presence of more (or less) beta carotene, which does not affect flavor (though it does increase the corn’s nutritional value, since beta carotene turns into Vitamin A when digested). Sweetness is most affected by time: The more hours elapse after picking, the starchier (and less sweet) an ear of corn becomes. But since people have been cross-breeding corn since the early 1800s to create varieties that hold onto their sweetness for longer, most corn you buy these days — even supermarket

They’re also quickly perishable, so you need to eat them right away… which, I promise, is never a problem.

Our absolute Number One favorite local fish is bonito. The first time I had it, a neighbor who’d just caught one brought it over, sliced it raw, and served it with a drizzle of soy sauce; it was the best sashimi I’d ever eaten, melt-in-your-mouth tender with a mild but distinctive flavor that spoke of whitecaps and seaweed and beams of sunlight streaming through the water into the depths.

Morning Glory Farm is also almost everyone’s go-to place to buy local corn when it’s in season. (See our story on corn on page 38.) Corn salads seem to be on the menu at every late summer dinner party I attend, and that makes me a happy guest; because really, who doesn’t love a good corn salad, say, laced with fresh basil and some halved sungold tomatoes? But my favorite way to eat fresh corn is on the cob, slathered in butter and sprinkled with salt. I always thought white corn was sweeter than yellow corn (though evidently

corn — is pleasantly sweet. And strawberries? I’ve been losing mine to squirrels and birds for the past couple of summers, but this year I found them in June at North Tabor Farm, and they were so delicious that I went back every few days for more while they lasted. (Morning Glory Farm also has them, I’ve since learned.) Grocery store strawberries have been bred and modified to be huge, extra-firm, and long-lasting, but they’ve traded away a lot in terms of flavor and texture in order to be able to withstand shipping and several days of sitting in the produce aisle. Local berries, in contrast, are small, deep red, tender, and oh-so-juicy.

In addition to eating as much as possible from my own and other Island gardens, I’ve resolved to eat local protein whenever I can. So far, nobody here is making tofu; but fish? Chicken? In both cases, you can’t go wrong eating local. Island-raised chicken (I’m partial to Mermaid Farm’s and North Tabor Farm’s) is hormone- and antibiotic-free, cage-free, and all (or most) of those other good things conscientious buyers look for on grocery store chicken packages. And, as with local vs. grocery store strawberries, the flavor of a local chicken is richer, more complex, more … chicken-y. When I ate chicken from grocery stores, I always thought of it as a largely neutraltasting vehicle for sauces, rubs, and other accompaniments. Not so with local chickens. Our favorite way to prepare a bird from North Tabor or Mermaid Farm is to cut it in half and roast it in a smoky grill. My husband, the grill master in our household, does this to perfection. The smoke permeates the meat deliciously, and it’s always tender and moist with the oils from its own fat. No sauce is required (though we do often serve it with chimichurri on the side, made from my own garlic, oregano, and parsley.)

As for fish, we tend to buy whatever the fishmonger tells us was caught locally that day. Sea bass, bluefish, tautog — they’re all scrumptious when super fresh and simply cooked. One of my favorite local seasonal catches is squid. We tried jigging for squid once with a friend, with no luck. Evidently you have to be in the right place at the right time, and we weren’t. Fortunately, the fishermen who

supply our local markets seem to know better than we did, and when fresh local squid comes in, we snatch it up. Again, we like it best done in our smoky grill, seasoned only with a little lemon brine (from the ever-present jar of homemade preserved lemons in my fridge), olive oil, and pepper. When it’s really fresh, squid is

tender, not chewy, and it goes very nicely on a bed of white beans cooked with rosemary and lightly mashed. Our absolute Number One favorite local fish is bonito. The first time I had it, a neighbor who’d just caught one brought it over, sliced it raw, and served it with a drizzle of soy sauce; it was the best

sashimi I’d ever eaten, melt-in-your-mouth tender with a mild but distinctive flavor that spoke of whitecaps and seaweed and beams of sunlight streaming through the water into the depths. That’s still our preferred way to eat bonito, but we’ve discovered that it’s also great very lightly seared, sliced, and served drizzled with both soy sauce and truffle oil, which turns it into a richer dish that can only be described as luxurious.

Meanwhile, since I haven’t found any wild lowbush blueberries near my house, I planted several highbush varieties in my yard. Most of them have grown nicely and yield quite a lot of berries… which, every year, the birds get to before we do. Year after year, I vow that next summer I’ll wrap them in netting to deter the avian gourmands, and year after year, I fail to do it. There’s so much to occupy me in my vegetable garden that I simply run out of time. Maybe one day I’ll get to it, but for now, I’m happy just remembering the blueberry crisps of my childhood.

We’d take colanders to the beach with us when we were musseling, and then we’d bring our catch home, and she’d steam them in white wine, garlic, and herbs, and serve them alongside a cup of melted butter for dipping. They were deep orange, flecked with green bits of parsley, and they tasted like little pillows of ocean-ness.

Have You Seen the

Little Piggies Eating All the Scraps?

Fork to Pork’s pigs upcycle Martha’s Vineyard’s food waste.

Story by Daniel Cuff Photos by Irina Bezumova

Come most spring summer days, Jo Douglas will drive her black Toyota Tundra around Martha’s Vineyard, and stop at more than thirty restaurants to collect leftovers and food scraps. She’ll cart about fifteen barrels back to her farm on the Land Bank Wapatequa Woods property that straddles the Oak Bluffs, Vineyard Haven line — and lay out a feast for her passel of Idaho pasture pigs.

When she pulls up with a truck full of carrot tops, beet greens, lettuce, tomatoes, avocado pits, scrambled eggs and a new discovery, yucca, the pigs squeal. (They are also known to enjoy the occasional Back Door Donut.) Jo’s pigs survive entirely on leftovers, until the time inevitably comes for her to slaughter them, and return them to many of those restaurants as pork.

Thus is the circular, righteous beauty of Fork to Pork.

Anyone who’s worked in a restaurant knows how much food gets thrown out — salad greens showing a bit of browning, prepared sides like vegetables and potatoes that can’t be used for a second service, or baked goods that lose their charm after a day or two, never mind the unfinished meals that diners leave on their plates.

Unlike restaurant patrons, Jo’s pigs never leave scraps behind.

Since eighth grade, Jo has wanted to be a farmer. In high school and while she was earning her degree in sustainable agriculture and food production (with a minor in animal studies) from Vermont’s Green Mountain College, she worked on farms as a farm worker, apprentice, intern, and manager. Summers, she’d come to Martha’s Vineyard.

Five years ago, she started her own farm.

“I was looking for a farm model that would work, where I could have my own animals,” she told me on a day I visited last summer, while pigs ate ravenously all around us. “I had worked on a couple of farms where we fed pigs some food scraps but not entirely on scraps.” A lot of farmers told her that feeding pigs a healthy diet completely from scraps couldn’t be done. “But I thought it could,” she said.

Most of the food she picks up around

the Island would have been shipped offIsland to a landfill along with all our other waste (if it wasn’t composted). And at the same time, ferries coming back to the Island bring large amounts of hog feed. Why not raise pigs on food that would have otherwise been thrown away?

It’s a win-win-win, no matter how you look at it: Save the carbon impact of trucking wasted food off-Island, save the methane created by putting organic waste in a landfill, save the impact of transporting food for pigs back to the Island.

And the pigs seem to love the entire dining experience. “You are what you eat, and around 95 percent of the pork in the US is from factory farms where the pigs are on cement floors and never get to exhibit their natural pig behavior of rooting for food,” Jo says. “That’s what pigs want to do. They’re smarter than dogs, so you have to kind of entertain them, so every day I come with my truck and I have 300 gallons worth of food, and they get to practice their natural behavior, rooting through all the food scraps and getting what they like. So they’re never bored, they’re always excited, they eat so much and then they take a few steps back and just pass out in a food coma.”

She says that when she first started, she collected from about fifty restaurants in all six towns, working twelve- to fourteen-hour days. “I was starting my own business,” she says, “so I said yes to everything.” In the past few years, she says she’s been able to strike a healthier balance.

When I asked if there were any particular challenges she faced, she shrugged. “It’s a lot of work. It can be very physically demanding, and it’s seven days a week. But I love it. I don’t treat it as a job, it’s my life.

“I get to collect all this great food for [the pigs] and I get to see these thirtythree happy animals that are growing well and eating really good food.”

They’re always excited, they eat so much and then they take a few steps back and just pass out in a food coma.

Jo Douglas with one of her passel of pigs.

Jo’s pigs survive entirely on leftovers, until the time inevitably comes for her to slaughter them, and return them to many of those restaurants as pork. Thus is the circular, righteous beauty of Fork to Pork.

THE FULL, RIGHTEOUS CIRCLE

Pawnee House, in Oak Bluffs, is one of the restaurants that sends its scraps to Jo for pig food. And Pawnee often has pork on its menu. Alex Cohen, co-owner of the restaurant with his wife, Deborrah (the chef), sent us this:

“We think Jo is an extraordinary human being! Here is the recipe for Debbie's Italian-style Porchetta dish that we ran as a special after receiving our pig from Jo. We ran it as both a sandwich, as well as a dinner plate with various sides — it was out of this world!” – Alex

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Check out Jo’s instagram (@forktopork) to see which restaurants help feed the pigs.

Consider ordering a pig for your family’s meals from Jo: She’ll pick up your food waste scraps to feed it! Write her at forktopork@gmail.com. Find more info at forktopork.com

5. Place the pork loin on top of the herbs and spices on the pork belly and roll. Tie the Porchetta with kitchen twine about 2 inches apart. Score the tough side of the skin like crazy. First left or right, then top, about 1 inch apart. This will help to render out the fat and crisp the skin when cooking.

6. You will need to dry the Porchetta in the refrigerator uncovered for 24 hours. This helps get that wonderful crispy skin.

DEBBIE'S Italian-Style PORCHETTA

Pork Belly ½ lb per person

Pork Loin (with Italian-style porchetta you actually wrap the pork loin around the pork belly)

INGREDIENTS FOR THE RUB

6 crushed Garlic Cloves

Rosemary

Sage

Nutmeg

Thyme

Zest of an orange

Fresh Fennel

Pinch of chili flakes

Generous cracked pepper

SERVING SUGGESTIONS

Ciabatta

Arugula

SALSA VERDE

parsley

capers

vinegar

evoo

s&p

DIRECTIONS

1. Score the inside of the pork belly with diagonal lines about 2 inches apart using a crosspatch pattern. This is so the herb mixture can penetrate the inside of the pork belly.

2. Freshly zest an orange and about a half grated nutmeg.

3. Chop fresh sage, rosemary, and thyme to cover the base of the pork belly.

4. Press all the fresh herbs into the belly. Fennel leaves are optional. Add cracked pepper, kosher salt, and six crushed garlic cloves. If you like a little heat, do a few pinches of red chili flakes. Press all of the herb spices into the belly, again.

7. Preheat the oven to 250°. Line a baking sheet with tinfoil then place the Porchetta on the rack and bake for 3 to 8 hours depending on the size until the pork reaches a temperature of 160 Fahrenheit.

8. Let rest for 30 minutes, then it’s ready to serve.

COURTESY PAWNEE HOUSE RESTAURANT

Noah Mayrand on the raft that is surrounded by buoys — his oyster farm. Each buoy marks a submerged cage lying twenty feet beneath the Lagoon.

Noah grew up on the Island and has been connected to the ocean and sea life for as long as he can remember.

He’s Farming Oysters to Feed an Island

Noah Mayrand: And helping our waters thrive.

Istep out onto the beach, and the familiar southwest winds running down the length of Lagoon Pond welcome me. Though I have spent many afternoons on these waters with my high school sailing team, I was barely aware of the flourishing shellfish farms a short distance from where we typically launch our boats — until I was invited to see one for myself.

I look behind me to see oyster farmer Noah Mayrand making his way down to the beach. He helps me onto his skiff, and we depart the dock. I have no idea what it takes to grow shellfish, but I’m eager to find out.

Noah grew up on the Island and has been connected to the ocean and sea life for as long as he can remember. “I spent so many hours on the jetties,” he tells me. “That was my babysitter — playing around, fishing, snorkeling.” Mayrand's father, a plumber, would barter his services with fishermen who would take Noah and his father on chartered fishing trips to catch striped bass. Noah was only four or five when he began fishing, but he quickly became addicted. His mom often took him to Tashmoo Beach where he’d climb the jetties with his

friends and scrape seaweed off the side of rocks or find small shrimp. He tells me matter-a-factly, “We would eat it. That’s where I gained a taste for ocean.”

He knew he wanted to keep this early, deep connection to the sea for the rest of his life. He learned to sail at Sail MV; later, he learned to build sailboats during a high school internship at the Five Corners boatyard with the Charter School. Both of these experiences, he believes, helped prepare him to be an oyster farmer. “My workshop was the boatyard,” he says. “That’s kinda why I know how to build rafts.”

I spot a ten- by fifteen-foot wooden raft surrounded by a dozen buoys — Noah’s oyster farm. Each buoy marks a submerged oyster cage lying twenty feet deep on the Lagoon floor. He docks his skiff and helps me onto the raft.

I want to know what has kept him motivated in the risky aquaculture business. How does someone decide to become an oyster farmer? For Noah, it stemmed from his career as a cook.

Though he studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Noah found himself drawn to cooking after he got out of college. The farm-to-table movement was taking

Story by Annabelle Brothers Photos by Randi Baird

off in California, and he wanted to be a part of it. Seeking a change from the Island, he left for San Francisco, where he experienced “life-changing meals.” He found a job at a restaurant called Beast and the Hare, where he learned the art of butchery. “It became, ‘how do we butcher it and how do we make a menu out of this,’” he tells me — as opposed to, “What can we make and where are we going to get it?” They used the whole animal, nose to tail, and built the menu around it.

Later he got a job at a big technology company in San Francisco, working as a corporate sous chef. While he often made sandwiches for interns, he also

got to work upscale dinners for CEOs and other private events. He had the budget to buy quality food, and he did just that.

Noah knew how to break down whole animals — pigs, lambs, goats, sheep. “We would go to cow farms and purchase a live cow,” he tells me. “They would be killed later in the season and then I’d butcher them.” Because he’d worked so closely with the farmers, he grew to appreciate the quality of local food. “I found this product was so far better than something that was sitting [in stores].” He adds, “The speed with which I could bring it to these people made it fresher — it just sat in that

many fewer refrigerators.”

After almost four years, he was ready for a change. “I was always talking about home. I was always saying ‘my island, my island.’” When he inherited some land on the Vineyard, he decided to return home. At the same time, he realized that he didn’t want to just cook fresh food; he wanted to grow it. He wanted to become a farmer — any kind of farmer. “I just needed a place to grow things,” he said.

Seeing the ocean as an extension of the Island, and noticing the growing aquaculture business on the Island, he did some research. Beyond the “howtos,” he learned about oysters’ ability to clean ocean water while capturing carbon, combatting some of the effects of climate change. This sealed the deal for him: He would grow oysters.

He hit a snag when he discovered that there was no process to obtain a permit for aquaculture in Tisbury, his town of residence. Undaunted, he went to his first town select board meeting in February 2015 and told the town “I wanna start an oyster farm. How do I do this?” At the board’s suggestion, he attended some shellfish board meetings, and along the way found others

Now, working as his own boss, he finds that what keeps him going is his commitment to respecting nature and being a role model in his community. “I wanna be that different fisherman who gives more than they take,” he says.

When Noah harvests oysters, he's taking nitrogen out of Lagoon Pond.

Noah harvests and sorts oysters.

who also wanted to create aquaculture regulations in Tisbury that would allow for permitting down the road. It took years of hard work to get aquaculture regulations finally passed.

In the meantime, he set about learning the oyster farming trade by working as a farmhand with shellfish companies in Katama. His employers knew he wanted to start his own farm in Tisbury; they supported him and ensured, during his “four years of oyster college,” that he acquired all the know-how he’d need.

For his part, Noah hoped the regulations in Tisbury could reflect what he’d seen in practice in Katama. It had worked for 25 years, he figured, so it seemed like a good model. But “I didn’t feel like I was being heard,” he tells me, and it was difficult to get the community to reach an agreement. Finally, after four years, in November 2019, Noah became the first oyster farmer to secure an aquaculture permit in Vineyard Haven. He was relieved and happy — and ready to get started.

Through it all, Noah found motivation in other people’s doubt; he knew he could prove them wrong. “When they say you can’t,” he says, “you absolutely will.” Now, working as his own boss, he finds that what keeps him going is his commitment to respecting nature and being a role model in his community. “I wanna be that different fisherman who gives more than they take,” he says.

As Noah looks back on when he first anchored in Lagoon Pond, he is amazed by the diversity of species that have become a part of his farm. He was determined to grow oysters to benefit the waters, so he was happy to find new species of seaweed, mussels, and fish benefitting from his farm. His farm has built the foundation for a new ecosystem. Daily, he sees more and more fish feeding off an environment he contributed to. “It brings me back to my childhood,” he says, “where I saw [nature] as plentiful and diverse.”

He learned about oysters’ ability to clean ocean water while capturing carbon, combatting some of the effects of climate change. This sealed the deal for him: He would grow oysters.

Annabelle Brothers just graduated from Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, where she served as the president of the school’s environmental group, Protect Your Environment Club. She is also a student advisor at Bluedot Institute. In 2022, she became involved with the Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s Climate Action Plan which developed goals and strategies for Martha’s Vineyard’s future to mitigate the effects of climate change while building economic and infrastructural resilience. Annabelle will attend Yale this fall to study Environmental Engineering. She hopes to eventually take her skills overseas and help promote green urbanism in developing countries.

How Do Shellfish Help the Ponds?

The Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group grows “tens of millions of baby shellfish,” says shellfish biologist Emma Green-Beach. These are returned to the Island’s ponds, where they eat phytoplankton, which have absorbed some of the nitrogen in the ponds, and that then becomes the shellfish tissue. “When we harvest and eat those shellfish, we’re taking nitrogen out of the ponds,” she says.

The shellfish themselves are nitrogen fighters in a number of ways, explains Green-Beach. They improve water quality by filtering it, absorbing tiny critters as food and using nitrogen and phosphorus in their shells and tissue. The cleaner water allows sunlight to better penetrate the water column, boosting growth of submerged aquatic vegetation — which in turn provides habitat and sequesters nutrients. When shellfish poop after eating phytoplankton, their waste is buried in the sediment, where bacteria turns it into dinitrogen gas, which is benign in the atmosphere.

In addition to seeding ponds (including Lagoon Pond, where Noah Mayrand has his oyster farm) with baby shellfish, the M.V. Shellfish Group has been active since 2011 collecting shells — oysters, clams, mussels — from Island restaurants and returning them to the Tisbury and Edgartown Great Ponds, a project sponsored by the Martha’s Vineyard Vision Fellowship. Given that acidification is one of the consequences of nitrogen in the ponds, the shells, which are made of calcium carbonate, “act like Tums,” says Emma Green-Beach. “[The shells] raise the pH, they release calcium back into the water, which the shellfish need, and then the shells themselves act as substrate for the oysters to settle onto.” What’s more, she says, the project keeps the shells out of the trash and gets them back into the Great Pond ecosystem.

Win, win, win.

This MV Shellfish information first appeared in a Bluedot Living story “What’s So Bad About Nitrogen” in May of 2021.

GRILLED OYSTERS WITH SWEET BUTTER AND CLASSIC FRENCH MIGNONETTE

Makes 36 oysters

FOR THE MIGNONETTE

1 cup red wine vinegar

1/2 tsp raw sugar

2-3 finely chopped shallots

1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

Lots of fresh cracked black pepper (6 turns of a pepper mill)

FOR THE BUTTER

1 stick of butter at room temperature

1/4 cup honey or agave syrup

Zest of 1 orange

Pinch of salt

36 fresh oysters, shucked

1. In a small bowl, mix together the ingredients for the mignonette and set aside.

2. In a separate bowl, whip the butter with the honey, orange zest, and salt. Top each shucked oyster with a generous ½ teaspoon of the butter mixture, then place the oysters on a hot grill and cook until the butter has melted and the oysters start bubbling, about 3 minutes.

3. Spoon a little of the mignonette onto each cooked oyster, and serve.

WHAT’S SO BAD ABOUT

CORN?

For a few sweet weeks each summer, corn on the cob from your local farmstand is the perfect treat — just check out the crowds around the bins at Morning Glory Farm. But corn is also grown to feed our cars and our cattle, and make the corn syrup that sneaks into so many of our processed foods. Meaning … corn is good, corn is not-so good, corn is complicated.

Story by Leslie Garrett Photos by Sheny Leon

Simon Athearn juggles corn in the fields at Morning Glory Farm.

Simon Althearn starts his day at his family’s Morning Glory Farm by taking a bunch of bites out of raw corn. “Every single morning,” he says, “us and the crew are out in the field nibbling … You’ve got to test it to know what batch you’re in and what ripeness level to pick it.”

Ask him about the best way to cook corn on the cob, and his voice takes on a tone of reverence. “I love this question,” he says. While he enjoys seawater-soaked corn cooked in its husk over a grill, his and his family’s favorite method is to steam the cobs in about an inch of water. Four to six minutes, he says, depending on the size of the ears. Other corn lovers swear by boiling, and still others prefer to cook it in a microwave oven.

But although how to cook corn is a question that elicits plenty of strong opinions, it is far from the most contentious corn-related topic. “We hear the word corn, we think of our grandmother's garden, and corn on the cob, and that's all lovely,” says Jonathan

“Every single morning [we] and the crew are out in the field nibbling … You’ve got to test it to know what batch you’re in and what ripeness level to pick it.”

–Simon Athearn, Morning Glory Farm

Clayton Williams at the morning harvest.

Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown, a non-profit dedicated to advancing science-based solutions to climate change. “But when you get to the industrial scale, which corn really operates in, it's the single biggest crop in America. It covers roughly 100 million acres of land in this country, about the size of Montana. And hardly any of it is used for food.”

Corn as far as the eye can see

Take a summer drive anywhere in the Midwest and Great Plains (and beyond), and you will see corn. How did this crop

come to dominate? Simple. Continue on your summer drive and the fields that aren’t covered in corn stalks are populated with cattle, chickens, and pigs — all of which eat corn. Stop for gas and guess what? You’re pumping corn into your tank in the form of ethanol. Pause for a stroll through your grocery store and the shelves are stocked with corn products — corn flour, cornmeal, corn chips, and — in just about everything — corn syrup. Even some of the bio-based packaging that holds these products is made from — that’s right — corn. As a crop, Foley says, corn is a crucial part of agriculture (and culture — more

on that later). The problem isn’t corn per se, he explains, it’s the system — a system that is subsidized to the tune of $2.2 billion dollars annually, making corn the most highly subsidized crop in the country.

And for all that money, Foley argues, corn doesn’t give Americans much that’s good for them. Because, remember, we’re not consuming most of that corn as, well, what we think of when we think of corn.

Corn in your tank

In the 1970s, a U.S. agricultural company that was making its money producing high fructose corn syrup found itself with an excess of a byproduct known as ethanol. But this problem became an opportunity when the company, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), decided to market this ethanol as an additive to fuels, riding President Nixon’s Project Independence initiative, focused on creating an entirely domestic energy supply. ADM launched a campaign to get politicians to back

Our gas tanks account for forty percent of the corn grown in the U.S.; a similar amount — thirty-six percent, Foley reports — feeds our cows, pigs, and chickens. But it doesn’t feed them particularly efficiently.

Seneth Waterman savors summer's freshest, sweetest corn.

them — a highly successful political campaign with the consequence (a half-century later) that forty percent of the corn grown in America goes straight into our gas tanks. “There's no environmental benefits at all,” Foley says. “In fact, net, it's probably worse for the environment in every conceivable way … the land it uses, the water it pollutes, the air quality it harms, and the fact it's not really carbon free.” A 2022 study funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy found that ethanol is likely at least twenty-four percent more carbon-intensive than gasoline “due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion.” In other words, we’d do better to burn pure petroleum than this so-called biofuel.

According to Donald Scavia, a professor of sustainability at the University of Michigan, writing in The Conversation, “This large-scale diversion of corn has raised prices, distorted the market, and had serious negative impacts on food choice and availability globally.”

What’s more, ethanol didn’t achieve any of its so-called goals, including energy independence. What it did achieve, Foley says, is increased revenues for a lot of large agriculture firms, land speculators, and politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Want to opt out of burning ethanol?

Too bad. Most gasoline in the country contains up to 10 percent of the additive, something that thrills corn farmers and dismays climate scientists.

Our cattle are all ears

So, while our gas tanks account for forty percent of the corn grown in the U.S., a similar amount — thirty-six percent, Foley reports — feeds our cows, pigs, and chickens. But it doesn’t feed them particularly efficiently. It takes about thirty calories from corn, Foley says, to produce one calorie of boneless beef. And the cost of those cows to the planet is significant: UC Davis tells us that cows are the number one contributor to greenhouse gas emissions from

Clayton Williams, Simon Athearn, and Rhodes Martinez.

Customers, Athearn insists, will notice the difference when they taste Morning Glory Farm’s milky sweet version (a promise that Vineyarders confirm as God’s honest truth.)

Eloise Shehan hauls corn to the Morning Glory booth at the Farmers Market.

agriculture. A 2018 livestock analysis — the largest to date, published in the journal Science — revealed that while meat and dairy provided just eighteen percent of the calories we consume, it used eighty-three percent of our farmland and contributed sixty percent of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Pigs and chickens have a lower climate impact than cows, but the study revealed that even the lowest impact meat, poultry, and dairy products caused more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetables.

So, Foley says, “in a nutshell, corn uses more land, more water, more nutrients, more chemicals, and more subsidies to produce less good than anything I can really think of in America in the world of agriculture.” (But again, Foley makes clear he’s talking not about corn as the food, but about corn as the system.)

Kernels of indigenous wisdom

Rebecca Webster has thought a lot about corn — so much so that she’s written an entire book about it. A member of the Oneida tribe and a professor at the University of Minnesota, Webster notes that the Oneida word for corn (“Yukwanénste,” which is also the name of her book) means “precious.”

“Corn was a huge deal for our people,” Webster explains, noting that it’s estimated that before contact with Europeans, an indigenous diet consisted of sixty percent corn. She and her husband grow corn on Oneida territory in Wisconsin. “From that very first time of planting our corn,” Webster says, “it really took us on a different path. It connected us to our community here in Oneida as well as in New York and in Canada, where

the Oneida people are originally from, to our relatives who are out East, it connected us back to our culture here at home, our language, our history.” Food, she says, “is a safe way back to reconnecting to those things that maybe our ancestors had to lay down in order to survive through colonization, assimilation, and removal.”

Like Foley, Webster makes clear that she differentiates her understanding of corn based on how it’s used. “We don't think of corn as a commodity, we think of corn as a relative. And it plays a significant role in our culture, in our ceremonies. And it's just something that has been with us since creation.”

Jennifer Randolph, a Wampanoag and Executive Director of Kinship Heals, an organization that works to address domestic violence on Martha’s Vineyard, says that corn, for native women, has always meant connection. Working in the garden was historically “a sisterhood,” says Randolph, and the way native women tended to the Earth.

“You can’t just eat native corn,” she explains. It’s not the type of corn we think of when we think of sweet corn, and rendering it digestible requires a multi-step, labor-intensive process that removes the outer layer of the corn. “When you try to do it yourself,” Randolph says, “it’s miserable. And there’s no way you can grow enough and process enough to feed your family.” But, she says, when you do it together … “And that’s how we worked. We had community gardens, we did this together.”

How sweet it is

At Morning Glory Farm on any August morning, Simon Athearn will gladly talk your ear off about corn as he walks amongst the stalks — no surprise given

“Corn was a huge deal for our people …From that very first time of planting our corn it really took us on a different path … It connected us back to our culture here at home, our language, our history.”

– Rebecca Webster, Oneida tribe member

how much thought and energy has gone into the farm’s cherished crop. For one thing, Morning Glory eschews genetically engineered versions of corn — “unnecessary for a good corn,” Athearn says. For another, instead of the supersweet corn you’ll find in a supermarket, Morning Glory specializes in sugar-enhanced types. “The super sweet type is one of the branches of corn that has good sweetness and a long shelf capacity, so that it can ship across the country without losing too much flavor,” Athearn explains. “And it has a very thick pericarp — the skin over the kernel — therefore making it less prone to bruising since it will be machine harvested, machine packed, and then shipped in trailer trucks.” Customers, Athearn insists, will notice the difference when they taste Morning Glory farm’s milky sweet version (a promise that Vineyarders confirm as God’s honest truth. Bluedot’s Julia Cooper, for example, insists that Morning Glory has “ruined me for all other corns.”)

Foley, who hates corn as the system, remains a committed connoisseur of corn as a late-summer crop. “I’d love to have more farmers grow corn that actually became food,” he says. The son

of New Englanders who had an organic garden, he notes that “Corn on the cob is the best kind of corn of all because it’s going right into your belly. It’s delicious and it’s wonderful.” But, he adds, “It has to be really fresh for it to taste great. I feel like if I didn’t pick it myself a few

hours ago, it doesn’t taste as good.”

Just picked — literally — is how Simon Athearn eats his corn. “I eat far more of my yearly intake of corn raw,” he says of his early morning corn tasting. “Get your breakfast in,” he says, laughing.

Jonathan Foley, who hates corn as the system, remains a committed connoisseur of corn as a late-summer crop. “I’d love to have more farmers grow corn that actually became food,” he says.

Dinner Salads

from Vineyard Farms

PHOTO BY RANDI BAIRD

Story by Catherine Walthers

Aplatter salad is a meal in one, chock-full of local vegetables, cheeses, fish or meat, designed to feed four to eight — easily. That’s the key: ease, quickness, and minimal cooking. You start with a base of leafy greens topped by tons of veggies and a protein of choice. It’s also a good way to cut back on meat or chicken — it’s not the center of the platter, just a part.

These have been my new favorite salads for the past few years, especially for company and casual dinners. Think Cobb Salad or Salad Nicoise with rows or groupings of colorful ingredients, but keep in mind that there’s no reason they have to be the same each time. Take the concept, but add flexibility, creativity, personal preferences, and what you might find in season around you, and you have the dinner platter. Once you realize that nearly anything goes, you can create an infinite variety — choosing from a myriad of summer veggies, shredded chicken, grilled shrimp, beans, tempeh croutons, or even mini lamb burgers — why not? A family favorite is a grilled steak summer platter with grilled bread, juicy tomatoes, greens, and cucumbers. For a recent salad of roasted salmon with raw veggies, I added roasted artichokes and cooked lentils for a little variety.

in Chilmark. North Tabor Farm, also in Chilmark, grows near perfect arugula — just the right amount of spiciness.

Baby kale is the most tender of the kales. This nutritious, dark, leafy green makes a great base for a platter salad. Look for baby kale at Ghost Island and Morning Glory farms.

roasted, like salmon or chicken, works well, too.) Sometimes I use a combination to accommodate all guests — some rolled prosciutto along with fish, or chicken and grilled shrimp. It is possible to make the platters without cooking at all: Smoked bluefish or salmon can work, as can rotisserie or

Start with a base of greens: baby lettuce, arugula, or baby kale. If you are buying off-Island lettuce from the supermarket in the summer, you should be booted off the Vineyard. Morning Glory’s Salanova mix of washed and ready soft baby greens in a bag or loose is a popular favorite. So is the party mix from Beetlebung Farm

While you are picking up salad greens, look around at what else the farm grows — juicy summer tomatoes, crisp tasty cucumbers, radishes, red cabbage, carrots, red onions. You will reduce your carbon footprint by buying and supporting local farms, buying tastier food that hasn’t been trucked for hundreds or maybe thousands of miles. You’ll often find some surprises, too, like fennel, daikon radish, or kohlrabi, which make crunchy additions. I try not to cook too much for the platters, but sometimes farm potatoes go nicely, or those yummy summer green beans (steamed for 4 minutes), or even farmfresh hard-boiled eggs.

Cheeses like blue cheese from the Grey Barn Farm or the feta at Mermaid Farm add additional flavor. If you can’t get Mermaid Feta, my second choice is the Valbresso feta from France. Fresh mozzarella works too.

For the protein, anything grilled makes sense in summertime. (anything

leftover chicken, shredded or diced.

You can put together these salads a few hours ahead of time. Take them out of the fridge a bit ahead of serving; the platters are nice when vegetables are at room temp.

Make sure to make the dressing yourself — this makes the difference between a decent salad and ones your friends or family will rave about. Storebought dressings typically use highly processed oils, not extra virgin olive oil, along with plenty of additives. My best go-to summer dressing (below) takes about 5 minutes to make and works on any salad.

I cannot emphasize enough the taste and quality that you get from fresh summer produce and the difference it makes in your summer meals. When fall rolls around, and I’m often forced back to the supermarkets, I really notice the difference and get a little blue. But for now, I’m in summertime glory.

These have been my new favorite salads for the past few years, especially for company and casual dinners.

PHOTO BY JEREMY DRIESEN

If you are buying off-Island lettuce from the supermarket in the summer, you should be booted off the Vineyard.

DINNER SALAD WITH EASY BAKED SALMON

Serves: 4-6

INGREDIENTS

1 1/2lbs (approximately) salmon

1 tbsp canola or olive oil

2-3 tsbps mixed fresh herbs (including chives, parsley, dill, basil, or a combination)

6 cups mixed baby lettuces, arugula or baby kale, longer stems removed 2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved, or 2 to 3 ripe tomatoes, cut into wedges

1 cup Mermaid Farm feta cheese, or Valbresso feta from the market

1 cucumber, peeled and sliced

1-2 carrots, peeled and shredded or cut with a julienne peeler Baby potatoes, roasted (optional)

½ red onion, thinly sliced Green beans, boiled 4 minutes and run under cold water to keep green

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 425 for the salmon. Cut salmon into 3 or 4 filets. Place skin-side down on a piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet. Coat or brush salmon with olive oil. Add salt and pepper. Top with 2 - 3 tablespoons fresh herbs. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, depending on the thickness. Salmon should be a uniform pink — don’t overcook. When removing from baking sheet, leave the skin. Serve warm, room temp, or chilled.

2. Prepare the remaining ingredients. If prepping ahead, store on a baking sheet in the fridge covered in plastic until ready to serve. (Platters are usually too large to fit in the fridge.)

Baked salmon is wonderfully versatile: it can be served hot, room temperature, or chilled. And salmon tastes delicious with so many combinations of greens and vegetables that you can’t miss. This can all be plated in advance, with the vinaigrette passed at the table. If you love olives or a different cheese, or prefer smoked salmon or bluefish fillets (already prepared), go for it. Make this once, then make it your own going forward. That’s the point.

3. When ready to serve, spread the greens out on a large serving platter, with enough room to show-off the toppings.

4. Top with the salmon, roasted potatoes, if using, green beans, red onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, and crumbled feta cheese. Pass the dressing at the table, and let each guest spoon or pour on their own. If the dressing separates, remind your diners to whisk or shake before spooning over their salad.

SUMMER HERB VINAIGRETTE (Great on both salads)

INGREDIENTS

3 tbsp. freshly squeeze lemon juicel

1-2 tsp raw Island Bee Co. honey

2 tsp. Dijon mustard

1/2 cup olive oil

1 clove garlic, minced

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 tbsp mixed fresh herbs (such as basil, mint, parsley, chives, dill, or a combination)

Salt and pepper to taste

DIRECTIONS

1. Whisk together the lemon juice, honey, Dijon, oil, garlic, 2 tablespoons herbs, and salt and pepper in a mason jar or bowl.

Searing tuna is very easy to do. Coating the tuna in a spice mix is helpful for searing and flavor. I like using a Cajun mix, no matter what I’m serving the tuna with. Use a thick pan, like a cast iron, Le Creuset or All-clad to keep the fish from burning. Look for about a quarter of an inch sear on each side of the tuna. Almost any veggie works for this salad — though I always try to use nice juicy summer tomatoes with tuna.

DIRECTIONS

1. Sear the tuna about an hour before making the salad. Place the spice mix on a plate and dredge the tuna on both sides. Heat a heavy-bottom or cast iron sauté pan on medium high heat, and when hot, add the oil. Immediately add the tuna and sear on one side, about 2 to 3 minutes, until a 1/4-inch crust forms. Turn the tuna and sear the other side. (The spice mixture helps the tuna

TUNA SUMMER PLATTER SALAD

Serves: 4-6

INGREDIENTS

1 lb (give or take) fresh sushigrade tuna (about 1 medium steak)

1 tbsp dry spice mix such as Cajun (my favorite) or lemon pepper

1 tsbp canola or olive oil

6 cups mixed baby lettuces, arugula or baby kale, longer stems removed

2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved, or 2 to 3 ripe tomatoes, cut into wedges

1-2 cups shredded red cabbage

1-2 cups snap peas, blanched for 30 seconds and run under cold water to keep green

1-2 cups carrots, peeled and shredded or cut with a julienne peeler (optional)

1 cup Mermaid Farm feta cheese, or Valbresso feta from the market (optional)

1 just-ripe avocado, sliced

1 bunch radishes, sliced

1 cucumber, peeled and sliced

1/2 red onion, thinly sliced

form a good crust). Refrigerate the tuna, uncovered, for about an hour. When ready to serve, carefully slice with a sharp knife.

2. Prepare the remaining ingredients. If prepping ahead, store on a baking sheet in the fridge covered in plastic until ready to serve. (Platters are usually too large to fit in the fridge.)

3. When ready to serve, spread the greens out on a large serving platter with room enough to show off the toppings. Top with the tuna slices, avocado, red cabbage, carrots, radishes, snap peas, cucumbers and feta, if using.

4. Pass the dressing at the table, and let each guest spoon or pour on their own. If the dressing separates, remind you diners to whisk or shake before spooning over their salad.

PHOTO BY RANDI BAIRD

Garden to Table: Protecting Your

Tomatoes

Unfortunate things happen in a vegetable garden every year, yet we gardeners tend to talk about them as though they’re completely unexpected. “My cucumbers all have some horrible blight!” we exclaim in dismay, or “the damn birds ate all my raspberries!”

The sad fact is that no matter how much work we do to try to get it right in the garden, something will always come out of left field and wreak havoc. All of your

zucchini plants suddenly wither and die, or one morning you find every one of your pepper seedlings neatly cut off at the stem, their leafy upper parts lying limply on the soil. What gives?

The answer, in a word, is pests. There are whole books — mountains of them — devoted to garden pests, which include everything from large animals (deer) to microbes (fungi, bacteria). Last year, there was a population explosion in the community of chipmunks that live in our stone

walls, and the little varmints (yes, they’re adorable, but they’re still varmints) devoured about eighty percent of our tomato crop, foiling my plans to can tomatoes for the winter. This year, I was determined to have plentiful tomatoes, which meant fighting not only chipmunks, but also several other critters and conditions that can bring a tomato plant to its knees. The following are some of the pests that attack tomatoes, and how I’ve been attacking them back.

Story by Laura D. Roosevelt

MORNING GLORY FARM TOMATOES, BY ALISON SHAW

Chipmunks: We got a dog. He likes chasing chipmunks. He never catches them, but he’s harassed them enough to (evidently) cause most of them to relocate.

Tomato hornworms: Tomato hornworms, which can grow as large as your middle finger, are capable of devouring an entire tomato plant literally overnight. They mainly eat the leaves, leaving skeletal veins behind, but they also sometimes eat the tomatoes themselves. The best way for home gardeners to get rid of them is to pick them off by hand and, in one way or another, do them in. (The least disgusting way is to drop them into a jar of soapy water and try not to watch as they squirm around and eventually stop moving.)

Because they are the exact green of tomato stems and tend to hide on the undersides of leaves, hornworms are hard to spot, but this year, a friend gave me an invaluable tip: hunt for them at night, using a black light flashlight, which turns them bright white in the darkness. I’ve removed a couple of dozen young worms so far, preventing them from doing any notable damage.

Yellowing leaves: They’re never a good sign. An online site called Tomato Bible gives seven reasons for yellowing leaves, and suggestions for addressing the problem. This year, I tried (twice) adding a tablespoon of Epsom salts to every gallon of water I gave to my plants, and perhaps it helped; Epsom salts are essentially magnesium, which the plant needs in order to absorb other essential nutrients (malnutrition is a common cause of yellowing leaves).

Tomato blight: This is one of the worst things that can happen to your tomatoes, because not only does it kill a plant in fairly short order (turning the leaves yellow, then brown, withered, and dead), but also, it’s highly contagious. To address the problem, you must first remove all affected leaves, being careful not to let them touch any healthy leaves on either the affected plant or any neighboring things that can happen to your tomatoes, because not only does it kill a plant in fairly short order (turning the

leaves yellow, then brown, withered, and dead), but also, it’s highly contagious. To address the problem, you must first remove all affected leaves, being careful not to let them touch any healthy leaves on either the affected plant or any neighboring tomatoes, and you must discard them somewhere far from your garden — preferably somewhere in another state or country.

This year, I tried spraying my tomatoes’ leaves with a solution designed to protect the plants from insects, bacteria, and fungi, and it kept the blight away for longer than usual (and none of my plants got whiteflies) … but since blight often starts in the soil, it’s hard to deter it forever. (Find that solution here: usda.gov/media/ blog/2010/07/16/tomato-plant-diseasesand-how-stop-them.) This is why it’s a good idea to rotate where you plant your tomatoes from year to year. It’s also why you should prune off your plants’ lower leaves, making it harder for soil-borne blight to get onto the plant. (Pruning the whole plant also helps, as it ensures proper aeration and keeps the plant from putting energy into unnecessary extra foliage.)

If blight is all over your plant, you’re supposed to get rid of the entire thing, which I confess I find hard to do while there are tomatoes still on it. But here’s the good news: Tomatoes showing any signs of ripening can be picked, and they’ll finish ripening indoors. In fact, picking your tomatoes when they’re just starting to turn color is a good idea in general, since leaving them to fully ripen on the vine exposes them to bug, bird, and varmint attacks, and to the risk of cracking (which happens when we get a big rain after a dry spell, and the fruits start growing faster than their skins can stretch).

And if you have to pick your tomatoes really early, think fried green tomatoes!

(https://www.southernliving.com/ recipes/fried-green-tomatoes)

MORE TOMATO RECIPES:

Grilled Peach and Tomato Salad

With Peach Bellini Vinaigrette: bit.ly/Grilled-Peach-Tomato

Baked Halibut with Leeks and Tomatoes, next page.

PHOTO BY WHITNEY MULTARI

This simple, yet satisfying dinner is perfect for mid-summer; it highlights sweet cherry tomatoes, flavorful leeks, and the freshest white fish you can find. Add some fresh herbs, and that's it. It's fresh, light, and just as easy for weeknights as it is for entertaining. The recipe is from Karen Covey, author of The Coastal Table: Recipes Inspired by the Farmlands and Seaside of Southern New England.

Cook's note: Leftovers are great served cold, along with a big bowl of fresh garden greens.

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 400.

2. Place leeks in a sieve and rinse under cold water several times to remove dirt. Set aside.

BAKED HALIBUT with Leeks and Tomatoes Serves: 4

INGREDIENTS

Kosher salt, to taste

Freshly ground black pepper

4 4oz. pieces fresh halibut (or similar), center cut and skin removed

1/4 cup olive oil

1 tsbp tablespoon unsalted butter

2 cups cups cherry tomatoes, larger ones cut in half

1 tbsp tablespoon minced fresh thyme

2 tbps tablespoons minced fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley

1 medium leek, white and light green parts, trimmed and chopped

3. In a large oven-safe sauté pan, heat butter and 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. Add leeks and tomatoes and sauté for about 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add thyme and parsley and cook for another 1 minute. Add another 1 tablespoon of oil to pan and nestle fish fillets in pan, around leeks and tomatoes. Drizzle remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil over top of fish, and season each with salt and pepper. Give pan a shake to make sure fish isn't sticking to bottom. Transfer pan to oven and cook until fish is cooked through, about 10-15 minutes, depending on thickness.

4. Carefully remove pan and transfer fish and vegetables to a large serving platter and serve warm.

Recipe and photo by Karen Covey

SAVING CHILMARK POND

Abel’s Hill neighbors rally to reduce fertilizer use.

Story by Sarah Glazer

One steamy afternoon in July 2020, my 2 ½-yearold granddaughter and her baby brother flung themselves into the shallow waters of Chilmark Pond, squealing ecstatically. “That,” said my son, pointing to the splashing kids, “is one hundred percent happiness.”

The following week, a bright green scum appeared on the water. This blue-green algae, known as cyanobacteria, is toxic to small children like my grandkids, who take in great gulps of water when they swim. It has killed dogs, birds, and wildlife. In humans, the Environmental Protection Agency asserts, it can cause everything from skin rashes (from shortterm exposure) to kidney and liver damage from drinking the water. The Vineyard Gazette reported in 2020 that a man who went crabbing on Chilmark Pond was sickened by neurotoxins from the algae.

I’m just one of many Chilmark residents who remembers when it was safe for my children to spend hours crabbing and swimming in Chilmark Pond. These days, the pond is off-limits to my grandchildren for weeks at a time because of safety hazards from cyanobacteria.

Toxic algae blooms have been showing up on Chilmark Pond with increasing frequency in recent summers, and scientists say a primary cause is the excess nitrogen pollution in the pond. Last year, the Great Pond Foundation found that fertilizer was the second largest contributor to nitrogen (after septic tanks), amounting to about twenty-four percent of the problem.

Earlier this year, a group of us who own houses clustered near Chilmark Pond decided to tackle the nitrogen problem by making a commitment to end the use of fertilizer on our lawns. The sixty-one families in the Abel’s Hill Association

Richard Wilkie, a professor of Geosciences at UMass, took these photos of beautiful but likely deadly algae swirls at the Abel's Hill crossing point to Chilmark Beach in 1993.

encounter blue-green algae — once it has bloomed — every time they wade through a shallow stretch of Chilmark Pond to reach their private ocean beach.

During a discussion of the pond’s deteriorating health at the association’s annual meeting in 2022, one homeowner suggested a moratorium on fertilizer use. That gave Jonathan Lipnick, chairperson of the association’s Pond Committee, the idea of developing a pledge to go “fertilizer-free.” The association announced that seventy-two percent of its homeowners had responded to a poll asking them to eliminate nitrogen-based fertilizer on their lawns; eighty-six percent of those had agreed to make this voluntary commitment.

Rallying people around a pledge was a departure from the usual business of the Abel’s Hill Association, which typically centers around road repairs and pleas to stack kayaks properly at their pond-side parking lot.

The association’s nine-member board unanimously approved the pledge drafted by the Pond Committee (of which I am a member) and sent it to association members in January along with a summary of the scientific research linking fertilizer to cyanobacteria. The association held two informational meetings that month via Zoom to discuss the pledge; guest speakers from the Vineyard Conservation Society explained the science behind the pledge.

But it was not entirely smooth sailing. At one of the meetings, a property owner remarked that an emerald green lawn would soon become evidence that a homeowner was guilty of failing to comply with the fertilizer-free pledge.

“That was the worst moment of the whole process,” says Michael Newbold, outgoing president of the Abel’s Hill Association, whose term ended July 1st. “People jumped on and said, ‘That’s exactly what we don’t want to happen.’” There was a concern about neighbor going against neighbor and hurting the Association’s sense of community.

I’m just one of many Chilmark residents who remembers when it was safe for my children to spend hours crabbing and swimming in Chilmark Pond. These days, the pond is off-limits to my grandchildren for weeks at a time because of safety hazards from cyanobacteria.

Joshua and Mark Safford fishing at the Abel's Hill shore of Chilmark Pond in 1972.

COURTESY JOAN SAFFORD

Seeking to bring the group into agreement, Newbold proposed avoiding using the term “pledge,” and instead allowing residents to simply check an “I agree” box next to the statement “I wish to join the Abel’s Hill community in this

voluntary, non-binding effort to eliminate the use of nitrogen-based fertilizer.” Some people, Newbold says, “viewed the pledge as a contract and were very resistant to that type of terminology.” Others found a pledge “antithetical to personal choice” — violating the New England spirit of “Don’t tread on me,” according to Lipnick.

But Joan Safford, 86, said she would have favored even “more forceful” language “because of my palpable experience of the decline of the pond” after decades of summering in Chilmark before the blue scum started to appear. “If we were contributing to that, it was important to take what action we could as a community not to contribute to the pond’s poorer health.”

Safford, who first came with her family to Chilmark Pond in 1947 at the age of 10, remembers catching perch, crabs and soft-shelled clams in the pond.

One summer in the early 1970s, when the crabs were especially plentiful, her children would trade them for vegetables from neighbors’ gardens. But with today’s concerns about contamination from cyanobacteria, Safford says, “I wouldn’t eat one now out of the pond or have my children wading for hours with a crab net.”

Rallying people around a pledge to not use fertilizer was a departure from the usual business of the Abel’s Hill Association, which typically centers around road repairs and pleas to stack kayaks properly at their pond-side parking lot.

Joan Safford with sons Mark (6) and Joshua (4), with perch they caught at Chilmark Pond in 1972.

COURTESY JOAN SAFFORD

Safford remembers that, in the 1940s and '50s, the pond's eelgrass, an important habitat for marine life, was so thick it would foul the outboard motor on her family's boat. Chilmark Pond is devoid of eelgrass today — one reason it has such a mucky bottom. The presence of an eelgrass ecosystem is "the gold standard" for a healthy coastal pond, says Emily Reddington, executive director of the Great Pond Foundation, who has heard similar anecdotes. She says you only see eelgrass in healthy ponds that don’t have an excess of nitrogen.

Newbold, too, remembers catching and boiling blue crabs as a child in the 1970s and 1980s without any worry. He wonders whether the water was safer back then — because there were fewer septic systems spewing out wastewater and fewer people fertilizing their lawns — or if it was “collective ignorance about what was happening under the surface.” Emily Reddington has says there’s something to that: It can take a couple decades for nitrogen from the watershed to appear in the pond water, a phenomenon scientists refer to as “legacy nitrogen.”

1970s. But the stories she’s heard about people fishing in the 1970s, together with the presence of aquatic plants and better water clarity, mean that the pond was “alive and vital,” she says. “That’s not what it is now.”

And because of the legacy nitrogen phenomenon, it’s not clear if the development of earlier decades has yet made itself felt in the pond. “We’ll be seeing the impact of what our community has done in the past for the next couple of decades,” Reddington says.

Concerns about cyanobacteria mean that Newbold is more likely to head to other bodies of water to kayak or paddleboard these days; Lipnick says he no longer wades daily through the pond to the beach.

Still, back then, Newbold recalls, “We were a little more tolerant of natural lawns here; if we had a dry spell, our lawns turned brown; if we had a wet spell, we had weeds in our yard. It was just part of the ethic or aesthetic of Chilmark.”

Testing for cyanobacteria by the Great Pond Foundation did not begin until 2021. Consequently, Emily Reddington says they don’t have cyanobacteria data going back as far as the

It was not entirely smooth sailing. At one of the meetings, a property owner remarked that an emerald green lawn would soon become evidence that a homeowner was guilty of failing to comply with the fertilizer-free pledge.”

Nobody knows for sure what effect, if any, the Abel’s Hill initiative will have on the pond’s health. A model letter addressed to landscapers, explaining that the homeowner wants no lawn fertilizer to be used, was sent to association members in both English and Portuguese.

Pond Committee member Kathy Coe says she’d like to follow up and “ask people what their conversations with landscapers were.” And she’d like to see the results from pond water samples in order to determine if there is a drop in nitrogen this summer and next. She would like to know: Did it get better around Abel’s Hill because we decided to try this?

In the long run, the biggest concern for Chilmark Pond is septic systems, the leading contributor of nitrogen. “The big task will be making it feasible to upgrade septic systems to reduce nitrogen runoff,” Coe says. But that effort is expected to take years and will be expensive. Refraining from fertilizer

Samantha Look, executive director of the Vineyard Conservation Society, has been promoting Abel’s Hill’s approach as she talks to groups around the Island about how to care for a Vineyard lawn ecologically. “It is

use is something Abel’s Hill homeowners can do now, say supporters of the initiative.

Samantha Look, executive director of the Vineyard Conservation Society, has been promoting Abel’s Hill’s approach as she talks to groups around the Island about how to care for a Vineyard lawn ecologically. “It is such an exciting step for a community to take it upon themselves to see a change that needs to happen,” she says, “and hopefully inspirational to others to do the same.” The recent data connecting nitrogen pollution to poor pond health is very clear, she adds. “We’re at a point where we either make the choices this data is pointing to — which means coming up with meaningful ways to limit the amount of nitrogen going into the ponds — or we suffer the loss of our ponds as the thriving ecosystems that we have enjoyed.”

Ultimately, to be effective, the no-fertilizer approach “has to be an Island-wide initiative,” Lipnick says, pointing to Nantucket’s vote last year to ban fertilizer across the island, except on farms. Lipnick would like to spread the word to beach associations and homeowners throughout Chilmark Pond’s watershed. “The idea of a pledge to me is positive,” he says, “a way of affirming our values, a way of saying we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. This Island, as beautiful as it is, will only remain beautiful if we take aggressive steps.”

such an exciting step for a community to take it upon themselves to see a change that needs to happen,” she says,

Looking across Chilmark Pond to the Ocean Dune, from Abel's Hill, 1967. Vegetation blocks the view today.

COURTESY KATHY COE, PHOTO BY HOWARD EDDY

very real. I hope very much that people figure out how to speed up rather than slow down this process.

LG: You’ve mentioned that you’ve seen some climate wins, and referred to the Inflation Reduction Act. What else do you look to?

BMcK: We know that when we rally together, we can win, because we stopped the Keystone pipeline and other projects like that. We know that we can shift truly powerful institutions. It took ten years, but we convinced Harvard to divest their fossil fuel investments, followed by Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, the University of California, and the New York State Pension Fund …. You know, we’re beginning to see at least a glimmer in the legal arena [of people] going after the fossil fuel industry for the damage they’ve caused. Maura Healy played a big role in that as AG, and I’m sure she’ll keep the pressure on as governor. Massachusetts is blessed with some really interesting officials right now. I think the mayor of Boston [Michelle Wu] is one of the most remarkable public officials in the country. Massachusetts could be a real leader.

LG: What do you do to shore yourself up? Because this is not easy work.

BMcK: I don’t think I could do the work I do if I couldn’t get outdoors on a regular basis. I don’t know how people who live in places where there’s no access to nature quite manage it, because for me, it’s crucial. That’s one of the great blessings you have here. You’re never more than ten minutes away from getting in the waves and really submerging yourself in the beauty of the world.

LG: You mentioned in an interview that you’re a big crosscountry skier.

BMcK: That’s my vice. It may have been a bad choice, because there’s no no pastime more vulnerable to climate change than Nordic skiing, but I love it.

LG: My dad used to flood our backyard every winter to make a skating rink. My husband’s tried, and it just doesn’t work anymore.

What would you like people to know about your work with Third Act?

BMcK: I think if people are looking to do good work in good community, they may really enjoy this Third Act. And we have [solid] working groups in all the places that [Bluedot] publishes. In a bunch of states now, they’re busy going after the public utility commissions, which are the key players in a lot of [climate-related] decisions. One of the advantages of older people [is] the fact that when something happens on a Tuesday, it doesn’t prevent someone from going. College kids are in college on Tuesday, working people are at work on Tuesday. So the only people who

show up [to climate-related proceedings] are lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry. But if we show up (and now we do), that’s very important.

We’re doing a lot of work around the promotion of democracy, because we don’t think we can do any of this without a healthy democracy. Lots and lots of voter registration. [We have a] great senior to senior project — where older people write high school seniors [about the value of voting]. In an election year, we’re excellent at mobilizing people for phone banking and door knocking. Local chapters are coming up with their own thing; Massachusetts has been working on the proposed expansion of Hanscom Field as a private jet airport in the Boston suburbs, and I think we’re gonna win that fight. I find it hard to believe that Mass Port is going to decide that it really needs twenty new hangars for rich people’s jets.

LG: In how many states is Third Act working?

BMcK: People have a fair amount of time, they have resources, and they want to give back. We have groups in thirty states at the moment, and it’ll be all fifty by the end of the year. There are a lot of different ways for people to get involved.

LG: And the beauty of aging is you just don’t care anymore. [laughs] I’m not here to make friends.

BMcK: Kids have to worry about getting arrested in a demonstration — it’s not so good for your resumé. But really, past a certain point, what the hell are they going to do to you anyway?

LG: Are there Third Act chapters outside of the U.S.?

BMcK: [There’s a lot of interest], but we’re trying to hold off for another six or eight months. We’ve got to raise enough money to make it work — really work — here. I think after the 2024 election, we’ll spread rapidly around the world.

See more about ThirdAct.org in our story on bluedotliving.com

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Continued from page 21 Get involved! You can support 350.org and Third Act (thirdact.org/donate/) financially, or log onto their sites for info on other ways to get involved. Third Act’s donate page invites you to take action individually, such as its Senior to Senior program, which encourages third actors to send letters to high school seniors about the importance of voting, or collectively, such as finding a working group or attending an event.

pay their rent, they have to pay their utilities, they have to pay for gas so they can take their kids to school and go to work. The one place they can get some relief is food. These are working families on the Vineyard that are in need. Some of them come once or twice a month, and you can see elders who are living on fixed incomes who are coming right before that social security check comes in. Food insecurity can be episodic — if you’re a construction worker and you break your ankle and you can’t work for eight or ten weeks — your family is going to need some support. If you have been diagnosed with cancer and are undergoing treatments at the hospital, you are going to need some support. Any of us could be food insecure at any point in time, and I think COVID really demonstrated that.

BDL: How is IGI providing education and public awareness to the Island community?

RH: We are trying to impact the food system on the Vineyard. We want to get other farmers committed to regenerative agriculture, and we want our farm to be a teaching farm where people come to our property and actually see the results of a regenerative system. When you utilize regenerative practices, you actually can get more food production per acre, and the traditional value of the produce is higher. We also have to bring along the next generation — kids are actually really interested in where their food comes from, and how they can help the planet. We started Island Grown Schools fifteen years ago, so we are almost seeing the first generation of kids on the Island growing up who have helped grow their own food in their individual school gardens. They have been taught the history of food, the cultural value of food, how food can be cooked in good and healthy ways, and have been encouraged to try things that

they might otherwise not try. To watch these kids plant seeds in these community gardens and have the little green seedlings come up, it’s incredibly powerful. For them to see green beans and realize “oh, that’s where green beans come from,” that’s knowledge and experience that will last them their entire lives. Kids can influence their peers, they can even influence the choices their parents might make in their households. For us, food is at the heart of health and wellness, and if we can start teaching the next generation that you are what you eat, we can help promote wellness for a long time into the future.

BDL: Can you describe what’s important about regenerative agriculture?

RH: Regenerative agriculture is meant to bring back and sustain the health of the soil which will then allow it to absorb water and keep minerals in the soil. Once there is life in the soil, that is going to lead to a much richer soil that will lead to a much richer yield of food. Another aspect is that you need to leave the root systems intact so that healthy soil begins to develop. As that soil microbiome gets healthier, it will actually pull down carbon

from the air and sequester that into the soil. That’s why we have the farm, because we are implementing all these incredible regenerative techniques and we want to teach people that this is possible, and it’s happening right here.

BDL: How about some specific examples of new and innovative regenerative techniques or technologies that IGI is utilizing?

RH: Andrew Woodruff has always been a part of our farm. He is developing new tools and techniques all the time. [See IGI’s Field Note on page 12.. He created a new seeder that just pokes holes into the ground and we drop the seeds in — there

Continued on page 62

Food is more than just nutrition. It is also love, it is family, it is community, it is tradition and history

Rebecca Haag at IGI'S farm.

PHOTO BY JEREMY DRIESEN

Continued from page 61

is no plowing that destroys the soil. He is also experimenting with reusable cover plastic for when we rotate crops. Instead of using plastic that you just rip up and throw away, Andrew has invented a roller so we can now reuse all that plastic. He is also looking at the rotations of the crops and how beans are a critical part of returning certain nutrients to the soil. Using cover crops and other regenerative methods, Andrew has found a rotation that will happen over three or four or five years that will enrich the soil. We have also moved our chickens out into the field because you really want to rotate animals as well. All these things are examples of new ways of operating that we want farmers and everyday folks to understand and take on for themselves.

BDL: What’s happening with the food waste/composting efforts? What can Islanders and visitors do to step up their efforts?

RH: We are taking food waste that would otherwise be dumped into the trash and sent off-Island to a landfill somewhere and are diverting that into compost that we have been using to enrich the soil. It seems like such an obvious circle. Why would we ship compost and food to the Island and then ship off food waste when we could be making compost right here. We are probably shipping off more than 6,500 tons of food waste each year. Our composting machine at IGI can process maybe 750 tons a year at its best. There is an organics committee that has been thinking for years about how we can create those composting drums in each town. Our composting machine is going to be offline soon, so we need to think about where we can process a large amount of the food waste. Of course, you can compost in your backyard. As an individual, separating your food waste is essential. Slowly you begin to see how much trash that you pay to take to the dump could be diverted if you separated your food waste into compost bins.

The other important aspect of divert-

ing food waste is shopping. If you are two people, shop for two people. Also, find more creative ways of making leftovers more appealing. How can you turn dinner from the night before into lunch the next day? Learn about the sell by dates on food packaging. If you eat yogurt, the date on the package is the last date you can sell it, but that yogurt will probably be good for another two weeks or so. There are too many consumers that prematurely throw away food. So there are a lot of small changes that individuals can make that actually make a big difference.

BDL: How long have you been at IGI now? How’d you end up in this job and what is your background?

RH: About seven years ago I was chosen as the first hired executive director of IGI. Before that, the board chair had played a big part in running the organization. We were a $750,000-a-year organization with a small staff. Now we are a $3.2 million-a-year organization with a robust education department, and we have created a number of food equity programs that didn’t exist before. We are farming regeneratively, and I think IGI has had a huge influence on the Island; on how people think about growing food, eating food, and respecting the environment. It’s all thanks to the incredible team that we have here. I see my job as the marketeer, out there with the pom poms raising funds and raising interest. When I pitch the work we do at IGI, I pitch it as an investment in the community, in keeping this Island a place where people want to live. Nobody wants to be here knowing that people are going hungry. Nobody wants to be here when they know that school kids in the summer don’t have access to lunch programs.

I lived in Boston for many years. I married well — my wife has had a house on the Vineyard since the 70s. For about thirty years we commuted back and forth. She was a PR consultant who did a lot of work around gay marriage, and she spent a lot of time here. We lived in Jamaica Plain, then gave up our house about seven

years ago and moved to the Vineyard. I have an MBA, I spent about twenty-five years in business, and then due to certain circumstances got into the nonprofit world. I served as a board member of the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts and I loved the work. I realized pretty quickly that my whole business training was focused around the opportunity to work in the nonprofit sector and actually make a difference in the world, so that’s what I was intent on doing.

BDL: Have you always been interested in food? How did you find yourself in this particular field and what do you enjoy about it?

RH: For me, I love to learn about new things. I really started this work knowing that it was part of a social justice agenda. I love to eat, I love to cook, but I am not a farmer or an educator. But I am surrounded by people who do those things. I am mostly like a coach on a baseball team. I can develop strategies on how we need to perform, but I can’t play second base. My team makes it all happen.

BDL: What’s changed during your tenure, both on the Island and at IGI?

RH: I was very pleased at how my staff stood up to the challenges and opportunities of COVID. The pantry could no longer have people coming in so everyone really had to adapt to the situation. People took risks, they were incredibly dedicated to supporting this community. Merging with the Island Food Pantry was a huge change. We have so many amazing organizations on the Island with a very supportive group of donors. But we can’t be inefficient with our resources, and I was very pleased when the president of the board of the Pantry approached us. Trying to get two organizations with different cultures together, we made that happen, and it happened during COVID. I think it was a pretty seamless process.

The farm has changed so much. We were growing hydroponically for a long

time, and we had trout for aquaponics. We figured out these things just weren’t sufficient. That’s when we turned to the idea of using the land that we owned, and showing people how regenerative techniques are so important to the sustainability of this Island. We have made major changes over there, and we are in the process of building employee housing as well as an education and innovation center where we will have our offices and a training room. When kids come to the farm, they don’t have a place to shelter when it rains or a place to wash their hands or eat their lunch. We want a real home for our operations, so that’s an exciting development on the horizon.

BDL: Paint us your ideal picture of Martha’s Vineyard in ten years: How are we farming, handling food waste, and making sure Islanders aren’t hungry?

RH: My vision is that there would be four or five big composting drums located in each town, and that we would

have people using tabletop containers to take their food waste to the composters. Ideally all the food waste from farms would also go toward making compost. From a growing perspective, we need to encourage the agricultural community. We need to get more farmers, and we need to make more land available for farming. Perhaps most importantly, we need to be resilient and we need to utilize regenerative farming so we can ensure the vitality of our soil here. We are an Island — we can’t deplete our soil and then move onto the next 40-acre field — it just doesn’t exist here.

I would love for the hospital and Island Healthcare to start writing prescriptions for vegetables and healthy food, instead of prescriptions for just medications. It would also be huge for them to become beacons of good food and good health. We want to work together with those organizations to provide that food and also work together to teach people that, in order to be healthy, you need nutritious food. Food is more

than just nutrition. It is also love, it is family, it is community, it is tradition and history. I would say that everyone can be part of solving our issue with food by reaching out to their neighbors. Don’t just make some soup for your elderly neighbor or your neighbor who is sick, go sit down and have soup with them. Food is related to people feeling connected and loved.

BDL: Tell us what you like to do when you’re not working. Do you have a favorite natural space on the Island where you like to spend time?

RH: I have three dogs, so we walk everyday. I love Peaked Hill, I love going to the lookout. Just seeing the wonder of the Island is such an amazing treat. I also love cooking and baking. During the winter it’s a lot of having friends over for dinner and spending time with them. I do love to play tennis, and will occasionally head over to the Beach Road Restaurant bar to have a Manhattan.

LOCAL

Bluedot Living spoke with Haag about her role at IGI, her passion for sustainability and her background in social justice, and how she and her team are approaching the food security and health of our Island right now, and in the years to come.

Bluedot Living: You’re the executive director of Island Grown Initiative. While we all recognize IGI and know it’s vital to the sustainability of our community, can you describe the mission of IGI?

Rebecca Haag: Simply put, we

are the food people on the Island. We believe that everyone should have access to education, good healthcare, housing, and food. We are focused on the food part of that. We educate people about food with our Island Grown Schools program and Backyard Growers. We are committed to teaching regenerative agriculture practices which will mitigate climate change and help pull more carbon out of the air. We have a 40-acre teaching farm where we are using only regenerative techniques. Around a third to a half of our produce grown at the farm is used for our food equity programs. We glean food, we have a great group of volunteers who go to fields all around the Island to get fresh produce that is donated through the Food Pantry to those in need. Additionally, we have food equity programs to ensure that everyone on the Island has access to good, healthy food year-round.

BDL: What are some of the major challenges that IGI is hoping to address with their food programs?

RH: A few years ago we merged with the Island Food Pantry and now there are 4,200 registered clients that are a part of our food programs; that’s 20 percent of the year-round population. We have seen a doubling of the demand for food. I think that’s a result of the lack of affordable housing here. People have to

PHOTO BY JEREMY DRIESEN

Interview by Lucas Thors

HEROES

The

IGI

crew is finding solutions to the Vineyard's food challenges.

Rebecca

Haag

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