Wisconsin Book Fest: Meals from the dark side

It seems logically impossible not to love food, but we all have wildly disparate levels of engagement with our grub. It’s sometimes hard to believe when all the food talk floating around—particularly if it has to do with local food and farmers—is sunshine and rainbows. (Except, of course, when Michael Pollan comes to town. Then people get really cranky.) Two books by authors appearing at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Oct. 11 provide an engaging counterpoint. The Flavor Of Wisconsin: An Informal History Of Food And Eating In The Badger State by Terese Allen and the late Harva Hachten takes the more common celebratory view of food in all its myriad forms, while Robert Wolf's Eating In Place: Telling The Story of Local Foods, makes sure that celebration comes with a dose of hard reality and broken eggs.

The Flavor Of Wisconsin, an extensively updated version of the 1981 classic, chronicles the history of Wisconsin through its food—and despite the Sconnie stereotypes, it’s not just cheese, beer, and brats. Allen expands on Hachten’s work to track the development of Wisconsin food from the gathering of wild berries and Native American gardens to growing demand for local, organic produce. Here you’ll find a meditation on the cheese curd, as well as histories of the cream puff, the Friday-night fish-fry, and the importance of lutefisk dinners. All essential Wisconsin food knowledge, particularly when you’re out enjoying these Wisconsin staples. (With the exception of lutefisk, which no one can possibly enjoy.)

The last chapter of Flavor, in which Allen discusses sustainable farming and eating, does edge over into some glaring contrast with Wolf’s book. Eating In Place is a collection of essays and stories on local foods written by farmers, chefs, farmers’ market organizers, and leaders of nonprofits. Where Allen describes the movement in mostly gilded terms, Wolf provides the voices of the people actually involved in creating and sustaining it—and it isn’t always the pretty evocation of community and bountiful fields you so often read about.

Farmer Lynn Tschumper writes frankly of earning no money during her first years of farming, while Wayne Wangsness describes the jealousy that led to the demise of the Northeast Iowa Organic Association. Dennis Keeney, former director of the Leopold Center For Sustainable Agriculture in Iowa, even calls into question whether the community model of family farming can possibly produce enough food and hold enough attractions to keep young people rooted to the land—throwing into doubt some sacred, um, cows to local food activists.

Sure, the overall thrust of the book is hopeful, but that hope comes with a hell of a lot of work. That’s the message that’s often missing from stories of the local-food movement. It’s probably a good thing that people are supporting local farmers by shopping at farmers’ markets and subscribing to CSA farms, but the facts remain: Farming isn't easy, failure is ever-present, and human flaws—including simple jealousy and competitiveness—threaten to sink even the most noble causes.