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By Nina Kahori Fallenbaum.

Originally printed in Hyphen Magazine.

Kaye Kozuki is passionate about peaches. She’s a peach partisan. “My favorites are the low-acid nectarines,” she says. “Most stores don’t write down the variety, or let you know what type of fruit you’re eating, but we do. It matters.”

Kozuki’s family has owned their stone fruit and grape farm in Parlier, CA for almost 100 years. Begun in 1926, it is now farmed by three of George and Hisaye Kozuki’s eight children, all third-generation Japanese Americans. The Kozuki parcel is 850 acres spread around the town of Parlier, about 30 miles south of Fresno in California’s Central Valley, the heart of the state’s booming fruit and vegetable industry.  California farmers supplied almost half of the nation’s fresh vegetables and 68 percent of processed vegetables in 2008, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.  

Farming is an unpredictable and financially nerve-wracking enterprise. Margins are low, and product must be sold in narrow windows of time, leaving farmers are the mercy of the markets.

The Kozukis, however, are part of a small but growing group of Asian American farmers determined to overcome the odds.

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This article by Sue Spolan, originally published in Flying Kite, features the work of IATP Food and Community Fellow Haile Johnston creating a food hub in north Philadelphia.

An Increasingly More Common Market: North Philly Group Sets Bar High for Local Food Distribution

They are the most beautiful eggs you have ever seen. Presented in a basket in the cafeteria at The William Penn Charter School, these locally produced eggs evoke the color of the sky, of a latte, of cream. This is no industrial food service product. In fact, a good percentage of what's served at Penn Charter is grown right in the Delaware Valley, thanks to the efforts of a fledgling local food distribution business known as Common Market Philadelphia.

It used to be a simple equation. The farmer grows the food. The customer buys the food. Over the past 50 years, the line from farm to table has become so complicated that it takes multiple PowerPoint slides to explain this lengthy, convoluted and invisible process. Common Market, a wholesale food distribution business based in the Hunting Park section of Philadelphia, offers a new model to get local food to institutional customers. Known as a food hub, businesses like...

IATP Food and Community Fellow Malik Yakini is heavily featured in Mark Bittman's recent New York Times opinion piece, in which he portrays Detroit as a new "model for self-reliance and growth." Here's a small taste of the article:

Food is central. Justice, security, a sense of community, and more intelligent land use have become integral to the food system. Here, local food isn’t just hip, it’s a unifying factor not only among African-Americans and whites but between them. Food is an issue on which it seems everyone can agree, and this is a lesson for all of us.

“The idea,” says Malik Yakini, a school principal who runs the two-acre D-Town Farm, “is to help black people stand up, to demonstrate that creating reality is not the exclusive domain of white people — without pointing fingers at white people.” The farm, located in Rouge Park — the city’s biggest — will soon double in size.

Yakini, the chairman of the Detroit Food Policy Council, which is holding its first conference this week, gave me a tour on the eve of spring planting while a dozen African-American volunteers steadily raked a sizable plot. “The farm can empower, drive the economy, reduce our carbon footprint and give us better food,” he said. “And we’...

IATP Food and Community Fellow Paul Greenberg's bestselling book, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food was recently awarded the 2011 James Beard Award for Writing and Literature. See the full list of James Beard Award winners here.

Four Fish will be out in paperback on May 31st.  As part of the paperback tour Greenberg will be in Seattle, San Francisco, Washington DC, New Orleans and Toronto during the month of June.  Tour dates will be released shortly.

For more information and for recent articles by Paul Greenberg, visit fourfish.org.