Key Ingredients: Food Issues in ND 2012

2ECOND THOUGHT A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council

winter 12

on

[the KEY INGREDIENTS issue]

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Photo by Joleyn Larson, Mandan, ND

Dinner Table Conversation

note from the executive director Lately Americans are pretty angry about pretty much everything, and food is no exception. Recently there has been outrage over $16 muffins served at a Justice Department Conference. (Taxpayers will be happy to note that a week after the muffin story went viral it was revealed the $16 price tag was for the cost of a full continental breakfast, not a single muffin.) Texas decided to stop the decades-long tradition of serving last meals to death row inmates after public outrage boiled over when convicted killer Lawrence Russell Brewer ordered more food than a family of four could eat in a week and then refused to eat any of it before his scheduled execution. (In response, Brian Price, a longtime prison cook, and former prisoner, offered to donate last meals to death row inmates, but the Texas Department of Criminal Justice declined his offer because, “It’s not the cost but rather the concept we’re moving away from.”)

A group of parents in California is suing McDonald’s to stop the practice of marketing nutritionally deficient food with toys, and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted on legislation that bans the practice with meals that don’t meet minimum nutritional standards. (The fast-food chain responded by calling the ban “unrealistic” because children will rarely eat a nutritionally balanced meal.) To top it all off, Oxfam reports that the average price of staple foods around the world will more than double in the next 20 years and warns of an “era of permanent food crisis, which is likely to be accompanied by political unrest.”

Economically, politically, and ethically, food matters, and there are important conversations we need to be having around issues of access, sustainability, and health. In the examples listed above, food issues are driving people apart.

Luckily, there is a community of folks locally who are taking the opportunity to let food bring them together. Community-supported agriculture, farmers markets, and co-ops are starting to build momentum and direct communitywide conversations around the way we eat. They are all part of a larger “slow food” movement that seeks “to counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.” At the core of this movement is the desire to use the power of food to create active and engaged communities, the substance of democratic society. This is literally an opportunity to break bread together and start talking about the things that matter the most to us individually and as a collective. And if our mouths are full now and again and we have to keep them shut long enough, we might just find out that listening to other people’s values and ideas isn’t such a hard thing to swallow. Perhaps there is more room at the table than we realized.

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt Executive Director

features [contents] KEY INGREDIENTS

2 Fathers, Sons, and North Dakota: Cultivating the Ties That Bind on the Agrarian Landscape

By Ryan M. Taylor

8 Eating with Eyes on the Community

By Dean Hulse

14 The Story of Food in America

By Dakota Goodhouse

16 Key Ingredients Community Pages

By Jessie Veeder Scofield

NOTEWORTHY 28 “Hard Work and Much Fun”: A North

Dakota State of Happiness

By Deborah Dragseth and Stacy A. Cordery

34 River

By Will Beachey

PLAIN THINKING 36 The Right to Food

By Tayo “Jay” Basquiat

ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the North Dakota Humanities Council.

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Editor Jan Daley Jury, Line Editor Dakota Goodhouse, Researcher To subscribe please contact us: North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

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This issue of On Second Thought is a special reprint of the Fall 2011 Key Ingredients issue with new information on the communities of Bottineau, Ellendale, Medina, Underwood, and the United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck.

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Fathers, Sons, and North Dakota: Cultivating the Ties That Bind on the Agrarian Landscape

By Ryan M. Taylor

One reality I’ve resigned myself to is that I’ll never get every book read that ought to be read. That’s one reason I appreciate book recommendations to help me sift through all that might interest me.

Several years ago, a friend recommended Iron John by poet Robert Bly to me. It’s subtitled “A book about men,” and even though I wasn’t a father at the time I read it, I was a devoted son. Now that I am a father of two sons and a daughter, but have lost my own father to age and Parkinson’s, I find myself thinking often of the themes I discovered in Iron John.

I read a little of everything, and although poetry and mythology aren’t regular residents of my literary nightstand, I’m not afraid of them either. I hadn’t had a lot of exposure to Robert Bly, and, if you Google him, you’ll find a range of opinions on him and his work, but I thank this poet laureate of Minnesota for getting me to think about my father, fatherhood, and male mentoring in a new light.

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Marshall “Bud” Taylor on a quarter horse stud named Squab at the Taylor Ranch, Towner, N.D., 1958

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Left: Bud and Ryan Taylor, 1977 (photo by Corinne Dokken Frey) Middle: Bud and Ryan Taylor with a tough little ranch pony named Geronimo, 1974 (photo by Elizabeth Taylor) Right: Bud Taylor on his John Deere 60 and Ryan Taylor on the ground on the Taylor Ranch hay meadow, 1992 (photo by Elizabeth Taylor)

It’s an interesting world we live in where a Harvard-educated poet can speak so directly to a North Dakota cattle rancher. We are all connected, though, no matter how we try to divide ourselves, so it shouldn’t surprise me. “Mitakuye Oyasin,” or “All my relations,” as my Lakota friends would say.

Bly uses the story of Iron John, a Grimm fairy tale, to voice some opinions on the way male relationships have changed as we’ve moved from an agrarian- and craft-based culture to an industrial age.

It’s rare now for fathers and sons to work alongside each other. More often, a father is someone who leaves early in the morning to go and ply his trade and comes home at night for a few hours, or less, of family time.

Although North Dakota, by definition, is considered an urban state because the majority of our people live in incorporated cities and towns, most of us still consider it rural and agrarian. As a rancher’s boy, I’m a bit of an anomaly to the typical industrial age son, and for that I am grateful.

Some of my earliest memories are being outside on the ranch with Dad— feeding cattle, making hay, riding horse, doing chores of one kind or another.

Now that Dad is gone, I feel like the luckiest son in the world to have had that “quantity time” with him.

Bly says the father as a living force in the home disappeared when the demands of industry sent him away to work in the factories. The living father force, however, was always present on our ranch.

Bly would probably say our ranching relationship was a little like tribal culture.

“Fathers and sons in tribal cultures live in an amused tolerance of each other.

The son has a lot to learn, and so the father and son spend hours trying and failing together to make arrowheads or to repair a spear or track a clever animal.

When a father and son do spend long hours together, which some fathers and 4

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...it’s about time and lots of it. If time is limited, don’t shortchange the little there is. sons still do, we could say that a substance almost like food passes from the older body to the younger.”

I certainly received that food, and the teaching, as Dad and I tried and failed in amused tolerance of each other while working cattle and completing all the regular, seasonal tasks on a ranch. Conversely, Bly says, “When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, and not his teaching.” The act of teaching, he says, sweetens our sometimes harsh and human temperaments.

I’ve lost track of all the things my father taught me. Some of the lessons are pretty common—how to shut a gate with a double half hitch or tie a horse to the hitching rail with a bowline knot, how to prime the leathers of a well cylinder beneath a windmill, how to judge when the hay is ready to be stacked or baled. I continue to do these common things so often; they are constant reminders of him that have helped me handle the grief of his loss.

I always knew that my relationship with Dad was special, and different, from many of my friends whose fathers had to leave for work every morning. But Dad was different, too, because he was 48 years old when I was born so it was a little like being raised by a grandfather.

While my friends’ fathers were baby boomers, my father was a World War II veteran of the South Pacific. He was a boy who grew up taking on odd jobs to help his family through the Great Depression. Those circumstances shaped him, and, in turn, helped to shape me.

One circumstance that shaped Dad was that he was raised without a father. When Dad was just a year and a half old, his father died from smallpox—he was unvaccinated. What’s more, in the short span of time between 1921 and 1923, his grandfather also died suddenly from a rupture and his young uncle was killed when he was rammed by a grown steer.

That meant every man on the ranch had been tragically taken within 16 months time, leaving two widows to care for two small boys and a soon-to-be-born baby girl. So my father never knew a father, or had the male presence of his uncle or grandfather in the immediate vicinity.

But he did have his father’s cousin from Montana named Gordon and he would become the father figure in Dad’s life.

I don’t want to overstate the whole male mentoring influence on rearing boys because Dad, one of the truly wonderful people in this world, was first and foremost a product of his mother and grandmother’s care and nurturing.

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I always described him as a gentleman who was a gentle man, who was caring and thoughtful, who put stock in relationships and knew the importance of helping a neighbor. Those traits were surely influenced by the strong, independent women who raised him and brought the young family through the 1930s.

But, there was a need for a man in the young boy’s life, and that’s where his elder cousin came in. Gordon was a cowboy’s cowboy who ranched in the rugged breaks of the Missouri River near Culbertson, Montana. He grazed several hundred horses in the area and made his living trading horses at a time when horses were still a valuable tool on the northern plains.

My male mentoring and initiation with Dad was more of a long and continual process. It was the hundreds of summer sausage sandwiches shared in the hayfield at lunch time. It was the conversations that I took part in, or just listened to, as Dad visited and shared stories with hired help and family friends who helped us put up the hay on our meadow.

When Dad was a young boy he would get on the train and spend entire summers on Gordon’s horse ranch, and I think that was his “Iron John” time when he left his mother and discovered the metaphorical wild man in the forest.

It was the visits and the silent time together while we dug postholes and built fence, or tamped in a railroad tie for a corner post. He’d be teaching while we were working. This is how you run the fence stretcher, this is how you measure the distance between the top wire and the ground (it’s hip height on a tall Taylor), this is how you practice your stoicism when you rip your hand open on the barbed wire and watch the blood trickle onto the ground.

Gordon was plenty wild when it came to riding bucking horses and living in rough country, but pretty tame in social ways as Dad said he never saw his male mentor drink, smoke, or gamble.

We harnessed teams, saddled horses, and broke colts.

We branded calves, doctored cattle, chased cows, and learned the temperament of animals and the proper temperament for people who work with them.

Bly speaks often of the importance of initiation in a boy’s development when he leaves his mother and his father to be with the wild man. For Dad, I believe he accomplished that when he was 14 years old and he helped Gordon chase 40 horses from Towner to Jamestown, North Dakota.

This all took time, and Robert Bly validated that time for me. There was no shortage of stories for me to share in the eulogy I delivered at Dad’s funeral because our time together allowed for the creation of so many.

He had given me his time in abundance, and with that “substance almost like food passing from the older body to the younger,” I knew that I had been well fed.

It was 1935 and the overland horse chase took several days of camping and herding as one of the two rode horse and the other drove the 1927 Buick coupe with the camping gear. The food was pretty ordinary and Dad always remembered Gordon buying a pail of eggs at a farm along the way. When Dad asked how he was going to keep the eggs from rotting, Gordon built a fire and boiled the whole pail. Dad claimed he ate enough hard-boiled eggs for a lifetime on that trip!

Dad spoke often of this grand boyhood adventure so I know it had a big impact on his development. He was just 14 but he was given a grown man’s responsibilities to help chase and sell those horses. Gordon bought

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him his first hat, boots, and saddle. He made him a cowboy, and a man.

But ranches and farms are fewer on our landscape and there are fewer families with careers that allow them to work side by side.

Yet, I believe fathers and sons, male mentors and boys, can make the most of the time we are given. Society will reap the benefit of young men with a sense of direction and the grounding of their fathers and close male role models, rather than the skewed male icons of popular culture.

I take a couple of clear messages from Iron John as I ponder good fatherhood, and it matters not if you work

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from a ranch, an office or a factory. First, it’s about time and lots of it. If time is limited, don’t shortchange the little there is.

I think the time ought to be invested in three areas—the outdoors, working together, and teaching. In the fairy tale, I believe Iron John is found in the forest, in the outdoors, for a reason. As we continue to move ourselves indoors, it’s more and more important for all of us, but especially fathers and sons and male mentors, to get outdoors. The forest, the prairie, the green and living spaces are fertile ground for relationship building and initiation.

North Dakota has a lot to offer for outdoor experiences. Take advantage of it—camp, hunt, fish, hike, bike, learn our history, feel the sun, wind, rain or snow together.

We should be on the lookout for tasks and jobs where we can have long hours of “amused tolerance of each other.” I think it’s nice to have something to point to at the end of the effort.

Stand back and admire the yard fence, listen to the rebuilt motor, appreciate the woodcraft you completed together.

Finally, teaching. It’s easy to be harsh or impatient after a long and stressful day. The act of teaching makes us think about the words we say, and reminds us that there is something to learn, that skills are not automatic but take some coaching from adults who are forced to keep their tempers in check.

We’re not teaching calculus here. We’re showing how to tie a knot, build a campfire, or explain some of the tasks we do when we are away at work.

Take the time to be a dad today, take the time to mentor a boy you know. Bly made me think and gave me some of the key ingredients in his book. It made me appreciate all that I have been given, and inspires me to be more giving. All from a poet writing about a fairy tale.

Ryan Taylor is a fourth-generation cattle rancher, author of the syndicated column, Cowboy Logic, and a North Dakota state senator representing District 7. He ranches with his wife Nikki and three young children near Towner, North Dakota.

Ryan Taylor (photo courtesy of Bismarck Tribune, 40 Under 40 magazine supplement, 2003)

Working together is easier for me as a rancher, but we can find chores and tasks in other settings as well. It could be in the garage or the backyard, or at the workbench.

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Photos by Sarah Smith Warren, www.sarahsmithwarren.com

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Eating with Eyes on the Community

by Dean Hulse

I recently came across a note I’d dashed off some time ago that concerned an advertisement (circa 1922), which I’d seen in my hometown newspaper. If memory serves, I’d been looking through newspaper archives while doing research on a topic unrelated to the ad’s subject, but its copy nonetheless caught my attention.

The ad read, “Butter and Eggs, same as Cash.”

My maternal great-grandmother and my grandmother both bartered butter and eggs (and cream) for staples, probably with the same grocer who ran that ad in my hometown newspaper. According to family legend, my maternal great-great-grandmother was a “fancy cook” in England before she and my great-great-grandfather emigrated first to Canada and then to Richburg Township in North Dakota’s Bottineau County.

Mom was an exceptional cook, too, so perhaps it’s genetic. Even as a child I experimented in the kitchen, and Mom and Dad were generous with what they allowed me to make. Like many farm families of that era, our “fruit room” resembled a grocery store—with shelves full of jams, jellies, tomato sauce, green beans, relishes, and pickles (beet, cucumber, corn, cauliflower).

Also, canned stew meat and meatballs, with congealed morsels glistening like jewels inside the jars. Without asking, I could go down to the basement and retrieve a package of frozen hamburger, wrapped in white freezer paper carrying the “Not for Sale” label our local butcher had affixed. The beef came from our own steers. My first food triumph was sizzling as Dad arrived for dinner: hamburgers, releasing the aroma of nearly every dried herb and spice Mom had in her cabinet.

A predominance of chili pepper, onion salt, and garlic powder gave these burgers a piquancy that perfectly complemented a melting slab of Colby cheese.

Of course, I had a few failures. A sodden tuna pizza comes to mind. A meal fit for our dog Stub, who required some persuasion.

“You eat that,” I barked.

I’ll end the tales of my adolescent cooking escapades here.

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Beside my note containing the “Butter and Eggs” ad copy, I’d scribbled my reaction: “Oh really? Try making a cake out of cash.” I know about cake. Dad’s avocation was baking angel food cakes, each requiring fourteen egg whites, and many of which he gave as gifts.

Butter and eggs, same as cash? I know bartering is a form of commerce, but during my life, I’ve witnessed this butter-and-eggs sentiment assume a more literal character. I don’t think it’s a stretch to claim that many who frequent supermarkets today behave as though their cash is the same as cabbage, one indistinguishable commodity exchanged for another. For many years, I was one of those shoppers.

When my wife, Nicki, and I first moved to Fargo, I relished the fact that I could shop at grocery stores overflowing with exotic produce at 3 a.m. if I so chose. Like many Americans, I ate daily, and well, without knowing or caring a lick about the food on my plate—except how it looked and tasted, and perhaps how much it cost.

For me, the convenience of that marvelous arrangement helped blunt some repulsive memories of growing up on a farm. Picking eggs as a child was a chore, especially when I’d encounter an unexpected visitor in the henhouse. I once discovered a large rat, sitting on its haunches, exposing an oozing ulcer on its underside. After retracing my steps, lickety-split and empty-handed, back to our house, Dad returned with me to the clucking chickens. That rat departed this world squirming on the end of Dad’s five-pronged pitchfork, creating a silhouette against the early morning sun.

And so, I was OK buying anonymous eggs produced who knows where. But in my late twenties, my outlook began to change. I don’t think genetics was responsible. More likely, it was modeled behavior—that is, my having grown up with gardening parents and my having experienced truly fresh food. What manifested my latent craving for vineripened tomatoes? I can’t say. What satisfied it? Thick tomato slices still conveying the sun’s warmth, made even more perfect by salt, pepper, mayonnaise, and two slices of bread, substantial enough to absorb the free-flowing tomato juices without becoming soggy. A summertime sandwich to savor for only a few weeks, but to anticipate the rest of the time.

At first, we rented garden plots from the Fargo Park District, and we drove to our garden with open buckets of water sloshing in our car’s trunk. Later, I bought a small trailer and adapted it so it could haul two fifty-five-gallon water barrels. One year, someone stole our entire crop of spaghetti squash. I pacified my anger by writing a letter to the editor of our local newspaper, in which I offered a recipe so that our thief could fully enjoy his booty (his large footprints among our picked-clean squash vines). A day after the letter appeared, I got a call from a woman living in Casselton. She offered to share some of her spaghetti squash with me. Another woman from Moorhead did the same. We ended up with more spaghetti squash than we had growing in our garden.

That series of incidents planted a seed that would sprout once we bought a home and had a garden of our own.

Now, we didn’t start our backyard gardening with the altruistic notion of supplying our neighbors with produce.

But on most years, there are only so many zucchini squash two people can eat. To our credit, we are diligent in checking our zucchini plants. We aim to pick the fruit when it’s six to eight inches long, and that’s what we share with neighbors. Those zucchini lurking at the very bottom of our plants, the ones stealthily growing to the size of small children’s legs, we toss into our compost pile.

We also share tomatoes, eggplant, onions, spinach, chard—whatever we have in overabundance. Our neighbors have been joyfully generous with their in-kind reciprocations. One of our neighbors, an elderly Japanese widow, treats us to several meals reflecting her culture’s cuisine each year. Painstakingly garnished and with precisely cut vegetables, her dishes don’t disappoint in presentation, taste, or texture. I often daydream about her sticky rice.

And the source of her homemade herb wine, which packs a punch more like a liqueur, grows right outside her 10

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garage service door. This year she’s going to show us how to grow the herb and make the wine.

Another neighbor is the patriarch of a family-owned package store and popular college bar. He repays with wine or beer, some of which comes to us with a “born-on” date that is either current or only a day or two old. A Montana native, he’s also shared cherries that grow near Flathead Lake.

Butter and eggs, same as cash? Sharing our garden’s bounty has taught us much about bargains, by which I mean the unspoken agreements that we’ve forged in our neighborhood.

For the most part, these bargains have been organic, in that all of our contributions fit together harmoniously, as necessary parts of the whole. We feed each other, but we also nourish each other with meaningfulness that sustains our friendship.

We’ve formed a network that pulls us tighter than could our geographic proximity alone. Our exchanges of fruits, veggies, and other goodies have created social capital, and I’d be hard-pressed to estimate its cash equivalent.

While we’ve developed our gardening abilities, we’ve also assumed responsibility for carrying on family traditions, both mine and Nicki’s. One of mine is plum pudding, a Christmas custom dating back to my maternal great-great-grandmother, the “fancy” cook. Plum pudding is steamed and among

Photos by Sarah Smith Warren, www.sarahsmithwarren.com

Our neighbor to the south loves our rhubarb. And we love her rhubarb pie, made distinctive by the fresh orange zest she adds. I’ve been known to eat three pieces of this pie at one sitting. The neighbor whose backyard is full of fruit trees lets us pick his cherries, apricots, and apples until our hearts and our appetites are content. While it takes many hours of picking and pitting, with me picking and Nicki pitting (the really hard job), our collaboration has resulted in a cherry jam that I have thought about in the middle of the night. We’ve dehydrated the apricots for a tart addition to our oatmeal.

And while I can count on one hand the number of pies I’ve baked, I did a pretty good job of creating a three-inch-high apple pie for one of Nicki’s birthdays.

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its ingredients are bread crumbs, chopped walnuts, dried cherries, diced apple, and suet—beef fat. We’re able to get our suet from the same person who supplies us with our organically certified grass-fed beef. He doesn’t sell the suet, but the last time I asked, he saved some and gave it to us. No charge, which is mighty neighborly.

Representing Nicki’s side of the family, we’re now the makers of lefse, horseradish (which we grow), and sauerkraut. Because we don’t want to take up the garden space required to grow enough cabbage for our kraut, I needed to find a supply, so I visited a local farmers’ market. Each August, I buy one hundred pounds of cabbage from the same farm marketer. This year, I’ll have bought cabbage from him for twenty-five years, a silver anniversary of sorts.

There are now nearly forty farmers’ markets operating across the state with support from the North Dakota Farmers Market and Growers Association. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports a 16 percent nationwide increase in the number of farmers’ markets just between 2009 and 2010.

Meanwhile, the concept of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is catching on, too. Typically, CSA members pay in advance for a share of a farmer’s produce, which he or she will deliver by the boxful each week during the growing season. The advance payment covers the producer’s anticipated costs and salary and thereby allows members to share in the risks and rewards of growing local food.

Many people I’ve talked with say they frequent farmers’ markets or join CSAs because they want to buy food grown closer to their homes. The food is fresher, with all the extra flavor and nutrients this freshness implies. They also get exposed to new fruits and vegetables and new ways of cooking, they learn how food grows, and they can meet the people who grew their food. Many visit their CSA farm once a year or more.

All of those reasons make sense to me. While our industrialized food system may be efficient in some respects, it is nonetheless dependent on fossil fuels throughout every phase—growing, processing, and distributing. We’re saving energy by eating whole foods raised locally. Also, our globally intertwined food system means food-borne illnesses can spread across the country in a matter of days, as outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisonings prove.

There are unexpected pleasures that come from buying locally, too. Once when I was standing in line to buy cabbage from my farm marketer, an elderly woman ahead of me in line struck up a conversation.

Without any prompting and without any apparent cue, she began telling me about the watermelon of her childhood. She told me that her dad would bury ripe watermelon in the wheat stored in their granaries. The wheat was warm enough to keep the watermelon from freezing. She said they’d be eating watermelon well into November during most years. I can only imagine what a treat it was.

After reflecting on our own local food experiences the past quarter century, I’ve concluded that the grocer who placed the “Butter and Eggs” ad in my hometown newspaper nearly a century ago was right to exchange his merchandise, like cash, for eggs and butter coming from someone he knew, from someone whose farm he could visit. I’ve also decided that while we still can’t make a cake out of cash, we can build a community out of fresh food.

Dean Hulse is a writer living in Fargo. He and his wife, Nicki, still own his family’s farm in Bottineau County, which is a source for much of Dean’s activism and inspiration concerning land use, renewable energy, and sustainable agriculture. In 2009, the University of Minnesota Press published Hulse’s memoir, Westhope: Life as a Former Farm Boy.

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A partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the mission of the North Dakota Humanities Council is to invest in the people of North Dakota by creating and sustaining humanities programs that provide us with a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better vision for the future.

Improve teaching and learning in schools North Star Dakotan provides teachers with a low-cost, educational and wellwritten text as they teach North Dakota history in their classrooms. This full-color series of newspapers brings history alive in an accessible and engaging format.

Strengthen the capacity of key social institutions to provide education and services to their communities Museum on Main Street shares Smithsonian collections, research, and exhibitions with rural Americans, broadens public interest in American history and develops a heightened awareness of local heritage, and motivates small, rural museums to make lasting institutional advancements.

Dakota Discussions improves literacy and revitalizes libraries by offering film and book discussions as mediums for renewing civic connections.

Grants offered by the NDHC enhance the ability of institutions and organizations to deliver public humanities programs and opportunities.

Promote lifelong learning and critical inquiry by making education and culture accessible community experiences Chautauqua uses theater as a vehicle for teaching American history in the town square.

Read North Dakota encourages readers, writers, and educators to enjoy good literature rooted in North Dakota though community and classroom events.

Public Symposiums bring the citizens of the state together to explore the people, places and ideas that have played pivotal roles in shaping our nation and world.

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The Story of Food in America

by Dakota Goodhouse

Across the history of the world one of the most defining characteristics of cultures is food: how it is hunted, gathered, planted and produced. The story of food in America has grown from American Indians planting and harvesting corn, squash, beans, tomatoes, and many other New World foods, to the arrival of Old World foods such as wheat, carrots, onions, beef, and many others. Most Americans don’t think twice about the history of their foods, much less the origins, or even the preparation of their foods.

The new Smithsonian traveling exhibit, Key Ingredients: America by Food, curated by Charley Camp, explores the connections between Americans and the foods they produce, prepare, preserve, and present at the table; it provides a provocative and thoughtful look at the historical, regional, and social traditions that merge in everyday meals and celebrations. It is the newest exhibition of Museum on Main Street, a partnership of the Smithsonian Institution and state humanities councils in service to museums and citizens of rural America. Through a selection of artifacts, photographs, and illustrations, Key Ingredients examines the evolution of the American kitchen and how food industries have responded to the technological innovations that have enabled Americans to choose an ever-wider variety of frozen, prepared, and fresh foods. Key Ingredients also looks beyond the home to restaurants, diners, and celebrations that help build a sense of community through food. Key Ingredients addresses farming, table manners, history, markets, and kitchen gadgets in a lively presentation that stimulates comparisons of back then and right now, over there and right here. The exhibition will engage audiences everywhere, creating conversations and inspiring community recollection and celebration.

We are honored to host the Smithsonian Institution’s Key Ingredients: America by Food traveling exhibit and are deeply thankful to the communities of Bottineau, Ellendale, Medina, Underwood, and United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck who will host this exhibit in their hometowns. In addition to hosting the traveling exhibit, each community will provide a series of events in relation to the exhibit.

Visit these communities. Discover and experience the story of food in America and in North Dakota.

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A list of ice cream flavors at the Dairy Dipper II, the ice cream shop inside of Pride Dairy in Bottineau. Pride Dairy is North Dakota’s only active creameries.

Photo by Jessie Veeder Scofield.

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Jessie Veeder Sc ofield is a sing er, songwriter, works on her photographer, family’s 3,000and writer w ac re cattle ranch ho lives and husband Cha in western Nor d. She keeps a th Dakota wit record of ranc back at the ra h her h life on her po nch..., provid pular blog, M es regular com ea n Hear it Now w hile, mentary on P , weekly colum rairie Public nist for the Fa Radio’s progra throughout th rg o Fo m rum, and perf e Midwest. V orms her orig isit veederranc inal music h.com for mor e information.

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Medina, ND October 20, 2012 - December 2, 2012

Driving through the neatly kept streets of Medina, population 355, past the even lines of a new corn field and the granary near the railroad tracks, one might be inclined to label this a quiet place. But inside the cabs of tractors just off of I-94, between the walls of farmhouses, schools and the café on Main Street, there exists a passion for a heritage and lifestyle that is responsible for feeding the world.

factory owner, and third-, fourth-, and fifthgeneration farmers.

Welcome to Stutsman County, where the people don’t take this duty lightly.

It’s a topic familiar to an area that once laid claim to several large dairy producers, a cheese factory, and now boasts a population of certified organic farms second nationally only to California. Medina is also home to the International Certification Services (ICS) office that provides agricultural and food operations with the proper certification.

“This is a community rooted in agriculture,” said Sue Balcom, Marketing and Outreach Coordinator for FARRMS, a local organization that provides education in organic farming and processing. “This is Medina!”

Balcom speaks enthusiastically among the community members she’s asked to gather around a table in the back of the Medina Café where each Wednesday they serve homemade chicken and dumplings and run out before the noon hour is over.

And the town comes to life as each character who contributes to an area rich in heritage and uncertain about the future introduces themselves as retired teachers, historians, a CEO, a restaurant manager, a former cheese

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They have all gathered in the name of community-minded pastor and friend, Karl Limvere, who recently passed away and left them with the determination to continue to pursue Limvere’s passion for agriculture and community conversations about their role in the food supply.

And as the corn along the edge of town reached toward the early summer sun, talk around the table moved from farming to Medina’s rich German heritage and the roast beef dinner served every year at the Fall Festival. There was a discussion about how they used to haul 500-pound barrels of cheese out of town on semis and trains and how important the railroad had been to the town’s establishment in 1881. Someone mentioned the difficulty that came with the arrival of the interstate and soon talk turned to the future.

Left: A corn field grows along the edges of Medina. Right: The Medina Café.

Photos by Jessie Veeder Scofield.

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takes to stay here,” said Heupel Reich.

Committed to the lifestyle, the Reich family schedules events around milking and gets their children involved as soon as they are old enough to feed calves.

“We are the only people we know who are collegeeducated, have worked for 30 years in the same job, and who are still getting paid the same,” said Reich, in a voice filled with urgency. “It’s a result of a disconnect in the understanding of how food gets to our plates.”

This is the issue that the people of Stutsman County are working to combat. And they are starting with future generations. In a school of 155 students, 95 percent of them are actively involved in the Future Farmers of America and 4-H programs and many continue participation into the last year of high school.

The schools in Medina also work with Balcom’s employer FARRMS by participating in the organization’s Farm-toSchool Program, a program that connects schools and local farms with the objective of serving healthy meals in school cafeterias.

It turns out the interstate that sent travelers one mile north of Medina in the early 1960s wasn’t the only change that had an effect on the growth of this agriculture community.

Although most of the farms in the area have remained in the family, the operations are growing larger, the equipment is more expensive, and the option of CRP is allowing people to stay on their farms longer.

Regardless of how time has changed the industry, Becky Heupel Reich, a dairy farmer who lives and works alongside her husband and eight children on the family’s farm, believes that those with a passion will work hard to remain in the industry.

“People have farming in their blood and will do what it

FARRMS also works to educate the public on starting their own small farming operations and to encourage them to learn about their food supply.

“People in our state have knowledge about farming that we are going to lose,” said Balcom. “We need to educate young people, let them get their hands dirty.”

With that, each person at the table in the Medina Café, the people who have collectively made one man’s mission their own, nod their heads, stands up to say goodbye while they make plans for the next 4-H meeting, to help a neighbor get their cows in, and to meet on Wednesday in the café for homemade chicken and dumplings.

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Bottineau, ND December 8, 2012 - March 10, 2013

Gerilyn Shepp shuffles through a stack of papers on her desk as she sits at the front of a humble building along the streets of Lansford, North Dakota. Every morning Shepp wakes up before the sun to fulfill and deliver thousands of orders for homemade wet salads throughout the tri-state area.

Shepp’s kept this schedule since opening Shepp’s Deli 17 years ago as a dream, not only for her family, but for the future of her community as well.

And Shepp, who grew up cooking and gardening with her mother on their family farm, has fought to keep her business, not only operating, but thriving, in a town with a population of only 300.

Throughout the history of Shepp’s Deli, Shepp has grown her business from two employees offering two products to today’s operation of 27 employees working to prepare and distribute 65 products, many made with North Dakota agricultural products.

In one week Shepp’s Deli processes 15,000 pounds of North Dakota-grown potatoes, all eyed by the hands of the dedicated employees Shepp is proud to call family.

“The people are the best part of my job,” said Shepp.

Entrepreneurs like Shepp seem to embody the spirit of Bottineau County, an area rich in Scandinavian, German, and Native American heritage that holds on tight to the traditions of faith, family, and fellowship, with food as the glue that keeps it together.

You will find Shepp’s passion and vision under that lid of potato salad you purchased for your 4th of July picnic, but it turns out that same dedication can be found in a cup of gourmet coffee at a hotel in Minneapolis, on top of an ice-cream cone and in the wheat used to make your bread.

Take a close look at your plate, from breakfast to dessert, and it is quite possible that you’re about to indulge in creations from the kitchens and harvests of Bottineau County.

“There’s something so natural about feeding people, getting back to the earth and doing what’s been done for decades,” said Nick Dreyer, a fifth-generation Bottineau County farmer whose connection to agriculture and the landscape keeps him traveling nearly 70 miles on weekends and evenings to help his father plant and tend to his crops.

Call it connection or tradition, but that same drive doesn’t end with harvest. At the edge of the wheat fields you can find entrepreneurs like Jo Khalifa of MoJo Roasters, Inc., embodying the community’s spirit and giving it wings to fly beyond the rural roads of central North Dakota.

The mother of seven discovered a passion for roasting coffee while experimenting in an old cast-iron pan nearly 20 years ago. Today she can be found in a small renovated out-building on her farm near West Hope, roasting some of the finest coffee beans from around the globe and filling orders for major hotel chains, restaurants, and customers from across the country.

And like many of the hard-working business owners in Bottineau County, for Khalifa, there is much more to her work than the coffee she makes.

“It helps me connect with people,” said Khalifa, “There is a great story in coffee.”

Perhaps no one understands the importance of that connection better than Jeff Beyer, who built 20

The 5th Generation Dreyer Farm in Bottineau County.

Photo by Jessie Veeder Scofield.

“I love rural living and I wanted to keep my business here to provide this area with jobs,” Shepp said.

Coffee beans roast at MoJo Roasters, Inc. in Bottineau County.

Photo by Jessie Veeder Scofield.

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a successful business based on the nostalgia of a community after he purchased Pride Dairy from the coop in Bottineau. “[The Dairy] is a big piece of Bottineau’s history and I decided to take on the challenge of keeping it open,” said Beyer. “There used to be 167 active creameries in the state of North Dakota. Now there is one, and it is us!”

Beyer will tell you keeping Pride Dairy open in Bottineau is important for the community because it provides jobs and distributes quality dairy products throughout the Midwest, but one taste of his chokecherry ice cream, a recipe the dairy has been using since 1940, and it quickly becomes apparent that the man is in the business to make people happy.

It’s the same reason Colette Shimetz and her family have kept the doors of Reid’s Place open and in the family since 1981. In a town of 800, the drive-in and neighborhood hot-spot is a fixture of summer in the prairie town of Dunseith, North Dakota, and the family takes great joy in preparing some of the best hamburgers in the county.

Perhaps it’s what the people of Bottineau County have in common, the joy they find in connecting with people while they work to keep a tradition alive, feed the neighborhood, or feed the world. And we can smile knowing that when we bite into that hamburger or dish up our potato salad this summer, we are sampling little pieces of Bottineau County and the spirit of those who have prepared it.

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Underwood, ND March 16, 2013 - April 28, 2013

When the residents of Underwood learned that the town’s only restaurant had to close its doors this winter due to a fire, it didn’t take long for the community to come together in the name of a mission—to make sure their town, population 788 and growing, had a place for people to gather and enjoy good food and good company.

“There was a bit of a panic,” said Becky Bowen, Underwood’s Economic Development Director, who worked with a community group known as Underwood Commercial Properties, Inc., to get a new restaurant up and running.

“Sodas and Things,” one of the state’s only original soda fountains in Underwood.

Photo by Jessie Veeder Scofield.

The organization, which formed four years ago with the mission to purchase and repurpose empty buildings on Underwood’s Main Street, was the driving force behind the restaurant build. Thanks to their efforts and community support, within six months, a cozy restaurant, serving soups and sandwiches during the day and dinner and drinks in the evenings, was open for business.

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Warehouse Grocery, Underwood’s only grocery store.

Photo by Jessie Veeder Scofield.

The foresight that helped open the doors on the Underwood Grille seems to reflect the mentality of the residents of a town that holds on tight to what makes the community special while working together for a vision of reaching their full potential.

It’s a mindset reflected in the excellent educational system, the economic development efforts, active churches and the farms and ranches that have stayed in the family because those who live here love it, and those who grew up in the area, appreciate the simple comforts the community provides.

If you don’t believe it, just ask Jane Rademacher.

You can find her working behind the counter of Sodas and Things, one of the state’s only original soda fountains and a business that has kept its doors open since the 1920s, despite multiple changes in ownership.

“It’s a community gathering place,” said Jane Rademacher. She has stayed happily behind that counter for nearly 20 years because she enjoys hearing the stories and memories the customers have attached to this place.

She goes on to talk about the coffee group that meets in the mornings, the local kids who stop in for ice cream after the swimming pool closes and the tourists who swing in and are delighted by the nostalgia of the counter.

It’s the regard for the past that helps Underwood move toward an energized future. Once a bustling railroad town rich in agriculture and boasting seven general stores, three lumberyards, five livery barns, six elevators and a newspaper, Underwood was known as a “metropolis with a future” in the 1900s.

Fast forward to today where trucks and cars drive by the small town on US Highway 83, a four-lane highway that connects Bismarck to Minot, with Underwood standing proud and full of potential in the middle.

Where Underwood’s location was once an advantage, today’s easy access to larger towns finds the residents working to capitalize on what makes their town unique.

One of those opportunities lies in a 1940s Quonset-style movie theater, recently purchased by the newly formed Underwood Arts Council to be used as a cultural events facility.

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It’s all a part of Underwood’s plan to keep the community a vital place to live, work and shop. And there’s excitement in the air as young families are moving back home or into the area from other parts of the country in search of the comfort and security of small-town living.

Long-time residents are excited about the population shift and are confident they can provide that friendly atmosphere and quiet lifestyle, but they also understand that just as they are in the middle of two of North Dakota’s largest towns, they are also located adjacent to the state’s largest energy companies.

Combine the employment opportunities that Great River Energy’s Coal Creek Power Plant and the Falkirk Mining Company provide, with the recreational opportunities of the nearby Missouri River and Lake Sakakawea, and you can see why Underwood is quickly becoming one of North Dakota’s gems.

But at the heart of it all lies the spirit of the people who built this town on the promise of good crops, good neighbors, and good faith. That culture is still thriving in Underwood where residents who have roots here embrace them and welcome those who have found a new home in Underwood.

One of those people is Harmony Higbie who moved to Underwood from Los Angeles when her husband took a job as a pastor at a local church. In addition to falling in love with the landscape and the friendly small town atmosphere, Harmony was excited to have the opportunity to be involved in making a difference in a community that shares vision and is full of potential.

“In a small town we are able to make a big difference,” said Higbie.

It’s a difference that Bowen expects will help keep Underwood vital for years to come.

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Homemade treats on display at the Fireside Family Restaurant in Ellendale.

Photo by Jessie Veeder Scofield.

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Ellendale, ND May 4, 2013 - June 16, 2013

Between the walls of the historic buildings in Ellendale, you will come to know a place through the quiet discussions of the people who inhabit it. Listen and you will hear residents talking over the price of the wheat that grows in waves along the edges of the town, worrying out loud about their children’s 4-H steer as they check out at the grocery store, or arguing with passion about who sells the best kuchen in town at the local bakery.

Ellendale, population 1,500 and holding, is rich in agriculture, strong in education, and holds true to the familiar comforts of many small towns in North Dakota. But at the heart of this town lies a passion for the traditions and unique character of their past that keeps them rooted.

Established in 1882, Ellendale was once a bustling gateway to North Dakota situated along the lines of the Milwaukee and Great Northern Railroads. The county seat of Dickey County, Ellendale was home to a Normal and Industrial College, a flour-mill, and many successful service businesses that served local farmers in the area.

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“It was a wealthy community, a community that had much influence on the beginnings of North Dakota,” said John Boekelheide, who grew up in Ellendale in the ‘50s and ‘60s and returns in the summers to renovate and live in his family’s Craftsman-Style home in his hometown.

“I remember being on Main Street as a kid in the late ‘50s and hearing many foreign languages,” said Boekelheide of the out-of-town farmers who would make the trek on Saturdays for supplies, and who were, during those times, still using the language of their ancestors out on the farms.

The memory Boekelheide shares of a diverse and dynamic history explains why he and his community are dedicated to the monumental task of reviving the Opera House, a three-story brick structure built in 1908 that was home to plays, graduations, dances, boxing matches and social events until a leaky roof forced it to close its doors in the 1980s.

The Opera House was a vision that the residents of Ellendale held as it built the city and it remains an important piece on the landscape today as the volunteer members of the non-profit organization O.P.E.R.A., Inc., have worked to raise funds to get people back inside its walls to pay tribute to their past.

values and traditions this community was founded upon seem to remain an easy constant that’s hard for the residents themselves to explain.

But you don’t need them to tell you. You can see it for yourself reflected in the faces of the 4-H students waiting to show their projects at the county fair, enrolled in a program that continues to flourish despite the decline in the number of family farms in the area.

But the strong thread that weaves through each resident is reflected in the conversations that take place over a slice of Gilbert’s rhubarb pie and inside the walls of Main Street’s Bakery each morning when Davis stops for coffee and marvels at how everybody knows his name.

And the heart of Ellendale sings from the walls of the old Opera House filled with memories and potential, standing strong and proud as a fixture of a community rich in history with a future full of promise.

“This building was the cultural center of our community, it holds our history,” said Jeanette Robb-Ruenz, president of O.P.E.R.A., Inc. “It’s important to keep our story alive.”

In order to achieve the organization’s goal of a complete renovation and keep guests coming through its doors, Robb-Ruenz uses the tools that have been tried and tested in the community for years.

Her motto, “If you feed them they will come,” has helped raise funds for the organization by hosting innovative food-related events such as a homemade soup kitchen, a tax day buffet and even a zucchini party.

Down the street inside the Fireside Family Restaurant, Peggy Gilbert— famous for her homemade soups, pies and caramel rolls—works every day to create a comfortable place where her community can gather.

“The town needs a restaurant and meeting facility and I like taking care of people,” said Gilbert, who worked as a waitress in the evenings while her five children were growing up, before being approached to help keep the restaurant’s doors open. “I like making people happy.”

And Gilbert puts in the hours to get those smiles, even going as far as learning how to cook homemade German dishes to be featured on her popular monthly German buffet.

“If you want to see the entire town of Ellendale in one place, go to the Fireside on German Night,” said Larry Davis, a community member who, enticed by the idea of small-town living, moved to Ellendale from Seattle a year ago.

Because even as the world spins around the town of Ellendale, the

Top: A prize winning rooster at the Dickey County Fair in Ellendale. Bottom: Ellendale’s popular greenhouse, Harvest Gardens. Photos by Jessie Veeder Scofield.

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The Anne Kupper Community Garden is one of several gardens that grows on the UTTC Campus.

Photo by Jessie Veeder Scofield.

There’s a vegetable garden growing just outside the doors of the United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) teaching kitchen in Bismarck. In between the brick buildings and asphalt, the hot summer sun works to warm the leaves of the strawberry plants and gently beckons the tomatoes to ripen in time for classes to start in fall.

United Tribes Technical College June 22, 2013 - August 4, 2013

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Because when the students arrive, that garden will be a teaching tool in college nutrition and wellness, foodservice and culinary arts classes that lead to an Associate of Arts degree. Students will slice cucumbers for a salad or experiment with pickling recipes, add peppers (Jalapeno, banana or green peppers) to salsas and compare cooking methods for the winter squash grown in campus gardens.

“This is our kitchen garden,” said Pat Aune, UTTC Land Grant Program Director, as she walks past commercial refrigerators, stovetops and prep sinks to open the door that leads to the small and bountiful plot growing outside.

According to Aune, UTTC is the only tribal college in the country that has an accredited degree program in nutrition and foodservice. The college is home to the only full-fledged teaching kitchen in Western North Dakota’s higher education system. In addition to the associate degree program UTTC has an extension program providing community education for youth and adults. Gardening, nutrition and wellness, cooking skills, food safety, and food preservation are just a few of the topics taught by extension educators in food and nutrition, horticulture and food safety.

Take a walk through the UTTC campus and you will feel the history and culture of the plains pulsing around you.

Owned by five tribal nations within the state, UTTC is one of the larger tribal colleges in the country and one of the few tribal colleges not housed on tribal

Children’s Garden on the UTTC Campus.

Photo by Jessie Veeder Scofield.

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lands. In fact, UTTC was built on the site of an old military post where the brick and mortar from the buildings of Ft. Lincoln II serve as dormitories and student service centers as new buildings slowly spring up along the edges of campus. All are necessary additions to host a student population studying a curriculum as diverse as the over 70 different tribal nations they represent.

But it’s what’s between the buildings that really reflect the traditions and cultures this campus community works to keep alive.

It resonates in the fruit trees and in the small garden plots growing outside the elementary school where children of college students grow their own vegetables. Community gardens provide a growing spot for families. The vegetable and fruit research garden called Dragonfly Garden produces an abundant crop to be shared with students, staff and faculty or served for lunch or supper in the campus cafeteria or given to the community food banks.

“The kids are so excited about the gardening. They squeal with delight when they pick the first green pea or cucumber or strawberry,” laughs Aune, who says it’s a blessing to be able to work with the children and teach them about local food, how it is grown and how to use it for healthy meals and snacks.

Aune believes strongly in the importance of supporting the knowledge and traditions of the Native American food culture within the college curriculum to ensure the knowledge is not lost. “I am a believer that children and adults are more confident and contribute to their communities when they are connected to the wealth of knowledge and skills that is a part of their heritage.”

UTTC’s food and nutrition programs focus on the benefits of local food sources including those that are native to these prairie lands. Food sovereignty means we manage our food environment. Hunting and gathering of traditional foods, medicinal uses of native plants, gardening, local food production, food security and traditional knowledge of foods, plants and animals are included in food sovereignty discussions and study. Nutrition research identifies the value of Prairie Turnip, Cattail Shoots and Stinging Nettles.

“Take a look at the reservation communities and other rural communities you will find that many are isolated and food resources are limited,” said Aune. “We are working to help people increase their food options. They might plant a garden or help with the community garden. When they go to the nearest grocery store they buy vegetables and fruits not just snacks or highly processed foods. A family activity could include a day of picking native fruits and plants.”

Aune explains that this does not mean ignoring the realities of the full time working families. Increased knowledge and skills provides families with the tools to make better choices, a home cooked meal, ready to eat in less than one hour is a possibility and a real feast when family members have the skills and the confidence to make those choices.

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North Dakota has a problem: a serious brain, brawn, and creativity drain. North Dakota suffers the highest net outmigration of 18-to25-year-olds than any other state in the nation.

The statistics are sobering. In both 2009 and 2010, North Dakota ranked second on Forbes “Worst States for Keeping College Graduates” list. According to the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, for each one hundred graduates with bachelor’s degrees produced annually in North Dakota, 71 of them will leave the state. Only 37 bachelor’s degree holders (ages 22-64) will enter, resulting in a net loss of 34. The loss of so many vibrant citizens carries incalculable costs, and the reasons for their departure may be rooted in the very traits North Dakotans hold most dear. State historian Elwyn Robinson described them in his seminal book, History of North Dakota, as “courage, optimism, energy,

warmhearted individualism

and

neighborliness, self-reliance.”

Theodore Roosevelt would have agreed. The people he met here were suffused with those qualities—they are what caused him to fall in love with North Dakota, and today they play a role in driving young people away.

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“Hard Work and Much Fun”:

A NORTH DAKOTA STATE OF HAPPINESS

Photo courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University.

by Debora Dragseth and Stacy A. Cordery

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“There are two things that I want you to make up your minds to: first, that you are going to have a good time as long as you live—I have no use for the sourfaced man—and next, that you are going to do something worthwhile, that you are going to work hard and do the things you set out to do.”

Theodore Roosevelt’s Journey Like so many Dakotans over a century ago, Roosevelt was first an “in-migrator.” He was born to a very wealthy New York family in 1858. Even before he matriculated at Harvard College in 1876, he was a recognized as an expert ornithologist. An avid reader, he was a hunter, a taxidermist, a naturalist, and extremely fond of the outdoors. But he was also puny, undersized, sunken-chested, asthmatic, and nearsighted.

At Harvard, he fell in love with a beautiful Bostonian named Alice Hathaway Lee. They were married on his twentysecond birthday in 1880 and, a year later, he entered the New York State Assembly. In the autumn of 1883, he came out to the Dakotas.

In so doing Theodore Roosevelt joined a larger American phenomenon. The federal Homestead Act of 1862 opened up the West by granting settlers 160 acres, provided they lived on and cultivated part of the land for a set time.

As TR matriculated at Harvard, the Northern Pacific Railroad aggressively began to recruit settlers by mailing pamphlets in English, German, and other languages touting the great possibilities in the Dakotas. Advertisements packed the pages of American, Canadian, Scandinavian, and German newspapers. Thus enticed, people came eagerly and the Great Dakota Boom of 1878 to 1890 began.

The Dakota boom caused the northern territorial population to increase from 16,000 to 190,000. In 1890, when the frontier was declared officially closed, 43 percent of the state’s inhabitants were foreign born. Western North Dakota was still the Wild West of Indians, cowpunchers, buffalo hunters, saloon rats, and outlaws. The land played, as it still does, a central part in the story of western North Dakota: blazing hot summers, blinding blizzards, miles of grassland punctuated by abrupt bluffs and buttes, magical sunrises and sunsets, long winding rivers and endless open spaces.

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Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the start of that boom.

He came to kill a bison. He took the Northern Pacific nearly all the way to the settlement of Little Missouri.

Top left: A young Theodore Roosevelt.

Bottom left: Theodore Roosevelt’s Maltese Ranch Cabin.

Left: Theodore Roosevelt with his horse.

There was little to see when TR arrived and Medora, the “town” across the river, had only been founded five months earlier, in April 1883. There wasn’t much there, either. Like the hero in many Western tales, TR was totally out of place in his new surroundings. But Roosevelt wasn’t after civilization. He was gunning for a buffalo.

It took him ten long days of nearly constant cold, driving rain, Badlands mud, and missed shots. He was freezing.

He was wet. He was riding tough miles and sleeping on hard ground. He was thrilled. This was living! It was nothing like his “effete” Eastern existence where he was protected by money and coddled by his relatives, where he had every comfort his inheritance could buy.

This was the sort of adventure only real men could endure and appreciate. He was so enthused, happy, and imbued with the spirit of the place that he embraced its potential and bought $14,000 worth of cattle and the Maltese Cross Ranch. He began to consider seriously a career as a Dakota ranchman.

After 18 days, he had to return to his pregnant wife.

Five months later, she and his mother both died on Valentine’s Day in 1884. In shock, TR wrapped up business in the legislature, gave his newborn daughter to the care of his sister, and returned to the Dakotas to mourn.

He arrived back here in June of 1884. Needing more quiet than the Maltese Cross could offer, he bought the Elkhorn Ranch, 35 miles north of Medora. He hunted.

He avoided a duel. He punched out a drunk in a bar.

He brought thieves to justice. He participated in cattle drives. He survived a midnight stampede during a thunderstorm. He injured himself. He wrote.

In his terrible grief, it’s as though he had to throw himself against a force as strong as death. Everything Roosevelt did in North Dakota, he did to an extreme… and the countryside, the weather, and the experiences of Westerners matched his desperate and stricken state.

“I do not believe there ever was any life more attractive to a vigorous young fellow,” Roosevelt recalled, “than life on a cattle ranch in those days. It was a fine, healthy life, too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision—in short, the virtues that ought to come from life in the open country. I enjoyed

the life to the full.” He loved the doggedness of the people, the critical nature of the work, the majestic scenery, the opportunities. “We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst…but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours,” he proclaimed, “was the glory of work and the joy of living.”

What Theodore Roosevelt appreciated in North Dakotans was their courage, their physical lifestyle, their persistence, their ability to shrug off danger, their calm and nondramatic fashion of taking life in stride, their facility with horses, cattle, guns, and knives, their independence—but also their ability to come together in community when the need arose. His experiences here became the basis for his strenuous life. He would say his political success rested on what he learned in the Dakotas.

North Dakota shaped Theodore Roosevelt. Here he cultivated an inner strength he suspected he possessed but had not been adequately tested. If the cold winter of 1886-87 had not killed off the majority of his herd, there might have been a different ending to the story of TR in the Badlands.

But his time here provides a mirror for North Dakotans.

We can peer into the past to see an extraordinary man who lived and loved this western life. He preached the importance of the strenuous life and criticized the choice to live without toil or danger. North Dakotans today take pride in the same qualities of perseverance, self-reliance, and pride in hard work.

But are these traits, dating back to the settlement of this territory, still valued today? Is hard work still considered exciting and fun? What do generational changes have to do with the prevailing perception of young people that a better life is to be found outside the borders of this state that Roosevelt loved? Do North Dakotans today believe that happiness lies somewhere else?

A State of Happiness For the last three years, the Gallup organization has called 352,000 randomly selected American adults between January 1 and December 31 (1,000 people a day) and asked them about their quality of life.

Responses are then converted to Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a part of Gallup.com’s massive project “State of the States,” the most comprehensive study of its kind, revealing state-by-state differences on political, economic, and well-being measures. One of the questions in the poll is, “Did you experience 31

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feelings of happiness during a lot of the day yesterday?”

Ninety-three percent of North Dakotans said “yes,” ranking the state third on the well-being or happiness scale and trailing only Hawaii and Wyoming. We rank an impressive number two in emotional health, barely edged out by the number one state, Hawaii. As the folks at Gallup acknowledged, “Sun and waves might be good for the soul—but the sunshine doesn’t necessarily elbow out Northern Lights and snow.”

Happiness is an enduring sense of positive well-being, an ongoing perception that life is fulfilling, meaningful, and pleasant. Science tells us this about happiness: Marriage makes people happy, but children don’t. Youth and old age are the happiest times in our lives. Globally, teenagers are the happiest people. And, of course, money doesn’t buy happiness.

Yet, these are simply generalities; happiness is not onesize-fits-all. Some of us are happier after our marriages end, or the happiest times in our lives might be in our 30s or 40s. With the utmost certainty, however, all of the research tells us one thing: happiness is a choice.

Neuropsychologist Dr. Rick Hanson believes, “We can actually use the mind to change the brain. The simple truth is that how we intentionally direct our attention, embrace positive experiences instead of negative ones, it will alter the brain’s structure.” Much of what changes us is our experiences. Theodore Roosevelt certainly had never read the research, but he intuitively knew that he needed to be among North Dakotans and in the singularly beautiful Badlands in order to rediscover his happiness. As Hanson emphasizes, “What flows through the mind actually changes and sculptures the brain.”

If any of us could live our life over again, what might we do differently? In studies of people older than 95, three answers surfaced time and again. They would 1) reflect more, 2) risk more, 3) do more things that would live on after they were dead. Although he only lived to his early 60s, Theodore Roosevelt surely hadn’t any of these regrets.

So, given that North Dakota consistently ranks as one of the two or three happiest states, why do so many of its young people “escape” at their first opportunity?

Demographers who study outmigration note that high school graduation and college graduation are the two key exit points. Researchers David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman surveyed 1,993 college students in the Midwest and southern California, asking them to rate their overall satisfaction with life. The researchers 32

found that the two groups were nearly identical in their self-reported life satisfaction. However, when they were asked whether Californians were happier than Midwesterners, both groups consistently reported that Californians were happier. The researchers posited that “it is not unlikely that some people may actually move to California in the mistaken belief that this would make them happier.”

North Dakota hit its peak population in 1930 at 680,845. But that’s not at all what observers thought would happen. Early twentieth-century forecasters expected North Dakota’s population to expand to two million people, of whom 200,000 would be farmers.

At an average family size of five, there would be one million total people on the farm with another one million living in cities and towns. The 2010 census counted 672,591 North Dakotans. Today, the state’s overall population is not declining; however, the population is consolidating and aging. Data gathered by the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation predicts that by 2012, the number of people age 65 and older will surpass the school-age population in North Dakota. And by 2020, nearly half of the counties in North Dakota are expected to have fewer than 4,000 residents.

College seniors tend to believe that life in North Dakota is harder than elsewhere and that by leaving, they will be happier. A full 33 percent of them—all native North Dakotans—insist they will definitely leave the state after graduating, one-third indicate that they will definitely not leave, and one-third are unsure. Those who intend to outmigrate believe their choice will make them not just happier, but wealthier and more fulfilled. Phrases like, “I am anxious to leave and experience bigger and better things,” and “I am leaving to start a career with more opportunities” pepper the comments of seniors who intend to leave the state.

Yet, North Dakota boasts five main positive characteristics, even for those readying to depart.

The seniors treasured the comfort and safety of North Dakota, the fact that there is less competition here, the friendliness of the people, the proximity of family, and the shorter commutes to jobs. But there were five negatives that weighed more heavily. In North Dakota, they believed they faced a lack of opportunities for advancement, low pay, a relative absence of technology, brutal weather, and a signal lack of social activities such as concerts, sporting events, and varied venues for nightlife.

[noteworthy]

Should North Dakota Change?

Does North Dakota need to change? Or, do we simply need to readjust the internal as well as external perception of North Dakota as a difficult place to live where people couldn’t possibly be happy? Ron Wirtz, editor of the Minneapolis Fed’s newspaper, recently wrote that “Unemployment is 3.7%, and according to a Gallop Survey last month, North Dakota has the best job market in the country. Its economy sticks out like a diamond in a bowl of cherry pits.” Yet, for every piece of good news, there seems to be a counterbalance in the national press.

Richard Rubin wrote disparagingly in the New York Times that North Dakota is “as you might imagine it: Vast. Open. Stark. Mostly flat. All but treeless, Above all, profoundly underpopulated, so much so that you might at times suspect it is actually unpopulated. It is not. But it is heading there.”

Whether we alter perception or reality, change is difficult. As famed North Dakota pundit and former lieutenant governor Lloyd Omdahl stated in his Bismarck Tribune column, “Unless we are under great economic stress…North Dakota plods along in the wagon tracks of our predecessors.”

Yet, if we can’t retain our young leaders today, when will we ever have a better chance? Let’s look to our mirror. What might TR have to say to young North Dakotans today? Perhaps he would repeat the words he offered in 1898 to a group of schoolchildren in Oyster Bay, New York: “There are two things that I want you to make up your minds to: first, that you are going to have a good time as long as you live—I have no use for the sour-faced man— and next, that you are going to do something worthwhile, that you are going to work hard and do the things you set out to do.”

Nature and remoteness are not seen as the twin enemies for those who find their happiness in western North Dakota. Perhaps, as TR found, closeness to nature and the land, doing something useful and leaving a legacy are the things that are necessary for peace within. The pursuit of happiness beckons us all, but it shouldn’t beckon our youth away from North Dakota.

Debora Dragseth is a professor of business at Dickinson State University. She is an active speaker on the topics of leadership, outmigration and Generation Y. Dragseth develops leadership curriculum for Fortune 100 companies and has been a recent contributor to New Geography, India Times, CNN.com and MSN.com. Her work on outmigration has been cited in both Forbes and Newsweek magazines.

Stacy A. Cordery, a professor of history at Monmouth College in Illinois, is the author of the recent biography and New York Times Notable Book, Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker. Her newest book, Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts, was published in February 2012. In the spring of 2011, Cordery served as the first Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University.

The pursuit of happiness beckons us all, but it shouldn’t beckon our youth away from North Dakota.

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[noteworthy]

Flood

by Will Beachey

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[noteworthy]

Don’t come here, River.

It’s not floor joists foundations sheetrock you destroy— it’s where we kissed the kids goodnight where we made spaghetti on a Saturday night listening to the Penguin Café Orchestra where I sipped a beer watching baseball where the boys practiced cello and piano.

Here’s the deal— we’ll move the couch, the piano, the buffet the beds—everything— we’ll move them out.

We’ll lay down 9000 sandbags we’ll work hard ‘til dark.

Then we’ll leave.

(Sorry, house; you seem so sad, so shamed with your carpet ripped out, the pad exposed.

But we’ll come back.

We’ll drive through deep water even when we can’t see the road below we’ll check on you every day.)

But then, River, you stay back.

Don’t come here.

Tom Gerhardt

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[plain thinking]

The Right to Food

by Tayo “Jay” Basquiat

One evening when I was in college, my fellow students and I amassed in the usual line at the dining hall doors. Instead of proceeding to the trays and food line as usual, we were given numbers and told to find our numbered place at the tables inside.

Seating was arranged such that most of the tables formed a square around the perimeter of the room with chairs placed on the outside of the square so that diners faced the center of the room.

In the center of the room was a table for ten, elaborately set and decorated. Each of us found our way to our designated place, the room abuzz with curiosity and nervous laughter. My place was in the outer square; one of my best buddies took his place at the center table. The smell of food emanating from the kitchen was unusually scintillating.

Soon, a small army of servers came with our dinner. They started with the center table: mixed green salad, fresh-baked bread, honey butter, and some kind of cheese. I watched my friend dig in; he was grinning ear to ear. We, at the outer square, waited for our food.

Nothing. Someone across the room picked up a knife and fork in each hand and started banging his fists on the table, chanting, “We want food!” Some joined in, others just laughed while speculation continued as to when we in the outer square were going to get to eat. I watched my friend at the center table; he looked very smug.

Next, the servers brought the main course to the center table: roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, more fresh bread, and milk.

The smell reminded me of home. I couldn’t wait, thinking surely this time the outer square would get food too.

And we did: the servers brought out three very large pots. The place-settings at the outer tables consisted of a paper placemat and a glass. In the center of each mat, we each received a big dollop of white rice. Other servers filled our glasses with water.

That’s it. No utensils, no roast, no bread. I looked at my friend at the center table, and when our eyes met, he laughed and exaggerated his enjoyment of a large bite of roast beef. Eating my meal—even with just my fingers—took about two minutes tops. I was angry and then envious when I saw the dessert course, again, only for the center table diners.

At this point, some of the center diners started showing signs of discomfort regarding their situation. The angry taunts from the outer circle diners couldn’t be silenced. Something that started out feeling like a game suddenly felt like a huge injustice. Each

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[plain thinking]

student at that meal paid the same meal fee as part of the dining program at our college, yet clearly we did not all get the same for our money. In my mind I was already forming a letter of complaint to the college president, but I also assumed that at any moment the situation would be rectified and we at the outer table would receive the real meal just as the center table diners had. But then we were all escorted out of the dining hall and the doors to it and the snack bar locked; we were to go to the auditorium, presumably for an explanation. My friend apologized in his goofy way, laughing the meal off as a joke. I was not laughing.

This experiment at our college was one of the events during Global Awareness Week. In the auditorium we were asked how we felt during the meal. From my point of view, I felt angry. My sense of justice and fairness was violated: I paid the exact amount of money that the center table diners had, therefore I felt I had a right to the same meal.

In the study of philosophy, we learn early on about logical fallacies— simply defined as an intentional or unintentional error or inaccuracy in reasoning that leads to a false belief or conclusion. One logical fallacy (and there are hundreds) is the fallacy of equivocation, using the same word with two different meanings within an argument where the crux of the matter rests on the slippage of that word’s meaning. Here’s an example: “Giving food to a hungry child is the right thing to do, so hungry children have a right to your food.” The equivocation here is the word “right”: the first usage refers to the moral assessment of one’s action, meaning here that giving food to the hungry child is a good thing to do; in the second usage, that same child now has a right or entitlement to your food that trumps your right to do with that food what you will. This equivocation on the word “right” results in an erroneous conclusion, a logical fallacy.

Or does it?

Numerous documents in the twentieth century have set forth basic human rights, including the right to food. The United Nations in 1948 adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that specifies the “right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of [a man] and his family, including food, clothing, and shelter”; in 1966, the UN adopted “The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights” that specified everyone’s right to “adequate food”; and in 1989, the UN undertook the “Convention on the Rights of the Child,” reminding us all that there are vulnerable among us who cannot or do not have the power to assert their rights, including the right to food, and rely on someone else to do this for them. What do these documents mean by saying that everyone has a right to food? Did I, in that meal at college, have a right to the same food as the center table diners? If everyone has the right to food, why do so many people (in 2010, 925 million people in the world, over half of them children) go hungry?

Adopting a document establishing that everyone has a right to food does not make for food to eat or hunger to be assuaged, so what 37

[plain thinking]

“The whole meal would have been better if our table had been in a different room so we wouldn’t have had to see the other students.”

good is wrought by recognizing the right? And more fundamentally, does such a right even exist?

An answer to these questions may be found in closer examination of three aspects of rights. First, the notion of rights stems from the attempt to delineate what is necessary or essential to living a human life. People use the language of rights to express their vision of the good society, or their conception of what we owe each other. The United States Declaration of Independence references certain “inalienable rights,” as does France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. The intent of such documents was to establish a particular kind of society in which legislative activities and social institutions and relationships would seek to elucidate and establish these human rights. This conversation evolved into the categorization of different kinds of rights. So-called first-generation rights are fundamentally civil and political in nature, protecting the individual from excesses of government. These rights include, for example, those found in the U.S. Bill of Rights, such as the right to a fair trial and vote. Next, people realized that certain basic rights needed to be in place in order for people to enjoy the first-generation rights, and so second- generation rights were recognized: rights to things such as housing, food, health care, employment, and so forth as essential to enjoying civil and political rights in life. People don’t care about voting rights if they are homeless, starving, and dying of sepsis due to lack of access to medical care.

This brief treatment of the nature of rights is, admittedly, oversimplified, but addresses a possible objection that people do not have a right to something like food, that food is a fruit of one’s labors. From the perspective of what it means to be human and live a human life, however, the right to food is a recognition of a basic necessity, fundamental to the enjoyment of the other rights we have taken such pains to enumerate, meet and protect. If food rights are subject to the free market game or some other vision of social relations a la Hobbes, capitalism or social Darwinism, then all rights are subject to the same objection, ceasing to be rights at all. If you have to be able to buy your right to freedom of religion, then only those with money or power will have that right—a Machiavellian “might makes right.”

Second, recognizing a right necessitates the attendant recognition of a counterpart obligation: if someone has a right to something, someone else has an obligation to meet or protect that right. These obligations might not be delineated by legislation, but they are duties or obligations nonetheless from an ethical standpoint. The philosopher Immanuel Kant referred to this as perfect vs. imperfect obligations where imperfect obligations are ethical requirements that stretch beyond the fully delineated duties (which he called ‘perfect obligations’). So while throwing half your dinner in the trash is not illegal, you are ethically obligated to attend to the right other people have to what you see as your food to waste if you please. You have the means to meet the right to food that other people have; because the right exists, you are ethically obligated.

Finally, recognizing the ethical status of rights and not just those that have legal status provides motivation for constructive efforts and activities beyond—though perhaps leading to—the legislative realm. Important social awareness is gained through a watchdog agency like Human Rights Watch or by the existence of a political document like the “Convention on the Rights of the Child.” For example, while we don’t like to acknowledge this, food is often used as a weapon to achieve political gain. Whether used as a carrot or stick, a grain embargo between nations in order to pressure a leader on an issue results not in the hunger of the leader but rather the further suffering and starvation of the most vulnerable of that nation, especially children. While an embargo might be a legal tool in the political realm, special philosophical gymnastics are required to make us feel better about the violations of ethical implications that have us uncomfortably wiggling on the proverbial hook.

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[plain thinking] And as uncomfortable as it is, we need to be on that hook and recognize our obligations. Chances are, if you are reading this magazine, you are among the “food secure” in the world: you have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life (definition according to the World Health Organization). Hunger and starvation just aren’t a part of your daily life; you have food and plenty of it. For the food secure, the hungry are easy to forget and world hunger is easy to dismiss as “too big a problem for little old me.” While paralysis in the face of such a huge problem is one side of complacency, the other rests in leaving our obligations in the hands of the state or other institutions, rather than seeing world hunger as a matter involving our individual obligation to meet the rights of others. An awakening on this order might be found in an exercise of moral imagination, such as the one I was given after that meal back in college. During that subsequent conversation in the auditorium—while I was in a huff about the violation of my rights, one of the center table diners made the comment, “The whole meal would have been better if our table had been in a different room so we wouldn’t have had to see the other students.”

That is the statement that sticks with me to this day, some 20 years later. As a single person, I used to believe I ate my meals primarily alone. Now I know that isn’t ever the case. Every time I eat, I eat in the midst of a world full of people. The obligation to meet everyone’s right to food does not go away just because I close myself off in a private room of my own making. I speak here of invoking the moral imagination: imagining there in the room with me, the hungry whose meal consists of rice—or nothing at all—while I feast on anything I well please. Invoking this imagination is the beginning of taking up my ethical obligations in the form of constructive action: Am I eating more than my fair share? How does my food budget reflect these obligations to others? Do I busy myself to learn about the institutions, corporations, and organizations whose environmental, labor, processing, and marketing practices involve themselves in my meals? Can I be mindful enough to imagine a circle of the hungry and their needs as part of my own meal practices?

The twentieth-century documents I mentioned earlier express the right to “adequate” food. When we speak of rights as our vision of a particular kind of society, the context of one’s dinner table is a good place to start. As a host of a meal, you wouldn’t serve your guests a dollop of rice and then serve yourself a three-course feast. Nor, if the tables were turned, would your idea of your right to food be satisfied by a spoonful of grain. We should not satisfy our sense of obligation here by calls for more food, export more grain, increasing growth and supply. World hunger has little to do with supply. Food insecurity has to do with availability, access, and utilization more so than supply. People can’t eat what is rotting in a locked warehouse because political will is lacking in distributing that food. Similarly, cartons of macaroni are useless to those who do not know what it is, how to cook it, or whose bodies, due to prolonged hunger and sickness, are unable to absorb the nutrients in such food. People cannot eat when other people in well-off countries use—and often waste—more than their fair share of the food. Think of how a television show like Iron Chef America would play before an audience of people who are food insecure.

When we begin to look at the complexity of hunger issues and the right to food, we can easily see that the answer is not to just grow more food as quickly as possible. We will each need to be more involved in meeting our individual obligations. We each need recognize our obligations to the hungry one dinner plate at a time, making changes to our own individual use, understanding of and relationship to food, acknowledging that we don’t just have individual rights, we have individual obligations as well. We each need to realize that every meal we eat happens in a room—no, a world—full of people who have a right to food.

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The North Dakota Humanities Council is a statewide nonprofit providing humanities-based educational and cultural opportunities that transform lives and strengthen communities. Our programs —all free and open to the public—encourage people to reflect on and draw inspiration from our cultural variety, the ideas of our great thinkers, the pivotal events of our history, and the imaginative creations of our great writers.

North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

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We have ways of making you think.

Board of Directors CHAIR Tayo “Jay” Basquiat, Mandan VICE CHAIR Kate Haugen, Fargo Najla Amundson, Fargo Barbara Andrist, Crosby Paige Baker, Mandaree Aaron Barth, Fargo Virginia Dambach, Fargo Tim Flakoll, Fargo Kara Geiger, Mandan Melissa Gjellstad, Grand Forks Kristin Hedger, Killdeer Janelle Masters, Mandan Christopher Rausch, Bismarck Jaclynn Davis Wallette, West Fargo Susan Wefald, Bismarck STAFF Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Dakota Goodhouse, Program Officer Angela Hruby, Administrative Assistant The North Dakota Humanities Council is a partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The humanities inspire our vision of a thoughtful, respectful, actively engaged society that will be able to meet the challenge of sustaining our democracy across the many divisions of modern society and deal responsibly with the shared challenges we currently face as members of an interdependent world.

“All sorrows are less with bread.”

— Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

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