By training and experience, Alan Wight is an educator, a sociologist, a permaculturist, a community gardener and sharer of stories. He has learned from artists, researchers, geographers and historians. By personality, he’s an extrovert, a big-picture thinker and a networker. A map of who he’s worked with, learned from and befriended would be a sprawling web across our community of local food.

That network and that habit of thinking collectively are behind the project that he’s been working on now for five years or so that has recently borne fruit.

It’s a book called “Cincinnati’s Foodshed: An Art Atlas”, a compendium of information presented through art: a visualization of the complicated human network by which we get and produce food in the Greater Cincinnati area. It shows connections between people, within sectors of the system, across the past, present and future, highlighting geographic space over time.

The Greater Cincinnati Regional Food Policy Council, of which Wight is a member, is the host of the project.

Anyone who wants to see what’s going on in food locally could dive into that world through the book, which was published in November. It showcases the work of an impressive collective of artists and historians and other knowledgeable local experts and participants. The project has a number of funders, making it possible to print a lavish, coffee table-style book that goes very deeply into its subject. Its overall impression is of how complicated and busy are the comings and goings and exchanges of every kind of edible.

“The book is a celebration of our food history and innovation. Cincinnati has far more impact globally than you’d expect,” said Wight. “We’ve been the origin of innovations from the Porkopolis disassembly line to the business inventions of corporations like Procter and Gamble and Kroger.”

Every subject gets a narrative, a timeline, and a graphic, whether it’s a map or a graph or portraits of food heroes.

One lesson is how much history can tell you about how things are today. There’s an acknowledgement of the peoples who originally lived on Cincinnati’s land and the agricultural practices they transmitted. Also an illustration of the African food diaspora: all those important foods brought and cultivated by enslaved people that are now essential to how we eat.

Today, we eat a long list of foods that depend on the agricultural industry of pollination of crops with bees. It still relies on the simple bee frame, an invention from Oxford, Ohio.

Another global system we are connected to is the coffee industry. A map and graph about the coffee we drink, often roasted locally, is connected to a large global agriculture system. If you’ve never thought about cellulose and the amazing things you can create with it, a graph and timeline will enlighten you. 

“The book also leans into the idea of a regional terroir,” said Wight. Like wine that showcases the characteristics of where it was grown, its terroir, can Cincinnati define its own unique food flavors and personality? 

Every size of enterprise that contributes to that Cincinnati uniqueness is included, from Kroger down to a graphic on the laws governing backyard chicken raising, a map of Aiken High School’s farm, a tribute to the Cincinnati enterprises like Frank’s and Perkins. 

Some pages show what might have been: a plan for a Hamilton County consolidated market for local farmers that was never built, or the never-finished subway that could have created a very different city.

The Atlas also speculates on what still could be and illustrates the work being done to make a different possible future: The possible future direction of our craft beef industry, for instance, or a diagram of the work that the Greater Cincinnati Local Food Policy council does. “It’s about dreaming for a utopian future,” said Wight.

Wight himself has contributed energy to many of those future-oriented efforts. He learned market gardening and community-scale farming Gorman Heritage Farm, he has a position at the University of Cincinnati as their School and Community Forest Garden Liaison, teaches Fruit and Nut Production at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, as well as his main teaching position at The Christ College of Nursing and Health Sciences.

The first print run of the Atlas has sold out, but more have been ordered and you can reserve your copy for $80 at https://www.cincinnatifoodatlas.com.

Most neighborhoods don’t have to form committees and hold meetings and put in volunteer hours just to get a place to buy food. Lower Price Hill did. Not just a few meetings and hours: It took several years of effort from residents to get a replacement for the only grocery store in the neighborhood after it closed in 2017. Without it, the area was left with no place to buy basic necessities. In a somewhat geographically isolated, low-income neighborhood where 70% of residents don’t own cars, that made daily life much harder for a lot of people. And, in the neighborhood with the lowest life expectancy among all Cincinnati neighborhoods, it was literally health-threatening.

Residents worked with the City and with non-profits to open Meiser’s Fresh Grocery and Deli in 2021. Half social enterprise business, half non-profit, its central goal is to give people in the neighborhood access to food regardless of income. Without it, many residents would have to take a bus up Warsaw Avenue to get groceries and lug them home. It’s also becoming a hub of neighborhood connection, employment development for neighborhood residents and better health.

It’s named for the family that ran the store since the 40’s, on State Street since 1960. By 2017 the building was about worn out. Price Hill Will, the non-profit community development corporation, had offered money to rehab it, but owner Carl Meiser didn’t want to live through an extensive rehab and start over, so he retired and sold the building to Price Hill Will.

A few women got together as a Community Action Team and began identifying what they wanted: an actual grocery store with a full range of products. But even with a break on the rent, no one came forward to operate what has always been a low profit-margin business in a low income neighborhood.

The only serious interest was from convenience stores. The people who’d worked so hard had never wanted a place that emphasized beer, lottery tickets and snacks, but it looked like the only alternative.

At a meeting of a local non-profit, Marisha Davis, one of those community activists, expressed her disappointment: That people would get sick, or become sicker. That all the effort of community organizing without result was sapping community spirit. And, she said, though the neighborhood had expressed its desire to spend money on fresh produce, they apparently didn’t have enough. It was like being told their money wasn’t good enough, or that people didn’t believe SNAP recipients cared about eating healthy.

Hearing her speak, Reba Hennessey, who was on the board of Community Matters, another Lower Price Hill non-profit, started thinking about bringing her non-profit experience to the situation. Your Store of the Queen City was established, the non-profit that runs Meiser’s, with Hennessey as executive director. During the pandemic and ensuing delays, they did free food giveaways outdoors, then re-opened the store in November of 2021.

The store, open to all ZIP codes, offers a combination of market-priced food and necessities, free produce and rescued food from their partners Last Mile, Produce Perks, La Soupe, the Free Store and Black Power Initiative. Some people pick up a Power Pack of basic non-perishables from the Food Bank, others can pick out a combination of free canned goods and fresh produce once a day. Or they can use SNAP benefits to buy food at retail prices. There are dinners for the neighborhood and sandwiches for sale, and some to give unhoused neighbors. Everyone who works there is local, paid a living wage and has opportunities for career development.

Meiser’s is different than a food pantry: it’s open 80 hours a week, 6 days a week. Like any grocery store, it’s a place to run into friends and neighbors, and here, the employees know just about everyone’s name. But it’s also creating more intentional ways of uniting a neighborhood made up of three groups: the urban Appalachians who were the majority here since the 70’s, African Americans and Hispanic immigrants. There’s a cooking club to share recipes and learn how to use produce. Now there’s a well-being club that’s based on sharing cultural perspectives and getting important health information. On Thursdays, there’s a market in the public room next to the market, called Outer Space, which is full of activity in the afternoon when Oyler School gets out, with a fresh produce giveaway including foods like asparagus, plantains and jalapeno peppers, a chance for local makers to sell goods, or Girl Scouts to sell cookies.

Hennessey is the official executive director, but she sees that what’s strong about the store comes from the neighborhood, for the neighborhood. They made it all happen.

Reba Hennessey, the executive director of Your Store of the Queen City, is a member of the Great Cincinnati Food Policy Council, on the Access and Education Committee. She’s interested in coming together with others on food policy that affects food rescue and food waste, about the city’s support of small and neighborhood food businesses, and about the level of food access benefits, particularly SNAP.

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Food Policy Council member Emalee Richman and her husband Pete, who own Rich Life Farm and Fungi, run a different kind of farm than most. Mushrooms are in the fungi kingdom, and grow by a different process than other farm crops. So the Richmans grow year-round, inside a temperature controlled building. They never till or weed or water or worry about frost.

Not that it’s easy. They face many of the same challenges other small farmers do trying to fit into the larger food system. Finding customers and markets. Distinguishing their product. Explaining the value they offer. Deciding whether to sell direct to consumers at farmers markets and keep the full retail price or skip all the retail work and sell wholesale at much lower prices.

The Richmans take both approaches. They go to two farmers markets a week, and they sell wholesale to 22 restaurants and a few retail outlets. But understanding that particular problem in the local system, they’ve been hoping to open a farm stop for farmers in their area. A farm stop is a hybrid, a place where farmers can sell their products without being physically present, but can keep more of the price. They have purchased a piece of property on Ten-Mile Road in New Richmond, not far from their mushroom facility. It includes a historic general store building, located in what was the tiny town of Spann. They’re still putting together the money to renovate and run it, but they think there’s the traffic to attract customers, and they’ve talked to plenty of interested farmers who grow food in Clermont County. They’re picturing a commercial kitchen, a little café, a place where people in the area can buy from their neighbors.

Meanwhile, they’re busy growing 500 pounds of mushrooms every week, figuring out the mysteries of fungus.

Mushrooms, after a long time of being either maligned or a very niche specialty product, are coming into their own these days. “I was at TJ Maxx the other day, and I saw mushroom motifs everywhere, from clothes to home décor,” said Emalee. That’s a pop culture indication of a new fascination with what we’ve learned fungi can do: create living systems in forests that link trees together, digest pathogens and toxins, consume hydrocarbons, or be used to make “mycomaterials.” Some have psychoactive compounds, and most have micronutrients with big health benefits. Lion’s mane mushrooms promise neurological and diabetes and Alzheimer’s-fighting effects.

Culinarily, they’re a quality source of protein (including all the amino acids) making them important in vegetarian diets, and umami, which make them delicious in any diet. Rich Life sells up to 35 different cultivars though they switch them up season to season, as some do well in colder, others in warmer, temperature.

Commercial mushrooms are grown in straw beds in huge underground facilities, mostly in Pennsylvania. Though micro farms are growing, there aren’t enough small cultivators that there is equipment sized for a Rich Life type operation. So it all takes some clever use of equipment meant for other things. The steamer they use to pasteurize their growing medium is repurposed from an old bread proofer. Their bagging system relies on a DIY system and computer program. They found a flow hood on Facebook Marketplace.

The process starts by introducing an isolated culture that is like the mushrooms’ “seed” into bags of grain mix in which the mycelium, sort of the mushroom’s “roots,” develop. That is broken up and mixed in bags with a substrate of pelletized oak sawdust and soybean husks until it completely colonizes the bag. In the wild, that mycelium grows into a massive underground network. When a trigger happens, a stressor or a particular combination of environmental conditions, it causes the mycelium to fruit, almost overnight. In the mushroom shed, this can be imitated by cutting a whole in the bag, putting them in a fruiting room at a certain temperature, and watching the weird, fantastic shapes of shaggy lion’s mane or the brown, toadstool-ish chestnut mushrooms or beautifully scalloped bunches of oyster mushrooms pop out from the slit in the bag. One thing they’ve learned, said Emalee, is that “the fungus are always 100% in control.”

Pete had started growing mushrooms as a hobby one long, boring winter they spent in Vermont. Back in North Carolina, where they’d met, they scaled up and started selling a small amount.. Then in 2020, they moved to the Cincinnati are, where Pete is from, where they afford land, and e it seemed there was room in the market. “We were tired of giving away the best of ourselves to other people,” said Pete of becoming entrepreneurs. That’s a sentiment many farmers would recognize. There are farmers who just grow lion mane and sell to companies that turn it into medicinal tinctures. They make own tinctures, too. But they are clear on their reason to be. “We want to grow food for people,” said Pete.

Through working at farmers markets and selling to chefs, Pete and Emmalee have become embedded in the local food scene. To use an unavoidable metaphor, they’re not just interested in the mushroom fruit, they care about the mycelium, too: the networks that allow a whole system to thrive. It takes a lot of intertwined effort to strengthen food production among local, small farmers. Hence their excitement about getting the food stop going, and Emalee’s membership on the Food Policy Council.

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