Back to the Roots: Memory, Inequality, and Urban Agriculture

By Sara Shostak

Across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, urban farmers and gardeners are reclaiming cultural traditions linked to food, farming, and health; challenging systemic racism and injustice in the food system; demanding greater community control of resources in marginalized neighborhoods; and moving towards their visions of more equitable urban futures. As part of this urgent work, urban farmers and gardeners encounter and reckon with both the cultural meanings and material legacies of the past. Drawing on their narratives, Back to the Roots demonstrates that urban agriculture is a critical domain for explorations of, and challenges to, the long standing inequalities that shape both the materiality of cities and the bodies of their inhabitants.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780813590165

Sara Shostak

Sara Shostak is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University.

Book preview

Back to the Roots

Nature, Society, and Culture

SCOTT FRICKEL, SERIES EDITOR

A sophisticated and wide-ranging sociological literature analyzing nature-society-culture interactions has blossomed in recent decades. This book series provides a platform for showcasing the best of that scholarship: carefully crafted empirical studies of socio-environmental change and the effects such change has on ecosystems, social institutions, historical processes, and cultural practices.

The series aims for topical and theoretical breadth. Anchored in sociological analyses of the environment, Nature, Society, and Culture is home to studies employing a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and investigating the pressing socio-environmental questions of our time—from environmental inequality and risk, to the science and politics of climate change and serial disaster, to the environmental causes and consequences of urbanization and war making, and beyond.

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Back to the Roots

Memory, Inequality, and Urban Agriculture

SARA SHOSTAK

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK,

NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shostak, Sara, author.

Title: Back to the roots: memory, inequality, and urban agriculture / Sara Shostak.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Series: Nature, society, and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020035570 | ISBN 9780813590141 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813590158 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813590165 (epub) | ISBN 9780813590172 (mobi) | ISBN 9780813590189 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Urban agriculture—Massachusetts.

Classification: LCC S494.5.U72 S56 2021 | DDC 630.9173/209744—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035570

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Sara Shostak

All rights reserved

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Manufactured in the United States of America

For my beloved, Matt Glaser

Contents

Introduction

1 Cultivating the Commonwealth

2 The Powers of Food

3 Lineages and Land

4 Stories of the Soil

5 Urban Futures

Conclusion

Epilogue

Appendix A: Into the Field: Data and Methods

Appendix B: Research and Reflexivity

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Back to the Roots

Introduction

On September 28, 2015, the Urban Farming Institute of Boston (UFI), Historic Boston Inc. (HBI), and the Trust for Public Land (TPL) celebrated the groundbreaking for their ambitious revitalization of the Fowler Clark Epstein Farm (FCE Farm).¹ Located in the Boston neighborhood of Mattapan, the FCE Farm is among the oldest remaining agrarian sites in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. At the time that HBI purchased the property, its hundreds-years-old buildings were falling apart, and the land, which had not been farmed in decades, was strewn with garbage and debris. Two years later, when the FCE Farm opened its doors, and its fields, as a 21st century urban farm, residence, and teaching center, Boston mayor Martin Walsh proclaimed, What you see here is history, what you see here is public health, what you see here is open space, what you see here is job training … [and] a symbol of Boston’s future.²

Mayor Walsh’s comments seem to suggest that we all see the same history at the FCE Farm. As we look at its painstakingly restored historic buildings, this may appear to be a relatively straightforward claim. Back to the Roots demonstrates, rather, that the aspects of the past we encounter not only at the FCE Farm, but at urban farming sites across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, are complex, multilayered, and profoundly consequential for contemporary cities and neighborhoods. Indeed, all of the important issues that Mayor Walsh highlighted at the opening of the FCE Farm—public health, access to land, job opportunities—require that we grapple with how the materiality and meanings of the past continue to shape the lives and life chances of urban residents. A central thesis of this book is that urban agriculture has become a critical site for recollecting and making visible both past- and present-tense inequalities, thereby opening up the possibility of new forms of reclamation, reparation, and resistance.

To be sure, compared to other urban farms in Massachusetts, the FCE Farm is unique in its centuries-long history as a farm.³ As we will see, urban farms are more often built on vacant lots and/or on brownfields whose histories are long buried.⁴ Likewise, the presence of historic agrarian buildings at the FCE Farm is atypical; when urban farming advocates talk about repurposing buildings, they more often are referring to the possibility of using long ago abandoned factories or warehouses for indoor growing. Nonetheless, the FCE Farm offers us a jumping-off place for understanding how the interwoven pasts of people and places, and their contemporary consequences, may be found in urban agriculture today.

FINDING THE PAST AT THE FCE FARM

The Boston Landmarks Commission (BLC) report provides a remarkable formal history of the site that is now the FCE Farm (2005). Based on the BLC research, we know that in the late 1700s, Stephen Fowler, a veteran of the American Revolution, left his 330-acre estate in the town of Dorchester to his son Stephen Jr. and his grandsons Samuel, Stephen III, and Jesse. The farmhouse was built by Samuel Fowler sometime between 1786 and 1806, when it first appears in city records. When Samuel Fowler died, he left an 11¼-acre parcel with all the buildings thereon to his wife, Mary; she, in turn, sold it to her son, Samuel Fowler Jr. Over time, the land was subdivided further, with some lots inherited by family members and others sold at auction to other Dorchester yeomen. In 1837, Henry and Mary Clark bought a parcel that included a "mantion [sic] house and barn"; they built the carriage house that now stands at the site around 1860. Agricultural production in the area continued until well into the nineteenth century.

In 1870, Boston annexed the town of Dorchester and the farmlands of Mattapan, which both became Boston neighborhoods. Beginning in the 1890s, as electric streetcars made the outlying agricultural districts of Boston more easily accessible, this land became desirable to developers (Warner 1978). Between 1910 and 1918, Mary Clark and her son, James Henry Clark, followed the lead of many Dorchester landowners, subdividing their roughly twelve-acre estate into sixty-one lots, the majority of which they sold. Houses, including the triple-deckers that are characteristic of Boston’s outer neighborhoods, were built on what had been their fields, as well as on those of their neighbors.

It is this well-documented agricultural history, along with the buildings on the property, that made it possible for the Boston Landmarks Commission to confer landmark status on what is now the FCE Farm. As noted in the site study that preceded the landmark designation: The Fowler-Clark farm reflects Dorchester’s rich agricultural history, with a long line of yeoman tilling the land.… The house and stable that comprise the Fowler-Clark farm are outstanding examples of vernacular architecture reflective of Boston’s agricultural past.… Such intact properties are exceedingly rare and highly valuable for study (Boston Landmarks Commission 2005, 9–15).⁵ It is this history that qualified the site for state and federal historic rehabilitation tax credits and earned it a place on the National Register of Historic Places.⁶ It is the preservation of this history that has received awards from the Massachusetts Historical Commission.⁷

At the same time, the farm is embedded in more recent histories of the city of Boston and its neighborhoods. In 1940, James Henry Clark sold the remaining acre and a half to the Hunt family, who held the property for just a year before selling it to Jorge Epstein. At this time, the neighborhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan were centers of Boston’s Jewish community; Mattapan, in particular, was home to many working-class Jewish families. Epstein was a jeweler, with a shop on nearby Blue Hill Avenue, then a bustling business district (H. Levine and Harmon 1993). Over time, Epstein also developed an architectural salvage business, Old Mansions Company, which boomed as the Boston Redevelopment Authority began to implement its controversial vision for urban renewal (Vrabel 2014; Warner 1987). As the city demolished older buildings—and, indeed, destroyed entire neighborhoods (Gans 1962)—Epstein took advantage of the opportunity to salvage mantels, windows, doors, moldings, pottery, cupolas, turrets, and other materials. While he sold some of these, reportedly for a handsome profit, he also installed many artifacts as part of the land around the farmhouse, where he lived with his wife, Ida, and their children.⁸

Beginning in the 1950s, and accelerating in the 1960s, Mattapan was among the Boston neighborhoods most devastated by blockbusting, redlining, and white flight (Gamm 1999). As is well documented by urban historians, real estate agents deployed racist tropes to encourage panic selling by white homeowners, and then bought their properties for far below their market value (H. Levine and Harmon 1993). At the same time, the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (BBURG) made federally guaranteed home mortgage funds available to low-income African American families interested in living in Mattapan as well as adjacent sections of Dorchester and Roxbury (Gamm 1999). African American families, in turn, were taken advantage of by real estate speculators and negligent inspectors, who often performed only cursory evaluations of properties for sale and failed to identify necessary repairs. When families sought loans for these repairs, they were often denied; if they fell behind on their mortgage payments, the banks quickly foreclosed. By 1974, half of the African American families in Mattapan had been shut out of their homes (Vrabel 2014). As buildings fell into disrepair—or were lost to arson—vacant lots appeared throughout the neighborhood (Warner 1987).⁹

During this time, racial tensions and violence wracked Mattapan, and nearly all of the remaining Jewish residents left (H. Levine and Harmon 1993). The Epsteins, however, stayed in their home, where Ida and one of her sons resided even after Jorge’s death in 1998. In 1999, Ida, then an eighty-one-year-old widow, spoke proudly of staying in Mattapan, explaining that she liked her neighbors and was not interested in relinquishing her home of fifty-seven years; eventually, however, her health deteriorated, and she and her son moved out (Clark 2015).¹⁰ In 2005, the lawyer for the family’s estate petitioned the city to demolish the buildings so that the property could be sold to a developer.¹¹ In 2006, however, the Boston Landmarks Commission designated the buildings on site as landmarks, mandating their preservation. In 2013, the city seized the property, alleging extensive neglect, deterioration of historically significant buildings, and years of arrears on tax bills. The city’s letter to the lawyer for the family trust described the property as an overgrown dumping ground infested with rodents that represented serious sanitary and building code violations.¹² With the goal of preserving the site, the city eventually allowed the family’s trust to redeem it and then sell it to HBI.¹³

Of course, the Epsteins’ neighbors were well aware of the deterioration of the property. As one recalled, It looked like a dumping ground with old, rattled buildings … it was tattered and dirty; folks threw trash in there. There were weeds everywhere, and piles of broken stones. Similarly, State Representative Russell Holmes recalled, When I first got elected, this was the place where everyone … just came over and dumped in.¹⁴ In the context of a neighborhood that did not feel seen or supported by city government, many saw the derelict property as yet another sign that the city had abandoned us (Field notes, February 2016).

Mattapan today is a vibrant neighborhood that faces a myriad of consequences from decades of racialized stigma, marginalization, and disinvestment. Mattapan has one of the lowest median household incomes in Boston¹⁵ and among the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and children’s emergency department visits for asthma (Boston Public Health Commission 2016–2017). Since the 1970s, it has become a majority Black neighborhood, home to many recent immigrants from the Caribbean, as well as African American residents; many of Mattapan’s businesses are owned by first-generation immigrants.¹⁶ Mattapan hosts a rich array of community-based organizations that seek to draw on the wonderful ethnic and cultural diversity of the Mattapan community to promote a healthy living environment¹⁷ and counter negative stereotypes of the neighborhood, including those perpetuated by local media.¹⁸ For example, the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition (MFFC) is a community-based organization led by African American and Caribbean women from the neighborhood who have expertise in nonprofit management, nutrition and diet, community and family engagement, and child and youth development. The MFFC partners with neighborhood residents, including youth, to create a time when Mattapan will become known as one of the healthiest communities in Boston, with easy access to affordable and healthy food options. Our streets will be clean, safe, walk-able, and bike-able. Our residents of all ages and abilities will take regular advantage of the abundant and inviting play spaces and recreational opportunities.¹⁹ In recent years, community organizing in Mattapan has also focused on housing and tenants’ rights, as many residents fear that the neighborhood is at high risk for gentrification.

Figure I.1. The Fowler Clark Epstein Farm. Photo credit: Sara Shostak

The challenges facing Mattapan, and community-based efforts to address them, shape the meanings of the FCE Farm. Speaking at the opening of the FCE Farm in 2018, Patricia Spence, the executive director of the UFI, who grew up nearby and remembers riding her bike past the farm as a child, expressed hope that the farm would be a healing landscape that will help us heal our community, bring our community together and help us help each other.²⁰ Vivien Morris, the founder of the MFFC, stated that the restored farm will be a great boon to the area by improving access to fresh food that is culturally relevant for the community.²¹ This is especially important in a neighborhood that has become home to so many recent immigrants. In fact, as we will see, across Massachusetts, urban farms and gardens have emerged as a critical resource for individuals who wish to stay connected to the foodways and herbal healing practices of their cultures.

Indeed, even as it is located in the history of the land, the neighborhood, and its residents, the FCE Farm is embedded also in the collective pasts and identities of the people who farm—and who are learning to farm—there today. It serves as the flagship headquarters of the UFI (see figure I.1), a person of color–led organization²² that seeks to develop and promote urban farming as a commercial sector that creates green collar jobs for residents; and to engage urban communities in building a healthier and more locally based food system.²³ As highlighted on the UFI’s website, its varied programs are meant to serve as a springboard for individuals for whom traditional job models do not work, a means of bringing people closer to food production, and a mechanism for heightening the awareness around public policy that has impacts in the community. UFI’s farms and programs orient especially to the Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, home to communities of color that long have been underrepresented and have critical needs in regard to both healthy food access and employment.²⁴ As part of its commitment to turning vacant lots into collective opportunity for neighborhood farmers, the UFI helped to found the first community land trust for urban farmland. Further, as part of its work training the next generation of urban farmers, the UFI has created space for reclaiming the history of Black farmers. This process of reclamation includes reconsidering relationships to the land as both a site of suffering and a means of liberation (Field notes, February 2017; see also Penniman 2018; White 2018).²⁵

As we can see at the FCE Farm, and as we will explore further in the following pages, the histories encountered at contemporary urban farming projects across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts uncover and make visible connections between a myriad of times, places, and peoples. In part, this happens because of the materiality of urban farming, most especially the need for land and soil. In Massachusetts’s postindustrial cities, many urban farming sites contain the sediments of industry and its demise. Other sites, especially vacant lots, represent legacies of municipal neglect and environmental racism as well as loci of neighborhood mobilization and collective hope. The histories of some sites may be recovered in archives, while others can only be pieced together from the stories of longtime neighborhood residents. Some of these histories are uncovered only upon the discovery of toxic traces of the past embedded in the soil. No doubt, some remain buried.

Moreover, urban farmers and gardeners bring to these sites their collective identities and memories. In their conversations amid the vegetables and herbs growing in their raised beds—and also, for example, at events focused on the history of Black urban farmers, in debates at neighborhood meetings about who should pay for the material legacies of environmental racism, and in controversies about the costs of high-tech growing systems—urban farmers and gardeners call attention to the deep histories of inequality that have given shape to their cities and neighborhoods and to the lives and life chances of their residents. They also reclaim knowledge and practices related to farming, food, and healing that are rooted in places and times far away from their current cultivations.

Drawing on a multiyear and multisited ethnography of urban farming in Massachusetts (see appendix A), Back to the Roots demonstrates that urban agriculture is a space in which individuals and institutions are encountering the meanings and materiality of the past and grappling with their consequences for the present and the future. It theorizes gardens and farms, harvest festivals, and cooking classes as places that are profoundly shaped by multiple social histories and how they are recollected. Indeed, although many urban farmers celebrate growing food as a way of reconnecting with nature, neither plants and herbs nor the soil in which they are planted are simply part of the natural world.²⁶ Rather, they carry deeply held meanings linked to people and to places, both urban and rural, past and present. As we will see, the meaning and materiality of the past can be found interwoven at the center of controversies about urban agriculture as well as in hopeful visions of its future.

AN URBAN (AGRI)CULTURALIST APPROACH

At the center of Back to the Roots are questions about how cultural meanings and material legacies of the past are unearthed, encountered, reclaimed, and reconfigured in and through the practices of urban agriculture. Back to the Roots asks how the stories that we tell each other about the past shape the material world (Jordan 2015, 2) and also how the material world shapes the stories we tell each other about the past, present, and future. It thereby calls attention to the importance of collective memory, broadly understood as the active past that forms our identities (Olick and Robbins 1998, 111), and its consequences for contemporary urban practices and policy. It centers memory projects, and the act of recollection, as critical focuses for the fields of urban sociology, environmental studies, and public health.

Sociologists distinguish between history and memory, contending that history is the remembered past to which we no longer have an organic relation—the past that is no longer an important part of our lives, such that memory inevitably gives way to history as we lose touch with our pasts (Olick and Robbins 1998, 111). Similarly, the boundary between memory and history is defined by the move from lived experience to practices of preserving and transmitting identities and cultures that might vanish without commemoration (Halbwachs 1992, 78–83; see also Nora and Kritzman 1996). That is not to say that we cannot claim a relationship to history; rather, we can celebrate even what we did not directly experience, keeping the given past alive for us (Olick and Robbins 1998, 111). Indeed, communities can be understood as in an important sense … constituted by their past (Bellah et al. 1985, 153; see also Zerubavel 2003). The act of remembering helps community stick together in certain ways and break apart in others (Zelizer 1995, 219).

It is clear also that the present gives salience to different aspects of the past, as the memory of the past is rooted in the present (della Porta et al. 2018, 160) and different elements of the past become more or less relevant as … circumstances and problems change (Schwartz 1996, 909). That is, even as the remembered past molds the present … recollections of that past are shaped by present-day concerns (Griffin and Bollen 2009, 602). For example, present events may reactivate and reanimate apparently dormant histories whose meanings may previously have seemed fixed (Bearman, Faris, and Moody 1999) and establish new connections between seemingly disparate realms of history (Schwartz 1996). Relatedly, memory can be a site of contestation, as agents of memory struggle over how to interpret the past, who should be remembered, and the form that a historical narrative ought to take (Jansen 2007, 959). These contestations, as well, have implications for the future as we create and critique worlds through stories we tell about the past (Reese 2019, 69).

A fascinating literature in urban sociology explores the role of memory, in particular, and culture, more broadly, in revitalizing cities. These studies suggest that as a source of images and memories, it [memory] symbolizes ‘who belongs’ in specific places … [and] it plays a prominent role in urban redevelopment strategies based on historical preservation of local ‘heritage’ (Zukin 1995, 1). Culture, in this sense, becomes a resource for urban growth machines (Logan and Molotch 1992), supporting the transformation of cities into centers of consumption, with specific place-based identities or brands, often linked to art or music (Greenberg 2008; Wynn 2015; Zukin 1989). Such strategies may rework the physical structure of cities as dormant manufacturing zones and … unique and unused places are transformed into entertainment zones (Wynn 2015, 25). New York City’s meatpacking district, with its high-end restaurants and vibrant nightlife, is a much cited and oft-criticized example of how historic places can be remade as centers of consumption where the ambiance of authenticity serves the interest of development (Zukin 1991, 51; see also Halle and Tiso 2014; Zukin 2010). Development, in turn, often contributes to gentrification, which may include the displacement of the very old timers whose stories are commodified in efforts to recapture the value of a place (Zukin 1991, 191–194; see also Brown-Saracino 2006; Tissot 2015).

Less attention has been paid, however, to how urban projects and policies outside of the strategies of urban growth coalitions—indeed, even in opposition to them—may build on cultural meanings and collective memories that are important parts of how we experience cities, their neighborhoods, and our places within them. This is perhaps due to the assumption that efforts to engage urban cultural meanings and memories can only be opportunistic, overly selective invocations of history (Paulsen 2007, 2) or false gods in the name of which developers act in the end, growing nothing so valuable as their own private fortunes (Katz 2010, 28; see also Gotham 2007; Greenberg 2008; Zukin 1995).

Recently, however, sociologists have begun to call for greater attention to the multiple processes through which cities are indelibly shaped by memory (Hunter, Loughran, and Fine 2018, 330; see also Small 2004; Sampson 2013). The concept of memory politics refers to political contests over the use of shared community history (Hunter, Loughran and Fine 2018, 331). Theoretically, memory politics offers a lens for explaining how both branding and opposition efforts derive their legitimacy from cultural associations among history, community, and place; importantly, it also opens up for analysis the actions and interests of groups located outside of ‘growth machines’ as traditionally understood (Hunter, Loughran, and Fine 2018, 331). Indeed, as anthropologist Ashanté Reese powerfully demonstrates, how people imagine the past provide[s] important data for understanding the social change people would like to see (2019, 90).

Building on these insights, Back to the Roots takes seriously how the rich cultural meanings linked to urban agriculture—including the meanings of food and farming, rural and urban, cities and their neighborhoods—reflect sincere efforts of individuals and groups to connect their lives to a meaningful past (Paulsen 2007, 2); establish bases for social identities based on food (DeSoucey 2016; Jordan 2015), farming, and/or proximity to the natural world (Bell 1994; Fine 1998; Jerolmack 2013); and advance specific notions of authentic and desirable community development (Stanton 2006; Wherry 2011) and urban futures (Jonason 2019). It attends carefully to the role of memory in mobilizations from below, that is, on the relatively understudied ways that memory features in contestations that emerge around political economic restructuring, racial segregation, poverty, and other issues (Loughran, Fine, and Hunter 2015, 198). In so doing, Back to the Roots demonstrates that urban agriculture has become a critical arena for explorations of, and challenges to, the long-standing and systemic inequalities that shape Massachusetts cities and their neighborhoods.

"OUR FOOD HOLDS OUR STORY"

As is evident in recent newspaper articles, television shows, award-winning cookbooks, and memoirs, food is very much at the center of contemporary projects of remembering, providing a mechanism for telling stories about the past, making connections between people and places, and articulating visions of hoped-for futures.²⁷ Food is intrinsic not only to individual memories but to collective memories; it is part of the collective identities of communities, diasporas, and nations (Jordan 2015, 36). Recent memoirs and cookbooks—many of which combine individual narratives, social histories, and recipes—use food as a means of exploring pasts marked by profound disruptions, dislocations, trauma, and loss, including slavery (Twitty 2017), settler colonialism (Sherman and Dooley 2018), and war (Ceizadlo 2012). To wit, in his extraordinary account of African American culinary history, Michael W. Twitty explains that, for African Americans, the food is in many cases all we have, all we can go to in order to feel our way into our past (2017, 21).²⁸

Scholars have emphasized different aspects of food in their accounts of its unique capacity as a carrier of memory. Central to these analyses is how food makes material relationships between nature and culture, places and people, and past, present, and future (Jordan 2015). In her beautiful elaboration of edible memory, sociologist Jennifer Jordan explores the intertwining of botanical, social, and edible worlds that vests specific foods, such as heirloom tomatoes and antique apples, with nostalgic ideas about the past (2015, 26). As Jordan demonstrates, the way that both individuals and social groups vest food with memory and meaning has profound consequences, shaping agricultural biodiversity, landscapes, and local and global food systems.

Another conceptualization of the connections among food, place, and culture is the French notion of terroir, which refers to the ways that the natural environment, including soil and climate, shapes a food’s special qualities and unique taste (DeSoucey 2016, 28; see also Beriss 2019).²⁹ In her incisive study of the gastropolitics of foie gras, sociologist Micheala DeSoucey demonstrates that the concept of terroir is imbricated with specific aspects of national identity, including the virtuousness and innocence of the French countryside, as represented by the image of the paysan farmer (2016, 72).³⁰ Terroir, therefore, can be seen as including both the physical and social history of a place, its materiality and its meanings.

Seeds also carry both genetic material and meanings forward through time. Studies of seed savers have emphasized how seeds become the carriers of stories, a material basis for cultural transmission (Carolan 2011; Jordan 2015). For example, Jordan describes how in addition to gathering (and distributing) more than two thousand varieties of seeds well adapted to the dry conditions of the Southwest, Native Seeds/SEARCH also has established a "Cultural Memory Bank … collecting in various ways the stories of the seeds as well as growers’ firsthand knowledge of techniques of cultivation, preparation, and preservation (Jordan 2015, 56, emphasis added). Reading the stories that travel with seeds can draw one into other worlds, other times, and places" (Jordan 2015, 56). In contrast with the more celebratory valence of terroir, stories that travel with seeds—like those I encountered among many urban farmers in Massachusetts—often bear witness to injustice, displacement, and loss.

Back to the Roots extends these insights, demonstrating the centrality of both food and its production—for example, urban agricultural practices—to contemporary projects of recollection and remembrance.³¹ It insists