‘Best in the nation.’ Two Ky local food activists get James Beard Awards | Opinion

Jim Embry grew up steeped in the agricultural traditions of a Black farming hamlet in Madison County, and as a young man, became acutely aware that too many people were suffering from unjust and unhealthy food systems.

For Valerie Horn, food was a second career in the mountains of Letcher County. As she encouraged people to grow gardens, she realized how much they needed help getting and preparing fresh, local food. In a short time, she transformed local foodways.

Although they come from different parts of Kentucky, Embry and Horn’s work in food justice on behalf of marginalized people in those places has resonated far beyond our state lines. So much, in fact, that earlier this month they were two of the six people in the United States recently given the top prize of the food world: the James Beard Leadership Awards for creating “a safer, more healthful, equitable, and sustainable food world.”

“I was flabbergasted,” Embry, 74, said, back in Madison County for a quick rest before he heads out again on his hectic speaking/farming/activism schedule. “All these people doing such good work and they recognized two Kentuckians.”

The awards are a huge honor, said Ouita Michel, herself a James Beard finalist for her restaurant, cooking and food empire of Holly Hill and Co.

“Kentucky is still a frontier in this country for exploring authentic food ways, diversifying our food culture, the sustainability and accessibility of local agriculture, and good nutritious foods.” Michel said. “The best in the nation are at work here — and for me, Valerie Horn and Jim Embry personify that work. My heart swelled with pride and so much gratitude for everything they do each day to improve KY’s food system. Their recognition is in spite of their deep humility — I can’t think of two more deserving or hard working activists. It made me really really grateful and proud to be living and working in Kentucky.”

Black and green

As a young man, Embry was involved in the civil rights movement both at the University of Kentucky and beyond, but quickly turned his attention to food. Growing up in Kentucky, fresh food had always been available and plentiful because his family was growing it, as they had done for centuries. (Embry’s family history is a fascinating and lengthy tale in itself.)

A trip to New York City opened his eyes.

“I thought all Black folk were green in the agrarian tradition, but up there I got a glimpse of food apartheid, where there were these communities that didn’t have access to fresh food and vegetables,” he said.

He got involved with the founding of the Good Foods Coop, earning the moniker of “the Black hippie.” In 2000, he spent four years in Detroit as director of the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. He returned home to Kentucky to found the Sustainable Communities Network, establishing community gardens around Central Kentucky and always stressing the intersection of food, justice, the ways in which the health of the Earth affects our own. He got involved with the Slow Food movement, the Kentucky Black Farmers Cooperative, worked on domestic violence and food production, pollinator groups, and always kept traveling and speaking.

“It started with addressing farming methods, organic food, but then went beyond to food systems,” he said. “Some people look at food justice from the lens of ethnicity, but for me, it’s about making the lens bigger. The question of food justice has to include more.”

That more has turned to the issue of seeds. In the midst of COVID, he got involved with the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, a national coop of heirloom seed farming.

“There’s a whole food justice angle to seeds,” he said. “How do we get those heirloom seeds back to the people who first had them?”

Embry has no plans to slow down his frenetic travel/speaking schedule, he said, because healthy food has kept him young. Because of his family history, he’s also involved with the Isaac Murphy Art Garden and African Cemetery #2, Some day, we hope, it will all be compiled in his already titled autobiography “Black and Green.”

The James Beard award, he said, will highlight work in places like Kentucky, where despite terrible indices for health and environment, “such good work is being done.”

‘Interconnected’

In 2013, Valerie Horn had already retired as a counselor in the Letcher County Schools, but had taken over from her mother as director of the Cowan Community Center, a series of building and playgrounds tucked in next to a creek with Letcher’s soaring mountains in the background. Thanks to the Grow Appalachia program out of Berea and the Community Farm Alliance, Horn started helping roughly 20 families learn to grow gardens, providing seeds, instruction and other help to what once had been a staple activity in Eastern Kentucky.

The program was such a success Horn soon realized there needed to be a market where these now-farmers could sell their produce and Letcher Countians could buy it. That led to the founding of the Whitesburg Farmers Market.

Then Horn kept thinking about value-added production. “Sure you can sell strawberries, but what if you could make more money selling strawberry jam?” she said. With the help of local healthcare organizations, that led to the creation of Community Agricultural Nutritional Enterprises, Inc. CANE Kitchen, a commercial kitchen space in Whitesburg, where such work could happen. The Mountain Comprehensive Health Corporation, which also recognized the need for better food in the community, lease the building to CANE for $1 a year.

Pretty soon, the kitchen was producing “Mountain Legend” products like bread and smoothies.

“They’re all so interconnected,” Horn said, as she took a break from overseeing the installation of a new piano at the community center. “We look at it like the Native American system of agriculture — bean, corn and squash together. Use the least resources to produce the most.”

CANE Kitchen quickly became a food hub of all kinds. The USDA summer food program administered by Cowan Community Center moved to the kitchen and in 2020, the kitchen served 750,000 meals to 2,500 families across eight counties.

Last year’s flooding proved how invaluable CANE’s Kitchen had become. She and kitchen executive director Brandon Fleming started texting around 2 a.m., thinking they’d be making meals for first responders. Instead, when Horn arrived there around 6 a.m., she found Dr. Van Breeding breaking down the door of the kitchen so he could evacuate nursing home residents there.

They ended up serving more than 100,000 meals to stunned flood victims in the days that followed.

Like Embry, Horn was stunned by the James Beard award; she said she was incredibly honored to be chosen “as the medal bearer for all the people in rural communities doing these grassroots effort and leadership that comes from within.”

But Horn is tired. She makes all these interconnected entities happen and makes it look easy, but it’s a constant, uphill grind of grant-writing, organzing, calling, meeting and talking. A granddaughter recently asked “Why doesn’t Granny have a life?”

“We don’t yet have these systems in place in a sustainable way,” she said. “I will see myself as successful when there are systems in place that can move these things forward regardless of who the leader is.”

She hopes the James Beard award will provide more credibility, to show that these are good ideas, worthy of support. “We want to keep supplying this county with fresh, local food,” she said. “And we want to keep making life a little better for everyone here.”