Author: Erika Howsare

Categories
Culture

How locals are fighting light pollution—and what’s at stake

A severe geomagnetic storm triggered the aurora borealis in early October, making it visible in many dark skies across North America. Photo: Tristan Williams

We’re in a dark field—a few hundred of us. There’s no moon. Voices rise and fall in the darkness; the Milky Way sweeps overhead; the land is black and the sky is navy, a forest of stars. It’s 8:30 or so at night. I put my eye to a telescope. In the floating circle, a planetary nebula looks like a tuft of cotton, gliding slowly upwards with the motion of the earth.

I wander away, passing dim outlines of people, toward a different scope. The operator here is a bit of a showman. “I’m taking requests,” he says to the small queue of people gathered in the grass. “The request line is open!” He points a laser into the sky, outlining the Summer Triangle. His scope is trained on the Andromeda Galaxy—“the haze of a trillion stars!”

We’re looking at the enormous universe with our feet planted on the ground at James River State Park, in southern Nelson County. This is a star party featuring the expertise and equipment of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society, and it’s happening here because James River is an official International Dark Sky Place, as listed by the advocacy group DarkSky International: a site far enough from any town to offer clear views of what’s out there, beyond our atmosphere.

In other words, we’re all here to get away from light.

Yet we’ve brought light with us. There are flashlights, headlights, and a video presentation under the pavilion. Of course there are cell phones. There are even digital displays on the bases of some of the telescopes. Our eyes adjust to the darkness, catch a flash of brightness, and adjust again. The stars stay steady.

Wherever there are humans, it seems, there is artificial light, and the amount of light we pour into the world has grown incredibly fast. According to a study published last year in Science, global sky brightness has increased 9.6 percent every year between 2011 and 2022. That is, light pollution doubled in less than eight years.

Kevin Fitzpatrick, president of the Charlottesville Astro­nomical Society, says that newer technologies make it possible to get stunning photos of the universe even in light-polluted skies, but dark skies are still key “if you just like laying out in the chair in the fall looking up at the night sky.” Photo: Tristan Williams

Seeing is believing 

“I’ve only seen the Milky Way twice before,” I hear a man say at the star party. I feel lucky that I can see it from home, anytime the sky is clear—and I am lucky; 80 percent of the world’s population lives under sky glow, that pervasive, cumulative effect of house lights, store lights, billboards, tennis courts, streetlights. This is a loss for amateur astronomers and all humans—our species evolved under dark skies and has been enriched in countless ways by our view of the cosmos—but it’s more than an aesthetic problem.

Light pollution can disrupt bird migrations or lure birds to fly into tall, lit-up buildings. It can lead baby sea turtles astray and attract insects to lights, where predators gobble them up. The presence of nighttime lights fundamentally changes the rhythm of day and night that has given essential cues to animals and plants for millions of years: when to hunt, mate, sleep, and grow.

Artificial light affects human health, too. “When people are exposed to blue light in the evening, whether it’s a cell phone or a streetlight spilling into the bedroom, that’s a sleep disruptor,” says Christine Putnam with Piedmont Dark Skies.

Along with Peggy Cornett and Carol Carter, Putnam began the loosely affiliated group in 2022 after the three of them, already active in local environmental issues, realized they shared a concern about dark skies. They’ve been trying to raise public awareness and to urge local governments, especially the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, to make light pollution a priority.

“We’ve done a bunch of tabling events to see, does this have legs in the community?” says Carter. “There were a lot of people who responded yes. The more we learn, the more concerned we are about the subject.”

The group has encouraged local governments to sign proclamations in support of reducing light pollution, but they also want to see binding language in local municipal codes. Albemarle, for one, is currently updating its Comprehensive Plan, and Putnam, a member of Albemarle’s Natural Heritage Committee, has advocated for strong language in that plan to set the stage for an improved ordinance in the future.

“I think the political will is there and the planners want to see that language in there,” she says. “[When it’s time to write regulations], it’s going to be important for astronomers and dark sky advocates to be involved in those discussions, to get the best possible ordinance, one that is effective and enforceable.”

Something big has changed since the county’s last Comprehensive Plan update: the new prevalence of LED lights. “That’s been the biggest game changer,” says Putnam. While LEDs are a great way to meet climate action goals—they’re much more energy-efficient than traditional outdoor lights—the light they emit is also more blue. “This has big implications for our health and all living animals,” she warns. “A shorter wavelength impacts our hormonal systems. And it’s more powerful in terms of creating that dome of light we have over our cities. By 2035, practically all of our outdoor lighting will be LED. If we’re not careful about how we select it, we’re really going to be in trouble. We’ll have a dramatic increase in the brightness of the sky.”

Piedmont Dark Skies activists Peggy Cornett, Carol Carter, and Christine Putnam point to this lamp at Friendship Court as an example of good street lighting. Photo: Tristan Williams

The light side

The good news: As Putnam implies, not all LED lights are created equal. “There is still time to make choices,” she says.

In fact, the City of Charlottesville is currently navigating those very choices, as part of an initiative, just begun this fall, to replace all the streetlights in the city. The lights come in a range of color temperatures and brightness, and DarkSky International provides recommendations about which of those are least harmful. But surprisingly, the city is limited in its options by the inventory of energy giant Dominion.

“We lease all of our lights from Dominion,” explains Kirk Vizzier, the city’s energy management coordinator. “They are the ultimate owners of all of those lights. Their inventory is all we have to work with. We are trying to work with them to expand that, but they are being resistant.” Vizzier says that the city is specifying the lowest color-temperature lights Dominion offers. “If we can get them to go lower at some point we will start to go lower,” he says.

Pierce Harding, an urban planning grad student at UVA, has been documenting existing light pollution levels in Charlottesville. He echoes Vizzier’s comments about Dominion. “There’s not an extensive inventory of DarkSky-certified fixtures,” he says. “With more pressure from the public on Dominion, that could help.” Charlottesville is part of a group of Virginia municipalities, the Virginia Energy Purchasing Governmental Association, which negotiates collectively with Dominion and can also exert pressure on the company to make protecting dark skies easier for localities.

Dominion spokesman Craig Carper, in an email, says that Dominion offers “many dark-skies friendly options” and adds, “We have been in communication with a representative from the Virginia chapter of the Dark Sky organization and will continue to have discussions about light offerings.” 

The public lighting initiative is expected to take around three years and cost $600,000. “It’s a big investment,” Putnam says, pointing out that the new lights could last a quarter-century.

Meanwhile, she says, municipalities need to enforce lighting ordinances already on the books. Putnam and her PDS co-founders can rattle off a list of sites that seem over-lit, from planter islands on the Downtown Mall to fast-food joints to sports fields. (Notice a too-bright spot? Read Brodhead with the city’s zoning office says you can complain through the MyCville app, phone, or email, and his department will investigate.)

Cornett also points out that individual choices matter—turning outdoor lights off when not in active use, opting for fixtures that point downward instead of out or up, choosing warmer-color and dimmer bulbs. Carter adds, “People think uplighting the façade of a house makes it look really nice. They just aren’t aware of the negative effects that is having on wildlife and on themselves.”

Before the dawn

Back at the star party, the showman aims his scope at Saturn. Someone looks and emits a guttural “wow,” and then a woman looks and says, “The crazy thing is, it looks fake!” Another person: “That’s cool…” Pause. “That’s really cool.” The showman enthuses: “That’s a crisp view right now! Isn’t that awesome?”

There’s a term for sadness over the loss of night sky views: noctalgia, or “sky grief.” It’s the other side of that joy and awe we feel in the dark field, looking at planets and comets.

Beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the cosmic wonders continue. This December 7, Jupiter and its moons are at their most visible all year. A week later, the “king of the meteor showers”—the Geminids—takes place. The stars stay steady. Whether we can see them or not, it seems, is our choice.

Categories
News

The art of the place

Photo by Nick Saraceno.

A chilly March night, and the indoor space seems to be unheated. It’s not designed to be comfortable; it’s an industrial building in Harrisonburg repurposed as a climbing gym that also hosts music, and it has a concrete floor, a loft reached by a ladder missing a rung, and odd couches and crates. People bob heads and dangle their feet. Eleagnus singer Taylor Hanigosky, wearing coveralls, pushes a metal dolly around a big cardboard Amazon box that’s been set in the middle of the room with a small basketball hoop taped to its side. She struggles to slide the dolly under the box; inside is another performer who, after Hanigosky wheels the box closer to her bandmates, will push her arms and legs through holes in its sides and stand, the upside-down Amazon smile becoming a creature’s frowning face, earning cheers from the audience. A few songs later, Hanigosky talk-sings over a groove laid down by her partner Jordan Fust and their bandmate Mahi Doiron, while the space’s booker, who goes by Shoz, watches rapt from near the wall.

Named after the Latin name for autumn olive—an invasive shrub that also makes edible berries—Eleagnus is the musical wing of an expansive partnership between Hanigosky, Fust, and a network of other people. They do many kinds of work: selling products at farmers’ markets; visual art in media like felting and screen-printing; performance art; river restoration.

All of this work has a distinctly DIY ethos that depends on community to come alive. “I just feel super passionate about … people being able to make art happen,” Shoz says, adding that before this underground space started hosting music, it was hard for fringe acts to find a venue in Harrisonburg. 

All this work, too, is firmly based in a specific place: the Shenandoah Valley—which, despite being reachable in less than 35 minutes from Charlottesville, can feel a world apart. The Valley’s public image is often more connected to agriculture, as though it were a slice of the Midwest slotted into Virginia’s rolling landscape. Yet it only takes a little digging to realize that the Valley supports its own crop of experimental and innovative artists.

Arts initiatives

Silk Moth Stage makes a point to be welcoming, providing not only free and reduced-price tickets but transportation, meals, and child care to audience members.
Supplied photo.

Many of their projects occur not in spite of, but in direct relation to, the Valley’s character and history. Take Silk Moth Stage, for example—a theater venue that happens to be located in Aili Huber’s yard. Artistic director Huber earned a master’s in directing through Mary Baldwin and the American Shakespeare Center and has lived with her family near Harrisonburg for 17 years. Since her home is tucked along the edge of a working dairy farm, the plays produced there fold the setting—fences, cows, silos—right into the theater experience.

“I love it when the cows come to the edge of a fence and stare,” says Silk Moth board president Holly Labbe, “or the cats come across the stage in the moment of the show and the actors respond to that. It feels very real.”

Huber, who founded Silk Moth in 2022, says the venue’s performance style owes a lot to the ASC, though rather than the Bard, 21st-century plays are her focus. And she chooses scripts that will fit well with her outdoor stage—which is actually a deck and a balcony on her house. “We can’t have anything where you have to have a set and fancy lighting effects. Some plays require a realism that isn’t going to work here. We do our shows in the afternoon, lit by the sun, and the actors and audience can see each other.”

Silk Moth has been producing just two shows per year—that’s the right number, Huber says, considering she relies on her neighbors to provide parking, and because she herself is sometimes busy directing plays elsewhere in the U.S. This year’s season opened May 10 with a production of Underneath the Lintel, a play by Glen Berger that maps the time-traveling adventure of a mystery-solving librarian.

Huber is deeply invested in the ethics of how a play comes before an audience—from the way directors treat actors to which audience members are made to feel welcome. Silk Moth has partnered with groups serving low-income and unhoused people to bring their clients to performances, providing not only tickets but transportation, meals, and child care. It also cultivates ties to local organizations like libraries and LGBTQ centers and has a fund to subsidize free and reduced ticket prices. “While our published ticket price is $34, our average last year was $20 when you factor in free and reduced,” Huber says. “A budget is a moral document.”

She also makes a point of paying actors and other collaborators—“To the best of my knowledge, there are only two other theaters within a two-hour drive of us that pay artists consistently, and we have a plan to pay people on a union scale by our fifth season,” she says proudly—and strives to create a “radically welcoming” experience for actors.

“Theater is generally really bad for the people who make it,” she says. “Just as a matter of tradition, we have these practices in terms of teaching or directing that are not good for people. We ask them to bring their own trauma to the surface of our art, and costume designers say horrible things about people’s bodies. I set out to create a new framework, where the core principle is we’re humans with needs, and we should have the right to radical consent about our bodies and inner spaces.” She calls her framework “Take5” because one of its tenets is that actors can ask for a five-minute break at any time.

Most Silk Moth actors are local, but this is not community theater. “People come to see our shows and they’re always a little shocked at the quality. It elevates this community in the eyes of people from elsewhere. I want this to be a destination.”

Breaking convention

Wild Altar Farmstead mixes art and farming. “It came from this desire to witness places that are in transition, to spend time lingering in places caught up in the human development and redevelopment cycle,” says co-founder Taylor Hanigosky. 
Supplied photo.

Separate from Charlottesville but not exactly part of Appalachia, the Valley is its own center of gravity. For Hanigosky, who grew up in the Rust Belt environs of Youngstown, Ohio, it’s a home she adopted after living on the West Coast, where she met Fust on a permaculture and fiber farm in Washington state.

“I got really immersed in fiber and it was a completely transformative experience,” she says. “Farming helped me understand a pathway to having a relationship with place. It caused me to reckon with my own trajectory from Ohio west and why I made that decision … I started to wonder if my gifts, my skills, my dreams could be more useful applied in a context that wasn’t about leaving and starting somewhere fresh but was about returning and dealing with the harm that’s been caused in a place.” 

Because Fust’s family had lived in Stuarts Draft for six generations, the Valley offered itself as a place where the two of them could dig into a landscape with personal connections. The pair moved there in 2019 and named it Wild Altar Farmstead, and the pandemic saw them quickly expanding their garden beds and selling at farmers’ markets in Waynesboro, Harrisonburg, and Staunton. Yet simply building a produce operation wasn’t their goal.

“You have to get efficient and tight with margins, but that’s not our path,” she says. “We’re really interested more in the relationship to land and trying to engage with the community and bring more people into the possibility of that relationship.” If, for example, they make jam out of those invasive autumn olive berries, “it opens up this whole world where you talk about why it’s here and what can we do about it. We can eat it! Food becomes this center of a relationship.”

At the same time, Hanigosky and Fust stay connected to their art practices through performing with Eleagnus, making visual work, and offering fiber arts workshops. They marry food and art by using Staunton’s Art Hive as a place to teach fermentation and seasonal cooking. They’ve even undertaken dance and performance art at the former site of the Staunton Mall.

“It came from this desire to witness places that are in transition, to spend time lingering in places caught up in the human development and redevelopment cycle,” she explains. “What does the land have to say about that? How are we witnessing this really rapid change?”

Located on the basement level of a 160-year-old brick building, SolArt Center in Staunton is the spot for “DIY outsider art,” says one of its founders.
Photo by Nick Saraceno.

The documentation of their work at the mall became an exhibition and performance in May at an intriguing new gallery/performance space in Staunton called the SolArt Center. Located on the basement level of a 160-year-old brick building, SolArt is the creation of Wes Wyse, who owns the vintage store Eclectic Retro upstairs, and Rachel Towns. 

“We were talking and saying, wouldn’t it be cool to have an arts space?” Wyse says, recalling their vision for a fringe-friendly spot that could accommodate music, small-scale theater, film, art, and other offerings. SolArt opened last November, hosting a popular zine fair as one of its first events. “We packed people in,” says Wyse. “After three months, it became clear that it was taking on a life of its own.”

By explicitly inviting local creatives to bring their ideas and projects, everything from medicinal mushroom classes to battle-jacket workshops, SolArt has made itself accessible and DIY-centric. The building itself—think walls made of giant stones and mismatched furniture—is a big part of the appeal. “The space has such a great vibe, it lends itself to certain types of music—folk, ambient, experimental drone things,” Wyse says. “[We did] a punk market in May. It builds on itself.” 

Like everyone else in this story, he and Towns take pleasure in midwifing the projects of others. “These are the artists and musicians who don’t fit Beverley Street or the Downtown Mall,” Wyse says. “I think there is a movement of DIY outsider art.”

The fact that the Wild Altar artists form a bridge between SolArt and Shoz is emblematic of the spirit of connection animating the scene here. “Definitely the work that’s been most motivating to me has been collaborative,” says Hanigosky. “That’s been really exciting about being in the Valley.”

Categories
Arts Culture

The apples of her eye

Diane Flynt will read from Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived at New Dominion Bookshop on November 11. Potter’s Craft Cider will offer samples at the event. Supplied photos.

When Diane Flynt signs onto a Zoom call from her home in southwest Virginia, the connection is spotty at first. That’s a tradeoff of rural living that she gladly accepts. Sporting a college-style sweatshirt reading KALE, she radiates a love for the land around her and what it can produce—a love that permeates her new book, Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived: The Surprising Story of Apples in the South.

“Behind each knobby brown orb, underneath every quirky apple name or sprightly flavor, lies a person, culture, and history. And nowhere is this history more interesting than in the South,” she writes in the book’s introduction.

Flynt would know. In 1995, she bought a farm near Floyd, Virginia, and planted an orchard with the goal of becoming the state’s first cidermaker. “She was the one who started the industry in Virginia,” says Mary Godinez, who co-owns an Augusta County fruit tree nursery and has known Flynt for nearly a decade.

Flynt spent years dividing her time between the farm and a corporate career, but eventually her Foggy Ridge cider became a full-time vocation and a widely distributed craft cider brand. Her book recounts this journey in vivid detail—pruning trees, tasting cider blends, spotting wildlife. Like when, “pruning saw in hand … I came face to face with a tiny hummingbird nest hidden in a tangle of apple branches.”

Diane Flynt.

Flynt also traveled relentlessly to build the business and spread the gospel of craft cider—a drink more akin to wine than beer, with every vintage a unique reflection of that year’s weather and that orchard’s terroir. If craft cider celebrates diversity, Flynt’s book is a record of the grand assortment of apples that once existed in the South.

“It’s clear that all Southerners grew and grafted apples, chose and named apples,” she says—“close to 2,000 varieties. The Southern-spawned apples were not just presidential, they were from everybody.” Though founding fathers are associated with certain well-documented varieties, Flynt is more interested in the everyday people—including Native Americans and enslaved Black workers—who contributed to apple culture in the South.

“What we don’t know about the past is as important as what we do know. I wanted to look at those blank spaces,” she says. “The history is the history—often, of privilege—the educated, people who could write, had access to having things published or had families that could preserve papers, and that’s not everybody.” She writes, for example, of Jarvis Van Buren, a white man who traveled into what had been Cherokee country in the Georgia mountains, after the Indigenous nation had been forced out. Van Buren collected fruit and grafting wood from abandoned Cherokee orchards and used these to found a nursery staffed by enslaved workers, “integrat[ing] stolen Cherokee apples into mainstream Southern agriculture, their wildness diluted, their Indigenous names disappeared, their history muted.”

All over the East, the 19th century saw an explosion of apple varieties being named and traded. But the vibrant Southern apple culture was always given short shrift by Northern writers and horticulturists. One 1845 reference, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America, mentioned only one Southern apple. “Patrick Barry’s book The Fruit Garden, from 1851, had 133 apples, and I think only three or four Southern apples,” says Flynt. “There just wasn’t the awareness.”

The golden age was not to last; interestingly, slavery in the South may have indirectly contributed to the ultimate decline of the Southern apple. The founder of the Northwestern apple industry, Henderson Luelling, moved west from his native North Carolina in the 1820s because his Quaker family were committed abolitionists. He hopped from state to state before landing in Oregon and starting a commercial nursery. “As it turned out,” Flynt writes with understatement, “apples grew very well in the Pacific Northwest.”

Apples and the foodways around them had woven themselves into many aspects of history—including local history. The Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park displaced mountain communities where families once grew apples for brandy and food, drying them on cabin roofs. The Dickie Bros. Orchard in Nelson County developed a variety named after the peak that overlooks the orchard, Priest Mountain (Pride of Du Priest, later shortened to Pride of Du Pres). And of course, the Albemarle Pippin enjoyed an international reputation.

But the ascendancy of the new Northwestern industry, plus technological changes like rail transport, pushed Southern apples into decline and favored the rise of more standardized, shelf-stable varieties—think Red Delicious—at the expense of the older, quirkier types. (The names of those varieties are a treat in themselves: Taliaferro, Limbertwig, Grimes Golden, Early Strawberry.)

As for Flynt, she eventually decided to give up cider making and focus on growing apples—and on writing. “I’m sorry she stopped making cider,” Godinez says of Flynt, whom she sees as an expert ambassador for artisan cider in a market flooded with mass-produced beverages. Yet the book is lovingly crafted, just like a small-batch cider; Flynt’s personal story brings a terroir to the book that enlivens the meticulously researched history.

“Now that I’m out talking to people about the book,” she says, “I see it in new ways. So many people say, ‘I love that memoir.’”

Categories
Culture Food & Drink

Growing home

“I don’t claim to be an overly great farmer in terms of produce, but I grow farmers.” Michael Carter, Jr. Photo by Eze Amos.

To call Michael Carter, Jr. a farmer would just barely scratch the surface. He does raise crops, but mostly what he grows are connections—to history, to other Black farmers, to markets and opportunities. It’s all encompassed in the term Africulture, also the name of the nonprofit he heads. Sitting in a farmhouse in Orange County, on land his family has owned since 1910, he begins his story by connecting the present moment back to events that took place decades ago.

The land had gone into probate and nearly left family hands, but during the 1940s, Carter’s great-grandmother and her children committed to paying off the debt. “Her three oldest sons were drafted to go into World War II, and they all sent back $29 a month Army pay for two to three years,” he explains. “And her daughters worked as domestics.” They pooled their income and saved the land. “She wanted to make sure she had a place for her boys to come back to and call home,” he says. “It really came close to us not being able to sit here [today].”

It’s not just this visit from a reporter that might never have happened; in a very roundabout way, Carter’s entire life’s work seems to flow from this land.

Photo by Eze Amos.

Surrounded by relatives who farmed and taught agriculture, he says he was “inundated” with the subject as he grew up, but resisted joining the tradition. “I wanted to be an investment banker or a street cop,” he says. “I was in 4-H and FFA and never found it attractive because I never saw Black people in those activities. As I got older the racial bias and cultural differences become much more glaring. There’s guys walking through with Confederate flags on their belt buckles. I stopped participating.”

Yet he majored in agricultural economics in college and, after becoming an African Hebrew Israelite in 2003, found himself farming on an Israeli kibbutz. Growing food took on spiritual importance.

“One of the first things in Genesis, Adam is placed in a garden, aka a farm, and he’s given instructions to till and keep the garden,” Carter says. “That gave me a different type of outlook on agriculture” as an honored, ancient occupation.

More travels followed: to Kenya and especially to Ghana, where he lived for five years in the mid-2010s, working on various agriculture initiatives—like helping conventional farmers transition to organic methods. Living in Ghana’s capital, Accra, he began supplying familiar American vegetables to the African American expat community there—things like kale, broccoli, and lettuce. Though growing those crops was a challenge in the Ghanaian climate, the project “planted a seed of creating a niche,” matching specific foods to specific customers. Yet he still wasn’t connecting all these experiences to his family legacy.  “I could not see the foundation I was standing on.”

Then, in July 2017, something changed. Carter was home in Virginia for a visit, intending to go back to Ghana, but his father had begun to press him to take over the family operation. At a cookout with his relatives here on the farm, he says, “The land started speaking to me.” Reveling in family camaraderie—and seeing his four sons on the land that his ancestors had sacrificed for—awakened a connection. Even in the days when legal barriers and the KKK tried to put Black land ownership out of reach, Carter’s family had held onto these fields and woods. Now, he felt it was time for him to take up the reins. By September, he’d relocated his family to Virginia, and in November, he founded a new business called Carter Farms.

“I contacted the owner of a restaurant in D.C. called Swahili Village,” he remembers, “and inquired about growing managu”—a leafy green that’s eaten in Africa. “We’re in the second largest area of African immigrants in the country, the D.C. metro area. [Those immigrants] usually don’t have access to their traditional foods. I did some more market research and found 15 African grocery stores between Fredericksburg and Alexandria. [I said,] ‘Uh oh, that’s a market.’” He started selling crops like managu and taro leaf wholesale, and found he couldn’t keep up with the demand. “I would take stuff to [the stores] and before I got to 95 from Route 1, they called and said they sold out. It was exciting but frustrating.”

Photo by Eze Amos.

Meanwhile, he began to think about a broader mission. “Carter Farms pivoted to growing farmers versus growing produce,” he explains. “We structured Carter Farms to be much more of a business that also farms. We received a beginning farmers grant in 2019 to help out farmers as an incubator and have grown that ever since.” His focus became the larger community of African American farmers. In 2020 he founded Africulture, a nonprofit arm that supports farmers and promotes the history and culture around Black farmers and African crops.

He had already been involved in getting Black farmers connected to customers—including a big one: Aramark, the contractor that services UVA Dining. Aramark’s regional vice president, Matt Rogers, says he met Carter in 2018 through a partnership with the Local Food Hub and 4P, organizations that do support work for local farmers. “We were starting conversations about how to improve our local supply chain purchases and understanding what the barriers are,” Rogers says. Carter became a voice for BIPOC farmers—a group that Aramark, in conversation with UVA’s Working Food Group, had targeted for greater spending.

“This is a demographic that has been well underserved and is a little bit distrusting of large institutional food systems,” Rogers says. “He is of that community and they trust him.” The barriers for small farmers can be as simple as where to park on UVA Grounds when making a produce delivery.

But Carter says he was concerned about the financials, too. “You need to pay a retail price but buy a wholesale volume,” he remembers telling Aramark. “I’m dealing with vegetable farmers, not commodity farmers that can make up for their low margins with volume.” He saw the African vegetables he’d been encouraging farmers to grow as a niche with both economic and cultural value: “We’re going to be growing some things you can’t get anywhere else.” If there was nutritional and educational benefit to Aramark serving ingredients like Nigerian spinach or callaloo, then Black farmers growing those crops could earn a premium.

Carter secured promises from Aramark to pay well and help out with the food safety certification process, which can be burdensome for small growers. The company also offers up-front guarantees to buy farmers’ produce. “I was shocked they had come to this,” Carter says frankly.

His approach wasn’t just to make demands. He also tried to get people excited. “The [Aramark] chefs came out here [to the farm], and we provided them some ethnic vegetables,” he says. “The chefs were inspired and started to create recipes.” He in turn went to UVA to give a presentation about the ingredients, sending students home with recipe cards in their pockets.

Clif Slade is a third-generation Surry County farmer, one of many Black farmers Carter works with. Carter showed him that sweet potato leaves are a delicious crop that can be sold, turning Slade’s “worthless” acre of leaves into a commodity. Supplied photo.

One of the crops Carter highlights is already familiar in the U.S.: good old sweet potatoes. But he’s been spreading the word that the leaves, not just the tubers, are delicious and full of nutrients.

It was news to Clif Slade, one of the many Black farmers in Carter’s network. Slade is a third-generation farmer who grows sweet potatoes on 15 acres in Surry County. For years, he’s been selling “slips”—baby sweet potato plants that other gardeners transplant into their plots in spring. He ships half a million of these around the U.S. every year between May and July, but he’d never considered the leaves to be a crop in their own right.

“I have an acre of plants that basically is worthless come July 15; I can’t sell them anymore,” he explains. “In comes Michael Carter and he says ‘Let’s see if we can sell them.’ We cooked [the greens] and they were very delicious. If it can turn lucrative, we can have these sweet potato greens right on up to Christmas.”

He says that Carter’s marketing savvy adds something important to his operation. “Mike’s a very enterprising young man,” he says. “This is like a byproduct, but it’s very scrumptious. I’m more of a grower than a marketer, and I’m 69 years old. He knows how to use all the social media. If it wasn’t for Mike I wouldn’t even try this.” He’s exploring the possibility of supplying both UVA and William & Mary with sweet potato greens, and says that Carter has plans for a public event at Slade Farms with food trucks and chefs.

According to Rogers, Aramark is already buying from eight or nine BIPOC farmers to supply UVA Dining. It took a few years to get there. “That was fall last year, really having this thing off the ground,” Rogers says. “Everything to that point was more capacity-building.”

Meanwhile, Carter continues to expand the scope of his mission. He sees his support of Black farmers as the preservation of an endangered way of life. “In 1925 in the state of Virginia, there were approximately 50 to 52,000 Black farmers,” he says. “[By] 2017 there were 1,333 Black farmers. That’s a 98 percent decline. This is an extinction-level event. In any situation where you have extinction you have to change the environment. I’ve sought to change the environment.”

As ever, that means attending to culture as much as to the business side. “I learned in Ghana that everything is connected,” he says. He keeps on finding more links: between the African-derived banjo and the gourds it can be made from; between young kids of color and the natural world; between American weeds and the African plants they sometimes resemble. The farm continues to act as a base for Carter to share these moments of expansion with all kinds of visitors. “When people leave here I want them to leave full, not with bellies, but with knowledge and soul being full,” he says.

Carter is teaching an Africulture course at UVA—bringing the connections to an audience on Grounds, even at a moment when diversity initiatives at the school are under attack. “I never expected someone would ask me to consult with a major corporation or teach at a university,” he says.

“I don’t claim to be an overly great farmer in terms of produce, but I grow farmers. And my greatest commodity is my story.”

Now growing

At Carter Farms, Michael Carter, Jr. plants many vegetables that are native to Africa, and are popular ingredients for immigrant communities in Virginia.

Managu

Common in Kenya and surrounding regions, managu leaves are often cooked with other greens.

Taro Leaf

Poisonous before cooking, the leaves of the taro plant are a staple in Africa and Asia.

Nigerian Spinach

This is an African green that’s used in soups and stews in many countries across the continent.

Callaloo

A rich leafy green that is frequently made into a popular Caribbean dish of the same name.

Sweet Potato Greens

The classic sweet tuber’s leaves have plenty of nutrients and flavor.

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Arts Culture

Something borrowed

Selected pages from Studies of Ancient Masters (Gakko-jˉo), Kanˉo Tsunenobu (Japan, ca. 1695) Ink and color on silk and paper. Photo: The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA.

Remixing, riffing, playing with memes: These are artistic modes that we sometimes think of as belonging to our own time, as though it was only in the 20th century, and only in Western countries, that artists began to knowingly recycle material. Think Roy Lichtenstein, Beastie Boys, and anybody who’s used the image of RBG’s lace collars. But artmaking has involved self-conscious imitation for a lot longer, and in a lot more places—including several hundred years ago in Asia, as revealed in “Earthly Exemplars,” a small exhibition of Buddhist art now showing at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA.

“The exhibition features materials mainly from the 17th through 19th centuries,” says curator Clara Ma. “That was a time when there was lots of cultural exchange and diplomatic exchange between Qing China and Tibet, and also there are connections between China and Edo Japan through trade.” In choosing pieces to highlight—from elaborate paintings called thangkas to sculpture to an astonishing painting on the leaf of a Bodhi tree—Ma hopes to demonstrate that China, Tibet, and Japan were involved in a complex swirl of cross-influences. 

Walking into the show at The Fralin, that concept probably wouldn’t hit you immediately. Instead, you might be struck by the delicacy and precision of, say, a painting from Tibet, made in the 17th or 18th century, showing the Goddess of the Victorious White Parasol. She has a long name (Ushnisha Sitatapatra), a thousand faces, and a thousand arms, which are actually depicted in a dizzying, overlapping arrangement like a sunburst or a bullseye. Her ferocious power—maybe even greater than a Supreme Court justice—contrasts with the serenity of the deities around her, and the loveliness of flowers and leaves.

Or you might be drawn to a thangka, also Tibetan, showing the life story of Pindola Bharadvaja, an arhat—a disciple of the Buddha, that is, venerated in his own right. In this piece, he sits on a throne in the center of the painting, surrounded by vignettes from his biography. The piece is lush and rich, even with a constrained palette of red, green, blue, and white; it conjures a whole world and a lifetime. And Ma says its landscape, and the ornate Chinese-style throne on which the arhat sits, are elements a Tibetan artist would have borrowed from the art of the Qing dynasty. “There would be missionaries or diplomats the Qing sent to Tibet with gifts of paintings, or vice versa,” she explains. “So the style or the composition, they got influenced through these exchanges.”

She says we can think of these connections like souvenirs—bringing home a new idea for how an image could look or a technology for making something, like the woodblock print that closes the show. But maybe an even better analogy is fashion. To get dressed is to refer to any number of cultures and histories, making oneself a living library of clothes. A Japanese album from around 1695, made by a court painter named Kanō Tsunenobu, amounts to an artistic wardrobe: Tsunenobu used the album to demonstrate his mastery of different painting styles, including the loose, poetic look of the paintings Ma highlights.

“The way he created it was to study Chinese painting at the court,” she says. “At the time, China was the center of Zen, and lots of Japanese monks went to China. They’d bring back a lot of the Chinese paintings. He’s making the claim, setting up that lineage for his own art school: ‘We have these deep connections, our school has this long history.’”

It sounds very modern, like a 21st-century piano student learning Bach one day and Scott Joplin the next. “I guess one way to see that is that these artists, for them to establish their own identity is not to come up with something totally new, it’s to connect themselves to different traditions.”

There’s even another layer of borrowing going on here, she points out—one that she wasn’t able to represent in this show. “They are all making connections to India,” she says, “but I didn’t select any Indian artworks. It’s all about these regions trying to connect back to India.”

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Arts Culture

Touch me not

The Cleopatra Project expands the collaboration between UVA Health System, the Blue Ridge Poison Center, and Virginia Master Naturalists with an educational booklet about poisonous animals, illustrated by members of Firnew Farm Artists’ Circle. Images courtesy of the artists.

Back in 2013, Alfred Goossens—a certified Virginia Master Naturalist—started to think about poisonous plants. How often, he wondered, were outdoor enthusiasts like him encountering species that might actually be harmful? “There are poisonous plants in our day-to-day life,” he says, “whether in the backyard or when you’re hiking, that many people don’t know about.”

He and some other Master Naturalists ended up talking with Dr. Chris Holstege, who’s not only a toxicologist in the UVA Health System, but also director of the Blue Ridge Poison Center and the Department of Student Health and Wellness. “I went to him and said, ‘How much do you see in the ER?’” Goossens explains. “The incidences were very high.”

It was the genesis of a multidisciplinary project meant to educate the public about plants—and, later, animals—that can cause trouble for the human body. Its called the Socrates Project, after the ancient Greek philosopher said to have been executed using the poisonous hemlock plant. The project brought together artists, naturalists and toxicologists to produce a free booklet published in 2020, featuring lovely artwork depicting 25 plants with ugly effects, plus information about how to identify them in the field.

By Berry Fowler.

Now there’s a follow-up called the Cleopatra Project (remember the legend of her suicide by snake bite?) that focuses on animals. The booklet will be published later this year, and as a preview, the lobby of the Student Health and Wellness Center is currently displaying many of the artworks and information for both plants and animals. Members of the Firnew Farm Artists’ Circle in Madison County have supplied the art.

“We’re trying to get students much more engaged in the outdoors,” says Dr. Holstege, explaining why the exhibition is located where students come for health care. “[Doctors are issuing] ‘nature prescriptions’ for everybody, not just students.” Anyone who lacks experience with the nastier local species would do well to bone up a little as they venture into the otherwise very healing great outdoors.

Holstege says that while some toxic species are very well known—think poison ivy—others might come as a surprise, like the beautiful but inedible berries of the pokeberry plant (Phytolacca americana). “Young kids eat them,” he says, “and they cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. They might have to go in for fluids because they get dehydrated.” Adults foraging for wild leeks, meanwhile, might mistakenly harvest American false hellebore (Veratrum viridae), which is potentially fatal.

On the animal side, snakes get a lot of attention, but spiders and caterpillars can also mess up your day. “We certainly get a number of black widow envenomations each year,” says Holstege. (By the way, if you’re wondering about the difference between venomous and poisonous, Holstege explains that venom is injected, as in a bite or sting, while poison enters through the skin or through eating.) The Cleopatra Project includes eight different troublesome caterpillars, five toads, two shrews with poisonous saliva, and even a jellyfish.

“The Eastern newt—it’s quite pretty, brilliant orange during its terrestrial stage—does have a poison in it,” Holstege says. “It could be a risk for pets.” 

While it’s certainly important to be aware of these dangers, the project organizers stress that all the plants and animals have a place in our world. They are part of Virginia’s ecology, and some of the very chemicals that are hazardous to humans may also find uses in medicine. The beauty of the paintings, collages, and fabric pieces in the exhibition attests to the respect of the artists for these formidable life forms.

Goossens says that as a public service project, the booklets are not for sale but are distributed to state parks, school nurses, and Master Naturalist chapters. You can also view both projects online.

Even the most familiar species can cause unexpected trouble. “A lot of people don’t know that if you have an open burn or a field fire, and poison ivy burns,” says Holstege, “that toxin gets aerosolized and gets on your skin.” So be careful with those fall brush fires, and watch your step in the woods.

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Arts Culture Food & Drink

Rooted wisdom

Kat Maier is a trained physician’s assistant with over 30 years of experience teaching and practicing herbal medicine. She will read from her new book, Energetic Herbalism, at New Dominion Bookshop on May 13 at 7pm. Supplied photo.

If Kat Maier were a plant, you could say she has released her seeds all around Charlottesville. She’s been here since 2005, teaching and practicing herbalism, so at this point she has many former students and clients in and around town. Her Belmont home, also the site of her apothecary, classroom, and garden, is a node where all these people—and many plants, from the weedy to the endangered—have gathered. The place itself, you might say, is a kind of tincture, or concentration, of our area.

On a visit in late spring, the garden is bursting with fragrant azaleas, plus the foliage of low-growing plants like goldenseal, trillium, and bloodroot. Maier is warm and welcoming, with intense blue eyes and a ready laugh. She sits in a shady backyard spot and explains that her new book, Energetic Herbalism, distills wisdom gleaned not only from her years of work in Charlottesville, but the two previous decades she spent in Rappahannock County. It’s a guide to several world traditions of herbalism and 25 of the most essential medicinal plants. She’ll give a book talk at New Dominion on May 13.

“I never went to herb school,” she says, summarizing a life history that she details more fully in the book’s introduction. “I really apprenticed to the plants. I taught myself by spending incredible amounts of time in Shenandoah National Park.”

She also trained as a physician’s assistant—a grounding in Western medicine that shows, for example, in her requirement that students bone up on anatomy, physiology, and the Latin names of the plants they use. But one senses that herbalism, for Maier, is really a matter of the spirit. “For me, the foundation is that relationship with the plant,” she says.

“I feel like she has been studying it and living it constantly for all these years,” says Katherine Herman, who completed the three-year herbalism course at Maier’s school, Sacred Plant Traditions, in 2013 and went on to found Gathered Threads, an herb farm in Nelson County. “It’s not just book knowledge. It’s just amazing the amount of wisdom that she has.”

A quick dip into Energetic Herbalism hints at the breadth of that wisdom; you might be looking for basic information on the uses of calendula, say, and find yourself reading about how the history of colonialism relates to our sense of disconnectedness from nature. Maier advocates for a lifelong practice of curiosity and humility toward plants. “Often when I lead a plant walk, people ask me whether this plant or that one is ‘good for anything,’” she writes. “Imagine if someone introduced me to you and, after greeting you, I wondered aloud whether you were good for anything, or how I could use you.”

Besides running Sacred Plant Traditions, Maier has also been deeply involved with United Plant Savers, a group that aims to protect native medicinal plants. A growing market for medicinals has threatened certain wild species, like black cohosh and ginseng. Maier’s city garden is, she says, a sanctuary for some of these plants and, she hopes, a model for others. “People are talking about how to rewild the urban areas,” she says. “We have to have many different people planting the plants. The time is now.”

She grows delicate natives—on this day, a colleague is transplanting wild yam along the side of the house—but that doesn’t mean shunning the plants that Europeans brought to North America and that usually get labeled as weeds. “Our major medicines are chickweed, dandelion, cleavers—all the plants on the Roundup label,” she says, adding that dandelion’s genus name, Taraxacum, means “remedy of all disorders.” “They were brought over as a primary food and medicine,” she says. In the age of climate change, she advocates for an inclusive view of the plants we find ourselves living with now, rather than a strict division between native and invasive.

At an earlier point in her career, she enthusiastically gathered medicinals from around the world, but she’s settled into a belief in bioregionalism—in her definition, “trying to have your food and medicine from the region where you live.” That’s why the book lists the characteristics and uses of just 25 plants. Choosing these, Maier says, was “one of the most agonizing parts of the book,” since she has knowledge of so many others. But working with a small number of plants, she says, is a mark of folk herbalists the world over. The book presents three different energetic systems—vitalism, ayurveda, and Chinese medicine—based on the idea of elements that make up the universe and the body. During her training, Herman says, this approach “gave us a well-rounded approach to the human body and how to look at herbs.”

Along with the publication of Energetic Herbalism, Maier has closed her clinical practice in order to travel and teach, as well as redesigning her clinical training. Her former students are carrying on her work in various ways—a local ecosystem of seeds she sowed, now blossoming.

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Knife & Fork Magazines

Sticking it out

At Lemongrass, Yoshihiro (pictured) and Yukiko Tauchi bring the know-how (and the flavor) from their former posts, from Foods of All Nations to Ten. Photo: Eze Amos

Yoshihiro Tauchi is tough. When he developed back problems decades ago while butchering tuna at a New York fish company, his way of “taking it easy” was to switch to restaurant work. After he healed up he started his own fish company in Washington, D.C. That was only the beginning of his adventures in the U.S.

Tauchi and his wife, Yukiko, arrived from Japan 36 years ago and have been working hard in the food world ever since. They’re warm and accommodating people with a wry sense of humor. As they tell the story of their intertwining careers, Yukiko often translates for Yoshihiro, and they finish each other’s sentences with the ease born of a long partnership. 

The two moved to Virginia in 1998 to help Foods of All Nations launch the concept of takeout sushi in Charlottesville. By the time the landmark restaurant TEN opened in 2006 on the Downtown Mall, Yoshihiro’s skills as a sushi chef were recognized enough around town that he was invited to come to TEN as a sous-chef. He spent nearly eight years in that renowned kitchen, while Yukiko stayed at Foods of All Nations. 

The couple dove back into entrepreneurship in 2013, buying the sushi spot in York Place then known as Miyako. The Tauchis changed the name to Kokoro—meaning “heart.” But Kokoro turned out to be a popular name, and the couple ended up on the wrong end of a trademark lawsuit. Ever resilient, they changed their name to “Mican”—a tribute to the Mandarin-type oranges popular in Tauchi’s hometown on the island of Shikoku—and served up a sophisticated menu of classic Japanese food, including sushi, donburi, and ramen. Their food earned glowing reviews.

It was hard going in that location, though—so close to the bustle of the mall, and yet oddly quiet. So when their friend Pham, the owner of the Thai favorite Lemongrass, got ready to retire in 2016, he proposed to the Tauchis that they might have an easier time in his well-placed Corner location. They bought Lemongrass and merged the two menus, Thai and Japanese. Pham thought they wouldn’t have to work so hard there. 

“But not true!” says Yoshihiro, laughing hard along with his wife as he continues the tale. For one thing, although Pham provided recipes, and one of the Lemongrass chefs stayed on to help, Yoshihiro had never cooked Thai food before. Even as he worked on learning this new cuisine, he faced new competition—the Charlottesville scene saw more and more Thai and other Asian restaurants opening all the time. And then COVID-19 came along, forcing them to survive on takeout only.

The Tauchis just kept on weathering the storm, though, showing the same grit that’s carried them through so many challenges in the past. And things are looking up. “Business is getting better,” says Yukiko, now that in-house dining has returned. They’ve gotten to know their new customer base—largely made up of students, who tend to order pad Thai or panang curry more often than sushi or donburi. And they’ve figured out how to adapt those flavors to American tastes. “South Asian food has very strong fish flavors, but we changed that to be more mild,” says Yukiko. 

After 23 years in Charlottesville, these two are as much a part of the local scene as anyone. And they’re still bringing the deliciousness, one Volcano Roll at a time.

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2021 Best of C-VILLE Staff Picks

A room with a Vu

Unknowingly eat like a vegan at Vu Noodles (try the banh mi!). Photo: John Robinson

Eating vegan is great and all, but where’s the flavor? Lots of folks find it hard to let go of meat and dairy—or, rather, their taste buds find it hard. Since she opened Vu Noodles in 2013, Julie Whitaker has been trying to make it easier. Her Vietnamese noodle shop, serving almost totally vegan meals, earns points for hearty flavor, and that makes it a favorite among eaters of all stripes. 

Whitaker—Vu is her maiden name—isn’t vegan herself, but she’s always gravitated toward noodles and veggies more than meat. “I don’t eat beef or pork,” she says. “Looking at the future and how we eat is really important.” She and her husband Todd Whitaker started cooking vegan Vietnamese food in a grab-and-go format for Whole Foods and other stores, moved through a couple of retail spots, and finally landed, last May, in their current place on Water Street, right behind the Jefferson Theater.

As a Vietnamese-American kid, Whitaker always got most excited about noodle night at home—hence the glorious profusion of noodles on her menu. The vegan pho wins raves for good reason: The mushroom-based broth rivals any beef stock. “For a couple of years I was working on that recipe,” Whitaker says. “I feel like I got it down.” Folks also line up for the noodle bowl with tofu and caramelized onion. Even the crispy rolls have noodles inside.

The only non-vegan item on the menu: fish sauce. “I grew up with that,” Whitaker says. “I can’t let that go.”

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2021 Best of C-VILLE Staff Picks

Wine, pennants, pastries, and more

Triple threat: At The Workshop, find coffee, wine, and pastries for every craving.

Picture a pair of people. One’s jonesing for coffee. The other’s ready to unwind with a glass of malbec. Where do they go?

The Workshop—a combo coffee shop/wine shop that’s part of The Wool Factory complex—wants to be the answer to that dilemma. It’s all things to all craving-afflicted people: a café serving locally roasted Grit coffee, a pastry shop with delectable bites made by Cou Cou Rachou, and a wine shop where you can pick up a bottle of Domaine Fino. There are beers on tap from Selvedge Brewing. 

It’s even, says The Wool Factory’s Claire Johnson, a “general store”—so if you need a jar of Cou Cou Rachou preserves or a Wool Factory hat, they’ve got you covered. Most wine selections run between $19 and $29, and many are side projects by noted winemakers from Virginia and beyond—like Early Mountain’s Ben Jordan, who sells his Lightwell Survey vintages here at The Workshop.

Folks tend to nurse their drinks of choice in the outside courtyard as often as they take them to go, says Johnson. As for us, we recommend the mystery box of day-old pastries: four goodies for $6. Now that’s worth the trip to Woolen Mills.