Heifer Heroes: A Few of Our Favorites

Heifer Heroes: A Few of Our Favorites

By Heifer Editors and Contributors

Each year, the World Ark staff honors our heroes, people who educate and inspire us to work harder in the mission to end hunger and poverty. This year’s list includes champions of good health and good food for all. Our winners pass on their skills, talents, time and expertise, and we hope they’ll motivate you to do the same.

Will Allen

The urban farmer from Milwaukee believes fresh food can be grown locally and inexpensively, even in the city. Greenhouses, worms and compost are just a few of the tools he uses to grow produce in frosty Wisconsin all year round. This year his innovative thinking, combined with a knack for sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm with young people, earned Allen a MacArthur Genius Award and the top spot on our list.

By Lauren Wilcox

Will Allen takes a break from shoveling compost at an urban project in Wisconsin.

Getting blockbuster news in the middle of the harvest was the last thing urban farmer Will Allen expected when he headed into the field last September. “I thought it was a prank caller,” he says, of the cell-phone call that he took as he was cutting heads of lettuce. But the news was no joke. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded him one of their so-called genius grants—$500,000 to be spent any way he chooses.

The foundation took notice of his work as founder and director of Growing Power, the Milwaukee-based nonprofit that teaches urban farming techniques to city residents, primarily those who are poor and have little access to fresh produce. Allen laughs off the award’s prestige. “No one’s ever called me a genius before,” he deadpans. But for a man who spends most of his days knee-deep in topsoil, working to share his good food and intensive-farming techniques, the award is a gratifying sign that his message is being heard.

Allen’s work began in 1993 when he developed a youth farming program on the north side of Milwaukee to teach teens the basics of local food systems and farming methods. That effort, fueled by Allen’s passion for sustainable farming and his natural rapport with the kids who worked for him, grew into a thriving collection of programs and training sites in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas that host interested visitors from all over the world.

Allen’s practical, hands-on approach drives his success. (He measures the youth program’s progress in pounds of worms—they started with 30 pounds, he says, and have more than 5,000 pounds now.) But he is also an innovative and ambitious thinker who has fired up many a prospective urban farmer. The training farm in Milwaukee is a rambling assortment of composting projects, most of which Allen designed and built himself, and includes tanks of hydroponic produce and fish and bins of worms. The training facilities are intended to show visitors what the possibilities are; they are not set up to offer step-by-step instruction in intensive farming. “The thing that we do best,” he says, “is inspire folks.”

Allen sees the MacArthur award as an opportunity to teach a much wider audience about the need for reform in our food systems. While the issues have been getting lots of attention from writers and thinkers, Allen believes that as someone who practices what he preaches, he can be a powerful instigator of change. “Everybody wants all the food, but they don’t realize what it’s going to take to make it happen,” he says. “It’s like, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

The timing could not be more critical for the changes Allen hopes to see. “I think we’re in a new era of agriculture,” he says. He says that as economic prospects dim worldwide, and large-scale farming continues to fail to feed the world’s hungry, “these smaller models of intensive agriculture, a more communal kind of participation and partnershipping, make a lot more sense.”

For now, Allen is balancing his new role in the public eye with continued efforts on the ground at home. Just weeks after receiving the award, the 59-year-old farming phenomenon was wrapping up a 10-day trip through the South to help other urban farmers plan their progress. Growing Power is taking stock of its own progress, too. “We’ve been at this a long time, and trained a lot of people,” Allen says. For the last year, Growing Power has been working with an independent evaluator to better understand how effective the training has been.

While the publicity will no doubt be a boon to Growing Power’s work, Allen is determined to stay focused. People have even started to ask him, he says, about a possible role for him as agricultural secretary in the new presidential administration, a notion he dismisses.

“I can’t let it interfere with my work,” he says. “I’ve still got work to do.”

Paul Farmer

We’ve admired the work of physician Paul Farmer for years and so have many others. He won a MacArthur Genius Award in 1993 for his work fighting infectious disease and providing health care to people in developing nations. The doctor immortalized in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains continues his mission to help the poor in Haiti and around the world.

By Lauren Wilcox

Paul Farmer performs a checkup on a young Haitian girl.

There’s a story that physician Paul Farmer tells about his work treating the poor in rural Haiti. A woman had brought her sick child to the clinic, and afterward, Farmer offered to carry her child home for her, to her village three hours away. In a 2003 interview with National Public Radio, Farmer recalled that the child was a sickly 3-year-old, malnourished and underweight. But nonetheless, after an hour of carrying the child along the country road, Farmer’s arms were aching. When they finally made it to the village, Farmer handed the child to the mother and collapsed, fanning himself. “My arm hurts,” he told the mother, asking her how in the world she was able to make such a long walk herself. “If I go to your clinic with one of my children,” she answered, “my arm hurts for weeks afterward.”

The incident, Farmer says, was a critical insight into the difficulties of treating the illnesses of the very poor, because it impressed upon him the importance of listening to—and learning from—the poor themselves, whom he calls “de facto experts in poverty.” In a field where obstacles are endless and often overwhelming, and the tendency is often, he says, to blame the patients, his dedication to “thinking about what patients must be going through” has allowed him to make extraordinary strides.

Born in Massachusetts in 1959 to free-spirited parents who encouraged their children to follow their interests (one of Farmer’s brothers is a professional wrestler), Farmer first encountered the problems of the rural poor in the early 1980s, when he spent time working in health clinics in Haiti. After graduating from Duke University, he helped found a community clinic on Haiti’s impoverished Central Plateau and completed degrees in medicine and medical anthropology at Harvard. In 1987, together with two colleagues, he founded Partners in Health to expand the services of the clinic in Haiti.

Throughout the years, as Farmer helped Partners in Health grow into an organization with a research and advocacy arm, specialized programs and studies in several countries worldwide, clinical practice remained a mainstay of his work. Currently a professor of medical anthropology at Harvard, he has developed pioneering, community-based treatments for AID S and tuberculosis, written several books, received numerous awards, and helped shape policy and perception of the treatment of the poor. Still, Farmer continues to see patients in hospitals in Boston and Haiti. If his life’s mission is to bring quality health care to poor people worldwide, his life’s work is to care for them, one patient at a time. For Farmer, the two are inextricably linked.

Carlo Petrini

The Slow Food founder reminds us that quality food is a right, not a privilege. The golden arches hold no appeal for this champion of locally grown, home-cooked meals shared leisurely among family and friends. This Heifer Hero teaches us that we honor ourselves and each other by revering the meals we share.

By Ragan Sutterfield

Carlo Petrini is a brawling gastronome with a refined palate and fierce dedication to food that is “good, clean and fair.” The founder of Slow Food International, Petrini began his career as a journalist and food critic, a role he has continued with weekly articles in the Italian and international presses. He has also written several books including Slow Food Nation.

Petrini’s life as an activist began when he worked to stop a McDonald’s from being built on the historic Piazza di Spagna near the Spanish Steps in Rome. The movement against McDonald’s led him to found Slow Food, an organization that fights all of the detrimental aspects of fast food, in his hometown of Bra, Italy. Three years after its founding in 1986, Slow Food became an international organization when advocates from around the world met in Paris to release a Slow Food Manifesto. “We are enslaved by speed,” the manifesto reads, “and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life... In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes.

“Our defense,” the manifesto says, “should begin at the table with Slow Food. Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.”

That defense of flavor and pleasure colors all of Petrini’s work. With a knack for politics and an intense rhetorical flair, he has become a spokesman for people who are uneasy with the cultural and environmental damage that comes from the industrialized food system.

Petrini offers a vision of food grown on economically viable small farms, prepared according to local traditions and enjoyed by friends and family around a table. It is a vision that resonates with people who are tired of eating homogenized food prepared and eaten with little care or conviviality and grown in ways detrimental to the environment. Since 1989, the lists of Slow Food members and Petrini’s friends have grown to more 80,000 people in more than 50 countries, including the Prince of Wales and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Slow Food’s influence continues to grow, with a University of Gastronomic Sciences in Petrini’s hometown, a biennial gathering of farmers and chefs called Terra Madre (‘mother earth’ in Italian), and a world food fair in Turin that showcases local food traditions.

As Slow Food grows, Petrini faces challenges. Critics have often labeled Slow Food as an elitist movement and rich person’s cause, accusations that Petrini works hard to overcome. He famously lambasted farmers’ markets in San Francisco for catering to the very wealthy with overpriced food. As Petrini said at the Terra Madre gathering last fall, “no one should make quality food a luxury’ quality should be a right for everybody.”

At age 59, Petrini continues to work hard to extend that right of quality to everyone. He invites us all to enjoy the simple pleasures of a good meal, grown cleanly, sold fairly and shared with friends.

 

Pamela K. Anderson

Some people know what they want to do at a young age. That was the case for Dr. Pamela K. Anderson, who bristled at the unfairness of the world. After earning degrees in ecology and entomology, she set out to ensure a safe, healthy food supply for the world. This director general of the International Potato Center believes the easy-to-grow root vegetable can help end hunger and poverty.

By Jaman Matthews and Austin Gelder

Dr. Pamela K. Anderson (center) meets with leaders of the ParuParu community in Peru's Cuzco Potato Park.

“Very young, I decided I wanted to dedicate my life to dealing with the social injustices of the world,” says Dr. Pamela K. Anderson, director general of the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru.

She’s doing just that at the center, where she accepted her current role in March 2005. Her mission is the same as the center’s—to reduce poverty and achieve food security by researching and promoting potatoes and other root and tuber crops.

Anderson, an ecologist and entomologist originally from Wisconsin, used her undergraduate years at Northwestern University to explore ways to tackle social injustice. She then studied entomology at the University of Illinois and both entomology and ecology at Harvard’s School of Public Health, receiving master’s and doctorate degrees. “I was really interested in this connection between health and agriculture, making sure the way we do agriculture doesn’t harm human health.”

When the United Nations declared 2008 The International Year of the Potato, phone calls and e-mails poured in. “When people first started hearing about this, there was a lot of chuckling and laughing, a lot of media inquiries that were fluff. People were asking, ‘What’s your favorite recipe? What’s your favorite potato?’” Anderson says. “When the food crisis hit, people stopped laughing and started to pick up the serious messaging we’re doing around the International Year of the Potato, pushing the importance of the potato as a world food-security crop.”

Potatoes are native to the Andes of South America, but are now grown on six continents. In 2005, for the first time, developing countries produced more potatoes than developed countries. Anderson is working with agriculture officials in China and India to help them use potatoes to feed their swelling populations. And in Africa, Anderson is pushing the orange-fleshed sweet potato as a healthy food for children. “If you can get children to eat 100 grams of sweet potato every day, it deals with vitamin A deficiencies, which are tied to night blindness and under-5 mortality,” she says.

Potatoes make sense as a remedy to the food crisis because they’re both economical and nutritious. While grain prices can fluctuate wildly, potatoes are not an internationally traded commodity and therefore remain largely unaffected by speculation. And potatoes are a good source of carbohydrates and micronutrients. One potato provides 50 percent of the daily-recommended amount of vitamin C.

In Memorium

Paul Newman

Actor, Humanitarian, Vinaigrette Guru

Oscar winner Paul Newman died in September 2008, leaving a legacy of artistic excellence and groundbreaking generosity. His winning idea to market his homemade salad dressing under the good name he earned from his decades-long Hollywood career continues to net millions of dollars annually for charities around the world.

The Newman’s Own line of salad dressings and other foods is perhaps the best-known of Newman’s philanthropic endeavors, but is by no means the only one. He helped found a network of free summer camps for children with life-threatening diseases. Newman also founded the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, a forum of executives and corporations that encourages businesses to support nonprofits.

When asked why he started his camps for sick children, Newman chalked it up to good fortune. “I wanted to acknowledge luck: the chance and benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others, who might not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it.”