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JOIN THE COMMUNITY
SOUP FOR THOUGHT
Jane Addams Hull-House Serves Hearty Helpings
Story and Photos By Judith Nemes
Hearty, organic minestrone soup and crusty multigrain rolls were on the lunch menu at Hull-House’s Re-thinking Soup gathering on a bright and breezy Tuesday in late August. But it was hard to tell if the 100-plus crowd in the dining room at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum on south Halsted turned out that day for the food or the conversation.
The guest speaker was Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA. Both he and the non-profit Viertel heads up are passionate advocates for changing the way Americans consider food as part of their everyday life.
“Every time you eat, you’re engaged in an agricultural act—that’s what we’re doing here today,” asserted Viertel as the audience dug deep in their bowls for chunks of zucchini, butter beans and heirloom tomatoes. Viertel urged his audience to get involved in issues of fairness in our food systems and suggested ways to act on those beliefs. “Slow Food is all about making change in the world we want to live in,” he offered.
Most likely, the crowd showed up for both the soup and the talk. Sparking ideas for progressive change is at the heart of Hull-House’s Re-thinking Soup program as much as it is about the humble, fresh-made soup served each week. Jane Addams, the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, created Hull-House at the turn of the 20th century as an experiment in democracy to help new settlers in Chicago secure fair jobs, adequate housing, and healthy food. Hull-House also served as a salon where activists like Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois and Gertrude Stein met with their peers and argued about how to address injustices they saw, explains Lisa Yun Lee, director of the Hull-House Museum.
Indeed, the Tuesday soup offerings today are still about assembling people to talk about social justice, with an emphasis on food activism, urban agriculture and the local environment. Of course, it’s also about soup.
The program started in the spring of 2007 when two local chefs—Tara Lane (a former pastry chef at Blackbird and Avec) and Sam Kass (formerly a sous-chef at Avec)—were searching for a location to cook small private dinners for influential Chicago couples, including the Obamas. At the same time, Lee and her colleagues at Hull-House were thinking about ways to re-invigorate the dining room space in the museum and tap back into the fertile history of the spirited debates that used to occur there.
“Local food was our passion and Lisa (Lee) wanted lively progressive conversation, and that’s how we came up with the idea of making soup and creating a lecture series to discuss ideas,” recalls Lane. “We made a gigantic pot of carrot soup that first Tuesday, did a ton of outreach to get the word out, and waited to see who would show up.”
About 50 people came that first week and the four long tables in the Arts & Crafts historical landmark dining room have been packed elbow to- elbow on Tuesdays ever since. An eclectic mix of diners often includes food enthusiasts and activists, University of Illinois students, bike messengers, nurses who work at nearby hospitals,moms with kids, and museum staffers. Hull-House is located on the UIC at Chicago campus and is part of its College of Architecture & Arts.
Kass has since moved to Washington, D.C., as President Barack Obama’s assistant chef in the White House. Lane now is the kitchen manager at Hull-House and she collaborates with her sister Jessica (a chef at newly-opened Jam restaurant in Ukrainian Village) to come up with the weekly soup choice. Jessica does most of the cooking, while Tara forages for produce from local growers at farmers markets. A donation from Whole Foods Market enables her to buy other ingredients she can’t find locally, especially in the winter months. They also get 200 bread rolls from Nicole’s Bake Shop each week.
This summer,Hull-House reaped the first harvest of its own organic garden located a block away that it’s leasing from UIC. Ryan Beck, the museum’s “gardener in residence”, built a hoop house on the lot and is expected to supply the soup makers with fresh veggies this winter. In addition, an ambitious canning and preserving effort was underway in the early fall to stockpile the local bounty, notes Lee.
“We want our efforts to be sustainable, so we decided to get in on the urban agricultural movement and begin growing some of our own food,” she adds.
How do the sisters decide what to cook? After all, they typically need a minimum of 100 pounds of vegetables for the 40 gallons or so that ends up in the pot.
“It’s a bit of a dancing act every week,” admits Lane. “We see what the local farmers can get us, what’s at the height of the season, and what produce we should expose to the audience.”
The sisters often cook with heirloom produce and display some of the vegetables on the tables. Lane hopes diners will be intrigued by the unusual items they may be eating in their soup and be inspired to try them again at home “We’re trying to shorten the distance between the farmers and the person who’s eating their food,” she explains.
On occasion, guest chefs from local notable restaurants will come in and add a dash of their own personality to a batch of soup. Last winter, Bill Kim, owner of Le Lan and urban belly, made a Korean version of a classic Latin-American pozole with kimchee, hominy and fish sauce. This season, participating chefs will include Paul Virant from Vie and Boka’s Giuseppe Tentori.
The speakers at the meals cut a wide swath of the food movement. This fall, expected guests include local artisanal farmstead cheese makers and a group of chefs and farmers from Beijing who will talk live via Skype about urban agriculture in China (see below).
Kellen Marshall-Gillespie, a Ph.D. student in the Ecology Department at UIC, came for a bowl of soup that August day when Josh Viertel spoke. She also was hoping to get ideas for her dissertation and learn more about food activism. Gillespie co-owns a business in Calumet City that helps African Americans and Latinos create their own backyard gardens.
“Listening to Josh gave me a different perspective of the big picture,” she confessed. “I was hardened about food issues within the black community and now I see there’s a bigger problem with how food systems are set up all over the country.”
Hull-House’s Lee envisions the Re-thinking Soup program as an opportunity to forge new communities of people who gather to have lively debates about the food movement with individuals they might not otherwise meet.
“Jane Addams believed everyone had something to contribute and we want to get people at these long tables to spring up conversations with each other,” says Lee. “With every bowl of soup, we hope to expand the dialogue about food justice.”
It’s more than just the soup. It’s soup for thought.
Judith Nemes is teaching a journalism class this fall on Environmental Reporting on green issues and urban sustainability at Columbia College Chicago. When not in the classroom, she is most likely out in the field, visiting a farm, with camera in tow.
Hull-House Kitchen: Re-thinking Soup: Every Tuesday, 12-1:30 pm, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Residents' Dining Hall, 800 South Halsted. Easily accessible by public transportation. FREE (donations gladly accepted).
SCHEDULED AT THE HULL-HOUSE RE-THINKING SOUP PROGRAM:
