“He (Hightower) was such an enthusiastic promoter, and that he did such a good job getting the word out about Texas foods and Texas wines. California was always the end-all, be-all with the whole California food movement. Suddenly, we were doing the same thing here in Texas, with more personality. I think we sold it better, frankly. What I remember […]
Rebecca Flores
“In July of 1988, Cesar (Chavez) started a fast, and he call it the Fast for Life. And this was really around the issue of pesticides, because he had seen that even though we’d been talking about it and we knew there were cancer clusters and we knew children were dying at a very, very young age. They’re like 10,11 […]
Kate Fitzgerald
“(M)y mandate from Hightower…was: “Do something with existing resources within TDA to help create new markets for farmers and at the same time address hunger.” …In the same way that agriculture was becoming concentrated, the grocery store industry was becoming concentrated…The effect it had was the creation of what’s now known as the food desert. (Hightower) saw it as a […]
Nancy Epstein
“(W)we were the first state exchange with Israel. At the time that I left, there were 21 states that had their own memoranda of agreement with Israel. They weren’t all agriculture, some were commerce, some were technology. But we were the first that created a whole movement… There was funding from the Meadows Foundation to begin a demonstration farm in […]
Robert del Grande
“Jim Hightower was the more eloquent voice of all of us and drew us all together. It helped everything because we all concluded that we were individuals but we would be better if we all worked together as a group. I remember saying that one restaurant cannot support one purveyor. The purveyor, the grower, the farmer need multiple people so […]
Ben Delgado
“I was the mechanic, the admin guy who knew how to do contracts, knew who to call, figure out how to hire people how to bring people on board, how to schedule things out, how to organize meetings, all the understated and underappreciated, even to this day, admin stuff that has to happen in order to make an organization work…I […]
Juanita Cox
“(W)ith Hightower, we were very proud, we were able to get even stronger pesticide regulations than what California had at that time….It was the combination of having people in office that cared about the people that harvest the food for this world. It was the power that the union had built in farm workers that said we want you to […]
Martin Burrell
“His (Jim Hightower’s) initiatives about working with small and minority businesses. That was one of the things that I learned from him, and I was able to use that. I’ve been using that, essentially built a career around strengthening the environment with women and minority business because his initiative was whenever we spend money, look for opportunities to do business […]
Sam Biscoe
“But we adopted them (the pesticide regulations). Well, the big producers sued us. But the lawsuit was here in Austin. So we won that lawsuit. And for a short time, you know, some of the farmers had come around and farmworkers became accustomed to being protected in the fields. The other thing is that, the most frightening part of all […]
Jennifer Bailey
“No matter how the brand changed, Taste of Texas products still today, international, national, and local markets always sell. Opening markets for products, giving opportunities for small producers to market their product and gain visibility in the market so they can grow, and have a homegrown product that is recognizable in the market is the seed that was planted by […]