Young food activist looks back on 2009

by Sam Levin, one of three coordinators of Project Sprout. Project Sprout is a student led and inspired onsite garden that supplements food served in the Monument Mountain High School (in Great Barrington, MA).

Exactly 365 days ago I sat down at this same computer and wrote a New Year’s Resolution piece for the Slow Food Blog. I said that my resolution was to inspire six other schools to start organic, student-led gardens. But do you ever tell yourself you’re going to do something, say, run 5 miles, but it’s really not until you stagger back into your house panting and dripping with sweat that you actually believe yourself? I guess I forgot how much can happen in the 8,760 hours that make up a year, because I did not really believe that my resolution would come to fruition.

However, one month after I first made that resolution we traveled to Martha’s Vineyard to speak at the schools there. My friend Luke had put together a video about our project, and we presented it to the public high school and the charter school. Within days after we spoke at the high school, a Facebook group of 90 kids had formed to start a garden. I wasn’t able to make it to the groundbreaking at the charter school that happened a few months later, but apparently the kids were ecstatic.

More after the jump

National Young Farmers Coalition

by Severine von Tscharner Fleming,
founding member of NYFC + director of the Greenhorns

Your farmer’s body needs protection.

Making it together.

The young farmers movement is growing, and the circle of caring continues to expand. As we work to build a business around our love of farming and a family alongside our practice, we encounter one scary part of growing up: Realizing how deeply critical our own health is to the viability of the farm. As young farmers with brave muscles and big dreams, we invest our best physical years in finding, setting up and capitalizing a farmstead. As entrepreneurs, we take tremendous risks and reinvest the earnings in service to a new small business. As citizens, we commit ourselves to place and to the performance of an ancient and sacred duty: providing sustenance to our community. But when the operation of all these interlocking systems relies for its longevity on the physical strength and resilience of an individual body, the body of the young farmer turns out to be one of the weakest links in the new food system.

We need healthcare. Many of us cannot afford it. Farming is physical labor with physical risks and with great demands on performance over time. As a nation served by many workers, some unionized, some wearing uniforms, we recognize the importance of retaining skilled practitioners with benefits. Our firefighters, coast guards and electricians are all provided with benefits, and healthcare. Why not farmers? Our enlisted soldiers and their families are provided with coverage for their service. Why not our farmers?

The reclaiming of our local economy will hopefully, in the next decade, be characterized by greater institutional regionalism. This means schools and hospitals buying food from local farms, this means deep partnerships of commerce within residential districts and within agricultural districts. In order to succeed at this level of engagement, the farmers will negotiate the hurdles of liability, red tape and logistics of rescaling. We’ll be operating forklifts and mid-sized delivery vans; we’ll be scaling up production. We will spend a lot of time resizing, retrofitting and rethinking systems of food production and distribution, in real time, and at real physical risk to ourselves. This is important work. We cannot lose the hardworking members of the team to illness and injury. We cannot lose any fingers or toes. We cannot afford for our farmers to be distracted by financial worry associated with the birth of a child or the infection of a blister. We need to provide health coverage for farmers, young and old, owners and workers, for the longevity of the sector and of the nation.

Are you interested in joining our National Young Farmers Coalition and working with partners to figure out possible solutions to the affordable health care situation? Please join the Greenhorns mailing list so that we can keep you in the loop.

Thank you.

Why I go Slow

[this post originally appeared on the Huffington Post Green Page]

This week I did a guest post for the blog of an amazing 12-year-old named Orren Fox. He asked me to explain why I care about food/why kids should care about food.

I think it’s hard to tell someone why they should care about something. When I meet someone who doesn’t give a damn about what they eat, I think about my own indifference to, say, football. Someone could sit me down and make me watch Rudy, or explain until they’re blue in the face why this sport above all others is a prism for the human spirit or something like that. I am guessing, though, at the end of it all I’d still not really care that much about football.

So, is it possible to get someone to care about food? To put time into learning how to cook? And are the reasons a kid should care about food any different from why an adult should care about food? I believe strongly that we have a responsibility to provide kids with the tools to care, but I feel the same way about adults.

Anyway, for Orren’s blog I came up with the following list:

I love cooking because I love ingredients:  I get such a thrill from visiting farms and seeing how food grows. The first time I saw asparagus growing I was shocked to see the spears popping right up through the dirt. How had I not known that? At the farmers market I love seeing brussels sprouts still attached to the stalk, getting a lesson in how they grow, while I’m shopping. I love eating something when it’s fresh—right off the vine, right off the farm. The taste is unbelievable.

I love cooking because I love transformation: Cooking is science meets magic. Anyone who loves a good science experiment or an art project can appreciate the magic of a sharp raw onion sautéing down into something sweet and sugary. Or the incredible transformation of fresh basil, oil, parmiggiano cheese and pine nuts into pesto, a personal favorite of mine.

I love cooking because I love to share, to express my affection for friends and family through home-cooked meals: Cooking for people is a way to get people to hang out with you—it’s true! When you offer people home cooked food, they come in droves and the conversation flows and by the end of the meal everyone knows each other a bit better, and everyone feels taken care of.

It turns out that there are unexpected side benefits, too.

More after the jump

Two More Days to Say How you Feel About Corporate Control of the Food Supply

I just wrote the Department of Justice a long email detailing how, as a consumer, I am affected by corporate control of the food supply.  Now it’s your turn.  Your voice absolutely matters: they are looking to hear from “average citizens.” Like you. Like me! This is our chance to tell them what’s wrong.

For more details, click here to see our post from last week.

E-mail your comments to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) BY DECEMBER 31.  Or you can submit two paper copies of your comments to Legal Policy Section, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 450 5th Street, NW, Suite 11700, Washington, D.C. 20001. All comments received will be publicly posted – if you’d like your comment to be anonymous, please note that in your email.
(Many thanks to the US Food Crisis Working Group who have put together sample letters and more topic ideas at www.usfoodcrisisgroup.org)

Holidays: Days of Feasting, Days of Fasting

by Gary Paul Nabhan

The end-of-the-year word is out: one in seven American families is having trouble putting food on the table, just as we try, each in our own way, to celebrate the Holidays. But what does it mean to celebrate and feast on a Holy Day with hunger at the highest levels it has been in years? With the economic downturn of the last year, far more of our neighbors have had to rely on food banks and food stamps than at any time in American history. Food bank budgets are down forty percent, meaning that they must stretch every resource they have to meet the needs of their communities. Many folks this Christmas will be serving up Stone Soup, that dilute but time-tried expression of people struggling to get by while not losing their dignity.

At the same time, world leaders have just come out of weeks in Copenhagen where they attempted to grapple with the looming monster of global climate change, one which is already wreaking havoc with the food diversity of this planet. Perhaps climate change itself is not the reason that so many people are hungry this year, but I did witness first hand how increasingly unpredictable weather has added to the food insecurity of Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, Sonora and the Yucatan Peninsula. Farmers, foragers and orchard keepers have shown me how their fields, fruit trees and gathering grounds have been flooded, with root rots, blights and powdery mildews rapidly spreading through regions that have hardly experienced them before in such virulent forms. In other places, such as the rangelands of Santa Cruz County, Arizona where I currently hang my hat, the drought has been so fierce that ranchers and grape growers are still reeling from its consequences. They hardly produced enough food to put on their own tables, let alone to pay the bills.

And yet we all go into the holidays hoping to share some kind of feast with family and with friends… something to rekindle our hopes, to express our sense of communion, and to tangibly demonstrate that even in a makeshift potluck, the whole is greater than the some of the parts wherever the human spirit is engaged. But what if we made the commitment this year—between Christmas or Hanukah and New Year’s Day—- to devote just one day to fasting, to volunteer at soup kitchens or food banks, and to reduce our own consumption, transferring whatever goods we have to others who may be more in need. Is not that another, fresher form of communion? Is that not a feast as well? Is that not its own expression of our love for humankind?

This year, for many, there is not only no room at the inn, but the all night café on the outskirts of town is closed. We must make due with whatever we can find out in the stable—- a bag of oats, a bag of corn, some spring water and some bitter herbs. Let it be a feast that we remember, one that can reunite us with rather than distance us from the rest of humankind, especially the poorest of the poor. And let us go into this next year sowing the seeds of food equity and food security for all, for that is the true universal health care for our planet.

Gary Nabhan, OEF, is the founder-facilitator of the Renewing America’s Food Traditions alliance, and the Sabores Sin Fronteras/Flavors Without Borders Foodways Alliance. 

Saving the Family Farm

Usually when we talk about saving the family farm, we are referring to the need for a new generation of farmers to replace the aging farmer population, the need for affordable land for these new young farmers, and the need for economic assistance for the failing rural economy.

Looking back on the past decade and looking ahead to 2010, it might also start to mean something else.  Climate change has brought new woes to the family farm in the form of floods, drought and tornadoes, as well as resulting disease and problems like late blight etc. 

The summer of 2008 was a sad tale for Iowa farms ravaged by the overflowing rivers.  Obviously large scale industrial farms were hurt by this as well, but it’s small family farms who tend to lack insurance.

The fall of 2009 brought devastation to many Georgia farms (covered recently here on our blog).  Tornadoes in Georgia in December? Very strange and possibly predictive of the future unpredictability of our weather.

Of course weather has always been a risk factor for farmers, so that’s not a new story.  What’s newer, though, is the extremity of the disasters and the vulnerability of the farmers.  With profit margins so slim, and the existence of the farmer so tenuous, how can they survive?

While it wasn’t a natural disaster that claimed hundreds of chickens on Terra Madre delegate Alexis Koefoed’s Soul Food Farm last September, there are some interesting things to be gleaned from that story including that this beloved and seemingly successful farm was living on such a slim margin that the farm would have been put out of business if not for the community rushing to fundraise and help.  There is also here—and in the story of the Slow Food chapter-founded Georgia Flooded Farms Relief Fund—a story of rescue and rebounding.  Soul Food Farm was in fact saved by the support of its community, just as the GFFR Fund has been amazed by the generosity of its donors as well.  This evidence of how a food community can band together is extremely comforting but does not obscure the reality that as we move forward into the next decade, we’ll likely be looking at more extreme weather challenges, and relying more on our food communities to come in and lend a helping hand, financial and otherwise.

Do corporations have too much control over our food supply?

Now is our chance to speak up. For the first time ever, the U.S. Department of Justice is on a fact-finding mission looking at how big business controls food and farming—and they want to hear from YOU before December 31st.

Maybe you’ve noticed prices rising at the supermarket even while most big food companies made record profits this year;

And you probably know consumers having trouble finding good food at affordable prices, as well as farmers having trouble getting good food into mainstream markets. Please reach out to them today: the Department of Justice needs to hear their stories.

They are specifically seeking comments and stories about how corporate control of the food system affects average citizens. If you’re concerned that just a few big businesses have so much power over where your food comes from and how it’s produced, be a citizen: tell the government! Your comments will help to inform a series of workshops on the issue in the coming year.
E-mail your comments to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) BY DECEMBER 31.  Or you can submit two paper copies of your comments to Legal Policy Section, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 450 5th Street, NW, Suite 11700, Washington, D.C. 20001. All comments received will be publicly posted – if you’d like your comment to be anonymous, please note that in your email.
(Many thanks to the US Food Crisis Working Group who have put together sample letters and more topic ideas at www.usfoodcrisisgroup.org)

Getting Real about School Lunches in Birmingham, AL

by Gordon Jenkins

The movement to improve school food reached Alabama last month, when Slow Food Birmingham brought school officials, chefs, farmers and the public together to highlight the challenge schools face in serving healthy school lunches – and what we as citizens can do to help.

Right now, Congress gives schools only $2.68 for each lunch served. Most of that money goes to overhead, leaving schools with only $1 per meal to buy food. Even the most well meaning school nutrition directors can’t keep kids healthy and prevent childhood obesity if all they can afford is cheap, processed food.

The Time for Lunch Campaign is calling for Congress to invest funding in school lunch when legislators renew the Child Nutrition Act at the beginning of next year. Across the country, volunteers are working to help kids and parents write letters to Congress and organize community events.

Slow Food Birmingham launched their local campaign by showing what could be done if Congress gave schools just $1 more per meal. Read about the event on Food Revival, the blog of volunteer organizer Amanda Storey.

The relationships that grew out of the event have led to some exciting partnerships for 2010. If you’re in the Birmingham area, contact the Slow Food chapter to get involved.

Slow Holiday Suggestions

It feels like it’s been “that time of year,” since the day after Thanksgiving.  The economy’s in a bad way, so more than ever the pressure is on us to buy our way out of the hole and bring smiles to the faces of our loved ones at the same time, right? 

Ever seen “The Story of Stuff?” Now’s a great time to watch that one again or for the first time and then to think about gifts that will fill your bellies instead of a landfill: food from local producers! Consider a gift of maple syrup, pickles or preserves from the local farmers market.

From our friends at Mother Nature Network (MNN), a fine list: 10 slow food Christmas gift ideas,” including CSA membership, local wine, and a membership to Slow Food USA. Brilliant!

And from membership coordinator Sheila Karaszewski:

Confession: I start listening to Christmas songs on Thanksgiving. And I don’t stop until the tree is down, the remnants of wrapping paper are cleaned up, and the last crumbs of the cookies have long disappeared. Yes, I’m a sucker for the winter holiday season and whether we’re talking about Christmas, Kwanza, Hanukkah, or Festivus, I think all the traditions and festivities are simply divine.

More after the jump

Growing through a Grow-out

by intern Alaine Janosy

As we near the close of 2009, Slow Food Midcoast Maine is just completing its first full year of existence, and oh what a year it has been! The chapter founders decided that the chapter’s inaugural year would be spent both growing the chapter and growing out endangered varieties listed in the Place-Based Foods at Risk in New England booklet, created by the Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) Alliance in order to raise community awareness about the loss of diversity in our food supply.

Midcoast Maine’s American Harvest Picnic was the chapter’s first organized event, other than chapter meetings and signature gathering at local farmer’s markets. Organizers brainstormed a list of local farmers that might be growing RAFT-listed or heirloom varieties and contacted them during the summer to see if they would be interested in donating any produce to the October 4th American Harvest Picnic. This resulted in ten farms committing to supplying 16 items, including four RAFT-listed varieties. The 2009 growing season in New England was wet and cold and some of the donations were lost due to crop failures, but in the end over 300 lbs of local produced ingredients were donated!

The picnic was held on Sunday October 4, 2009 at The Morris Farm in Wiscasset, Maine. In addition to enlisting local farmers and producers to supply the endangered foods, chapter members also recruited nine area culinary talents to prepare wonderful dishes using the foods provided. The event was attended by over 70 people including many children. Surplus food items were donated to the Midcoast Hunger Prevention Program. This event was not only a great success, but also a great learning experience for chapter organizers. They will be applying all the lessons learned this coming year.

More after the jump