Farm to School Programs

glc4 posted a great comment last week after watching a classroom full of 3rd graders eat lunch! Thanks, glc4!

That's pretty horrendous, I must say. And the worst part, as you noted, is that the high fructose corn syrupy food they were eating were FROM HOME! Like, either they were packing their own lunches, or like their parental units were packing for them, and not packing particularly healthily. No fruits. No vegetables. Not even sandwiches, as you say! Sugar, sugar, sugar, it sounded like. Tsk, tsk! I am with you in fearing for these kids in 15 years if they don't learn better eating habits now! And no wonder it's hard to keep them focused on schoolwork during classtime! Poor teachers! And another tsk!

Again, the most amazing thing to me here is that the food was coming from home. School lunch programs have been long under fire for this sort of poor nutrition thing. Some school districts across the country have even signed contracts with "big bidness" to sell sodas and serve franchise fast-foods from McD's and Taco Bell and Domino's. They say it's "easier" or "faster" or "cheaper," but it sure ain't good for the kiddies.

In some parts of the country, parents have responded by getting organized and starting "farm to school" programs in their districts, linking schools up with local farmers who provide fresh produce for school lunches. This helps the kiddies AND it helps farmers. AND it helps build a stronger community.

For more information about Farm to School Projects - how they work and how to get one started in a school district near you - check out the Community Food Security Coalition's website:

http://www.foodsecurity.org/farm_to_school.html

Lots of good stuff there!

Of course, none of that helps directly with the problem of poor, parentally-packed lunches. Sigh. But maybe if one parent told another parent about what s/he saw in a 3rd grade classroom during lunchtime...and then that parent told another parent...who told another parent...well, maybe we could get some awareness raised at least. So, get talkin! Maybe over some triple certified fair-trade, shade-grown, organic coffee! And some freshly-baked, homemade apple pie (with apples grown at an orchard near you!) with some sharp cheddar cheese on top (from your local dairy!)

Yum! Now I'm hungry!

Until next time...eat well and be well!

Final Harvest

Alas. Summer's really over now.

Yesterday I picked up our final share of fruits and veggies from the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture program) that we joined this season for the first time. This week's harvest included Bright Lights Swiss Chard, green leaf lettuce, peppers, cauliflower, broccoli, garlic, apples, and celeriac.

"What is celeriac?" you ask. We were asking the very same question last week when it showed up in our kitchen for the first time. Celery root. Good for soups and stocks. Apparently also good to munch on raw (as was the fennel bulb we picked up last week - thinly sliced with just a touch of sea salt.) One of this weekend's projects is figuring out what to do with 4 of 'em. I might try a recipe for wild rice and celeriac soup. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, I just finished cleaning and putting away the swiss chard. It's a beautiful leafy green, I must say. I separated the stalks - red, yellow, pink, orange - from the leaves, washed both, bagged them separately. It's a bitter green, which I don't mind. I'll saute it up with a little garlic and oil and add a splash of vinegar or lemon juice at the end. Still, I must say that when the multi-colored stalks are sitting together in a bowl of cold water, being washed of their sand, they look a little reminiscent of a bowl of high fructose corn syrupy froot loops - one of my favorite Kellogg's cereals from days gone by.

It's been a good growing season, from my perspective. I really enjoyed picking up our harvest each week and taking the time to sort and clean the goods. I enjoyed having to be a little creative in using things with which I don't usually cook. I tried some new things. Baked turnips, for example, that I really enjoyed. My wife tried some new things, too, like bok choy, which she really seemed to enjoy. Less so the swiss chard, I'm afraid. Oh well, more for me.

I've especially revelled in the knowledge that most of our produce has come from a suburban farm not more than 5 miles from my suburban home and that it's been grown organically. I've loved looking at my dinner plate and knowing the source of everything on it. And I've been glad to know that what hasn't been picked up each week has gone to local soup kitchens. That, too, has been part of this CSA's mission.

It's going to be tough heading back to the grocery store for out-of-season veggies over the winter. I wish we'd been able to can or preserve some of the summer's harvest. But we'll still get to enjoy our farm-grown winter squashes for some weeks, even months to come. I'll miss the dark, leafy greens the most. And the beans. I really enjoyed picking the green beans...and the purple beans. Through the dark months of winter, I'll be dreaming of beanies...

My Soapbox on Corn

This is really part two of why I am a "food snob." When I was still in elementary school, my aforementioned anti-WonderBread eldest brother started dating a lovely woman who was to become his wife. Aforementioned lovely woman had an allergy - she was allergic to corn.

And so, anytime they were to visit, my mother and I had to prepare the larder. We had to shop. We had to find foods without corn. This may sound easy, but I assure you it is not. I just read somewhere that of the 10,000 or so products found in your typical grocery store, approximately 2,500 of them have a corn byproduct or were produced or manufactured using corn.

I suspect that that number includes things like corn-fed beef and farm-raised salmon, which is also corn-fed. But back in the early 80's, my corn-consciousness was mostly limited to food products that contained corn syrup, corn starch, and cornmeal.

It's hard to find, in your typically grocery store, a loaf of bread which is free of corn syrup. Likewise, soda, which almost goes without saying, and cranberry juice. Often chinese food is made using corn starch as a thickener. Did you know that? How about this: confectioners' sugar...corn starch. Most jellies, jams, ketchups, tomato-based pasta sauces include corn syrup. Bagels, pizza...you have to be careful that the bakers haven't used cornmeal on the crust. Most cereals contain corn syrup. The list goes on and on. Try it some time. Next time your in the grocery store doing your shopping, check out the labels. Look for the corn.

Anyway, as a result, from age 11 or so on, I have been trained to read food labels...carefully. And I was trained to hate corn. Well, not corn itself. I love a freshly picked ear or two as much as the next guy or gal. And I'm a sucker for the occasional Frito. Every once in a while, when my nieces are around, I'll even indulge in a bowl or two of Captain Crunch.

But for almost a quarter of a century, I've been mindful of the uses and abuses of corn and I've tried, when reasonable, to avoid products with corn byproducts. Here again, I fall well-short of my self-imposed, non-corn, food-ethic standard. Again, Dunkin Donuts.

In any case, here's an informative interview from our friends at the Christian Science Monitor with Michael Pollan who's written fairly extensively about the evils...I mean, the impact of corn:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1031/p17s01-lihc.html

And here's an interesting article about high fructose corn syrup - how it's manufactured, which is not a pretty picture - and how it can affect the human body, also not pretty:

http://www.westonaprice.org/motherlinda/cornsyrup.html

Someday I'll write about the grass- (not corn-) fed side of beef in my freezer. That's another of my favorite food-related soap boxes. In the meantime, enjoy reading about Ol' King Corn.

Food Snobbery

I sometimes call myself a "food snob." That's a not-so-nice way of saying that I'm very "food-aware." I wasn't always this way, but it's been close to thirty years at this point. I think I got it from the older of my two brothers. He is a "food snob," too; and I mean that affectionately. It's not a bad quality, in and of itself, though it can manifest in not-so-helpful ways.

For example, while we're on the subject, I remember once having a fit in a grocery store parking lot when my mother, trying to be helpful, came back out to the car with the generic store-brand of pop-tarts rather than with the true blue thing. What I wanted was blueberry frosted with the little colored sugar sprinkles. What I got was, in my mind, not fit to be opened, let alone consumed.

Food snobbery, at its worst, doesn't necessarily imply an awareness of healthful or sustainably produced foods. Sometimes it's just snobbery. And hissy fits are never called for. For the record, I am still working on controlling my inappropriate internal child-snob. I have to fight it most in large, corporately-owned grocery stores with poor selections - I walk through the aisles muttering angrily under my breath like a Hebrew prophet in a scratchy shirt - and, in particular, when I'm faced with Kraft products. But that's another post entirely. I'm sure, as you read along, you'll hear it, on occasion, crying out.

The reason I attribute this to my brother? Well, he is 13 years my senior, which means that when he went off to college, I was only 5 years old. A very formative time in my life, to be sure. I remember him coming home for a visit once and going on an absolute tear about WonderBread. It was full of air, he said. It was full of chemicals, he said. It was not fit to be consumed, he said. Or words like those. And from that day on, I don't believe I ever partook of another slice of WonderBread. His words were to me the words of revelation. They were the words of a god - a god who knew food. And this so-called "food" was not worthy of the name.

It goes without saying, however, that I did not then, in my pop-tart days, consistently apply the ethic he taught.

Life is more complicated now. I'd still say I'm a food snob, but I've realized that as an adult I follow a completely different food ethic. I might describe the old ethic best as "only eat brand name foods." I've come a long, long way from that.

Actually, I've come to realize that I now have at least 4, maybe 5 different - and sometimes competing - food ethics. They are as follows:

• only eat locally produced food
  
• only eat organic and sustainably produced food
  
• only eat foods of the highest nutritional values, ie, "SuperFoods"
  
• never eat the products of large-scale industrial "agriculture"

This is a tough standard for consumption! I always, always fall short. Sometimes radically short. I confess that some of my eating habits go against all of these rules. I have a particular weakness for DunkinDonuts coffee and donuts. For $3, and a scant 10 minutes of pleasure, I can break all of these rules at once.

You'll note that I'm neither vegetarian nor vegan. I was once. For 5 years I had an ethic of eating no red meat. That was toward the end of high school and most of the way through college. What finally wore me down was a persistent craving for a BigMac. My vegetarian ethic ended ceremoniously - a good friend was there to mark the occasion with me - at the McDonald's on route 6 in Newton, Iowa. I've never looked back. Which is not to say I have no ethic for meat consumption. See the above. And I'm sure I'll write about it soon. I'll also get back to the complications of having competing food ethics. But now I've got to go, well...eat.

Dog Food

A blogger friend of mine recently said that every dog-owning blogger eventually blogs about his/her dogs. Why should I be any different? I might as well get it out of the way.

I live with two labrador retrievers who seem to be as passionate about food as I! The male, in particular, loves almost nothing better than to stand by my side in the our very small kitchen, angling for scraps from the cutting board.

He and his sister are not especially picky, but they are happy to be healthy eaters when they must. When our boy was a still just a wee pup, we started feeding him stems of romaine lettuce in the morning as a sort of after-breakfast dessert. The stems were left over from the morning's ritual distribution to our cats of torn-up lettuce leaves. A daily bowl of lettuce seemed to be keeping them away from the African violets and the Christmas cactus. But what to do with the fibrous stems?

Ah, yes. Feed them to the bottomless dog! He'll dispose of them! And he did. Con mucho gusto!
And now his sister, too, looks forward to the morning sacrament.

They both are very good vegetable eaters. They love carrots, broccoli stems, raw potato, even turnips. They're also appreciative of fruits. They've never met an apple they didn't like. They beg for clementines, although they sometimes appear disappointed by navel oranges. Our little girl recently had her first bite of banana. She was skeptical at first, as is sometimes her way, but willing to try anything once. And, of course, she loved it and looked hungrily for more.

Berries are the best. This past summer I raised a crop of tristar strawberries in a strawberry planter on our deck. When our boy discovered them it was hard to keep him away. He'd go out to do his business, manage to get down the stairs; but then, thinking I wasn't keeping careful account of what had passed, he'd try to sneak right back up the stairs to get to the planter. I'd find him up there eating berries right off the stems. We had quite a good first crop this summer, but it did rather take a hit from the dog.

Then he discovered the blue- and rasp-berries. Our neighbor has both growing along the fence that runs between our yards. And in mid-summer, the branches began to navigate through the chain link from her yard into ours. In short order, I found that our boy was going down the stairs - and staying down - but making his way now immediately and persistently to the berry bushes, pulling both kinds off the branches, raspy stickers in his lips be damned!

A fall crop of raspberries has ripened now, and so he's at it once again. When I see him over there munching away, I have to laugh. What a fine speciman of his kind! Labrador retrievers, after all, came from stock that ranged in Newfoundland. They'd spend their summers working, helping the fishermen retrieve their fishful nets. In the winter, though, when food was scarce for human and canine, the fishermen would turn them loose to scavange what they could. They're survivors, these dogs. They really will eat almost anything.

I don't mean to give you the impression that my dogs have, in any sense, a narrow taste for crops alone. Like any healthy labradors they also have an abiding passion for cheese, meat, oatmeal cookies, yogurt, peanutbutter, and whatever else is offered. I do believe, however, that clementimes are the best of the best. You should see them beg!

The First Course

One of my favorite writers, Wendell Berry, has written:

"We can [not] live harmlessly or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament; when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration...in such desecration, we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want."

My purpose here is to create an outlet to reflect on food - its production, its distribution, its preparation, and its consumption.

Sometimes I worry that my passion for food is likely to consume me! I think about food almost all the time - not in an unhealthy, compulsive way, but in a reverent, mindful way. I'm mindful of my eating habits. I'm mindful of the sources of most of my food. I'm mindful of the value of my food. I try to practice gratitude for what I eat. I talk about food seemingly endlessly with my family and friends and especially with my poor wife. I must drive her crazy sometimes! Poor thing!

So, I figure that this blog could be a good outlet for my self-indulgent wanderings and wonderings about food. And maybe as I write and reflect, something less self-indulgent will emerge.

Perhaps someone else will join the conversation and we can together talk about food and hunger; about poverty and "food insecurity;" about what happens in the world when we consume greedily and mindlessly and destructively. Perhaps we can talk about "spiritual and moral loneliness," and our forgotten and neglected responsibilities toward those who are in want of food.

In fact, that conversation has already begun in my "real" world. Last night I met for the first time with a small group of people from the church that I serve as minister, and we began an eight-month exploration of food and hunger issues using the book Food & Faith: Justice, Joy and Daily Bread, which is a resource of Earth Ministry, "an ecumenical, Christian, environmental, eco-justice oriented, nonprofit organization based in Seattle, Washington."

You can learn more about their work at their website:

http://www.earthministry.org

I'm excited to have other people to talk with about my passion for food and hunger-related issues! Last night we started by talking about food, our memories of early food-related events or rituals, our favorites foods, our families' relationships to food production. By the end of our meeting we were already imagining ways to bring some of our passion and our learning back to the rest of the congregation and to the larger community. This promises to be a good year filled with wonderful conversations with delightful and passionate people!

And I am grateful. And I am inspired. And so we begin...