Gathering Our Voice: The Story of Food in North Central Washington

Looking at the past can sometimes cause us to discover new and exciting directions for how we can improve our future. As a society, sometimes we can get off track due to our wanderings and quests for economic efficiencies. One place where this is clearly evident is in our food systems. But sometimes what is right for the global economy, doesn't make sense in our local communities. It is important then, to take a closer look at the past when our local economies were more robust to know how we can improve and revitalize the rural areas we all care about.

A non-profit in North Central Washington has done just thought. In their new half-hour DVD "Foodways & Byways – The Story of Food in North Central Washington", IRIS (the Initiative for Rural Innovation and Stewardship) asked just that question, "What can we learn from the past that can help us build a strong local food system today?"

I was fortunate to have a small hand in this endeavor, by creating the North Central Washington map used in this production. I encourage you all to check out this project and learn more about IRIS. And for goodness sakes, watch the short trailers online and consider buying the DVD!

Guest Blog: My Sister Talks Local Food in NY

This week on Eat What You Grow my youngest Sister shares her experiences in New York at farmers markets and local farms:

I am a proud Washington native but I moved to New York two years ago when I landed an AmeriCorps VISTA Fellowship with Siena College in the Capital Region of New York. Upon first getting here, I judged this area pretty quickly. The boarded-up, vacant buildings were my first clue that it was once a booming industrial town and now it is a dying city. Most of this region's population is living at the poverty line or just barely over. Besides the local colleges and state office officials supporting the economy, there isn't much more to say for this area. That's what I saw and believed for a long time but now I don't think that is so accurate anymore. So what did I discover?

If you're at all familiar with Upstate New York, you know it is pretty rural. Rolling hills of green deciduous trees go on for miles and most of the land is owned by farmers. One of the biggest crops here is apples. Go to any given grocery store and you'll find freshly squeezed apple cider. At the local farms, you'll find apple cider donuts (some of the best donuts you'll ever taste).

One of my favorite local farms that sells apple cider donuts is Indian Ladder Farms. I have visited several times to not only get the delicious donuts but also to pick apples and I have also been to Bowman Orchards where I have picked strawberries. Yesterday, I got to visit a new farm called Samascott Orchards. It was a beautiful farm in Kinderhook, NY and I picked sour cherries, gooseberries, currants, and blueberries. I tried not to sneak in too many fresh berries off the trees and bushes, but they were so good and so unbelievably fresh. How can I ever go back to the grocery store? And just out of curiosity, have you ever seen a gooseberry at a grocery store? You have got to try one. Just a short drive out of the local cities and you'll find yourself in this rural paradise. It's hard to leave the countryside, but the great thing is, you still have access to it when you get back.

I found a way to access local farm produce at my local farmers' market in Troy, New York. The Troy Waterfront Farmers' Market is every Saturday all-year-round. You can find just about everything there like fresh produce, baked goods, condiments and preserves, sweeteners and sweets, flowers and plants, household items and artisan wares. My favorite items have always been the rare alfalfa honey, freshly made pesto, milk from Battenkill Creamery, and the homemade soaps. I often go there with no agenda but just to take in all the wonderful sounds and smells of the market. For many years in a row, this market has been named the best in the Capital Region.

You can really tell that our local cities support local gardening and farming. At many of the local farmers' markets, credit cards and food stamps are accepted, people are using reusable bags and containers, and community members are finding vacant plots of land and repurposing them for community gardens. There is a movement here and it is inspiring. Maybe this area isn't what it used to be in terms of economic wealth and power of the industrial period, but it is a great example of establishing city-farm relationships and supporting ways to get fresh, local produce into the homes of our communities. Whether you grow your produce in a local community garden, buy it at the farmers' market, or drive a short distance to pick fresh crops yourself, the Capital Region of New York is a great example of the growing national movement to eat fresh foods grown locally. Join the movement and find your nearest farmers' market or family farm and you won't be disappointed!

Too Fat to Fight

I went to a talk on Tuesday all about the Farm Bill. Have I lost anyone yet?

For liking food so much, I don't know much about the farm bill so I took this as an opportunity to learn and I'd thought I'd share some of my thoughts from the evening. The featured speaker was Daniel Imhoff, author extradonaire. He's written such books as Food Fight - The Citizen's Guide to a Farm and Food Bill, CAFO - The Tragedy of Industrialized Animal Factories, and Farming with the Wild - Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches. I hadn't heard a word in my life before this about Daniel Imhoff but these are some pretty awesome books and he has some really interesting things to say about the farm bill and food and farming in our country.

Here are a few interesting pieces of information I learned right off the bat. First, if you could summarize the farm bill with a dollar bill, 70 cents of it would first go to nutrition. Nutrition is the government's way of saying food stamps. Forty million Americans are on food stamps and the farm bill directly supports this effort to feed America's poor. About 20 cents goes to commodity crops. When the farm bill started, over a 100 crops were subsidized by the government. Today, the government subsidizes just a handful including corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, and rice. Roughly ten percent of the farm bill goes to supporting conservation, mainly programs supporting the Wetlands Reserve Program and Conservation Stewardship Program.

The farm bill has an interesting history. It originated during the Great Depression to help farmers and people struggling in America to feed themselves. By paying farmers for surplus food, farmers were able to keep farming and the hungry were able to be fed. In the 1940's, the Child Nutrition Act was passed creating the school lunch program we are familiar with today. The military needed strong, young men to fight in World World II and many were malnourished until this program was started. Over the next several decades, farming became a big business in this country as our farming techniques begin to industrialize. The average farm size grew bigger than ever before and the farmers that remained through these trends are most likely growing one of the commodity crops mentioned above. These are the crops that feed the majority. Interestingly enough, Daniel Imhoff noted during his talk, that in farm bill speak, a speciality crop means fruits and vegetables. Something is definitely wrong with that! Essentially, what we are told to eat (the food pyramid we all know, fruits and vegetables rank highest for what we should be eating most) is directly inverted to how we farm in this country and where our farm subsidies go. And this folks is where the farm bill turns into a food fight!

At the end of the talk, Daniel Imhoff fielded an interesting question with an interesting answer. Someone asked, "With budget cuts facing just about every program in the country, why aren't we also cutting military spending? How does the farm bill play into this?" Imhoff addressed that question by saying the military is potentially our biggest ally in working for a better farm bill. Not the answer I was expecting! Remember how I mentioned the beginnings of the school lunch program, young men were too malnourished to fight and the country needed to change this? It was in our national interest back then to have strong, healthy young fighters. Young military recruits today, are increasingly struggling to pass fitness tests because they are too fat. More and more, the young generation of today is too fat to fight! In the 1940s, our young soldiers needed a nutrition boost. Like those soldiers, the youth of today are in need of one too! A boost consisting of fruits and vegetables, not high fructose corn syrup. The military is also concerned about CAFOs, or confined animal feeding lots. The majority of meat (chickens, turkeys, pigs, and beef) we eat in this country is processed through just thirteen slaughter houses. The military recognizes that these operations are terrible breeding grounds for disease and could potentially be grounds for a terrorism attack, given how quickly disease can spread from one location to the mouths of millions of Americans.

The farm bill isn't just for farmers or big business. The farm bill affects us all. Food is central to our well being and so are the practices of how we farm including the people and systems themselves. Our diets have changed dramatically over the last several decades for the worse and it is time that we demand healthier options. Our government should be subsidizing healthy options not unhealthy ones. People in Washington, Oregon, and California are working together to create a movement to fight for a better farm bill. If you wish to learn more about it or get involved, I've included some links to explore.

• Northwest Farm Bill Action Group
• Farm Policy News
• Mark Bittman on Farm Subsidies

blog image: Watershed Media

Hope for Our Food System!

This kid is cool and he'll tell you all about what's wrong with our food system in five minutes. The 11 year old wants to teach people about the food system and is doing it with energy and passion. It's not every day you hear about a kid passing up the dream of playing NFL football when he's older to becoming an organic farmer instead! Listen to his TED talk and see for yourself.

Homemade Hummus from the Palouse

When visiting the Palouse recently, I had it on the top of my list to pick up some dried lentils and garbanzo beans. After all, the Palouse is known as the lentil capital of the world. The agricultural productivity of the area is something I have often taken for granted. I am a big proponent of bringing the small farm back. If only this could be a productive option again in the Palouse. Perhaps we could take a few lessons from times gone by. I visited the Dahmen Barn in Colton, WA, an old dairy barn that was restored and converted to studios featuring local artists. I wandered through and found a corner with local area history and sat down to watch farming footage from the 1930's and 1940's. Trailers full of men worked the fields, overalls and bandanas on. Horses and sweat were the fuel of the day. I thought about all this while picking up my five pounds sacks of lentils and garbanzo beans from the Moscow Food Coop and made my way home with my small gifts in tow.

What to do with five pound sacks of legumes? Well I will have plenty of time to find out! First on the agenda, homemade hummus. Hummus is something most of us are familiar with because it tastes so good! It is a Middle Eastern sauce made from mashed chickpeas, or garbanzo beans. It is often seasoned with tahini, lemon juice, garlic, and olive or sesame oil. You can serve it as a dip with pita bread or spread it on a sandwich. When you venture to the grocery store, you will notice that hummus can be fairly pricey, sometimes up to five dollars a pop! Hummus is ridiculously easy to make and I have proof because I made it this week. The five pound sack of garbanzo beans I bought (priced at about seven dollars) will surely stretch my hummus dollars for many months to come. Here is the simple recipe. Give it a try. You'll be quite pleased with the result.

2 Cups Cooked Chickpeas
Juice of 2 Lemons
2 Cloves Garlic
1/4 Cup Tahini
1/2- 1 Cup Cooking Water
Olive Oil
Kosher Salt
Cracked Pepper

Soak chickpeas overnight in water. Cook over medium high heat until tender and cooked through. Drain but reserve 1/2 cup to one cup cooking water. Add chickpeas to food processor (or bowl if you want to hand mash) with lemon juice, tahini, and 1/2 cup cooking water. Blend to desired consistency. Add more cooking water if needed. Season with salt and pepper. Put in containers and drizzle with olive oil. If you want to get more creative add chili powder, roasted garlic, herbs, or kalamata olives! Tip, if cooking a large batch of chickpeas, put the leftover chickpeas in freezer bags to use in salads and soups.

How Did You Vote?

I started my day off with some organic breakfast blend Seattle's Best coffee. I also had a piece of whole wheat toast with some Adams peanut butter on top. I've definitely gotten away from the store brand peanut butter (way too much sugar for my taste) and now buy only the fresh stuff. For lunch I had leftovers, lentil and bean chili with andouille sausage. The lentils came from the bulk food section at Whole Foods, not quite sure where the beans came from, and I know that the sausage was made locally, although I don't know if that means the pig was native or not. I also had a biscuit that I made from scratch with some Tillamook cheese. I had a small pack of fruit snacks, yes from the box, and then a couple of pieces of white chocolate (then a couple more) in the afternoon. For dinner, I used figs that came from a local farm, bacon that was also produced locally, and to spoil the gourmet theme I was going for, some macaroni salad (always a weakness) from the deli counter. 

So why the lengthy list of all the food I ate today? Well, believe it or not the food you eat says a lot about you. Obviously you can glean what my preferences are for taste and perhaps where I like to shop or how I like to cook, but there is so much more information embedded in my consumer choices that I am not even aware of. In preparation for my cooking class in a couple weeks, I've decided to read the Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I've read sections here and there in the past but never the whole book all at once so now is as good as any other time. It was on the bus this morning that I read this in the introduction, "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." To me that means that we are what we eat in the sense that what we consume casts a vote, has an impact, in an ecological, political, and agricultural sense. Ok, so I just felt some weight bear down on my shoulders!  

Agriculture has been one of the most successful innovations by humankind which has afforded us many benefits in terms of food production and supply, especially in the last fifty years. But it hasn't come without costs. Industrial agriculture, or factory farms that rely heavily on energy from fossil fuels in their food production,  has reshaped the way we eat so that most of us are totally disconnected to the relationship we have to our food.  As Michael Pollen says, "Forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat." 

By knowing where our food comes from and how it is produced we become more engaged in the connections and relationships we have with our natural world as well as have the power to affect change that benefits both society and the environment. By knowing, we will be are aware of what we are actually voting for in terms of how we eat.  Take a look at what you've eaten already today. How well do you know your food, where it's come from, and how it's produced? How are you voting? Did you buy a local product, knowing you supported small-scale agriculture that benefits both local farmers and local economies? Did you buy imported shrimp not knowing the fish stocks where it was caught are overly depleted? Did you buy organic, knowing that the product you are consuming is healthier and keeps pollutants and fertilizers out of our streams and rivers? Did you buy grass-fed beef because you know that it's food source came from renewable energy powered by the sun rather than by fossil fuels? 

The voting polls are now officially open. Vote well!

Purple Carrots

This past Saturday I returned to 21 Acres, a community sustainable farm and educational center in Woodinville, WA. I had visited this past Spring and fell in love with the quaint farm and the enthusiasm of the people who worked and volunteered there, and so finding myself not busy on one Summer weekend, I decided I would return to learn more about this place. When I arrived, the sun was shining fully on all of the gardens. I was welcomed by the volunteer coordinator who showed me my way to a work project. My task, to weed the demonstration garden at the entrance of the property and beautify it. The weeds had gotten out of control and we needed a wow factor right there at the entrance to entice people in. I consider myself an efficient weeder, having practiced and labored many long hours in my Mother's garden, so I was finished well before noon. Sunflowers, corn stalks, and lavender lined the pathways. Last May I had taken the farm tour that they offer the first Saturday of every month and decided I would take another since the farm had transformed dramatically in just three months and was bursting at it seams with new produce and projects. For instance, the Platinum LEED (highest standard for green building construction) community center 21 Acres had broken ground on in May now had a solid concrete foundation in place. The concrete was salvaged and reused from a building in the area that had been demolished. The community center is scheduled to be finished next May and will have a cool storage cellar for canned and preserved foods, vender space for a permanent year round farmers market, kitchens for food preperation and cooking classes, and demonstration areas on solar energy, green roofs, water storage and recycling, and composting. Once built, it will have the largest solar array in the northwest and be among just a few dozen buildings in the United States with this green building certification! Amazing! I can't wait till it is finished. As we began the tour, our host told us a short story about how a group of school children had toured the gardens and discovered for the first time purple carrots. How could carrots be purple that is ridiculous they said. Then breaking into her story, an older man in our group said, "isn't that something I just learned about purple carrots yesterday." You could see the smiles forming on the faces in our group when a teenage girl replied, "purple carrots? I am learning about this right now!" For such a simple thing, purple carrots, it was quite the enlightening group experience. This is what eating locally produced food is all about. For this group, in this moment, it was almost an awakening of sorts. 

The rest of the tour took us through farm fields, demonstration gardens, and wildlife habitat. I sampled raw blackberry honey that had been taken from a hive that morning! It was delicious. And as I continued to walk through all 21 acres of the farm my awakening during this recent visit (besides the purple carrots of course) was for this Saturday morning there was really no other place I wanted to be. I felt at home and I felt inspired by my surroundings.  Every volunteer and garden worker at the farm shared this same spirit, we were alike and alive in what were were doing. It is not every day you hear stories about people changing their careers to become farmers, former professors coming out of retirement to teach the community again, or individuals investing their free time to learning organic farming principles and design. Those stories are told at 21 Acres and people are starting to listen.