That Rosebud School Garden Again

Here's a link to Montana's Evening news from Dec. 8, where AERO (Alternative Energy Resource Organization) asked me to share a little bit about the work I'm doing in eastern Montana. It is a summary of my Montana FoodCorps Blog from October. Tune in at minute 25:30.

http://www.mtpr.net/program_info/2011-12-08-132

I decided it would be a little too depressing to mention that three weeks ago the greenhouse heater failed on a particularly cold night and killed all of the tomato plants, but we will be reevaluating and winterizing the building soon so we can hopefully try planting again after the holidays.

Cooking at Christmastime!

Winter has officially arrived in eastern Montana. This past weekend we got a surprise dusting of snow and temperatures hovering around 5 degrees. Since I’m slowly recovering from a cold, it was the perfect time for cranking up the heater and the Christmas music in my little apartment and doing some cooking!

For me, the Christmas season is largely defined by food. The arrival of the holidays is signaled by seasonal coffee drinks, pastries doused in cinnamon and hearty soups. I’ve stocked up on butter for cookies, potatoes for stew and have been keeping an eye out for a candy thermometer that won’t melt while in use.

Although consumerism certainly has a stranglehold on the holidays, much of the season is defined by the food we eat. Thanksgiving, of course, is all about turkey (and pie!) but in truth the entire season revolves around food. It’s the time when families gather in the kitchen and everyone participates in the crafting of celebratory meals. Ham, prime rib, roast beast, salads, homemade bread, sweet potatoes, pie, whipped cream, eggnog, chocolate. Even the least culinary-inclined families have traditions surrounding the food they eat, whether they keep the cranberry sauce in the shape of the can or set the pudding on fire. My Christmas Eve isn’t complete without a Buche de Noel, a chocolate dessert carefully decorated as a rotting log, including gummy holly and meringue mushrooms.

During the holidays, even people who don’t normally cook take a go in the kitchen. Family expectations push people who can barely make pasta into crafting homemade dinners, and children who’ve yet to learn how to make scrambled eggs help make cookies. Even accomplished cooks are pushed past their comfort zones to produce the perfect holiday meal.

Although it’s often viewed as a source of stress, the fact that the holidays push more people into their kitchens is fantastic. The season helps to make food about more than just sustenance- it becomes a social event, one that everyone participates in and benefits from. By virtue of the fact that people do more cooking around Christmastime, I argue that this raises the quality, if not necessarily the nutrition, of the food that Americans eat.

Because it’s the season of food, this is a great time to start a conversation about cooking, and about how not nearly enough people are doing it. Our current health crisis stems from Americans’ preference for processed foods and their growing inability to produce anything independently in the kitchen. Inexperience is a formidable opponent when it comes to cooking, but Christmas time is the one time of year when it can matter less than normal. Learning to cook again is one of the most important things that Americans can do to both improve their health and well-being. Cooking ensures they eat at least a little healthier, and makes it a little less likely that they are eating alone.

What I'm Thankful For

This week is Thanksgiving, and with the (very cold) winter having already arrived, I have had plenty of time to review what I am thankful for this year. The last several months have been ones of transitions and challenges, but have provided me with an ample list of things to be grateful for. Though eastern Montana can be bizarre and lonely at times, I am so glad to be having this wonderful experience.

I am thankful for this crazy adventure that FoodCorps is taking me on. When I graduated from Earlham, I never envisioned myself playing pool with toothless bikers or walking to work every day through the scent of smoking venison, but here I am. FoodCorps came along just when I figured out what I wanted to do for a career, and made it happen faster than I could ever have imagined. At a time when many people are struggling to find jobs, I know how privileged I am to have work doing something I believe so passionately in.

I am thankful for the new friends I have in my fellow FoodCorps volunteers, and for the other AmeriCorps and Montana friends I am making all over the state. It’s wonderful to be reminded of how strong activism is across the state when it is easy for my efforts to feel defeated in Forsyth.

Although I will be spending Thanksgiving this year in Missoula with old and new friends, I am thankful for my family back in Oregon, and I will be missing the delicious food, absurd toasts and high-decibel chaos I am sure will ensue.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Making Change by Making Compost

Being a sustainability activist in eastern Montana can be frustrating, and there have been moments as I listen to coal trains screech their way through Forsyth when I have wondered what the hell I am doing here. Helping people to think differently about their food and where it comes from can seem an insurmountable task. Although this is probably the most important part of making change, sometimes I wish my work would produce something concrete that will be around even when I don’t change minds. A couple days ago, I finally got it!

Rosebud School has expressed some interest in composting, even more than for the garden. With some hard work and organization, I scheduled (and rescheduled) a day for students to learn about composting. We had a visit from Mike Dalton, founder of Gardens from Garbage, who came down from Great Falls to teach us about Bokashi composting and how to build an appropriate compost bin.

Bokashi composting is a form of cold composting that uses microbes which ferment rather than decompose food scraps. Meat cannot be added, but it can compost breads and grains as well as fruits and vegatables. The Bokashi we’re using is a dried mix of wheat bran, molasses and microbes purchased from Gardens from Garbage. A small amount of Bokashi (which smells and looks like Grapenuts Cereal) is sprinkled into the food scraps along with some carbon matter, and will produce a rich fertilizer in about 60 days without the maintenance that a traditional hot-compost pile requires. The fermentation process is anaerobic, so the compost pile does not need to be turned or watered, making this method the easiest one for the school to start with.

In preparation for compost day, I spent several lunches collecting food scraps from the cafeteria, which was one of the funniest things I’ve ever done. I stood over the table where students dump their lunches and supervised what could and could not go into the compost bin. Most of the older students easily figured it out, but for the kindergarteners and first graders it was a fascinating challenge. Their eye grew huge and they asked me in amazement, “You’re RECYCLING our food?” They could barely hold their trays steady as they asked me about every single thing on their plate- “can this green bean go in? Can my corn dog stick go in? What about this grape?” They dropped in spoons, milk cartons, and spilled chili all over the cafeteria floor. Subway sandwich day was the worst- these kids were determined to throw in the bread from their sandwiches, which required pulling out the meat. You cannot imagine what a trial this was.

On compost day, the 7-12^th graders at Rosebud gathered out by the workshop and the greenhouses and built two compost bins under Mike’s supervision. We stuffed wooden pallets with flakes of straw for insulation and then wrapped them in visquine plastic. We arranged an open-topped box out of 5 pallets and held them together with wafer board on the outside.

Although this is a simple process, building these bins with nearly 50 students on a Friday afternoon and only a couple people who really knew what’s going on was definitely a challenge. Luckily I had help from Anne, the Glendive Foodcorps member, who was instrumental in keeping things running smoothly. (She also finally got to see that I haven’t been making things up about what a unique community Rosebud is. While we were sitting outside waiting for Mike to arrive, a man walked right past the school with his shotgun during recess, and no one blinked an eye.)

At the end of the day we had one bin fully constructed except for a permanent lid, and one waiting for final assembly. We dumped in several pounds of food scraps along with some straw and leaves to inaugurate our new compost bin and sprinkled in the first handfuls of Bokashi.

When I came in to collect compost this week, one of the high school students told me she had collected all compostable food scraps over the weekend from the bar next door and was bringing it over to add to our bin. This was the most exciting thing I could have imagined- every institution in Rosebud now composts (except for the soon-to-be-closed Post Office, which doesn’t really count). My hope is that composting will reduce the amount of garbage the school produces and the costs the school spends on shipping garbage to the landfill. I also envision the compost enriching the garden and saving us the cost of buying fertilizer, and the garden, someday, saving us from having to buy tomatoes for school lunches all together.

This concrete success makes me feel a little bit better about the time I’ve spent just talking to people about composting and gardening and eating local. And now I am excited to be able to point out the beautiful compost bin behind the school slowly filling with food, as tangible proof that I am making a difference.

What is Local, anyways?

My efforts to eat local food, produced on my windowsill

Almost any discussion about eating right these days reviews the importance of eating locally produced food. Eating local is the new hip thing to do, along with shunning Justin Bieber and posting cars with ‘Keep Portland Weird’ stickers. In a place like the Willamette Valley where food is practically effortlessly grown and distributed, it’s easy to see eating local as a simple task and a fun way to engage with your community.

Living in eastern Montana, however, requires an entirely different expectation for eating ‘local.’ Although not impossible, there are major challenges to eating local here. The scarcity of food processing centers makes it extremely hard to find food that has stayed on this side of the state. My efforts to eat local food consist almost entirely of planting spinach in my windowsill garden, which I will eat in a couple months provided that the heat in my apartment kicks in soon. Few Forsythians, however, go to this effort to object to the distance that most of their food must travel to their plate. Farmers have few options for selling small-scale produce, and thus little incentive to grow something besides industrial commodity crops. Consumers who have never had the option of making local purchases don’t know what they’re missing, and so seek out Wal-mart deals rather than Montana-grown foods.

So, how does one eat local in a place where there is no local food?

This required a revision of my understanding of the word ‘local.’ Luckily, the definition is quite flexible. Instead of being a defined distance, local food simply comes from as close as possible. That may be the spinach on my windowsill, or a batch of lentils grown and processed halfway across the state. Eating local is not eating food only produced within a certain distance, which would result in starvation for most eastern Montana ‘locavores.’ Buying local foods represents an opportunity for people to improve their health, revive their local economies and create a more sustainable lifestyle.

Little of this is evident to my neighbors though, who rarely have the opportunity to buy anything that comes from anywhere near here, and they have expressed little interest in it. Several weeks ago the Extension Office mailed out a survey to all Treasure County residents to see if they are interested in starting a grocery store in Hysham. The surprising answer was not really. Hysham residents have thus far been unwilling to listen to the myriad of reasons I came up with that this will be good for the community and the economy. Buying local is such a foreign concept that I can tell it will be an uphill battle to help people understand the opportunities that having a store in town will bring to their tiny town.

Obama and Corn

There’s nothing more exciting than opening up the mailbox and seeing a letter from the White House, as I did this earlier week. It was a form letter from President Obama thanking me for sharing my concerns about the health and wellness of Americans, and promising that he is working hard to address the issues I’d raised. It lacked the personal touch I’d gotten from the First Lady, but was thrilling and empowering all the same.

I wrote a letter to the President about two months ago to tell him that eliminating corn subsidies is the way to begin improving American’s health while moving towards a more sustainable agricultural system. Although corn subsidies represent a political minefield, their elimination would be an efficient way for our government to take on a number of problems at once.

Since 1995, $73.8 billion has been spent propping up the corn industry. Farmers are paid a set amount for their corn, regardless of the market price, which is then used in everything from soda to Twinkies to chicken nuggets. I’ll leave it to the nutritionists to debate whether corn syrup is worse for you than cane sugar, but the fact remains that the abundant corn supply is what fuels the copious amounts of the least healthy food available to Americans today. I’ve heard it argued that this food is important because it provides cheap calories for low-income consumers, but do we really need more cheap calories? With one-third of Americans begin obese, I think we can agree that cheap calories are no longer be a priority. What Americans need is affordable, nutritious food which can compete with the hyper-processed grub sold at the grocery store. The problem is that whole foods like vegetables offer limited marketability and profit for the major food processors compared to the food which contain corn by-products. Government policy often values capitalism over public health, and so corn subsidies have become a central and dominant part of our food system.

Ending corn subsidies will not be an easy political decision, even in this time of panicky cuts at the federal budget. American farmers are struggling, and taking away this source of income would necessitate thoughtful planning and consideration of market influences to be successful. This would be an opportunity for America to encourage the production of healthier foods and a more diversified food industry.

Cutting corn subsidies probably won’t have much of an effect upon the price of soda and fast food. What it would do, however, is send a clear signal that our government is committed to transitioning towards healthier and more sustainable farming.

If you’re interested in learning more about corn and how the industry works, the documentary King Corn by Curt Ellis is the best place to start.

The Seeds We Can Plant

October 24 is the first national Food Day- a day to celebrate and honor efforts to bring real food back to the American diet. Although it may seem a little gimmicky, this day is a very worthwhile way to gather like-minded people to encourage discussion about the issues of our current food system. Food Day’s goals are these:

1. Reduce diet-related disease by promoting safe, healthy foods

2. Support sustainable farms & limit subsidies to big agribusiness

3. Expand access to food and alleviate hunger

4. Protect the environment & animals by reforming factory farms

5. Promote health by curbing junk-food marketing to kids

6. Support fair conditions for food and farm workers

Events are being hosted all over the country (and some truly fantastic meals being served in Montana!) and I encourage everyone to participate. Events can be found on the website: http://foodday.org/

I was lucky enough to attend and present at the Food Day event in Billings on October 22, where it was encouraging to see how many people there are genuinely interested in food issues in eastern Montana. The isolation of communities out here can often make it seem like I am acting alone, but I could see that this is not the case at all! We watched the film ‘Fresh,’ ate a glorious all-Montana lunch and heard from numerous activists about the efforts they are taking to change Montana’s food system.

I came away renewed in my enthusiasm for my work in Forsyth, and reassured that I am not alone in struggling to introduce my community to the benefits of healthy food.

This Food Day event acted as a reminder for me that all revolutions, whether they are Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring or eating local, require energy more than anything else. For the food movement, this means getting people excited about the changes that they can be making and the benefits they find from them. It’s not enough to get people to eat right, because eating thoughtfully requires effort and education. Although it may be a step in the right direction to get someone to shop at the farmers market rather than Walmart, it means little if they don’t understand why they should be doing this. This also means that they won’t be able to tell other people to do likewise. For the food movement to be a sustained movement, the emphasis always needs to be about building excitement through education.

I think it’s important for Foodcorps members- and all food activists- to remember that energy is the main thing we are building. It’s an investment in future action. Our communities might not yet be ready for farmers markets, or our schools not prepared for Farm to School, or families not able to cook for themselves. Getting people excited about food is just as valid an achievement. If we can engage just a couple of people in a conversation about food and educate them about one of the issues, this plants the seed which has the potential to grow into action somewhere down the road.

No Substitutions!

Undeniably, there is a healthcare crisis. Perhaps it hasn’t quite hit us yet, but it is not something that we can avoid discussing any longer. One in three American children is overweight or obese and by 2030 if current trends continue, 85% of American adults will be overweight or obese.[1] For years we’ve been preaching the virtues of eating healthy and exercising, but with scant success. What’s the problem?

There are numerous issues at play, including the availability of cheap fast food, increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and the disappearance of the sit-down family meal. Although very important, I don’t think that these factors entirely explain the problem. The obesity crisis emerges from the fact that Americans no longer know what food is. I’m not talking about the cultural acceptance of Twinkies, but instead our inability to see food as a whole rather than broken down into its components.

Science has identified the important nutrients that make up our food, which has in turn determined modern day eating practices. Food itself means less and less as the focus falls on its nutritional variables instead. We’re told that we need to eat fiber and vitamins while shunning carbohydrates and calories, and consequently seek or avoid foods containing these ingredients. In pursuit of a healthy diet, Americans are likely to seek out foods containing these nutrients rather than seeking foods which are recognized as healthy as a whole.

The benefit of breaking food down into its parts is that it allows all foods to become equal. If foods have the same levels of carbohydrates, calories, proteins, or fats, etc, they are treated as equals by our system of grading nutrition. Little consideration is made for food origin, freshness and level of processing or other factors. If all nutrients are comparable, it doesn’t matter if they are delivered via fast food or the farmers market. This has encouraged Americans to believe that it is acceptable to get our fiber from a yogurt instead of vegetables. Vitamin- enhance granola bars save us the inconvenience of eating fruit. Now we can serve children Lucky Charms, and know they’re eating healthy whole grains. What a fantastic way to eat healthier without having to change what we eat! And this has had very, very bad consequences for our health.

As long as Americans think that individual nutrients make a healthy diet, health will continue to decline. As long calorie-counting is a more popular weight loss tool than eating square meals, weights will continue to rise. Although a diet is much more appealing when you simply need to limit your order at McDonalds rather than finding a meal not fried in grease, it is no surprise that 95% of diets are unsuccessful in the long term. All food is not equal, and America needs to recognize that substitutions cannot be made when it comes to our diet.

Instead of seeing calories as a part of food, we need to focus on how food becomes part of a meal, and learn to recognize the health benefits of eating kale rather than eating Vitamin K. We need to overcome this need to micro-manage and regulate our diet. MyPlate, championed by Michelle Obama and Let’s Move! is the tool Americans should be using to reeducate themselves about food. Instead of listing the abstract nutrients our bodies need, it illustrates the whole foods that make a genuinely healthy meal.

Americans need to relearn what foods are healthy instead of what nutrients are necessary. When you eat a balanced meal, your nutritional needs are taken care of without needing to know anything more.

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[1] http://www.thelunchtray.com/a-startling-infographic-on-childhood-obesity/