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.