Last summer at the downtown market, Americorp Vista worker, Kelly Koss, introduced herself. I learned she was a recent graduate from the University of Maine with an MS in Food Science and Human Nutrition. This young dietitian impressed Friends with her dedication to help tackle the many issues of improving nutrition through education and access to healthy foods . To serve the underserved, she joined Campus Kitchens NU, a real gem in this effort to combat local hunger. ( Below is Kelly’s description of CKNU.)
We are pleased to collaborate with CKNU and the Evanston Public Library on a Spring Film Series to educate about sustainable agriculture and food insecurity. Read all about the film series here. In planning this series, a Campus Kitchens volunteer, Junior Chemistry major, Eseohi Ehimiaghe, designed our publicity. Another wonderful talent!
Vikki Proctor
The Campus Kitchen at Northwestern University (CKNU) is a non-profit organization and one of over 40 university programs that are part of a national organization called the Campus Kitchens Project. The mission of the Campus Kitchens Project is to engage student volunteers in reducing food waste and increasing access to nutritious food in their communities. Volunteers at the Campus Kitchen at Northwestern University recover prepared food from dining halls and nearby restaurants as well as fresh produce from the Downtown Evanston Farmers’ Market. The recovered food is then used to assemble healthy meals that will be delivered to individual clients and non-profit partner organizations throughout Evanston. In 2014, CKNU staff and volunteers served 34,157 meals to 9 organizations, and 430 clients. In addition to preparing and delivering meals, CKNU volunteers teach nutrition classes to children in after school programs and distribute information about SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) and community organizations that offer application assistance. The student leaders and employees at CKNU are dedicated to advocating for food justice and are thrilled to collaborate with Friends of Evanston Farmers’ Markets on the upcoming film series at the Evanston Public Library!
Join Real Food at NU, the Environmental Policy and Culture program, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities for a screening of Food Chains, and discussion with director Sanjay Rawal.
The film is an exposé of our food supply’s dependency on desperately poor and marginalized populations for labor. Food Chains follows the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group of tomato pickers in southern Florida, as they struggle against corporate behemoths in a fight to revolutionize farm labor through their Fair Food program that rallies growers and retailers to change the system of injustice.
RSVP to the Facebook event here. This event is co-sponsored by Wild Roots, M.E.Ch.A, SEED, NUCHR, DivestNU, ESW, Green House, Campus Kitchens, NU Sustainable Food Talks, College Feminists, and the Office of Sustainability.
The event, at Harris Hall, Room 107 is on Tuesday, February 17 at 6:30 p.m. Harris Hall is located at 1881 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL.
Another wonderful downtown spring, summer and fall market season came to a close in November. With the help of donors, Friends was able to support even more LINK card patrons and farmers in 2014. In 2010 LINK card shoppers spent $2,000 at the downtown market. In 2011, Friends, with the help of donors, launched a new chapter by incentivizing healthy eating with financial benefits given directly each Saturday to shoppers. Each year we’ve increased the amount available to LINK patrons. This year, we’re proud to report that Friends gave $18,024.50 at the Saturday market. LINK patrons spent another $18.564.50 of their own funds. The total spent on healthy food was over $36,000. That’s something to smile about!
OUR DONORS…. should be thanked! Northshore University HealthSystem was our earliest supporter. Now, we have added First Bank and Trust of Evanston and a private Family Foundation to our list of donors. We also add you because so many of you have attended our annual fund raiser with Now We’re Cookin’. This benefit, hosted by Nell Funk, graces our organization with proceeds that support our mission to educate about healthy eating to all regardless of income. Whole Foods of Evanston also helped us this year with a 5% Day and products for our benefit.
MORE KUDOS… should go to our market farmers and vendors who, rain or shine, provide us with delicious and nutritious food. And our chefs!! They also come to the market donating their time and skills using market food to create dishes offered at the market and at our benefit. We hope you didn’t miss the activities provided by D65 teachers-check out this website for potato heads! Heller Bees from Highland Park for the second year has educated us about bees. And heck, while we’re in the thanking mode, we’ll give our board a pat on the back! f you haven’t checked out our website lately, do! You’ll find timely articles, a blog, recipes, photos and more.
FINAL BOW…. should be taken by our hard-working market manager, Myra Gorman, and her assistant, Ryan Tasovac. We’re always being complimented by shoppers for the warm ambiance of the market, the diversity of healthy food and family-friendly educational activities. This praise rightly goes to Myra and Ryan!
BUT WE’RE NOT RESTING ON OUR LAURELS…we’re busy planning for Season 2015. This year will be the 40th anniversary of Evanston’s Farmers Downtown Market. We’ll kick off the celebrations with a spring film festival about farms and food insecurity planned with Campus Kitchens of NU and Evanston Public Library. AS WE CLOSE this year, we thank all of you shoppers and eaters-your important role is more evident everyday as we realize that healthy eating not only is what we need to survive-it’s what the earth needs.
Just when we think we’ve got the what-to-eat conundrum right, along comes chef Dan Barber to shake things up. As a responsible chef he attempts to serve the tastiest and most nutritious foods grown locally and organically, which he does. But a key lightbulb moment arrives when he realizes that in a matter of a few hours his restaurant patrons have devoured lamb chops that took months of preparation. As he scrambled to find more farmers to satisfy his customers, he began to question the sustainability of what we eat. In The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, Dan Barber distills more than ten years of exploration into a proposal for a new definition of ethical and delicious eating. Barber begins his journey by examining the American plate.
FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD PLATES: He describes the first plate as one dominated by a large piece of animal protein accompanied by a small side vegetable. The second plate looks much like the first but the ingredients are local and organic. According to Barber, still not the sustainable change the world needs for a healthy planet and people. He reveals the third plate as local and organic but with foods that the land can provide sustainably. Perhaps he says that will look like a carrot dish holding the primary space with a sauce of second cuts of beef.
Barber’s journey toward better tasting and sustainable food begins in the dirt and on farms with farmers. In part one, “Soil”, we learn that it was only after WWII that American farms changed from using time-honored sustainable methods of farming to conventional mono-culture farms with chemicals to address soil fertility and pests. But Barber doesn’t just jump on the “organic is better” bandwagon; he states that chemical farming and bad organic farming both can kill the soil by starving it. Bottom line here is that we need healthy soil to produce nutritious food. It’s all about the dirt. Instead of being interested in farm practice labels, Barber urges us to question the care of the soil.
In parts two and three, “Land” and “Sea”, Barber takes us to more farms. He presents a farmer fattening geese for foie gras without tube feeding and a local community following sustainable practices for harvesting bluefin tuna. We visit farmers as they tell why they left behind the world of chemical farming and embraced organic and sustainable practices.
In the final section,”Seeds”, Barber explains our loss of seeds. Since the beginning of agriculture, farmers bred their own seeds and saved seeds suited to their land. With the Green Revolution, crop diversity and seeds were lost as monoculture farming was encouraged for higher yields. But the miraculous yields fade away as they are honestly compared to the total yields of diverse crop farming. This revolution also brought seed companies replacing the seed-saving farmers. In the 1990s Monsanto bought many of these companies, just buying out their competition further reducing seed supplies.
Interestingly, we learn at the very end of this book that it was our government that allowed for the friendly takeover of public research of agricultural practices through the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act making it legal to pay breeders for their seeds. Those public land grant universities dedicated to research and providing their results free to farmers were now in the business for profit.
Barber’s quest to find sustainable food is a journey discovering the history of food in various regions, in-depth stories of farmers and their struggles to recapture, replenish their land and provide diverse and plentiful food often fighting government and corporations.
Although I found that some of the writing could have used another round of editing, Barber’s book is compelling as he lays out the struggles of good farming. This book might be viewed as the introduction to a new and exciting revolution in farming, cooking and eating.
by Vikki Proctor
While locally grown food is considered more flavorful, nutritious and ecologically friendly than what you can find at the grocery store, there is one way, in many peoples’ estimates, that it falls short: price. In recent years, the local food movement has taken hold across the country, particularly in well-to-do, environmentally conscious communities where residents can afford to pay extra for “local,” “sustainable,” or “artisanal” products. To many, local food is still seen as out of reach due to its higher price point and, as a result, the local food movement has been criticized for being elite and out of touch.
As former farmers ourselves, we know that, in order to have any chance of becoming economically viable, growers must charge a price that they feel is “fair” for both the farmer and customer – a price that is often dictated by the market. And, while that price can seem high to customers, in reality many small farms are charging less than the price that would allow them to make a living wage since they are trying to stay competitive with not only large grocery stores chains, but also each other. As a result, many small farms have made positive strides toward ecological sustainability but falter in terms of economics.
And so this brings us to one of the primary contradictions within the local food movement: the farmer’s price and products are often deflated and devalued because they are operating in a competitive food environment (even Wal-Mart has gotten in on the local food game), yet these very same prices seem high to the consumer and can be unaffordable for most “regular” people. With all of this in mind, how can we shed the belief (and perhaps the reality, depending on who you ask) that local food is a luxury and begin to address the issue of building a local food system that improves healthy food access for all people?
We can begin by critically examining the notion that local food is more expensive than food at the supermarket. The few studies to date have found the opposite – that is locally grown food is often less expensive than supermarkets (granted these studies may have limited relevance outside their specific geography). The investigators were careful to account for growing methods, i.e. not comparing organic local food to conventional supermarket produce, but consumers may not always be so discriminating.
But what gets inevitably gets lost in any discussion of price is the question of value, which is arguably much more important. Simply put, all food is not created equal. Even if that big shiny supermarket tomato is pennies cheaper per pound, chances are it was picked weeks ago when it was green and rock hard and green by an immigrant farm worker who was paid a poverty level wage, trucked across the country, ripened with ethylene gas, and is as flavorful as cardboard and probably just as nutritious. Compare that with a local tomato that you can purchase within hours of being picked ripe from the vine from a farmer who will then capture 100% of your food dollar, compared with maybe 20% at the supermarket.
Nevertheless, many families do not have the luxury of making their food choices based on quality over price. Friends has begun to tackle this issue through its matching LINK (Illinois’ food stamp) program, which makes purchasing healthy food more affordable for LINK users by providing matching funds to LINK card holders who purchase fresh produce at the downtown Evanston Farmers’ Market, effectively reducing the cost of food by half. This innovative program is aimed at addressing the economic barriers to eating locally and nutritiously, and as a result to good health.
For the many individuals and families who do not qualify for LINK but for whom healthy eating is prohibitively expensive, below are some strategies for maximizing food dollars at the farmers’ market:
Beyond this, moving toward a more equitable food system for both eaters and growers will require not only a massive shift in our agricultural policies, food culture, use of farmland, tastes and values, and priorities and expectations for how food is produced and its cost, but also increased attention on the problem that underlies nearly every issue our nation faces: inequality.
By Rebecca and Brian Weiland[1] Alternative Medicine Review (2010), PloS ONE (2010), J. Agriculture & Food Chemistry (2007).
