From Farm To Table: A Local Tour

It has been a very Farm To Table week here in Virginia.

Herb garden at the Clifton Inn

For the uninitiated, Farm To Table is a local food movement that aims to get food from small farms onto the tables of local consumers through their homes, their schools, and their restaurants.

Probably the most famous example I can think of offhand is Chez Panisse, a restaurant in Berkley, CA that was started in 1971 by Alice Waters.* The notion of a restaurant where all the food was grown locally and organically was pretty radical at that time, but the movement has been slowly and steadily gaining ground and has enjoyed a pretty significant upsurge in the last decade or so.

Last week, the Madison County Farmers Market put on a "farm to table dinner" to benefit the market. Farmers from the market - including us - donated food for a practically 100% local meal. The dinner was held at Prince Michel Winery, who (predictably) provided the wine. Brian, Autumn and I volunteered as servers, along with several other local farmers who work the market.

Then the very next morning, I drove down to Charlottesville to visit the Clifton Inn, a B&B slash restaurant. One of the chefs there buys produce from us occasionally, and had offered to give me a tour of the grounds and the gardens, where he grows some of the produce the kitchen uses. So I went. And he did.

Although the garden was a little smaller than I was imagining, it's exactly the sort of thing I love to see a place like that doing - growing their own food, and sourcing some of their produce locally. A lot of people - everyone from individual consumers to school cafeterias to restaurants - are intimidated when they hear about places like Chez Panisse, who grow and/or buy all of their food locally. But it's okay to start small - growing a squash plant in your back yard, potting a few herbs in the windowsill, visiting the local farmers market and buying a few things a week. I recently read about a school district in Virginia that has the goal of buying 8% of their food locally this year, and gradually increasing that amount to 25% over the next two years. That sounds a lot more feasible than attempting to immediately grow 75% of your own food.

Another bit of Farm to Table news from this week has been the initiation of the newest AmeriCorps program, known as FoodCorps. This inaugural program aims to work with schools to educate youth about nutrition and food, build and tend school gardens, and get more fresh, local produce into school cafeterias.

Ah, if only I were younger and had fewer years of AmeriCorps under my belt.




*Incidentally, Alice Waters was just interviewed on Fresh Air to celebrate 40 years of her career in the local food movement.

Flexitarianism - just a red herring?

 


 When I first heard the term "flexitarian", I laughed. Another word to describe another way not to eat meat? How unnecessary. Silly, even. Little did I know that, one day, I would become one.

There doesn't seem to be an exact definition for flexitarianism out there, but the ones that exist are variations on the same theme. Flexitarian was voted by the American Dialect Society in 2003 as the year's most useful word, and defined as "a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat." A 2008 Newsweek article called it "being a vegetarian of convenience...cutting back on meat, rather than abstaining completely". As TIME magazine described last year in the article Weekday Vegetarians, "Part-time-vegetarians, a.k.a. flexitarians, choose what to eat and when." Okay, I get it now. I think.



Flexitarian is joining an already disginguished list of words that are slightly different versions of the same thing. Vegetarian. Vegan. Pescetarian.  Lacto-Ovo-Vegetarian. Part-time vegetarian. All of them describe various levels of eliminating flesh from your diet. Just want to eliminate red meat? Be a pollotarian, and you can still enjoy your Chicken Divan. Do you not want to eat anything that has been exposed to tempuratures above 115 F? Go raw. Don't want to eat any animal products at all, even ones that don't require said animal to be killed, like honey or dairy? Vegan, baby. But be careful... those naughty animal products can hide in the unlikeliest of places, just like the Commies.* 



AND she eats meat! The horror!

Maybe that's part of why being a flexitarian is so attractive. They're not asking you to make a full time commitment. You can start off small, just one night a week, as advocated by the Meatless Monday movement. Even by doing this small amount, the non-profit says, "we can improve our health, reduce our carbon footprint and lead the world in the race to reduce climate change." And if you like your Meatless Monday, maybe you'll consider a Meatless Wednesday. Or Meatless Weekends. Or Daily Meatless Snack Time. Think of it as the gateway drug for vegetarianism.

There are all kinds of reasons that people choose to embrace vegetarianism in one of its many forms. Health, weight loss, a tight budget, they saw it on Oprah,  "I can't eat anything with a face", and so on. I didn't start down the flexitarian path until a little over a year ago, but I didn't do it to lose weight or because some dude from Glee said it was cool. I did it because I felt like being socially responsible.

Let me backtrack. When I was a kid, my cousin became vegetarian (although he was later caught sneaking leftover turkey from the fridge after Thanksgiving), and I was treated to a series of lectures/rants on how the animal industry exploits and mistreats our gentle bovine and porcine friends. My twelve-year-old self questioned this. Why, I wondered, would you boycott all meat and eggs in order to take a stand against the industry, when you could (and should, I figured indignantly) instead buy free-range, farm-raised, organic versions that promote the values you claim to uphold? You vote with your dollar, after all. Then I got distracted by something that twelve-year-old's get distracted by (probably Jonathan Taylor Thomas or something), and I forgot about it for the next decade.

For most of my life I was vehemently against even the idea of becoming a vegetarian, being a self-proclaimed "meatetarian". It wasn't until I came to AmeriCorps NCCC and found myself more or less in charge of my entire team's $4.50 per person, per day food budget that I felt responsible for spending our money wisely, and began questioning my food choices. But  I didn't really start thinking about cutting meat from my diet intentionally until reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

The book chronicles Kingsolver's year-long attempt to become a full-blown locovore with her family. (Locovore... another crazy word, this time meaning people who only eat locally produced food.) At one point in the book, Kingsolver discusses her family's decision, made years earlier, to only eat meat that is ethically, organically, and sustainably raised. This really struck me. As early as twelve, I had thought of this, if not in those exact terms. After some deliberation, I decided to try it out, starting January of last year. The way I defined my own personal version of flexitarianism is as follows:

I solemnly swear to only eat meat that has been ethically, organically and sustainably produced. I will only eat meat products that have been fed on their natural diets, that are not treated inhumanely, and that are given space to roam and graze to their little heart's content.

There are, of course, a couple exceptions. If someone fixes me a meal with meat in it, of course I will eat it. They took the time and the effort, it's my own fault if I didn't tell them about my diet, and I'm not about to be wasteful. Alternatively, if I'm at my parents' or grandparents' house, I'm not going to demand that everyone else change their eating style to accomodate me. I could - and sometimes I do - fix something seperately for myself, but that's unusual. My family always dines together. It's an important part of our dynamic, and when I'm home, I don't mind cooking and eating something I wouldn't normally eat, in the interest of being a family and all that warm fuzzy stuff. Plus.... well.... it's tasty.

One way in which I absolutely do not waver, however, is eating out. I will not buy a meat dish if it is not explicitly stated that the meat came from a local organic farm that treats its livestock ethically. And although I'm less strident about it, I try only to eat fish and seafood that is sustainably farmed and/or harvested, although I'm not as good with that.

That being said,  it's going to be interesting to see how my semi-vegitarian leanings will pan out this year, when I'll be fixing and eating food alongside the other workers at the farm. Susan and Dean, who run the farm, are definitely not vegetarians.

Last comment: if you're one of those militant and unbending people who is thinking right now, "You can't be a little bit vegetarian. That's like being a little bit pregnant! Who on earth do you think you are?" all I can say is go bite yourself. Except I guess you can't, since you're probably a vegetarian. Too bad. You're probably delicious.

  

*Speaking of communism...the dye Natural Red 40 is made from cochineal insects, making it a big no-no for vegans. When crushed, the cochineal makes a beautiful red dye known as carmine, which has been used as a clothing dye since the 1400's and became an important export to Europe in the 16th century. I wrote a paper on it in college. Well, I thought it was interesting.

AmeriCorps NCCC: A Retrospective

My last post was on...October 20? Yikes. A lot has happened in that time.

I'm not sure where to begin - the Acres USA conference, which I attended in December in my hometown of Indianapolis? I saw speakers, attended workshops, bought books, met farmers. My progress in farm research, perhaps - I've applied to six internships in the last week, from Washington state to Virginia, and I'm researching dozens more. Maybe a book review; I'm continuing to voraciously read, and have several new purchases/gifts I'm drooling over, including Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes; Food Politics and What to Eat by Marion Nestle; Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, a collection of essays by Wendell Berry... the list goes on. Or maybe I could discuss my many culinary adventures over the holiday season. Or maybe talk about volunteering at the Indy Winter Farmer's Market. Or one of a dozen more ideas ricocheting off the inside of my skull.

These are all things I hope to get to eventually. But what I think I should devote this post to is the culmination of my most recent adventure, AmeriCorps NCCC.

I've mentioned the program before - AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps, a team-based, fully residential leadership program for young people ages 18 to 24. I served at the Atlantic Region, based out of Perry Point, Maryland. I was a Corps Member in 2009 (a member of the infamous team known as "Kill Squad"), and the Community Relations Support Team Leader in 2010. In NCCC, you travel around your region with a team of about ten, doing community service projects lasting six to eight weeks. In return, you get room and board, a modest living stipend, uniforms, health benefits, and an education award of that you can use to pay off loans or help pay for college or grad school.

It staggers me, thinking about who I was when I joined in February of '09, and who I was when I left a couple of short months ago. When I joined, I was a fairly recent college graduate, 22 years old, with degrees in Theatre and Drama and Germanic Studies under my belt. I was pale from holing myself up behind stacks of scholarly journals during the Indiana winters, researching and creating color-coded outlines as I sweated over research papers. And although I loved the student life, I knew that after graduation was my best chance to get out and do a few years of service work, before getting saddled with too much debt from grad school.

I remember sitting in the airport on my flight to Baltimore, thinking about this new chance to be reinvented. I wanted to cast myself in a mold befitting a worldly do-gooder: I would no longer be the listless student, tracking down annotations, corralling post-it notes and organizing my books by spine-height. In my mind's eye, I saw myself pulling victims from F5 tornado debris, administering CPR to grateful half-drowned people, and bonding with like-minded individuals from across the country as we took on the beasts of poverty in our left hands and inequality with our right. My idealism burned with the fury of the thousands of wildfires I knew I would soon be fighting.

It didn't take long for certain realities to give my naïveté a good drubbing. While most of the people in NCCC were there because they wanted to help people, I don't know that I would call all of us "like-minded". It definitely didn't take me long to understand that "diversity" is a complicated word, and it means a hell of a lot more than color, creed, socio-economic status or where you went to school. Forget about so-called "cultural differences"... my team argued about whether to get skim milk or 2%.

The shock of being thrust into this entirely new scenario, so different from anything I had dreamed up, quickly shattered all my pretensions of wanting to be "reinvented". It was all I could do to hold on to the person I thought I was. And as if it wasn't enough to be in a new place, surrounded by new people, doing things I had never done before, they went and gave us all uniforms so we all looked the same - little grey-shirted clones running around, getting things done for America. This was definitely not what I had imagined. As the months rushed by, I let go of my fantasies, and focused on the all-consuming task in front of me - helping the communities where we were assigned. Which is what I'd signed up for, after all.

Although we all go through periods of wanting to transform into new, better versions of our former selves, I credit NCCC with showing me the truth about myself that exists deep down where nothing can uproot it. It was with some surprise that, my very last weekend, my fellow Team Leaders told me over and over how they admired me, how great that I wasn't afraid to be myself, that they'd never met anyone who was so proud to be the person they were. I thought, ".......Really?" But as I thought about it, I realized they were right. It had kind of snuck up on  me, but I had grown into myself in a way I hadn't thought was even possible.

I learned a lot in AmeriCorps NCCC. I learned how to swing a hammer. I learned how to mud and sand and spackle. I learned how to shop for food on $4.50 a day. I learned how to live with seven other people in a tiny apartment where we shared one bathroom. I learned how to send a kid to time-out. I learned how to do "controlled interior demolition" on flooded homes. I learned how to write a killer press release.

I also learned a lot of things that are harder to explain on a resume, like when to talk and when to listen. To not sweat the small stuff. That people sometimes act like dicks just because they're uncomfortable, or sad, or scared, or lonely. That it's okay if you don't always know where the road is taking you. That sometimes it's best to just close your eyes, feel the sun on your face, and go with the flow.

More than being just a learning experience, I've come consider AmeriCorps NCCC a living experience. It's an experience in starting each day anew, in accepting change with an open mind and an open heart. I think I can say with confidence that, more than anything else, I learned how to do just that.

One last thing, before I sign off here. As I think back on the last two years, the days that stick out to me aren't always the easy ones. They're sometimes the days where I thought I couldn't keep up. There were days when we dragged ourselves back to the house with mud and crap in our hair, under our shirts, even in our underwear. There were days when I cried, because of something someone on my team said, because I was homesick, because I hated the job I had to do, because I thought I would never get everything done I needed to. There was the day my grandmother died, less than three weeks before graduation, when I still had to complete the yearbook, round up everyone's final paperwork, finish the end of year slideshow, write speeches, and help finalize details for the awards banquet and graduation ceremony.

But what sticks out to me about those days was not how terrible I felt, or how unfair it all seemed. Ultimately it worked out, because the team came together, because my friends and co-workers helped me out, because someone gave me a hand or let me talk about what was going on. These days stick out to me not because they were bad, but because I got through them, and they made me stronger.

I'm sure it sounds like a huge cliché... probably because it is. But the funny thing about clichés is that they tend to have a lot of truth behind them. And I speak only the truth when I say that everything AmeriCorps handed me that I thought was too hard to handle ended up making me a stronger person in the end.

The First One

Hello all, and welcome to my new blog.

This blog will chronicle my forthcoming adventures in the wide world of WWOOF-ing, otherwise known as World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. This is an organization that allows people to work on organic farms all over the world, in exchange for room and board.

A little bit about me: I am currently a Team Leader with AmeriCorps NCCC (National Civilian Community Corps), a fully residential, team-based community service program for 18 to 24 year olds. It is a fantastic program, but one that sadly will not allow me to serve a third year with them. Therefore, I am in the process of figuring out what to do with myself after November 23, when the federal government shall cut me adrift.

My current plan is to go back home, enjoy my two favorite holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas) with the family I hold so dear, and then in January... well, the metaphors are endless, but somewhere "stretch my wings" and "hit the road" should do the trick. Point being, I plan on having some serious bonding time with Sylvester, my faithful Toyota Echo, as we explore the vast and varied organic opportunities that await us.

That's it for the time being. Good night, and good luck.