Renewal. Retool. Remake.

This lyric essay is an adaptation of the piece I performed at April's MNFYP event, part of the storytelling series. The topic: renewal.

I read a poem last November, when the world was wrapped in mono gray. It was the climax of MyTake: A Story to Nurture in Five Food Groups.

As nature squeaks into color, life, and growth, this protean poem unfurls tightly packed stanzas into the broad notes of spring.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One thing broke me;
         two built me back.

Fall in FScN 4612, Human Nutrition,
each lecture softening the edges of my circumscribed truth.
Studies strive for stolid statements,
         but humans refuse to cooperate.
We fictionalize what we ate yesterday,
we guess at how often we eat fish,
we tick the same box for grass-fed beef,
         for venison,
         for McDonald’s Hamburgers.

I crumbled under the weight of peer-reviewed articles,
at odds with each other,
squinting their way to the truth.

Winter, and I watched a dietitian speak with precise passion
         of an ecological approach to food and health,
         of environmental health and natural resources,
         of starting with oneself.

Essential building blocks condensed
         into a strand stretching
         from a protein machine, bending and twisting
         into a tertiary structure,
The Food System.

Summer, and I was swept along on a sustainability safari:
landing in locations
         from labels off co-op shelves,
scuffling with scripts
         from scholars and scientists,
facing furrowed facts
         from farmers and foragers.

I transcribed novelty into neurons,
I put my hands into the blackness and pulled.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What is protein?

Amino acids line up according to ancient instructions, attract and repel each other, furl into microscopic protein machines, group and grow to make this protein machine, complex and communal.

What I'm Excited About #5

Includes the following:

Visual recipe by Stacy Stanley.

• Tapping URSA: A black IPA made by Fulton with Mighty Axe Cascade Hops? I'm there. 
• MNYFP December: A mini-launch of the Minnesota Food Charter next Wednesday at Gigi's Cafe, hosted by Donald Warneke and (who else) Eric Sannerud. For details and to RSVP, bop over to the Facebook event.
• Visual Recipes: Local artist Stacy Stanley records recipes, illustrates them, and shares the creation. She recorded my recipe for, well, something tasty and will be posting the result on her blog, 
• Condiment Clean-Up: I am on a mission to extinguish all the condiments in my refrigerator. Today I defeated a small bottle of Maruso Soy Sauce.

What are you looking forward to?

MyTake: A Story to Nurture in Five Food Groups

This five-poem cycle was debuted tonight at Gigi's Cafe in Minneapolis, MN (thank you, Eric! #MNYFP) and The White House in Fayetteville, WV (thank you, Garnet! #RDpoets).

Grain

For my second birthday, my mother stacked bagels
into a pyramid and lit a candle.

My aunt and uncle glanced

at each other.

I grasped and cooed

at my first flickering food.

When I was old enough to balance on a chair,

I stood at the counter next to my mother as she

turned and folded,

turned and folded

nascent bread.

My hands worked, too,

on a knob, brown and hard.

She divided her mass of dough, all curves, into four,

and tucked the soft edges under.

We greased our pans—

wide and accommodating for her, a narrow box for me—

and tapped flour across the bottom, the sides.

Her loaves sprang in the oven.

Mine were obstinate,

until I developed the patience to follow the recipe exactly, to

turn and fold,

turn and fold.

Dairy

I knew cow’s milk belonged in my diet 
the same way I knew I would go to a liberal arts college—

from context and culture.

In America’s dairyland, sheltered by the Lawrence Bubble,

I ran with Russian

and lounged with Linguistics.

Then one sunny spring afternoon,

I stepped into the dark.

The Lawrence University Vegans and Vegetarians were screening Eat:

Giggles from the back row when rhetoric leapt,

but hush when furtive footage rolled.

My cognitive construct of Milk

curdled.

I stepped out of the dark, the bubble—

burst.

How could I cipher Cyrillic, compare conjugations

in this savage light and sharp air?

I made curt changes,

homemade soy milk for cow’s milk,

coconut oil for butter,

sorbet for ice cream,

and on and on.

Ossified academia lumbered along—

I semestered in Russia:

my brain in St. Petersburg, my belly in Minnesota,

and delectable dairy products in my face:

smetana, tvorog, syrok.

Russia, like so many kefir grains,

fermented the familiar to a

teeming,

complex

tang.

Protein

One thing broke me;
           two built me back.

Fall in FScN 4612, Human Nutrition,

each lecture softening the edges of my circumscribed truth.

Studies strive for stolid statements,

           but humans refuse to cooperate.

We fictionalize what we ate yesterday,

we guess at how often we eat fish,

we tick the same box for grass-fed beef,

for venison,

for McDonald’s Hamburgers.

I crumbled under the weight of peer-reviewed articles,

at odds with each other,

squinting their way to the truth.

Winter, and I watched a dietitian speak with precise passion

of an ecological approach to food and health,

           of environmental health and natural resources,

           of starting with oneself.

Essential building blocks condensed

into a strand stretching

from a protein machine, bending and twisting

into a tertiary structure,

The Food System.

Summer, and I was swept along on a sustainability safari:
landing in locations
         from labels off co-op shelves,
scuffling with scripts
         from scholars and scientists,
facing furrowed facts
         from farmers and foragers.

Now, feet planted in soil,

eyes raised to the sun,

I throw my arms open to complexity.

Vegetables

The anorexic client’s favorite tallies 
are vegetables.

The anorexic client’s favorite colors

are black and white.

I watch the clients serve themselves.

“That’s enough salad,” I say to one

           and she glares at me.

Here, dessert is more important than vegetables,

and clients purse their lips at it,

wishing one of them would disappear.

Here is the bitter pill to swallow:

there is no black and white.

Only a magnificent muddle of color.

 

Fruit

A child with her first fig 
Doesn’t know what the seeds look like

Until she has ripped open the skin.

I labored four years eating from the tree of knowledge,

facing bracing questions,

planting enchanting answers.

I rested two days with a dietitian turned farmer,

who sat on a hay bale and recalled with remorse the advice she once gave patients,

who stood by a fire and wept over the death of her son.

She planted rows and rows of trees for him, the fruit of her land.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

how does your orchard grow?

---
Revised April 2015. You may also be interested in the poem Sunbeam, the lyric essay Renewal. Retool. Remake., or my 2015 poetry project, Right Now Is Your Life.

"Be Loud"

This post was written by my buddy David Haverberg, a University of Minnesota alumnus currently exploring graduate school options. 

This May 6th, the Humphrey School of Public Affairs hosted a forum entitled “Science, Democracy, and a Healthy Food Policy.” Put on by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the forum hosted thirteen professionals in various food policy fields. For almost three hours a variety of speeches and panels discussed the range of issues found in food policy, as well as some of the regional solutions that have been put in place to mitigate some of those food policy issues. It was a fantastic event.

If you haven't seen a keynote from @cadwego, make sure to do so. You get delicious slides like this one. #CsdForum pic.twitter.com/8xSOOAf1yL
— KatieEukel (@KTAndrea) May 6, 2014

I left the conference hugely inspired to positively affect food policy. I wanted to find a way to inform the public that perhaps the way-too-happy Leprechaun should not double as their child’s nutritionist, or that adding calcium to ice cream does not make the product a health food. The speakers were so well informed and so persuasive — particularly Lynn Silver, Michele Simon, and Ricardo Salvador — that had they suggested we rush the offices of General Mills en masse under the banner of kale I probably would have led the charge. I wanted to help and I wanted to help right away.

It’s probably useful to note that I have no formal education or experience in the food policy field. I've simply read a number of books on the subject and am hugely interested in what is being discussed. I heard of the forum through Hannah and attended as a member of the general public.

Unfortunately, and this remains my only complaint of the forum, I left unsure as to how I could help. Don Shelby, who emceed the event, suggested that those in the audience needed to “be loud.” This message felt directed at audience members already in a food policy related field, or already in a position to speak to large groups of people. For me of 27 twitter followers and no connection to the field, “being loud” seemed unlikely to help in any way. With “being loud”, or at least doing so to any worthwhile effect, off the table, what was I to do to help?

This is a question I still have in the week after the forum and it’s a question I’d still liked answered. What can I do? Are there internships or volunteer opportunities available in offices connected with any of the ongoing campaigns? If so, I know how to work a stapler and have a pretty good idea of what “collate” means. Are there meetup groups in my area I can join to help plan a grassroots campaign? I’d love to attend and lend a hand with whatever they need.

I am not exaggerating how well the “Science, Democracy, and a Healthy Food Policy” forum was presented and I am certain I wasn't the only audience member whose worldview was totally altered by the speakers. I am also certain that I am not the only audience member who wants to do more but is unsure of what “doing more” entails. Had more been done to address the latter the forum would have been perfect. I just want to know what I should do next.  

Follow David on Twitter: @thisguyisdavid.

What I'm Excited About #3

It's snowing again, and that's not one of the things I'm excited about this week. Rather, I am excited about...

• A second appearance on a class panel for the Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives: A Food Systems Approach to Cooking class. I persuaded my friend and fellow food blogger Charles to take the class this spring, and he's been blogging up a storm. The HFHL institute is also offering a one credit class this fall: Cooking on a Student's Budget.
• The Life-Changing Loaf of Bread. I've made this "bread" four times now, never the same way twice, and never way the recipe suggests (though I do weigh the ingredients). HT to my colleague Jesse Haas for sharing this! I've been eating it for breakfast almost every day for weeks.



Photo by Kim Unertl.

• A moss garden?! Our housemates invited a landscaping friend over to give us ideas about how to make the yard more interesting and less grassy. Staring at a soggy patch of decaying wood chips, I had a brainwave - a moss garden! "You could grow ferns, too," Mr. Landscape added. I have no idea how to make this happen.
• A shift in priorities. I attended a conference of the National Cooperative Grocers Association the other week, and something clicked around Hour 5. I'd been struggling with the feeling that the Hampden Park Co-op board was not the right place for me, that co-ops just weren't my "thing," that I was taking time away from food systems consulting by pouring time into my duties as board chair. But that day, I realized what a boon to my career being on the board actually is. I could will get so much out of my experience by putting my entrepreneurial schemes on hold for a year or two and unabashedly embracing co-op work.

What are you excited about this week?

Surprises at the Market: South Korea

This post was written by a former classmate of mine, the engaging Kelsey Hotle. After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a bachelors in nutrition and dietetics, she moved to South Korea to teach English. She produces podcasts about the adventures of people living aboard, which you can find at Frolicking Foreigners.

The professor of my food culture course advised us to never make assumptions. "When it comes to other cultures," she said, "it is always best to ask." She told us thousands of things that semester, but that stuck out as solid advice. Yet for some reason, I still held on to an assumption that all produce in South Korea was local.

In this case, I didn’t get off without a lesson. I bragged about the produce situation to the wrong person and wound up with a writing assignment. My goal: obtain actual information about the farms in Korea. 

My first year as a teacher in South Korea gave me high hopes about local food. I lived in the middle of a farmer’s paradise, aka nowhere, called Seosan. Elderly Korean women sat on the steps of my high-rise apartment sifting though piles of produce, removing stems and such. Occasionally they tugged on my shirt and pantomimed until I pulled it into a makeshift bowl for them to fill with their seasonal produce. I’d usually post pictures of my unsolicited goods to Facebook in hopes that somebody could identify it. 

Dropwort?
Photo by Kelsey Hotle.

My second year in Korea found me far removed from the little farming community.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

Another product of cleaning out my in-box: a webinar hosted by the America Farmland Trust, an organization working to save farm and ranch land across the county.

farmland.org

This event was the second in a series entitled Planning for Food and Agriculture: Taking a Systems Approach that highlights success stories from which others can learn. The first webinar focused on the state and region level, and the one I attended looked at community and county activities.

The four speakers each presented a wealth of information specific to their communities (Sacremento, Iowa Corridor, King County in Washington, Multnomah County in Portland). A couple items stuck out to me, which reinforced how one size does not fit all when it comes to local food systems.

First, from Sacramento, the urban-rural edge. This is where farmland abuts city land. The "softer" the edge - that is, the more urban and rural land is mixed together - the more likely the farmland is to lay fallow. The likelihood increases because that field is closer to traffic, pets, invasive plants, and vandalism or theft. And the urbanites might not be too chuffed about the farm next door because of spraying, dust, noise, and odor. Furthermore, land near developments is ripe to be developed itself; so, farmers may find the land more valuable sold than farmed.

Ways to address these potential points of conflict include buffer zones, Right-to-Farm laws, and ag parks.

Wait - what parks?

The Sunol AgPark in San Fransisco

Ag parks! According to the Sacremento Region Rural-Urbans Connections Strategy, an ag park is "a combination of a working farm and a municipal park that is located at the urban edge;" Sunol Water Temple AgPark is the model. Given an ag park's modest acreage and proximity to the city, it can be a good option for small farmers looking for a bit of land.

So that was the first item that stuck out to me. The second was King County's drainage and floodplain issues. Did you know that the ditches draining agricultural areas are often swum by endangered salmon? Neither did I! Maintenance of these ditches is understandably highly regulated to protect the fish and the water quality.

Also, farms in Washington's floodplains are liable to, well, flood. Did you know that some farmers build "farm pads" or "critter pads" to elevate their livestock above Base Flood Elevation? Me neither! The pads require permitting to ensure negligible impact on the floodplain, and can also be used to elevate houses.

Always something new to learn.

Eating Alaska

As part of my independent study week, I watched the documentary Eating Alaska, by Ellen Frankenstein.

"What happens to a vegetarian who moves to Alaska and marries a commercial fisherman and deer hunter?" Frankentstein Productions

Ellen explores Alaskan modes of "extracting resources," from stalking caribou to diving for sea cucumbers to chasing mountain goats and getting stranded for four days. She never manages to pull the trigger, but is adept at cleaning, packing, and eating venison.

The movie features a varied cast of characters. The founder of an Alaskan vegetarian group who would give up meat before processed food believing there is a basic value in not exploiting animals and the earth. A teacher guiding sixth graders through a grocery store, comparing labels and reading ingredients list. A Yupik woman on St. Lawrence island, former site of a military base, describing the toxins embedded in her indigenous diet.

Eating Alaska drives home the point that one size does not fit all when it comes to eating "correctly." It depends on who you are, where you live, and how well you understand the complexities of that environment.

Internship Update and Homegrown Minneapolis

Last Wednesday marked the midpoint of this UMN-TEP dietetic internship. I have passed the eight-week eating disorders rotation, visited half of the community sites, dabbled in school foodservice, and made it through four weeks of foodservice in a long-term care facility.

And now, right before a two-week vacation, I'm enjoying my Independent Study week. Besides sitting in on an intensive outpatient program at The Emily Program, I am taking advantage some local food events.

Homegrown Minneapolis is an initiative started in December 2008 geared toward strengthening the city's local food system. They've knocked off some impressive items off their to-do list, the most exciting of which to me are:

• Completed a community kitchen inventory of more than 50 commercial and noncommercial kitchens
• Established a food council beginning this January
• Made it possible to use Electronic Benefits Transfer at farmers markets, aka "circulating federal food support into the local economy"

Cleaning out my in-box, I found an email about the initiative's community meeting from Healthy Food, Healthy Lives listserv. Hey, that's tonight! I thought. It was a sign - that and the fact that I heard it mentioned on MPR on my way over.

After a program introduced by Mayor R.T. Rybak that outlined the efforts and successes of Homegrown, we settled in for hosted table conversations. Our hosts for the evening wanted to know what we thought was the most significant progress made thus far and what should be the focus of the food council as it moved forward.   

Homegrown Minneapolis

Our table agreed that connecting the dots between growers, processors, distributors, eaters, and composters signified the greatest progress. And in my opinion, the future focus should be on increasing food availability and access, which is to say, eliminating food deserts.

Also, they should get a facebook page, or something with their logo on it.

A pinch of optimism

Recipe for America: Why our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It, by Jill Richardson. Ig Publishing, 2009.

Like Coming Home to Eat, Recipe for America is book that popped up in a search for something to read. I had never heard of it or Jill Richardson before, though the latter’s blog, La Vida Locavore, did ring a bell.

The book is a succinct summary of the major issues facing the U.S. food system. I appreciated Richardson’s attempt to pull together and lay out the social, political, and environmental issues that plague our food system. Out of necessity, she couldn’t go very deeply into any one of them. Most of the points Richardson raised were already familiar to me, so I was able to detect occasional bias or extra emotion.

Richardson mentioned a handful of things that I hadn’t heard before. She spent some time working at a Whole Food bakery, and could describe how the bread slicer, certain spoons and pitchers, and a separate sink were dedicated for organic products, because “accidentally mixing [a customer’s] organic latte with a few drops of conventional dish water would be a violation of trust (and the law)” (68). That’s dedication! On paper, at least. In practice, the employees must actually follow the conventions and stipulations for Whole Food's dedication to be actualized. Richardson did. Other employees didn’t necessarily.

Another example that I was unfamiliar with was the cooperative CSA. Richardson visited a cooperative of several Amish farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Posted by Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative on Thursday, April 9, 2015

Each farm grows several crops rather than all of them to protect against coordination problems with crop variety and quantity. The cooperative model allows farmers to share costs, time, and split up marketing and financial management responsibilities. The model also softens the blow of natural disasters and poor crops that affect one farm. Of course, if the farms are located near one another, a drought in the region could affect them all equally.

I found the last chapter on the Farm Bill to be the most interesting. I don’t know very much about this piece of legislation except that it’s huge and passed about once every five years. Richardson’s brief treatment made me want to learn more.

The Appendix, "How to Cook Up a Recipe," for America is also interesting. It lists five ways to get involved and resources to do it.

1. Sign up to receive action alerts
2. Follow issues on blogs
3. Track legislation
4. Watch congressional hearings
5. Write letters to the editor.

I looked up all of the blogs and added them to my Google Reader. But I haven’t yet looked up the organizations she recommends:

• Organic Consumers Association (organicconsumers.org)
• Food and Water Watch (foodandwaterwatch.org)
• Consumers Union (consumersunion.org)
• Union of Concerned Scientists (ucsusa.org)
• The Cornucopia Institute (cornucopia.org)
• Food Democracy Now (fooddemocracynow.org)

Recipe for America pushes me in two directions: to get more involved in changing the food system and to work for a publishing company, copyediting. (This book had several baffling typos, including “stsy” instead of “stay” and random switching between rbGH and rBGH.) I’d be cool with either route.

Egg Miles

At the family Christmas party, my aunt and I got to talking about the food system and we spent some time talking about the environmental impacts of hauling food across the country. I’m less concerned about food miles than I used to be, in part because of a presentation I saw earlier this month at the CFANS Solution-Driven Science Symposium.

Roger A. Cady of Elanco Animal Health, who also worked for Monsanto for nine years, gave a presentation entitled Environmental Sustainability: A Benefit of Animal Productivity. Cady’s industry perspective often made me hot under the collar, but I tried to keep an open mind and appreciate the data he presented. For example, he broke down oft-cited Food and Agriculture Organization’s statistic that 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions are from animal agriculture. He showed that half that number is due to deforestation. The U.S., however, is a reforesting country, which brings our percentage down to 2.

Furthermore, Cady had a graph showing that transportation accounts for only 4% of the dairy industry’s greenhouse gas emission (the greatest amount occurs at the farm). He continued with an illustrative example comparing two vehicles. Vehicle 1 burned 70 gallons of gas in one hour, Vehicle 2—10 gallons. Both traveled 350 miles. Which is greener?

Don’t answer yet! There’s additional relevant information: Vehicle 1 had 50 passengers; Vehicle 2—4 passengers. That’s 17,500 people-miles and 250 people-miles per gallon (mpg) for Vehicle 1, compared to 1400 people-miles and 140 people-mpg for Vehicle 2.

This is a simplified example of Life Cycle Assessment, a complex and holistic method for analyzing the environmental impact of a service or product. Rather than focusing on the production process (gallons of fuel burned, miles per gallon), LCA calls for looking at the rest of the picture, including assessing the environmental impact per unit of output.

Photo credit: tiny banquet committee

So take eggs. Fill a refrigerated truck with hundreds of dozens of eggs and ship them a hundred miles to Cub or Rainbow. You’re going to get pretty good egg-miles. But if you’re a local farmer driving fifty miles to a farmer’s market with maybe twenty dozen eggs, your egg-mpg will be pitiful, according to Cady’s analysis. And then what about all of the people driving to the farmers’ market, taking home only a dozen eggs each?

Other analyses concur. Weber and Matthews of the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon found that transportation from producer to retailer accounts for only 4 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (one page summary, citing World-Watch article).

Does this mean we should forget about food miles and only purchase food that’s been transported in bulk? Not necessarily, because while LCA gives a broader view than production analysis, it does so with an environmental perspective. Clearly, there are other important perspectives:

• Social: Knowing your chicken farmer, being able to visit the farm. 
• Political: Are fresh eggs equally available in all communities? 
• Food safety: Are the eggs more likely to have Salmonella?

Food miles are the BMI of the food system—that one number just doesn’t tell the whole story.

Why am I here?

I am here to read, to think, to write about the connections between healthy land, healthy food, and healthy life. It’s a broad theme. It has to be.

That’s the justification in a nutshell. For the whole meal deal, keep on reading.

The seminal reason for starting this blog is selfish and has to do with my high school social studies teacher, Mr. Scarlett. He had us write one-page reflections on almost every reading he assigned. Standard practice for students, but he claimed he did the same in his own life. Always attracted to record-keeping, I continued the practice outside the classroom and diligently wrote down something about almost every book I read. I wrote on lined paper, scrap paper, colored paper, and white paper, sometimes for several pages, sometimes just one line.

These pages are three-hole punched and sit quietly in a big black binder next to a big blue binder of financial records. Keeping a record of what I've read for its own sake seems increasingly pointless to me. I need to not simply absorb and document, but also read and reflect. This blog will help me to reflect.

Also pointless is relegating the thoughts and reactions I had to a static binder when I what I read nowadays feels so urgent. People don’t need to know what I thought about The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, but I would like to tell them about Coming Home to Eat and the Heathy Food, Healthy Lives Institute. I want to share with others the complex and fascinating fields I'm picking my way through.

I am no longer focused on the corner of Nutrition. In fact, my love affair with the topic imploded earlier this semester. Our relationship was tested when I began making reluctant friends with the Food System. Things came to a head during a Human Nutrition assignment to frame a nutrition-related question and review the relevant literature. I found that studying the effects of a single nutrient in a randomized clinical trial involves asking very specific questions with a limited vocabulary. I found that the data analysis from epidemiological studies is beyond my comprehension. In short, I found that all the nice tidy details I found in my intro textbooks are not tidy at all.

Nutrition is certainly not the unique in this aspect. Push any area of study far enough and you will find its limits. One could view these limits as opportunities, take up research, and find more answers. My reaction, however, has been to step back - way back. I asked Nutrition if we could just be friends. I need some space right now. I need to see what else is out there.

Since my classes are not designed to address the Food System, I happily seek access points elsewhere, both on and off campus. I read books, I attend seminars, I watch the occasional movie. These are what I want to digest and disseminate. So stay tuned! I hope to post updates once a week. Send me things to read, events to attend, movies to watch, and ask questions. I look forward to engaging with you.

Updated January 2015.