Real Food, Real Health

Over the last several months, I have conducted a research project with my friend Sam Lipschultz, who recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.  Our research focused upon farm to institution collaboration in the United States, and particularly upon Farm to Hospital programs.  Below is a brief introduction to our final report, and you can download a full PDF file of the report by clicking here, or on the link that follows the introduction.  We hope our work might serve as an inspiration and as a resource for hospitals in the United States.  Your attention and feedback is appreciated!     

Real Food, Real Health: Reasons and Resources for Starting Farm to Hospital Programs in the United States

U.S. hospitals spend over $5 billion each year on food.  The average hospital serves over a million meals each year.   If shifted to support the healthiest, freshest food, this buying power would help hospitals meet their most basic goal, of nourishing human health, while supporting the food system infrastructure required to increase and maintain access to healthy food for years to come. 

Connecting farms with nearby hospitals has positive implications far beyond environmental and human health.  Farm to hospital programs create a niche market for the types of farms that are often left out of both the conventional food system, and alternative local food systems.   Small farms, often farming with some variation on certified organic practices, tend to gravitate toward direct retail markets, such as farmers markets and Community Supported Agriculture groups.  Large farms, often practicing chemical intensive farming, tend to produce for export to other regions or countries.  It is the mid-size farms that are disappearing fast.  And it is those mid-sized farms that are perfect for the wholesale market of farm to hospital programs.  Farm to hospital programs provide an increase in nutritional value and taste of food; a heightened capacity for accountability over food safety and worker conditions; increased food access and food security by offering fresh, healthy food to the entire spectrum of community residents; and key contributions to the much needed infrastructure for thriving local food systems.

For healthy food in hospitals to become the norm, hospital stakeholders must begin to act on their awareness of the pitfalls of producing and consuming conventional food, and on their knowledge of the advantages of purchasing locally grown and sustainably produced food.  The following study considers the unique and strategic location of farm to hospital  programs on the frontier of local, equitable and sustainable food systems.

FULL REPORT: Real Food, Real Health, by Annie Myers and Sam Lipschultz

Op-Ed: The Marathon for Health

Americans are beginning to understand that buying and eating locally grown food is better for our health, the environment, and our local communities and economies than consuming the monocropped or factory-raised processed foods that we find cheaper, faster, and more readily available..

Local communities support farmers markets across the country. Through outlets known as Comnunity Supported Agriculture (CSAs), small farmers sell shares of their harvests to season-long customers. And after-school gardening programs teach elementary school children how to avoid diabetes and obesity by eating, and often growing their own, fresh vegetables. 

In New York, the Manhattan Borough President has called for the promotion of urban agriculture to help solve issues of hunger, food distribution, and nutrition education.  Michelle Obama has announced plans to use the White House Garden to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables.

As farmers markets and CSAs, community gardens and urban farms, tiny delivery companies and small locally-minded businesses gain ground, they are creating the potential for service to larger institutions.  Forty-one states have operational Farm to School programs, providing children in nearly 9,000 schools across the country with healthy lunches.  Students from nearly 300 colleges and universities report to the Real Food Challenge, and are working to increase the procurement of “real food” on their campuses.

Despite this progress, there remain two major dots we haven’t quite connected: the institutions that are in the business of serving our health, and healthy food.

Fresh, local vegetables are healthier than processed foods.  We should have them in our hospitals.  Access to nutritious food should be factored into policy as preventative care.

There are several significant reasons why this hasn’t happened yet.  First, four companies control 80 percent of America’s beef production.  Two companies process 75 percent of the precut salads in the country.  The voices of such companies are powerful in Washington.  Second, pharmaceutical companies aren’t big on preventative health care.  Hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are in cahoots.  Third, the industrialization of America’s food system destroyed much of the infrastructure that would have allowed large institutions to source locally.  In almost any region of the country (except perhaps California), it is difficult to coordinate the arrival of enough locally grown food at a hospital kitchen.  Fourth, our policymakers aren’t prone to holistic thinking, and so we are left struggling to find something other than band-aids to help heal our environment, our economy, and our health.  We don’t usually consider the complex options that might help cure, all at once, these ailing elements of our society.  And finally, we need a leader.  We need someone in Washington who will commit to introducing healthy food into hospitals, and who will integrate nutritious food into our health care plans.

Undeterred by these obstacles, little groups of ambitious individuals have begun creating models, hard-earned examples, of Farm to Hospital coordination.  One is in New Milford, Connecticut. 

In 2007, three women — a chef, a pediatrician, and a lawyer — came together to bring local, fresh vegetables into the kitchens of New Milford Hospital.  They found a powerful ally in the hospital’s CEO, a specialist in preventative cardiology.  Their hospital signed the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge, agreeing to adopt food procurement policies that “provide nutritionally improved food for patients, staff, visitors, and the general public,” and “create food systems which are ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially responsible.” They launched their Plow to Plate program with cooking classes for the community and meetings between farmers, community members, and hospital representatives.  They changed their hospital’s contract to include local procurement policies, and made a request for proposals for a new food service provider.  Eighteen long months later, the Plow to Plate program is serving fresh, wholesome foods to their patients; supporting regional farmers through institutional accounts as well as the Plow to Plate farmers markets; and teaching local middle and high school students how to farm sustainably, cook safely, and eat healthfully.

Many institutions are, in fact, working to create similar systems.  A total of 122 health care facilities across the country have signed the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge.  The majority of these institutions are in California, Oregon, and Washington, but others are in Nevada, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

Hospitals making the transition to serving healthy food have embarked upon a marathon thick with hurdles.  They face the difficulties of finding a food service provider willing to work specifically with regional sources; of identifying regional farmers who can reliably produce enough product to service a large institution; of competing with the growing strength of direct marketing at retail farmers markets and the higher prices farmers receive selling retail.  They have to find the right farmers, distribution centers, and distributors; to retrain their kitchen staff and perhaps renovate their kitchen facilities; and they have to teach their community of patients why healthy food is important.  They face their most daunting challenge in increasingly tight hospital budgets.

Policy could do a lot to eliminate obstacles.  Washington could require hospitals to source fresh, locally grown vegetables.  The immediate force of hospitals’ enormous purchasing power would find farmers ready to cater to their needs, distribution centers built overnight, processing centers and canneries springing up in every region, and food service providers overhauling their systems in response. 

Until Washington sees the light, locally elected officials can connect some dots on their own.  A representative of the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets made clear to me this February that the mental and political divide between urban and rural areas is the largest barrier against developing a regional food system in New York City.  Farmers don’t know what hospitals need or how they could propose to service them.  Hospitals don’t know how many farms are nearby or what sort of demand local farmers could meet.  The rural and urban political representatives don’t even realize they have something to talk about.

Hospitals have got to start serving healthy food.  The change will be a challenge, but well worth the effort.  People walk or jog dozens of miles for Breast Cancer, MS, Heart Disease, and HIV/AIDS.  This is a marathon for Diabetes and Obesity, for Soil, for Community, for Local Economy.  We have to run it, for our health, and for the health and future of our kids.

More Radishes?

 

This article is cross-posted on the Slow Food USA Blog.  According to Slow Food USA, “Slow Food is an idea, a way of living and a way of eating. It is a global, grassroots movement with thousands of members around the world that links the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment.”

Some projects are inspired by enthusiasm, some by curiosity, or morality, ambition, passion, friendship, or obligation.  The inspiration forRadishes and Rubbish was born out of such a combination of these emotions that Carla and I never doubted our ability to draw others into our work.  We are both novices and experts, both endlessly enthusiastic and quite stunningly naive.  We had no idea what times were in store.

Radishes and Rubbish is (in elevator speak) a series of field trips to food production and processing sites and waste management locations within the New York City region.   The Green Grant program of NYU’s Sustainability Task Force provides the funding for these trips, during which my friend Carla Fernandez and I offer participants an adventure, education, transportation, and a meal, all for free.  The transportation may be by foot, by subway, or by boat, by the occasional rented van, or the rare and appreciated large comfy bus.  The meal is always made with ingredients sourced as locally as can be, grown organically if possible, and always made or sold by people or shops that we know and support.  The participants are ideally freshmen in college, though they have ranged from librarians to chemistry professors, from film students to food distributors to the curious and unemployed.  The destinations are up to us.

Carla and I came at the idea of our trips from slightly different perspectives.  I study regional food systems; she studies socially responsible supply chains.  She wanted to learn about the large-scale waste management centers where our trash so misleadingly seems to disappear; I wanted to share my friendship with and knowledge of several innovative and small food producers and processors in the region.  As students at NYU’s Gallatin School, we both proposed parallel “field trip” projects in April 2008, without knowing of each other’s propositions.  The Green Grant committee told us we would receive funding if we combined forces.  And thus Radishes and Rubbish was born.

 

We have led our fellow students (and students at heart) to one recycling center, one artisan baker, two urban farms, two slaughterhouses, three cheese shops, three farms upstate (of which one composts NYU’s organic matter), one importer’s warehouse, and the second largest wholesale fish market in the world.  We’ve just finished up the school year with two trips in one weekend: to a commercial rooftop greenhouse on the Upper East Side, and to the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.

 

The trips have been glorious fun for us two.  We keep it simple.  No classrooms, no preaching.  We invite anyone to join us, ask no one for money, and let our destinations work their magic.  We’ve led city girls in kitty heels to meet the weeds of an urban farm.  College boys have shown up late night to see the wholesale source of the fish that’s sold throughout the city where they live.  A journalist for the Washington Square News noticed the piles of the school newspaper on the conveyer belt of the recycling facility where NYU sends its paper waste.  Two film students imagined a documentary staged in the compost heaps of Vassar’s composting facility.  One of our students has begun writing a book proposal about the meat industry, and suddenly some of our adventurers are having dinner 

parties where their cheese shop is a topic of conversation, and they can name the farm where the cheese was made.  One of our participants took the recipe for egg salad posted on our site and made her first meal from scratch in years.  This weekend, one of the students on our upstate trip, standing in the kill-room of a small-scale slaughterhouse, asked (clarified, really) that “this was the sort of place where the meat in the supermarket comes from?”  In response, Jake Dickson, the meat purveyor who’d accompanied us on the trip, explained the big differences between a local slaughterhouse and a factory operation, the price differential of the resulting meat, and the ways in which local vs. factory meat products are distributed.  I can’t measure the enthusiasm with which that girl scrawled her notes, but it is that sort of learning that makes our trips worth the work.  It is that pen on paper that means “field trips” are worth every penny. 

Carla and I hope Radishes and Rubbish might continue, of course, and that we might continue to have the privilege of introducing students (and ourselves!) to the small places where we produce good food, and the huge places where we send all our leftovers.  We are working on a funding arrangement for the coming year.  We are open to funding suggestions.  If all goes well, we promise another year of trips, and very much hope you will join us!!

The Newness of Survival

This is one in a series of short essays related to Annie’s colloquium, Brooklyn Brews and Oyster Pie: Visions for a Local Food System in the New York Region. An explanation of the “colloquium,” as well as a link to download Annie’s topic (the rationale), can be found under Gallatin Colloquium, in the Research section of this site.

In December 2007, NYU Professor George Shulman taught a course entitled “Authority, Modernity, and Democracy,” in which the students read (among other books) Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.  I wrote about this reading on Thanksgiving Day that year, in an essay entitled Arendt & Berry on Joralemon Street.  I had been reading Wendell Berry too.  I am only now adding the genius of Wes Jackson into my jungle of a brain.  I have not written about Wes because I would prefer to just write what he writes.

For now, I’ll share what I wrote in 2007.  My final essay for George’s course was the one I have posted below.  I apologize for the academia.  And for the imperfect footnotes.  I still believe what I wrote.

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The Newness of Survival (December 12, 2007)

The following essay will evaluate the distinct separation of political agency and human survival throughout Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and the unnecessary boundaries drawn by this separation, with which Arendt limits her own brilliant ideas.  The German Jewish political theorist values the complexity of newness, remembrance, and public space, and yet sets boundaries on the political potential of those values by separating them from the privacy of “simple” life and survival.  While articulating the valuable ideal of individual agency through creative, political action, Arendt fails to utilize the interactions of the system of Nature, which, if recognized and emulated, would allow man not only to act with agency, but to live by our ability to act.  Arendt’s theory would do well to incorporate and adjust to the fact that the material of man’s work, the inspiration for our action, and the historical and geographical context of the change we create all depend upon the earth’s environment, and on the evolving, mutually dependent, biological cycles of our natural world.  Instead, Arendt limits her core values in The Human Condition to a world that requires selectivity, subordination, and slavery, when man could embrace her underlying vision of agency, remembrance, and diverse individuals, in a system without such negative qualities.

Download the full essay here.

Harlem Pancakes, Brooklyn Collards

This is one in a series of short essays related to Annie’s colloquium, Brooklyn Brews and Oyster Pie: Visions for a Local Food System in the New York Region. An explanation of the “colloquium,” as well as a link to download Annie’s topic (the rationale), can be found under Gallatin Colloquium, in the Research section of this site.

Assata Shakur has now lived in Cuba for thirty-five years. She was a Civil Rights activist, a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, and is today just 61 years old. State and Federal police departments harassed and assaulted her throughout her years of activism, convicted her of many crimes she did not commit, and victimized her and her community through the FBI’s Counter Insurgency Program (COINTELPRO) in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Cuba granted her political asylum when she escaped from prison. In her autobiography, Assata, she relates the horrors of her time in the hospital and in prison before and during her trial for the 1972 New Jersey Turnpike Shootout. She tells this brutal story in sections, spliced with the chapters of her childhood in New York City, and her youthful years of gradual political and philosophical growth.

The publication of Assata in 1987 gave a powerful, personal voice to the violent and enraging racist reality confronted by black activists during the ‘60s and ‘70s. But the book speaks as much of a woman’s childhood memories and their importance, of her youthful decisions, judgments, and actions, and of her mind, always learning and expanding, even while fighting a world of aggressively closed and narrow mentalities. Assata was a formidable individual, yet she acted as a participant in a movement, rather than a leader. Two years ago, when I first read her work, it was her mention of and reflection on her smallest actions that changed my perspective. Her simplest stories fueled my love of the otherwise humbling, often fundamental, elements of my own social education and participation.

Assata was nearly eighteen when she became friends with a group of African students at Columbia. “One day,” she remembers, “Vietnam came up. It was around 1964 and the movement against the war had not yet blown up in full force. Someone asked me what I thought. I didn’t have the faintest idea. I said, ‘It’s all right, I guess.’” When she justified her stance by saying that, you know, the United States was fighting the war for democracy, against communism, “the brother asked [her] if [she] knew anything about the history of Vietnam,” and proceeded to explain about colonialization, exploitation, starvation, illiteracy, and the long fight waged in the North. “I sat there with my mouth hanging open.” Assata remembers. “He knew all this stuff and he wasn’t even studying history. I couldn’t believe that this African, who didn’t even live in the u.s. or in Asia, could know more than me who had friends and neighbors who were fighting over there.”

She began to read about the war, to educate herself, and found that the Africans had told her the truth. “I never thought I could be so easily tricked into being something I didn’t understand,” she writes. “It’s got to be one of the most basic principles of living: always decide who your enemies are for yourself, and never let your enemies choose your enemies for you.” Five years later, as a member of the BPP, Assata was assigned to the children’s breakfast program in Harlem, and woke up early in the morning to make the kids’ pancakes, eggs, and sandwiches. “Working on the breakfast program turned out to be an absolute delight,” she recalls. “The work was so fulfilling. From the first day I saw those kids, my heart went out to them. They were such bright, open little people, each with his or her own personality.”

Assata’s activism was one of important friendships, gradual education, intent observation, and seemingly intuitive self-reflection. She respected those whose work she truly admired, and voiced thoughtful disapproval of others’ work, even when she knew criticism was not welcome. She volunteered for the groups and organizations that she saw were doing good. She heartily accepted that opening her eyes would mean having to act. The day-to-day construction of her convictions reflects these simple, grounding principles.

Just as Assata built up her convictions, and did not let them make her self-righteous, so should we. By knowing that we do not learn in order to lead, but to open our eyes, and to act as a result. In the social movement towards environmental justice and food sovereignty, we who participate will need to embrace the power and fulfillment to be found in even the smallest forms of participation. The work of this movement will necessarily evolve as we become better informed of opportunities for change, but it will most likely continue to be the work that is least valued in our culture. We will continue to cultivate land, pick tomatoes, organize our communities, sort garbage, drive trucks, set up market tents, weigh vegetables, cook meals at soup kitchens, outdoor markets, senior centers, and at home. None of these constitute or lead to a highly paid or well-respected career. Nor do they give us a specifically strong voice in Washington. But they are each a way of participating in the movement, and each is as necessary as cooking breakfast was for black children in Harlem in the 1970s. Working towards the freedom of all people to understand, decide upon, and control what they will grow, cook, and consume, it is our (ever-growing) knowledge and our fulfillment that will be our strength.

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Shakur, Assata.  Assata: An Autobiography.  (Lawrence Hill Books: Chicago, 1987).

Butchery

There is certainly a difference between sharing a meal with people and sharing the butchering of a meal.  And most people – even doctors – would not want any learning experience to involve physically sawing a corpse in half.  A butchery workshop, therefore, doesn’t sound like a very enjoyable gathering of family and friends, nor like a particularly pleasant educational opportunity.  Yet, somehow, it can be both.

In a break from the usual pattern on this site, pictures will be prominent here.  The subject of this essay inspires a craving for images.  But the point is more in the history, and in the story of a profession of profound importance.  Butchery is a craft, a formerly respectable career of prominence and skill, rendered nearly obsolete by the industrialization of agriculture.  Should strong regional food systems truly begin to emerge across the country, it is a craft we will have to recall.

Jake Dickson led our butchery workshop last Friday, accompanied by our host, Moe Albanese, of Albanese Meats and Poultry.  We butchered two small pigs, raised by Jenny of The Pig Place in Fort Edward, New York, and processed at Hilltown Pork in Canaan, New York.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We began by sawing the first pig in half.  While the half-pig remained intact, Jake pointed out the loin, ham, belly, shank, shoulder…as well as the head, feet, tail, and teeth.  We proceeded to butcher each of the two halves of pig, each differently, so as to produce a variety of cuts.  From those first halves, we cut little pork chops and baby back ribs, two hams, and thick bacon.  From the second pig we saved the head to make head cheese, removed the bones from the whole loin for porchetta, left the double ham for good presentation, and cut the picnic shoulder, as well as the boston butt.

 

Meanwhile, Jake told us about what breeds are good for this quality or that characteristic; why some farmers feed pigs a vegetarian diet and some don’t; and how pigs hold flavor in their fat (like apples, or acorns), and thus foraging affects the taste of the pork.  As Moe nodded agreement (and instinctively, endearingly, repeatedly reached for the knife to correct our novice butchery), Jake told us about the change in the meat industry over the past fifty years.

 Moe’s father opened Albanese Meats and Poultry in 1945, a few blocks away from it’s current location on Elizabeth Street between Prince and Houston, where it has been open since 1945.  With the help of her son, Moe’s mother ran the butcher shop until she was 90 (1995), and Moe has run the business ever since.  In 2009, he is nearly alone in his profession on a block where seven butchers once served the local population of European immigrants.  Our two pigs hung on the shop’s old hooks where whole animals used to hang daily, ready to be butchered according to each customer’s requests.  But Moe hasn’t butchered whole animals for his community in over twenty years.  The industrialization of meat raising and processing has dumbed down the butcher’s profession, and  Moe now receives “boxed meat,” just like most grocery stores and super markets.  The meat is shipped into the city, neatly packaged, already prepared in standardized cuts.  The modern “butcher” is in fact a low-skilled worker, trained to slice big cuts into smaller cuts, in large amounts, as quickly as possible.  The high quality product, transparent sourcing, personal interactions, and customized services of a true butcher shop are nearly impossible to provide, and are no longer even expected.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

The actual process of change in the meat industry over the past fifty years is a story of immense complexity, inhumanity, danger, and waste.  The history of butchering in New York City begins with prominent figures of practiced skill, proceeds through cycles of immigration, threats in sanitation, gangs and wars, surges in population, industrialization, and barely survives to the present day.   I have learned only little of this enormous and intricate story of meat, but one brief workshop brought that little to life.  No textbook or lecture, demonstration or meal, could ever have made me so eager to learn.  It was a gathering of family and friends like no other.

 

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Although most animals are skinned when slaughtered, Hilltown can leave the skin on, through a process of dipping the bodies in boiling water and removing the loosened hairs with a machine (much like that used for removing the feathers from chickens).

A Prescription for Power

This is one in a series of essays related to an ongoing research project. The research is focused upon developing a Farm-To-Institution distribution program in New York State. A more detailed description of this work can be found under Ongoing Research, in the Research section of this site.

The latest two interviews conducted for this project presented a rather revealing story.  The first was with the organizer of a small delivery company that links farmers to restaurants in New York City.  The second was with a representative of a Brooklyn District Public Health Office (DPHO), who is involved in the Brooklyn Coalition of the NYC Food and Fitness Partnership.

Representing the small delivery service, the first interviewee eagerly told me about how her company works.  She gave me the nuts and bolts, the logistics, the schedule.  The farmers post their products on Fridays, the restaurants order on Mondays, the farmers harvest to order on Tuesdays and deliver to a drop-off site that night.  The truck is loaded that same (Tuesaday) night, the driver departs early Wednesday morning, the city driver takes over by sunrise, and the restaurants receive all their deliveries before Wednesday evening.  The company works with farms in a single county.  They deliver to about twenty restaurants.  They charge their farmers a fee that leaves them (the farmers) with a higher percentage of the price of their produce than they would ever receive from a wholesaler or mainstream distributor.  The interviewee herself is essentially a vibrant link, on the phone, answering farmers’ questions, dealing with chefs’ neurosis, solving the little crises that occur when the truck breaks down or the traffic is bad or the frost lingers longer than is ideal.  She told me about the possibilities for the company’s growth, who might be served, how service could be expanded and made more efficient, what additional farmers she might work with, what additional clients she might seek.  We spoke for nearly two hours about the potential and possibilities of the model her company has pioneered. 

Of course, the small delivery company serves relatively high-end restaurants that are committed to buying fresh, local products, and of sourcing through a short, transparent supply chain.  Such restaurants are willing to pay a premium for the high quality (and marketability) of these products, as are their customers.

The bodegas of Central Brooklyn are a different story altogether.  They are no more able to pay a premium for perishable produce than they are to charge their customers $4/lb for tomatoes.  But they’re still a part of the same food system.

As a result of the Kellogg Foundation’s Food and Fitness Partnership, the second interviewee participates in many meetings and conferences regarding the regional food system, and in particular, related to the high rates of diabetes and obesity in the neighborhoods within her district of Brooklyn.  Her DPHO, along with the one in Harlem, recently conducted research that shows a correlation between a lack of access to healthy foods and health risks.  The research found that most community members buy their food from bodegas that rarely offer fruits, vegetables, or milk, but instead primarily provide the residents with cigarettes, alcohol and soda.  This research led the NYC Department of Health’s Physical Activity and Nutrition Program to partner with local bodega owners to expand the availability of healthier food choices in target neighborhoods the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the city (Harlem, South Bronx, and Central Brooklyn).

As the second interviewee explained the Healthy Bodegas Initiative, she did not lose her eagerness to share her experience, but her words were not hopeful.  “The distribution network does not exist,” she said, “to make it feasible for local, small grocery stores to source foods from local farmers, even if fresh produce were financially accessible.  It would be great if the farmers who sell at markets in nearby [more wealthy] neighborhoods,” she continued, “could just come here at the end of their day, and sell their leftover produce at a discounted price to a distributor at a central drop-off/storage location, rather than trucking it back home.  Storeowners could then purchase the produce from the distributor, at a lower price than is possible at the moment.  But this system is not set up, and at the moment, the farmers don’t have the incentive to come here!”

So the story goes: When enough high-end restaurants begin to demand fresh, local produce, a delivery company emerges to cater to their demand, trucking quality products straight to their door from upstate New York.  When community residents demand fresh, local produce, they work to change policy.  But their bodega-owners can’t “demand local produce” because there isn’t an efficient distribution system in place to make fresh produce convenient and affordable enough for their business.  The community demands may change policy – in some ways, they already have.  But only purchasing power can inspire the creation of a distribution system.

The second interviewee had never considered the effect it would have to encourage the purchasing of fresh, local produce in the hospitals of Central Brooklyn.  Yet the main tool she has to work with, besides policy, is purchasing power.  Bodegas may provide many people with “food,” but they are small and unorganized, and have no set choreography for collaboration.   Their purchasing power, as individual entities, is negligible.  Meanwhile, several local hospitals serve thousands of meals a day.  The patients in these hospitals are the same mothers and fathers and children who so are so gravely affected by obesity and diabetes as the customers at the local corner stores.  If anything, hospitals are deeply invested in their patients’ health, and the correlation between human health and consumption of fresh produce has been proven!  The latest draft of the New York City Council’s “Global Warming ‘Foodprint’ Resolution” sets a goal for 20% of food served in city-run institutions to be local and preferably organic produce within ten years, and provided a budget allocation to make this possible.  As policies like these develop, centers of demand for fresh produce are powerful tools for inspiring the development of a stronger local food system.  Hospitals are hubs of such demand.  We who understand (and are so eager to learn!) how we might connect our nearby farmers with the city….we have to talk to the hospitals.

Some other cities and regions at work…

Plow to Plate: New Milford, CT

Center for Food and Justice: Los Angeles, CA

Local Food Plus: Toronto, Ontario

Grow Montana: Montana State  

Columella: On Agriculture

This is one in a series of short essays related to Annie’s colloquium, Brooklyn Brews and Oyster Pie: Visions for a Local Food System in the New York Region. An explanation of the “colloquium,” as well as a link to download Annie’s colloquium topic (the rationale), can be found under Gallatin Colloquium, in the Research section of this site.

The work of a Roman has again, like The Georgics, presented me with strikingly familiar ideas, written about today in all the papers and blogs and research reports, and yet well known to a writer in the 1st century A.D.

The twelve volumes of De Re Rustica, by Lucius J. M. Columella, offer what may be the most comprehensive account of Roman agriculture in existence.  Through this work, Columella does not lyrically entertain nor pleasurably instruct his audience, but rather educates his readers, politically and practically.  He believes, as Jefferson did nearly two thousand years later, that the practice of agriculture is perhaps the one “method of increasing one’s substance that befits a man who is a gentleman and free-born.” He recognizes the practice of agriculture as “the art of highest importance to our physical welfare and the needs of life.”

The work is rather like a grassroots organization’s guidebook, back when twelve volumes was perhaps the appropriate length for such a thing, and begins with a relatively brief raison d’etre, just as we would today:

- Columella laments the fact that “we think it beneath us to till our lands with our own hands, and we consider it of no importance to appoint as an overseer a man of very great experience.”  He explains, “The common notion is now generally entertained and established that farming is a mean employment and a business which as no need of direction or of precept.”

- He worries about the migration of the population from country to city.  “We have quit the sickle and the plough and have crept within the city-walls; and we ply our hands in the circuses and theatres rather than in the grainfields and vineyards.”  He cites the initiation of importation, a clear result of the slothful activities of young men in the city.  “We let contracts at auction for the importation of grain from our provinces beyond the sea, that we may not suffer hunger; and we lay up our stores of wine from the Cyclades Islands and from the districts of Baetica and Gaul.”

- He questions the lack of a single institution devoted to the education of farmers.  He attests, in defense of the material to be learned, “For my part, when I review the magnitude of the entire subject, like the immensity of some great body, or the minuteness of its several parts, as so many separate members, I am afraid that my last day may overtake me before I can comprehend the entire subject of rural discipline.”

Finally, the author embarks upon his own, detailed education of those who wish to pursue agriculture.  “One who devotes himself to agriculture should understand that he must call to his assistance these most fundamental resources: knowledge of the subject, means for defraying the expenses, and the will to do the work.” When choosing land, “two considerations are of chief importance – the wholesomeness of the climate, and the fruitfulness of the region; and if either of these were wanting and one had none the less the desire to live there, he had lost his senses and should be turned over to his legal guardians.”

And the instruction goes on.  Forever.  Most succinct and poetic of all is the following little passage, on fertility, and mortality, in man, and in nature:

“It is a sin to suppose that Nature, endowed with perennial fertility by the creator of the universe, is affected with barrenness as though with some disease; and it is unbecoming to a man of good judgment to believe that Earth, to whose lot was assigned a divine and everlasting youth, and who is called the common mother of all things…has grown old in mortal fashion.  And furthermore, I do not believe that misfortunes come upon us as a result of the fury of the elements, but rather, because of our own fault.” 

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Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus.  On Agriculture, Ed. and Trans. Harrison Boyd Ash (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1941).

The Georgics

This is the first in a series of short essays related to Annie’s colloquium, Brooklyn Brews and Oyster Pie: Visions for a Local Food System in the New York Region. An explanation of the “colloquium,” as well as a link to download Annie’s colloquium topic (the rationale), can be found under Gallatin Colloquium, in the Research section of this site.

Nine years of Latin courses – long years of conjugations, translations, and interpretations – did not once shine light upon The Georgics. The poems we read were about love, and war, politics, and the gods, and deceit. The epics were about love, and war, politics, and the gods, and deceit. The common portrayals of Roman meals emphasized the bare breasts of the women and the lounging comfort of the men, dangling grapes over their mouths, pouring another glass of wine. There was a story here and there of a young man leaving his plow for the sword, or the war hero returning to his fields after victory. But these were stories of strength and manhood; of the beauty of bloodshed, and the power of military strength.

We did learn of the prominent gods charged with agriculture, grain, and growth: Ceres (Demeter), and her daughter Proserpina (Persephone). Theirs was the story of the seasons. Their tale told of how Proserpina had been kidnapped by Pluto (Hades) and taken to the Underworld, where she had eaten of his food – the pomegranate seed – and so was forced to return to him for a certain period each year. During this annual time her mother caused plants to die, and would not allow the earth to fruit. Proserpina’s return to her mother each year signaled the return of fertility, the bursting of buds, and the sprouting of seedlings: the beginning of Spring.

This is all a Latin student of today might learn of farming in Ancient Rome. And I’m sure a student of modern agriculture would learn little more of ancient practices. Yet Roman agriculture was perhaps as primitive as Roman architecture. Farming was in ancient times, as it is now, the basis of human existence.

Virgil wrote The Georgics in 29 B.C.E. Reading this poem more or less makes up for nine years of silence on the soil and the seeds, and the gods with their celestial signals for agricultural action. Virgil instructs his readers – in verse, no less – on the correct time and manner for sowing each type of seed, the type of hills over which to guide one’s sheep, and the care with which to keep and honor bees. He offers not only detailed direction but too the myth behind the need to slay a two-year-old calf when one’s bees die off.

As city dwellers of the 21^st century plant their urban farms and build their green roofs, as new small farmers crop up throughout the United States, as peoples throughout the world attempt to achieve food sovereignty and end their dependence upon profoundly destructive inputs – as agriculture attempts to embrace the ecological systems by which it functions – the knowledge we need is hardly different than that which Virgil offers. We would do well to learn from books like this one.

The following passage details instructions very much the same as those taught today in New York:

Next I come to the manna, the heavenly gift of honey.

Look kindly on this part too, my friend. I’ll tell of a tiny

Republic that makes a show well worth your admiration –

Great-hearted leaders, a whole nation whose work is planned,

Their morals, groups, defences – I’ll tell you in due order.

…

For a start you must find your bees a suitable home, a position

Sheltered from wind (for wind will stop them carrying home

Their forage), a close where sheep nor goats come butting in

To jump on the flowers, nor blundering heifer stray to flick

The dew from the meadow and stamp its springing grasses down.

…

But mind there’s a bubbling spring nearby, a pool moss-bordered,

And a rill ghosting through the grass:

See, too, that a palm or tall oleaster shadow the entrance,

For thus, when the new queens lead out the earliest swarms –

The spring all theirs – and the young bees play, from hive unprisoned,

The bank may be handy to welcome them in out of the heat

And the tree meet them halfway and make them at home in it’s foliage.

(Book Four, Lines 1-27)

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Virgil, The Georgics. Trans. C. Day Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 65.

Missing: Prisoners and Patients

This is the first in a series of essays related to an ongoing research project. The research is focused upon developing a Farm-To-Institution distribution program in New York State. A more detailed description of this work can be found under Ongoing Research, in the Research section of this site.

During a recent conversation with Christina Grace, of the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets (NYSDAM), my research questions prompted her to mention the common food service providers of hospitals and prisons. In many cases, these institutions are serviced by providers like Aramark, Sodexo, and Chartwells. The usuals. Of course they are, yet it wasn’t something I’d thought about. Christina’s was the first interview Sam and I had done, in our work concerning farm-to-hospital and farm-to-prison distribution.

My first reaction was to want to whip our project clear around and embark again in the opposite direction.

NYU works with Aramark, as do many public and private universities and colleges across the country. In the early stages of our ongoing efforts to change the food sources in our school dining halls, Sam and I and many students, primarily organized by the Real Food Challenge, learned how to read our food service provider’s contracts. We may have primarily looked for the date on which the contracts would end, but many students – particularly those from large schools like NYU – learned how to negotiate, to wade through the bureaucracy, to talk to company representatives about releasing their purchasing data, to discuss whether the company executives might approve sourcing from a small distributor that might feed one ingredient to one college, rather than the entire kitchen to the entire nation. The results were not negligible – NYU now has a pilot local and organic dining hall, fair trade coffee in all seven dining halls, and Aramark may eventually work with the New York farmers markets. But working towards these changes felt mildly like convincing Wal-Mart to sell Organic, or Starbucks to buy Fair Trade. Aramark would certainly strategically adjust, but their heart would never be in it.

Now, in the initial stages of our new project, Sam and I have focused upon learning from alternative Farm-to-Institution distribution programs around the country, with the ultimate goal of writing a proposal (for a policy, or an organization, or a business) that will create a Farm-to-Institution program in New York State, particularly to service hospitals and prisons. I have been excited to think of this as very different from our work with our individual universities – a different constituency, a different structure, a different (more invisible) need, a different sort of potential for change. And so when I heard Aramark, I wasn’t excited. I had wanted to do something more creative than propose the same changes in a different contract.

The other interesting aspect of the conversation with Christina was that although she had a lot to say, she switched her focus early on to her work with public schools. She spoke of the numerous initiatives of the School Food program, of the sliced apples and the carrot coins, the yogurt, and the school gardens. There are certainly scattered projects across the country addressing hospitals, and prisons, and NYSDAM is looking at starting something with hospitals in New York, but there’s nothing on the ground yet. The School Food program, after all, is an ongoing struggle, and it only started in 2002. But it was disappointing to hear that there haven’t been more efforts to serve other institutions.

It took two days for the underlying conversation to rise above my superficial discontent. I’ve never heard much about patients and prisoners getting access to local, organic, fresh, healthy foods in New York. That was part of my motivation for this project. But I hadn’t realized what an integral puzzle piece they were in the food movement; how perfectly, predictably, they are a part of the big picture. New York policy has really only acted upon concern for school children. The 2002 school food legislation demands that, “The State Education Department should collect information from schools and other educational institutions that are interested in purchasing New York farm products and share that information with interested farmers and farm organizations across the State….The schools would then be notified by the State of the availability of the products.”

This bill was and is a wonderful step in the right direction, but it significantly ignores the interconnectedness of all major institutions, considering the vast number of meals they must provide, the few providers they source from, the purchasing power they possess together, and the potential benefit of a policy like that of 2002 for the State Departments of Education, of Health, and of Correctional Services – all together! This sort of demand would no longer clamber up the big bad supply chains, reaching for a chance to make a difference. This sort of demand would be a Giant for those beanstalks. A new distribution system would have to grow to serve it, stronger, and closer to the ground.

The idea that specific institutions can band together to make their demands heard is not a new one. So far, primarily, public schools have come together with public schools, and universities with universities, to demand access to the local products that are available. These focused efforts have not been easy nor yet “successful,” and it may feel as though broadening their focus will only complicate and slow the progress that has already been made. This may be true. But as the force behind a movement that claims a sort of holistic integrity, the community working to create a more sustainable food system cannot neglect the state of our health care system nor ignore the industries that control our prisons. These are the trademarks of an era we have in fact elected to end, but now it is our job to connect ALL the dots.

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Department of Agriculture & Markets News. Governor signs bill establishing farm-to-school initiative. Press release (Feb 13, 2002).