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Eating local at UP tests comfort zones
Shelby Wood, The Oregonian
University of Portland students were challenged this week to eat a meal made entirely from ingredients produced within 150 miles of the North Portland campus (except for salt).
Considering that students didn’t have to shop for or cook the meal, this wouldn’t appear to be much of a challenge.
At first.
… At UP, every item prepared for Tuesday’s lunch met the 150-mile rule — from savory roasted squash soup to thick smokehouse beef sandwiches, to stacks of fresh strawberries, peaches and watermelon. Cory Schreiber, an award-winning chef who founded Portland’s Wildwood restaurant, helped create the menu, which included tweaked versions of Wildwood’s mushroom bread pudding and roasted beets with chevre.
A challenge? Please. It was $5 for all you could eat. However passionate (or not) one feels about eating local, this tasty feast was a deal. Many students seemed to agree, piling plates high with chicken salad on homemade bread and hand-sliced potato chips.
Yet an undercurrent of tension rippled through the Commons, UP’s dining hall. Two hours into the lunch service, it revealed itself on the comment board outside dining manager Kirk Mustain’s office. Early results ran 8 to 2 against eating local. Anyone who has balked at the unfamiliar — beets? leeks? — would recognize the rage.
“Why did you have to do ‘eat local’ on chicken wrap day? You ruined my week,” read one note scrawled on a recycled-content napkin.
“We are not HIPPIES,” read another. “We don’t care where our food comes from. It just has to taste good. This does not taste good.”
… Mustain believes that learning to eat local is a life skill, so he’s always pushing students to try new things — especially the freshmen who enroll with a taste for spaghetti and Ragu sauce, not pumpkin-stuffed ravioli.
“We have to be careful and not be preachy,” said Mustain, a thoughtful, bearish guy who does not come off as preachy. “I say, ‘This is how cooking used to be, and still can be.’ . . . If I can get them to try one thing out of their comfort zone, it’s a victory.”
(3 October 2008)
Familiar story at our house. After a few years, “local” has won out here. We now look forward to local greens like chard and collards. -BA
Why My Dad’s Going Green
Kate Sheppard, YES! Magazine
… I never really felt like my politics fit in my family. There was my conversion to vegetarianism (the same as “communism” in Dad’s book), my stance against President Bush and the Iraq War, and my growing commitment to environmental work. Dad griped that I was becoming one of “those radical environmentalists.”
So when my father called a few years ago to ask me about this whole organics thing, I was confused. He asked, did I buy organic? Where did I shop? I was a college student at the time, so the answers were “When I can afford to” and “The closest grocery store to campus.”
I was sort of flattered that Dad thought of me as his de facto source of information about the young and eco-minded. Turns out he’d been reading in agricultural trade publications that organics were the next big thing. My father, though not always in tune with the latest on the environmental front, was ever a savvy businessman: He wanted in.
My father, Thomas Sheppard, has been a farmer since he was old enough to wield a shovel.
… But in recent years I’ve realized that a lot of my beliefs aren’t in spite of where and how I grew up—they’re because of it. I care about the land because it’s from the land that my family makes a living. I care about food sources and security because I never had to think twice about where mine came from growing up—I could just walk out back and pick a tomato or a pepper. I care about open space and clean water and air because I can’t imagine a childhood without them.
And so does Dad. Even if we may never agree on a lawn sign.
Kate Sheppard wrote this article as part of Purple America, the Fall 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Kate is the political reporter for Grist, and has also written for The American Prospect, In These Times, Alternet, The Guardian, and Bitch. When not braving the wilds of Capitol Hill, she’s out searching for bike lanes and defending the honor of the Garden State.
(October 2008)
Britain on a plate
Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian
Jamie’s Ministry of Food, the celebrity chef’s new TV series, is a powerful portrait of the socially excluded. It also reveals an enduring truth, says Felicity Lawrence: our diet today is as much about class as it always has been – and it will take more than a one-man mission to change that
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There was a moment in the first episode of the new Jamie Oliver TV series last night when the Essex-lad-made-millionaire had an outburst worthy of a revolutionary. Emerging from a mealtime visit to Natasha, a single mother on benefits in Rotherham, he raged in his own inimitable language of protest: “Fucking hell … it’s fucking Great Britain. It’s 2008. I’ve been to Soweto and I’ve seen Aids orphans eating better than that.”
Natasha feeds her two children takeaways most nights. Aged five and two, they have never eaten a meal that has been properly cooked at home. Instead, they sit on the floor – no table, no cutlery – and eat shavings of doner kebabs or chips with processed cheese from polystyrene boxes with their fingers. Even instant noodles have to be negotiated without forks. The bottom drawers of Natasha’s fridge are stuffed full of sweets and chocolate bars. “This is where all my money goes,” she admitted. About £70 out of a weekly benefits cheque of just £80 on fast food and junk. Five-year-old Kiya has already had to go to the dentist twice to have rotten teeth removed. Natasha can see the life of obesity and illness ahead of them; it’s not that she doesn’t share the middle-class fantasy of sitting down to a cosy communal table each night, but despite her eight-hob gas cooker and the countless cookery shows on her flatscreen TV, she doesn’t seem to know what to do.
Whenever Oliver leaves her, in this and subsequent episodes of his TV mission to teach the nation to cook, he is stirred to the same outrage, shouted from the barricade of his celebrity jeep. Natasha turns out not only to have a big cooker and TV but debts large enough to make her a pawn-shop regular, and depression deep enough to make her give up trying. When Oliver finds this out he confides to the camera in his car, “I don’t blame her … but I’m fucking angry. I’m fucking angry and I don’t know who with or what with.” He has just met poverty in all its 21st-century complexity – and it has a profound effect.
Miss this Ministry of Food series and you’ll be missing some of the most powerful political documentary in years.
(1 October 2008)
Could Quotas Keep Fish on the Menu?
Peter Ritter, Time Magazine
Giving a man a fish — not teaching him how to do it — may actually be a better way to preserve the world’s dwindling fish stocks, according to a new study published in Science on Sept. 19. Scientists and fishermen have known for years that global fish populations are in bad shape. According to one bleak 2006 study, all of the world’s major commercial fisheries could collapse by 2048 because of overfishing and loss of habitat. Now a team of economists and biologists say they know one way to prevent the loss of this crucial resource in global waters: more quotas…
…According to Costello, fisheries, or areas where a certain kind of fish is caught, represent a textbook example of a tragedy of the commons — the classic economics metaphor for a shared resource that is ruined because of competition between users. Giving fishermen catch shares — also known as Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQs) — doesn’t dampen competition for fish, but manages it by essentially making fishermen stakeholders in a fishery. Costello explains that IFQs, which can be bought, sold or traded just like stocks, discourage overfishing by giving fishermen a vested interest in preserving the future health of the resource…
(1 October 2008)
Zimbabwe on the brink of new crisis as food runs out
Alex Duval Smith, The Observer
As President Mugabe and opposition MDC leaders wrangle over cabinet appointments, millions face starvation in a catastrophe created by economic chaos and the dramatic collapse of commercial farms
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Six months after the elections, Zimbabwe still lacks a functioning government and is on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe.
Following the worst wheat harvest since the independence war, bread has run out and sugar supplies are set to follow. USAid, the American government humanitarian agency, is warning that the country could run out of the maize, the staple food, by next month. Farming officials say the government’s stated aim of producing maize on 500,000 hectares this season is unattainable.
‘We are in serious trouble,’ said Jabulani Gwaringa, of the Zimbabwe Farmers’ Union (ZFU), which represents small-scale operators. ‘There is no seed, fertiliser and crop chemicals on the market. Banks are not offering farmers any credit. In July we had produced about 25,000 metric tons of seed maize. We are down to 9,000 because farmers opted to eat their hybrid seed or sell it to millers.’
One European diplomat said: ‘We are already hearing isolated reports of child deaths from hunger.’ In the poorest provinces, such as Matabeleland North, subsistence farmers have begun bartering their livestock for maize: one cow buys six buckets of maize, while four live chickens or a goat buy one bucket.
(5 October 2008)
