Future Farmers of America in Edible Portland - Kids and Food

In the Winter 2010 Issue of Edible Portland there was a great article about Future Farmers of America, describing the renewed interest in farming skills. There may be hope for agriculture and animal husbandry after all! The program doesn’t exactly teach sustainable farming or animal raising practices, but it does provide kids with small business skills as well as technical / trade skills related to food, like butchering and small scale farming (it’s not just for hippies anymore!). The culture of the organization seems like something I wouldn’t really fit in with (fairly conservative), but it seems like an organization that is leaning towards common ground of real people making good real food. I’m considering trying to study some of these kids for my dissertation, to explore their experiences of food from a more conservative perspective than my current study subjects, urban farmers.

Last year I was reviewing vendors for the Farmers Market at Portland State University in the Park Blocks for recruiting participants for my study, I came across a listing for Food Works:

"Food Works is a youth-run farm project based in North Portland that uses farming to support youth to develop their skills, engage in their community, and increase their leadership and involvement in the food system."

Which made me think about the movie Ingredients (see post in a few days), especially the part about taking kids to working farms to help reconnect kids with food. This is another angle to take, talking with urban kids before visiting the farm and after (and follow up). It might be interesting to study the transition that kids go thorough, but probably would be hard for kids to articulate change...but there ARE more programs, so it is still interesting...

I’m also thinking about studying a different population altogether, people who have never gardened before, have picked it up recently, and found unexpected benefits that compel them to continue, either in the context of garden programs in prisons (see the same Winter 2010 Issue for A Prison Garden) or for low income community gardeners. Talking with people about my project, both of these suggestions came up, since both groups have been used in some studies about gardening as therapy or as exercise, etc.

Gastronomica - the Journal of Food and Culture

There are lots of fantastic, thought provoking, and just downright tasty articles packed into each issue of this magazine! I was looking for a magazine to regularly read, that was stimulating, giving me new ideas about experiences of food, senses of place, and sustainability. Gastronomica has really hit the spot. Here’s a few of the articles that are my recent favorites, and I’ll be writing about more:

• Spring 2009 - On the Trail of Tilleul | Kelly Gibson
  French Linden Tree harvest, used for traditional herbal infusion
• Spring 2009 - memoir - What We Ate Back Then | Jimmye Hillman
• Summer 2009 - regional fare - Utica Greens: Central New York's Italian-American Specialty | Naomi Guttman and Roberta L. Krueger
• Summer 2009 - La Finanziera | Francine Segan
  Cock Comb Soup in Northern Italy
• Fall 2009 - libations - Perry | Cherry Ripe
  Traditional fermented pear libation
• Fall 2009 - at the movies - This Ain't Burger King | Vanessa Gregory
  Films for Southern Foodways Alliance by Joe York
• Fall 2009 - Book Reviews - Yquem | Tara Q. Thomas
  French dessert wine

Neighborhood Organizations

On December 24th, 2009 there was a drive-by shooting at a duplex half a block away on my street. Eric and I jumped out of bed onto the floor, and I called 911. No one was harmed, the shooter just hit a car and the duplex a few houses away. The shooter was apprehended a few days later, but the whole event was a big wake up call to the entire neighborhood. We had noticed what looked like drug dealing involving two of the young men who lived or hung out at the duplex, but didn’t really want to get involved, but after the shooting we went to our Neighborhood Association meeting to see what we could do.

We are part of the Brentwood-Darlington Neighborhood, which has a fairly active Neighborhood Association that meets every first Thursday of the month. Our Association was a great place to start, everyone was very supportive and we met more neighbors who lived near our street and were also very concerned.

The house that was shot up (the “drug house”) was a rental, so we decided to write the owner and plead with them to evict their tenants (the drug dealing ones, not the tenants on the other side of the duplex). We looked up the owner using PortlandMaps, wrote a letter with our neighbor, then took it to most of our neighbors on our block for their signatures as well.

Some of our neighbors hadn’t heard about the shooting, but still had a lot to say about what they wanted to see change on our block (and at times I had to stop them, not wanting to hear more accusations, gossip, or rumors about various groups of “those people”). All in all, it was a great opportunity to meet my community and come together on an issue we were all concerned about (or became concerned about once they heard about it).

We worked with the owner of the property that was shot at (she didn’t even know about the shooting, her Management Company didn’t tell her and she lived out of the city), and there are now new tenants in the duplex. We also formed a Neighborhood Watch for longer term community building and increasing public safety (I’m the block captain). That’s been a little slow to move forward, but there was a great first meeting. Again, it was great just to meet neighbors and start to build more community. Here are some projects the Neighborhood Watch is probably going to work on in the near future:

• Foot Patrol, in the evenings around Woodmere Elementary (to increase community presence and discourage drug & alcohol use in the park and school grounds)
• Increased street lighting on the south side of the Woodmere park
• Neighborhood Watch signs
• Graffiti removal (especially at Duke and 78th on the fence and on traffic light posts)
• Bus Shelter at Duke and 78th, Westbound
• Recruiting and welcoming more / new neighbors to the Neighborhood Watch

We’ve already seen more of a police presence around the school, which is nice to see. Growing up I was very anti-police, it seems like they had nothing better to do than harass us kids when we weren’t doing anything against the law (being an unschooler out on the town during school hours probably didn’t help, but still), or trying to give kids their police-baseball-card things (message: Cops are cool when they harass people!). But in this case, I’m really happy to see the police, and all interactions I’ve had with them (or witnessed) has been good. This is not to say I’m completely pro-police in Portland, I know there’s a lot of issues people have, but I think near our school, it’s nice to have the police around to discourage vandalism, drugs and alcohol, in addition to our community safety efforts.
I plan on going to the Neighborhood Association meetings as much as possible, and staying engaged in my very local community, it feels great to know more of my neighbors and increase my social sense of place!

Resources

• Office of Neighborhood Involvement - Crime Prevention website
  http://www.portlandonline.com/oni/index.cfm?c=28395
• Establishing Your Neighborhood Watch brochure
  http://www.portlandonline.com/shared/cfm/image.cfm?id=79548
• Graffiti Abatement Program website
  http://www.portlandonline.com/oni/index.cfm?c=32420&
• Street Light requests website http://www.portlandonline.com/transportation/index.cfm?a=192894&c=47271
• Non-Emergency Portland Police line: 503-823-3333
• Pothole Hotline: 503-823-BUMP (2867)
• Northwest Grocery Cart Retrieval Hotline: 888-55-CARTS

Urban Gardening - The Front Garden

The ready-to-plant Front Garden!

Here's a picture series showing the building of the front garden, from burlap-covered-grass to compost dumping to retaining wall.

Why study food? (Kitchen Literacy)

Anyone who's curious what I'm up to, locked away in my office, giving myself carpal tunnel this summer, have a look. I'm finally able to get my ideas more organized and write my dissertation research proposal (in the works). Here's one of my favorite authors ideas, that parallel some of my core background ideas for my research

Excerpts from Kitchen Literacy by Ann Vileisis

Where we are right now

When we consider “connecting with nature,” we are more inclined to imagine gazing at a spectacular waterfall than to consider rows of crops on a farm, let alone the frozen-foods aisle. In one of those great modern ironies, food is rarely regarded as “natural” unless it has been so labeled.

Yet each time we eat a turkey sandwich or a bowl of cereal, we are dependent on land and water - we are fixed in food chains that link us to places that are surely embedded in ecological systems. Author Michael Pollan has recently described eating as “our most profound engagement with the natural world.” Indeed, through food, we are irrevocably attached to the natural environment. The odd thing is that, by habit, we rarely realize this, and collectively, our lack of awareness has given us a distorted view of our place as humans within the larger world. With the supermarket nearby, we live with a detached assurance that our stomachs will always be full, even as industrial farms severely degrade soils, consumer enormous amounts of fossil fuels, pollute waters with excess nitrogen and toxins, and inadvertently spur pests and microbes to alarming potencies.

How we got here

Ostensibly, city shoppers never actually chose to know less about where foods came from and how they were raised, but the importance of knowing stories about food’s origins had been overshadowed by other, more pressing matters a American urbanized industrialized and grew. In the face of urban squalor and increased understanding of germs at the turn of the century, shoppers had chosen hygienic and prepackaged foods. As the supply of servants shrank, homemakers more openly considered laborsaving methods, products, and appliances that eliminated unseemly work. In the wake of World War I induced scarcity, city dwellers yearning for the security promises by a modern food system.

Where we came from

Cooks and eaters had long chosen foods based on sight, smell, taste, and tough – senses that could discern a full spectrum of qualities from ripeness to rot and all sorts of distinctions in between. Now a panoply of made-foods confounded those senses. What had always been a direct, natural, sensuous relationship between eaters and food seemed to be at stake.

Where we are going? My research! How does the experience of being an urban gardener reconnect people with their food and with nature in a way that leads to sustainable consumption?

Urban Gardening, part 2

Delightful picture of the season

Clothesline - Solar Power!

I installed my clothesline today, an umbrella kind that is easy to fold up and store during Portland's rainy winter. I love the smell of freshly dried clothes in the summer, especially my sheets. Clothes are definitely a little more stiff when they are dried on the line, but I don't mine too much for most things, I actually kind of like the stiffness of socks when you first put them on.

Clotheslines are one of the 7 things that will save the planet, says Author John C. Ryan, of Seven Wonders: Everyday Things for a Healthier Planet. All seven things are (not that I necessarily agree with all of his reasons):

• bicycles
• public libraries
• ladybugs
• condoms
• pad thai
• clotheslines
• ceiling fans

Other advantages of clothes lines (besides the free energy of the sun): You get to go outside and move your body (free vitamin D)! Warning: once you go outside you might not want to go back inside. You might becoming inspired to do yard projects, or get a good book and a lawn chair... anything to stay outside more.