Back Home On The Redwood Coast

Last year, my family and I left the beautiful Del Norte coast for parts east, driving out 199 the day before all the Food Day festivities started at the fairgrounds. After participating in many weeks of planning, I missed all those events as we drove through Great Basin National Park, traveled the "Loneliest Highway", visited old friends in St. Louis, and finally arrived in our new home state just as Hurricane Sandy smacked the whole region with devastating winds and flooding.

It was not the welcome to your new home we were anticipating.

Things didn't work out as planned, despite the wonderful proximity to parts of my extended family and my hometown. When I was offered the blandly-titled, but absolutely wonderful Food Systems Analyst position and my husband was told he'd be welcomed back to the parks here, the decision to come back wasn't all that tough. We will miss friends and family in the east, but I think we learned that we are all Westerners now.

I'm in my third week on the job now and in the midst of planning 2013's Food Day celebrations (see our dedicated Food Day posts here). There have been good and bad changes since we left town. Wild Rivers Market opened in their expanded space shortly after we left, but Ray's closed their stores in Crescent City and Smith River. 

Everywhere I've gone over the past three weeks, I've been welcomed back with open arms. It's hard to move a family across the country, but much easier when you're coming back to friends and the Redwood Coast.

We're going to be bringing the Growing Tables blog and our Community Food Council Facebook page back to life over the next several weeks. We want to be a place everyone can come to learn about food events, resources, and people. Keep checking back!

May Food Drive

The May Food Drive at Starbucks starts today! All month long, Starbucks in Crescent City will be collecting for the food bank at Community Assistance Network. Bring your non-perishable food items by and place them in the barrel. Right now, the food bank needs nutritious foods that are  high in protein most, like peanut butter, tuna, beans and powdered milk. All food that is donated will supplement CAN's food boxes. It's sure to go home with someone who needs it.

ReThink Your Drink!

World Water Day is coming up. March 22 is the day set aside to celebrate freshwater and further the discussion on the importance of safe water, sustainable access and practices. This year, the focus is on the link between food security and water security. Drought is the leading cause of food shortages - it is especially hard on communities relying on local agriculture for food.

Del Norte County is fortunate to have a large supply of freshwater, but that doesn't mean everyone always has access to safe, clean water. Sodas and other sugary drinks are  sometimes the most accessible beverages at parks, schools, hospitals and other public spaces. A 20 ounce bottle of soda has 17 teaspoons of sugar, and soda is the number one source of sugar in the American diet. Consuming a lot sugar has known health risks. To address this, DHHS, First 5 Del Norte and the North Coast Nutrition and Fitness Collaborative teamed up to put on a "ReThink Your Drink" forum and training event for community members yesterday.

The afternoon was both informative and interactive, providing participants with materials and activities for furthering the campaign message, that water is best, and we can get it best from the tap. A "photo journey" through the "State of Our Water in Del Norte," with Sara Haug as Field Guide, showed that some places were better at providing access to the tap than others. This photo from Little School of the Redwoods, shows a girl taking advantage of hers.

If you're interested in learning more about the virtues of water, or getting involved in the campaign, click on any of the above links. There are some great materials already available. Maybe you'd like to do something special for World Water Day! 

Thanksgiving And The Economy

At a time when many people are already struggling financially, Thanksgiving dinner is expected to cost 13% more than it did last year. Commodity prices have gone up, raising prices in the store on everything from bread to flour to cranberries. And, of course, the main feature on many Thanksgiving tables: the turkey.

Soon Ray's and Safeway will begin their Fall Food Drives. Each store has put together a bag of groceries worth $20 that shoppers can buy for $15 and donate to CAN. Our food bank will get the food onto tables throughout our community that would otherwise look a little bare on November 24th. Please give generously so that everyone in our community has a comforting meal to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

Food Day Films And Celebration

The first annual Food Day is coming up on Monday, October 24th! Maybe you're celebrating by putting in a winter garden or cooking an all-local meal or savoring a meal at one of our local restaurants. If you don't yet have plans -- or even if you do! -- please join us for a celebration of Food Day through film and community.

Starting at 5:30, the Community Food Council for Del Norte and Adjacent Tribal Lands and Community Assistance Network will be hosting a Food Day event at the Del Norte School District Office at 301 Washington Blvd. We will celebrate the newly-elected Food Council representatives with a half-hour mixer with food and drinks. At 6pm, we will show a collection of short documentary films highlighting various parts of our food system from farm to waste stream. They are thought-provoking, funny, and inspiring. I hope you'll join the viewing and a post-film conversation.

Community Gardening Excitement

If you haven't seen today's Triplicate yet, make a point to pick it up. A beautiful above-the-fold photograph of one of our community gardeners opens a great article about the Elk Valley Community Garden. The predominantly Hmong gardeners at Elk Valley have turned a bare lot into an extremely productive piece of agricultural land over the past four and a half months. Looking at the garden, it's hard to believe that they only started planting seeds in mid-May! (Check out our past post about this garden to see the before pictures!) This garden supplies fresh, healthy food to 24 families, representing over 100 people. It's a small part of our population, but what a beautiful first step they've taken.

This excellent coverage by Kelley and Bry is the topper on a month of great community gardening in Del Norte. With five community members returning from NYC's American Community Gardening Association conference at the end of August, we have been inundated with information and excitement from their experiences. You can read about it here and here. At this month's Community Food Council meeting, we had two of our school Nutrition in the Garden educators tell members about the status, joys, and challenges in our school gardens. From there, eight people have formed a new subcommittee (open to all community members!) to find news ways to build support for all of our school and community gardens.

Last week, we shared a wonderful day of learning and collaboration with community gardeners from all over California and southern Oregon, right here in Crescent City. Ten sessions about gardening and community gardens took place at the beautiful Oceanfront Lodge. Forty-five participants learned about raised bed techniques, aquaponics, gardening with kids, incorporating fruit trees into community gardens, and much more. Above, Joe Gillespie talks about lessons learned during his 18 years of gardening at Crescent Elk Middle School. Below, participants show off their color-matched finds during a gardening with kids hands-on activity.

After a delicious lunch courtesy of the Bar-O Boys Ranch culinary arts program and exciting afternoon sessions, attendees toured our local community gardens and met with our gardeners. They toured six gardens and learned something new at each one.

 At the Seventh Day Adventist Community Garden

The new garden at the Wellness Center

When the tour was complete, a large contingent of our out-of-town guests had a laughter-filled dinner overlooking the Harbor at Good Harvest. They had more chances to ask questions and share information about their own community garden projects. People left Del Norte with new tools for their own communities. They loved our coast and our redwoods. They raved about the meals and our community's hospitality. It was Del Norte at its best: sharing one of the things we do well in one of the most beautiful places on our planet. Our gardens are an inspiration for people just starting out. They show what our community can accomplish when we work together and we were very proud to show off our gardeners' successes! Community gardens are about food, community, relationships, and hope for the future. All of that was on full display for 45 very happy conference-goers last Friday.

Book Reading: Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas

Please join us for a book reading by Mark Winne this Friday evening. Mark is an extremely knowledgeable and lively speaker on food policy and has written extensively on food justice and food "rebels". This promises to be an enjoyable and educational event.

Food Sovereignty and a Yurok Tribal Beach Gathering

Recently, we've been asking a lot of people about food sovereignty and what it looks like to them. Food sovereignty has been defined as "the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems." You can read more about food sovereignty here, here, and here. The last link is to the Mvskoke Food Sovereignty Iniative, one of several Tribal food sovereignty movements in North America.

For larger scale food sovereignty actions, Maine is at the forefront. A few towns have recently declared that USDA regulations do not apply to locally produced foods exchanged between community members. These local ordinances will no doubt be challenged in court, but they serve to change the conversation about local agriculture and food policies. In the past couple weeks, the Maine legislature passed a joint resolution along the same lines, stating:

"RESOLVED: That We, the Members of the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Legislature now assembled in the First Regular Session, on behalf of the people we represent, and in recognition of our State's proud agricultural heritage, take this opportunity to oppose any federal statute, law or regulation that attempts to threaten our basic human right to save seed and grow, process, consume and exchange food and farm products within the State of Maine."

To the USDA, those may well be fightin' words, just as recent local events may be fightin' words. Over this past weekend, members of the Yurok Tribe attended multiple beach gatherings to collect seaweed and mussel shells for traditional and ceremonial uses. Indigeneous rights to some of these cultural resources have been threatened by various government entities. Part of the purpose of the gatherings was to evoke indigeneous cultural rights and the right to food sovereignty. You can see pictures of the events on the Yurok Tribe's Facebook page.

Unfortunately, the beach gatherings conflicted somewhat with the Yurok Spring Fling in Klamath, where we were busy asking people about their vision of food sovereignty. The folks who were demonstrating it weren't able to add this vision to the poster. We're in the process of creating visual word clouds of the answers from the Weitchpec and Klamath Spring Flings and will post them when they're finished.

In the meantime, what does food sovereignty look like to YOU? If we get enough answers in the comments, we'll make and post a word cloud for this, too.

The USDA Plate and the Crescent City Farmers Market

The Crescent City Farmers Market opens this Saturday! If anything deserves an exclamation point on this overcast day, opening day of the market does. The farmers market is so much more than a place to shop for local veggies (although that's a critical and wonderful part of it!). Friends and neighbors chat, children play, recipes are swapped -- the farmers market is a social event and our community needs more of them.

I hope that Saturday dawns clear and warm so we can all celebrate the start of local food purchases and consumption. The market is at the Del Norte County Fairgrounds from 9 to 1.

This year marks the second season that the Crescent City Farmers Market will accept EBT cards for CalFresh purchases. It is an exciting development that opens the market up to more Del Norte neighbors. You can read more about it here.

This is a particularly good time for the farmers' market to open because the USDA has just replaced the traditional food pyramid with the food plate. If you look at the image, you'll notice that half the plate is set aside for fruits and vegetables. For many people, that's a tall order, but shopping at the farmers market can help! Many small farmers experiment with unusual veggies or varieties that can add color and texture to your plate or entice you to try an unfamiliar food.

Community Garden Build -- Bring Your Work Gloves!

People who leave Crescent City on Friday afternoons and stay out of town until returning to work on Monday will have a big surprise next week. Where there is just a vacant lot this week, there will be a new community garden come Monday. If you haven't already heard the news, there is a huge community volunteer day happening this Saturday, May 21st, at the Wellness Center campus on Northcrest and Washington.

Fifty raised beds are going to be assembled, put in place, and filled with the lucious enhanced dirty fines produced by Del Norte's own Eco-Nutrients. We're expecting a big turnout, but we'll still take volunteers, especially those who come bearing shovels, rakes, wheelbarrows, staple guns, tin snips or metal shears, and power screwdrivers. In a few hours, bare, compacted dirt will be covered by fertile soil in raised beds. 

The fun begins at 10am and we'll have coffee in the morning and lunch around noon. Under-18 volunteers are welcome, but will need a parent's signature on a release form in order to work. The event is weather-dependent -- if it's raining lightly or misting off and on, check back here to see if it's still on. We want our gardeners to be able to start growing, so we won't be easily scared by a little rain! If you have questions before the event, you can call Connor at 464-9190 ext. 119 for more information.

Art Walk: Friday 4 to 7 pm

We are very excited to offer a preview of this Friday's Art Walk. CAN's office at 343 G Street will be a participating venue for the first time and we have a great show lined up for your enjoyment. The theme of the show is Food and Farms and we will have both visual and functional art related to the theme.

E. Chris Wisner, as you can see from these samples, takes stunning pictures of produce that can elevate our view of these "humble" foods. We will also have a collection of photographs of bees and beekeepers by Miranda Forni and some functional art in the form of mixed-wood cutting boards made by fine woodworker Mike Olmstead.

We're looking forward to seeing you all during the Art Walk. Food and beverages will be served -- and we are most likely going to have live music, too!

CAN's downtown office building is located just off the corner of G Street and 3rd Street, near Glenn's Bakery and the Triplicate offices.