CalFresh Challenge

As part of our local Food Day events this year, we decided to promote a CalFresh Challenge. The Challenge asks participants to live for a week (or five days, in our case) on the average benefits provided by CalFresh, California's version of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In California, that means participants were expected to spend no more than five dollars a day for all their food and beverages.

My goal was to not only stay within budget, but also continue to eat (and serve my family) healthy meals including adequate fruits and vegetables. So how did I do?

I managed to stay under the $75 limit (three people at five dollars a day for five days). I didn't even struggle to do it. We ate similar food to what we typically eat and even had enough left at the end of the week for a very simple breakfast out (six dollars for two of us). 

But I'm under no illusion that it is that "easy" for most people who actually live on the CalFresh budget day after day, often for many months at a time. I have some major advantages over people living with poverty and food insecurity. Among them:

1. I have a reliable car and money for gas. These two things are not a given for many families living with food insecurity. In our region, many people live 10 miles or more from the nearest supermarket. Without adequate transportation, they are forced to buy their food from smaller markets that offer fewer healthy options AND tend to charge higher prices because of their smaller scale.

2. I know how to cook. Again, this is not a given. Many adults have grown up on packaged foods and don't know how to create healthy meals from whole foods. Because our agricultural subsidy system rewards commodity growers, foods like boxed mac and cheese and ramen noodles are incredibly cheap while offering almost no nutritional value beyond calories. By knowing how to cook, I can make foods with much higher nutritional value from cheap ingredients like onions, potatoes, and frozen corn (which became a corn chowder at $1/meal last week).

3. I have a full, working kitchen in my house. I don't only know how to cook, but I have all the tools I need to cook most things: a working refrigerator, stove, and oven, plus pots and pans and knives and wooden spoons. If you are homeless or living in a hotel room or couch-surfing with a different friend every week because you have lost your house to the mortgage crisis or your job to the recession or your whole way of life because of a catastrophic illness, you probably don't have access to a full kitchen. Maybe you have a mini-fridge, a hotplate, and a microwave in your hotel room. Or maybe you have an open fire. Either way, you aren't going to be cooking a lot of made-from-scratch meals and you can't count on being able to store food, whether we're talking about ingredients or leftovers. For me, I could make the giant pot of corn chowder at the beginning of the week, knowing I could portion it into containers and keep them in the fridge for lunches throughout the week.

4. I eat a mostly-vegetarian diet. I eat fish and other seafood somewhere between two and four meals a month usually. Otherwise, I don't eat any kind of meat. During the Challenge, I didn't buy or eat any fish, so my proteins were all much cheaper than almost any cut of meat you can find. We had omelettes one night and even though I purchased local Alexandre eggs, they still only cost $3 for all of our omelettes. We had tofu another night -- at a buck-fifty a pound, our main course cost all of 65 cents per person once I added in the cost of seasoning and the oil for pan-frying.

I do, of course, have even more advantages -- I don't work two jobs, I don't work swing shifts, I don't have a job that leaves me physically exhausted at the end of the day -- but the four discussed here helped me stay within budget without much trouble.

The causes of poverty and food insecurity are systemic and closely related. The effects of food insecurity are devastating -- people who do not get adequate nutrition get sick more often, can't concentrate as well at school or a job, and simply can't live up to their full potential.

One in seven Americans relies on SNAP. One in seven Americans is at risk of falling below their potential. It doesn't have to be this way.

CalFresh Challenge Tips For Success

So you've taken the first step and registered to be part of the 2014 DNATL CalFresh Challenge from October 20th to 24th. (What? You haven't registered yet? Register here!) You've committed to spending just $5 per day on all of your food and beverages.

What next?

Unless you're used to living on a tight food budget, you might be getting anxious about what you'll eat next week. We've put together some tips to help you be successful.

First, rethink your drinks. Consider sticking to water during the Challenge! It's the most cost-effective choice. But if you are used to grabbing a latte (at $3.50) on the way to work and can't give up the caffeine, what are some alternatives that will fit your new budget? If you often relax at the end of the day with a glass of wine or beer, you should stock up on Two Buck Chuck or figure out a replacement. Although you certainly can find beer to fit a $5/day budget, think carefully before you commit 15-20% of your total food budget to alcohol. The cost of juice, soda, and sports drinks also adds up quickly while adding lots of sugar and not much nutrition.

Second, PLAN. Figure out a menu for the five days of the challenge. Some things to consider:

• Meat tends to be expensive, so participating in Meatless Monday (and maybe Wednesday and Thursday, too) will help you stay on budget
• Cheaper protein alternatives include beans, eggs, and tofu
• Try to incorporate at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day -- a vegetable and bean soup could be a great part of this
• Don't forget to plan breakfasts and lunches -- if you choose well, these can be very cheap meals
• Write out your menu, make a corresponding shopping list, and STICK TO IT at the store

Third, make ahead in bulk. If you can make a big pot of soup that can be dinner one night and lunch for a few days as well, you won't find yourself hungry without a quick, easy option within your budget. Some other ideas:

• Hard-boil five eggs at the beginning of the week for your breakfast or lunch (even super-premium pastured eggs only cost about 50 cents each)
• Cut up carrot and celery sticks for the whole week and store them in a container of water in the refrigerator -- you'll have a quick veggie snack or lunch component that will stay fresh all week
• Re-use leftovers creatively

Fourth, remember why you're doing this Challenge. The CalFresh Challenge isn't about winning or losing. It's not a competition. The goal is for you to gain new understanding of the lives of people living with food insecurity. If you absolutely have to attend a business lunch and your meal consumes three days worth of your CalFresh budget? Take a deep breath, enjoy the meal, and take $1.50 out of your Challenge budget to represent the lunch you would have had otherwise. Just remember that someone who actually lives with a CalFresh budget wouldn't have that option and think about what that would mean for feeling included at work functions.

Fifth, join in one of our Food Day community dinners on Friday! Even though you're supposed to avoid free meals during the CalFresh Challenge, make this one exception. We'll be showing A Place at the Table, a movie about hunger in America, and providing a free dinner in Crescent City, Gasquet, Klamath, and Smith River. Consider sharing your Challenge experience during the community conversation after the movie. Find details about the showings here and take a couple bucks out of your budget to account for the dinner.

If you're struggling to find low-cost recipes, check out USDA's recipe finder. Most of the recipes on their page are geared toward low-income food budgets. Googling "low budget recipes" will also net hundreds of low-budget, but very tasty recipes.

Thank you for participating in the CalFresh Challenge! We wish you happy eating and hope you share what you learn with others.

Frozen Cattle And The Ghost Food Truck

Earlier this fall, South Dakota experienced an early blizzard that caught ranchers off-guard. Three to four feet of snow fell overnight in the first week of October when cattle were still in unprotected summer pastures and had not yet grown winter coats. Between 15,000 and 30,000 cows died during the storm, with some ranchers losing the majority of their herds.

This snowfall broke previous records for the entire month of October and came after several days of warm weather. It's being called a freak storm, but just how freaky is it? Since 2005's Hurricane Katrina broke all records as the most-damaging and costliest hurricane in US history, there has been a string of "freak" weather events that devastate communities. As seen in South Dakota, these communities are often food producers, which means that these storms also impact our food supply.

With a few exceptions, most people now recognize that human activities are changing the world climate in ways scientists are working to fully understand. Weather patterns are changing, overall temperatures of land and water are rising, and all of this has consequences.

It is difficult to grasp exactly what climate change means for future weather patterns -- increased drought and heat in some places might be paired with more frequent floods in others -- but the best explanation I've ever heard uses rolling dice as an analogy.

With a normal pair of dice (the weather patterns humans have lived with for millennia), the extremes in terms of rolls are a two or a twelve. So if you're rolling the dice for how intense the hurricane season will be, you could get a mild two or a terrible twelve. Climate change, scientists say, change the rules in two ways. First, it loads the dice so that the higher numbers are more likely. Category 5 hurricanes, massive tornadoes, or devastating droughts will become more common. 

But the dice are changed in another way, too: Climate change adds dots. One of the dice gets an extra dot on each face. Now, the most mild weather we can hope for is a three, not a two, and at the other end, we can suddenly roll thirteens or fourteens.

We've seen some evidence of this in recent years. The northeast coast got slammed with two major hurricanes, Irene in 2011 and Sandy in 2013, that damaged states like Vermont that don't usually have to worry about hurricanes. Irene was the seventh-costliest hurricane in United States history and Sandy was the second-costliest. Twenty-six people were killed by a single tornado in Moore, OK, earlier this year.

The problem is not confined to the US by any means. In 2010, severe droughts killed as much as 25% of Russia's wheat crop, leading the country to ban wheat exports that year. Wheat prices spiked around the world. 

Our food supply depends on predictable weather and we may not have that any more.

Two artists have been thinking about what foods might be lost altogether or become so scarce as to raise prices to luxury-good status. They are touring in what they call the Ghost Food truck, providing free tastes and smells of substitutes for chocolate milk, fried cod, and peanut butter. It's a bleak vision of the toll climate change could take on our food supply.

Healthy. Sustainable. AFFORDABLE. Fair. (Part III)

For two years, I lived in the remote community of King Salmon, AK. There were 400 residents and one road, which led 16 miles to the coastal town of Naknek, with 600 residents. If you were a resident for at least a year, you could get a subsistence fishing license that allowed you to take almost 1,000 salmon, of various types, from the Naknek River and its mouth. This provided a great and almost free source of protein, and if you had the patience, you could gather gallons of blueberries and cranberries from the six-inch-high tundra berry "bushes" for vitamin C. Everything else, however, was flown in via Anchorage or barged in on one of six or seven massive barges that circled around the tip of the Aleutians once a month when the weather allowed.

In other words, food was expensive. Eight dollars for a gallon of milk and seven for a loaf of bread or box of cereal. That kind of expensive. By the time produce reached us, it was long past its prime, but still outrageously priced.

We were a one-income family at that point and even that was an entry-level salary, so we learned tough lessons about affordable food, or lack thereof.

It is a lesson that many Americans live every day, not just for two years because of an extreme location. One in four children in the United States live in food-insecure households, meaning that the adults in their life don't always know where the next meal is coming from. In households considered "very insecure", adults are often skipping meals on a regular basis.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food..." and yet, around the world, many people do not have access to adequate healthy food for themselves and their children.

This year, a high-profile film, A Place at the Table, focused attention on hunger in America. Part of the aim of the film makers is to make Americans as dedicated to ending hunger as they were in the past. Our political leaders have cut funding to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a federal program that supplies a maximum of $1.50/meal to low-income Americans) and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children, a program that supplies healthy foods to pregnant and nursing mothers and children under the age of five). People who use these programs are demonized in the public conversation about these cuts, despite the fact that most "facts" presented in these arguments are actually myths. One myth is countered in the image above; for more of the myths and misconceptions about the hungry, read this article that includes the entire infographic.

Because of the rhetoric surrounding the hungry in the media, there is a stigma attached to needing nutritional assistance. People don't want to be seen going into a food bank; they don't want their neighbors to know they are unable to feed their families.

In Del Norte and the adjacent tribal lands, there are people who cannot afford to buy adequate food for their families. There are people who live more than an hour's drive from the nearest supermarket. Most of DNATL is classified as a food desert. There are people who need help, but don't seek it for fear of what people will think.

Food Day is not just about a single day each year. Food Day is an ongoing attempt to make our food system better for everyone. Wouldn't it be great if, because of work we do over the next year, everyone in DNATL would have enough healthy food by the time Food Day rolls around next October 24th?

To join this conversation and action, please come to a Community Food Council meeting, follow this blog, "like" us on Facebook, and help our neighbors. As a community, we are only as strong as our weakest members: Shouldn't we work to make everyone strong?

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. It is a celebration, a call to action, a time for reflection, a day to inspire. In the past year, as in all years, women have made new discoveries in science; acted to change their communities; taught children to read and write; worked with their partners to create loving homes; gained new freedoms; and grown and cooked food for their families and local markets. In the past year, as in all years, women have also been hungry; struggled to feed their children; suffered from preventable illnesses; died in childbirth; survived violence both inside and outside their homes (and sometimes, not survived); and faced unequal access to agricultural land, tools, knowledge, and credit.

This year, the theme for the United Nations celebration of International Women's Day is "Empower Rural Women: End Hunger and Poverty".  In explaining the theme on their website, they write:

"Key contributors to global economies, rural women play a critical role in both developed and developing nations — they enhance agricultural and rural development, improve food security and can help reduce poverty levels in their communities. In some parts of the world, women represent 70 percent of the agricultural workforce, comprising 43 percent of agricultural workers worldwide.

Estimates reveal that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20–30 percent, lifting 100-150 million out of hunger."

In some parts of the world, women produce most of the food grown for home use. Research has demonstrated that women who have secure land tenure -- that is, women who own or otherwise have full control over their agricultural land -- produce more food per acre, put more time and resources into improving their land, and are more likely to live above the poverty line. And yet women are often denied land ownership, access to agricultural education, and development dollars that are poured, instead, into high-value crops for export.

When women are given access to business opportunities, whether it is through micro-enterprise programs like the Grameen Bank and Kiva or through non-profit development organizations like Bead for Life and Heifer International, they are less likely to live in poverty. And because poverty is one of the best indicators of food insecurity, women with opportunities are also less likely to be food insecure.

Women have the ability to raise their families out of poverty and food insecurity, but if women continue to have restricted access to land, capital, opportunity, and education, "ending hunger and poverty" will remain a theme of International Women's Days for years, if not decades, to come.

Distant Markets: Shopping Perspectives

When I first moved to Crescent City, people asked me how I liked it with great hesitation, as if they were assuming that my first impressions would be terrible. But for the four years leading up to moving here, we had lived in King Salmon, AK, (population: 400) and Cima, CA, (population: 3) in the middle of the Mojave National Preserve. To me, the prospect of being able to buy a gallon of milk without a) spending eight dollars (King Salmon) or b) driving 75 miles to Las Vegas (Cima) was a joyous prospect. Four grocery stores! In town!

It was practically a miracle.

King Salmon, where we lived, is on the Alaska Peninsula, leading out to the Aleutian Island chain. It's about 16 miles inland from Bristol Bay along the Naknek River. The only place you can drive from King Salmon is Naknek, sixteen miles away; otherwise, it's a fly-in, fly-out community. Students in South Naknek fly across the mouth of the Naknek River for school every day. They do isolated and rural to the extreme there.

This is the airport we fly in and out of. You can, in fact, see almost the entire business district of King Salmon in this photo. Our summer restaurant is next door to the airport, our bank, National Park Service offices, and a social services office are in the long building across the street. The building in the upper right, cut off at the edge of the picture, is our supermarket (left hand side of the building) and liquor store (right hand side, separate entrance).

This is downtown Cima. The left hand side of the building is the post office (closed permanently by USPS a few months before we moved), the right side is a small store with beer, soft drinks, candy, and chips, open on demand while the post office still functioned. We lived about a mile away. Our nearest neighbors were five miles further north. This is our neighborhood, a collection of abandoned small ranching houses at the junction of several unnamed, sandy dirt roads:

There were many things I loved about living in both King Salmon and Cima. There are things I miss deeply. Grocery shopping is not one of them. There is no real joy in driving an hour and a half to Las Vegas in 105 degree weather, with a toddler, to hit several stores, a library, a park, and every other possible service in one day. Anchorage is also not that enjoyable when a day in Anchorage means going to CostCo, Fred Meyer, and New Sagaya (ethnic and whole foods store), followed by scrounging for cardboard boxes, packing up the food and other purchases, and making a trip to the air freight company.

We had two things going for us: we had reliable transportation and we usually had enough cash available to do two or three months worth of shopping at a time. Without that, I'm not sure how we would have maintained a varied diet in either location. I once paid $14 for four ears of corn shrink-wrapped to a styrofoam tray because it was the only fresh produce in the store -- fruit or veg -- that looked edible and I was low on frozen stuff at home.

So after these experiences, the grocery shopping in Crescent City was enough to make a very good first impression.

All this leads up to my first visit to Pearson's Grocery in Weitchpec. I had driven through Weitchpec maybe a year earlier, on my husband's whim during my first trip to the Bald Hills. This time, I was going to Weitchpec, not through it. When I walked through the store, I was reminded very much of our store in King Salmon. There was maybe a little less produce at Pearson's, but prices were lower than they were in King Salmon. Both are typical stores for rural, isolated places: not much selection, limited fresh foods, high prices, a strong emphasis on prepared, shelf-stable foods.

A larger problem in both communities is that many families are not as lucky as mine. They don't have reliable transportation. They don't have a job that occasionally takes them to places with better stores. They don't have cash reserves that let them stock up when they do get to bigger, cheaper, better-stocked stores.

So how do we make health happen in communities like King Salmon, Cima, and Weitchpec? What changes can be made to bring healthy, affordable food options to places that are way off the beaten path? How do we guarantee that a child growing up sixty, seventy, three hundred miles away from the nearest full-service grocery store grows up with the same nutritional opportunities as someone who can walk to a Safeway or a Whole Foods or a Northcoast Co-op?

SNAP: A Critical Local Economic Resource

Last year, we featured a few articles about the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), called CalFresh in California. There's been quite a bit of buzz around town about CalFresh recently.

Del Norte was again recognized at the state level for our success in having a high percentage of residents eligible for CalFresh benefits actually using them. It's not just a win for our neighbors who need some help buying nutritious food, it's a win for our grocery stores and the people they hire. Hundreds of thousands of grocery dollars come into our county through CalFresh each and every month. Those dollars free up other sources of household income for purchases of taxable goods, raising the local tax base. It's a cycle that helps the whole community. You can read more about it in the Triplicate.

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.

Local Food As Insurance

In today's New York Times, food writer Mark Bittman discusses the benefits of locally- and regionally-grown food. He writes about similar issues often, but today's column hones in on the policies that create more incentives for growing commodities (wheat, corn, soy) that we export, feed to livestock, or feed to automobiles than incentives for growing fruits and vegetables, for which we are a net importer. He quite rightly points out that our current agricultural system, requiring massive transport costs to bring "fresh" fruits and vegetables to our supermarkets without regard for seasonality, depends on a continuation of cheap fossil fuels. 

He writes, "We’ve seen that nothing is guaranteed: not energy, not water, not the financial system, not even the climate. Our food supply isn’t guaranteed either (remember 2008?), but it’s more likely to provide us with security if we focus more on regional agriculture and less on trade." 

As it happens, there is a living, breathing example of what happens to a food system dependent on imports and fossil fuels when those things disappear. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did Cuba's food economy, which had relied heavily on sugar exports to nations behind the Iron Curtain, and imports of staple grains, tractors, and petroleum-based fertilizers and fuels. With no fuel coming in and no lucrative markets for its sugar, Cuba's food production was forced to become small, labor-intensive, and local. Human labor replaced tractors and small urban gardens and farms replaced sugar plantations almost overnight. You can read about it here, here, and here. 

Obviously, there are many criticisms that can be made of Cuba and it's Soviet-era economy is not one that is widely shared by nations today. But the lessons learned by Cuban citizens when they needed to take food matters into their own hands are valuable for us all. There are good reasons to build (or rebuild) local and regional food economies, and Cuba has shown the world that it is possible. Just some food for thought. 

Where Do You Buy Lettuce?

Shortly after I moved to Crescent City, I was at BC's Lake Earl Market waiting for sandwiches when a young boy came into the store. He was probably 9 or 10 years old and lived close enough that he had walked. When the young woman behind the counter noticed him, he put three quarters on the counter and asked if he could buy 75 cents worth of lettuce. The young woman looked puzzled, but the man making my sandwiches nodded and told her to put some washed lettuce leaves from the sandwich prep area in a ziplock.

This was clearly not the first time a transaction like this had happened. Other than the young employee (and me), nobody seemed surprised by it. The store was fairly generous in the definition of "75 cents worth" and both sides seemed satisfied.

Now maybe this boy's parents were making a dinner full of fresh veggies and realized that they had forgotten lettuce when they were at the grocery store. Maybe the lettuce was just a small part of a healthy meal fulfilling the USDA suggestion to fill half your dinner plate with vegetables.

Or maybe the transaction I witnessed is symptomatic of our community, where many people lack adequate transportation to stores that offer a full range of fresh produce. In urban areas, neighborhoods lacking in full-service grocery stores are often described as food deserts. We have them, too. Residents of Gasquet, Hiouchi, Klamath, Weitchpec, parts of Smith River, Fort Dick, and other small outlying communities have to travel considerable distance to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. For low-income residents, that can be a significant financial burden.

The good news is that there are a lot of resources for making our "corner stores" healthier. Nationwide, communities are focusing on having produce replace chips, sodas, and especially alcohol in the often small stores in underserved neighborhoods. You can learn much more at the website for the Healthy Corner Stores Network.

So where do you buy your lettuce? At a corner store? A supermarket? The farmers' market? Your kitchen garden?

Working Together To Overcome Challenges!

One thing our community does very well is work together. In some places, organizations, public agencies, and private businesses jealously guard their corner of whatever market they are in. But not in Del Norte! Since moving here, I have been continually impressed by how well people come together when there's work to be done. Today's post highlights another of these stories.

Future Farmers of America (FFA) provides agricultural education, often through classes and after-school clubs, as they do at Del Norte High. FFA provides leadership and research training, and helps young people learn how to plan and execute individual projects. You can read more about the organization here.

In Del Norte, our local FFA chapter is actively engaged with the larger community. Students have been working with Porters Pots and Plants to grow fresh veggies for Our Daily Bread Ministries, which serves hot meals to our low-income and homeless neighbors. Like most supplemental food programs, Our Daily Bread is seeing an increased need for their services at a time when many former donors have been hit hard in the pocketbook themselves. This is a great example of a public (schools)-private (Porters P&P)-charitable (Our Daily Bread) partnership. (And even goes beyond our community thanks to a massive seed donation by Territorial Seed Company of Oregon!)

Nineteen of our FFA students have been selected to go to the California State FFA Conference in April and they are in need of travel funds. They are working on a variety of fundraisers and will be holding a big rummage sale on March 19th. The garage sale will be at the Chetco Federal Credit Union parking lot. There are three ways you can help:

1. If you have unwanted, saleable items sitting in your house or garage, you can donate them for FFA to sell. These funds will help send our students to the state conference.
2. Come to the FFA Garage Sale on March 19th and turn someone else's trash into your treasure, knowing that the money will send a student to Fresno.
3. Bring a donation of fresh fruits and vegetables to the FFA Garage Sale. The produce will be donated to Our Daily Bread and you will receive a free gift of vegetable starts grown by the FFA chapter. It's a win-win situation!

Our strength is much greater when we all work together. We can all support our FFA students, not just by helping them go to the conference, but by showing that we appreciate their community service and the work they do. These are potential future farmers right here in Del Norte -- we will need them in years to come.