I grew up in a small town in New York that was rural and agricultural. It was also an hour and a half drive from Manhattan, something people sometimes have a hard time picturing. But it's true: Less than two hours from the big, wicked city, my small town (the village had 6,000 people when I was in high school) was filled with pick your own apple orchards; dairy farms being run by the seventh generation of the same families; 12,000 acres of the best soil on earth, mostly planted to onions; and a bustling fall tourist industry fueled by apple picking, apple cider, hay mazes, and pumpkin patches.
I worked in one of the orchards for two or three years, pulling cases of cider out of a refrigerated truck and collecting thousands of dollars in a single day from city dwellers who had come for their annual day in the country. I even had NYC taxis come through my line occasionally!
So I know that tourism based on farms and food can work. Heck, I participate in it wherever I go. I visit farmers markets and specialty food shops and haunt Yelp for restaurant recommendations any time I travel.
This all leads up to my being very excited for tomorrow! Travel Oregon, the state office of tourism for our neighbors, are putting on a series of tourism workshops for the Oregon part of the Wild Rivers Coast. There are some great topics (Wednesday is bicycle tourism, for instance, and there are tourism marketing workshops early next year), but tomorrow I'm heading to Gold Beach for eight hours of training in Culinary- and Agri-Tourism!
Thanks to our location at the north end of the Redwood National and State Parks, a steady stream of people drive through Del Norte County. A lot of them, unfortunately, drive straight through without stopping for more than a short hike and a quick stop at one of the visitor centers. We have more to offer than the magnificent redwoods and I think our food and farms are one of our developing attractions. I'll spend tomorrow listening and learning and hope to return to our part of the Wild Rivers Coast with some thoughts about attracting more tourist time, attention, and dollars on our food system.
Our last day of Food Day events featured six successful DIY Food Workshops. People came to learn about hunting wild mushrooms and keeping backyard chickens, among other things. We heard a lot of excitement in the community for these workshops and so we plan to do more of them!
We asked participants, what other DIY food topics do you want you learn about? People suggested permaculture, meat and fish smoking, more canning, and a variety of other subjects.
And now we're asking YOU! Are there workshops you'd like to see offered? Foods you want to know how to produce or prepare? Or is there something that you know how to do that you'd like to teach to others? We have a variety of resources to make these classes happen, so bring on a list! Let us know in the comments what DIY Food Workshops you'd like to see next.
We've featured successes from the Crescent Elk Middle School garden before, but this time Joe Gillespie and his students have taken things a step further. They have been providing food to the school kitchens on a regular basis and have been featured in a "Know Your Farmer" spot! It's a great way to close the circle and make an impact:
Each November for many years now has brought National Blog Posting Month, in which hundreds, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of bloggers commit themselves to blog every day for a month. We blogged every day for Lent a few years ago, but Growing Tables has never participated in NaBloPoMo.
Until now.
This month, we will blog every day. It will be fun. For you, at least, I hope.
Probably, you have a calendar you can follow along with as we blog through November, but you might not have a calendar for next year yet. If that's the case, let me recommend that you find yourself a copy of the new 2014 Humboldt CAFF calendars! Each year, the Community Alliance with Family Farmers creates a spectacular calendar of photographs by the great Chris Wisner. Chris has an eye for capturing the beauty of produce and farms and this year's photos are no different.
What is different is that he captured two Del Norte farms for the 2014 photo shoot. Alexandre Eco-Dairy and Ocean Air Farms are both featured in the calendar and CAFF is currently working to find Del Norte outlets to sell the calendar so we can all hang it on our walls. As soon as outlets are confirmed, we'll post it here.
Enjoy November!
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.
We've spent the last two days preparing kits to go out to all the preschools, Head Start centers, and state preschools in the DNATL world. Almost 400 preschoolers will take part in a Food Day activity celebrating healthy eating.
We packed boxes with copies of Lois Ehlert's Eating the Alphabet, tangerines, bananas, and Potter the Otter: A Tale About Water books. We started delivering the boxes this afternoon, and by the end of the day tomorrow, preschools in Smith River, Crescent City, Klamath, and the upper Yurok Reservation will all have their kits for Food Day. It's an amazing start.
Our kits are a gentle introduction to the concepts of eating HEALTHY. They'll be making banana ghosts and tangerine pumpkins, and then eating the fresh fruit treats. Potter, in his newest book, will be teaching about healthy eating and active living. Everyone will learn about the benefits of drinking water over sugar-sweetened beverages and juice.
A lot of our nation has moved away from cooking at home, from scratch, using real, whole ingredients. Part of our Food Day schedule involves reteaching skills that have slipped out of everyday American lives. Food made from scratch is generally lower in added fats, sugar, and salt than heavily processed foods.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of conflicting advice about what constitutes a "healthy diet" and I won't enter that fray here. Also? We're a little busy counting tangerines and Potter the Otter stickers. But our ever wonderful Director of Nutrition for the Del Norte Unified School District sent me a link for an awfully cute Bugs Bunny cartoon about healthy eating, and I thought I'd share that with you. It doesn't cover every base, but it's a start.
That's all, folks!
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?
