“Dust ‘em off, tape ‘em up and send ‘em out; that’s what we do here,” declared Linda Rogers, about the goods that she and the other volunteers were picking through in the recovery room. She should know, after almost 18 years of service to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. A lot has changed in those years since she started helping out one night a week at its former location in West Warwick (it moved to Providence in 2003), but the work is the same. “It’s still sorting food. That’s what it’s all about,” she said.
That is what it’s all about, and the Food Bank has been providing quality food to Rhode Islanders facing hunger for over 25 years. Hunger has an impact on every single community in the state, affecting some 48,000 households. Through its network of certified member agencies, the Rhode Island Community Food Bank provides a safety net for families in need and distributed $11 million in donated food in 2007—approximately 8 million pounds. Food insecurity is a growing problem. Rhode Island’s rate of childhood poverty is up to 21 percent, the fastest growing in New England and the third highest in the country among cities with a population of 100,000 or more.
While the Food Bank has been successful in distributing food through a variety of over 300 agencies, including soup kitchens, food pantries, shelters, group homes and community action programs, it has established other innovative programs as well. The Community Kitchen, for example, is a job-training class for people with few employment skills. Student chefs learn basic kitchen skills to prepare them for jobs in the food service industry. As a part of their training, students cook meals every day for the Kids’ Cafe, which serves healthy meals to children and provides nutrition education as a part of their after-school activities. Kids’ Cafe feeds more than 500 children at 12 sites in Providence and Newport.
But merely having food for everyone isn’t enough, according to Andrew Schiff, the executive director. “We’re really trying to improve the quality of the food,” he says, and the move into the expanded facility has allowed them to do just that. The Food Bank’s new home at 200 Niantic Avenue effectively doubled the size of the West Warwick location. The capabilities for handling perishable products, such as fresh vegetables, multiplied many times over.
This led to the Community Farm program in 2005, when a network of farms started growing and donating fresh produce items to the Food Bank. A year after that, the Neighborhood Pantry Express began delivering quality local fruit and vegetables to the communities that need it most. Using a “farmers’ market” approach, hungry people in high-need areas of the state are given access to the most nutritious foods possible. The seven farms around the state bring full-circle the concept of community-based resources to fight hunger.
One primary emphasis of the seven Community Farms is the use of unused or underused land for the purpose of growing valuable fresh foods. In at least one case, in Cumberland, a farm connected with the Food Bank was saved from being developed. “They were [going to] put up condos,” says Frank Geary of the Historic Metcalf-Franklin Farm. “Three years ago a group got together to buy the 1854 farm house and the two-and-a-half acres. We were successful in adding it to the National Register [of Historic Places.]”
“We talk a lot with the Food Bank on what we’re going to grow. They give us guidelines and we go with what we feel is easy to grow and harvest,” adds Denise Mudge, the volunteer coordinator for the Franklin Farm. They grow “spectacular” tomatoes, eggplant, basil, parsley, cucumbers and yellow and acorn squash, using spring-fed water and no pesticides. A variety of people come to help out on the farm, from little kids, to seniors, to people who just want to come after work. The focus is to keep it sustainable by making it convenient for the volunteers. “We have an open-door policy,” says Denise. “We know [volunteers] can’t always commit.” Every Monday and Thursday, from 5:30 pm to dusk, people can give a half an hour or an hour—whatever they can give. “It’s a very friendly thing,” Frank added. “We’ve had such a great group of people…and everybody who takes part in it feels good about it.”
One of the great things about the farm program is that it happens in summer, the “forgotten” time of the year. “There’s seasonality to giving,” the Food Bank director said. “We tend to get a lot of donations in November and December for the holidays. But summer is the low time for us in terms of our inventory. Food donations are down; cash donations are down. With kids not eating meals in school, for our clients, it can be the worst time.” Even though the 2007 growing season generated over 107,000 pounds of fresh produce—a huge accomplishment—the Summer Food Drive provides essential shelf-stable foods like cereal, pasta, rice and canned soup or beans. Participants in the Summer Food Drive can organize local food drives in their neighborhoods or work places, and drop off donations directly to the Food Bank.
Clearly, there’s a huge community support for what the Food Bank does every day. “People really identify with how difficult it must be when a family has trouble putting food on the table,” says public relations manager Michael Cerio. “We’re flexible with what we’re able to do with monetary donations, whether it’s a dollar, or five dollars, or five thousand dollars. Everything’s tight for everyone, but people feel that the little they may be able to give will make a big impact.”
“I’m really blown away by the different people who are involved with the Food Bank,” adds Andrew. “It’s just amazing. From Johnson & Wales, to local food pantries and all their volunteers. It takes so many people to make this work. But we really have amazing support throughout the state.”
For Linda Rogers and her husband Bob, the Food Bank is a very comfortable place. “The volunteers are wonderful people, and we really enjoy each other. We get lasting friendships. We’ve been fortunate in our life, so it’s only fair if we can help this way.”
She paused. “Everybody wants to be needed, I think. It’s a feeling of, ‘I can help. I can do something.’”
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Johnson & Wales at AS220: A Lively Experiment
When one talks about a community arts center like AS220 (www.as220.org), where unknown and struggling artists or musicians can find a guaranteed place to showcase their works, one wouldn’t think that culinary arts could play a role. Yet this is exactly what happened last winter at the gallery on Empire Street. Brought to us Providence local-foods lovers by Farm Fresh RI (www.farmfreshri.org), the Wintertime Farmers’ Market was an experiment: While farmers’ markets are all the rage in summer, would the age-old concept translate into the off season? Could there be enough local foods to sustain sales all winter long? And what kind of Rhode Island-farmed foods are there in the wintertime? It turned out to be a great success. On Saturday afternoons the market turned into a family-friendly combination of colorful original art by local painters, food products from area farms and purveyors, and toe-tapping music from the Old Time String Band.
It was into this backdrop I decided to bring cooking demonstrations to the market. As a community-service chef at the Feinstein Center, I’ve done “Veggin’ Out” demos at farmers’ markets many times before—in the summer, of course. Since food stamps can be spent at these markets, Veggin’ Out’s goal is to make valuable culinary and nutritional information available to that audience, and to help expand participation in the WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program. This, in turn, helps to support local farmers and locally grown produce. JWU staff and students demonstrate healthy nutritious meals using locally grown produce and provide recipes for participants to take home. The recipes use the produce available at the markets so WIC recipients can then use their vouchers to purchase the produce used in the recipes and make the meals at home.
The beauty of these public cooking demonstrations is that they benefit more groups than just their intended target. Farmers and other food producers certainly have a stake in seeing their wares purchased and consumed, perhaps even more so in winter. Everybody who eats (and there are a lot of us) can benefit from nutritious local products. Providing samples of unfamiliar food items helps to create more demand, for Food Stamp recipients as well as for everybody else. Sampling ensures that market customers know exactly what they’re getting beforehand so they won’t be afraid to spend their money on a food item if they’re not sure they’re going to like it.
Beyond trying to stimulate sales at the Wintertime Farmers’ Market, a major part of my rationale was to increase student involvement. Initially I turned to members of The Green Collaborative (TGC), the new student organization dedicated to sustainability at the University. It was, in my mind, a great opportunity to put TGC members out into the public view and to showcase Johnson & Wales’ progression into a greener, more sustainable campus. And while these volunteers were essential to making the demonstrations feasible, I felt I needed to go a step further. The culinary students of The Green Collaborative already had knowledge of, and a gung-ho interest in, the issues surrounding the consumption of local foods. The Wintertime Farmers’ Market could be a great environment for teaching chefs-in-training about the benefits of buying local.
Therefore I started arranging for some practicum students to participate in these cooking demonstrations as a part of their nonprofit rotation. I found it unfortunate that most of the Veggin’ Outs occur during the summer, when there aren’t any students around. Even more importantly, I soon recognized that many foodservice and hospitality students had never been to a farmers’ market. There isn’t, in fact, much in the culinary curriculum regarding these types of “green” issues. Awareness of sustainability in the food world is essential to these young chefs if they want to realize dynamic, successful, passionate careers.
The students’ participation in the farmers’ markets, however, was not merely a classroom project. As the season progressed, and I tried to get the students excited about these real-world experiences, many questions came up. What kinds of people go there? What sort of foods do they have? How do they even make cheese, anyway? Not content to just tell them, I decided to show them. It’s perhaps too easy to tell people why they should support their local farms: It’s safer, more nutritious, tastes great, saves on transportation (“food miles”), and so forth. It’s a different thing entirely for students to fully comprehend that food isn’t just a thing that’s ordered from the storeroom to be delivered to a classroom, without any context for how it was created. Asking the person how she made the cheese, shaking the hand of the man who grew all those apples, or sampling an oyster from Rhode Island waters, shucked by the man who grew and harvested it—all are experiences that can’t be duplicated in a culinary laboratory.
By all accounts, then, the Wintertime Farmers’ Market was a great success, despite some of the challenges. The AS220 gallery is small and was unable to accommodate all of the vendors who wanted to participate. Parking is an issue, too, possibly keeping people away who might otherwise be willing to support the local economy by patronizing the farmers at the market. Nevertheless it has been shown that an off-season market is an effective way of getting local foods into the hands of consumers, in addition to an educational experience for chefs.
The idea is evolving. Next winter it could take shape as a central year-round farmers’ market, complete with an incubator kitchen, where farmers could increase the value of their crops by developing prepared foods from their own locally grown ingredients. Furthermore such a market could function as a hub through which local produce could be distributed to restaurants, schools and supermarkets. Given the right situation, such a site could include a demonstration area where local chefs and students could conduct cooking demonstrations and other nutritional programs. That would be quite a lively experiment indeed.
It was into this backdrop I decided to bring cooking demonstrations to the market. As a community-service chef at the Feinstein Center, I’ve done “Veggin’ Out” demos at farmers’ markets many times before—in the summer, of course. Since food stamps can be spent at these markets, Veggin’ Out’s goal is to make valuable culinary and nutritional information available to that audience, and to help expand participation in the WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program. This, in turn, helps to support local farmers and locally grown produce. JWU staff and students demonstrate healthy nutritious meals using locally grown produce and provide recipes for participants to take home. The recipes use the produce available at the markets so WIC recipients can then use their vouchers to purchase the produce used in the recipes and make the meals at home.
The beauty of these public cooking demonstrations is that they benefit more groups than just their intended target. Farmers and other food producers certainly have a stake in seeing their wares purchased and consumed, perhaps even more so in winter. Everybody who eats (and there are a lot of us) can benefit from nutritious local products. Providing samples of unfamiliar food items helps to create more demand, for Food Stamp recipients as well as for everybody else. Sampling ensures that market customers know exactly what they’re getting beforehand so they won’t be afraid to spend their money on a food item if they’re not sure they’re going to like it.
Beyond trying to stimulate sales at the Wintertime Farmers’ Market, a major part of my rationale was to increase student involvement. Initially I turned to members of The Green Collaborative (TGC), the new student organization dedicated to sustainability at the University. It was, in my mind, a great opportunity to put TGC members out into the public view and to showcase Johnson & Wales’ progression into a greener, more sustainable campus. And while these volunteers were essential to making the demonstrations feasible, I felt I needed to go a step further. The culinary students of The Green Collaborative already had knowledge of, and a gung-ho interest in, the issues surrounding the consumption of local foods. The Wintertime Farmers’ Market could be a great environment for teaching chefs-in-training about the benefits of buying local.
Therefore I started arranging for some practicum students to participate in these cooking demonstrations as a part of their nonprofit rotation. I found it unfortunate that most of the Veggin’ Outs occur during the summer, when there aren’t any students around. Even more importantly, I soon recognized that many foodservice and hospitality students had never been to a farmers’ market. There isn’t, in fact, much in the culinary curriculum regarding these types of “green” issues. Awareness of sustainability in the food world is essential to these young chefs if they want to realize dynamic, successful, passionate careers.
The students’ participation in the farmers’ markets, however, was not merely a classroom project. As the season progressed, and I tried to get the students excited about these real-world experiences, many questions came up. What kinds of people go there? What sort of foods do they have? How do they even make cheese, anyway? Not content to just tell them, I decided to show them. It’s perhaps too easy to tell people why they should support their local farms: It’s safer, more nutritious, tastes great, saves on transportation (“food miles”), and so forth. It’s a different thing entirely for students to fully comprehend that food isn’t just a thing that’s ordered from the storeroom to be delivered to a classroom, without any context for how it was created. Asking the person how she made the cheese, shaking the hand of the man who grew all those apples, or sampling an oyster from Rhode Island waters, shucked by the man who grew and harvested it—all are experiences that can’t be duplicated in a culinary laboratory.
By all accounts, then, the Wintertime Farmers’ Market was a great success, despite some of the challenges. The AS220 gallery is small and was unable to accommodate all of the vendors who wanted to participate. Parking is an issue, too, possibly keeping people away who might otherwise be willing to support the local economy by patronizing the farmers at the market. Nevertheless it has been shown that an off-season market is an effective way of getting local foods into the hands of consumers, in addition to an educational experience for chefs.
The idea is evolving. Next winter it could take shape as a central year-round farmers’ market, complete with an incubator kitchen, where farmers could increase the value of their crops by developing prepared foods from their own locally grown ingredients. Furthermore such a market could function as a hub through which local produce could be distributed to restaurants, schools and supermarkets. Given the right situation, such a site could include a demonstration area where local chefs and students could conduct cooking demonstrations and other nutritional programs. That would be quite a lively experiment indeed.
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