Farm to Fork

A little pricey, but I am definitely getting tickets to one of these (it benefits Oregon farmers and winemakers afterall!):

Farm to Fork Dinners

"A memorable meal on Oregon's backroads."

"Each summer, we invite you to meet the farmers & winemakers, tour the farms, and experience a truly unique meal in the company of friends, neighbors, and fellow supporters of our local food and wine communities."

Table to Farm Movement?

Restaurants that compost food waste might renegotiate garbage removal fees (because they produce less garbage) and offset the cost of food waste removal... turning it into farm compost. Would restaurants take the time to separate food (for example, take out meat products)?

A simple story, but a genuine idea. Take a look at the article, Table to Farm Movement, by Mother Nature Network.

Food Stamp Folly

What happens when the food stamp swiper machine is down? If you use food stamps (SNAP), you don't get to buy food. That's what a shopper recently discovered when it happened at a Portland Safeway store.

Safeway announced over the loudspeaker that the food stamp computer was down, and they couldn't accept cards that evening.

"'It just looked discriminatory to me," said Durham, 58 [the shopper]. "They were taking all the money from customers who had money, but they were basically kicking out the people who had (food stamp cards). If they can't take the cards, they should close the store down.'  

The federal government agrees." 

Read the Oregonian's story here. Have you ever seen this happen? Talk to a store manager. When stores have problems with swipe machines that debit shoppers' food stamp accounts, the typical procedure is to fill out a form logging a customer's purchases. The store can then call the 24-hour federal hotline to check the customer's account.

Are you an elitist, socialist, commie, un-American piece of scum?

I am. 

But I'm in good company! So is Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Robby Kenner (Food, Inc.), Michael Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma), and almost everyone I know (but I live in a liberal bubble). 

Schlosser penned an excellent op-ed in the Washington Post, Why being a 'foodie' isn't elitist, in response to the name-calling the American Farm Bureau Federation’s president, Bob Stallman, recently dished out:

"This name-calling is a form of misdirection, an attempt to evade a serious debate about U.S. agricultural policies. And it gets the elitism charge precisely backward. America’s current system of food production — overly centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a handful of companies, overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels — is profoundly undemocratic." 

Schlosser continues:

"While small farmers and their families have been forced to take second jobs just to stay on their land, wealthy farmers have received substantial help from the federal government. Between 1995 and 2009, about $250 billion in federal subsidies was given directly to American farmers — and about three-quarters of that money was given to the wealthiest 10 percent. Those are the farmers whom the Farm Bureau represents, the ones attacking “big government” and calling the sustainability movement elitist." 

To me, "big government" means monopolistic companies that the government supports. So what's up, Bob? It looks like you don't actually represent farmers, just SOME farmers. Are you even a real Republican?

In the beginning... Part V

At Jasculca/Terman and Associates (JT), a public affairs firm in Chicago, I had the great pleasure of working with some of the most brilliant people I have ever met. These are the kind of people you want on your team - they walk into a room jovial and warm, truly listen and hear a client's issues, immediately have a dozen creative and highly relevant ideas to throw on the table, and can actually implement all of them. And I don't even work there anymore, so I don't have to brown nose.

There, I worked with the "Creative and Strategic Development" team. We handled a portfolio of about a dozen or so clients, mostly nonprofit and public sector, as well as responded to new business opportunities on behalf of the firm (proposal writing 101).

What did I learn? I learned how to work accurately and I learned how to work very, very fast. I learned how to "paint a picture, tell a story."

I learned that despite gang violence in the neighborhood and poverty at home, every single student of the inaugural senior class at Urban Prep high school, all African-American and all male, could be accepted to four-year colleges. 100 PERCENT!

Volunteers speed-date to find the
perfect nonprofit match. 

I learned that "speed-dating" could take on a whole new meaning when hundreds of talented women in Chicago meet nonprofits in a fast-paced game designed to help kickstart skills-based volunteering (and it's really fun to be the person on stage who rings the bell when time's up!).

I learned that almost 20,000 people wanted to witness the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center's grand opening, and that logistics for this kind of an event (or series of events), are mind-boggling.

But I also learned that Chicago is not the city for me, despite my family's deep roots there, and that straight PR is not the perfect path for me at this moment in time.

So after some travel and quality family time (and a whole lot of volunteering), I upped and moved to Portland, Oregon, with my fiance and dog for an adventure... filled with green gardens, lots of rain (and sun - seriously, there is sun here), mountains and waterfalls and the ocean, a slightly slower pace of life.

Like I said, I've been passionate about poverty-reduction through food security for many years, but I've never actually grown any food myself. And that is what I am here to learn. (Along with a dose of food policy, food justice, food economics and just plain delicious food.) Here we go...

In the beginning... Part IV

Tajik refugee in Kyrgyzstan market.
(Photo by K. Springer)

After college, I worked at an international humanitarian aid and development nonprofit in Washington, D.C. I actually first heard about the organization through a Craig's List posting for an apartment I ultimately didn't take. But the author's email signature included a line about being a "food security program assistant." What, may I ask, was that? Instead of meeting to see the apartment, she met me and answered all my questions about her job. Eventually, they were hiring in the communications department. It wasn't food security, but my parents were journalists, so I had ink in the blood, and I loved to write and design. That was enough, right?

Trial by fire! At first, my role was to update the website, create donor newsletters and assist the CEO. But as my understanding grew of the organization's work, beneficiaries and partners, my role greatly expanded, and I fell in love. I felt I had found my calling - I didn't want to be a nutritionist or a monitoring and evaluation specialist. I wanted to COMMUNICATE. i wanted to share with the world the great things this organization was doing, the people they were serving and working with, and how people in the U.S. could help. I loved it.

I was fortunate to be asked to travel to the organization's civil society and humanitarian aid programs in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazahkstan. There, I photographed local nonprofit leaders filling gaps the government left behind when the Soviet Union collapsed, talked with media groups that were not owned by the state (just harassed by it), and met nurses at clinics that also served as community meeting houses and libraries. 

Small boy sits with his mother at a food
distribution point. (Photo by K. Springer)

And in Senegal I visited food security programs, interviewing and photographing gardeners, mothers receiving vaccinations and supplemental food donations, kids learning about nutrition at school, and HIV/AIDS patients receiving hot meals fortified with vitamins. 

I put my stories and photos into the donor newsletters and annual reports I created, I posted them on the website, and I framed them as auction items at fundraisers. I'm not a photographer. I felt awkward posting them all over, but since some turned out not half-bad and it was my job, after all, I went ahead with vigor. Having revitalized the latent communications division at the organization and linked with the new fundraising division, donations to the organization increased significantly that year. It felt good.

I decided that what I brought to the table was a knack for sharing others' stories. But I needed to learn more to be able to share those stories well. So I packed up and moved to Chicago to work as a senior account executive at a public relations firm. 

In the Beginning... Part III

My passion for food security grew and I studied international development in college. During a year abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I spent mornings in class and afternoons at a soup kitchen.

"Soup Kitchen, Open Doors"

But the people at this soup kitchen in the city were very different from the people I had met in rural Honduras and (even more rural) Ecuador. These folks had been part of the burgeoning middle class in Buenos Aires, the "Paris of the South," but had lost everything during the economic collapse there in 2001. Many used to stand in lines to go to the movies, and now stood in lines waiting for a hot bowl of whatever was cooking that day. I wonder how an urban farming trend might have impacted this city in those years.

And at the same time, there was a barrio just a few blocks away where families lived in tin-roof shacks they had built from scraps, with fantastic views of the gleaming financial sector high rises that had caused the collapse and deepened their chronic poverty. Location, location, location. Thanks, IMF!

"With political prisoners, there is no democracy"

In the Beginning... Part II

In high school, I spent less time at Grandma and Grandpa's farm over summer breaks. I traveled to Latin America after my sophomore year and lived with poor, rural families learning about what it's truly like to live on a few dollars a day, growing everything your family eats, and sharing all you have with friends and guests, despite maybe not having enough yourself. In Ecuador, the families I lived with ate boiled tuber potatoes for almost every meal - not mashed with butter, or sprinkled with salt or as a side with chicken. Poverty doesn't give you these options.

The delicacy in the Andes is guinea pig, which families don't eat themselves because it's one of the sole providers of cash income when sold at the market, three hours away by treacherous dirt roads on crazy, colorful buses decorated with fringe and religious icons, and filled with flapping chickens and enough people to comfortably fill four buses in the U.S. While I wrote home to my family during those eight weeks about how much I wanted a hamburger and pizza as soon as I got off the airplane at the end of the summer, my host family threw a despedida party for my departure, complete with three roasted guinea pigs in my honor. Though I hesitated, and felt guilty about the hamburger letter-writing, I ate all of what I was given because I knew it was all (or more) that my host family could afford. Despite me being a perfect stranger and not speaking Quechua (and barely any Spanish), they'd become my friends and cared for me in an amazingly beautiful, intimate way.

I sometimes think about how my host family is likely still eating plain boiled potatoes 10 years later, and it's a complicated feeling. I have the means to visit them. I have the means to donate directly to the family. I have the means to start a nonprofit there that benefits the whole community. But instead of continuing to feel guilty, I try to think about the time I spent with them, and appreciate what it taught me. I think about how it made me better understand the world outside Kent, Ohio. I think about how it led me to want to study international development in college, which led me to Washington, D.C. And I try to focus on appreciating the moments we spent with each other, and how I can help people now, people whose paths cross mine today.

In the Beginning... Part I

I've been passionate about poverty-reduction through food security for many years, but I've never actually grown any food myself. It's time to change that. Here's my story. 

John Casper Kline, my grandfather

In the beginning, there was a Midwestern girl curious about her Grandpa's 300-acre Illinois prairie corn and bean farm. Grandpa wasn't much for small talk, but he'd tell you his opinion with a few well-chosen colorful adjectives if he felt strongly. The door to his secret room in the basement of the farm house was speckled with "Do not enter" and "Stay out" warnings, along with his framed NRA lifetime membership plaque. Though I never glimpsed the secret room until after he had passed, all us cousins knew growing up that that's where Grandpa kept his extensive gun collection, prized deer hunting photos and perhaps even more prized pin-up gal calendars. We were pretty damn curious (and learned that word from Grandpa).

Though Grandpa was gruff, he had a soft spot for the grandkids (if you asked very sweetly, he'd always give you a little spending money for the dollar store). But I was happy chatting and making cherry pies with Grandma and playing with the feral kittens in the barn, wishing so hard my parents would let me keep one. Still I wondered, what was Grandpa doing all day out in the dirt on his John Deere tractor? And why didn't we eat the corn or beans he grew?