Mark Winne

The United Methodist Women, one of the nation’s oldest and largest women-led mission organizations, has selected Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty for their 2010 national reading list. Over 40,000 members of United Methodist Women are organized at the congregation level into reading groups to pursue interests related to the church’s mission work, social action, and spiritual growth. The inclusion of Closing the Food Gap in the denomination’s reading list means that the book’s issues of food justice, empowerment, and equal access to affordable and healthy food will be considered by thousands of socially concerned women nationwide.

When I was much younger, I would take solo backpacking trips in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. On one occasion, I found myself at a very remote campsite deep in the forest. My original plan was to commune in some vague, Thoreau-like fashion with nature, and with a congenial assist from the Almighty, discover heretofore unseen truths.

After taking two hours to fastidiously set up my campsite, I soon realized I had nothing to do. I grew nervous, impatient; paced around the site and back down the trail I had entered on.

Fortunately, the necessities of wilderness survival intervened. I needed to collect firewood to make a fire. I had to haul water from the nearby stream for drinking and cooking. Boiling enough water for three days took more wood, water and time than I thought. And before I knew it, my worries were over; I would haul water and collect wood, haul water and collect wood, haul water and collect wood.

This act of enforced simplification – reducing one’s daily life to a few essential tasks – became a kind of mantra for me later in life, and rough guidepost for the way I would approach food.

Like my experience with water and wood, I decided to narrow my range of options and take a more mindful approach to what I eat. I am trying to eat locally and seasonally, and as much as possible, assemble my daily menus from an admittedly narrower, but happily tastier range of choices that closer at hand.

I start with my household garden and then move to the farmers’ market for the produce I eat. I buy beef from a nearby New Mexico rancher whom I know personally and whose cows are  raised entirely on grass. I’ve been to the facility where the cows are slaughtered; it’s locally owned, employs 10 people in a small town where every job counts and operates humanely.

Not all my food is local. I buy Organic Valley milk from Colorado farms because our New Mexico milk is produced from hormone-injected cows raised in factory farms. Connecticut is lucky; it has its own small dairies that market their milk locally. Coffee comes from a fair trade company out of Massachusetts. The rest of the I shop at conventional supermarkets for such things as bananas, cereal, and of course, beer and wine (locally produced when available).

The simplifying act is to start with what I have first and to put together simple meals around those foods. A hole, free-range chicken from the natural food store was more the accessory to the carrots, parsnips and onions from my garden a few nights ago. New Mexico beef anchored my dried chiles, canned tomatoes and cold storage potatoes the night before.

I’m not trying to imitate Barbara Kingsolver or eat only the 100-mile diet. I’m not a food purist nor do I while away my days in a state of hyper-anxiety over the health, origin or method of production of the food I buy. I love to garden; it’s my recreation, my fitness club, my calisthenics. I learn about other foods – what’s good and what’s not- when I have time. When I haven’t been fortunate enough to have my own garden, I’ve joined a community garden, shopped more at the farmers’ market and bought a share in a community-supported agriculture farm.

But there’s one more facet to the process of simplification, and its not so simple. In my opinion, it’s not enough to only satisfy your desire for simplicity and good food. You need to be a good food citize as well.

This means two things: The first is that if you believe that you should have the best and healthiest food available, then shouldn’t everybody, regardeless of income? This is what we call food justice. To that end in may be worth supporiting socially disadvantaged farmers, initiatives that protect the area’s precious farmland and projects that encourage the purchase of our local bounty by lower-income families.

The second characteristic of good food citizenship has to do with public policy. Bills will come before out state lawmakers that will promote local agriculture, healthier and locally grown food for students in our public schools, and more opportunities for low-income people to better feed their families. We need to support those initiatives. As good food citizens we need to speak up for policies and practices that promote local and healthy food for all.

This piece originally appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican (January 1, 2009) and the Hartford Courant (April 19, 2009)

May 9 – Boston, Massachusetts – Boston University – Conference “The Future of Food”. Presentation as part of panel “From Farm to Fork: The Global Food Chain.” Books on sale throughout the day. For more information see www.bu.edu/euforyou/EU/future-of-food.html or contact Elizabeth Amrien at 617-358-2778.

May 15 – Alamosa, Colorado – Presentation and book signing – For more information contact Liza Marin at 719-587-1034 or marronL@vwhs.org.

June 8 – Hartford, Connecticut – Hartford Foundation for Public Giving – Presentation to the Catalyst Fund. For more information contact Mary-Ellen Powell at mepowell@hfpg.org.

June 10 – Montgomery Village (Jay Peak), Vermont – Field to Plate Seminar – Food Dialogs: Moving the Discussion beyond the Pyramid – June 9-13. Presentation to seminar participants on June 10. For more information contact Amanda Archibald at amanda@fieldtoplate.com.

June 18 – Albuquerque, New Mexico – National Association for Rural Mental Health Conference – Keynote presentation at 8:45 AM. For more information contact Helene Silverblatt at hsilverblatt@salud.unm.edu.

June 28 – Salt Lake City, Utah – Unitarian/Universalist Association General Assembly. 11:00 AM. Presentation: “Closing the Food Gap: Sustainable Food for All – Salt Palace 255 B. For more information contact Claudia Kern at claudia.kern@valley.net.

(First appeared in the Kennebec (Maine) Journal)

By Mark Winne

Let me say from the outset that I eat well. Not well in a maternal, “please finish your broccoli, dear” sense. I mean very well. I cultivate a large organic garden, buy grass-fed beef from a local rancher, and when I’m feeling particularly flush with cash, frequent my local Whole Foods.

I’ll even eat at one of those bastions of gastronomic elitism like Stone Barns in New York or that citadel of all things “foodie”, Chez Panisse in Berkeley. On one such occasion I celebrated my son’s college graduation with a dinner at Stone Barns where the tab for the two of us came to a cool $325. It dawned on me as I was staggering out of the restaurant that I could have paid for 126 low-income children to eat school lunch that day at the current USDA reimbursement rate of $2.57 per meal. Better yet, 283 food stamp recipients might have had dinner on me that night at the average meal allotment of $1.15.

Such disparities in the way that different classes of Americans eat are disconcerting. With our nation teetering on the brink of economic meltdown, a record 31.8 million of us are receiving help from the food stamp program. Nearly 190,000 Mainers currently receive food stamp benefits, 15 percent more than last year.

Food banks and food pantries have been overrun as well. Over 25 million Americans are using emergency food assistance annually. Maine’s Freeport Community Services’ Food Pantry alone received 20,000 visits from people seeking food last year, but estimate that will grow to 28,000 this year.

In light of the fact that demand for “free” food is reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression, at a cost to the taxpayer of $73 billion a year and climbing, it might seem odd that there is also an infatuation with higher-priced local and organic food.

Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters, regarded by many as the nation’s premiere food elitist, appeared recently on 60 Minutes to proclaim the virtues of local and organic.  She snootily dismissed its high cost by saying, “some people buy Nike shoes, two pairs, and other people want to nourish themselves.” And in a recent New York Times op-ed, Waters slashed the quality of the nation’s school lunch program, pronouncing that its federal subsidy should be doubled to $5.00.

But when it comes to the cost of good food for our children as well as for those who have hit a rough patch on the economic highway, I find the arguments over food elitism a bit spurious. Why can’t our society ensure that all our well fed? After all, aren’t we a nation that just bailed out the financial industry to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, including bonuses for those who put our economy in the toilet?

Perhaps it was this group of financial elitists who were among the party of 12 at Spaggio’s, Chicago’s premier eatery, (yes, the Obamas’ “special occasion” restaurant) who spent $18,000 on one meal this past November. Not only would that feed 15,652 food stamp recipients, it makes my dinner at Stone Barns look like a Happy Meal.

The fact of the matter is it will take money to make sure that everyone eats well. And I place the emphasis on well because we must ensure that everyone has regular access to healthy food. If we don’t, we run the very real risk of sustaining one food system for the poor and near poor, and one for everyone else – a divide, my friends, which is as unconscionable as it is unsustainable.

While the Maine state legislature should be congratulated for its support of school breakfast and lunch programs, the answers are not all about government spending. They are also about commonsense and compassion, qualities that I have found Mainers have in uncommon abundance. Take the new Fresh from the Pantry program currently being devised by the Freeport Food Pantry and two area CSAs farms – Laughing Stock and Tir na NOg. Together they will use the pantry’s ability to help people, the growing skills of the farmers, and the generosity of their CSA members to bring the best food to people who need it the most.

Ideas like Fresh from the Pantry combined with a citizenry willing to support the simple notion that all should be well fed will lift both the economic and personal health of the nation. And in the end, we all may become little food elitists. Wouldn’t that be grand!