Alexander Velikoretskikh transformed this once-vacant lot in southeast Portland into Great River Farm. Photo by Andrew Daddio

GROWING NEW ROOTS
Immigrant and Refugee Farmers Dig In
By Zoë Bradbury
For Spring 2008

The translator is late.

Cumulous clouds scud across a rain-washed blue sky, the spring light playing over bunches of neon-orange baby carrots, redder-than-blood beets, and tender heads of lettuce. On this Sunday morning, Alexander Velikoretskikh and four of his eight children work together in a quiet choreography under a white E-Z Up canopy as they arrange produce for display at the Lents International Farmers’ Market in outer Southeast Portland. In quick, soft Russian, Alexander says something to the oldest boy. He runs off, returning a few minutes later with a whiteboard borrowed from the market manager.

“To make sign,” gestures Alexander in halting English. “Velikoretskikh is ‘Great River.’ My name,” he pronounces proudly, smiling and jabbing a thumb towards his chest. “Great River Farm.”

Without the translator, relying on shy pantomime and only a few words of shared English between us, Alexander and his kids convey fragments of their story to me. Among the roughly 10,000 refugees who have resettled in Portland in the last decade, they came in December 2006, having fled religious persecution in Ukraine.

Shortly after arriving, Alexander discovered Mercy Corps Northwest’s New American Agriculture Project (NAAP). Three months later, he and his family seeded their first crop on a vacant half-acre lot in Southeast Portland.

Continue reading " Growing New Roots: Immigrant and Refugee Farmers Dig In " »

Posted by Laura Ford at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Photo by Bryan Wolf

Deborah Kane implores us to be patient - that better food really is coming to our children's lunchrooms - in her fall Edible Portland story, Back to School: Voting with Your Lunch Money.

It looks as though change really is afoot with Cory Schreiber making himself at home as the new Farm to School Food Coordinator at the Oregon Department of Agriculture. And now, a bill that is going in front of the Oregon Legislature during the 2008 session would create a complimentary farm-to-school and school garden program at the Oregon Department of Education so that Cory has a "partner in crime."

If passed, we’ll be the first state in the nation to secure such specific focus on farm-to-school and school gardens within state government.

On January 22, The Oregonian endorsed this bill. Read on for the editorial.

For more information on the bill, click below.

For more information about Ecotrust's involvement in the bill, click here.

THE OREGONIAN
Multiplication tables
Oregon has farms and food processors aplenty, but schools need help to connect them to kids' lunches
Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Former Wildwood chef Cory Schreiber recently revisited one of his favorite lunch spots, a place he returned to again and again when he was growing up.

It wasn't entirely his choice. But he's nostalgic about it, anyway: Chapman School.

Back then, he loved the sloppy Joes and rolls right out of the oven. "I still remember that smell distinctly," Schreiber says, meaning it as a compliment. On his most recent visit, though, he was fixated on the cherry cobbler, which was so good he asked for seconds.

And that's good news for Oregon. Believe it or not, cherry cobbler figures as a potential headliner in a food revolution rumbling in Portland that soon could be sweeping the state. Parents want their kids to eat more fresh produce, schools want to serve it, and Oregon farmers are eager to sell it. In theory, it shouldn't be more expensive to provide locally grown and processed foods in schools, but the reality is that many school districts are too tiny to do their own food R&D.

Continue reading " Good news for school food: Oregonian endorses new farm-to-school and school garden bill " »

Posted by Laura Ford at 2:27 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

The story "Sticker Shock" describes many of the local programs working to bridge the gap between poverty and nutrition (read the full story here). Even with all these programs, organic and pesticide-free fruits and vegetables are still going to be out of the budget of many Portlanders (organic vs. conventional price comparison). For those people, learning which foods are the most—and least—contaminated can help. Christine Horner, M.D., a Taos-based expert on natural foods, gave us her suggestions.

“You can familiarize yourself with which foods have the highest and lowest content of pesticide residue,” Dr. Horner said. “Celery is considered one of the worst, for instance, but asparagus is great. If you wash and peel your food carefully, you can eliminate as many pesticides as you possibly can. Remember, eating conventionally grown fruits and vegetables are still going to be better than eating processed foods with nearly zero nutritional value.”

In a 2006 study, the Environmental Working Group found that shopping wisely could help consumers reduce the amount of pesticides in their diets by 90%. The organization issued a list of the “Dirty Dozen” fruits and vegetables, which found peaches and apples to be the most pesticide-ridden. Others on the list included sweet bell peppers, celery, nectarines, strawberries, cherries, pears, imported grapes, spinach, lettuce, and potatoes.

On the “Consistently Clean” list were onions, avocados, corn, pineapples, mango, asparagus, sweet peas, kiwi, bananas, cabbage, broccoli, and papaya—unfortunately, mostly foods grown in warmer climates than the Northwest.

With Portland staples like apples, cherries, potatoes, and greens on the bad list, it’s important to know how to clean and prepare them to eliminate residues if you’re not able to buy organic versions. Washing and peeling is effective with some foods (including peaches and apples), as most of the pesticide does not penetrate the skin; with others, such as squash and potatoes, chemical residue is found throughout.

Dr. Horner suggests going on the Internet for more information on which foods are best, and how to prepare them to make them safer. One place to start is at Earth Easy:

www.eartheasy.com/eat_pesticides_produce.htm

The Environmental Working Group has also made free wallet-sized cards called the “Shoppers’ Guide to Pesticides in Produce.” To download and print a copy:

www.foodnews.org/walletguide.php

-Kevin Allman

Posted by Laura Ford at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Organics and local foods are often pricier than their non-pedigreed equivalents, and for families on public assistance or tight food budgets, the premium for healthier foods can be an unaffordable luxury. But the extent of those price differences can sometimes be shocking, as I found in October 2007 when I visited a Portland supermarket (not an upscale health food store).

There were a few surprises. Only pennies separated the price of conventional canned beans from their organic equivalents, and the produce manager said that he’d stopped stocking non-organic beets because the price differential was negligible.

But for most staple items, the cost of organics was not only higher, but substantially so. The above six items tell the story: The organic alternatives exceed the average recipient’s weekly allotment of food stamps*, but the non-organic varieties consume only 54%.

*The average food stamp recipient in America receives $21/week for groceries.

-Kevin Allman

Read Kevin Allman's story on the affordability of organics and natural foods in the Winter 2008 issue of Edible Portland.

Tips on reducing the damage of conventional fruits and vegetables.

Posted by Laura Ford at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

STICKER SHOCK
Organics and healthier foods are more available, but not everyone can afford them. Some Oregonians are looking for solutions.

By Kevin Allman
For Winter 2008

In 2007, Oregon governor Ted Kulongoski and several members of Congress took the “food stamp challenge”: shopping and eating on a $21 per week budget that represented the average American’s food-stamp allotment. Kulongoski and his fellow politicians met with limited success; some managed the challenge, while others ended up cheating by week’s end.

After the experiment, Nancy S. Tivol of Sunnyvale Community Services, a California nonprofit emergency assistance agency, wrote in the San Jose Mercury-News: “Feeling full on $3 a day is one challenge; eating nutritionally is virtually impossible. Illinois Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s week’s worth of fruits and vegetables consisted of one tomato, one potato, a head of lettuce, and five bananas.”

Hungry bellies aside, the food-stamp challenge illuminated a more subtle aspect of poverty: the lack of quality food available to the poor. For some, the opportunity to buy fruits, vegetables, and meats without antibiotics, pesticides or growth hormones is nonexistent, even if they’re on the corner market’s shelves. Something as basic as organic kale or a pound of natural ground beef might as well be lobster or caviar.

As Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Ca.) reported in a public diary during her week on the food-stamp challenge: “This is such an unhealthy diet. I am trying to eat the most healthy food I can afford, but I have no problem imagining how someone eating like this could quickly develop diabetes or high cholesterol. And with all these carbs, I can see how easy it would be to gain a fair amount of weight.”

THE PROBLEM
In Portland and across the nation, organic and locally grown foods are more available than ever before, from upscale specialty stores to supermarkets and even retailers such as Wal-Mart. But with social services agencies reporting record demand for their help, the gap between affordability and availability is wider today than it’s ever been. And the products made available by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s commodities program aren’t always the most healthful.

Jessica Chanay knows that struggle firsthand. In the early 1990s, she was a young mother with two children, and her family was on public assistance. Today, she’s a program coordinator for the Oregon Hunger Relief Task Force (503-595-5504), a group that’s “attempting to address the economic disparity in the availability of healthy foods,” according to Chanay.

The task force was created in 1989 by the state legislature to work with state agencies, nonprofit groups, public policy organizations, and federal nutrition programs. One of Chanay’s goals is providing an alternative to what she calls “filler food”—high-calorie meals and snacks that may be cheap but provide little nutritional benefit, such as the “dollar menu” items at fast-food restaurants. Chanay says she understands why overworked people who might be dependent on public transportation may find it easier to buy a 99-cent fast-food burrito or cheeseburger after a long day.

“As a society, we don’t cook as much as we used to, and that particularly impacts people with lower incomes and higher stress,” she says. “But the cost of food is rising rapidly at this point, and the purchasing power of those food dollars has been eroding. We’ve been working hard on the federal Farm Bill, and the food stamp program, that’s really benefited a lot of people. We’re trying to help people with limited resources get access to healthy foods, with programs like farmers’ market vouchers."

Continue reading " Sticker Shock: Organics and healthier foods are more available, but not everyone can afford them. " »

Posted by Laura Ford at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Updated 3/26/08: Zoë Bradbury, author of "Help Wanted: Young Farmers," has answered the call and become a young farmer herself. She recently began plowing the fields on Oregon's southern coast. In 2008, she will be blogging all about her experiences on Edible Portland in a series titled Diary of a Young Farmer.

My husband and I remember a conversation we had with my parents almost 15 years ago now. We were fresh out of graduate school and announced to my folks that we wanted to be farmers. You could have heard a pin drop. Suffice to say my parents didn’t share our enthusiasm. Today my husband and I both have "desk jobs." Zoë Bradbury knows the raised eyebrow of which I speak. But lucky for us, she’s following her dreams raised eyebrows notwithstanding.

The average age of U.S. farmers is 55. Who is going to grow our food when they retire? We’re really going to have to give some serious thought to recruiting the next generation of farmers in our country.

–Deborah Kane

HELP WANTED: YOUNG FARMERS
Written by Zoë Bradbury
For Fall 2007

Every five years, the United States Department of Agriculture conducts something called the Agricultural Census. And every five years, once all the results are tallied—the irrigated acres summed, the number of women farmers counted, the gross revenues from hog production totaled (and much more)—without fail, an alarm bell sounds.

With no offense intended to my spunky, fiftysomething parents and their baby boomer friends, U.S. farmers are getting old. The national average has climbed to 55.3 years as of the last agricultural census in 2002 (the 2007 census is currently underway), and the trend is ever upward.

Well, big whoop, my parents are muttering as they read this. Fifty is the new 30 anyway....

Though that may be true, the sirens are clanging not only because farmers are getting older (in fact, more than a quarter of U.S. farmers are older than 65), but because young farmers are getting scarcer. A mere 5.8% of farmers are now under 35, compared to 16% in 1982.

If you’re digesting these numbers over breakfast, you might stop to wonder who’s going to milk the cows and grow the grain for your morning bowl of corn flakes.

Continue reading " Help Wanted: Young Farmers " »

Posted by Deborah Kane at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 12 )

Zoë Bradbury's story, Organic, Local and Everything Else, was a great starting point for discussing just how it is we navigate our modern food system. What questions do we ask ourselves when facing two similar products at the grocery store? Which is local? Organic? Fair trade?

Deborah Kane by comparing Breyers ice cream to Coconut Bliss (which we profiled in the Summer 2007 issue - read that story here). Zoë promised us that she'd have some answers to our questions from Coconut Bliss founders Larry and Luna. This is what Larry says about their purchasing practices:

THE FARM
"All our coconut milk is organic and all of it comes from an 880-acre farm in Chanthaburi, which is one of the only USDA-certified organic producers in Thailand. The milk is canned in 5 gallon tins in a plant owned by the same family in a nearby town (which we also visited). The farm and factory are owned by a Thai family, and their workers are paid a living wage and work under conditions very similar to those that we have observed in farms and plants in the Willamette Valley (except that the coconuts are harvested year-round and migrant workers are not employed).

DISTANCE TRAVELED
"The coconut milk is shipped to us in containers on large cargo ships, and travels around 9,000 miles to get here. While this is a long distance, sea transport uses only 12% of the fuel per pound of goods as trucks. So the coconut milk shipped from Thailand uses less fuel to transport to Oregon than oranges or strawberries trucked from southern California.

Continue reading " Organic, Local and Everything Else: The Conversation Continues... " »

Posted by Laura Ford at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Zoë Bradbury suggested we join her on-line to continue the conversation she began with her article "Organic, local, and everything else: Finding your way through the modern food fray." I have a burning question to get the conversation started….

Our recent issue of Edible Portland featured Coconut Bliss, a non-dairy ice cream produced by a locally owned company in Eugene, Oregon. It is darn delicious, though the coconut milk base and exotic flavors leave little room for local sourcing.

Let's compare Coconut Bliss to Breyers ice cream. I don’t know where Breyers is based; it isn’t clear from their website. I do know Breyers is owned by Unilever, a mammoth food industry giant. But I’m told that many an Oregon strawberry ends up in those pints of Breyers. If true, which scoop makes for the better choice?

Here is Zoë's response:

Your tough question inspired me to do a Google search on Breyers and Coconut Bliss both. An innocent little query about ice cream quickly turned into an hour-long research project! It drove home the point that being an informed food consumer in this day and age really does require 1,000 questions.

This is what I learned about Breyers to help lend some insight to your “which is better” question:

Who: As you said, Breyers is owned by Unilever and is the world’s largest ice cream company.

Where: Corporate headquarters is in Wisconsin, but Breyers has regional plants around the country and world.

How: Breyers uses rBGH milk to make their non-organic ice cream. That’s a genetically engineered hormone injected into dairy cows to make them produce more milk, which is known to cause cancer and is banned in Europe.

Fishiest of all: Breyers is now using a genetically engineered (GE) protein derivative of an eel-like Arctic Ocean fish, known as the Arctic pout fish, to make “creamier” low-fat ice cream varieties. (I’d be pouting, too, if someone were genetically engineering my proteins and putting them in tubs of Rocky Road!).

The protein is a natural anti-freeze that keeps the pout fish’s blood from freezing in sub-zero water, and as it so happens, the GE version (made by altering the genetic structure of a baker’s yeast) works to reduce ice crystal formation in ice cream. (Read more here.) The jokes about “van-eel-a” ice cream abound, as you can imagine…

Continue reading " What's the better choice? Coconut milk from afar versus hormones and genetic engineering " »

Posted by Deborah Kane at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 4 )

Written by Zoë Bradbury
Illustration by Tae Won Yu
For Summer 2007

AWHILE BACK, I DID SOMETHING in the produce section of the grocery store that made my boyfriend, Danny, stare down into the cart in shock. I stared, too, a little confused by the impulse that had just landed a tropical bromeliad flown thousands of miles from Maui into our cart. It was squatting resolutely next to the tub of yogurt.

“A pineapple?” I looked up sheepishly and he reached to feel my forehead in mock concern.

“Organic, at least?” I shook my head and bit my lower lip.

“You feel okay?”

A few feet later, he returned the volley, snatching a bunch of ripe bananas and settling them next to my pineapple. My eyebrows went up.

“For my smoothies,” he quipped, and rolled ahead to the checkout. I began to wonder if the mini-quiche samples we’d tried by the front door had been laced with something.

This was a few months ago in early spring, and as we unpacked the groceries at home, an odd countertop disjuncture developed with the pineapple and bananas camped out next to our late-season basket of winter squash. In a kitchen that typically housed seasonal produce from nearby farms, it was as if we were suddenly harboring illegal aliens—secretly exciting, and at the same time I hoped fervently that our neighbors wouldn’t drop by that day.

That afternoon, I harvested a bucketful of pea shoots out of the cover crop I’d seeded last fall. From the yard, I could see the spiky silhouette of my pineapple sitting inside on the counter, and as I turned back to the tangle of delicate pea tendrils, I had an uncanny sense that I was witnessing two opposite extremes in the big, complicated continuum that is our modern food supply—homegrown spring pea shoots at one end and a foreign industrial pineapple at the other.

What lies between those two archetypical foods is an entire landscape of food choices that can be bewildering even to the most literate eaters amongst us. For the consumer seeking “natural,” “healthy,” or “sustainable” options, organic used to be the obvious and easy answer. Now “local” has become the latest buzzword, with a myriad of other labels, stories, values, and standards proliferating in the grocery aisle that can turn a quick trip to buy eggs into a nerve-wracking test of your personal belief system.

Continue reading " Organic, local, and everything else: Finding your way through the modern food fray " »

Posted by Deborah Kane at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Congressman Earl Blumenauer was in Portland recently championing his Local Food and Farm Support Act. The Act is intended to strengthen the local farm economy, make local and healthy food more accessible, help the environment and improve the quality of food served in our public schools. Alright Earl!

Now is a good time to remind the folks in Washington that the Farm Bill is about FOOD. And since we all eat, we all have a stake in the Farm Bill. I sent off an email today. It was really easy. I just followed this link: www.healthyfarmbill.org

Need a refresher course on why any of this matters? Continue reading for Dan Imhoff’s article from Edible Portland, Food Fight 2007: A Citizen's Guide...

Continue reading " The Farm Bill is still on our minds " »

Posted by Deborah Kane at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )