2008 Woodie Awards
Field to Family festival promotes locally grown
Claire Lekwa - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 9/4/08 Section: 80 Hours
At the New Pioneer Co-op, a simple cardboard box stuffed with veggies is enough to invigorate employees. Theresa Carbrey leans over the treasure, brought to the administrative offices by a coworker, and picks up curvaceous purple eggplants and little yellow tomatoes.
"Look at how they're gleaming, glowing," she murmurs. "They're so alive and fresh."
In fact, the vibrant produce could scarcely be any fresher. The day's harvest was just picked up at Rainbow Ridge Farm in Waverly, Iowa, where Jason Gomes grows root and other assorted vegetables. He is just one of the more than 150 Midwest growers who supply the Co-op with its locally grown inventory.
To Carbrey, the Co-op's education and member-services coordinator, the idea that the eggplants, tomatoes, yams, peppers, and sweet potatoes filling this box were grown only 100 miles away is worth the excitement. It's a feeling she hopes more people will start to share.
The opportunity to learn about locally grown food arrives with the start of the two-week Field to Family Festival, commencing with the Benefit Culinary Walk today at 5:30 p.m. in downtown Iowa City. Presented by the Johnson County Local Food Alliance, an organization of farmers and consumers working to build sustainable agriculture in the community, organizers intend to create awareness of the amount of food produced in Iowa City and the surrounding area. This concept is all-the-more important as national political attention continually focuses on the environment, economy, and health of America.
( Daily Iowan video feature )
"Americans have been tricked, bamboozled into thinking cooking is some kind of chore, that food is something you have to do to get on with the rest of your life," local chef Kurt Michael Friese said. "That's so wrong. Cooking and eating the way we do is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. The happiest moments of your life, I bet almost all of them were spent at a big table with great food in front of you and the people you love all around you."
As part of the festival's events, Friese will read from his new book, A Cook's Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland, at the Motley Cow Café, 160 N. Linn St., on Sept. 14. The book compiles the stories of Midwesterners dedicated to a slow-food lifestyle - a global, grass-roots movement started in Italy in 1989 to counteract the fast-food mentality and revert to home-cooked meals made from local food. After three years of research, Friese found that people all over the Midwest are truly interested in returning to this way of life.
"I wanted to make it clear that this is happening all over," he said. "These stories were easy to find. The hard part was paring it down."
The slow-food revolution goes far beyond the Midwest. There are more than 85,000 members of the international Slow Food nonprofit organization, a group that spans 132 countries. Sixteen thousand of the organization's members are from the United States.
James Nisly, the president of the local food alliance and owner of Organic Greens, a homegrown sprouts business, has witnessed the growth in local food purchases from a grower's perspective. Farmers' markets have been revived in North Liberty and the Amana Colonies in the last year, and Nisly estimates his sales have increased five times since he started roughly 10 years ago.
There are also at least 12 Iowa City restaurants buying local ingredients, Friese said, a number that has grown significantly since he opened Devotay, 117 N. Linn St., in 1992.
The motivation behind slow food comes from many things, but perhaps the most basic reason is rooted in the senses: the food's taste. At the Culinary Walk, Devotay and five other Iowa City restaurants committed to buying locally will serve specialty hors d'oeuvres, demonstrating through firsthand sampling that fresher simply tastes better.
"First and foremost, it's the flavor," Friese said. As a culinary expert, the chef knows from experience that meals made from fresher ingredients impress the palate more. "The closer it is to my kitchen door, the fresher it's going to be."
And when he says close, he means it. The Co-op defines "local" food as anything that comes from within 250 miles, products from Iowa and the surrounding Midwestern states.
Minimizing food transportation affects factors other than taste. Proponents argue that it stimulates the local economy, puts less stress on the environment, discourages social injustice, and strengthens community relationships.
"Buying locally allows you to have a connection with the person growing your food, rather than getting it from a vast field of oppressed minorities and trucks burning fossil fuels 2,000 miles away," Carbrey said.
But for students and families with limited finances, the switch to local food may seem more difficult, especially because it often includes higher prices for organic products. In response to this challenge, Friese presents an example. He notes that diverting a mere $10 of families' and students' existing grocery budgets toward local-food purchases will keep millions of dollars in the community that might have otherwise gone elsewhere.
Whitney Westphal, who moved to Iowa City over the summer with her husband, Scott Westphal, a UI medical student, insists that buying at the Iowa City Farmers' Market doesn't necessarily imply a cost increase.
"I can get a whole bunch of basil here for $1, whereas I'd pay a couple dollars at the grocery store for a little package, and it's not as fresh," she said. "If you choose wisely, you can save money."
Some students have even found a way to pay nothing for their produce by growing it themselves. The UI Environmental Coalition planted its community garden near North Hall at the end of the spring semester. Three months later, it's flourishing with ripe tomatoes and ready-to-eat broccoli, squash, and carrots.
"All people should have a garden in their yard," coalition member and UI graduate student Adam Perkins said. "That's the way it should be, I think."
It seems the concepts behind the slow-food philosophy could hold answers to many pressing problems. A healthier diet rich in fruits and vegetables, less dependence on fossil fuels, more sustainable agricultural practices - the list seems flawless. But can Americans really free themselves from the conveniences they're so accustomed to? The people behind Field to Family hope that the programs and lessons will make each step a little easier.
"It doesn't need to be complicated and difficult," Friese said. "The idea is that food is raised with care, prepared with fashion, and served with love."
Sounds like a tasty enough notion.
E-mail DI reporter Claire Lekwa at:
claire-lekwa@uiowa.edu
Book Excerpt:
A Cook's Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland
by Kurt Michael Friese
From the chapter "A Vanishing Breed: How Kevin Powell is Saving the Mulefoot Hog."
Strawberry Point, Iowa - Iowa is the biggest pork producer in the United States, but most of the hogs grown here are artificially inseminated, hormone- and antibiotic-laden inmates confined in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations known commonly as CAFOs or "hog lots."
Quietly though, there are farmers who are resisting the pressure to join the meat processing multinationals. They are raising heritage breeds in deep beds and pasture, free to be happy pigs wallowing and rooting with their offspring as they do naturally, with no hormones or subtherapeutic antibiotics. One such grower is Kevin Powell, and the story of his Slow Food Ark registered Mulefoot hogs begins quite a long time ago.
Five centuries ago, Spanish explorers were populating the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, but not with people as much as with pigs. The swine brought over from Europe would be set free along the coasts of what became the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, to be harvested as needed when settlers arrived. Some of the descendants of those pigs can still be found running wild there. Most, though, were herded up by farmers and domesticated for food and trade in the newly burgeoning southern United States.
One of the popular practices was to keep hogs on small islands in rivers like the Mississippi and the Missouri. These islands worked as natural corrals, but they were very wet, and some breeds would develop foot rot. Through selective breeding techniques, one variety was developed without the pig's usual cloven hoof (a characteristic called "syndactylism"), thus seeming to help it avoid the bacteria that caused foot rot. These came to be known as mulefoots, and their hardiness combined with excellent flavor made them a very popular breed throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was rumored (though later disproved) that they were immune to hog cholera, and this added to their popularity among farmers. The National Mulefoot Hog Record Association was organized in Indianapolis, Indiana, in January 1908, and by 1910 there were 235 breeders registered in the US.
When the Army Corps of Engineers banned the practice of corralling pigs on river islands - it had something to do with recreational use and people not liking pigs at their picnics - the popularity of this delicious breed declined. The mule-like hoof, meant for muddy riverbanks, did not fare well on the concrete floors of hog lots. Industrialization and a focus on a narrow genetic line of swine nearly decimated the breed.
In 1964 a man named R.M. Holliday of Louisiana, Missouri, took up the task of reestablishing this vanishing breed. He bought registered mulefoots from a wide area and created his own breeding herd. He sold some of his herd to Mark Fields, of Clark, Missouri, who enlisted the aid of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy in rebuilding the Mulefoot registry. They in turn contacted Kent Whealy of the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, who took them on behalf of the Institute for Biodiversity at Luther College.
Down the road in Strawberry Point, Kevin Powell was looking for a way to use his degree in animal science from Iowa State University on his family's fifty-four-year-old farm. Frustrated with the narrowing of the livestock gene pool, he became interested in diversity and what he calls ethical genetics. He found a way to make a difference with Whealy's herd of Mulefoots in 1998.
Powell now cares for a herd of 30 mulefoots and is the chairman of the National Mulefoot Hog Association. It is a very small association though, since the ALBC lists the Mulefoot as critically endangered, the rarest American breed of hog still in existence. Today there are fewer than 200 left in the world.
In 2005, the Mulefoot Hog boarded the Slow Food Ark. The Ark is one of three major endeavors of Slow Food USA to preserve, protect and promote foods that are in danger of extinction due to the industrial standardization of flavors in the food supply. To date, more than 250 indigenous American foods have been carefully catalogued in the Ark USA, joining the hundreds that are on the international Ark.
The mission is to preserve endangered tastes - and to celebrate them, by introducing them to the membership and then to the world, through media, public relations, and Slow Food events. In addition to the Ark, Slow Food USA also forms Presidia, or "active defenses" of certain products that can benefit from a more vigorous intervention to promote their well-being.
Through programs like these, and the tireless efforts of visionary farmers like Kevin Powell, Slow Food is protecting a world of flavors. When writer and farmer Wendell Berry famously said, "Eating is an agricultural act," he meant also that conversely, farming is a culinary act. Just as we, as consumers, should be keenly aware of the origins of our food and of the people involved, so too should the farmers be looking back along the food chain, toward an awareness that flavor and nutritional quality are of interrelated importance.
"Look at how they're gleaming, glowing," she murmurs. "They're so alive and fresh."
In fact, the vibrant produce could scarcely be any fresher. The day's harvest was just picked up at Rainbow Ridge Farm in Waverly, Iowa, where Jason Gomes grows root and other assorted vegetables. He is just one of the more than 150 Midwest growers who supply the Co-op with its locally grown inventory.
To Carbrey, the Co-op's education and member-services coordinator, the idea that the eggplants, tomatoes, yams, peppers, and sweet potatoes filling this box were grown only 100 miles away is worth the excitement. It's a feeling she hopes more people will start to share.
The opportunity to learn about locally grown food arrives with the start of the two-week Field to Family Festival, commencing with the Benefit Culinary Walk today at 5:30 p.m. in downtown Iowa City. Presented by the Johnson County Local Food Alliance, an organization of farmers and consumers working to build sustainable agriculture in the community, organizers intend to create awareness of the amount of food produced in Iowa City and the surrounding area. This concept is all-the-more important as national political attention continually focuses on the environment, economy, and health of America.
( Daily Iowan video feature )
Video in QuickTime format, click here for free player download
"Americans have been tricked, bamboozled into thinking cooking is some kind of chore, that food is something you have to do to get on with the rest of your life," local chef Kurt Michael Friese said. "That's so wrong. Cooking and eating the way we do is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. The happiest moments of your life, I bet almost all of them were spent at a big table with great food in front of you and the people you love all around you."
As part of the festival's events, Friese will read from his new book, A Cook's Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland, at the Motley Cow Café, 160 N. Linn St., on Sept. 14. The book compiles the stories of Midwesterners dedicated to a slow-food lifestyle - a global, grass-roots movement started in Italy in 1989 to counteract the fast-food mentality and revert to home-cooked meals made from local food. After three years of research, Friese found that people all over the Midwest are truly interested in returning to this way of life.
"I wanted to make it clear that this is happening all over," he said. "These stories were easy to find. The hard part was paring it down."
The slow-food revolution goes far beyond the Midwest. There are more than 85,000 members of the international Slow Food nonprofit organization, a group that spans 132 countries. Sixteen thousand of the organization's members are from the United States.
James Nisly, the president of the local food alliance and owner of Organic Greens, a homegrown sprouts business, has witnessed the growth in local food purchases from a grower's perspective. Farmers' markets have been revived in North Liberty and the Amana Colonies in the last year, and Nisly estimates his sales have increased five times since he started roughly 10 years ago.
There are also at least 12 Iowa City restaurants buying local ingredients, Friese said, a number that has grown significantly since he opened Devotay, 117 N. Linn St., in 1992.
The motivation behind slow food comes from many things, but perhaps the most basic reason is rooted in the senses: the food's taste. At the Culinary Walk, Devotay and five other Iowa City restaurants committed to buying locally will serve specialty hors d'oeuvres, demonstrating through firsthand sampling that fresher simply tastes better.
"First and foremost, it's the flavor," Friese said. As a culinary expert, the chef knows from experience that meals made from fresher ingredients impress the palate more. "The closer it is to my kitchen door, the fresher it's going to be."
And when he says close, he means it. The Co-op defines "local" food as anything that comes from within 250 miles, products from Iowa and the surrounding Midwestern states.
Minimizing food transportation affects factors other than taste. Proponents argue that it stimulates the local economy, puts less stress on the environment, discourages social injustice, and strengthens community relationships.
"Buying locally allows you to have a connection with the person growing your food, rather than getting it from a vast field of oppressed minorities and trucks burning fossil fuels 2,000 miles away," Carbrey said.
But for students and families with limited finances, the switch to local food may seem more difficult, especially because it often includes higher prices for organic products. In response to this challenge, Friese presents an example. He notes that diverting a mere $10 of families' and students' existing grocery budgets toward local-food purchases will keep millions of dollars in the community that might have otherwise gone elsewhere.
Whitney Westphal, who moved to Iowa City over the summer with her husband, Scott Westphal, a UI medical student, insists that buying at the Iowa City Farmers' Market doesn't necessarily imply a cost increase.
"I can get a whole bunch of basil here for $1, whereas I'd pay a couple dollars at the grocery store for a little package, and it's not as fresh," she said. "If you choose wisely, you can save money."
Some students have even found a way to pay nothing for their produce by growing it themselves. The UI Environmental Coalition planted its community garden near North Hall at the end of the spring semester. Three months later, it's flourishing with ripe tomatoes and ready-to-eat broccoli, squash, and carrots.
"All people should have a garden in their yard," coalition member and UI graduate student Adam Perkins said. "That's the way it should be, I think."
It seems the concepts behind the slow-food philosophy could hold answers to many pressing problems. A healthier diet rich in fruits and vegetables, less dependence on fossil fuels, more sustainable agricultural practices - the list seems flawless. But can Americans really free themselves from the conveniences they're so accustomed to? The people behind Field to Family hope that the programs and lessons will make each step a little easier.
"It doesn't need to be complicated and difficult," Friese said. "The idea is that food is raised with care, prepared with fashion, and served with love."
Sounds like a tasty enough notion.
E-mail DI reporter Claire Lekwa at:
claire-lekwa@uiowa.edu
Book Excerpt:
A Cook's Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland
by Kurt Michael Friese
From the chapter "A Vanishing Breed: How Kevin Powell is Saving the Mulefoot Hog."
Strawberry Point, Iowa - Iowa is the biggest pork producer in the United States, but most of the hogs grown here are artificially inseminated, hormone- and antibiotic-laden inmates confined in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations known commonly as CAFOs or "hog lots."
Quietly though, there are farmers who are resisting the pressure to join the meat processing multinationals. They are raising heritage breeds in deep beds and pasture, free to be happy pigs wallowing and rooting with their offspring as they do naturally, with no hormones or subtherapeutic antibiotics. One such grower is Kevin Powell, and the story of his Slow Food Ark registered Mulefoot hogs begins quite a long time ago.
Five centuries ago, Spanish explorers were populating the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, but not with people as much as with pigs. The swine brought over from Europe would be set free along the coasts of what became the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, to be harvested as needed when settlers arrived. Some of the descendants of those pigs can still be found running wild there. Most, though, were herded up by farmers and domesticated for food and trade in the newly burgeoning southern United States.
One of the popular practices was to keep hogs on small islands in rivers like the Mississippi and the Missouri. These islands worked as natural corrals, but they were very wet, and some breeds would develop foot rot. Through selective breeding techniques, one variety was developed without the pig's usual cloven hoof (a characteristic called "syndactylism"), thus seeming to help it avoid the bacteria that caused foot rot. These came to be known as mulefoots, and their hardiness combined with excellent flavor made them a very popular breed throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was rumored (though later disproved) that they were immune to hog cholera, and this added to their popularity among farmers. The National Mulefoot Hog Record Association was organized in Indianapolis, Indiana, in January 1908, and by 1910 there were 235 breeders registered in the US.
When the Army Corps of Engineers banned the practice of corralling pigs on river islands - it had something to do with recreational use and people not liking pigs at their picnics - the popularity of this delicious breed declined. The mule-like hoof, meant for muddy riverbanks, did not fare well on the concrete floors of hog lots. Industrialization and a focus on a narrow genetic line of swine nearly decimated the breed.
In 1964 a man named R.M. Holliday of Louisiana, Missouri, took up the task of reestablishing this vanishing breed. He bought registered mulefoots from a wide area and created his own breeding herd. He sold some of his herd to Mark Fields, of Clark, Missouri, who enlisted the aid of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy in rebuilding the Mulefoot registry. They in turn contacted Kent Whealy of the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, who took them on behalf of the Institute for Biodiversity at Luther College.
Down the road in Strawberry Point, Kevin Powell was looking for a way to use his degree in animal science from Iowa State University on his family's fifty-four-year-old farm. Frustrated with the narrowing of the livestock gene pool, he became interested in diversity and what he calls ethical genetics. He found a way to make a difference with Whealy's herd of Mulefoots in 1998.
Powell now cares for a herd of 30 mulefoots and is the chairman of the National Mulefoot Hog Association. It is a very small association though, since the ALBC lists the Mulefoot as critically endangered, the rarest American breed of hog still in existence. Today there are fewer than 200 left in the world.
In 2005, the Mulefoot Hog boarded the Slow Food Ark. The Ark is one of three major endeavors of Slow Food USA to preserve, protect and promote foods that are in danger of extinction due to the industrial standardization of flavors in the food supply. To date, more than 250 indigenous American foods have been carefully catalogued in the Ark USA, joining the hundreds that are on the international Ark.
The mission is to preserve endangered tastes - and to celebrate them, by introducing them to the membership and then to the world, through media, public relations, and Slow Food events. In addition to the Ark, Slow Food USA also forms Presidia, or "active defenses" of certain products that can benefit from a more vigorous intervention to promote their well-being.
Through programs like these, and the tireless efforts of visionary farmers like Kevin Powell, Slow Food is protecting a world of flavors. When writer and farmer Wendell Berry famously said, "Eating is an agricultural act," he meant also that conversely, farming is a culinary act. Just as we, as consumers, should be keenly aware of the origins of our food and of the people involved, so too should the farmers be looking back along the food chain, toward an awareness that flavor and nutritional quality are of interrelated importance.
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Kurt Michael Friese
posted 9/04/08 @ 1:13 PM CST
For the record, I said "prepared with passion," not "fashion"
kmf
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