Last week I attended my first Dining Facilities Meeting for Dover Public School District. It’s an honor to be accepted to this committee as a future parent—my daughter is 2 and my son 5 months old. Our family has several years before we’ll officially cross Garrison school grounds. So why does public school food matter so much to me? Here are a few thoughts.

• I’m a lunch lady in my own home and my daughter is a diverse eater, sometimes veggies at the forefront of her dinner plate. Although finicky at times (she is two!), she always comes around and sometimes surprises us with her distinguished palate.
• Dover school kids are served more or less highly processed food and produce from the West or Midwest. Produce not picked at the peak of ripeness and lengthy travel time diminishes flavor and nutrients. Thanks to a culinary degree, I have the insight and “foodie” credentials to make this statement.
• Although our household isn’t perfect, we aspire to live sustainably and would like to encourage others, especially institutions catering to kids, to do so.
• Schools should offer a well rounded education. Lost within our culture, American children need to be reintroduced to a simpler, rewarding lifestyle—well prepared food from a local farm (yes kids, a carrot grows in the dirt and that’s not icky), taste, and the art of dining or conversation over a well prepared meal with family and friends. Schools have a lot to shoulder in the broader category of education and this could be a controversial grey area. To counterpoint, parents are ultimately responsible to feed their children a healthful diet, but that’s not happening. Can our schools come to the rescue to save children and local farmers alike?
• Nationally 16 percent of school aged children and adolescents are overweight—a figure that has risen three-fold since 1980. ¹ Between 70 and 80 percent of overweight children and adolescents remain overweight or become obese as adults. We’re told that the obesity epidemic also links to skyrocketing rates of other illnesses like diabetes. Responsible adults should take care of their kin, not kill them.
• I’ve heard excuses like kids are served Oreos and boxed mac-n-cheese at home. That’s what they like and eat, and therefore that’s what they are served at school. Not so! That’s what they know. I won’t denounce, it’s a challenge to feed kids, especially when on the go, but it is worth the effort.

The point of blogging about this experience it to help others interested in starting farm-to-school programs. By keeping up with what is happening in Dover, some folks might be inspired to leap forward in another district or join the volunteer cause in Dover.

The Dover Dining Facilities Council is headed by the district Business Manager and is made up of the Director of Food Service, a school board member, school nurses and parent volunteers. This particular group of parents and nurses, anyway, is fired up and looks forward to seek positive change—more vegetables (hopefully local) on school lunch tables.

At the meeting, Nathan Duclos, NH Farm to School Program Coordinator from University of New Hampshire Office of Sustainability gave a presentation on the NH Farm to School program. Mark Saunders, owner of Saunders Fruit and Produce was also present and shared a few words on distribution issues.

Basic challenges to overcome: build a plan with measurable results that will work for this specific district; establish a farm-to-distributor-to-school system; devise new recipes and create new menus to accommodate the local produce; cost, will it cost more to pay local?; figure out how best to market new food items to students (elementary, middle and high school-age); educate students (again, different ages) on the health benefits of eating more vegetables and fruits, and about local farming and food in general.

Nathan Duclos made it clear that each of these areas is a huge task in itself, not to be taken lightly. To be successful, the group needs to focus and make small-scale change, an example, serve kale on the menu in 2008. The group is up for the challenge, and despite the hefty workload, we learned something inspiring—Dover schools still have fully equipped kitchens!—anything can happen. We meet next at Dover high school for a group kitchen tour… hairnets not required.

“THE FASCINATING LIFE OF THE HONEY BEE,”

Wendy and Bill Booth

Thursday, May 22 6:30 PM

The Exeter Public Library. 772-3101.

More information >

TASTE, SIP AND ENJOY GREAT WRITING AT SLOW FOOD SEACOAST’S 1st ANNUAL FOOD WRITERS NIGHT.

This evening, the words are good enough to eat! On  Wednesday, May 21  from 6:30-9:30 p.m. Slow Food Seacoast will stimulate your mind and body  in  a celebration of local food writers and tasty recipes prepared from their cookbooks and essays.

The Seacoast’s  best food writers will whet your  appetite  when they read from their work in this unique evening program. After each reading, guests will be able to taste food inspired by the writer’s recipes and essays.  Tickets are $55 and includes the reading, food and libations. All proceeds will benefit  Slow Food Seacoast. Tickets can  be purchased through www.seacoastfoodie.com. The event will be held at The Pearl of Portsmouth, 45 Pearl St., Portsmouth. Tickets are limited to only 60 attendees and will go fast.

In an innovative experience of  literature  and flavors, each writer will present in “courses” followed sips and tastes.  Beginning at 6:30 p.m.,  guests will be able to sample hors d’oeuvres before sitting down at 7:00 pm to enjoy the reading and between each, they’ll  sample food and drink paired with the listening experience. After the program, all are invited to mingle and ask questions of the authors and purchase signed copies of the author’s books, provided by RiverRun Bookstore. 

 Our nationally renowned food writers include Denise Landis, New York Times columnist and author of “Dinner For Eight: 40 Great Dinner Party Menus for Friends and Family”, Jean Kerr author of  the “Union Oyster House Cookbook” and “Mystic Seafood”, Kathy Gunst author of “Stonewall Kitchen Favorites” and “Stonewall Kitchen Harvest” and “resident chef” on WBUR’s Here and Now and James Haller, author of “Vie De France” and founder of the famed Blue Strawbery restaurant. The evening will be hosted by Rachel Forrest, food writer and restaurant critic for The Portsmouth Herald and host of Wine Me Dine Me, a food and drink themed radio show on Portsmouth Community Radio.  Books will be supplied by RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth and will be available for signing and purchase. The event is sponsored by Seacoast Media Group and Taste of the Seacoast Magazine and includes wine, beer and food donated by local caterers, restaurants and purveyors.

The evening’s proceeds go to benefit Slow Food Seacoast, a “convivium” within Slow Food USA,  a non-profit, educational organization dedicated to supporting and celebrating the food traditions of North America through programs and activities dedicated to Taste Education, Defending Biodiversity and Building Food Communities.

Tickets can be purchased by going to www.seacoastfoodie.com or by calling (603) 315-3276

Seacoast Local invites UNH professor John Carroll to talk about increasing local food security beyond peak oil as part of the ‘Making the Connection’ sustainability series, at RiverRun Bookstore on Thursday, May 8 at 7pm.

How can we boost the local economy and re-establish our food security? Dedicating land for grazing taps into New Hampshire’s heritage and is a natural fit for the future. John E. Carroll, author of “The Wisdom of Small Farms and Local Food” and “Sustainability and Spirituality,” comes to Portsmouth on Thursday, May 8 at 7 p.m. to talk about restoring food independence, the subject of his new book “Pastures of Plenty: The Future of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Conservation in New England.”

“This is an important message for our community, especially in light of rising food prices,” says Rich Wood, a board member of Seacoast Local, home to the Seacoast Buy Local program. “Food self-sufficiency represents security and independence. And we know that money spent locally stays in the community, so re-building local food capacity will make everyone’s dollar stretch farther while enhancing our overall economic vitality.”

Carroll explains why we should be thinking about raising our self-sufficiency. “In all of the preparations we must make in order to respond to the demands of greenhouse gas reduction—80 to 90 percent reduction in carbon dioxide by 2050 or sooner—and the end of the era of cheap oil, our greatest challenge will not be transportation nor home heating, but food and the threat to our food supply,” he says.

Princeton petroleum geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, author of “Beyond Hubbert’s Peak: The End of Oil,” has said that agriculture is the first victim of peak oil. James Howard Kunstler, author of “The Long Emergency,” has written that “Agriculture is going to come back to the center of the American way of life in a way that we couldn’t imagine.” Matthew Simmons, Houston oil analyst and investment banker, tells us that local agriculture will be of critical importance to our future.

Carroll offers a response for our locale, New England: grass-based agriculture. The how and why for a return to grazing; for a full range of dairy and meat product (not only cows, dairy and beef, but also sheep, pigs, goats and poultry); for integration with diversified horticulture for vegetables and fruit; and for integration with forestry, is spelled out in detail in the new University of New Hampshire book, “Pastures of Plenty: The Future of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Conservation in New England.”

A sequel to his earlier work on sustainable agriculture at the local level, “The Wisdom of Small Farms and Local Food,” Carroll’s latest book takes a close look at the prospects for our own region. “Take advantage of your local circumstances,” Carroll suggests, “and reconstruct your world around them.”

Carroll will read at RiverRun Bookstore, located at 20 Congress Street in downtown Portsmouth. For more information on his research, visit http://www.unh.edu/natural-resources/fac-carroll.html. For more details on the event, call 603-431-2100 or visit www.riverrunbookstore.com. For more information on Seacoast Local, including its “Buy Local” program, visit www.seacoastlocal.org.

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we’re counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

For example, buying local supports community economic development, helping communities sustain their livelihood and character. It provides access to the freshest food available, enhancing taste and reducing food waste. And it strengthens our food community, encouraging social networks and food security in our communities and regions. Not only that, but knowing where your food comes from can help you advocate for lower-carbon production methods in your community, such as reducing fertilizer usage, no-till agriculture methods, and pasture-based livestock systems.

And next month, you too will get a newsletter in your email box, full of fun and helpful info like this schedule of live music and special events:
May 3, Random Acts of Harmony

May 10, American Flyer for our official ribbon-cutting with Mayor Ferrini

May 17, Taylor River Band for SGA’s own version of Earth Day

May 24, Penhallow

May 31, The Reef Band

And this tidbit on the Wednesday Dover market:

The Dover market has moved, and is better than ever!  SGA is teaming up with the Atlantic Culinary Academy at McIntosh College (181 Silver St.) to bring you more vendors than ever, as well as special demonstrations by faculty and student chefs at the ACA.  The new location offers plenty of parking, and easy access from the Spaulding Turnpike, exit 8E.  Come check out Seacoast farmers growing new roots in Dover.

I *heart* the farmers’ markets!

Sorry I don’t have more interesting things to add, but I was so excited that I just rushed to put this up so you all would go read the article and post to the comment board.