It’s clear now that schools around the country will be closed until at least next fall, but McDaniel hasn’t stopped gardening. “I want people passing by on their daily walks to see that [the garden] is still growing and that our community still grows and continues,” she says.

The closures came at a rough time for school gardens—which had either just planted their spring crops or were planning to plant them. Though anything related to food production is generally considered “essential” and allowed to operate during the COVID-19 outbreak, the decision to keep a school garden open depends on the school and staff running the program.

“As soon I heard schools were closing, I emailed the principals of every school we work with and said, ‘We want to keep gardening’,” says Michelle Welton, executive director of Grow Portland. The organization works with 13 low-income schools in Oregon, and its staff is still maintaining the gardens in 10 of those schools.

Instead of planting the gardens with the intention of using them as learning gardens—each one seeded with a few carrots here, some beans there, and a hodgepodge of other produce for variety—Grow Portland’s staff is pivoting to use the beds for production. In lieu of each school growing a bit of everything, Welton says, the gardens are now working more like urban farms, with entire beds of carrots or leafy greens.

Photo courtesy of Edible Schoolyard.

Grow Portland has reduced some staff hours but hopes to pay everyone’s wages again with the help of a government payroll loan. The organization has a small staff working on multiple sites, which makes it relatively easy to coordinate working hours for social distancing. The staff has already harvested over 20 pounds of produce, mostly leafy greens, in the last few weeks. But rather than being used as a teaching aid, the harvested food will be given back to families for use in their home kitchens and donated to local food pantries.

Columbus City Schools in Ohio are working to adopt similar practices. “Our high school teachers are definitely going to their gardens, or they have indoor gardens they’re trying to keep going,” says Chris Weatherholtz, farm-to-school curriculum coordinator for the district. In some Columbus schools, students were already growing produce with the express goal of donating it to local food banks. In those cases, the teachers and the receiving organizations have kept the garden running and shared regular updates with the students about what’s growing, and how the food is being used.

Weatherholtz says it’s hard to predict how much food the gardens in Columbus will be able to donate because they’ve never tried farming for production before and it’s still so early in the season. The gardeners are doing what they can to help with the resources still available.

“We’ve got some rock star teachers. I don’t know how else to put it,” Weatherholtz said.

While school gardens provide a valuable service as an outdoor learning lab, their goal is primarily an educational one. Classes linked to gardening and nutrition, which can take place in the classroom or outside, can help augment education in just about any other subject—from math and science to reading and the arts. Yet figuring out how to continue a garden curriculum while kids are at home with different types of access to the outdoors, food, and parental oversight has been a challenge for garden coordinators around the nation.

There are many ways to serve a school garden community. In Arkansas, McDaniel is putting together online classes as well as facilitating a way to open the garden (in a limited capacity) to students and their families. She created a system that allows families to sign up for an hour harvesting and helping out in the garden, where they can find sanitizing equipment as well as a first aid kit and garden activities such as a scavenger hunt. Roughly 20 percent of families in Cedarville live below the poverty line, and the school usually provides free meals to all students.

“My schedule is still shaped around what the school needs, but instead of lessons I’m helping the school provide virtual lessons, garden maintenance, and hunger relief,” said McDaniel. FoodCorps and the school’s teachers also printed out and distributed SNAP applications to families after the state widened the eligibility guidelines.

The Edible Schoolyard Project, the Berkeley-based nonprofit that provides “edible education” curriculum support to more than 6,000 schools worldwide, hurried to create and share lessons that would work for kids at home.

“The content we [had before the pandemic was] meant for a classroom and for people who can go to the grocery store with ease or have a garden that can propagate a multitude of plants,” says Deputy Executive Director Angela McKee-Brown. “We found ourselves having to do an extreme pivot.”

In April, Edible Schoolyard launched a series called Edible at Home, which provides teachers with lessons that students can do at home with limited parental oversight. One of the early lessons was focused on the spice cabinet, McKee-Brown says. “We understand families have different abilities to access food and the outdoors right now, but spices are ubiquitous in our homes.” The spice drawer was a vehicle for a lesson about smell and memory, family origin, and how scent itself functions.

Lessons like this that see learning more as an opportunity to communicate and reminisce than homework (for parents and students alike) seem more necessary than ever right now when most school-aged kids are accessing educational activities online. “What’s beautiful about kitchens and gardens is that they are safe spaces to connect,” says McKee-Brown. “We want to think about our lessons in a similar fashion. How can we use shared learning experiences to bring children and their families together?”

Many school garden educators are also shooting videos of themselves in the garden or sharing the progress of crops as they grow from seedlings. For example, Grow Portland is installing mason bees at the garden sites and filming that process, says Welton. It’s a big learning curve for many staff members to create digital content. “None of us were hired for those skills,” she adds.

As McDaniel sees it, a garden can be a symbol of resilience in the face of this global pandemic and the many changes it has brought to everyone’s lives. The Arkansas native spent several years attending the under-resourced school where she’s now serving in FoodCorps.

Her service is over in July, but she’s already applied to come back next year, provided school is back in session in the fall. Either way, the goal is to keep the garden going. Things will keep growing as long as someone is there to tend to it.

“I come from a family that had some struggles and understands the challenges of being faced with food scarcity,” she says. McDaniel never thought that the end of her service year would look like this. “I know a lot of us feel like there are so many projects we wanted to be able to accomplish but I look at what we can get done.”

Top photo: Tara McDaniel stands outside the Cedarville Elementary school garden. Photo courtesy of Food Corps.

The post With Schools Closed, Their Gardens Take on a New Role appeared first on Civil Eats.

Most of these new and seasoned gardeners are making careful decisions about what type of plants they want to grow and how to organize the beds, but it’s also a good time to consider another, perhaps more important aspect of food sovereignty: what kind of seeds you’re planting and whether or not you’ll be able to save and share them next year.

To save seeds is to preserve food culture. Heirloom crops wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the gardeners who meticulously grew and saved seeds including the Brandywine tomato, Purple Top White Globe turnip, and many other varieties, passing them on to future generations.

In recent years, many Indigenous groups have also used seed saving as a way to preserve their cultures—as well as important crops like Cherokee White Eagle Corn, the Trail of Tears Bean, and Candy Roaster Squash for future generations.

Perhaps most important in this moment, saving (and sharing) seeds also makes sense economically. “People are having a hard time right now financially,” says Philip Kauth, director of preservation for Seed Savers Exchange. But saving seeds is free and many seed libraries, seed exchanges, and other groups offer packets of seeds at prices that are lower than those offered by retail seed companies. “There are so many economical aspects to it. You don’t have to buy seeds every year and you don’t have to buy produce, depending on the time of the year.”

“In the 1930s and 40s, it was popular for home gardeners to save their own seeds,” says Fern Marshall Bradley, author of Saving Vegetable Seeds and an editor at Chelsea Green Publishing. The practice died out but is being revived again by gardeners who want more control (and creativity) with their crops. And it’s easier than it seems to get started. If you’re growing beans, tomatoes, squash, or similar plants you’re already growing seeds. “Why not just take the extra step of saving them?” Bradley says.

Why Avoid Patented Seeds?

Seeds are either open-pollinated or hybrids. The latter are often bred for specific traits like drought resistance or large yields, but you can’t save the seeds. Unlike open-pollinated seeds which can be collected and replanted year after year to get the same tomatoes or lettuce as the year before, hybrids are often patented and have been bred to grow just once. Technically, you can save the seeds, but they won’t don’t grow true to type, meaning you’re likely a plant that produces very different food the second time around (if the seeds grow at all).

Beginning with the 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA), which granted companies a certificate ownership of seeds, and the 1980 Supreme Court case Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which allowed seeds full patent protection, seed ownership began to look more like intellectual property law. In many cases, farmers were no longer allowed to save seeds and breeders couldn’t use patented seeds to breed new plant varieties either. Today, the bulk of seed breeding has moved from public universities to private laboratories and four companies control more than 60 percent of global seed sales.

“When there are only two [companies] you can go to for your seed, you’ve got problems.”

“Farmers no longer buy seeds,” says Jack Kloppenburg, a sociologist and author of First the Seed. “They rent that seed from Monsanto or Syngenta,” he explains referring to the trend that has overtaken many commodity crops like corn, soy, or cotton. Rather than growing a number of open-pollinated seeds that are bred to thrive in a particular climate or soil conditions, farmers throughout the world are turning to a few conglomerates to buy the same seeds and grow the same cash crops as the rest of the world.

“When there are only two places you can go for your seed as a farmer,” Kloppenburg says, “you’ve got problems.” He worries that if current trends continue, even more seeds will wind up under patent.

On the other end of the spectrum, a small group of seed breeders are working to expand the number of plant varieties that can be freely saved and shared. The Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) asks plant breeders working with open-pollinated varieties to pledge not to restrict others’ use of the seeds they breed (or their derivatives) by patents or legal restrictions.

Seed companies can still sell the seeds (and the OSSI site includes a long list of open source varieties with links to the companies that sell them) researchers can still use the genetic material to create new varieties; they just can’t restrict other companies and researchers from doing the same. The renewed popularity of open source seeds, independent seed companies, seed libraries, and other exchanges means that it’s getting easier to find seeds adapted for local conditions. But you still won’t find them in the plant section of Home Depot—or most other mainstream plant stores.

“If we have hyper-consolidation of all these [agricultural] industries and our farms are getting bigger and seed companies are getting bigger, I think people have less control over their food system,” says Claire Luby, co-founder of OSSI. “People are starting to recognize the role seeds play in food sovereignty, but it’s been slower than the local food movement.” Having seeds adapted for a local environment is particularly important in an era of climate change. That doesn’t happen if one [laboratory] is breeding “carrots for the entire country” as Luby says.

“It’s a fun thing to see people breeding [plants] for their community in the mountains or the high desert or really high conditions,” she says. “Sure, this tomato won’t be grown everywhere but that’s not the point. It does well in that one place.”

However, “you don’t need the breeder’s long-term view” to be good at seed saving, Bradley says. Even if someone isn’t trying to become a plant breeder, by saving seeds from plants that have survived (and thrived) enough at the end of the season to produce seeds, there’s already some selection taking place. “If you keep saving seeds from healthy plants, each year those seeds will give you plants that are better adapted to your conditions,” she says.

A Farmer’s Perspective

Even if they don’t want to counter-balance the global seed giants, some farmers have practical reasons to work with open-pollinated varieties and save their own seed. Kristyn Leach is the owner of the two-acre Namu Farm in Winters, California, which supplies produce to restaurant group Namu Gaji as well as other local establishments. When Leach started her farm in 2011, she quickly realized that most commercially available seeds didn’t work for the kind of farm she wanted to run.

“My aim has always been focused on no-till and minimum inputs,” Leach says, referring to her approach to using fertilizer, pesticides, and even water. Seeds might be labeled “high yield,” but farmers will only see those yields if the use of heavy irrigation which, in California, is particularly expensive for farmers and the environment.

Leach had previous experience breeding plants while working for a tomato breeder and decided to put those skills to use saving seed and selecting for crops that are optimal for her farm’s conditions. She set aside a few rows on her farm for breeding, stressing the plants by giving them less fertilizer or water and seeing which ones stayed alive.

“Basically you’re attempting to kill a percentage of your plants in the hopes that what remains has the genetics to withstand [those conditions],” she explains.

Plant breeding and seed saving are not common practices among farmers, who look at the economics of buying a seeds versus the land and time needed to grow extra plants to save their own. “Seed is not an expensive line-item but fertility and water are,” Leach explains. “It saves money downstream.” One project she undertook with eggplant took six years to complete. But at the end of that time, Leach went from needing to water the crop three hours every other day to one and a half hours every week.

It was after midnight on a night in October and Tony Moyer and his brother-in-law Sam Troyer were wearing headlamps. Without them, it would’ve been impossible to see inside the dumpster the two men were digging through. The dumpster belonged to a CVS store in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and it was not their first dive. Over the last few years Moyer and Troyer had become avid dumpster divers.

“It got to the point where we had so much food, we didn’t know what to do with it,” Moyer says. “So we looked into donating.” In addition to the food they ate and gave away to friends and family, Moyer and Troyer donated roughly 600 pounds of food to local charities in six months. The food was wrapped, not past-dated, and yet it was being thrown away week after week. “I couldn’t in good conscience let it go to the trash,” says Moyer.

Moyer and Troyer had done their research and they knew that what was in the dumpsters was legally available as long as they didn’t break into anything locked or see “No Trespassing” signs on the premises. In general, the practice is legal throughout the United States with the exception of some local laws that have banned or otherwise restricted it. Moyer and Troyer had been stopped a few times by police who politely told them to leave. On that night in October, however, they weren’t so lucky.

“Yeah, it doesn’t look good when two guys are digging through a dumpster in the middle of the night,” Moyer admits. Police spotted them and, this time, brought the brothers-in-law to the station where the two men were charged with loitering and criminal trespassing. “We tried to explain what we were doing and I told them I had receipts showing that we donated this food,” Moyer says. “They didn’t believe our story.”

After being apprehended and charged, the brothers-in-law were released to await trial. Criminal trespassing in Pennsylvania is a summary offense carrying a maximum of 90 days imprisonment and $300 fine. The other charge, however, is a third-degree misdemeanor with charges of up to a year imprisonment and $2,000 in fines. Though CVS didn’t press charges against the two men, the local police did. It’s unlikely they would face the maximum sentences, but the charges against them are not paltry. As soon as Moyer got home that night, he sent an email to someone he thought could help: Rob Greenfield.

As we reported last year, the food waste activist had offered to pay the fines of individuals arrested for dumpster diving for food (as long as they weren’t breaking any other laws in the process).

Food waste has recently gained increased national attention—last year, the Obama administration announced a goal of cutting the amount of food wasted in this country by 50 percent. And Greenfield has played an active and very public role in the fight against retail food waste by sharing photos of the vast quantities of food he has recovered around the country. In 2008, in-store food losses amounted to 10 percent of the total retail food supply, or roughly 43 billion pounds.

Greenfield believes one of the biggest barriers to dumpster diving—and, as a result, wasted food recovery—was a fear of being ticketed or arrested. He hoped his promise might embolden some potential divers to get out of their houses and into the dumpster.

Greenfield’s name came up while Moyer had been researching the legality of dumpster diving. Now, he figured, “what was the worst that could happen?” Greenfield responded a few days later. He came to Pennsylvania soon after and created a video about their situation which has received over 400,000 views since it was uploaded in late November. Greenfield is currently raising money through a GoFundMe campaign that will be used to pay the divers’ fines if charges aren’t dropped. If they are dropped, the funds will go toward creating “a food rescue program with grocery stores so that the food can be donated and not put in the dumpster in the first place.”

Greenfield says he had heard from other people in similar situations, but Moyer and Troyer were “the first ones that really exactly fit the bill.” Some had written to him because they’d been arrested, but not for dumpster diving for food, and others had been ticketed for trespassing but never followed up after Greenfield’s initial response.

The food waste activist didn’t think anyone would actually take him up on his offer and says he hasn’t found accounts of people getting arrested for dumpster diving before. But it does happen. In 2013, a homeless veteran’s arrest in Houston received more coverage than average since Houston has not only outlawed dumpster diving is also among the cities that have made it illegal for anyone to feed the homeless without a permit.

In the almost two years since he announced he’d pay these fines, Greenfield has changed his impression of the people who are apprehended and prosecuted for dumpster diving. “What I learned is that [Moyer and Troyer] aren’t the only ones for sure,” he says, though he still doesn’t believe the risk is high enough to keep people away from food recovery.

Later this month, Moyer and Troyer will have a preliminary hearing and they’re hoping to see the charges against them dropped. If not, they hope to show the judge that about 90 percent of the food they’ve recovered has been donated to charity in hopes it that the charges will be dropped.

While many stores have made attempts to cut down on waste by donating spare food (Trader Joe’s donated over $321 million worth of food to food banks in 2015 and has donation coordinators at each location) others haven’t substantially changed their policies. Troyer and Moyer say they’re regularly found large quantities of food at their local CVS as well as other “big box stores.”

Greenfield had some stronger words about the chain: “CVS truly doesn’t care from what I’ve seen while diving into hundreds of CVS dumpsters across the nation.”

“We’ve asked if we can just come in and take the food and donate it directly but they said they can’t do that,” says Moyer.

Moyer recalls that the manager told him the chain donated “on a store level,” but had no further details  about what that means in practice. CVS didn’t respond to our request for comment about how it handles food waste, but the company’s “social responsibility” page lists waste reduction among their goals and notes that in 2015 they made $56 million in “product donations.”

Dumpster divers are arrested and ticketed, but no one is tracking how often. Some divers, like Moyer and Troyer, have jobs and homes; others are low-income or homeless people who rely on the waste stream for sustenance. Most of these arrests never make the news. “They’ll go to court and whatever the system lays on them is what will happen,” Greenfield says.

Unless the dumpster diver is fighting back or goes to the media, people simply pay up and move on. Moyer found Greenfield because he happened to do his research before getting caught. But, as Greenfield says, “I think most of the people [who get ticketed or arrested] may not find me because they don’t have a computer in the first place.”

The post Food Waste Activist Emboldens Dumpster Divers appeared first on Civil Eats.

And if Michael Pollan’s new documentary series, Cooked, which begins streaming on Netflix today, is any further evidence, the spread of processed foods and Western diets is taking out cooking, one family at a time.

Based on his 2013 bestseller of the same name, Cooked is a four-part series in which each 50-minute episode focuses on one of the elements—earth, air, water, and fire—and the role they play in cooking.

Like last year’s Pollan-focused PBS documentary, In Defense of Food, the series features themes familiar to anyone who follows the author’s work: traditional methods of eating are best for teasing both health and flavor from food; corporations shouldn’t be trusted to make our meals; eating itself is both a primal and evolutionary act. Critics of Pollan’s books who believe that the diets he advocates are out of reach for those on the lower end of the social-economic spectrum or unsustainable on a global scale will also likely find the same flaws in this documentary.

Yet what the documentary, produced by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, brings to the table is a reminder that cooking isn’t just ethical or political—it is also one of the greatest human inventions of all time. Cooked is a salute to eating, celebrated by people around the world, and filmed in color so rich you can almost taste it. Pollan frequently underscores the point that cooking itself may have made humans human. And thanks to Netflix’s powerful distribution platform, documentaries like Pollan’s are easier to watch than ever before. His message, each episode of which is spearheaded by a different director, could potentially reach each of the streaming service’s 75 million worldwide members.

In the first episode, “Fire,” Pollan talks to Harvard primatologist and anthropologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that using fire to soften our food and make it easier to chew allowed us to consume calories more quickly and, therefore, feed our growing brains. “The brain,” Wrangham says, “is a very hungry organ.” Primates who still eat raw shoots and leaves, by contrast, spend half of their waking hours chewing.

What we eat may also affect the combination of microbes living inside our bodies. For every one cell in our body that is human, 10 belong to something else—and they need to be fed, too. Unfortunately, antibiotics don’t just fight the bacteria making us sick, they also kill the microbiome—the colony of bacteria living inside us. “It’s safe to say we’ve gone overboard on the war against bacteria,” Pollan says. This is true of the bacteria we use to produce foods like cheese, too.

The “Earth” episode features a Connecticut nun, Sister Noella Marcellino, who used to make cheese according to a French peasant recipe, letting the milk sour in wooden barrels rather than the stainless steel commonly used today. After an outbreak of listeria, health inspectors told her she had to stop using wood. The levels of E. coli in her finished cheeses spiked immediately. Using slick steel instead of porous wood may feel like the hygienic choice in food manufacturing, but it was the bacteria produced by the wood itself that kept her original cheese E. coli-free.

The elemental themes that tie each episode together makes for what we would think of as unlikely bedfellows. Cheese is an everyday product; kombucha is not. Yet both are the products of fermentation, tying them both into one episode. Before refrigeration, fermentation was one of the only ways to preserve food.

Today, Pollan says, we think of things like kimchi, kombucha, and other fermented foods as “exotic,” but they all have a long role in human history. “A third of our foods are fermented and in most cases we have no idea,” he says, listing chocolate and alcohol as two favored fermented foods.

The evolved human, Pollan says in later episodes, then became brewers or bakers—changing society yet again. “It’s hard to imagine bread evolving in a hunter-gatherer society,” he says, noting that people have had to create communities to clear fields, plant and harvest grain, mill, and knead—just to finally bake something as simple as bread. “Bread,” he says, “is in that sense the product of civilization as well as an enabler of civilization.”

Then there’s the kitchen—the center of social life where communities came together to cook and eat in a group. Individual families eventually splintered off, and, as Pollan says, “women were marooned in the kitchen.” In other countries, this transition is starting to take place today. When women went to work, Pollan notes, rather than renegotiating the division of labor in households, the U.S. food industry stepped in instead. “For the food industry, people cooking foods at home are an obstacle to selling more of their product,” Pollan says in the “Water” episode.

After a while, people forgot how to cook. Unless big changes are on the horizon, cooking will seem a little harder, slower, and less useful a skill to each generation. If cooking made us human, is allowing companies to cook for us the next step in our evolution or a horrible mistake? Cooked is a nudge to remember our past, how far we’ve come as a species, and what we’re really giving up when we concede the kitchen.

Though Pollan himself does occasionally proselytize (such as when he reminds viewers that Southern barbecue today relies on commodity pork “raised in confinement in brutal conditions”), the breadth of voices in the documentary augment his points. If Pollan’s elegy for the 24-hour pork roast fails to connect, perhaps members of the Australian Aboriginal Martu, who talk about the central role fire has always played in their culture, will. “We had bush sweets, not sugar,” one Martu woman says of their past diet. “Sugar has made us weak.”

Pollan shows that eating better isn’t just a first-world diet fad or weight loss scheme—changed food habits have literally destroyed the health of communities. Today we’re so far gone in our eating habits, that it’s easy to forget these changes once created huge shifts in both health and local culture.

Going back to our edible roots is about more than eating delicious food. Stories in Cooked from “non-experts,” like a Moroccan baker, the manager of a cacao farm, the people who help run a community kitchen in India, and others are really what tell the story of why cooking matters. In the end, the series shows that academics, doctors, and nuns don’t cook—people do.

Today, the desire to cook still lingers, albeit in forms that would look odd to our ancestors, like those meal kits that provide perfectly portioned ingredients along with step-by-step instructions for dinner. This is what cooking is starting to look like in America today. And we can either keep traveling down the same path, getting closer to dietary diseases and obesity, or turn toward the foods that nourished our ancestors and built their communities.

All Cooked stills courtesy of Netflix.

The post This New Netflix Documentary Will Inspire You To Make Dinner appeared first on Civil Eats.

“Farming is important to me and encouraging healthy food systems is important to me,” says Chatch Pregger, the director of Farm to Ballet. He and the other dancers started working on the month-long performance in February on an entirely volunteer basis. Pregger says while he was scouting locations to see how he might frame the show, one farmer asked Pregger why they weren’t charging for their time. “This farm hosts events, but might hire a band to play for it,” explains Pregger, adding that he told the farmer his goal was to support the farm, not to make money off of it.

The proceeds raised at each performance go to a different food-related nonprofit. “Sometimes the host and non-profit are the same entity,” Pregger says. This was the case for Shelburne Farms—which is both a farm and educational center—and the conservation, food, and arts-focused organization Marble House Project, and Feast & Field Market.

The ballet itself is meant to evoke life on a farm,” according to Pregger, (who adds that using that the term “storyline” to describe the choreography might be misleading). Set to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the first scenes take place in spring with apple trees, pollination, and a farmer planning his crops. Moving through the seasons, the dancers act out planting and tending to crops, irrigating, and the harvest. The final scene is of a farm-share pickup and celebration of a year’s work well done.

The most noteworthy feature of the ballet might be the scenery—provided by mother nature herself. Farm to Ballet installs a barn-like structure at each event, Pregger says, noting,“That’s our only scenery.” The group also has a portable solar panel for any energy needs during the performances. This allows them to pick the best part of each host farm to set their dance without being tied to practical concerns like electrical outlets.

At Shelburne Farms the event was so successful that they not only sold out but had to “manage the waitlist,” according to Tre McCarney, the director of community programs. When McCarney was initially approached about hosting this event, she says, “Little did I know there would be such a buzz. It definitely brought out a new demographic of people.” She has been affiliated with the farm for long enough to know regulars by sight—and there were a lot of new faces in the audience.

Often referred to as “agritourism,” events like this are becoming more popular as farms look for additional ways to earn income. According to the 2012 Census of Agriculture, 33,000 farms had some type of tourist or recreational activity on their farm compared to 23,000 (almost a 50 percent increase). On average, each farm earned an additional $23,000 in annual income—a number that is nothing to scoff at considering most farmers’ low profit margins. Many farms will try just about anything once, whether it’s musical events, U-pick days, or speed dating. And because farms and ballet can both benefit from attracting new people, this project may be a perfect marriage.

Pregger had two goals when starting the project—helping local farms and bringing ballet to a new crowd. “We wanted to dance outside and make it accessible to an audience that might not come to a theater,” he says says. Ballet is one of the lowest attended of all performing arts according to a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey. Of the American adults who go to see arts performances, only 2.9 percent attended the ballet in 2008. The only art less popular was opera (at 2.1 percent). But the NEA study also found that outdoor festivals were the most popular type of arts event—perhaps because of their air of accessibility. Parents in particular are often apprehensive about bringing their children to a theater. But when the ballet is taking place in a field or beside a barn, “The kids can run around,” Pregger says.

Farm to Ballet is meant to be a celebration of those who grow our food and those who care about where it comes from. And it’s okay if farmers don’t flock to dance class after seeing a performance. “I already have farmers who take ballet classes,” Pregger says. “But I’m also trying to get ballet dancers to the farm.”

The post Farm to Ballet is Bringing Dance Lovers to Farm Fields appeared first on Civil Eats.

According to census data, one in three households in Far Rockaway earns less than $25,000 a year, and the neighborhood would be referred to by many, including the government, as a “food desert” (a term some food activists dislike). Time to cook a meal from scratch or even just sit down to eat is a precious commodity in many households here.

In 2014, the food-focused Brooklyn radio station Heritage Radio Network (HRN) started a program to not only teach teens how to produce stories for radio, but also to help them share their perspective on food in their communities. Far Rockaway seemed like the perfect starting place.

“We see one of our goals here as bringing new voices to the floor in the food conversation,” says HRN’s executive director Erin Fairbanks. “Teenagers and high schoolers are people you don’t often get to hear from, but they’re some of the most impacted in terms of food access and food insecurity.”

Miranda is one of five students selected for the first Saxelby Radio Scholars program, which brought a handful of 17- and 18-year-olds together at the HRN studios. The students were chosen by a selection committee made up of community leaders, food and radio experts, and Pam and Bill Saxelby, the program’s funders. (Ann Saxelby, their daughter, is the owner of Saxelby Cheese and wife of Patrick Martins, the owner of Heritage Foods USA and founder of HRN.)

Students commit to five sessions of training, talk about their experiences with food, and learn about radio from volunteer radio producers, engineers, and other leaders, says Caitlin Pierce, HRN’s program manager, who oversaw the scholars.

Dekendra Dazzel says that before she became a Saxelby Scholar, “I felt like it was just me thinking that the stores didn’t have a lot of greens. I didn’t know other people felt the same way.” For her segment, she interviewed Far Rockaway residents about their troubles eating well and delved into whether farmers’ markets and community gardens can help those in her community eat the way they want. She interviewed a local resident who says of the farmers’ market, “I usually get on buses and trains to find fruits and vegetables that are adequate, and I don’t have to do that anymore.”

Justina Utionkpan, whose family moved to Far Rockaway from Nigeria, noticed stark differences between the food she ate in her home country and what’s now available to her. In her radio piece, she focused on the plethora of fast food in her neighborhood—something which her Nigerian parents strongly disapprove of spending money on. As Utionkpan said in a phone interview, “There’s a deli on every corner. This has an impact on people’s health.” She recognizes that when cheap, unhealthy food is readily available, fewer people will bother cooking at home. Many of her classmates eat fast food almost every day.

“When you tell a high school student that they’re making pieces about food in their community, they think about food as a big idea, and community as a big idea rather than themselves within it,” says Pierce.

By focusing on the personal, their stories began to take on a candid quality that trained journalists don’t often have. “The students spoke from the heart and it ended up being really compelling,” Fairbanks says. The students illuminated many of the topics food advocates focus on, “But it wasn’t because they had a strong background in food or policy,” she says. “They were just telling it like it is.”

The radio pieces explore topics like the impact of good food on physical performance, a stepfather’s struggle to eat healthy, or how a lack of time can change a mother’s eating habits. In a media landscape where food access is often discussed by advocates and doctors focused on policy change, the Scholars’ radio pieces are a breath of fresh air for their direct line into people’s daily lives. But that doesn’t mean the students aren’t curious about the forces that shapes their community.

While discussing her story, for instance, Utionkpan expressed curiosity about the part of government that might be responsible for making healthy food easier or cheaper to purchase. The U.S. Department of Agriculture may be a foreign concept in Far Rockaway, but its effects are all too real.

“I don’t understand why they make healthy food expensive, but then expect people to eat healthy,” Utionkpan says. “There’s economic hardship everywhere—even here—and people turn to the cheapest thing they can find.”

Listen to all five Saxelby Scholars radio pieces here.

Heritage Radio Network is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to rebuild their website and continue broadcasting the work of the Saxelby Radio Scholars, in addition to the 39+ live shows that play on HRN each week.

Photos courtesy of HRN.

The post Reporting Live From a ‘Food Desert’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

Farmers add nitrogen to the soil in the form of synthetic fertilizer, which tends to run off of Midwestern farm fields and build up in waterways and aquifers. By traveling down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, this pollution has been a major cause of one of the largest dead zones in the world.

It is for these reasons that some farmers and scientists are pointing to sorghum, also known as milo, as a corn alternative, especially in drought-prone areas. Not only does sorghum seed cost less than corn, but the crop requires less nitrogen too. An acre of sorghum only needs two-thirds of the water it takes to grow corn and will thrive even when there’s no rain for months—exactly what happened in the 2012 drought.

“The only crop that made it was sorghum,” says Ismail Dweikat of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Agronomy program. “Corn did not make it. Soybeans did not make it.” And some farmers, many for the first time, started paying attention to this lesser-known crop.

Although it is primarily used for animal feed or ethanol here in the U.S., sorghum is an important subsistence crop for the large, food-insecure population of sub-Saharan Africa. Both traditional and modern African food uses sorghum and you can find it in recipes for everything from breads and couscous to mass-produced hot cereals. The hearty crop is better suited to the arid African climate than imports like wheat. But until recently, sorghum has been more or less ignored in other parts of the world.

Now some U.S. food manufacturers are capitalizing on its most marketable trait: sorghum is gluten-free. In the past few years, it has been popping up in spirits, grain mixes, and as a popcorn substitute. While the grassy stalks resemble wheat, the kernel-heavy tops can be as wide as a human hand (even larger in the case of sweet sorghum). Once a staple sweetener in the Appalachian region of the United States, sweet sorghum is also making a comeback as a syrup that tastes like a cross between maple syrup and molasses.

Gluten-free beers are another popular use for sorghum. Lakefront Brewery’s New Grist beer was among the first sorghum beers produced in the U. S. Today it represents a quarter of Lakefront’s more than 33,000-barrel production with two new flavors on the way.

“Sorghum has a unique flavor and it was one of the biggest things we had to overcome,” Lakefront’s head brewer Luther Paul says. Fermented sorghum often takes on a distinctly sour taste even though the grain itself is more neutral. “We wanted to make this beer taste like beer.” They ended up adding other grains like brown rice to soften the flavor. But other brewers have gone a different route. Sprecher Brewing’s sorghum and millet beer, Shakparo Ale, is based on a traditional recipe from West Africa.

Most brewers don’t source their grains directly from farmers but go through a malting company instead. In the earliest days of gluten-free beers, brewers had to go through multiple sources to find enough sorghum. Today it’s no longer a problem. As gluten-free foods continue to gain momentum, sorghum production has increased as well.

While sorghum has many qualities to recommend it above corn as a crop, it’s still imperfect. Despite its relatively small water footprint, sorghum generally produces fewer bushels per acre than corn, making it less valuable in non-drought years.

“Sorghum’s economic advantage is tied to the environment you’re competing in,” says Justin Weinkeimer, Crop Improvement Program Director for the Sorghum Checkoff. Most Iowan farmers who can harvest 300 bushels an acre of corn would be hard-pressed to grow sorghum instead.

Although there is currently no genetically modified sorghum, it doesn’t mean that the crop is perfect from an ecological perspective either. A herbicide-resistant, conventionally-bred variety of sorghum is in progress and likely to be sold in 2016.

And conventional sorghum (which makes up the majority of the crop grown in the U.S.) requires the same inputs of herbicide and soil cultivation as any other industrial crop. Over time, the annual cycle of planting and harvesting sorghum—if it’s not grown in rotation with other crops—can also degrade the soil quality.

At the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, scientists are working to develop a perennial sorghum that would persist from year to year without the need for re-sowing. It’s just one of several crops, including wheat, that the organization hopes to make available to farmers in the coming years.

Today, there are no perennial grain crops in production. Monocultures require rotating crops—both to keep the soil healthy and keep insects away. But experimental perennial varieties have been proven to retain more water than their monocultured cousins, preserve more nitrates in the soil, and even reduce the need for some types of farm equipment.

“We eventually want to develop a type of agriculture that would involve not just a crop, but a whole group of perennial crops being grown together in an ecosystem,” says Stan Cox, Land Institute Senior Scientist.

Sorghum’s water conserving properties are particularly important in this ecosystem, Even if the perennial wheat withers in the field in a dry year, sorghum will be ready come harvest time.

Unfortunately, this approach is still years away from the marketplace. “It won’t [happen] in the next decade,” says Cox.

In the meantime, many agronomists believe bringing sorghum to the drought-inclined Great Plains should still remain a priority. The Ogallala aquifer supplies water for 80 percent of the region’s population and 13 million acres of agricultural land already exceeds demand. Ismail Dweikat, an advocate of government support for sorghum, is hoping the U.S. Department of Agriculture will incentivize sorghum’s growth through subsidized insurance or other forms of support.

“We’re hesitant to change, but I think people recognize the benefit of growing sorghum in terms of sustainability and cost,” he says. “The crop is there. We just need to take advantage of it.”

The post Is This the Gluten-Free, Climate-Friendly Grain We’ve Been Waiting For? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Greenfield has been drawing attention to food waste by traveling the country, engaging local communities, and photographing the enormous quantities of wasted food he finds. Now he hopes more Americans will begin looking at the problem directly by trying it themselves by taking people’s fear of arrest and fines out of the equation.

“From what I can tell the main reason that people don’t dumpster dive is the fear of getting arrested or ticketed,” wrote Greenfield recently on his website.

“Dumpster diving is not the answer to The Global Food Waste Scandal, but it really brings it to the attention of others and gets people thinking. If everybody saw what was happening and the amount of food being thrown away, we would have a drastically changed society tomorrow,” he adds.

Food waste is a big problem. Each year, 40 percent of all food produced and grown goes to waste in the United States. And much of it is perfectly edible. In 2014, Greenfield decided to eat only out of dumpsters during a 1,000-mile bicycle tour from the Heartland to New York City. In every city Greenfield has visited, he’s found enough wasted food to feed hundreds of people. But rather than champion dumpster diving as a way of life, he hopes it is a fleeting practice.

“The goal is to have dumpster diving go away in my lifetime,” Greenfield says. “We’re trying to feed hungry people and do it in a just way rather than making them eat out of the trash.” He wants to turn more people into food waste advocates by maybe seeing (and even eating) wasted food when statistics fail.

Aside from the potential punishments for dumpster diving, the other main barrier is social stigma. Unfortunately, Greenfield says with a laugh, “I haven’t figured out a campaign to take people’s social stigma away yet.”

Though Greenfield would be happy to pay up on his offer, he says it’s unlikely to come to fruition. “The odds of getting arrested for dumpster diving for food are very slim,” he says, adding, “I wouldn’t mind being the one to be arrested myself.” Not only are the police understanding, according to Greenfield, they often recognize the absurdity of the waste.

Broadly speaking, the act of digging through and taking things from someone’s trash is legal. However if the dumpster in question is located on private property, divers could be subject to trespassing charges. Disorderly conduct is another potential reason the police might get involved. In 2010, one university banned dumpster diving on campus and instituted a $1,000 fine after the practice became too widespread.

There’s a misconception that eating wasted food is something that only poor or homeless people do to make ends meet. But Greenfield estimates the number of dumpster divers in America to be in the tens of thousands and he says many have expressed support and excitement about his offer.

“For so many of them, it’s a sigh of relief knowing they’re out there trying to save money and they don’t have to worry about losing money from a fine,” he says.

The post Go Ahead, Dumpster Dive. This Guy Will Pay The Fine. appeared first on Civil Eats.