Sonoma County crop report

The 2018 edition is out, and available here
https://sonomacounty.ca.gov/Agriculture-Weights-and-Measures/Crop-Reports/
A friend reported that the conference yesterday launching it was not well attended. She brought by a copy of the power point handout. Under reporting, especially from small specialty crop growers, continues. But

• For the first time, the gross value of agricultural product in Sonoma County exceeded one billion dollars.
• It was a bumper year for wine grapes.
• Tree fruit volume was down, but value way up. So local fruit is even less affordable for many of our residents?
• Hard to figure out what's happening with the burgeoning cider business - how many of the processed apples are becoming an alcoholic beverage - or with cannabis production, which I'm guessing comes under another agency, even though it uses precious ag land. 

I am drinking more cider these days than wine. I enjoyed the cider tasting at the Gravenstein Apple Fair on Sunday. But it concerns me that more and more land is growing crops for alcohol or other intoxicants. I want the statistics on that.
And a btw. The pictures in the report are great, and much less fuzzy than this thumbnail. .

A New Look - and less wonky sidebars

Well, I've just finished a tour de links and cleaned things up a bit.
I realized in doing so that I have many more links on extra food which I could have posted, but most  can be found through the Sonoma County Food Recovery Coalition web pages, and the link is on the right.
"Extra food" is a much better way of saying food waste. We decided in our Coalition that it should only be called food waste if it ends up in the landfill. If it can be shared with people, fed to animals, or composted, it isn't waste. Our little group here in Sonoma County includes representatives from gleaning groups, food justice organizations, cooperative extension, environmental health, and waste management - and a pig farmer.

Food is more than nutrients

The last week or so has been very busy here in Sonoma County. And there's lots of food system news from further afield.

The thread running through everything for me is that food is more than fuel, and even more than the right fuel.

It began for me in the middle of the week with our monthly Food System Alliance meeting. With lots of new members and some significant work behind us we are trying to find a new focus. The conversation was the best yet about this. But there's some wondering going on about whether the entry point of health which has kept us going for the last several years will change as grant and staff support from the county health department goes away in the middle of this year. Could it be that we are looking at economic justice (or social equity which seems to be a phase that sells better these days) to be our new focus? Where are the places in our food system that are perpetuating or increasing inequality? Or, more positively, how can our local food system promote greater equity?

On Thursday - news from the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee for the first time suggests that the environmental impact of our food choices are to be considered as part of the picture. Hooray!
Eat your eggs with whole grains, beans, nuts, fruits and veg; lower your meat consumption, watch the saturated fats, sodium and added sugars. The feds have caught up with us!
Read in full and comment (for the next few weeks) here:
http://www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/
A sensible environmentally aware diet. Call it Mediterranean or Nordic depending on your cultural tastes - or combine them into what I am calling the Norditerranean diet. (Much better than the Medic diet.)

On the same day we had our Sonoma County Hunger Index Forum. While the focus was clearly and deliberately on reducing the meal gap, I was surprised to see people representing so many different aspects of the food system and our foodie culture there. What a gathering at the Redwood Empire Food Bank! We add a delicious supper, premiering the new vegetarian option from the Council on Aging's Meals on Wheels, prepared for 200 people on the federal SNAP allowance per meal of $2.27. Really - the meal made me wish I were eligible for the program - though thankful that my only qualifying stat is the age number.

My sense is that to make further progress on providing the 34 million missing meals here, two things will be necessary. One is in the area my panel covered, grassroots action. We need more community gardens, and just plain more community and neighborliness. We must develop policies that support such activities, rather than regulations which frustrate them. (The gleaners in the county are working hard to resist the latter, for example.) The other thing we need is more opportunities for people to earn a living wage. Reducing the income gap would contribute greatly to reducing the meal gap.

Friday evening and Saturday I took a break from all the food system work and just enjoyed it. My great niece was visiting, so we picked up dinner from Ruthy's Real Meals http://www.ruthysrealmeals.com/ on Friday, tasted at a few wineries and Vella Cheese http://www.vellacheese.com/ on Saturday stopping for lunch at El Molino in Boyes Springs, and ate in on Saturday evening with a nice winter soup (even though winter here was a 70F day) made with produce from my garden and Imwalle Gardens https://www.facebook.com/pages/Imwalle-Gardens/.

Speaking of enjoyment, of food being more than nutrients, what about the news from the San Francisco school district, where work is underway to improve choices and ambience in school cafeterias? More fresh foods alone were not enough. Wouldn't it be wonderful if school dining everywhere could be made slower, more pleasant, more constructively social? Go SFUSD!  http://www.sfusdfuturedining.org/

This new week began, and this frenzied period of food system activity wrapped up, with the annual conference of the Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative. The best yet. And I came away with so many ideas that I am going to write part 2 of "more than nutrients" later.

Invalid food

That's IN-val-id food, although the reason I am writing is that I have had a lot of in-VAL-id food in the last few weeks as I made the progress from hospital to rehab to home.

Hospital food was okay.  By the evening of my surgery I was ready to eat something, and there was something to eat.  Given Kaiser's reputation, though, I was a little surprised that most of the vegetarian entrees were Amy's frozen meals.  They are produced locally - but they are frozen, and many are too high in salt for me.  I've tried Amy's foods from time to time, hoping they might be an occasional easy alternative - but they seem to be either high in sodium or bland.

Home food has been pretty good.  Before surgery I tucked a few treats in the freezer (small persimmon cakes and pumpkin breads - that sort of seasonal dessert) and also froze some soups and pasta dish starters (tomato and beans from the summer garden, for example).  Niece Pam was here, and made a big winter squash stew (with the other sisters included) the day I got home.  She also wanted to learn to make mushroom pate, so we dragged out the Deborah Madison and worked through that recipe - somewhat tedious, but a wonderful savory treat, and something to serve friends who dropped by.  Getting back to my usual breakfast rotation was good, too.

But it took several days to pull out of the gloom induced by the rehab food.  Even 50s school lunch seemed good by comparison.  I tried explaining that I was an ecotarian, but would be a dairy vegetarian for their purposes, but I was there four days before I saw anyone from nutritional services.  It said on my menu slip that came with each meal that I as a vegetarian who liked whole grains and plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. Each tray had canned fruit on it.  It was five days before someone found a banana for the breakfast tray. Oatmeal was gummy, but I gagged it down.  Most days there was some other kind of hot cereal with scum on the top.  Dinners alternated between lightly sauteed tofu and the worst reheated vegetable burgers I have ever seen, mostly canned veg and white rice on the side.  Bread was "wheat" squishy. The only fat on the trays was margarine.  One day I had frozen veg sauteed with garlic.  One lunch I had something quesadilla like.  These two were the highlights. Occasionally I had a meal that was just what everyone else had - minus the meat and dessert.

I would be so ashamed to be serving such crappy food in a sustainable food center like Sebastopol!  But I realized that my first clue should have been the logo on the promotional materials for the rehab facility.  It was a red delicious apple - not the variety we think of when we go local about food in Sonoma County. Somebody is paying no attention to context.

My question, repeated to many staff members in my eight days of food misery, was "Why do you serve such pitiful food and then give everybody a daily laxative?"

I became a supplier while there.  Thanks to the friends who heard my cries, I had pounds and pounds of tangerines and other fruit which I shared with staff.  "Won't you have one of my tangerines?"   I learned that some staff members bring very healthful meals from home.  Others go to the nearby McDonald's.  One talked about her home food garden, which she and her husband and two young children tend.  I feasted on asking the CNA's what they were having for holiday dinners, and asked them why there were no tamales on our Christmas trays!

Meal times got rather prolonged for me, because when my trays arrived I produced the box of decent tea bags a friend brought, and the loaf of whole grain bread, and my prunes or tangerines, and had my CNA fetch my cheese from the refrigerator.  There wasn't much I could do about fresh, seasonal cooked vegetables.

On reflection, I asked myself why this food was so bad.  Several strands contribute to it, I am sure. One is outdated nutritional guidelines, some enshrined in government regulations, because so many patients are on some sort of government funded health program.  (I saw maybe 2 or 3 people on the rehab wing who were younger. That means most of us were on some version of medicare.)  Parallel problems exist with government guidelines for school meals, of course.   A second is budgeting. One way to cut corners is with food. Never mind that a decent and tasty diet is a part of healing.  It's a place to save money, and then rationalize the action by opining that everyone would complain about the food anyway.  A third is that with some older patients, particularly those on the skilled nursing wing, the challenge is to get calories into them, so why not lowest common denominator foods which are familiar?  But as a colleague who does a lot of hospital and skilled nursing visiting points out, the boomers are coming, and we left coast boomers do not want hot dogs and white bread and canned fruit and vegetables. We want our calories to count for something (better nutrition) and stimulate our taste buds.

Before I left rehab I gave some thought to what might be done about this deplorable situation.  I am, after all, a member of the Sonoma County Food System Alliance, and we do have a working group called Farm to Institution.

I don't think the answer is doing is going to be meet your farmer programs such as our F2I group has done for school lunch leaders.  Getting everybody together to talk solutions may be edifying, but it is the laudable actions of particular institutions which, when reported publically, move the agenda forward.

In the best of all worlds, what I would do is to seek out a rehab/skilled nursing facility which would like to become a model of what is possible, growing into an institution which features healthful food, sustainably sourced.  And I don't think I'd focus on the nutrition and kitchen staff, but bring together representatives of various departments and skill levels who care about good food, including those nutrition and cooking people who are capable of envisioning new approaches.  Who knows - the maintenance worker may have an organic vegetable garden, a nursing assistant may come from a long line of good cooks, a nurse may see things and wonder about how patients' food choices and medications work together - or don't.  And all of the staff receive feedback about the meals - it's just a natural topic for conversation when people are confined without a lot of external diversions. Good food must be seen as integral to a healing system.

Our Food System Alliance could work with such an institution, connecting the resources need to make it a showplace of wholesome, local food.

Food System Alliance update

There are days when all the meetings seem worth it.  Not always, but sometimes.  We've been going through some staff changes with the Sonoma County Food System Alliance, as well as adding some new members.  Because of these, today at our regular monthly meeting we took the time to introduce ourselves, and it was wonderful to hear again all the experiences that have brought people to this commitment, in this place and this time.

I'd only seen our facilitator, Katy Mamen, in action once before, and that a few years ago.  So I watched to see what I could learn.  I'm going to steal her framework for our self-introductions. What is your passion, your path, and your position?  Easy to remember, and provocative of interesting stuff without being gimmicky.  I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at how many people had to start with their position and organizational identification.

We are finally ready in our FSA to get out there with Food Action Plan.  http://aginnovations.org/articles/view/sonoma_county_board_of_supervisors_adopts_sonoma_county_healthy_and_su/
We'll begin getting the organizations we represent to endorse it, and planning four fora on the four pillars of the plan, starting in July and running into early next year.  I will be working with a very small group on the Social Equity pillar, targeted for November.

2012 in review

How instructive to look back through my calendar and this blog and see what was accomplished (and not) this year.  Seems like I have not been paying as much attention to issues at the national and global levels, but I have also done more than in any previous year locally.

In January I did a late glean of some persimmons, and not much else.

In February the meeting schedule heated up.  I planted some peas in my plot and started tomato and pepper seeds inside.  Our clergy conference on wellness left a whole lot to be desired from the food perspective.  What we ate was pretty good and some local, but the information about diet was devoid of any eco-justice awareness.

In March I began helping with stakeholder interviews for the Food Action Plan, and the communication committee of the Food System Alliance began meeting.  Joe Valentine contacted me about his interest in gleaning, and I had a first meeting with Steve Schwartz about interfaith plans.  I wondered why there were so few people from ag advocacy and food system organizations at the Volunteer Center's non-profit conference.

In April interviews and communication planning for the Alliance continued, and I gave away lots of plants, mostly tomatoes, for Earth Day at Trinity.

May was meeting heavy. I found myself missing a lot of meetings at my community garden because of so many other Saturday commitments.  

June brought the beginning of meetings with folks forming the county Community Garden Network, lots of meetings and interviews for the gleaning project, and some writing of introductory materials for the Food Action Plan.

July was filled with still more meetings, interviews and schmoozing activities to drum up interest in gleaning.  We enlisted the support of the Community Center and the Sonoma Valley Granged.  I made my debut on Mornings in Sonoma as part of the launch.

In August we finally had an introductory meeting with gleaners and formally launched the Sonoma Valley Gleaning Project - on a way too hot evening for a room with too few fans and no A/C.  First gleans were  backyard table grapes and model vegetable plots at Cornerstone.   August also was the beginning of tabling season, promoting the Alliance and its members at the county fair and Gravenstein Fair.  I wrote some quiz questions about Sonoma County ag which we used to attract attention.   Meanwhile, we began our preserving parties at Trinity with zucchini pickles and relish.  

The first day of September El Dorado County Master Preservers did a demo on canning fall fruit at Trinity, and late in the month we had a jam session.   We tweaked the recipe I'd found last year for tomato apple jam, and between church and home kitchens probably made way too much of it!  Definitely the food trend of the year among Sonoma Episcopalians.   We continued gleaning - mostly apples.  I volunteered at the second annual Heirloom Expo.   I met with some others in the deacon community and inspired some more gleaning and other food justice efforts around California.  The Food System Alliance approved the Food Action Plan.   The Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative was launched.  And I wrapped up the month by cooking for a small retreat in 100 degree weather.

Gleaning moved from late apples to figs and walnuts in October.  I created a display for the produce swap at the Sonoma Valley Grange (a partner in the gleaning project) Harvest Fair.  The Food Action Plan was approved by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. It's hard to say what was the most fun:  gleaning on beautiful autumn days, enjoying the harvest from my garden, or attending the sustainable food and wine hearing which State Senator Noreen Evans convened.  I looked around that large hearing room at the city offices and, realizing how many I knew, thought, ah, these are my people.

In November the gleaning of harder to place produce began - things like persimmons and quinces.  When you have to cook something it is not nearly as attractive to food programs and their clients and guests.   I applaud Sonoma Valley Teen Services, where the teaching of cooking and nutrition has educated a group of young people who accept the challenge of trying anything in their small commercial kitchen.   November also brought an opportunity to talk with a realtor friend about how the real estate community might cooperate with gleaning efforts around the county.  I wonder what will happen with this?  I was more successful at connecting folks from Gridley involved with agriculture development in Liberia with Ecology Action interns.  Seems significant that this happened at a deacon's ordination.   But again, I wait to see what happens next.  How will these seeds grow?

As December began I realized that we had completed one full year of Food of the Month at Trinity.  I noted today that I didn't always post my copy on each month's item here.  We wrapped up November with masa harina, and began again with peanut butter.   December is also the season of never leaving home without food - something baked with local fruit or nuts, or a preserve and some local cheese for the cheese board.   And as we look to the new year, the Food Action Plan roll out begins to pick up speed as we seek endorsements from municipalities, businesses and organizations.

The Sonoma Valley Gleaning Project ended its first year (five months, really) with 1129 pounds gleaned, by 17 different volunteers, from 16 donors, on 20 occasions, to 6 local organizations.

What a year of local activity.  But as I checked just now (could it have changed at the last minute?) the U.S. still doesn't have a farm bill, or even the extension of the 2008 version set to expire at midnight (in which time zone?)

Food Action Plan roll out

Our Sonoma County Food Action Plan, which was accepted by the Board of Supervisors in late October, is beginning to make its way in the media and among movers and shakers.  Here's the perspective from our alternative weekly:
http://www.bohemian.com/northbay/local-food-inc/Content?oid=2332697

Tomorrow I am taking one of the limited run print copies of the plan to Sonoma's pro tem mayor when I appear on his radio show to give a report on the gleaning project.   We are beginning to seek endorsement from municipalities, businesses and ngos.

You can see the full report here:
http://aginnovations.org/images/uploads/FAP_Final.pdf
A heads up, though - it's a massive download.

Lent

I'm not doing a food discipline for Lent this year.   Frankly, I can't figure out quite where to go from here, especially in the wake of having some restrictions in both quantity and variety imposed by my health since June of 2011.

But it's nice to see that others are thinking about eating less and eating more simply.
Here's a blog to follow:
http://whitemountainmusings.blogspot.com/2012/02/eating-more-simply-for-lent.html
It's been years since I've seen Fran, but I'm sure she will have some interesting reflections.

Meanwhile, after a couple of months of missing meetings, I'm back on track with our Sonoma County Food System Alliance - working on the policy committee, and volunteering for the communication committee.   I feel that I increasingly carry the justice-seeking portfolio - but I'm trying with some success to temper my opinions with humor so I don't become insufferable.

I'm also pondering how to continue gently challenging and stretching my congregation on food issues.

Perhaps smiling and pondering are as significant as fasting?

At the Board of Supervisors

I was impressed today by the knowledge some of the members of the Board of Supervisors showed - knowledge of the food forum report, and even the food system assessment. They had done their homework, and several showed that they had been paying attention to opportunities to address issues in their districts. Good for them.

Both the food forum report and the report of the survey of county lands to identify food growing potential were received unanimously.

What's distressing me, though, is the class bias evident on the part of two of the supervisors. Some of this relates to the obesity epidemic, and the facile drawing of cause and effect relationships. Makes me want to get up and scream, "I am fat and I do not eat fast food, nor do I have diabetes!"

There's a lot of blame the victim going on, too - as though avoiding obesity and diet-related diseases were simply a matter of personal discipline. I really do not care that one of the supervisors felt the need to confess to eating potato chips last evening. So what! Just because he has internalized the food police does not mean that he has the answers, or that the answers are a matter of conscience for everyone. Busy middle and upper middle class families should resist drawing parallels between their lives and the lives of the working class, working poor, and poor.

There was some poo-poohing of community gardens as no real solution to anything, too, and I wondered about that. I see the difference that our community garden makes in the diets of the 16 households who garden there, and their friends and networks. Other gardeners are constantly commenting on how at this time of the year they eat from the garden. One gardener shares with those for whom she provides in-home care, another pair of gardeners shares with their congregation and a twice monthly food pantry. A number of us swap our excess with other gardeners, give it to friends, get it to FISH or Food for Thought AIDS/HIV food pantry. We aren't very good at counting the pounds we share, but my guess is that at least four times as many households as garden get some benefit - some fresher or more varied produce - than they would otherwise. And when we talk about ways to use county land - spots that are too small for even small-scale commercial farming, can serve many households with fresh, local vegetables.

Now the work continues. The Board of Supervisors knows that there is a Food System Alliance, and we are working with them on the goals which surfaced from the forum, and on developing an action plan.

Finally - I would love to post a link to the forum report here, but I can't find it where it was supposed to be, on the Ag Innovations web site. grrrrrrr.

Sonoma County food system assessment

Here's the press coverage of our Food System Alliance work.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110806/ARTICLES/110809608/1033/news?p=1&tc=pg

Many of our our Alliance labored long and hard to pull together existing information about the state of the food system here in Sonoma County into this assessment document. This PD article has the right spin, I think, and picked up some of the critical points, but I must say I am embarrassed at how poorly it's written.

The assessment is just one of four reports coming out now and in the next few months, from the Alliance and member bodies. This Tuesday we bring the Food Forum report to the Board of Supervisors.

Stay tuned.

Cheese Touring

Here's a handy resource, the Sonoma Marin Cheese Trail Map.

http://www.marineconomicforum.org/images/Map_for_web_crx.pdf

Seems like lately whenever people talk about local cheese they use the overworked term "artisan" or "artisanal" - which seems to mean $20-30 per pound.
I guess I am happy that producers have found people to pay those prices, so that they can earn a living through cheese, but I tend to go to the older places where the prices are better: Vella and Matos.

Marin French Cheese has recently been acquired by a French cheese company, Tians. They promise no changes in the press release:
http://marinfrenchcheese.blogspot.com/2011/04/mfcc-announces-new-owner.html
but any time I hear improvements I figure that means higher prices. I wonder if there will still be bargains at the factory? Tians also owns Laura Chenel, our chevre company before we had so many. The best prices on Sonoma chevre (Presumably Laura Chenel) are, curiously, at Trader Joe's.

Now that we have an official map, I wonder if it will be as much fun to put together cheese tours for my out of town guests?

Sonoma County Food Forum

I'm going to write an off the top, eyewitness account here - before I have to engage all the official data for the report which I'll be working on over the next few weeks.

It was a good day yesterday, with about 300 people over all involved and representing many sectors of our community: agriculture, health, food justice, eco-justice, government, and just foodies.

I still find it difficult to condone men wearing hats inside, but in yesterday's case it was somewhat instructive - a way of sorting the various subcultures. Everything from woolly caps worn over hair that would've been dreadlocks if it had been better cared for to 10 gallon stetsons. (Old men in rural Nevada taught me that real cowboys don't wear their hats inside. Apparently that does not extend to dairy farmers in Sonoma County.) In between: ball caps and a brimmed cap like a certain vintage of men wear when driving, and even one of those dreadful little synthetic hats with the narrow brim. Footwear (boots to birkenstocks) works sometimes, but yesterday it was headgear which revealed the diversity of the crowd.

Two things contributed to the success of the day, I believe. One was the relationships many of us have been building among ourselves, and across the various sectors. The other was a balanced design, where neither those who wanted an old-white-male conference format or those of us who would have liked an all open space format prevailed. Short addresses, panels, a modified cafe process and a response from the politicos provided a balanced day.

The food was great, too. Local as far as possible, beginning with buns and yogurts, wending through a luncheon salad buffet of great variety, and ending with a local cheese tasting.

I always enjoy listening to the farmers, because I always learn something, and realize that across the political divide there is still a lot we have in common. I learned where a lot of wool from all purpose sheep here goes (to a wool mattress maker) and the difficulties of running a diverse produce farm in this county. And I did not realize that the past president of the Farm Bureau has a full organic operation - and was the first FB president for whom that was true, a shocker at the time.

A take home from both the panels was a new appreciation of "value added". I have thought of this as meaning making cheese or jam from what one grows/produces - but often the added value is in terms of relationship - knowing or feeling a connection with your farmer/rancher. Of course, it is!

Tom Scott of Oliver's Market told a story of an experiment - selling oranges marked California oranges for $.99 per pound - and also, in a display featuring more info about the source, a pic of the farmer, etc. for $1.29 per pound - and selling more of the latter. This is instructive, and it's wonderful when it's my local market - not so good when it's Safeway or Whole Foods exploiting people's good will with a constructed narrative.

One of my ongoing concerns is community education, helping people to learn more about food system issues and to do some reskilling in food growing, preparation and preservation. What I realized yesterday is that the hook we have for this is marketing, and working with the markets. A little of this goes on - samples and cooking demos at our local supermarkets - but there could be many more tie-ins, I think. Beyond the local, it occurs to me that a regional chain like Raley's could do more with tips on seasonality and sustainability issues in their free magazine without hurting their business - maybe even enhancing it.

Later, when I've done my preliminary review of the input from the cafe tables, I'll make some informal notes here about priorities in vision and action steps. But for now, I want to say that I do get a kick out of watching the pols and the bureaucrats in action. We had four of our county supervisors there yesterday, some other locals, and a former local who now works for the USDA in DC. They represented many points on the smooth operator scale. Perhaps most interesting was to see the degree to which they really were - or weren't - engaged in the conversation. Time will tell, as our report with priority recommendations for policy and program will go to them.

We may be on a roll

here in Sonoma County.

Yesterday things began to move ahead in using county-owned land to grow food.

http://www.petaluma360.com/article/20110216/community/110219619

The land is out there -in parks, the open space district, water agency land, and General Services controlled land.

County officials are working to identify land that could be used for community gardens, small farms of 10 acres or so which could do much to boost the county's produce totals and make growing it almost affordable for farmers, and larger parcels of rangeland.

Yes, I know, there are people who might question these uses environmentally - but the facts are in: organic farming and well-managed rangeland increase carbon sequestration. And anything we do to increase local sourcing of food is an eco-justice plus.

Two of the stars of next week's countywide food forum
http://press.sonoma-county.org/content.aspx?sid=1018&id=1691
are mentioned in the news story - Dr. Mary Maddux-Gonzalez, our county public health officer, a champion of win-win solutions, and Stephanie Larson, our head of UC cooperative extension here, whose office will be doing the assessment. Getting to know these two women has been a plus for me as a member of our Food System Alliance.

And I know that the Forum will be identifying more do-able goals for improving our food system for everybody.

Spring Gardening Events

So much is popping here in SoCo this spring with the encouragement of food gardening.

One of the two most notable events is the Sustainable Food and Gardening Festival at the Finley Center on Saturday April 24:
http://www.igrowsonoma.org/content/sustainable-food-and-gardening-festival

This event is kind of a hodgepodge of things, and I haven't found the organizer responsive, but I do plan to go anyway. Ruth Lefkowitz (www.ruthysrealmeals.com) will be selling sandwiches there, and I've offered to help her. I also plan to cruise the booths.

I am definitely helping with the 350 garden challenge
http://www.igrowsonoma.org/content/350-garden-challenge
This is an innovative and collaborative event, over the weekend of May 15 and 16. A number of organizations and agencies are working together to see if we can plant 350 new or renewed water wise food gardens in Sonoma County. Why 350? To link food system and water use issues to climate change, as in the 350.org project, the one that has church bells ringing in October to remind us that 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere seems to be a maximum safe level - and that we have exceeded it.
I like the idea of tying the complex of environmental issues together. Or should I say recognizing that they are tied together.
I also like the idea that the gardens can be big - or just a potted tomato.
At our TLC community garden we are going to talk this Saturday about what we will do to get with the program. And I'm working to link all the church-based community gardens on the west side of Santa Rosa. There are two new ones this year, at Knox Presbyterian(http://www.knoxchurchatwest3rd.org/garden.html), and at Santa Rosa Alliance Church. The latter is a communal urban farm on an acre and a half - Cielo Azul Farm(http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100328/NEWS/3281108?p=1&tc=pg). And I just learned from a fellow knitter last week that the SW Santa Rosa branch of First UMC is putting in a garden - they have all this lush grass (looking to become a mega church, I guess, at least that's the way it felt the one time I attended there) that could be food!

To keep this all down to earth, literally, I am also starting extra seedlings - of the cucurbits mainly - to give away on May 15.

Finally a Sonoma County Food System Alliance

I went to the inaugural meeting Monday afternoon.

And as I began to type I thought about the fact that this blog is public, so while I will share some of my learnings, I won't share all of my impressions.

Joseph McIntyre is the fast moving facilitator and Dan Schurman the ED of the coordinating organization Ag Innovations Network.

The participants were heavy on the human health and environmental advocacy angles, not so much economic justice. Farm labor, small scale farmers and the Food Bank were represented, but no other dimensions of labor, like food service workers or food processors, and no restaurateurs. There was also no one from the food waste angle.

Last week when I was at the Imagine conference for ordained women of Province 8 of the Episcopal Church, I figured something out. I'm in the middle on this food system business, upholding the environment related issues to the church, and the economic justice issues to the eco-foodies who dominate the scene in my locale. I can live with this, and work with this.

We met at the Food Bank this time. What I hadn't thought about until I walked through the warehouse, was how dependent our food safety net for the poor is on nationwide sourcing. This is very scary. If there were a terrorist attack or environmental disaster that disrupted transportation; or if there were a huge spike in gasoline or diesel prices; or just a few decades down the road when peak oil is way back in our rear view mirrors, we are going to be in big trouble trying to meet the needs of the food insecure from local sourcing.

We've been discovered

Tourists are coming to Sonoma County to eat local and write about it for the New York Times.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/travel/01explorer.html?ex=1369886400&en=a8a9c32f89b711eb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

While I can sing the praises of some of the places mentioned in the article, I would like to add that you don't have to be precious or pretentious to eat locally here. But perhaps it helps to live here, and to have a sense of how community (the opposite of tourism) and local food work together.

I hope these folks go home and do something about their local food system - and not just for well-to-do foodies.

Happy World Food Day

Yes, today is World Food Day, the anniversary of the founding of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.

I am celebrating by going to a meeting where grant apps will be reviewed. Our Sonoma County Food working group is looking for a piece of the pie, as it were, to conduct a survey of our food system and develop some base line indicators so we can track progress toward fresh, local food for all.

Studying the WFD web site, this photo caption caught my interest:

"What is adequate food? It means an amount and variety of food sufficient to meet all of one's nutritional needs for a healthy and active life. The right to food is more than the right to basic staples or to sufficient dietary energy."

Now, I resist the nutritionistas and the obesity police, but I would have to agree with them on this: many of our US children, most of them affluent by any global standard, are not having their right to adequate food honored as they subsist on chicken nuggets, Kraft dinner, artificially flavored and colored yogurt, cola and its cousins, with canned or frozen corn as a vegetable - as though they weren't getting enough corn in the other things.

The other thing that struck me as I read so many of the materials on the WFD site is this: food aid is a last or emergency resort. Adequate food requires that we address all the issues that impede people's ability to meet their dietary needs - land rights, environmental degradation, living wage, water resources. If a person is hungry it usually means that lots of other things have already gone wrong in their lives, most of them systemic issues. Hunger is the last symptom of a community that is not supporting the lives of its members.

I struggle with how we get churches to see that food aid for the hungry is the least we can do. Unless it is accompanied by other initiatives that work to develop or change policies that eradicate poverty, it's useless. Unless we look at the whole food system, we are only doing good for the next meal or the next day, not really doing anything to secure and sustain adequate food for all.

I'm posting the link to the Right to Adequate Food guidelines on the list to the right.

The excellent leaflet for World Food Day is available here.

http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wfd2007/pdf/WFDLeaflet2007E.pdf