A Fresh Nation Follow-Up

As promised, here is my follow-up to my interview last week with Hannah Pullman about Fresh Nation Farmers Markets. On its website, Fresh Nation describes its mission as being "to foster strong and enduring relationships between farmers, food artisans, and consumers to bring local, healthy eating into the mainstream of American life."

The company's market inside the Danbury Fair mall accomplishes just that, bringing fresh food to the mall's holiday shoppers. During my interview with Hannah , I snapped a few photos:

If you're looking for the market, it's located on the lower level of the Lord & Taylor wing. It will be held every Saturday from 10am to 5pm and every Sunday from 11am to 5pm until April 29, 2012, so don't miss it!

As you can see, the indoor market has been designed so customers have plenty of space to talk directly with local farmers and food producers.

The market offers plenty of high-quality seasonal produce, while also providing shoppers with a number of gift options, from jams and sauces to baked goods (and you can always pass off one of the homemade pies as your own).

While the market features many returning vendors from Fresh Nation's summer market, it has also added several new vendors. Some of the best food stuffs on sale, in my opinion, are the homemade pickles, and the pasta and sauces.

So if you have some time this weekend and you're in the area, make sure you check out the farmer's market at the Danbury mall!

Food For Thought

Today is Thanksgiving, and before we start giving thanks for our deep-fried turkeys and $200 flat-screens, we should all take a moment to consider the issue of food insecurity in this country. In a previous post I discussed how U.S households that are "food insecure" -- meaning their access to food is limited or uncertain -- are on the rise: 14.6 percent of U.S. households fell into the food-insecure category at some point in 2008.

While this number is alarming, there are people who are trying to do something about it. This past weekend, while visiting a friend in Boston, I had a chance to meet someone who is working to provide food to those who need it: Nancy Jamison, the executive director of Fair Foods, a non-profit organization based in Dorchester that collects surplus food and distributes it to nearly 10,000 families in the eastern Massachusetts area. On Saturday I spoke with Jamison about Fair Foods and the organization’s trademark program, “Two Dollars-a-Bag.”

“Two Dollars-a-Bag” provides families with 15 pounds of groceries for a donation of $2. Operated by about 200 volunteers, the program trucks food to more than 50 distribution sites, located in churches, schools and senior housing complexes. Though donations are voluntary, Jamison finds that most people choose to contribute the money. “We do this program to give people their dignity,” she says, “People don’t like a handout.”

Rarely does Jamison sit down. With her matted grey hair, wool sweater and overalls, she looks much older than her 56 years; but she has an inexhaustible supply of energy. “Her day starts between four and five in the morning, and she usually doesn’t leave until around nine,” says Larry Lawson. Lawson is lanky with dreads that rain down his back. He is the main manger of Fair Foods, and Jamison calls him her “right-hand man.” He joined Fair Foods 15 years ago, having heard of the organization through its “Two Dollars-a-Bag” program.

While Jamison barks orders at a group of Harvard kids who are volunteering that day, Lawson stands quietly by a waiting truck at the opening of the warehouse. You’d easily mistake the warehouse for a junkyard if it weren’t for the stacks of food organized in the center of the room. Panes of glass and scrap wood overflow from every corner, and a broken-down car lingers to the side of the asparagus.

Jamison first became concerned about hunger relief during the 1984 famine in Darfur, western Sudan. “You had all these people, like Bob Dylan and Michael Jackson, singing ‘We are the World’, but what we needed wasn’t a song; we needed a food program.” But at that time, she was stuck raising her sister’s seven kids because of her sister’s drug addiction.

In 1988, she was working for Habitat for Humanity at Dorchester’s Pilgrim Church. Driving home one day, she saw surplus food being dumped at a Stop & Shop distribution center. She got a truck and brought the food back to the church. Jamison then recruited some friends, got more trucks, and soon they were delivering 45,000 pounds of food a week to local food banks.

Today, Fair Foods delivers 150,000 pounds of food a week, though Jamison says this number is far from adequate. “Nearly 300,000 pounds of food still gets dumped weekly,” she says, “as Fair Foods grows I want to address that problem.”

Lately, Jamison has been finding it difficult to continue delivering 150,000 pounds of food a week. Fair Foods’ current warehouse is smaller and holds less food than their previous location, which had two stories and was also located in Dorchester. They were forced to relocate because of issues with their landlord. “Our last landlord was racist,” Jamison says, “He’d start fights with all the black guys who worked for me. Once he even stuffed a can down our drain pipe!”

Even at their new location, they are having trouble with their landlord: “We were busy painting the ugly walls of this place and [the landlord] comes in here with these two dogs peeing everywhere, and starts yelling at us for painting.” Jamison is now looking to buy a larger warehouse in Chelsea, Mass., and hopes to move there by the spring.

Funding for the move has come mostly from money that Jamison says she made through real estate deals a couple years back. She has also received over $200,000 in grants, but says she dislikes taking them because she feels that she is endorsing what she’s termed the “non-profit industrial complex.”

As Jamison discuses the Greater Boston Food Bank, a similar organization that distributes food to hunger relief agencies in the city, she digs her hands into her pockets and sways backwards with a critical look in her eye. “They pay their executives $200,000 a year to just go to meetings; they need to get their asses in gear.” Jamison says she makes $40 a week through Fair Foods. “I give myself the same amount that I give the people working for me because one of my goals is to integrate the haves and the have-nots.”

Jamison’s employees are a mixed bunch. She has about 300 people working for her, with five managers. Some come from jails or half-way houses, others are from nursing homes. Most are people volunteering or fulfilling a community service requirement; Jamison has few steady workers. Part of her full-time staff is Jason Bennett, a carpenter and recent alumnus of Boston University. Jamison often puts him in charge when she is picking up or distributing food. Jason is quietly self-assured, giving orders to the Harvard kids, who show up late for volunteering, in an easy going, non-confrontational manner.

When Jamison arrives later with Lawson, the Harvard kids, taking a break from bagging squash, have formed a circle and are singing a cappella. Jamison sets them to work immediately, saying later that she took an immediate dislike to them. “The Harvard attitude messes a kid up, it makes them feel entitled.”

Of Jamison’s employees, Lawson is among those who have been with Fair Foods the longest. He also seems to be the most understanding of Jamison’s mischievous sense of humor. She does not hesitate to interrupt him when he is quietly chatting with a man who has stopped by to pick up some food, bursting into his office and chiding him for eating pig skins -- an acquired taste.

Whether Fair Foods will continue in Jamison’s absence remains to be seen. “Fair Foods is not a normal non-profit organization, it’s more like a family," my friend who volunteers there says, "and one of its biggest flaws is that so much of it relies on Nancy’s energy; I’m not sure who’s going to run it when she retires."

With the last truck pulling away, the Harvard kids gone, and her employees making their way home, Jamison slumps in a chair in her office. Lawson leans against the desk beside her. They talk about the Harvard kids, and how useless they were; they voice their shared frustrations with the current warehouse. Then Jamison tosses her glasses on the desk and Lawson absentmindedly picks them up, turning them over in his hands.

“You coming around for dinner tonight, Larry?” she asks. “You’ve been eating at my house all week; you keep coming around and your wife is going to divorce you.”

He laughs: a loud, unrestrained burst of sound that echoes. “Yeah, I guess I’ll stop by.”

Breaking News: Pizza Is a Vegetable

Actually this isn't breaking news, though you may find it surprising. Current rules for the nation's school lunch program dictate that about a quarter-cup of tomato paste on a slice of pizza can count as a vegetable serving. Congress merely affirmed its "pizza is a vegetable' rule this past week when it blocked rules proposed by the Agriculture Department that would have overhauled the nation's school lunch program.

I've actually discussed this overhaul in a previous blog post: at the beginning of October I wrote about the The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which President Obama signed into law towards the end of 2010. One aspect of the law was that it gave the Department of Agriculture the authority to set nutritional standards for all foods sold in schools during the school day, including vending machines.

Last January, the Department of Agriculture proposed its new rules, which would have cut the amount of potatoes served and would have changed the way schools received credit for serving vegetables by continuing to count tomato paste on a slice of pizza only if more than a quarter-cup of it was used. The rules would have also halved the amount of sodium in school meals over the next 10 years.

Turns out what I wrote about the law's changes was fairly prescient:

All of this sounds very progressive, but you're probably wondering how much it costs - according to the White House, in addition to reauthorizing child nutrition programs for five years, the bill will provide $4.5 billion in new funding to these programs over 10 years. Figures like those make me miss the heady days of late 2010, when child nutrition legislation could get passed with a unanimous vote by the Senate and a vote of 264-157 in the House.

Of course, now we're in 2011, and economists are no longer making rosy projections about unemployment decreasing and consumer confidence bouncing back. Instead we have debt crises and double-dip recessions. So it's not surprising that public schools are worried about the rising costs of serving lunch.

And not only are public schools worried about these rising costs, but, more importantly, food companies are worried about losing out on their lucrative contracts. The NY Times reports:

Food companies including ConAgra, Coca-Cola, Del Monte Foods and makers of frozen pizza like Schwan argued that the proposed rules would raise the cost of meals and require food that many children would throw away.

The companies called the Congressional response reasonable, adding that the Agriculture Department went too far in trying to improve nutrition in school lunches.

“This is an important step for the school districts, parents and taxpayers who would shoulder the burden of U.S.D.A.’s proposed $6.8 billion school meal regulation that will not increase the delivery of key nutrients,” said John Keeling, executive vice president and chief executive of the National Potato Council.

The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, said that the change would have simply brought tomato paste in line with the way other fruit pastes and purees were credited in school meals.

I could talk about how shameful it is that Congress would rather protect industry than children's health, especially at time when childhood obesity is a national health concern. But when the GOP's argument for shooting down the changes is that serving our kids healthy food constitutes an attack on their personal freedoms (you know, from broccoli and other yucky vegetables), I think they've just about made my argument for me.

It's no wonder then that the approval rating for Congress is at an all-time low of 9 percent - when lobbyists are deciding our nutritional standards, I think it's fair to say our government is broken. As Jon Stewart said on his show Wednesday night: "It's not democracy it's Digiorno."

A Meatless Interview With A Real Life Vegan

This week I had the opportunity to interview Hannah Pullman (center in the picture below) who is part of the team behind Fresh Nation Farmers Market.

Fresh Nation's strategy is to partner with shopping centers in order to bring local food to the masses. So far, the company has one location in Connecticut's Danbury Fair Mall -- you can learn more about the company on its website.

Below, Hannah and I discuss Fresh Nation and her choice to become vegan.

When did you become vegan?

I was 18, so five or six years ago.

What were your reasons?

Definitely moral reasons -- I could no longer ignore the horrible living conditions that meat and dairy animals endure and the torturous slaughter methods used by the meat industry. Why support suffering, mass cruelty and murder when I don't have to?

What influences shaped those reasons?

I was always uncomfortable with eating meat, but it wasn't until I went to sleepaway camp at age 10 that I discovered the existence of vegetarian options. I never knew there was such a thing as meatless dinner options, and I loved it! Over the next few years I cut out different animals from my diet until I was vegan. I had a few vegetarian friends along the way whose choices influenced me. Then I joined a vegan club as a freshman in college and that was it -- I just had to become vegan. Also there is a great documentary "Earthlings" that influenced my final decision to become vegan. Such a compelling movie!

How did family/friends react at the time? Has anybody ever challenged you about it?

My dad hated it. People challenged me all the time. Every time I walked into a room of people I knew I felt attacked for my choice of diet. It sucked. Also I was so passionate about being vegan that I welcomed all conversation about it and tried to convince everyone I knew to stop eating animal products. There are also a lot of ignorant assholes who used to come up to me (and sometimes still do) and say "Bacon is awesome... I loved tortured animal meat" or something like that. I'm now a lot better at recognizing those people and I avoid having the vegan conversation with them.

What is your vegan "pitch? How do you sell it to someone who is interested?

Vegan pitch...For me it is "Why should I take part in such cruelty when I can live a perfectly happy and healthy life without doing so." Animals obviously understand pain, suffering, and pleasure (think of a pet dog or cat) -- why abuse them when we don't have to. If the person really doesn't care about animal feelings, then I would appeal to the environmental aspect of veganism.

Why do you think farmer markets are important?

Support local businesses! Small-scale farms are suffering today. And large-scale farms are mostly mono-crop farms. This mono-crop style of farming is destroying the land and forces farmers to increase the use of toxic pesticides that pollute the air and our bodies. Plus, vegetables from grocery stores take a week or more to ship to the store and then sit on the shelf. By that time they lose most of their nutritional value. Local produce from a farmer's market is fresher, tastier and more nutrient dense.

How is your market different to ones like it?

We are located within super regional malls so a larger demographic and population can access the market. We also provide a more formal and aesthetic aspect to the market that other farmer's markets do not offer.

Do your vendors just sell their own goods, or do some have contracts with companies?

Each farmer's market is different. Market operators usually enforce certain standards for their vendors. Fresh Nation Farmers Markets enforces a 95 percent policy -- 95 percent of all products sold by vendors must be grown, made or produced by the vendor.

What's your vision for this farmer's market? Where would you like to see it in 10 years?

I would like to see farmer's markets in malls across the country.

And what's the one vegan dish that everyone should try?

Seitan!

Check back next week to read about my visit to the Fresh Nation farmer's market in Danbury.

McAmerica

A map of every McDonald's in the United States has been making its way around the blogosphere after it was posted on Reddit and then picked up by the aggregators at HuffPo. For your review:

While the image is getting some attention now, it was actually created in 2009 by artist and scientist Stephen Von Worley, whose blog Data Pointed offers a wealth of data visualization research (be warned, it's quite the time waster).

In his post about McDonald's, Worley pinpoints areas where the company is ubiquitous, which turn out to be everywhere but the desert:

As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota.

Worley has even located "The McFarthest Spot" - the place in the Lower 48 states that's furthest from the nearest McDonald's. Currently that location is in the high desert of northwestern Nevada, and he's even made a trip there to mark the spot with McDonald french fries (which, despite what employees at your local chain might tell you, aren't vegan: they're coated in beef extract).

Looking at this data map, it should come as no surprise that McDonald's Corporation's 2010 revenues totaled $24.1 billion. Still, while the company's sales rose in the latest quarter, they fell short of expectations; the company also had to raise prices recently due to a spike in commodity costs.

But clearly McDonald's isn't going anywhere, and now that the company is opening stores in China (it hopes to have 2,000 locations there by the end of 2013), it's only a matter of time before the whole world is lit up by the golden arches.

A Recipe for the Winter

One of the most difficult parts of transitioning to a meatless diet is that you have to learn how to cook all over again. For example, during college I would cook a jambalaya every week, and I had to work at perfecting the recipe once I began substituting tofu for meat.

Jambalaya is a Louisiana Creole dish made by cooking meat and vegetables and then adding stock and rice. I like it because it's healthy, cheap and easy-to-prepare. Also, one pot will last you half the week (so basically the perfect dish for college).

When I became a vegetarian, I thought that substituting tofu for chicken would be an easy change; however, for some reason the most finicky aspect of the recipe - cooking the rice - got thrown off and the dish would end up with rice that was either soggy or brittle.

But I worked at it and the dish has become one of my favorites, especially as the weather gets colder. Here are the ingredients you'll need to make this meatless jambalaya:

1 package (14 oz) firm tofu packed in water, drained

1 tablespoon olive or vegetable oil

1 large dark-orange sweet potato, peeled, cut into 1/2-inch cubes (2 cups)

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 can (14 oz) vegetable broth

3/4 cup uncooked regular long-grain rice

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper (cayenne)

1 can (15 oz) black beans, drained, rinsed

12 medium green onions, sliced (3/4 cup)

Before you start making the jambalaya, you have to drain the tofu and cut it into 3/4-inch cubes. This step can take a bit of practice: I've found that the best way to drain the tofu is to place several layers of paper towels on a cookie sheet, and then add the block of tofu to the towels. On top of the tofu place several more layers of paper towels and firmly press the tofu to blot the excess water.

Once you've pressed out all of the water you can start cutting up the tofu; don't worry if you're having trouble cutting cubes though, the block of tofu can be a bit crumbly after you've gotten rid of the water.

Next, heat oil in a 12-inch skillet over medium heat and cook the tofu in oil for six to eight minutes until it's a light golden brown. Then remove the tofu from the skillet and set it aside.

Add sweet potato and garlic to your skillet and cook for two to three minutes, until the sweet potato begins to brown. Stir in broth, rice, Worcestershire sauce and red pepper. Then heat to boiling. After your skillet has reached boiling, reduce the heat, cover the dish and simmer for 10 minutes.

Next, add your beans; then cover the skillet and cook for eight to ten minutes, stirring occasionally, until the rice is tender and the liquid is absorbed.

Finally, stir in your tofu and green onions. After that, you just have to make sure that the dish is thoroughly heated and then it's ready to serve.

This jambalaya is low in fat and high in protein, and adding sweet potatoes helps to make it highly nutritious. But, above all, I think you'll find that this dish is delicious. Enjoy!

Trader Joe's Dirties Its Image

I've been a fan of Trader Joe's since I discovered the grocery chain while living in Boston. Now that I live in the suburbs, it's a bit of a drive to find one, but I still shop there when I can. Still the company's response to a coalition working to address labor abuses in tomato fields, might change that.

Last week in The Atlantic, Barry Estabrook reported that when about 400 workers' rights advocates from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) showed up at Trader Joe's headquarters to present a letter asking the chain to sign a Fair Food Agreement, no one would open the door. Estabrook writes:

For the last several months, the coalition has been trying to persuade Trader Joe's, a 360-plus store chain that brands itself as a worker- and customer-friendly bastion of all things sustainable, organic, and fair-trade, to sign a Fair Food agreement. Companies who sign the agreement promise to pay one penny more per pound for tomatoes harvested by the workers (the difference between $50 and $80 a day for a worker) and insist that growers who sell to them abide by a code of conduct that mandates no slavery or sexual harassment in the fields, accurate time keeping, a grievance procedure, first-aid training for workers, and tents to provide a bit of shade. Complying with the agreement would cost the billion-dollar company about $30,000 a year.

You'd think that "no slavery" would be a superfluous request, but apparently not: as Estabrook reports, "In the past 15 years, seven cases of slavery involving more than 1,200 workers in Florida agriculture, including tomato workers, have been successfully prosecuted."

But when the group, which was accompanied by about 20 religious leaders, showed up at Trader Joe's headquarters, they were met by a security guard who said that no one at the company would accept the letters. Then police arrived, and ordered the group to disperse, which they did.

Trader Joe's image is one of a socially conscious company - in fact, that's often the reason people attest to shopping there. So its strange that the company would respond to the CIW in this way.

Estabrook had a chance to interview Matt Sloane, Trader Joe's vice-president of marketing, who decided to disparage the CIW rather than talk about the issue:

The reason that no one from Trader Joe's accepted the letters, he said, was that "the group was behaving more for effect -- street theater -- not an invitation for serious discussion."

It would nice if Trader Joe's could fill everybody in on how they'd like the issue of labor abuses to be brought to their attention. Until then, I'll be shopping elsewhere.

A Wholesaler's Campaign for Better Ingredients

One of my favorite food writers is Mark Bittman, a columnist for The New York Times Opinion section and Times magazine. Every Tuesday, Bittman offers his take on current food issues and their impact on our health and the environment. His commentary also extends to the Times website, where he writes a blog called On Food.

On Food is less in depth than his Times column - Bittman (see photo on the right) mostly uses his blog to link to interesting stories or follow up on a point he made in one his opinion articles. Still, last week he posted a letter from a New York meat wholesaler to a well-known chef, which caught my eye.

The letter was sent by George Faison - a co-owner of Debragga and Spitler, which has been selling meat to the city's restaurants since the early 1920s. In the letter, Faison explains why he believes restaurants should be pursuing clean agricultural ingredients as standard practice.

While Bittman points out before printing the letter in its entirety that Faison sells industrially-produced meats in addition to naturally-raised stuff, the letter is interesting because meat wholesalers are a part of the food supply chain that I haven't given much thought to. Not to mention, Faison makes a pretty convincing argument for using better ingredients:

Our food supply system is broken. Badly. 80 percent of the U.S. beef production is controlled by four industrially producing companies. Three of these companies also process 60 percent of the nation’s pork. Too much chemical fertilizer and pesticides are used to produce our crops. The variety of crops produced around the world has diminished dramatically in the last 60 years. There are now nearly 5,000,000 fewer American farmers since the 1930s.

Yes, this industrial structure has significantly lowered the monetary cost of the food we consume. But this is misleading. While the amount of money we spend on food has declined, the quality and nutrition supplied by this food has deteriorated. As a country, about one third of all adults are obese, and since 1980, the incidence of obesity has tripled among children ages 2-19.

Faison's point is that "People have gotten used to eating cheap food and it is killing them." He therefore wants to promote naturally-raised meats that are antibiotic free and hormone free. Of course, he admits that cost can be an issue for restaurants:

Yes, naturally and humanely raised meats cost more. Maybe you can counter the higher monetary cost by offering smaller portions. Or expect chefs to charge more money for it.

I do not think the solution to our food supply problem is to use poorer quality ingredients because they cost less money. In the long run, the true cost of these meats is so much higher.

Promoting naturally-raised meat is commendable, but it's clearly also profitable. Indeed, in the comments section for the post, David Dadekian from Oneco, CT notes:

Chefs can educate by charging more. There's a small family-owned college bar & grill near the farm that has an "industrial" burger on their menu for $8 and a Blackbird Farm burger on the menu for $12. They tell us the $12 burger is a consistent seller.

Obviously charging more for higher-quality meat wouldn't work everywhere - this is New York City we're talking about, after all. But in such a competitive market, it seems like common sense to offer better food, even at higher prices.

It's also common sense that a meat wholesaler would be urging chefs to spend more on their ingredients, but it's an aspect of the food supply chain that I haven't given much thought to. Instead, I've generally thought that restaurants would improve their ingredients when prompted by consumers or a report in the The Boston Globe. Thanks to Bittman's On Food blog, I now know otherwise.