Eating healthy: Fresh vegetables and new skills

July 06, 2009

Eating healthy: Fresh vegetables and new skillsby David Sarasohn, The Oregonian Sunday July 05, 2009, 7:01 AM

VANCOUVER -- After Emily Stoutsenberger got divorced a few years ago, and then had her hours cut back at the bookstore where she works, a dangerous presence began to loom over the home she shares with her 12-year-old daughter:

Boxed macaroni and cheese.

The worst recession in 75 years may be a crunching experience for people, but it's a great time for ramen noodles. When the economy sits down at the kitchen table, people are likely to eat not only inadequately, but unhealthily.

But Stoutsenberger reflects not just one trend in the hunger movement -- the sharp increase in demand on the emergency food system -- but two. The food pantry at Vancouver Vineyard Church is part of a growing effort among hunger activists to grow their own fresh produce, to increase the food supply for clients and to set their tables with something besides calories.

Now, Stoutsenberger cooks up collard greens with Northern white beans and pasta, and sautes zucchini with onion. She's taken a course on cooking vegetables, expects to take another, and seasons her descriptions with the word "awesome."

"I will say, definitely, that's a really nice benefit," she says, "learning to eat more healthy."

And in a devastating time, her survival strategies have another benefit.

"I'm keeping my spirits," she says resolutely, the small piercings under her chin holding firm. "The economy has affected me as a human being."

Which may be the ultimate recession recipe.

In this time of empty plates, there's a wave of grass-roots agriculture out there, from Michelle Obama planting vegetables on the White House lawn to community gardens that now have a winter melon waiting list. Some of the mulching movement is on principle, arguing the advantages of arugula grown within tossing distance of the salad bowl. But a lot of it, from the Oregon Food Bank's own gardens to the green shoots outside pantries from Hillsboro to Fairview, is an attempt to fill in some of the spaces that keep widening at the national dinner table.

The Vermont Food Bank has bought itself a farm, and others have acquired land and orchards. Local operations, from Atlanta to Orange County, Calif., run community-wide Plant Another Row programs.

"We have a hunger crisis in Oregon. It's just expanding," explains Multnomah County Commissioner Jeff Cogen, who's just set up a vegetable garden on the empty cropland, fertile with irony, of the former county poor farm. "My hope is this is the first of many."

Up at the Vancouver Vineyard Church food pantry, David and Andrea Walker are looking to their third summer harvest. Clark County is part of the Oregon Food Bank area, and in its first year the operation received an OFB award for excellence in client service.

This year, the Walkers are hoping for 5,000 pounds of produce from the 3,000-square-foot garden out behind the church. It's not a rolling or pastoral stretch; it's off to the side of an alley-like casual road, just some cultivated acreage -- or more precisely, yardage -- in the midst of a weedy lot. At some point in the future, the space could turn into a small apartment court, like so many around it.

As do-it-yourself farmers, the Walkers have learned some things. Lettuce and carrots, although the first crops you might think of, are actually less successful than squash, tomatoes and lemon cucumber. Pole beans can give you three crops over a summer, better than bush beans. Unless someone lives next door, watering can be a problem, but with a little work you can rig up an automatic system.

It's also useful to have someone around who actually knows something about growing things, such as the Vancouver Vineyard minister, Steve Fish, who once spent two years at the Oregon State University School of Agriculture. This year, he designed a system of covering the crops with Visqueen black plastic and fish emulsion, which might not qualify as a revelation to farmers but has had a considerable impact on the ground here. The garden is maintained by about a dozen volunteers connected to the church, some of them also clients.

Asked about the connection between the church, the pantry and the garden, Fish offers what he calls his own translation of a passage from the Gospel of John: "The word of God became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood."

The whole operation is overseen on a full-time, skinnier-than-a-shoestring basis by the Walkers, who have learned some other things from the experience -- such as what an immediately fresh tomato can mean to people whose food planning has been driven largely by the need for bulk.

When the harvest comes in, says Andrea, the week's produce is offered on tables outside the pantry office. People waiting in line to register are distracted by the fresh produce and have to be reassured that there will be enough for them when they get through the rest of the process.

Sometimes, when the tables do run short, clients are invited into the garden to make their own ground-level choice.

"I get a shocked reaction," says David. "They say, 'You're going to let me go into your garden?' I say, 'It's your garden.'"

But the length of the line has been growing. Over the past year, numbers at the food pantry are up 13 percent.

Sounding the theme that comes from every hunger operation around Oregon, Andrea Walker reports, "People that have never, ever had to get a food box are here. People call me, they're almost embarrassed."

Emily Stoutsenberger, now heartened by fresh zucchini, remembers the hurdles to her first visit.

"I was a little embarrassed," she recalls. "I didn't fit the demographic. I have a college degree, from Washington State, in digital technology. But it's hard to find work."

And right now, it's hard to say, with a former economy's confidence, just what is a food pantry's demographic. The current crowd's identity doesn't have the clear recognizable lines of an heirloom tomato; it looks a lot more like a hybrid.

A hundred, or a thousand, garden plots like Vancouver Vineyard's, or even like Multnomah County's two-acre spread, aren't going to fix the situation we're in. That's going to take more government efforts and more private initiatives, and pretty much everything we can think of -- including more garden plots, providing food that's not only healthy but in a curious way heartening.

There is, notably, a considerable distance between boxed macaroni and cheese and tagliatelle with truffles. But there is a certain democracy to a home-grown tomato.

This may be part of what Joel Berg means when he writes in "All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?" that "whenever possible, food banks, food rescue organizations, soup kitchens and food pantries should sponsor their own farms, gardens, farmers' markets. ..."

Darin Kiive recently got laid off as an apartment manager, and since it was kind of an informal arrangement, there's no unemployment coverage involved. He's been coming to Vancouver Vineyard for a while, today riding over on his bicycle.

Last year, he went into the garden and pulled some weeds. This year, he's thinking a little bigger.

"I went down and got some seeds to do a little garden myself," he says, with a pioneer's gaze off into the middle distance. He's gotten seeds for cucumber, cauliflower, tomatoes, peas and beans.

"It won't be a huge garden," he admits, but it will be something.

Which, in a hungry time, can be everything.

David Sarasohn, associate editor, can be reached at 503-221-8523 or davidsarasohn@news.oregonian.com. See other writing at oregonlive.com/sarasohn/

July 06, 2009

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