People’s Harvest targets hunger

The following article ran today in the Worcester MA Telegram & Gazette. I thought I'd post it here as an example of people trying to solve the problems many of my other posts discuss. The original article had a chart and photo, but those didn't pick up.

People's Harvest doesn't yet have a website, but I've added other links.

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By Gus Steeves Correspondent

AUGUST 19, 2005

POMFRET (CT)— Food is something many people take for granted: Go to the store and it’s there.

Most people don’t see it quite the way Carl W. Asikainen and Lisa M. Hart do. They want others to consider how that food got there, where it came from, how those who can’t buy it will eat tonight, and what people can do locally to promote food security.

To help accomplish that, they founded People’s Harvest last spring. The all-volunteer group grows vegetables and collects produce from area farms to donate to local food kitchens, senior centers, shelters, and similar organizations that feed the needy. They made their first deliveries last month and have so far distributed about 700 pounds of produce, most of it donated by other farmers, to 15 nonprofit agencies.

“The average distance our food travels to get to the grocery store is 1,500 miles,” Mr. Asikainen said. “By emphasizing local (farming), we can call attention to hunger that exists close to home.”

Of Windham County’s 110,000 people, about “one in 10 are food-insecure, meaning they don’t know where they’re going to get their next meal,” he said. About 3 percent occasionally go without that meal.

As site coordinator of the food kitchen at the North Grosvenordale Methodist Church in Thompson, Shirley A. Wilbur was one of the first recipients of the distributions by People’s Harvest. Her kitchen serves about 50 meals every Monday, one of five area kitchens that does so on an assigned day every week. The other four are Methodist churches in Moosup, Danielson and Putnam, and a retreat center in Wauregan.

“We don’t get many fresh vegetables” from places other than People’s Harvest, she said, although some of the other sites do.

“It’s a good project. They help spread (fresh food) around so everyone gets a little of it,” Ms. Wilbur said.

People’s Harvest has a small garden at the vacant Averill Farm in Wolf Den State Park. This year they are growing squash, tomatoes, eggplants, and a few other vegetables, and plan to expand that to include fruit trees, corn, and other crops over the next year or two. Eventually, Mr. Asikainen said, they might seek certification as an organic farm, but are satisfied at present with simply using natural farming methods without fertilizers or pesticides.

The crops themselves, however, take a back seat to the organization’s primary role: educating about hunger and how people can grow their own food.

“In a few years, we’d like to see discrete gardens all over the county,” Mr. Asikainen said. “I don’t really want to be a food bank or a shipping organization. I want it to be more of a model and an opportunity for education on these issues.”

Mrs. Hart was more direct: “We hope to bring (people) back to what gardening is,” she said, by turning the site into a center for exhibits, classes, workshops, and hands-on experience with plants, and bringing some of those events to local schools and other agencies.

“You don’t need a very large garden,” she said. “Even a four-by-eight or a three-by-six (foot) garden can produce a lot of food.”

One of their donors, Wayne M. Hansen of Oneco, agreed, saying, “I wish more people would learn to grow stuff because if you do that, you’re less disconnected from the Earth and other people.”

Mr. Hansen runs Wayne’s Organic Garden, a hand-tilled vegetable farm. He likes the fact that People’s Harvest exists because it enables him to donate food that he cannot sell, either because he’s got too much of it or because it “doesn’t look quite right.”

“I hate to see stuff go to waste. Some years, I don’t have anything extra, but this year I did,” he said.

For both founders, this project is an effort of love. Neither intended to be farmers, but realized this idea combined their areas of expertise, according to both Mr. Asikainen and Mrs. Hart.

For Mr. Asikainen, of Eastford, this project is a natural outgrowth of his full-time job with End Hunger Connecticut; in fact, that organization gives him time off to do it, although he said they can’t afford to pay him to do it. For Mrs. Hart, of Woodstock, it’s a somewhat more focused expression of her experience as a math and science teacher and former 4-H farm educator.

The foray into farming was actually a stroke of luck. Both grew up in Pomfret and thought the inactive state-owned farm would be a great place for their project, but were afraid to ask for it specifically when they raised the subject with the park ranger.

Fortunately for them, the ranger offered it to them.

“It took so long to get the ground ready this year because it hasn’t been farmed in so long,” Mr. Asikainen said. With other volunteers, they had to rip out extensive tree roots and pull up large swaths of poison ivy, among other challenges, he said.

They also hope to get Historical Commission funds to renovate the farm and barn, which date back to 1796 but have been vacant for at least a decade.

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Edited 8/20 to add: You'll notice three deleted comments. I appreciate comments from folks who actually READ my blog, or even just visit it out of curiosity, but not from spam-bloggers trying to get me or others to visit their junk sites.

"Off the Grid"

An episode of the FX series "30 Days"
Aired week of July 13, 2005

Without preparation, for most people transition to a post-industrial culture will be a shock. The "guinea pigs" of this show, Vito and Jahari, are no exception.

Typical Americans from the Bronx, they live a high tech, energy-guzzling, unsustainable lifestyle that would require 12.5 Earths to support humans if everyone lived that way. That's called the ecological footprint.

I assumed while watching that they were tallied together, or 6.25 each, but maybe not -- I tried the test purposely putting in all of the most energy-using answers with a randomly selected Manhattan zipcode (10080) and came out to 13.5. When I took the test for my own lifestyle, it came out better than that, but still falls well into the unsustainable realm:

CATEGORY... ACRES
FOOD... 5.4
MOBILITY... 2
SHELTER... 6.9
GOODS/SERVICES... 5.9
TOTAL FOOTPRINT... 20

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 ACRES PER PERSON. WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE ACRES PER PERSON.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 4.6 PLANETS.

Not good! I know a fair part of my lower than average score is because I try to recycle a lot, have a fairly fuel efficient car, try to make sure things get turned off, and basically like natural darkness. But I also drive a LOT more than I want to -- there's no public transit near home, and as a freelance reporter I have to go where the news is, although the plus is that I frequently work from home and don't have a daily commute.

A few days ago, a thunderstorm knocked out our power for about 4 hours... and I liked it. No background hum, no idiot box squawking, plenty of candles for light. I actually grumbled when it came back on, but know it wouldn't have been easy for a long period since our well is electrically-pumped, most of our food's in the fridge, our stove's electric, etc.

In short, my lifestyle is beholden to the grid... and I don't like that. But I don't have the money to install solar panels (if the trees around my house would even let enough light in for them to be useful) or to reinsulate the house more efficiently. I'd love to live in an ecovillage like the show's Dancing Rabbit village (outside Kirksville, MO), and want to convince Jenn (my gf) to do so... but she's a lot less concerned about this stuff than I am.

Anyway, back to the show:

Despite what some naysayers argue, ecovillages are NOT abandoning modern technology & trying to live like ancient people. Common sense says we cannot practically do that, for several reasons, including our much larger population and the fact that most people know about as much about our ancestors' methods of surviving off the land as they do about particle physics.

Instead, many ecovillages & similar groups espouse what is in fact high technology, but not wasteful technology -- things our ancestors would still find to be magical -- and combine that with practices our ancestors would indeed recognize. For the Dancing Rabbit folks, that's solar panels, fluorescent lights, a computer, and a car fueled by biodiesel and alcohol alongside hand-hoed crops fertilized by "hu-manure," insulation based on straw and plaster, heat and hot water provided by wood fires, and indoor lavatories resembling old-style outhouses with sawdust(?) as deodorizer.

The one thing I have a little problem with is their veganism; while our ancestors probably did have a much higher percentage of vegetable food in their diet than we do, they also had meat. I like meat. I understand and agree with the DR point that corporate husbandry practices are notoriously bad for the environment and that beef-raising is especially wasteful, but there are other ways of raising meat, and hunting it wild is something people have done since we came down from the trees.

I might be wrong, but my feeling is that a vegan lifestyle is something that can only be sustained in an advanced society. In times of subsistence, meat is usually the fastest way to get most of the nutrients the body requires for survival. I seriously doubt there's ever been a tribal culture that avoided meat in some form (including fowl or fish) when they could get it, and in some climates meat is the only food source capable of supporting human life. (The Inuit tribes before Europeans came are agreat example; the Arctic has almost no plant life, and their food supply was almost entirely hunted.)

Vito had a problem with that; and both "guinea pigs" had issues with several elements of the DR lifestyle. For them, however, there was always the knowledge that the change is temporary -- if they choose to, they could go back to their consumptive ways once home in the Bronx. # Losing the products and ease of our everyday lifestyle upset them, and if it were permanent, would make even those of us who are sympathetic to a DR-like lifestyle realize just how addicted to the complex web of national/global commerce we are.

# Vito & Jahari said they'd adopt some conservation methods, but I found Jahari more likely to actually do it. It would be interesting to see how they live a month or so after returning from DR.