Archive for the ‘Food Access’ Category
City Fruit September Update
Aimee in a plum tree
From our friends at City Fruit:
Hi everyone,
Indian summer is the best – especially when it’s our only summer. Italian plums and Asian pears are coming in this month, and it was an amazing fig year. So, please, enjoy the harvest and eat some fruit. And take a cooking class (see below)! Fruit tip: It’s time (or almost time) to harvest pears. Read our Blog to find out how and then read “Green Pear Tree in September” (attached) by Freya Manfred.
Save your Saturdays for our new cooking series!
Five teachers with deep roots in Seattle’s culinary community expand the ways we think about fruit in our new cooking series, Beyond the Canning Jar. Amy Pennington will tackle quince and Laurie Pfalzer will roast, braise and poach fruit – plus much more. Enrollment is limited. Register at Brown Paper Tickets or send a check to City Fruit, PO Box 28577, Seattle WA 98118. Classes are $30 members, $35 non members, $120 ($140) for the five-class series. Special thanks to Dish It Up! and The Pantry at Delancey for partnering with us on these classes and to Morgan Larsen for setting them up.
Oct 1 – Fruit Pies and Pastries – Marcee Clark of Seattle Culinary Academy
Oct 8 - Demystifying Quince – Amy Pennington, author of Urban Pantry
Oct 15 – Shrubs (Drinking Vinegars) – Patricia Eddy of Cooklocal.com (featured on KUOW)
Oct 22 – Fall Fruit from Start to Finish – Roxanne Viera of PCC Cooks
Oct 29 – Simple Fruit: Poaching, Roasting and Braising – Laurie Pfalzer of Pastry Craft
City Fruit News
Harvest: In mid-August the figs finally kicked in and now Italian plums are on the horizon. Although we have harvested at many sites, in general we’re getting about half as much fruit per tree as we did in 2010 – probably due to the spring weather. We deliver to ‘small’ sites (shelters, meals programs, schools) and to ‘large’ sites, e.g., food banks. Several loyal — and local–partners buy a portion of City Fruit fruit: Bar del Corso (Beacon Ave), Dahlia Workshop (Belltown), De Luxe Foods (Wallingford), Le Gourmand Restaurant (Ballard) and Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream (Capitol Hill). Support them, and when you do, tell them you’re also a City Fruit supporter.
Grant: The Horizons Foundation awarded us a general support grant to help with our core projects–the fruit harvests, educational programs, and movement toward becoming a self-sustaining organization. We thank them for this, and also thank Katherine Ransel, an excellent proposal writer.
Media blitz: Check out “City Fruit helps feed the hungry from our backyards” at the Seattle P-I online and then go out–this week–and buy the September issue of Edible Seattle, with Abra Bennett’s four-page color spread on City Fruit, “Closing the Urban Fruit Loop.”
Harvest Festivals
Sept 10 Seattle Tilth’s Harvest Fair, Meridian Park. 10 am – 4 pm. Workshops, music, farmer’s market, local food.
Sept 11 Jubilee County Fair in the Holy Cross Lutheran Church orchard, 4315 -129th Pl SE, Bellevue (across from Newport High School.) Food, games, cider, and music. Noon to 5 pm.
Sept 24 Festival of Fruit at Piper’s Orchard in Carkeek Park, 9:30 am – 3 pm. Celebrate the 120th anniversary of Piper’s Orchard and hear speakers on historic orchards and fruit foraging. Also, pie competition, cider pressing, apple identification and lectures in the orchard. Oct 2 Salt Spring Island Apple Festival, Salt Spring Island, BC. Orchard tour of heritage and organic apples, pie contest, apple identification. Contact Seattle Tree Fruit Society for group outing info: lorineb@mindspring.com . Don’t be left out — join us! As you must know by now, City Fruit has no fat. Your memberhip directly supports our fruit harvesting and donations, our educational work, and our lobbying for the importance of urban fruit with whoever will listen. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and read the Blog. Take care, and have a great month. Gail
Hi everyone,
Save your Saturdays for our new cooking series!
Five teachers with deep roots in Seattle’s culinary community expand the ways we think about fruit in our new cooking series, Beyond the Canning Jar. Amy Pennington will tackle quince and Laurie Pfalzer will roast, braise and poach fruit – plus much more. Enrollment is limited. Register at Brown Paper Tickets or send a check to City Fruit, PO Box 28577, Seattle WA 98118. Classes are $30 members, $35 non members, $120 ($140) for the five-class series. Special thanks to Dish It Up! and The Pantry at Delancey for partnering with us on these classes and to Morgan Larsen for setting them up.
Oct 1 – Fruit Pies and Pastries – Marcee Clark of Seattle Culinary Academy
Oct 15 – Shrubs (Drinking Vinegars) – Patricia Eddy of Cooklocal.com (featured on KUOW)
Oct 22 – Fall Fruit from Start to Finish – Roxanne Viera of PCC Cooks
Oct 29 – Simple Fruit: Poaching, Roasting and Braising – Laurie Pfalzer of Pastry Craft
City Fruit News
Harvest: In mid-August the figs finally kicked in and now Italian plums are on the horizon. Although we have harvested at many sites, in general we’re getting about half as much fruit per tree as we did in 2010 – probably due to the spring weather. We deliver to ‘small’ sites (shelters, meals programs, schools) and to ‘large’ sites, e.g., food banks. Several loyal — and local–partners buy a portion of City Fruit fruit: Bar del Corso (Beacon Ave), Dahlia Workshop (Belltown), De Luxe Foods (Wallingford), Le Gourmand Restaurant (Ballard) and Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream (Capitol Hill). Support them, and when you do, tell them you’re also a City Fruit supporter.
Grant: The Horizons Foundation awarded us a general support grant to help with our core projects–the fruit harvests, educational programs, and movement toward becoming a self-sustaining organization. We thank them for this, and also thank Katherine Ransel, an excellent proposal writer.
Media blitz: Check out “City Fruit helps feed the hungry from our backyards” at the Seattle P-I online and then go out–this week–and buy the September issue of Edible Seattle, with Abra Bennett’s four-page color spread on City Fruit, “Closing the Urban Fruit Loop.”
Harvest Festivals
Sept 10 Seattle Tilth’s Harvest Fair, Meridian Park. 10 am – 4 pm. Workshops, music, farmer’s market, local food.
Sept 11 Jubilee County Fair in the Holy Cross Lutheran Church orchard, 4315 -129th Pl SE, Bellevue (across from Newport High School.) Food, games, cider, and music. Noon to 5 pm.
Life and Death and Urban Ag
Increasing numbers of the world’s poor now live in urban areas. How can urban ag feed this population and what are the risks to farming in the urban environment? Richard Stren from the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, seeks to answer this question in his publication: Healthy city harvests: Generating evidence to guide policy on urban agriculture
The subject of this book has been an important one to many of us researchers and policy-makers – for many years now. It has been important since so many urban residents, both in developed, and developing countries, have been raising animals and cultivating fruits and vegetables to enhance their incomes and to improve their families’ food security. These activities, invisible to many, have at best been defined as “illegal” or a “concern”, even though they are widely practiced. But in very recent months, just preceding the completion of the book, the issue of urban food supply has become a matter of extreme apprehension and even alarm. Why? Note the following, typical headlines over the last six months: “Forget oil, the new global crisis is food”, “Soaring food prices threaten stability” “Fear of rice riots as surge in demand hits nations across the Far East”, and “World in grip of food crisis”. Clearly, what was already a tight situation for millions of the urban poor in cities across the world – but particularly in the poorest developing countries – has become even more widespread and desperate. Urban food supplies are not only an important and central policy issue, but in some countries they are the central policy issue.
Increasing Local Foods in School Lunches
Check out this report to see what a difference seven cents can make in increasing local foods in school meals.
What if schools had an additional $.07 per meal to spend on buying local foods for the lunch line?
During the 2008-2009 school year, researchers at Ecotrust set out to answer this question, placing particular emphasis on evaluating the economic effects of increased procurement of local foods. Based on financial data provided by the Oregon Department of Education, schools in Oregon spent about $1.31 per meal on food costs during the 2008-2009 school year after paying for labor, overhead, and other non-food related expenditures.
In 2009, as the Oregon Legislature debated whether to allocate state funding to increase schools’ purchasing power for foods grown, processed and manufactured in Oregon, the question at hand was whether an additional investment of just pennies per meal could provide significant economic benefit to the state. Beyond economic effects, researchers also explored the potential public health benefits of bringing more local products into the lunch room. See full report here.
City Fruit August Update
Aimee in a plum tree
By Gail Savina
Pierce County Gleaning
From the Lakewood Patch here’s news on gleaning in Pierce County. For more info on gleaning in King County check out Solid Ground and City Fruit.
It is a little bit of work with a lot of impact and they call it the Pierce County Gleaning Project.
The project combines the Emergency Food Network and St. Leo’s Food Connection. The goal is to fight hunger by recruiting volunteers to harvest local produce that would otherwise go to waste and donate it to local food banks and hot-meal sites.
The effort was borne of St. Leo’s and EFN wanting to get more fresh produce into food banks – and seeing too much being wasted on all levels, from grocery stores to residential neighborhoods. More…
New Community Garden in Des Moines
Coming soon!
From the Waterland blog here is information and lots of lovely pictures of a new garden that just opened in Des Moines.
In 1996 the City of Des Moines received a 9.3 acre plot of land adjacent to Parkside Elementary School. The land came courtesy of Daisy Sonju and her family.
15 years and a lot of planning and manual labor later, the Daisy Sonju Community Garden & Pea Patch is now a reality.
The journey to today’s ribbon cutting involved 142 volunteers and over 700 hours of work to remove invasive species, identify salvageable trees in the orchard and create the garden space.
The space includes a pea patch, demonstration beds for local elementary school groups, a herb garden, seating areas and planting space for the Des Moines Area Food Bank and Senior Services. More…
Is this a Tomato or a Tennis Ball?
From Grist here’s a story on what now passes for “tomatoes”.
My obituary’s headline would have read “Food writer killed by flying tomato.”
On a visit to my parents in Naples, Fla., I was driving I-75 when I came up behind one of those gravel trucks that seem to be everywhere in southwest Florida’s rush to convert pine woods and cypress stands into gated communities and shopping malls. As I drew closer, I saw that the tractor trailer was heavy with what seemed to be green apples. When I pulled out to pass, three of them sailed off the truck, narrowly missing my windshield. Every time it hit the slightest bump, more of those orbs would tumble off. At the first stoplight, I got a closer look. The shoulder of the road was littered with green tomatoes so plasticine and so identical they could have been stamped out by a machine. Most looked smooth and unblemished. A few had cracks in their skins. Not one was smashed. A 10-foot drop followed by a 60-mile-per-hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato. More..
Everett Opens up New Land for Farming
From the Seattle PI news on a new farming opportunity for Everett residents.
An Everett group is hoping to put 10 acres of unused city-owned river bottom land back to work providing produce for local food banks.
By next week, plots in the Snohomish River valley will be available to farm as part of an initiative called the Red Barn Community Farm.
Eventually, the land should provide fresh produce for local food banks and those who want to do subsistence farming but don’t have the acreage.
The community group organizing the farming project, Transition Port Gardner, also hopes to give Snohomish County a lesson in the challenges of the 21st century: diminishing fossil fuel and climate change.
“We’re determined to make this work this summer,” said project manager Dean Smith. More…
USDA Funds Incubator Kitchen
The USDA just funded this non-profit kitchen in Pennsylvania to do a whole bunch of different activities. Wonder if we could apply and do something similar here?
YORK, Penn., June 17, 2011 –Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan joined other USDA and local officials today to officially open a kitchen facility in York that will provide education and workforce training. Financial support for the kitchen was provided through a USDA Rural Development Rural Business Enterprise (RBEG) grant.
“Projects like this one encourage development of new food products, train individuals who want to acquire skills necessary to get a job, and provide educational opportunities for residents who want to know more about providing healthy meals to their families,” said Merrigan. “The Obama Administration is helping create jobs in Pennsylvania by developing regional food systems that will stimulate growth of new businesses within rural areas.”
Known as “YorKitchen” and located within York’s Downtown Central Market, the kitchen will help to overcome the road blocks that can stand between a farmer or food entrepreneur and marketing a food product. Operators are also partnering with local community service organizations to provide educational opportunities to low-income individuals who want to learn about nutrition and healthy food options. The kitchen will also provide workforce training opportunities and business start-up technical assistance. A “performance kitchen”, donated by various local companies, will be a complimentary show kitchen within the YorKitchen incubator. More…
Resources for Gleaning
Gleaning is a great way to get food that would go to waste to people who need it but it can be tricky to know how to proceed. Here are some useful resources to get your gleaning program going:
- City Fruit’s Harvest Handbook
- Solid Ground gleaning links
- Harvest Against Hunger’s Gleaning Resource Guide
- Small Potatoes Gleaning Program
- Pierce County Gleaning Program
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