Kudos to Rooting DC

What an energizing day.  I arrived with three questions:

1. Which vegetables, highest in nutrition, should we plant in a community garden that donates to food banks?
2. What should I plant to replace invasive ivy in a deep to dappled shade slope inhabited by beech trees with high roots?
3. Why doesn’t DC’s low income population have access to good nutritious food?

I only got about 1 1/2 answers, but I have plenty of more questions to look at and consider.  It only took me five minutes to target Damian from the DC Department of Environment, being handed off by someone else who said, “He’s the expert”, to tackle the invasive ivy question.  Turns out that the beech trees might be the major problem.  Damian pulled out the Maryland Native Plant guide which I’ve pored through, and in the end, after agreing that partridgeberry and Allegheny pachysandra were very slow growing, fell back on ferns.  We’ve put in some Virginia sweet spire and chelone, so we’ll add ferns and see what a/survives, b/spreads!

The day had four workshop sessions, each with four or five choices, on food access, food production and gardening, and nutrition.  Hard to choose, but I started with Specialty Crop Program of DC.  The first half was a little bit of a sleeper about urban sustainable agriculture, sharing with a knowledgeable group that already supported sustainable agriculture, but two charts showed that aged cow manure had equal or better results for most winter and summer crop vegetables compared to fertilizer.  Since fertilizer that’s  not taken up by the plants either sits in the soil or, particularly in the case of unused Phosphorus, runs into the rivershed, damaging the Anacostia and Potomac, using labor-intensive cow manure makes more sense than spreading fertilizer.  I absolutely love having researched back-up for what I believe.  And, as speaker Dr. James Allen pointed out, gardening is fun.  It may be labor-intensive sometimes, but it makes you less tense!

His fellow speaker Yao Afantchao took a different spin, discussing the market demand for ethnic crops such as African vegetables and a 20 year program to convince Maryland’s tobacco/corn/soy farmers to try growing water leaf, garden egg, jute leaf and other greens using sustainable agriculture, thus weaning them away from the yearly fertilizer cycle.  The good news is that after 19 years of discussing and befriending one southern MD farming family, he convinced them to start a pick-your-own sustainable mini-farm for some African vegetables that are shared by the Asian and island communities.  With financial success and community support (those pick-your-owners were departing with what looked like 40-pound bags of garden eggs, a type of small eggplant), that program hopes to build on success.  I’m waiting for lemon grass to show up in my local groceries on a regular basis….or maybe for someone to give me a cutting to tuck into my flower garden!

Next it was on to Breaking through the Barriers — The Business of Better Food for All by idea-a-minute founder Robert Egger.  He’s a showman through and through and opened DC Central Kitchen with the “leftovers” of the first President Bush’s Inaugural dinner.  However, like many in the non-profit world he is realistically accepting the fact that man (and institution) does not live on donation alone; figuring out a sustainable business model is as important as figuring out a sustainable agricultural model and a sustainable food processing/distribution system.  His vision of coordinating unused school/food/service kitchens with high school/college community service, social enterprise, and retirees/elderly to provide nutritional meals for after-school programs, meals on wheels, single mother support, etc. is something to get your teeth into and work toward!  Get behind it, metro DC.  Sure there are problems, many of them regulatory and safety/responsibility related, but using local volunteer and paid labor to provide locally grown and processed food using sustainable, energy-friendly means is a GOOD IDEA!  Let’s make it happen.  I particularly liked his idea of starting micro-enterprise food carts with ethnic foods, owned and serviced by ex-prisoners who have a hard time even finding minimum wage jobs in this (and maybe every) marketplace.  Imagine the pride of an ex-prisoner who hears, “Hey, man, this is the best food on the block” from some established lawyer grabbing a bite on the run.

The issue of DC school food came up over an outdoor picnic lunch (Thanks, Fresh Start Catering of DC Central Kitchen, the vegetarian sandwiches were fabulous, even though I dropped a piece of yellow squash on my lunch companion’s jacket!).  One of my companions, a carpenter, remarked that building a LEEDS certified school in Adams Morgan was a lot easier than getting good nutrition into the school.  Even though the kitchen had been rebuilt to the specs of DC’s school caterer in order to get their “more  nutritional” food package, the food was still terrible.  On the other hand, he remarked, “I’m wondering if it is ever possible to have healthy nutrition-packed vegetables after they have sat on a steam table for a hour.”  So maybe the question is how to avoid steam tables?  While college students, at least the girls, flock to salad bars, how do you get good vegetables into kids?  Fresh carrot sticks, broccoli florets and dip?  Great soups, hot or cold?  This is another issue that takes some creative thought and change.

And then, gulping the last bite of the great sandwich, off to “Food for the Brain”, a discussion and demonstration with Tambra Stevenson, an engaging nutritionist and counselor.  While she ran over her time, she also handed out a very organized little cheat sheet on what you should eat to stay smart, healthy, and upbeat.  I’m sending it straight to one of my four sons, or maybe all four of them!  Two take aways:  add some flax seed meal to all your baked goods and incorporate more sweet potatoes into soups, salads, stews to feed your brain.  Add the high-Omega 3 fish (sorry, I understand tilapia really doesn’t make it although chefs love it because, as one told me several years ago, “Tilapia is chicken for people who hate fish!  It soaks up the flavor of the sauce and has little taste of its own.”), eat a variety of foods, and take over the world!  Unfortunately, for my question #1, I don’t think flax is going into my garden, although I am wintersowing some blue flax for my garden.  I’ve got to look up that seed and figure out where it comes from, other than Trader Joe’s.  However, I did sprout a sweet potato last year and I will figure out how to grow those over the summer and see if I can make it work.  I actually hated sweet potatoes until a year ago when all of a sudden my taste buds switched on me and they are now almost as tasty as a baked potato with butter and yogurt and chopped onions and chives.

Next came “Wild Fermentation”.  I could not resist that name.  While I was hoping for sourdough, it turned out to be sauerkraut, courtesy of Ed Bruske the Slow Cook blogger.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure I could ever deal with five pounds of sauerkraut, but if I can figure out how to make a pound in a big glass jar, I’ll try it for sure.  What could be easier than chopping without even washing, dousing with a good dose of salt, punching down with your fist and covering.  That’s almost as good as making no knead whole wheat bread!  Take Away:  grab the heaviest cabbage for its size — it’s the freshest because it still has the most water in it AND if you want non-watery cole slaw, slice and salt the cabbage the night before, slip it into a towel, and either swing it around centrifugally outside (my get your exercise variation) or squeeze that towel until all the water runs out and you’ll have nice dry cabbage shreds to flavor!

Finally, on to another food access panel, “Creating Healthy Food Systems” with Judy Davis of Glut Food Co-op, Michele Levy of Crossroads Farmers Market, and  moderated Vinnie Bevivino of Engaged Community Offshoots with a little help from a USDA employee in the audience.  I came late and had to leave before the end for another engagement (trading New Zealand spinach seeds for space saver spinach seeds to get into the ground NOW in our parish garden), but the Take Away is: change the system.  Grow more food locally, support urban/suburban local agriculture, think big, think creatively to bring nutrient-rich food to more people for equal or less money, and, you guessed it, change the agricultural delivery, processing, and access system of our local community.

Different people would make different choices of workshops, so scout the web for other bloggers — I know at least one other one was there.  And next year, GO!  The people attending are a great resource, and I now have more seeds than I know what to do with….but was able to pass on some endive and swiss chard packets along with the New Zealand spinach!