UVM Food Feed

Breakthrough Food Leader Marian Dickinson: Student & Public Health Advocate

Posted by admin | June 19, 2012

Guest blog post from Marian Dickinson, a participant in our Breakthrough Leaders Program for Sustainable Food Systems. She is a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

What about our food systems do you want to change?

My passion for food systems is related to the impact it has on individual and community health. Since I was a child I have always wanted to be in a helping profession. I have felt called to use my skills and abilities to improve the lives of others. Our food system impacts everyone, and increasingly, to a negative result. I envision a food system that instead of making us sick makes us well and promotes the health of individuals, communities, and the environment.

How did you come to be in the role you are currently in? What was your journey?

I was fortunate enough to grow up on a dairy farm in western Ohio, although I never would have admitted that at the time. This has given me an appreciation for the hard work and dedication it takes to be a successful farmer. My cousin Debra Eschmeyer also grew up on a dairy farm a couple of miles away and has made her mark on food systems with the founding of Food Corps and managing her own organic farm with her husband. She and I both left the farm to go to college and start careers but have found ourselves coming back to our roots through food. You can take the girl out of the farm, but I guess you can’t take the farm out of the girl!

After four years working in drug and alcohol abuse prevention, I decided to go back to school to study the rising preventative cause of death–obesity. I found myself more interested in news articles about health and wellness than drug and alcohol news. I was most interested in understanding how and why we make choices that will ultimately hurt us and damage our health, much like many people do with alcohol and other drugs. I found enormous satisfaction in working directly with youth, but I often felt frustrated that I could not do anything to change the real underlying causes of my students’ problems—poverty, broken homes, parental drug abuse, or discrimination. That is why I am now drawn to working at a systems level to work on the root of problems instead of just addressing the symptoms.

How do you effect food systems change in your current role?

My current task as a student is to learn, so I’m not effecting much change yet. For the next six months though I will be an intern with the Food Policy Director of Baltimore City. Under her watchful eye, I will contribute to the food system changes already started in Baltimore. Her goal is to increase city-wide access to healthy, affordable food and establish Baltimore as a leader in emerging sustainable food systems. Although the city of Baltimore has its challenges, it is also a city with innovative spirit and great potential. I intend to witness and contribute to initiatives that will establish long-term solutions to food access.

What are you most looking forward to about the Breakthrough Leaders Program?

I am most looking forward to meeting others who are passionate about the same issues as I am. My current learning experiences have been largely academic, and I am eager to learn from others how they are approaching this problem by other avenues.

What was your most memorable meal to date? Why?

I have been fortunate to eat many delicious meals made by the hands of talented chefs in restaurants, the homes of friends and family, and at my own wedding. But the most memorable meal for me will likely be the 2006 Thanksgiving dinner. I was living in Northern Ireland and the community I lived with was gracious enough to set aside time for my fellow North Americans and I to cook and share a Thanksgiving meal with them. Despite the holiday being meaningless there, they understood the spirit of the day (and the miracle that is pumpkin pie) and celebrated with us the true meaning of Thanksgiving. To me a meal is more than great food.

What is your favorite food? Why?

While my friends and family might guess dark chocolate, they would be wrong. I would have to say that my favorite food is homemade bread, preferably warm and with butter. Aside from the delicious taste, there is something about knowing the hours of effort that goes into homemade bread that makes the taste even better.

Posted in Health, Social | Tagged breakthrough leaders program, obesity, public health | Leave a comment

Why We’re Hosting a Food Systems Summit

Posted by Cynthia Belliveau | June 18, 2012

We’ve heard in many times, there are nearly 7 billion people who need to eat every day and more coming. And we have a global food system that degrades our land, our health, and increasingly our humanity through short-sighted practices and policies that benefit a few at the top. The University of Vermont has decided to do something about it by hosting a Food Systems Summit this June to discuss solutions for change. We believe that change must come from the ground up — both literally and figuratively — through innovative regional food models that have proven workable, sustainable and inclusive to many here in Vermont.

Vermont is full of positive deviants. Yes, you heard it right, I said positive deviants. The definition is simple: positive deviants are people whose uncommon, but successful. behaviors or strategies enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers, despite facing similar challenges and circumstances. Vermont’s tradition of positive deviance and cutting-edge innovation, in the face of adversity, makes it a rich site for the creation of more sustainable food systems models adaptable around the world.

Considerable intellectual capital has been invested by the University of Vermont in this domain in recent years, and we are now engaged in addressing a substantial agenda over the next decade. At the core of our work is no more dauntless a question than “How does a regional food system feed the world?”

To address this question and others, we have set in motion a Food Systems Summit that will bring together emerging international leaders in food systems study and work, as well as in practice with prominent national and international researchers and educators in the field, for in-depth examination of obstacles and opportunities facing us in the decade ahead. It is our expectation that the Summit will translate discussion and exploration into policy and research that can be brought into practical application — first regionally, then nationally and even globally.

As we have assessed the dimensions of the challenges before us, certain themes tend to surface again and again. Among them is the suitability of the State of Vermont, with its human scale, as a “living laboratory” for exploring new solutions to chronically unsolved problems. As Vermont’s research university, UVM is already a leading contributor of knowledge that helps to shape the state’s and New England region’s food system.

A strong existing network of partnerships among UVM researchers, experimental farms, and commercial and community organizations amplifies the impacts of food systems work being done in Vermont.

For all of these reasons, we believe the time is ripe for a systems approach to a regional food system in New England that builds on our existing strengths and resources. The Food Systems Summit is the conduit to bring together like-minded leaders interested in finding solutions and then sharing them with other regions worldwide.

Are you ready for the revolution? Come join us! We will be hosting a livestream of the public conference on June 28 right on this blog and on our UVM CE Facebook Page and tweeting at the hashtag #UVMsummit. Follow us at @uvmCE or @UVMFoodFeed.

While you’re reading this blog, read some of the latest posts from our summit speakers and participants.

Posted in Economic, Environmental, Health, Social | Tagged summit | Leave a comment

More Food = More Hunger? The Productivist Paradigm Paradox

Posted by David Conner | June 12, 2012

Photo: empracht

Can organic agriculture feed the world? Is local food efficient? How do we feed a growing population? Questions like these are posed often in my world. On the surface, the answer is obvious: whatever system grows the most food is the best bet for addressing hunger, both today and tomorrow.

A friend recently sent me this article.

This set me to thinking, and I had something of a professional epiphany: rather than solving hunger, the push for more production at any cost makes it worse. More food=more hunger? How can that be?

A quick web search suggests that global food production per capita and hunger are both increasing. Frances Moore Lappe, one of my early professional heroes (I sat in on a class at Penn State which featured her book Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, which was incredibly influential on my life and career trajectory) showed four decades ago that hunger is caused by poverty, not lack of global food supply. Yet, arguments such as the ones above (production solves hunger), including those of Dennis and Alex Avery and others, continue. Some scholars call it the productivist paradigm.

We economists love optimization: it is the bedrock of any microeconomic theory course. Choose the level of inputs to maximize a given outcome (usually profit or utility). Our food system has set about the task of “maximize yield per production unit” (milk per cow, bushels of corn per acre) and has been wildly successful at it. Yet hunger increases. There is a huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico due to US agriculture. Diet-related illness is off the charts. More than half of US farms lose money every year. Why?

My simple answer is that we optimizing the wrong function. Instead of maximizing quantity, a more important goal should be something like “maximize quality of food available where people can access it.” In the single minded pursuit of yield, we are being hit by countless externalize costs such as those above. External costs are real and they will find you, whether you count them or not.

A great example to me is dairy operations. In my experience, and with few if any exceptions, the goal of our supporting education, policy and support institutions is to help farmers maximize milk per cow. Yet dairy farmers in are peril. Without doubt the model that maximizes milk per cow is the modern confinement model. Cows spend the vast majority in barns, are brought a feed ration designed to maximize production. Manure is augured away, stored in vast lagoons and injected into fields.

I have done extensive research into the pasture-based Management Intensive Rotational Grazing (MIRG) model of dairy production and have found in every way I have found to measure save two –milk per cow by a large margin and milk per acre by a very small one) – the MIRG model is superior. Countless studies have shown MIRG performing far better in profit per cow, profit per production unit (hundredweight) of milk, farmer and community well-being, environmental impact, animal welfare and even human (consumer) health. It is a good model for beginning farmers and small to medium sized farms , which many studies over the years have shown to be vital to the socio-economic well-being of rural communities. Here is a paper I wrote summarizing these issues.

Dairy farmers are taught and encouraged, in many ways, to maximize milk per cow and ignore everything else. Our dominant food system says maximize yield and profit no matter what. Farmers take great pride (and rightfully so) in “feeding the world,” and the perceived inability of any alternative system to do so allows the alternative to be dismissed quite easily in many circles. But the truth is, unless we put the community and ecosystem back in – a community based, agro-ecological food and agricultural system – the hunger, the diet-related illness, the external costs, the community degradation will just get worse.

What do you think? Leave a comment or questions below.

Posted in Economic | Leave a comment

RECIPE: Warm Spinach Mascarpone Dip

Posted by Elizabeth Berman | June 8, 2012

In celebration of National Dairy Month, Vermonters are virtually obliged to celebrate the almighty Holstein, Jersey, Guernsey, Ayrshire and Brown Swiss during the month of June. And rightly so – the dairy industry is tops in the state, accounting for nearly 75% of Vermont’s total agricultural sales.

Vermonters have capitalized on ways of turning fluid milk into highly coveted value-added products: butter, ice cream, yogurt, and cheese. One company, Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery, has been making cow and goat cheese in Websterville, Vermont, since 1984. Sourcing from approximately two dozen family farms in Vermont, they make a variety of fresh and young style cheeses in old world tradition, including Feta, Bonne Bouche, Crottin, Bijou, and Mascarpone.

This appetizer, which combines mascarpone with early spring spinach, comes from In a Cheesemaker’s Kitchen, published in 2009 by Allison Hooper, co-founder of Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery. This cookbook is available in the University of Vermont’s Department of Special Collections (call number: TX759.5 .C48 H66 2009).

Warm Spinach Mascarpone Dip

1 small onion, minced

2 tablespoons olive oil

16 ounces frozen chopped spinach

8 ounces mascarpone

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon pepper

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

½ cup grated Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 350˚F. In a large sauté pan over medium heat, cook the onion with olive oil until translucent. Add frozen spinach and heat until spinach is hot but still green. Add mascarpone, salt, pepper, cayenne, Parmesan cheese and stir. Pour the mixture into a small casserole or baking dish. Bake for 30 minutes until bubbling around the edges. Serve warm with pita chips or a sliced baguette.

This blog post is part of a series highlighting recipes that interweave the culture and history of cooking in Vermont, and is related to the Vermont Foodways Digital Initiative.