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My Page: Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel

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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

As Hollywood starlets and organic farmers know all too well, popularity often leads to labeling. Soon grass-fed beef will join the list of labels dotting our food. Starting November 15th, the USDA will require grass-fed beef to be labeled and defined as meat that comes from animals who ate nothing but grass after being weaned.

In recent years, grass-fed has become increasingly popular because, compared to feedlots, raising cattle on pasture decreases environmental damage, improves animal health and reduces antibiotic use. Grass-fed beef also confers human health benefits with high amounts of Omega-3 fatty acids, which can reduce the incidence of heart disease. [more]

Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

The Rocky Mountain West’s tourism industry is worth billions of dollars. In 2006, Montana raked in $3 billion from non-resident vacationers, Wyoming $2 billion and Utah $5 billion. An increasing number of these visitors are leaving behind their jobs and worries for a few days not only to fish blue ribbon streams or ski the perfect powder. They are coming West to don a pair of spurs, rustle some livestock and sleep in a farmhouse on working farms and ranches.

From 2000 to 2001, 62 million adults visited farms and ranches across America according to the United States Department of Agriculture. This agricultural tourism, better known as agritourism, includes farm tours, you-pick operations or country stores as well as farms that provide accommodations. From New Mexico's El Rancho Nido de las Golondrinas to Brush Creek Ranch in Wyoming, places of work are becoming places of play and respite. [more]

Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

As the local food movement grows so does the need for processing facilities and businesses at the local level (see last week’s article). In 2004, sales of retail specialty foods was more than $24 billion and from home to restaurant, hospital to school, local food buyers want locally made salsa, tortillas, cakes and cookies. In response, some nonprofits and enterprise centers are creating Incubator Kitchens.

The Sustainable Agriculture Association of the Bear River Area, otherwise known as SAABRA, started the Bear River Kitchen Incubator a public-use, inspected kitchen that provides a space for people who want to process and prepare foods for public sale. Unlike the home kitchen, the Bear River Kitchen follows the state and federal laws necessary for food entrepreneurs to sell food to the public. [more]

Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

Over the last two years, it has become difficult to talk about the creation of local food systems in Montana without discovering a project or policy supported by Grow Montana. In a short time, the broad-based coalition that promotes Montana-owned food production, processing and distribution as a sustainable economic development strategy has catalyzed and coordinated efforts to support a vibrant Montana food system.

Led by the National Center for Appropriate Technology’s (NCAT), Nancy Matheson and coordinated by Crissie McMullan, Grow Montana’s work is directed by a steering committee, which includes members from across the state. Through university research and reports about the distance food travels, the coalition has revealed the conventional food system’s inefficiencies and the potential economic benefits of a state-based system.
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

Over the weekend the mysterious bluetongue virus simultaneously appeared in parts of England and Southeastern Montana. On Sunday, the BBC reported the first case of bluetongue, also called catarrhal fever, which most likely traveled from Europe in a swarm of infected midges. The small gnat-like insects can travel up to 124 miles a day, and just one midge bite is enough to infect an animal. And while the United Kingdom’s Telegraph reports that the disease is harmless to humans, it can kill up to 70 percent of ruminants in weeks.

Meanwhile, the San Diego Union-Tribune, reported that bluetongue had been confirmed in eight flocks in six Montana counties this month. A quarantine is now in effect for sixteen eastern Montana counties, which will prevent ranchers from transporting animals at a time when lambs are usually shipped to feedlots. [more]

Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

In August, The Idaho Statesman published an article about Reed Stanley, a 72 year old farmer who doesn’t believe in retirement. His story of working until, “his body gives up,” is an increasingly common one for aging farmers in the United States where, according to the 2002 Agriculture Census, the average age of farmers is 55, and one in four is 65 or older.

As older farmers die, so goes their intimate knowledge of droughts, dust bowls and weather patterns that others can only study. Beyond these large, often defining events, the daily rituals of farming and ranching are also lost. But new farmers looking for a mentor and some assistance, particularly with sustainable farming methods, can now access programs that attempt to connect the old with the new and keep traditions alive. [more]

Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

No matter who you sit with at the cafeteria lunch table, if you eat the school lunch you are likely tasting the same chicken-fried steak, potato-based, pizza on Friday meal as every other kid in America. For more than thirty years most lunchrooms around the country have been serving processed and pre-cooked food in an effort to make decreasing school lunch budgets go further and still meet federal nutrition requirements.

But as kids around America return to school this year, more are finding unexpected delicacies like fresh broccoli and home-made chili on the lunch menu, thanks to Farm to School programs. [more]

Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

In early August, Mike Johanns, Secretary of Agriculture, spoke to Nashville farmers and ranchers about the 2007 Farm Bill, which regulates government expenditures for food and farm programs ranging from school lunch funding to farm subsidies. The bill is voted on every five years and is currently in the Senate where it will likely be reviewed in September.

After commiserating about the drought and insidious grasshoppers, Johanns discussed proposed changes to subsidies in the Farm Bill and how those will affect farmers and ranchers in this country. According to Johanns, the USDA proposed that if farmers make an annual adjusted gross income of $200,000 or more, producers would “graduate” from receiving the Title I cash subsidies. Even that stipulation would only affect 38,000 farmers. By comparison, he argued that the House version of the Farm Bill, passed in July, will only affect 7,000 people because it will not graduate farmers unless they make $1 million annually.

For Johanns this system is inequitable and to highlight the misuse of farm subsidies in the United States, the Secretary turned to a map of Manhattan, the New York City borough in the most densely populated county in the United States where land sells for $1,500 a square foot. Each red dot on the map represents a farm subsidy payment made under the 2002 farm bill with the largest circles representing quarter of a million dollar payments. [more]

Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

Famous for hot dogs and deep dish pizza more akin to lasagna than the flat bread stuff of New York, the city of Chicago is considering some new rules for Illinois’ eaters.

According to the Chicago Tribune’s Bill Daley, the city’s Department of Planning and Development has developed a campaign called "Chicago: Eat Local Live Healthy," to create "a climate where the production and distribution of locally grown, healthy food is available, accessible and affordable to residents year-round." The city of Chicago boasts three times the population of the entire state of Montana so these rules have the possibility of exponentially expanding local food markets.
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

This week, a group from Sustainable Table visited Missoula to partake in the bustling Missoula food scene. Sustainable Table, a nonprofit that aims to educate eaters about agro-food issues while offering viable solutions, rented a rock-star tour bus to travel from California to Randall’s Island, New York, where the Farm Aid Concert will be held on September 9. As they travel across the country, Sustainable Table hopes to eat from the, “nation’s most sustainable farms and restaurants,” blogging their escapades along the way in order to raise awareness of the options that are available to eaters.

As we drove to a potluck gathering this week (unfortunately we couldn’t take the bus due to the dirt-road), Diane Hatz, the founder and director of Sustainable Table, talked about the reason for their travels. “This is the fluff tour,” she said. “We are aiming to be the Entertainment Tonight of the food movement, not CNN.” [more]

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