Food Day and Other Adventures

Today is the last day of October and I'm wondering whether the month has been a trick or a treat. First activity of the month involved cleaning out most of my raised bed garden. The only plants remaining are some hardy Thai hot peppers and some basil. For my first try, I had a pretty successful experience.

Second activity came with mid-way through the month we posted a new CFNI web page dedicated to Food Day with a link to the contribution we hoped to make for that celebration - "Celebrating Food Day, a Community Guidebook." But as luck would have it our website host initiated a new format around the same time and our page was lost in the transition. After a lot of back and forth, we were able to recover the page, but only after Food Day!! Luckily we did put in our guidebook introduction that the concept of Food Day was something that could be celebrated throughout the year. So hopefully all is not lost.

Third acivity came last week when I went to hear Michael Pollen speak at the Music Center at Swathmore. As I sat in my $45 seat on the Promenade Level I contemplated on how much food my ticket money could have bought a less fortunate family. To get those thoughts out of my mind I convinced myself that Pollen's lecture would help me better deliver CFNI food messages to the community. He started his lecture going through a couple of bags of groceries purchased from a local grocery store. Item by item pulled from those bags depicted "food like products" (kind of name he gave them) that were not real food, loaded with sugar, salt and other stuff, and not very healthy. In fact, he said if the label had more than 5 ingredients on it, the product wasn't real food. Morale of that lesson is to read food labels because a "healthy" food like yogurt can be ladened with lots of sugar! Another take away message was regarding pursuading people to cook. That simple activity causes people to know what they're eating and where it came from to a certain degree.

Overall, I enjoyed Pollen's presentation. However in the end, I was left with this empty filling going back to those families that can't afford to put food on the table, let alone go hear a lecture on food. Deep down the information I gained from the lecture I'm still trying to rationalize how to fit into the CFNI voice.