My Car as a Metaphor

Anne McHale is a Service Member in Glendive.

I’m a person who enjoys variety in my days, so my position as a service member is a pretty good match.

In a week I’m likely to run between various farms, gardens, schools and the Boys and Girls Club here multiple times. Sometimes I feel like I’m living that riddle about the farmer with the fox, a goose and a bag of beans. In case you're not familiar with this riddle, here’s a like to the Wikipedia article: .

Gardening is a pretty material-intensive activity, especially this time of year. Luckily I have a trusty steed in my sedan which is often filled to the brim with plant starts, bags of compost (and occasionally worm composters), recycled containers, bins of local food, and scattered carrot tops. I imagine if I were to water my floor mats, diverse spilled seeds would bloom into a model of permaculture.

Children’s artwork often decorates this mess and a scattering of receipts for bought materials inevitably take flight each time I cruise with the windows down. I grab for the slips as planting soil swirls around me and settles into a layer over everything. In a past life, I loved how my car smelled when bringing coffee beans home from the store, or pastries. Now I love the days my car smells like warm, rich soil and it’s a good thing, because those days are most days these days.  Maybe producing soil scented air freshener will be my next entrepreneurial pursuit, and wouldn’t the world be a pretty nice place if there was a market for that?

Here is a photo diary of a week in the life of my car. Bloomin’ car mats and soil scented air fresher are in the pre-alpha stage of development. I'll make sure to let you all know when they hit the market. Until then...

        

Lessons from Detroit: Growing Healthy Communities by Working with what We've Got

Alyssa Charney is a Service Member in Red Lodge.

As I furiously packed, attempted to reschedule three days of classes, and rushed away early from our annual Food Partnership Council celebration, I couldn’t help but be a bit frustrated that the midyear FoodCorps gathering in Detroit was pulling me away from a busy schedule of spring preparations and the last few months in a community that has very much become home.

But alas, I left Red Lodge at 4AM on Saturday and headed to Detroit.

Someone once told me that what’s happening in Detroit should be a model for the way rural communities can also rebuild themselves after significant population decline. Instead of trying to bring back all the people who left, Detroit is working with what it’s got, building off of opportunities that have come about from the challenges.

Detroit has lost half of its population within the past fifty years, and as a result, efforts across the city are focused on reviving and repurposing abandoned lots and neighborhoods through urban agriculture.  We visited and volunteered at D-Town Farm, Flint River Farm, Earth Works Urban Farm, or the Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women, learning from the innovators who are rebuilding Detroit, literally from the ground up.

Detroit’s approach of tapping into the resources that it already has can be a model for rebuilding rural and urban communities throughout the country. Our midyear gathering reminded me that as FoodCorps members spread out across the country, we, like Detroit, are also figuring out how to “work with what we’ve got.” We’re all in communities that are resilient in their own ways, and there is no single cookie cutter “FoodCorps approach” that can be applied at all sites.

Alyssa gives her Food Talk at the Detroit Mid-year gathering
which you can see here!

Hearing stories of bread making, native seeds, and young culinary rock stars from across the country reminded me that the true strength of FoodCorps is the adaptability and creativity of each service member, thriving within communities that are all so very unique. And FoodCorps staff are also tirelessly working to build a FoodCorps that works for each community - taking the time in Detroit to hear from us about how the program’s structure can be modified and improved based on our experiences.

And so as I made my way back home from Detroit, I felt lucky to be returning to a community that offers so much creativity and support to my work everyday, and also lucky to be part of a national network of service members, fellows, and FoodCorps staff who, like Detroit, are working to build healthy food systems with the resources that are uniquely available within each community.

Smoothie-licious Lessons

Nicki Jimenez is a FoodCorps Service Member in Ronan.

Teachers have affected my life tremendously and I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to influence young people in some way with my service this year. While I have always been grateful for my teachers, leading lessons in classrooms this year has made me appreciate what they do so much more, especially lesson-planning. I work with some incredibly committed teachers who prepare interesting lessons and schedule guest specialists to come in to their classrooms. Still, I have luxuries—freedom from a full-time class and a budget provided by a seed grant from the National Center for Appropriate Technology, FoodCorps Montana’s Host Site—that allow me to go wild with lesson planning.

At national FoodCorps training in August, we learned that FoodCorps doesn’t have a curriculum because a central value of FoodCorps service is that it is locally adapted. That’s why we’re placed with local organizations already doing farm to school in the community. And that’s why FoodCorps Service Members work with teachers to create lessons and curricula that meet the needs of their students and schools. This is especially important for food and nutrition education because what’s grown or raised in one region is different from another. There are plenty of food and nutrition curricula out there and lesson-planning as a FoodCorps Service member has involved drawing on those to piece together lessons that are appropriate for my students and for Western Montana.

The class gathers around to discuss the results of the
Go Slow Whoa Fruit and Veggie Challenge.

One curriculum I’ve developed is an eight-week nutrition series for third graders at K. William Harvey Elementary School in Ronan. These students already knew some basics of nutrition: in the fall they experienced the SNAP-Ed program out of the Flathead Reservation Extension Office. Our goal was to reaffirm and build off that knowledge while incorporating physical activity and healthy snacks. We started off with a couple introductory classes. In a lesson about energy balance I taught about how calories give your body energy and to stay healthy you should balance energy in from food and energy out from physical activity. We calculated how many calories were in a carrot and cucumber and then did as many jumping jacks as the energy from the snack provided! In the second lesson, we reviewed MyPlate by giving each kid a food group and having them make a MyPlate out of people from memory.

Then we moved into new material: Go Slow Whoa. Go Slow Whoa is a method developed by CATCH (Coordinated Approach to Child Health) to help kids learn how to make healthy decisions. I taught about how we should eat more Go (anytime) foods than Slow (sometimes) foods and more Slow foods than Whoa (seldom) foods. We played a “red light green light” game with different motions for Go, Slow, and Whoa foods to start getting the hang of it. Then we got down to business, learning about Go Slow Whoa for each food group. It’s fun to come up with creative ways to make each lesson engaging and fun with hands-on activities and snacks featuring local foods when possible.

The blue/purple group is hard at work brainstorming
fruits & veggies while classmates ponder the other
colors of the rainbow.

In the dairy lesson, we identified and practiced activities that keep our bones healthy, then ate homemade ricotta cheese made with local Kalispell Kreamery milk. In the first fruit & veggie lesson, we did the Go Slow Whoa Fruit and Veggie Challenge where the students each received a food item and had to categorize it. In our second lesson, students worked in groups to brainstorm fruits and veggies for each color, then presented their ideas to the class as we talked about eating a rainbow! We made smoothies to go with each fruit and veggie lesson—Go Strananarrot (strawberry, banana, carrot) and Rainbow (with seven fruits & veggies including spinach). Next we’ll learn about grains and taste Montana-grown Kamut and finally we’ll learn about proteins and make a Montana lentil hummus.

Students measure strawberries, orange juice and yogurt into
the Vitamix while others look on, anxious to try the
rainbow smoothie!

I’ve seen some encouraging signs that these lessons are memorable for the kids in my class. I met a parent who said “oh so you’re the Miss Nicki my son’s been talking about.” One of my students volunteered to collect the recipe instructions during clean up just so she could write them all down for herself. She didn’t have to worry, though because at the end of the nutrition series, we’ll send the kids home with a recipe book. It’s my hope that by making food and nutrition fun—maybe even a highlight of their school day—these kids will begin to develop healthy habits to carry long into the future.