METRO TALK SPOKANE’S FOOD CULTURE in a sense:
That is another food culture delineation, the “fast-food nation” with its
automobile-addicted distracted citizens looking for more convenient, cheap and easily gulped-down food. The salt, sugar and fat extracts and those multi-hyphenated chemicals listed on the sides of packages developed in flavor and texture labs and food factories have created an entire generation of consumers, rather than diners. The reality is that all those people
supporting the Spokane Farmer’s Market, the Community Supported Agriculture boxes from Fresh Abundance, or all those vegan choices at Huckleberry’s Market, make up just a small niche, a fraction of America’s food culture. Many readers probably have seen
Could it be that all our food needs can be provided by locally sourced food, like local wheat?
Changing City Codes for Nigerian Pigmy Goats, Guerrilla Gardens, Egg Layers What is this concept of a “food culture”
author Novella Carpenter was trying to express at Santé when she was showing locavores and other foodies the ins and outs of raising not just massive amounts produce in a confined back yard space, but how to tend animals and then use them in their recipes? Her book, Farm City, covers her eight
years of “gardening” in the broadest sense of
the term: taking over a vacant lot in
West Oakland called Ghost Town Farm, and turning it into a farm with vegetables, goats, rabbits and, invariably, a pig or two. For Carpenter, Sante’s Hansen and many
other area food experts, growers, chefs and consumers, a food culture means many things, from low-on-the-food-chain healthy eating using fresh whole foods grown without the use of pesticides, to a multiple- course and gourmand-titillating explosion of foods like cured meats, chocolate-infused cheeses and fresh-from-the-land fungi, veggies, legumes, herbs and fruits prepared at any number of quaint-looking places. The future of Novella’s Ghost Town Farm
is now in question, especially during this day and age of corporate control of our food. Oakland city officials hinted the farm might have to close for this hypocritical reason: Carpenter sells too much produce to be deemed a family garden and will need a costly permit to continue. “It seems ridiculous,” she says. “I need a conditional use permit to sell chard?”
32 SPOKANE CDA • February • 2012 Spokane municipal codes allow four
beehives, four hens, unlimited front and backyard “hobby” farms/gardens on average private city lots.
Old School – Know Your Local Meat and Veggies/ New School – Lower Your Footprint
One of the reasons Hansen came back
to Spokane after schooling at Le Cordon Bleu—formerly Portland’s Western Culinary Institute—and work in various locations, including Portland, Seattle and New York, was “to give something back to my community . . . engage in changing the culture to a healthy, sustainable eating mindset . . . and promoting knowledge on how to buy food and cook it right.” What’s evolved in his case is a farmer-to-
chef connection that enables Hansen and his staff to take heirloom products, including an entire pig, and turn them into tasty foods that have the added value of supporting local economies and, in one slight sense, lowering the
carbon footprint by guaranteeing
the beef and pork come from a 150-mile radius around Spokane. The goal is to cook seasonally, what the area and the seasons can provide. It’s a tough row to hoe in the Inland Northwest. He also wanted to “flip around” his
own working class roots and make good classy food for what he and others see as a quintessential Spokane palate and belly, which are all “gummed up” by fast-food sewage.
the movie, Supersize Me, but the more informative source, Fast Food Nation, a book written by Eric Schlosser, speaks of the American diet as a turbo-charged assembly- line kind of inspired trip through a horror movie set. We spend more on fast food in the U.S. than we do on higher education, personal computers and new cars; more on those Happy Meals than the combined purchases of magazines, newspapers, videos and recorded music. There’s no getting around it – the health-
inspired, small farm-sourced, organic-grown, carbon footprint lowering diets that some in
Smaller, local farms often put an emphasis on an organic approach to growing food.
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