welcome to eating sustainably along the lake shore my name is sarah to the community relations manager for herrick district library and i'm one of the two co chairs for tonight i guess  m the new sustainability director at the highland hope college sustainability institute here in holland and so we're really excited to have you guys here this is a really fantastic of an event and we hope you guys enjoy it so eating sustainably a long lecture is many of you know is part of a series of events called living sustainably along the lake shore so we want to make sure that we thank all of the organizations that are part of living sustainably along the lake shore so as you can see there are quite a few indorsing organizations who partner with us and advise us on different topics throughout this series the next series that we have is going to be on water so you'll see a slide for that coming up april thirteenth that's the next program  there is a collaborative a five organizations that make up the committee that actually plans these events so thank you to whole college and thank you to them for hosting us tonight to grand valley state university to the holland chapter of the league of women voters to hear district library and to see the city of howland and the sustainability committee so thank you so much to those groups so we are going to get started now with a panel in just a few minutes but let me give you an overview of tonight and make sure you know where everything is because if you haven't been to the hey were center it can be a little confusing if you would prefer to use a coat rack there is one but it's kind of hard to find it so it's built into the building it's across the main entrance hallway and then over to the right you may do that if you need to use the restroom at any time this is somewhat of an informal event so come in go there are restrooms around to the left over here and then after th panel we are going to have a couple of vendors who have a prize drawing i know that crane dance firm has a prize drawing and nature's market has a prize drawing to any other vendors have a prize drawing ok so if you haven't yet been to crane dance firm all the way over here or nature's market you can buzz over there during our session tonight enter oh and eventually sure has respect yes if you're really starving during the session you can get up and get one of those too but we will have the panel for you know forty five fifty minutes or so and then we're going to do some mingling and give you a chance to meet all of the vendors who are here and michelle is going to tell you a little bit about who's here tonight unfortunately panelists was unable to attend he had a family emergency come up and that was garrett sickler from the i miss you extension so unfortunately he's not able to be here but we do still have three wonderful panelists with us and then we also wanted to say thank you to our vendors who are here we have a farm visser farms holland farmer's market gallons of all c s a hope college studying air creative dining hope college which is representative of environmental science environmental studies and the green team grand valley representing the sustainable food system certificate their sustainable ag project and summer learning opportunities that i do a county food policy master gardeners shannon nature's market some delicious treats for you and so right now we'll have our panelists just go down the line and introduce themselves and kind of tell a little bit about themselves and how their organization is incorporated into sustainable eating  community and healthy eating for others i think it's jeff rossen and what they farm are ok here in holland are an urban nonprofit farm we have two sites one the south side off thirty you so we're going to start with questions for the first one is what is sustainable eating in your opinion and why is it important for you ok sustainable eating to me is understanding in knowing where your food came from knowing that you can go to my stall all summer long by my food keep can it freeze it and be able to eat it all winter and that you can come to me and say how is this grown how is this raised so that you know it was safely grown in safely raised in the most perfect way it could die related diseases and we're living as a nation is choosing this kind of air culture on environmental credit by borrowing from the future when we turn to monoculture is to chemically driven and fossil fuel thirsty our culture we're paying for food on credit percent compared to ten percent seems like a lot but historically one hundred years ago people were spending that states on their food and globally right now there's a lot of place in the world people spend a lot more interesting their income on food so in context it's was doing the math the median in how median household income the united states is roughly fifty thousand dollars twenty five percent of that would mean that we're spending twelve thousand five hundred dollars a very income on food a year it's roughly a friends and our family members is that you know we need to be spending more money on food if you want to be sustainable so really to think of those numbers to twenty five percent is a good number to aim for most of time when the conversation table eating or sustainable food is brought up i think this is what people are talking about the talk about buying better food local food organic stanley grown but one big problem at this juncture is that we're nowhere near coming to terms the fact this kind of food should cost a lot more than it more we want these kind of farms to exist and so we have panels like this we don't want to pay too much more for our food we've been conditioned to have cheap food and i think this is the big hurdle we have to keep getting over from just i mean articles that titled when nobody told me about small farming i can't make a living and i'm a part of the grand rapids urban growers group and in january we had a meeting this about fifteen growers there it was a me  for reasons more than money but those are very telling because like no one is making i mean if you were succeeding and was making more than twenty five thousand dollars a year these are college educated and hard working people  and they believe in it but there's no health care and retirement benefits so that's me again points the fact that you know we're there competing against an industrial food system and you're not going to win so most intriguing to me and that would be as a start society and us individually starting with it we need to shift away from consumption into production it's not saying we still won't be consumers there will be a market economy gannett groceries the producer grows a vegetable garden maintains food trees berries and raises animals issue wasted energy the less back and sooner recycles the producer buys less and produces processes and stores more issue change at the societal level or empowerment individual level and  that to me kind of gets at it i think we need to i see ourselves more as producers and hear how we can actually produce because if we think about if we do shift from ten percent to twenty five percent of income on food that have you know more than two percent of our population being farmers so there's going to need for more production and it's rewarding work and it's a whole new topic but the cup and folks as this is a lifestyle producer can actually be more far more stimulating complex and interesting and consumption oriented way of living and i find that to be just so true last i basically have a a business that revolves around that but ultimately you know for us to stay in ability sustainably eating demands for  supporting the network that's going to provide long term solutions for our environment that's going to support and promote animal welfare  and providing more than than what we're taking in terms of specifically sustainable eating to touch a little bit on what jeff has said as well and actually i see a little book here dan barber third plate which is a marvelous little piece and it begins to introduce to us something that is pretty far from very specifically the midwest mind and that's what we're eating at our meals i think that  we've gravitated to in terms of society towards especially in the midwest meat and potatoes a very protein centered diet that isn't necessarily sustainable in terms of our ecosystem and our environment in the long jeopardy of a food system here moving way past you know commodity grown food in factory farm food and things of that nature but more specifically what we're consuming what we eat what i am in many ways forced to put on a menu and market towards our customer base in terms of what they want to eat is very protein focused you know the very same gentleman again barber wrote a fairly controversial article that basically spelled out if you want to support diversity in our ecosystem you cannot accomplish that in a silly vegetarian diet  and it was it was quite controversial for a lot of people that felt that they were supporting the bigger picture in terms of not supporting you know livestock or protein choices in terms of their meals but what  presents in this book in terms of the third plate which is a very different balanced diet for us as americans i think we've got a long ways to go to get there to total sustainable eating so all three of you touched on the idea of local food and so if you can elaborate a little bit more as to how that really focuses in on sustainable eating and why is this important and why are you guys focusing on this  and being passionate about it i guess the locality of our food for me specifically at salt of the earth we kind of went in the back door for what we did we started  our restaurant about six and a half years ago and this was long before it was marketable or trendy to be doing the local thing as it is today in a lot of in a lot of our industry it wasn't a new thought by any means but we started focused soley on ingredient quality that was basically ours our starting point was sourcing the best and highest quality ingredients that we could find and as a secondary nature in terms of business at our restaurant we value relationships that we build with folks over business transactions we feel that business transactions are momentary and done and relationships are what sustain our business as well as other folks business and it was natural for us both with the consideration of food quality as well as desired to build relationships with folks that can help support our community was just natural and it just quickly quickly this was very challenging six and half years ago i used to joke with a lot of friends that in our first couple years i spent more time in the car going to get product than i spent in the kitchen actually preparing it because there wasn't any infrastructure in place  sourcing local farms to restaurants that's something that's happened changed very dramatically over the last couple years there's a massive amount of infrastructure that's continuing to come to folks like us and  so it was just kind of a natural growth for us to find that local movement and easily something that we can more support today  arizona and she realized you know it's just people should be living out here in the middle the desert and have been for everything in this house sustainable so you know she moves over to virginia their family and they you know produce their allow their food and they just shop at farmer it meet every night and it's to the point we have like a eight ounce piece of meat so you have your carbs or grains then you have you know a little bit of vegetables on the side and he argues that the second plate as happened kind of recently the trend of like local has it's a similar place if you look at it it's still meat centric it still needs to grasp that eight ounce steak now and then you have your organic grains are starch carbon and then you have to be carrots in the farmer's market start from california sense to have some meat and dairy so all depends but it's it's a difficult question i think it's really quite the most important one is how can we listen to our land and not just force on what we want visser farms has been screaming buy local for years we want you to buy local and we come every wednesday and saturday with an unbelievable plate for you and a table full of things for you to eat that's fresh and well grown and grown you know planned that you can just eat michigan food homegrown right here in holland michigan by local we've been doing it for years and so it's not hard to embrace something when there's that wonderful of a product for you to have it's easy to buy local and it's easy to eat local and the city of how one has embraced having a winter market now and we've been there three times so far and you know we were blessed with good weather all three times basses day and ten either way every time so we're really grateful but yeah there's no reason you guys have to eat stuff that isn't fresh from the farm seat so if you have an empty seat in your oh could you just screw down and there are several in the front row at least five or six so come on up and for those of you who are vendors you can sit too you don't have to stand  and while people are finding a seat please continue to do that i'll just ask the next question all right so you've touched on this quite a bit already so you don't feel like you have to repeat yourself but if you want to add anything to the question where could people aquaponics system in his basement so start there but then yeah definitely go local good restaurants  s i mean just to repeat we have a lot of folks that are newer to the idea of local foods and they it can be kind of a little bit mind boggling for folks that don't have this incorporate in their life where do i start and we always tell him go to the farmer's market and start meeting folks if you don't find it there i guarantee you the people that are there know the people that aren't there if you go to the farmer's market and you're looking for a half a cow and there i guarantee you that phil and cindy know where to go and find people and it's always a great starting point and from there it's just a matter of developing relationships with folks that are doing other it thanks great and i will kind of interject at this point and i doubt that we do have a master gardener here so if you guys are interested in learning more about backyard gardening we have shannon here and she's more than happy to talk to you about that and i do know that also at the summer's farmers market they do also sell like seedlings little plants and things like that i don't have particularly a great green thumb i did a bunch of seeds and none of them took this past winter and so i went and got some seedlings are some of the little sprouted tomato plants and some peppers and peas and my son he was just under two years old this summer and he just had a ball that was his responsibility was to go around and help me water all of our play and so and then he got to reap the benefits and pick the snap peas often he won't touch them if we get him from the grocery store but if he picks them right off of the plant then then hell eat i'm so it's just a really great thing to see that happening get much more sustainable than in your own backyard too so  so another thing that we want to talk about is we've been hearing a lot in the news about g m o is or genetically modified organisms so if you guys can maybe kind of tell us a little bit what they are exactly what if there are any concerns associated with them and kind of also let us know if all organic foods are sustainable or g m o free or not you might all be able to just take a little piece of that or  just kind of play with that i guess i think i'll take kind of the the short run here and essentially it's genetically modified organism which i think that  there's a fair amount of controversy surrounding j m o's primarily for the fact that they're relatively new third they're less than twenty years old in terms of commercial industrial production and some of their facts one way or the other are largely unknown you know there's just as much research supporting the fact that g m o's have little effect on nutrients in terms of health and just as much on the other side opportunity to preserve not g m o type food so really applicable this is a part of that of his poems the world is babble to pieces after divorce of things from their names ceaseless preparation for war is not peace health is not procured by the sale of medication or purity bad addiction to poison science at the bidding of the corporations is knowledge reduced to merchandise is a whoredom of the mind and so is the earth that causes progress so is the cowardice the cause have become a huge thing and we try to not use any g m o products at all no seeds like that at all but the guys are right they're both right but the jury's still out it's it's so new we don't know but we err on the side of caution to night use g m o seeds on our farm but their hundred percent right someday twenty years from now maybe we'll learn that there was a really good reason for him maybe twenty years from now will know that that was the most awful thing that ever was created will find next question for you so i go to the farmer's market and i buy some great looking sustainable food that i can't even pronounce or don't know what it is or maybe i've heard of it before i know somebody who cooks it so then i get home what do i do with it what are some tips for cooking with sustainable food especially if it's a vegetable you might be unfamiliar with ok good idea is to go on our website and or facebook and ask questions what do i do with us i bought it from you today but i don't know what to do or when you're at the market ask us how do i prepare this brand new vegetable that you have we can give you ideas we can also help you come up with ideas how to freeze and can it so that you can have it all winter long because vegetables are great but something yeah strawberries you know fresh frozen stories that are in my freezer just magnificent right now it just gives me hope for the future so i'm not going to lie i have  but so the best part about farmers market is you can ask me questions what's my best bang for my buck he wants us to spend twenty five percent or we want you to spend twenty five percent of your income and you know buying local from the market but what's my best thing i can say here if you get three bought baskets for ten dollars your second basket was only two dollars if i go to myers or walmart no one's there going city if you do this you'll save a lot of money so the market will really really help you get your best bang for your dollar we can also give you many ideas the chef series every saturday morning there's a lot to you that sit there every saturday morning and learn about how to prepare the foods that are on our tables so yeah just ask questions don't ask me questions cooking be my wife melissa she be the person talk to my house better answer go talk to her afterwards e it's spreading that message it's really important kind of highlight a little bit on what's what's what's been said here by jeff and cindy we have we have a quotation that's posted in our kitchen at the restaurant and it's by for an employer and he basically says the secret to cooking while is first having a love for it for if you've committed it to be drudgery and terrible leave the kitchen at once there is no  and i agree with that i mean we see it from from the viewpoint of our our staff and our employees you know the reason why i personally cook in my life is because i love it i have a passion for it i love to cook food and as a result of that i get you know fed a million times and spiritually emotionally in a number of different ways but i think that so many so many times you know i meet folks that are excited about supporting locality and going to the farmer's market and we'll have these conversations that ok how do how do i go about this ok go to the farmer's market and you meet all these people and you talk to all these people and they're going to find all these great things to you and it'll it'll go on and on and on and on and they are so excited and then they go well then what do i do with it and i think like well you got to cook it you know and i think quite naturally we're so we're so far removed in our society a lot of folks are from from actually cooking food  had the opportunity to hear a great talk by michael pollan this past fall and he mentioned that the average american spends twenty seven minutes in the kitchen today preparing food in his definition that was used for this the statistic was that preparing simply meant combining two ingredients so a bag of store bought lettuce and some pre made dressing would be constituted  preparing food and three and a half minutes for cleaning and that was it he said he said it's kind of interesting that the average cooking show on t v last thirty minutes because now that's all we do and he said that that the average american spends almost two and a half hours a week watching cooking shows but they're not applying their knowledge so i think it all boils down to you know starting slow go back to the farmer's market these relationships that you're developing for finding food i don't know a single c s a or farmer that doesn't actively have links to recipes how to work with their products they will help you oftentimes i get e mails through our website asking for cooking tips  and i will it's usually the first on my list of replies i am anxious to help people grow because we have a passion for cooking and want people to be in touch with with with food that they're going to hopefully source well but it's a matter of starting slow getting recipes starting some basics the book the art of simple food by alice waters is a great place to start it's very basic it's very simple and you can source just about everything from from an appropriate farmer's market so i think that's probably one of the biggest challenges there's so many folks i think that they're like ok i'm totally and i want to support the local movement i want i want to go to farmer's market and i want to buy all this food and you know i've met people that actually get to that point and then the food gets home and it sits in their fridge in iraq it's because either they don't have time for it or because they don't quickly have the knowledge you know for some folks to be able to walk into the kitchen and cook dinner it could be a three four hour kind of deal because they're not as organized they don't have you know quick access to the knowledge and it takes time it's a it's kind of a lifelong thing to learn how to cook well and you know outside of that knowing where to start i mean the internet is flooded with really terrible recipes you know the second you see a recipe for chocolate fudge the at that ads velveeta cheese it's like just run away so it can be hard to weed through that and know what to trust and know where to go but you know again  starting those relationships you know come to the restaurant we honestly bring people into the kitchen oftentimes that that want to learn some basics and come on in we'll put you to work that's for sure so of course at her district library we have lots of cookbooks right my favorite one is simply in season but yes you don't have to worry about what's good on the internet because if it's worthy of being published it's probably a decent recipe so we are very close to the end of our panel our set up questions for our panel i do have one other one that came across my mind while we were going through and then we'll open it up to you guys to ask questions for our panelists as well but how do you think the holland area is doing in terms of eating sustainably a and how do you think we can improve if we're not to where you think we should be obviously all three of you are very well educated on the topic so like to get your opinion on that this was not a preplanned question so this is spur of the moment you know specifically i'm a little bit south of holland in fennville so i'm a little bit away from from the day ins and outs of of the food movement specifically as it relates to holland but i can tell you that the farmer's market here in holland is one of the most vibrant that we have in west michigan and it's massively supported we have to be very careful as as as shoppers at the farmer's market to be careful when we're going to go i mean we're either up early early in the morning at like six thirty which is unusual for us and the restaurant industry because it is flooded i mean it is just packed wall to wall and you know typically we're going to get our ingredients in and we have a you know sixteen eighteen hour day at work so we don't have time to go through masses of people so i mean that specifically i think is is is very relative to how it's how the community is supporting this movement you know i think at the end of the day it's up to all of us as consumers to continue to vote with their food dollars as as michael pollan always says be careful about the choices that you see that you make look for transparency in the restaurants that you visit and where you spend your money because those dollars are going to support the right of the wrong thing going we're we're poised west michigan southwest michigan we have great land for agriculture you know some people say we could be you know years on the road on the breadbasket now right now a lot of stuff early chicago comes from california very well could come come from southwest michigan so we're surrounded by great cultural and we have a lot of great farmers there's a lot of room for growth individually and again it has this message along i think it's so they do their job communicating it same faces get here so i'm great i'm glad you're here but we need new faces in this conversation too i think we need go to restaurants and you read the menu and it has our farmers names in it that encourages you to realize that this is home grown food it's not just from cisco and as a farm in the last five plus years that we've done restaurant sales that has grown like crazy and it's been a blessing to our farm to be able to sell to restaurants as well as to farmer's market it helps with our bottom line and when you guys support places that will buy local it really helps us and our community and we're very grateful for that about one hundred fifty that we you know something's we do double crapper different things by iran one hundred fifty we have the land in jenison which is mach land that fills grand great grandparents came when they came from the i know i have seven kids you but it's a lot of work and you know i have an incredible blessing when i think about what i'm going to have for supper i just walk outside to the cooler and to the shed and i just pick what we want to have today no my choices right now are much smaller than they are in those number but they it's why i freeze and can some stuff in the summer so i can hang out of all them joyful things like beans and snow peas and snap peas now that i wouldn't be able to have if i didn't do that extra little bit of work but i'm grateful that you know my kids were raised on a farm and they could learn how to we raised a few cows and pigs when our kids were little we have chickens so they all learnt exactly what it took to get a cow bay because no two big enough to buy votes or so they all seen the whole process of and bringing the vegetables after market to the pig pen i mean wow do we have good pigs ok we have a question over here i'm a graduate student in social innovation sustainability so this is really exciting that this is  occurring in holland but i feel like it's necessary to ask that this is such a great turnout but how do we as a community or how do you guys think that we can express spread this to maybe a my more diverse  group so i think that there is this knowledge of maybe having the privilege to be able to buy locally or so or so locally but how do we make that kind of a more diverse atmosphere in holland  where there's a wider range of people we have in the last few years had double up food bucks and the bridge card was available at the farmer's market for them to people that were low income compromise people that don't have the ability when the economy was hard a few years ago there were some people lots and lots of people that that helped them get by being able to use their double  i just wanted to answer that question as well as we have the howling community garden which he donates all of the produce that we produce and we've worked with jeff an eighth day with that too and we did about six thousand pounds of food this past year and that is all completely donated to people of lower income and they can come and learn how to do things as well so there's there's different levels i mean there's the beautiful restaurant amazing gorgeous food and then there's the dollar bucks that helps you get in and then there's also availability for free produce as well so it's not a perfect system and yes we need to fix it but we're trying on many different levels to do that get out of our two hundred plus families involved c s a only to two were using bridge cards ok because i know the michigan apartment agast put a lot of energy into that and i just and we're grateful yeah oh it makes perfect sense and a lot of people don't know it but at the end of the day fisher is a man which is downtown zealand has a truck come to the market and picks up whatever's left on there our table and it goes to their food pantry and on saturday night all of this fresh produce gets given away to people that just don't have it and what a blessing that is for you know people because then they get fresh stuff when i think about those school lunches they're not always the healthiest but these are kids that sometimes that's the healthiest food that they're getting because they don't have it at home and they have lovely things like apples  plastic bags and things like that and i just wish that there weren't hurdles there and i don't know exactly what those hurdles are to get like some of the southwest michigan farmers and to the schools more do you have any idea about that i think the most direct hurdle in terms of getting a lot more low cal sourced products into our food systems i mean primarily it's money you know the the amount of of financial energy that's devoted towards some of those food programs range somewhere from thirteen to twenty cents per child per day it's it's almost nothing and it largely could be a part of a much bigger  conversation but it's you know for the most part but the public school system is supported you know directly through programs you know devised by the u s d a and a lot of our i guess you know locally driven values in terms of getting some of those products into the school systems fall short of some of the infrastructure that's in place naturally in in a lot of those institutions but i think it i think it boils down to finances there's not much funding that goes towards the food programs in the schools he will comment also as i carry the mike over and when i was in wisconsin there was a wonderful nonprofit called norrish so if there's anyone who's really interested in that topic carol christians and she started that and it they have an amazing snack attack program where they're like taking produce right from the gardens to the students and getting them to try these things so if there's anyone who's interested in learning more about that i'm more than happy to talk about that too so it's a really really great program i think along with the whole financial aspect that everybody's talked about it's really hard to get young people into farming it's very hard and we're never going to have enough local food if we don't sprout some new farmers creamed as we've been trying to find a young person who really wants to be a life stock farmer for a decade it's hard to find and would want to go into farming it's a lot of work and it doesn't pay very much so i think we probably have time for one last question and i want to make sure that we give you enough time at the tables with the vendors ok so i think it's getting the kids excited about that that fresh food again helping them get that connection back to where their food comes from so i think that's a big part important piece of that so do we want to do one more question or do we have any other last questions  and then and they actually have some granting to help schools pay for some of that stuff and there's also a new program called who passes for health in which subsidizes a farmer getting  posts and then they pay back seventy five percent of the cost of that house by selling either to low income members of the community through farmers markets or directly to schools so there are some things that are starting to try to make more possibilities out there so that's those are some of the great i should say since they're here tonight too if you're interested in that food waste issue with regard to  cafeteria or our large scale food service creative dining here at home had some really interesting things with the hope population on that particular topic so to tell you about that when you get to the vendor tables ok well i think we're go wrap up i don't know if our panelists have any last comments or anything like that obviously this is a topic that we're all very concerned about and we could talk about for hours and probably days basically trying to solve these issues so we're really excited that you guys are here and learning more about this topic if there's other topics related to this that you want to learn more about feel free to reach out to us were happy to put on more and more events within the series or connect you with other resources so we thank you for coming and we thank you