The Campus Kitchen you volunteer or work with makes a difference.  We know the lives we’ve touched and the people we’ve helped, but maybe it doesn’t just stop there.

Sometimes doing good is more than just helping others, but inspiring others to help others too.  These two guys think they change the world, even if it’s one person, one community at a time.

Do you think it can work?

This is Project Everlasting, a quest to change the world one heart at a time.  Maybe we need to find out what people really need.

The average person (myself included) assumes that all produce that is edible gets picked and finds its way to grocery store shelves.  After reading a post from Jeffery Wankel at Beyond Bread, I found out that this isn’t the case

The example he gives is in reference to cucumbers.  Apparently, while they are sorted there are certain criteria the need to be met in order for the cucumbers to go to market:

“Cucumbers are rejected for several reasons:

A. They are too curvy for efficient packaging.
B. They have a small white spot at one end, usually only one square inch in size. This is caused by the tip being buried and missing out on photosynthesis. 97% of the cuke is green and edible, but grocery stores still won’t take them.
C. They have small cracks that keep them from the market. Rod notes that, while cucumbers do have a short shelf life, the cracks don’t affect taste or ripeness.”

Sadly, those cucumbers that don’t make the cut are just left on the ground to be used as fertilizer.  Often times the farmers do not have the time or resources to donate this wasted produce to organizations like Campus Kitchens.  How much produce could be donated if there was an avenue for these farmers to easily get their crops from their fields to other organizations.  Robert Egger likes to say “We don’t have a food problem in this country, we have a transportation problem”.

So as the youngest person in the office, I’m the closest removed from the days of public school lunch. I, like so many others, was bombarded with choices during lunch.

The scary part was that it was not a matter of economics. A tray of pizza and fries was priced much higher than the healthier alternatives. I regularly enjoyed my choice of entrée, soup, tatertots, fruit, dessert and milk for far below what my peers paid for deep fried and over processed food.

In today’s Washington Post, Jane Black wrote and article about strides that have been made in certain Kentucky public schools, the 7^th fattest state in the nation, inside school cafeterias. The article was written in favor of more stringent national policies to curb the childhood obesity epidemic.

Ginger Gray of Kenton County, KY started with the basics. She replaced fried potato chips with their healthier baked alternatives. She then set her sights on full calorie sodas and fruit drinks with little to no nutritional value (think Hawaiian Punch).

Black continues by explaining that one of the greatest fears for public schools is the loss of revenue. However, Gray  found that her revenues were actually rising, without having to raise prices, to the tune of 61%. When presented with healthier options, more students actually participated in the school lunch program.

Food policy has come to the forefront of national attention with the horrifying childhood obesity statistics as well as the most recent bill to change healthcare. We hope that our Campus Kitchens can continue to be a strong force in their communities and provide healthy meals whether new legislation passes or not.

So I know a lot about food.  I like to eat it.  I like how it tastes.  I eat lots and lots of food.

But maybe these Locavores are on to something.  Where does our food come from?  One of the most stunning parts of the video that I heard was that the modern grocery store has on 47,000 products.  Who needs that many products, and if they make THAT many different kinds of food maybe we just don’t know where it all comes from.

Today DCCK started it’s summer gleaning program.  There were all kinds of fresh produce being sent out to client agencies across the city.  How are you getting local food into the meals you are distributing?  We’d love to hear your ideas.

Before I started researching for this blog post I could have told you two things about honey:

1.    Its golden brown in color

2.    It comes in bottles shaped like bears

But after some handy internet research, I now feel like an expert on all the different uses for honey as well as its nutritional superiority to granulated sugar.  I’m even borderline inspired to begin adding honey to my everyday diet. 

You’re probably asking yourself how all this came up.  This week there was a story about how in addition to the White House Garden, the Obama’s added a beehive that produces all the honey needed for the First Family.  The story also goes into detail about Charlie Brandts, the official bee keeper of the White House.  He was a carpenter in the White House for 25 years before turning his hobby into one of the most unique jobs in the country.  I’m guessing his job isn’t going to be too affected by the recession.

We can look at the broader picture of this and see the advantages of home-grown food.  I think it’s a stretch to think that the Campus Kitchens will be able to maintain their own beehive to produce honey, but you can extrapolate the idea out into what other things can Campus Kitchens can do to produce their own food.

Any ideas?

So when’s the last time you came up with an awesome idea.  How about an idea that can lead to social good?

Well make sure to tell Barack and Michelle Obama.  I know the number isn’t listed.  But in 2010 they are creating a brand new office to support awesome projects like CKP.

It’s being called the Social Innovation Fund and they’ve asked for $50 million dollars to get it started.  It’s nice to know that it’s not so huge it will get taken out.  But think of all the help that can get done with $50 million.

You can listen here to what NPR has to say about it.  And read here it’s the official press release.  Just makes sure that while we wait for the FY2010 budget to get fully approved, you keep thinking of new ideas.  And just maybe, CKP can get some money to help promote all your great ideas.

I don’t know about everyone else, but raw cookie dough is one of my all time favorite snacks.  I choose to ignore the warning about the dangers of eating the unbaked treat and indulge until I feel my arteries start to tense up

My world was rocked over the weekend when I read in the Washington Post that Nestle was recalling 300,000 cases of raw cookie dough after fear of an E Coli outbreak.  The article goes on to say that the FDA is shocked because salmonella is the main fear with uncooked eggs in the dough but that E Coli was the culprit of the infection.  E Coli is primarily found in beef.

WHY IS MY COOKIE DOUGH COMING ANYWHERE NEAR BEEF!?

In an unfounded statement the article also suggests that federal officials are looking into the possibility that the dough was intentionally contaminated.  Some quotes or other facts would be nice.  But I would prefer to think that there isn’t any foul play happening behind the scenes in the Nestle factory.

While some people would argue that frozen cookie dough isn’t healthy enough to be distributed to the nations homeless population, think of all the happiness and sustenance it could bring.  It was the same arguement that was had last week over the Little Deby truck fiasco.  Chances are that the 300,000 cases of cookie dough will find their way to a local landfill instead of in the stomachs of hungry citizens.

A new food safety bill was passed unanimously by the House Energy and Commerce Committee

Chris, a DCCK intern, goes through his first week on the job with First Helping.  It looks like it was a busy week, but he was still able to blog about it for all of us to enjoy.

Ever wonder how much money actually goes into lobbying?  La Vida Locavore has the scary statistics.

There’s a new painting of Obama being eaten by a hamburger.  I wish I could make stuff like this up. 

The next documentary to attack the food industry, Food Inc., opened in select cities this week. 

Yesterday the CEO of our very own DC Central Kitchen was on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, a local NPR show in the greater Washington, DC area.  I thought I’d bring you some highlights from the show about local food sustainability.

Kojo aptly named shoppers who look to eat and buy local foods “Locavores”, a term first coined by Bay Area chef Jessica Prentice.  It’s a great name and a great frame of mind not only for DC Central Kitchen but the whole CKP network as well.

You know, you used to be able to get great strawberries for a week or two twice a year; now you can get lousy ones all year round.”  -Bill (listener comment)

Ann Harvey, from FRESHFARM Markets, talked about how to double the value of Food Stamps at Farmers Markets.  Many farmers markets already take WIC and Senior Get Fresh Coupons.  Last year they added Food Stamps to Silver Spring and H Street farmers markets in DC.  She heard about other national programs that doubled the dollars for Food Stamps, and received a grant from Wholesame Wave to double the amount of buying power on Food Stamps for the local markets.  WIC/Senior Gardens are typically $35/a season but Food Stamps provide hundreds more per month.  It really served as growth for the market as well as paying huge benefits to local low-income programs.

Mike Curtin, our CEO, then talked about DCCK’s own Healthy Returns Program.  He referenced their work about the importance of nutrition, how to access the nutrition and all the work the program has done.  We’ll put a shout out here to our own guest blogger (and hero) Dahlia Rockowitz, who has been doing an amazing job at running the program this year.  (If you haven’t already read them, you can check out her guest posts here and here.)

The last comment I’ll leave you with is from Mark Toigo of Toigo Farms.  Particularly notable in these economic times, he mentioned his background as an Aerospace Engineer: it was the recession that caused him to go into farming.  He talked about the local foods movement and mentioned that he thought it’s been a pretty good movement (in regard to demand).  A lot of consumers want better quality.  As the national distributors expanded local farmers began to tail off.  People lost interest in where the food was coming from and as the quality dropped, everyone began to care again.  He doesn’t think of it as increased demand but as a renaissance of food.

That’s just the highlights: I encourage you to listen to the entire piece on the Kojo Nnamdi show. And tell us what you think!

On Jordan’s latest excursion to open the Campus Kitchen at Eastern Carolina University, he was handed a report called the “FBCENC Gap Analysis Project” that was created by Professor Nicholas Didow, who is a business professor at UNC.  The first thing I did was googled FBENC, which stands for Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina.

            The report outlines the major food shortages that will be happening in North Carolina as far into the future as 2030.  The results are scary.  After utilizing three different methods of analysis, Didow showed that the FBCENC will need anywhere from 14 – 75 MILLION more pounds of food to feed their constituents!  This is a prime reason why Campus Kitchens and community partnerships are so important.  The amount of people that we serve directly affects hunger statistics, and the strain on local food banks.  The outlook does not look much better.  By 2030, Didow predicts that the amount of additional food needed by the FBCENC could be upwards of 108,834,715 pounds. 

            This situation is not unique to North Carolina.  Sadly this is the story as we look around the country with unemployment rates at their highest totals in years.  This can be a staggering statistic to tell everyone from kitchen managers to volunteers.  I tried to find the report on the web, but was unsuccessful.  Keep up the good work.  Your communities depend on it.