Event at UK library features discussion of Kentucky food traditions, how they are changing and how to capitalize on them

Story and photo by Melissa Landon
Kentucky Health News

Local food experts gathered at the University of Kentucky April 9 to discuss how Kentucky food tradition is changing and how to develop local food culture through businesses and other means.

"From Plows to Plates: A Journey Through Kentucky Foodways" was an event sponsored by the UK Libraries Special Collections Research Center. It included a panel discussion, book signings by local food authors and food samples. Panelists included anthropology professor John van Willigen, author of Kentucky's Cookbook Heritage: 200 Years of Southern Cuisine and Culture; Ouita Michel of Midway, chef and proprietor of several restaurants; Tiffany Thompson, horticulturist and manager of the College of Agriculture, Food and Environment's Community Supported Agriculture program; and Kristy Yowell, marketing manager of the Good Foods Co-Op in Lexington.

"I want to elevate Kentucky food culture way above restaurants," Michel said. "Restaurants are not food culture." She said Kentucky is known for its chain restaurants, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, but she wants to focus on helping young chefs and small businesses succeed.

Emma Yetter talks about vegetables via community supported agriculture.

Yowell said, "We want to make affordable, healthy food for everyone. That shouldn't be a privilege."

Thompson said Kentucky's history has had a lot to do with tobacco, which is becoming less prominent. He said community supported agriculture, in which local residents agree to buy produce in advance, has much potential. "What can Kentucky agriculture do to positively influence health? Make more vegetables! CSA is growing, and I'm really excited about it."

The college's CSA Vegetable Program allows people to sign up to receive weekly seasonal vegetables throughout the spring, summer and fall. It costs $19 per week for the smallest "share" of vegetables, which is enough for a single person or a couple, said Emma Yetter, who works events and does deliveries for the program.

Associate Dean of Libraries Deirdre A. Scaggs, author of The Historic Kentucky Kitchen, said at the event that her inspiration for the book came from working in the Special Collections Research Center. She found old recipes, many of which were hand-written, and decided to try them out. She collected over 100 recipes, tested them and modified some of the instructions so a modern audience could understand them.

At roundtable on food and agriculture, Prince Charles says we need to reconnect with the food system and nature, keep stock

Prince Charles "called for urgent restructuring of local and global economies to save humanity from itself" in a whirlwind visit to Louisville on Friday, James Bruggers reports for The Courier-Journal.

In addition to a speech at the Cathedral of the Assumption, the heir to the British throne briefly participated in a roundtable on health and the environment and a similar gathering about food and agriculture, at which he said people need to become "intimately acquainted again with the food system and nature," as The Courier-Journal put it.

"I am very keen on connecting people to school gardens," he said, "and encouraging them to keep their own chickens and the occasional pig." Here's The C-J's raw video from the roundtable:

Wendell and Mary Berry welcome Prince Charles and wife to Louisville, where prince will focus on local food and sustainability

In honor of a royal visit on Friday to Louisville by Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, who will be highlighting issues of sustainability and local food, renowned farmer-author-poet-philosopher Wendell Berry and his daughter Mary Berry, executive director of The Berry Center in New Castle, have written a welcome letter, published in The Courier-Journal. It begins:

Sir,

Your presence among us honors us. We have taken courage from your courage in opposing those who destroy for short-term profit the substance, health, and beauty of this world, which we did not make and cannot conserve except in obedience to its natural laws and to the divine imperative of human stewardship.

You will not be surprised to learn that in Kentucky, as in much of the world, the ways of conserving the land, the water, and the air are repeatedly blocked by the combination of corporate wealth, political connivance, academic complacency, and a deficit of hope where hope is most needed.

Here as elsewhere, the damages done by surface mining are severe, permanent, and largely unrestrained; the loss of land to "development" is, arithmetically, unsustainable; our use of our forests is for the most part ecologically unsound; our farmlands are eroding under an increasing burden of annual grain crops; those lands are priced beyond the reach of aspiring small farmers; and our streams are everywhere degraded by chemical and other pollutants.

But I believe you will be unsurprised also to learn that in Kentucky, as in places similarly exploited and threatened all over the world, there is a growing number of people and groups of people competently aware of, and determinedly opposed to, the diminishment of the natural health and beauty of our state and our world. We are proud to welcome you into the company of friends and allies who, like you, are unrestingly committed to the work of ecological sense and sanity. (Read more)

Prince Charles to keynote Louisville health and food symposium

Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles

Prince Charles of the United Kingdom will keynote a health symposium in Louisville March 20.

The prince of Wales and his wife Camilla Parker-Bowles, duchess of Cornwall, "will highlight the work being done by members of the local community and charitable organizations to protect, preserve and promote the health and well-being of the people of Louisville through community cohesion, clean air and food literacy initiatives," says a release on his site.

The release says the prince will speak "to an audience of health practitioners, business, faith and community leaders about links between health and the natural environment. Highlighting the same theme, the duchess will visit a food literacy project for young people at a local farm. The project also offers young people an opportunity to experience life on a farm in order to help increase their knowledge of the connection between food and farming."

The speech could include some of the same points that Charles made in a speech at the Future for Food Conference at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 2011, where he said, "We will have to develop much more sustainable, or durable forms of food production,  because the way we have done things up to now are no longer as viable as they once appeared to be."

Kirby Adams of The Courier-Journal reports that the symposium will be held by the Institute for Healthy Air, Water and Soil, chaired by Christina Lee "Christy" Brown of Louisville, who is one of four board members of the England-based Sustainable Food Trust. Her son, Owsley Brown III, is one of three board members of the Sustainable Food Alliance, the trust's U.S. partner.

Nico Hines of The Daily Beast reports that the Kentucky visit is being organized with the help of Gov. Steve Beshear, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer (who has been active in food issues) and the Owsley Brown Charitable Foundation, named for Christy Brown's late husband, the former chairman of distiller Brown-Forman Corp. Her son-in-law, Matthew Barzun, "is the U.S. ambassador in London," Hines notes.

Hines's story is largely unfavorable. It begins, "Prince Charles is taking his unusual views on health, previously described as 'witchcraft' and 'quackery,' to the United States." Those descriptions came from a professor at the University of Exeter and the British Medical Association, which said in 2010, "Homeopathy is witchcraft."

When the prince became BMA president in 1982, Hines reports, "He advocated a radical overhaul of the medical system in favor of alternative therapies which he said had been successfully practiced for centuries by faith healers using the patient’s 'physical and social environment, as well as his relation to the cosmos.' Rather than laugh off the private views of their new figurehead, the doctors ordered a full inquiry into the efficacy of alternative medicine. After three years and 600 submissions, it concluded any support for the use of these therapies was purely 'unscientific'. . . . Prince Charles has remained resolute in his controversial beliefs." Some commenters on the story defend him.

The future king's Louisville stop will come on the fourth and last day of an American tour that will include "stops at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington, site of the Lincoln Cottage, where it is believed Abraham Lincoln wrote the last draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. The royals will also visit Mount Vernon, home of George Washington, and the National Archives to mark the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta," The Courier-Journal reports.

Comer encourages Kentucky schools to serve fresh local foods on 'Farm Fresh Fridays'

State Agriculture Commissioner James Comer wants Kentucky schools to offer fresh, local foods for students on Farm Fresh Fridays. The program will launch with Farm to School Month in October, according to a Department of Agriculture press release.

School food-service directors have been asked to provide at least one Kentucky Proud fruit or vegetable each month. Students will be encouraged to talk about their Farm Fresh Fridays activities through social media, and hopefully will learn about local food through the program.

"Serving fresh local foods to our school children will provide them the nourishment they need to grow up strong and healthy," Comer said. "It also will provide educators a way to teach them about where their foods comes from. At the same time, buying farm-fresh foods helps local farmers make a living."

During the 2011-2012 school year, the Farm to School Program distributed local foods in about 702 schools to approximately 364,000 children. To read more about the program, go to www.kyagr.com or contact Tina Garland at 502-382-7505.