Cooking Knowledge as Key to Healthy Food Systems

Posted on May 20, 2014 by Ryan Puckett

by Nic Mink

One of my favorite lines from Wendell Berry comes from his essay, The Pleasures of Eating, an instructive piece that offers a stinging rebuke of the industrial food system and outlines guidelines for more thoughtful eating.

“That they,” he writes of the food industry, “do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so….The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach.”

In re-conceptualizing my Sustainable Food Systems class this spring, I took Berry’s line to heart, as I thought of ways to ensure that my students would never find themselves strapped to a table with a tube running directly into their stomach! This resulted in the creation of three gastronomy labs, created in partnership with Maggie Hanna, the executive director of Fall Creek Gardens Urban Growers Resource Center.

The labs sought to provide hands-on lessons about the science, history, and culture of food, all while instructing students in food preparation. Over the course of the semester, we ended up cooking fish and chips, macaroni and cheese, and gumbo, all from scratch. In the process, we interrogated ingredients, examined labels, and explored personal conceptions of health and well-being.

These labs were some of the most rewarding I have ever instructed and they taught me many lessons.

First, despite the fact that most of my students had a real interest in eating “healthy,” most of them had never considered that healthy eating included the necessity of cooking their own food from scratch. Healthy, to many of them, simply meant ensuring that food had the proper number of calories (few) and the right amount of fat (even less).

Second, the labs also taught me that most of my students had never actually cooked a meal from scratch. Ever. In their two decades of existence, they had always relied on others—parent, fast food chains, sit-down restaurants, or a school cafeteria—to provide their nourishment.

The process of cooking with students (and learning these lessons) suggested, to me at least, the value of making culinary and nutrition education a core part of any college curriculum. Not only can you teach just about any subject through cooking, but you can also provide an outlet for creativity and an avenue to build interdisciplinary connections.

At the end of the semester, one of my students remarked that these labs were the best classes he’d ever had. While it would be nice to pin this success on Maggie and I’s uncanny abilities as educators, in reality I think the remarks this student made reflects the power of food to build community, nourish our souls, and teach us that immense and profound happiness can be found in cooking with one another.

Nicolaas Mink, PhD is the urban sustainable foods fellow at the Center for Urban Ecology.

Year of (Less) Waste: One Semester In

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Ryan Puckett

by McKenzie Beverage

The “Year of Waste” is the unofficial term for my first objective at Butler: get the recycling program, behaviors, and awareness locked in, then tackle things like transportation, local food, etc. Recycling is a baseline. The program (and participant behavior) should be seamless. Once that happens, we can take the conversation to the next level. This blog entry is a reflection on the first half of the Year of Waste.

[Reduce]
Trash audit results are in. People at Butler are putting 33% of their recyclables in the trash. Students from my class (and a couple of daring volunteers), helped us sort through the 1,800 pounds of trash strewn across Butler’s west mall during Earth Week. Reporters from many of the local news channels and the Indianapolis Star also joined us.

Are you as excited as I was to know what is being thrown away? There were some things that surprised me—two bags full of clothes in perfect condition, a case of unopened Ramen, and an unopened box of windshield wiper blades.

There were many things that didn’t surprise me: plastic water bottles, fast food containers, LOTS of pizza boxes, beer cans, Starbucks cups, and uneaten (but cooked) food leftover from the dining halls. Food waste itself accounted for one-third of the total. Read Shel Silverstein’s poem “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout” and you’ll get a good idea of what it was like to root around through one day’s worth of garbage from the dining halls.

The trash audit served two purposes: 1) raise awareness and 2) collect data. Reducing consumption is directly tied to raising awareness about our current consumption patterns. It was a newsworthy spectacle that hopefully gave some perspective on just how much we consume.

[Reuse]
When you think of Butler, what do you think of first? For some people, it’s the lovely green campus, maybe the bell tower, or the historic buildings. For most people, it’s Hinkle Fieldhouse.

On Earth Day, we announced that we are working with People for Urban Progress (PUP) to salvage fieldhouse seats to sell them to the public and install them in public places as the second round of PUPstops. This unprecedented project has already received national media attention and will hopefully inspire other university athletics departments about how to get engaged in sustainability initiatives.

[Recycle]
In addition to the trash audit, students from my class designed and implemented two-week recycling competitions for some Greek houses and graduating seniors. The students completely managed the whole process and came up with exceptionally creative ways to incentivize participation. Between the recycling competitions and the trash audit, my class helped divert over 2,500 pounds of recyclables from the incinerator. While I am thrilled that they were so successful, I am also deeply bothered by how many pounds were accumulated by so few people in such a short period of time.

I am an absolute advocate for recycling, but I truly believe that it encourages consumption. The good feeling that we get knowing that we can recycle something often blinds us from the fact that that product was still manufactured and shipped which takes an enormous amount of energy. Recycling itself uses significant amounts of energy. Advocating for reducing and reusing before recycling is difficult, especially in our one-time-use-disposable-culture.

I’ve got some big ideas for the next half of this year. I’ll check back in soon and let you know how it goes.

McKenzie Beverage is the sustainability coordinator for Butler University.

Making Nice with Money

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Ryan Puckett

by Tim Carter

Money has always been, and will continue to be, a hard topic to write about. Wars are fought over it, it’s inherently exclusionary, and it’s one of those topics (like religion and politics) that you’re not supposed to discuss at a dinner party.

Many of us in the non-profit sector, as implied by that description, are not inherently driven by the desire for our organizations to make gobs of money; therefore, the relationship to funding is always one laced with tension. We need it to do what we do, but we strive to not let it drive our operations. To put together successful grant applications, like our recent one from the National Science Foundation, it takes a lot of partnerships, months of planning and conceptual development, and creativity to fit your proposed activities within the funder’s framework.

Which is why it’s so refreshing to encounter a program privately funded by Smallbox called “Nice Grants”. Nice Grants started in 2013 and the premise is simple: if you have a good idea that helps to improve the city, fill out a short application and potentially get $1,000 to make it happen.

CUE’s proposal, along with nine others, was selected for funding this year. Our project is to expand the “Make Change” initiative that we piloted in the Mid-North area of Indianapolis into all of Indy’s Midtown neighborhoods.

Make Change also directly engages the monetary system. When you do something good for your neighborhood’s environment, you earn community currency that can be redeemed at participating businesses.

Be on the lookout for the official launch of Make Change expansion this summer! In the meantime, if you see a coin with a logo that looks like this, you know that person has done something that improved their local environment. If you see a sign in a business that looks like this, you know the next time you receive one of those coins, you can redeem it at that business.

Nice Grants and Make Change are two ways to rethink how money can be used in service to community. When we are creative about the use of currency, it may help us operate out of a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity.

Tim Carter is director of the Center for Urban Ecology at Butler University.

Places and People We Encounter

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Ryan Puckett

by Molly Trueblood

As much as I try to keep my life spontaneous, I tend to fall into patterns. Wake up at the same time, bike the same route downtown, mow the yard on a certain day each week, eat at the same restaurant over and over. Sometimes it’s easier to do just what I’ve done before.

But recently I’ve been apt to explore new places I’ve never seen before, like the Burdsall Parkway fire station, or the Eagledale neighborhood. As I bike through these unfamiliar streets, I wonder, where do folks who live in these neighborhoods gather? How do they build community and ensure cohesion? Where are the hidden gems in this neighborhood?

Ray Oldenburg coined the concept of the “third place,” a gathering place that isn’t home or work. This is a place where folks go in their neighborhood to relax and connect with neighbors such as a park, a pub, a library, a community garden, or a religious institution. These spaces create opportunities to encounter folks we may or may not have met before, to have discussions and to spark new ideas. They help forge new and stronger links between individuals within a certain location.

There aren’t many third places in my neighborhood. There are a few churches, a great park, a few places to eat, and a soft-serve ice cream shop. But wouldn’t it be great if there were a place where activities were going on almost all the time? Music shows, art classes, dances, spoken-word performances and poetry readings, cooking demonstrations, a community garden, activities for the kids in the neighborhood.

Places like these exist around Indianapolis – some great examples are the Harrison Center for the Arts, Murphy Arts Building, the newly opened Grove Haus. In all of these places, arts are the sturdy backbone of the location, encouraging experimentation, exploration and creation in and around their physical walls.

The arts have a proven track record of successful revitalization, from community-centered art galleries in Detroit to economic development in California. In fact, the idea of creative placemaking is taking off around the country. Art seems like a good place to start if we want to encourage participation by neighbors, community ownership, and creative expression.

Reconnecting to Our Waterways has received a grant to encourage creative placemaking in Indianapolis, particularly in neighborhoods like Mapleton Fall Creek and West Indianapolis. Indianapolis waterways have been both integral and overlooked in our neighborhoods and it’s time that we encourage people to creatively reimagine their waterways as places for art, nature, beauty and recreation.

You can help in the planning process by participating in a waterway committee. Check out more information here. How will you transform your neighborhood’s overlooked assets into destinations for gathering, encountering, and creating with your neighbors?

Molly Truebood is community organizer with the Center for Urban Ecology working on the the Indianapolis/City as a Living Laboratory (I/CaLL) project.

(Accidentally) Saving the American Chestnut

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Ryan Puckett

by Tim Dorsey

Burrs of the American Chestnut

Recently I had the chance to intervene and save what might be an extremely rare specimen of an almost completely decimated population. It wasn’t due to my forethought or activism, but a case of extremely fortuitous timing.

My wife and I had just moved into our new house and our next-door neighbor was casually mentioning that his other-side neighbor was going to have her chestnut tree cut down over the coming weekend and he was going to salvage it for firewood. Apparently, the falling burrs (which contain the nuts) had become a nuisance to our neighbor each autumn when they fall.

My first thought was indeed to protest and try to save the tree—but not for what would prove to be the most important reason. I was excited about the nuts as a source of locally available protein and deliciousness, and proposed to take over the duties of collecting them when they fell, and not-so-urgently asked my next-door neighbor to pass on the offer.

The very next day I was giving a tour of the CUE Farm to several visiting students on Butler’s campus for an undergraduate research conference. Two of them happened to mention work they were working with one of their professors at Hanover College to breed a strain of chestnut tree resistant to blight. Immediately I recalled that chestnut trees had been severely affected by disease over the last century. I noted the unbelievable timing and mentioned that my neighbor was planning to have one cut down and was met with a collective ghastly outcry! They insisted I needed to make sure, but that there was a 99% chance that the tree in question was the entirely different species Horse chestnut, which folks also commonly refer to as “chestnut”.

As it happens, the once mighty American chestnut—comprising perhaps 25% of our Eastern forests—had been decimated by chestnut blight introduced in the early 20^th century following its introduction through the importation of an Asian chestnut species. The American chestnut just hadn’t developed a resistance to the disease. Over the course of a few decades nearly all the American chestnuts in its native range were killed, and by some estimates there may be less than 100 specimens remaining (out of perhaps 3 billion!) at a diameter of 24 inches. [The species is not extinct in the native range, even other than the handful of larger specimens left, due to the fact that the stumps of the killed trees continue to send up sprouts, but these never reach reproductive age before succumbing to blight.] The chestnuts sold around the Holidays are usually from a European cousin or possibly from successfully grown American chestnuts grown out West where the organism responsible for the blight doesn’t survive.

I did in fact confirm from an old fallen burr and some fallen leaves that this was indeed an American chestnut. How or why it has survived is unknown but it may be valuable in breeding efforts due to the fact that it obviously has shown resistance to the blight. I feel privileged to live in its neighborhood! And I’m still looking forward to collecting those “nuisance” nuts in the fall.

Tim Dorsey is the CUE Farm manager.

Experience Nature Through Our Waterways

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Ryan Puckett

by Kelly Harris

Waterstrider

As the sun filtered through the leaves warming my back and the cool water flowed around my ankles, I stooped to watch water striders dance along the surface of the stream – this was a common occurrence in my childhood. I grew up on a 400-acre dairy farm that has woods with a spring feed stream flowing through it. I would spend all my free time outside and it was here that I my love affair with nature began.

I nurtured this love through school. I earned my Bachelors of Science in Conservation Biology and then a Masters of Environmental Science in Applied Ecology. Now, I work at the Center for Urban Ecology (CUE). I could have gone down a much different path if it wasn’t for all the opportunities I had as a child to explore nature.

However, you don’t need to live out in the boonies or in the woods to experience nature, it is everywhere, even in a city (see Tim’s post for a more in-depth look into the ecology of a city). Along waterways is one of the best places to interact with nature, especially in an urban setting, for waterways are a mecca for wildlife. Waterways provide water, food, shelter, and corridors for wildlife. Indianapolis has a multiple waterways flowing through it that are brimming with life and possibility.

Indianapolis’ waterways have been overlooked and neglected for years. They have been hidden by invasive plant species, used as dumping sites and polluted with sewage. Over the last several years, the Indianapolis community has join together to change the perception and treatment of the waterways through the formation of the Reconnecting to Our Waterways (ROW) initiative.

ROW seeks to make Indianapolis’ waterways a community asset by “helping neighbors strengthen waterways, and in turn, helping waterways strengthen neighborhoods.” ROW is currently focusing on six waterways and their surrounding neighborhoods which are:

ROW takes a holistic approach to its work around Indianapolis’ waterways by integrating six elements. These elements are aesthetics, connectivity, ecology, economics, education and well-being. These elements function as lenses to craft solutions to problems and to developing projects and programs around the waterways. ROW’s holistic approach is essential to making Indianapolis’ waterways vibrant, safe and healthy destinations for people to experience nature in our city.

I feel providing people opportunities to experience nature no matter where they live – be it a city, the suburbs or a dairy farm – is a critical educational and developmental opportunity that could lead to better environmental stewards. As Baba Dioum says:

“In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we have been taught.”

So much of learning is through experience; you can’t learn about nature only through the Discovery Channel. You have to get out in it. Go explore one of Indianapolis’ many waterways and you might just see a heron, turtle or water striders. I have seen them all and more in Indy’s waterways!

Kelly Harris, MSES/ MPA, is an Americorps SPEA-VISTA Fellow at the Center for Urban Ecology.

The Future is Bright for Food System Change

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Ryan Puckett

By Nic Mink

ifcapple

Late at night, when I’m the last one left at the CUE office (heck, I’m the last one left in Gallahue Hall!), I crank music on Spotify. Loud, cheesy music. The type of music you sing along to by yourself, late at night, in the basement of an academic building, bathed in the blue hue of fluorescent bulbs and surrounded by piles of half-graded papers.

Tonight, the Five Stairsteps are in heavy rotation. They’re the group behind the funk-it-out, soul bending 1970 classic, “Ooh Child.” Its political message is now largely lost, but its lyrics still resonate with people who recognize the tremendous opportunities that the future holds.

“Ooh child, things are gonna get easier. Ooh child, things’ll get brighter”

For food and food system change, the future is bright indeed! Citizens, entrepreneurs, policy makers, farmers, chefs—all of those people who make up the “food system”—are collaborating like never before to bring healthier food into communities and to create more just and equitable food systems. In the process, food is quickly becoming a catalyst for meaningful and lasting transformation in American society.

Look around and you’ll notice the way that people grow food and eat food is transforming, quite radically, right before our eyes. Eating locally and organically are no longer just buzzwords, but are now commonplace activities for many Americans. The number of community gardens and farms in urban areas are exploding. National policy makers are reinforcing this change through large-scale public investments. In the most recent Farm Bill, for instance, seed money for farmers’ market and local food promotion quintupled.

Locally, citizens in Indianapolis just launched the Indy Food Council, an organization that looks to build community around food and advance food system ideas and initiatives at a city-wide level. The City-County Council recently passed a Healthy Food Resolution that commits the city’s resources to building a better food system. Organizations like Growing Places Indy, Fall Creek Gardens, Indy Urban Acres, and Distelrath Farm—to name just a few—are growing both food and community here in Indianapolis.

These developments represent a groundswell and a seismic shift, but brighter, still, we must become.

Nicolaas Mink, PhD is the urban sustainable foods fellow at the Center for Urban Ecology.

Raising Recycling Awareness at Butler

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Ryan Puckett

by McKenzie Beverage

Pulling the top of a recycling bin off and removing the contents in the busy atrium of Gallahue Hall is not an atypical sight. Butler’s custodial crew sweeps through the building daily, transporting our refuse to places unknown by most. But pulling the top of a recycling bin off with a class gathered around to inspect the contents and removing each item piece by piece will certainly catch the eye of passers-by.

“Ew, that’s disgusting!” one of my students proclaimed at the sight of a Gatorade bottle filled with chewed sunflower seeds. “Why would someone throw a Snickers wrapper in the plastic bottle recycling bin?” asked another. “Why is there so much trash in there?”

When we arrived back in the classroom I asked them to pair up into teams and sort through items placed on two different tables. I prompted them with the question, “What is recyclable?” Some of the items included: a dry erase marker, Starbucks bag with old food inside, balloon, push pin, paper clip, iPod, battery, book, small bits of paper, Solo cup, electronics charger, CDs, etc.

One team separated the items according to what they thought was recyclable on Butler’s campus. They included the iPod along with the other non-recyclables. Roughly half of their items were deemed non-recyclable. The other team separated the items according to what they thought could be donated or reused in some way. They only had one item in their non-recyclable pile—a beat up dry erase board eraser. When asked what to do with old batteries and iPods, none of them were sure. They knew they shouldn’t throw them away, but they didn’t know where to take them.

As the first sustainability coordinator for Butler, I am tasked with answering those questions and coming up with solutions to raise awareness. My job is to bridge campus operations with academics and create learning opportunities out of our waste, our buildings, our food, our trees, etc.

My first big push as sustainability coordinator is focused on trash and recycling on campus—specifically awareness. People have very emotional responses to recycling—it’s tangible and it’s ingrained in us from a very young age. Although most people want to recycle, many of them, like my students, are unsure what and how to recycle on campus. Signage varies, bins are not uniform sizes, and bin placement is inconsistent.

After discovering trash in the recycling bins, one of my students noted that there weren’t any trash bins nearby. In fact, there weren’t any on the entire floor. This may seem like a strategy to increase recycling, however it more often increases contamination (trash in the recycling). If contamination is too high, all of the recycling will be thrown in the trash. This is one of the biggest complaints I hear at Butler and it fuels negative perceptions of the way our building services team operates.

As part of Butler Earth Week programming, a student group from my class will be performing a highly visible trash audit. The contents of a dumpster will be poured out in a well-trafficked area and an Anthropology class will assist sorting through the garbage. Students will gather data to determine the percentage of recyclables and food waste in the dumpster while simultaneously raising awareness about waste on campus and educating my students. This data will help me understand what is being pitched and inform my decision about what to target in an awareness campaign and on signage. If we see those Google glasses that Tim Carter threw away, we will be sure to reuse or recycle them.

McKenzie Beverage is the sustainability coordinator for Butler University.

Urban ecology (re)defined

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Ryan Puckett

by Tim Carter

I’m really excited for the day when Google develops a retina-mounted camera…something that can capture people’s immediate responses to things you say to them. Whenever I tell people I work at the Center for Urban Ecology (CUE) at Butler University, they look as if they just heard that a new planet was discovered or found out that their cousin is trying out for American Idol.

Kind of awkwardly happy and interested but not sure what it really means or what to say next.

So, for all of you out there who have given me that look in the past, here’s an attempt to give three points about what urban ecology means for us here at the CUE (pronounced Q):

The city is an ecosystem.
The city is an ecosystem that includes all the living and non-living things as part of it. This includes humans, plants, water, buildings, and everything else that is here. We don’t treat humans as separate from their environments. In fact, understanding how humans work is really important to understanding how the urban ecosystem works.
Humans are important.
Ecology is a discipline that studies living and nonliving things and the interactions between those things. Many ecologists study interactions that “drive” the ecosystem, such as how much solar energy it takes to make plants grow, what the temperature changes are during the year in an area, and what food is available for animals to eat. In a city, many of these drivers are uniquely dominant such as human culture, legislative and regulatory influences, and socio-economic factors. To understand urban ecology all of the drivers, including the human ones, must be considered important.
The future can be better than the past.
It’s true that the humans’ relationship with non-humans is not a healthy one, either historically or presently. In many ways this relationship is fundamentally broken as our species acts, not surprisingly, in very self-serving ways. In no place is this relationship more profoundly dysfunctional than in cities. What this doesn’t mean, however, is that our past or current activities will necessarily determine our future ones. Human self-reflection may be our strongest asset in developing future urban ecosystems that don’t look like the past. Human innovation and creativity, while not a panacea, leads us at the CUE to be optimistic rather than fatalistic about urban futures.

The CUE is working here in Indianapolis to improve our city. My hope is that through our projects we can inspire others to view cities as opportunities for creative restoration…and I can throw away my Google glasses in the meantime.

Tim Carter is director of the Center for Urban Ecology at Butler University.