Slow Food Western Mass

Slow Food Western Mass Meeting Minutes 2/4/08, 1pm, at The Nutrition Center, 94 West Ave, Great Barrington, MA

Officers elected:

• Dominic Palumbo: co-leader
• Peter Stanton: co-leader
• Simeon Joffe: treasurer
• Jonathan Schwartz: secretary

Dom chaired the meeting and reported:

• To receive notice of meetings, everyone needs to go to slowfoodwesternmass.org to sign-up.

• Through our convivium and Slow Food, members’ own projects and programs, interests, involvements and vocations, either work or personal, can easily dovetail with one another.

• There are sustainable/local/food/agriculture issues programs/initiatives at Monument High School, Mount Everett High School, and Simon’s Rock. Let’s establish mutually beneficial relationships with these.

• Dom working with Waleed (not able to be at meeting) on a survey of our convivium email list to understand interests for direction of convivium.

  • will send draft to meeting attendees for comments.
  • check with other convivia: have done/are doing surveys?– benefit from their work.
  • anyone’s help in crafting survey (especially those with experience) would be greatly appreciated.

• Dominic proposed project inspired by photo essay in Time magazine (families from all over the world with the food they buy and how much they spend in a week): organize a local photo contest for most local diet

  • involve local people and local media

  • have real food as prizes

• Identifying communities & bringing them together so that they can understand their relationships to one another to work more cohesively together.
• Targeted 2 authors with connections to our area to possibly be included in educational/fundraising events:
  • Michael Pollan
    • author of In Defense of Food (’0 and Omnivores Dilemma (’06) among others
    • associated with Schumaker Society
    • summer resident of Cornwall
  • Gary Nabhan
    • author of Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Deserts (’0 and Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods (’0 among others
    • writes on biodiversity
    • on board of Seed Savers
    • involved in Slow Food Nation taking place in San Francisco August ‘08
    • coming to Great Barrington for event sponsored by Orion Society in April

• Identifying communities & bringing them together so that they can understand their relationships to one another to work more cohesively together.

• Slow Food Nation coming up:

  • to take place in San Francisco in Aug ‘08

  • modeled on Salone del Gusto (that takes place in Italy which attracts over 2 million people in the course of a week)

  • different areas of the country are being identified with a regional food – eg. Northeast is Maple Syrup Nation

Dom introduced three guest speakers from Monument High: Sam Levin, Sarah Steadman, and Natalie Akers talked about Project Sprout:

• Project Sprout is a student lead and inspired effort to supplement food served in the Monument Mountain High School (MMHS) with food to be grown onsite. It is part of the Green Project at the school which a wider effort to live more sustainably.

• An additional goal of Project Sprout is to give students an opportunity to bond with nature and combat Nature Deficit Disorder

• Also create awareness about eating locally.

• Using an old soccer field (20,000 sq ft available).

• This first year, plan to plant 1000 sq ft to get some idea of what can be produced and see how it goes.

• Collaborating with Project Native (Rayna) – having a native plant sale to raise funds.

• Working with garden designers.

• There are 50+ students involved and at least one faculty member (Mr. Powell) who has put in time an served as an advisor (others have expressed interest.)

• Work is done outside of regular school hours.

• At present there is no solid agreement with the cafeteria how this will all work (Cathy Sullivan is the head of the cafeteria at MMHS.)

• Need to have a certified kitchen.

• The Muddy Brook Elementary School (MBES) is doing something similar.

• Would like to be able to combine efforts with MBES and also Mount Everett High School (MEHS) and Undermountain Elementary School (UES.)

• Would like to look into other programs that are doing similar things to learn from them.

• Peter Stanton mentioned knowing 3 food service directors at nearby schools who had an interest and/or are working in this direction (Wocester, Westfield, ?)

• Need to look at where there have been successes at introducing real food into institutional kitchens.

• Students talked about how they only have ½ hr for lunch and as a result of long lines and the limited time, their salad bar was cut. The kids took on a project on their own to be additional “lunch ladies” in order to get their salad bar back and were successful.

• The need to talk to the state was pointed out in order to make sure that program will be in compliance with any state regs.

• Plan is to donate any food that the school(s) can’t or won’t use to local food pantries.

• Sam has talked to Route 7 Grill about a pig roast to introduce Project Sprout to the community.

• Orion, Route 7 Grill and Gary Nabham — looking to do something together – Slow Food Western MA and Project Sprout might think about trying to join in too

Meeting then turned to organizational matters

• Goals of SFWM

• How best to support Project Sprout

• Monthly potluck

• Regular meetings

  • Some discussion about how often to have meetings – to be continued

  • Some discussion of whether sub-committees should meet more frequently – to be continued

  • Should there be a monthly meeting of the entire convivium? — discussion to be continued

  • Next meeting to take place 2/26 at Nutrition Center at 1 PM

• At next meeting, so that more people will be able to participate in discussion, we will talk about scheduling of meetings.

Welcome to the new Slow Food Western Mass Blog. This is THE place to come to find out and share with others all that is going on in the Slow Food movement in western Mass. Our hope is that this will be a very happening place, where people like yourself will come to find out about, learn, grow, share, contribute, discuss, and all that other good stuff. In order for it to be that kind of place we need your participation. If you see something on here and have a comment — post it. If you heard about an event that you think others in this community would like to know about — post it. If you have an idea, question, or possibly even a complaint (yes, even those) — post it. The important for you to know is that this is YOUR blog too. We invite you to participate!

We’re off …….