Table Talk at the Statehouse

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The scene: Wednesday, 3:30 p.m., the Statehouse cafeteria. It had been a momentous afternoon, and now it was time to eat. At one table, Pete Coleman of Vermont Salumi offered curls of capicola. A few feet away, apple pies rubbed shoulders with maple-cured bacon, pasture-raised pork meatballs simmered in sweet maple chili sauce, and green smears of Intervale-grown-pesto-topped half-toasts. The crowd roamed and hummed, fortified by chocolate milk and apple cider and all things good and local.

Among the farmers and the bakers and the curers and the lawmakers milled peeps from the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, and they had every right to be merry. They’d just spent 18 months combing the state for input from farmers, vendors, chefs, researchers, academics and everyone else who felt they had something to say about what was working and what wasn’t in Vermont’s food system.

Then they took that raw data and fashioned it into a 10-year plan with dozens of interrelated objectives. As a Nor’Easter swirled outside, they unveiled its contours to lawmakers with a press conference, a joint legislative session and an elegant 52-page executive summary.

The F2P strategic plan was born in spring 2009 when the legislature approved the Farm to Plate Investment Program. Its goals are simple: to increase access to healthy local food; to create more jobs within the food system; and to generate more money. Even a five percent growth in the food system, the plan asserts, could generate 1500 new food/ag jobs in the state.

The plan identifies 33 goals and no less than 60 "high priorities," from increasing production of grains, dry beans and eggs; to expanding goat dairies; to multiplying mobile slaughterhouses; to funding training for butchers; to creating a Vermont Food Atlas.

I just moved to Vermont from New Hampshire, where a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own bootstraps ethos pervades everything from welfare to entrepreneurship to farming. Across the river, we have long admired how Vermont has branded itself and become a leader in getting its maple syrup, cheese, ice cream, pumpkins, poultry, cookies and whatever else into hungry hands. So I was surprised when the weaker links in this $2.7 billion industry were laid out in detail during the joint legislative briefing.

Mark Curran of Black River Produce recalled a time when “we were buying broccoli in old Quaker State oil boxes.” Now he moves thousands of pounds of foods through his warehouse, from farm to vendor, within less than a day. He advocated for better and broader distribution, naming big chains such as Price Chopper and Hannaford the next frontier in markets.

Even so, Kari Bradley, general manager of Montpelier’s Hunger Mountain Co-op, would love a steadier supply of local products, and urged the state’s food purveyors to tackle the "untapped market" of frozen veggies.

Tom Gilbert of Highfields Center for Composting pointed out that Vermont throws away somewhere between 120,000 and 160,000 pounds of food scraps annually. Later, he wrote, “The underlying story here is the need to re-establish the ecological 'principle (or law as many refer to it) of return' -- without these fundamental principles in place, our goals for a healthy food system will amount to little more than goals, rather than effective strategies that can deliver the end game."

Return also figures into feeding our hungriest. Theresa Snow of the Vermont Food Bank pointed out that Vermont had the highest jump in food insecurity during the last decade -- a dubious distinction shared only with Alabama. She’d like to see more capture of agricultural waste into the system, aka gleaning. “We need to think of how each component affects every other component. It’s kind of like its own ecosystem.”

The aims of the plan are so heady, with their tendrils in practically every part of our daily lives, that just thinking about them calls for a heavy dose of goji berry. No wonder everyone needed to let off a little steam later that afternoon, at times rather surreally. In among the Vermont-made kimchi, soy milk, and sausage, Joe from Vermont Bean Crafters served up mini-patties of their tangy, nutrient-loaded (and yummy) black bean burgers. A mustachioed lawmaker accepted one. “It tastes a lot better than it sounds,” he enthused. Then: "You know who would go for these? The Hispanics." He waved the burger’s remains around for emphasis. “That would be a good market.”

The final plan will be hundreds of pages long, drip-released chapter by chapter as PDFs over the course of several months. "We’re pumped," said Ellen Kahler, VSJF’s executive director, rushing back to the Statehouse yesterday for another briefing.

Comments

[Jcarter]

The state should do away with hunting seasons and let man do what they have done thoughout time.

If person A wants to stop at City Market and grab a slice of beef they can. If person B want's some rabbit for dinner why can't he stop on the way home and get himself one for stew anyday of the week?

[Peter Colman]

I'm also of the mind set that picking yourself up by the boot straps is an essential trait in life and society. Yet feel so fortunate to live in a state that spearheads policy creation to fuel job growth, agricultural sustainability and long term food security.
Thanks VT, you rock!