Students present summer research to Local Food Council
Allison Burket
Issue date: 9/28/06 Section: News
- Page 1 of 1
On Tuesday, a regular meeting of Knox County's Local Food Council focused on efforts by Kenyon's food service to purchase locally-grown food, how to promote awareness of buying and selling locally-grown food, and the conversion of downtown Mount Vernon's Buckeye Candy Company building into a local food center.
Since its formation in 2004, the council has met quarterly to discuss the Kenyon-run Rural Life Center's Food For Thought initiative, which provides "a special opportunity for interaction among individuals at all points of the food system and a unique point of contact between Kenyon and area residents," according to the Rural Life website.
The council's membership includes local farmers, institutional buyers, restaurant owners and representatives from Mount Vernon-based distributor Lannings Food, the Mount Vernon Farmer's Market, the College and AVI Foodsystems.
The council is a "collaborative effort" begun several years ago to help "develop a countywide food system," by pooling resources from the community and the College to guide the Food for Thought initiative, with the goal of building a sustainable local market for foods produced in and around Knox County, according to the Rural Life Center web site.
• Project updates
A featured component of Tuesday's meeting was the presentation of two student summer research projects. Meg Maurer '07 and Tempe Weinbach '07 surveyed over 100 Knox County residents to "investigate consumer buying habits and attitudes about local foods." While attitudes tended to be largely in favor of supporting local foods, it was consistently identified that "people don't know where to buy local foods," according to Assistant Professor of Anthropology Bruce Hardy, who advised the student researchers.
Juniors Liesel Schmidt and Mariana Templin's project involved driving along every road in Knox County and stopping whenever they saw a sign advertising an individual farmer selling food from home. "The purpose of this research was to discover the nature of these small-scale businesses: how prevalent they are, what are they selling, and who their customers are," said Schmidt.
Schmidt and Templin's travels brought them in contact with fifty sellers peddling what was often a surplus of eggs, fruit and meat. Half of those sellers expressed interest in being published in Homegrown, a guide to local food products published by the Rural Life Center in 2000, a new edition of which the Council hopes to publish this year.
John Marsh, vice-chair of the council and project coordinator for Food for Thought, presented the state of the ongoing project of trying to turn Mount Vernon's long-abandoned Buckeye Candy Building into a center for local foods, several floors of which were donated to the Food for Thought program.
"We are currently looking at costs to weigh the various local food promotional options the building affords the community," explained Marsh. "The critical role set before us now is to discover what potential for the facility exists within the body of local producers and to facilitate the development of that potential."
Marsh described the costs and benefits of options such as developing a co-op style marketplace or bringing in businesses to sell local foods for profit. However, without a complete knowledge of how much projects will cost and where donations are coming from, no decisions could be made, Marsh said.
"There was a big hesitation within our group to consider something non-profit," said Marsh. "The biggest shortcoming we saw is if there's no money in this place now, how are we going to know there is going to be funding in the future?"
• Local food in Kenyon dining halls
Melody Monroe, resident director of AVI, presented the current status of local foods in Kenyon's dining halls, which is one of the council's largest ongoing projects.
According to Monroe, 16.5 percent of the current food in the dining halls is locally grown, including much of the produce and some of the ground beef and chicken. Although that number is down from the 19.1 percent at the end of last semester, Monroe said AVI's goal is to reach 30 percent by December.
"We are starting to establish direct connections between AVI and local farmers," explained Howard Sacks, director of the Rural Life Center and chair of the council. "As the semester progresses, things will get more routine."
"We have an ongoing effort to open the communication link to the community and all farmers to increase the number of local farms that we source from, not only for Kenyon's dining halls," said Sam Gillard from Lannings Food, the distributor from which Kenyon buys its local food. "We sell a lot of local produce to our other customers."
One of the goals for the semester, according to Monroe and Sacks, is to improve the "educational component" within the dining halls, making it more clear which foods are locally grown and which farms they come from.
Monroe and Sacks also hope to address the question of what exactly 'local' means. The definition currently includes counties surrounding Knox County.
• Next step
However, one of the obstacles to the initiative's goals is a lack of awareness of the potential for a local food network. May farmers said that their own neighbors were unaware of even the weekly farmer's market in Mount Vernon. Sacks and other members of the Council emphasized that the next large step for the group is to come up with a formal marketing strategy in order to more effectively spread the word to Knox County residents.
"The support in the community is that you literally have to go dig it up," said Marsh.
The Council also hopes to come up with a more effective system of connecting institutional buyers, such as restaurants or retirement homes, with local producers, in order to guarantee both a stable supply and demand.
• Why local food?
"I think local food is all about creating a community, the sort of community that's been lost over the past 50 years," said Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, president of the Kenyon student organization People Endorsing Agricultural Sustainability (PEAS), who also attended Tuesday's council meeting. "It's about trying to recreate those links through which people knew each other, people cared about each other. … It's something that benefits the community nutritionally, economically, emotionally."
One of the goals of PEAS, explained Ginsberg, is to be a sort of liaison to the student body to help encourage awareness of these issues.
Marsh also envisions expanded student involvement. "I see Kenyon students stepping into the community as project ambassadors to other young adult and youth audiences across the county," he said.
Since its formation in 2004, the council has met quarterly to discuss the Kenyon-run Rural Life Center's Food For Thought initiative, which provides "a special opportunity for interaction among individuals at all points of the food system and a unique point of contact between Kenyon and area residents," according to the Rural Life website.
The council's membership includes local farmers, institutional buyers, restaurant owners and representatives from Mount Vernon-based distributor Lannings Food, the Mount Vernon Farmer's Market, the College and AVI Foodsystems.
The council is a "collaborative effort" begun several years ago to help "develop a countywide food system," by pooling resources from the community and the College to guide the Food for Thought initiative, with the goal of building a sustainable local market for foods produced in and around Knox County, according to the Rural Life Center web site.
• Project updates
A featured component of Tuesday's meeting was the presentation of two student summer research projects. Meg Maurer '07 and Tempe Weinbach '07 surveyed over 100 Knox County residents to "investigate consumer buying habits and attitudes about local foods." While attitudes tended to be largely in favor of supporting local foods, it was consistently identified that "people don't know where to buy local foods," according to Assistant Professor of Anthropology Bruce Hardy, who advised the student researchers.
Juniors Liesel Schmidt and Mariana Templin's project involved driving along every road in Knox County and stopping whenever they saw a sign advertising an individual farmer selling food from home. "The purpose of this research was to discover the nature of these small-scale businesses: how prevalent they are, what are they selling, and who their customers are," said Schmidt.
Schmidt and Templin's travels brought them in contact with fifty sellers peddling what was often a surplus of eggs, fruit and meat. Half of those sellers expressed interest in being published in Homegrown, a guide to local food products published by the Rural Life Center in 2000, a new edition of which the Council hopes to publish this year.
John Marsh, vice-chair of the council and project coordinator for Food for Thought, presented the state of the ongoing project of trying to turn Mount Vernon's long-abandoned Buckeye Candy Building into a center for local foods, several floors of which were donated to the Food for Thought program.
"We are currently looking at costs to weigh the various local food promotional options the building affords the community," explained Marsh. "The critical role set before us now is to discover what potential for the facility exists within the body of local producers and to facilitate the development of that potential."
Marsh described the costs and benefits of options such as developing a co-op style marketplace or bringing in businesses to sell local foods for profit. However, without a complete knowledge of how much projects will cost and where donations are coming from, no decisions could be made, Marsh said.
"There was a big hesitation within our group to consider something non-profit," said Marsh. "The biggest shortcoming we saw is if there's no money in this place now, how are we going to know there is going to be funding in the future?"
• Local food in Kenyon dining halls
Melody Monroe, resident director of AVI, presented the current status of local foods in Kenyon's dining halls, which is one of the council's largest ongoing projects.
According to Monroe, 16.5 percent of the current food in the dining halls is locally grown, including much of the produce and some of the ground beef and chicken. Although that number is down from the 19.1 percent at the end of last semester, Monroe said AVI's goal is to reach 30 percent by December.
"We are starting to establish direct connections between AVI and local farmers," explained Howard Sacks, director of the Rural Life Center and chair of the council. "As the semester progresses, things will get more routine."
"We have an ongoing effort to open the communication link to the community and all farmers to increase the number of local farms that we source from, not only for Kenyon's dining halls," said Sam Gillard from Lannings Food, the distributor from which Kenyon buys its local food. "We sell a lot of local produce to our other customers."
One of the goals for the semester, according to Monroe and Sacks, is to improve the "educational component" within the dining halls, making it more clear which foods are locally grown and which farms they come from.
Monroe and Sacks also hope to address the question of what exactly 'local' means. The definition currently includes counties surrounding Knox County.
• Next step
However, one of the obstacles to the initiative's goals is a lack of awareness of the potential for a local food network. May farmers said that their own neighbors were unaware of even the weekly farmer's market in Mount Vernon. Sacks and other members of the Council emphasized that the next large step for the group is to come up with a formal marketing strategy in order to more effectively spread the word to Knox County residents.
"The support in the community is that you literally have to go dig it up," said Marsh.
The Council also hopes to come up with a more effective system of connecting institutional buyers, such as restaurants or retirement homes, with local producers, in order to guarantee both a stable supply and demand.
• Why local food?
"I think local food is all about creating a community, the sort of community that's been lost over the past 50 years," said Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, president of the Kenyon student organization People Endorsing Agricultural Sustainability (PEAS), who also attended Tuesday's council meeting. "It's about trying to recreate those links through which people knew each other, people cared about each other. … It's something that benefits the community nutritionally, economically, emotionally."
One of the goals of PEAS, explained Ginsberg, is to be a sort of liaison to the student body to help encourage awareness of these issues.
Marsh also envisions expanded student involvement. "I see Kenyon students stepping into the community as project ambassadors to other young adult and youth audiences across the county," he said.