Transcription of Healthy Harvest #57
Male: You are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland Maine. Show summaries are available at doctorlisa.org. Download and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle through iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details. Here are some highlights from this weeks program.
Female: It meets you because you say you don’t have to meditate eating this way. You become meditation because your body isn’t fighting anymore. It’s just hooked up with heaven and heart and all of the things moved through you in a freeway as suppose to having to fight all the time to find balance. For me it’s very therapeutic and I find that children or people of all ages and abilities can find some sense of peace and satisfaction when they’re in the garden when they’re allowed to get dirty, and dig around and see something grow from a tiny little seed to a plant that can actually be given away and help others.
Male: Then our task is okay, we have a student that has not resonated with traditional school, how are we going to integrate the student into our program and find whatever gift they may bring and amplify that gift.
Male: One way, we look at farm to school as breeding a whole new generations of folks that really are into growing food, and cooking food, and eating food.
Male: The Dr. Lisa radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors. Maine Magazine, Mike LePage, and Beth Franklin of Re/Max Heritage. Robert Hodgkins at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Seabags, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialist. Marci Booth of Booth Financial Services. UNE, the University of New England. Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial. Aphotic Carry by Design, and The Body Architect.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Show number 57, Healthy Harvest. For the first time on October 14th, 2012 on WLOB and WPEI Radio Portland Maine. Also streaming on wlobradio.com. Today’s guest include Lisa Silverman, Macrobiotic cooking instructor from Five Season’s Cooking School. Christine Slader of the Yarmouth Community Garden, Craig Haims of the REAL School, and Ken Morris from the Maine Farm to School Network.
Of those of you who listen regularly may realize we spent a lot of time in the last few weeks talking about students, and schools, and education, and this is an appropriate time of year to be doing that because September is our back to school month, or was our back to school month and now we’re into October which happens to be farm to school month. As a younger physician in primary care practice, I quickly realize that food and nutrition was pretty much key to many of the problems that I was dealing with my patients.
I also quickly realized that it was something I needed to learn more about. In medical school we did get a basic education in bio chemistry and nutrition. We didn’t really learn about hands on things, cooking for example. When I was reconfiguring m y practice and trying to figure out how I could best help my patients I went back and I thought myself how to cook. In fact I went into the Macrobiotics school of cooking which is a healing tradition, Macrobiotics is a healing tradition.
This is one of the reasons that we have Lisa Silverman coming in to talk to us today. For more than a decade I wrote for the parent and family newspaper and spent many columns advocating about getting children into the gardens, getting adults into the garden, getting adults out to the Farmers Market and really reconnecting people with their food. Now that was more than a decade ago now, maybe 15 years.
I’m happy to say that it’s come to fruition, many people who formally believe in the importance of Community Gardens, School Gardens, and getting children and adults back out where the food is being grown. I think this is something that we’re all coming to understand. It’s important from a multi sensory perspective, the fact that you get your hands on your food, you learn how to grow your food, or at least you appreciate how it is grown.
You learn how to cook your food, you know what’s nutritious for yourself and for your family and you know how you can choose for sustainable products that are going to better impact the local economy and the environment. This is the reason that we have Lisa, Christine, Craig, and Ken on today’s show talking with us about health harvest. Thank you for joining us, we hope you enjoy this.
Female: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is pleased to be sponsored by the University of New England. As part of our collaboration with the University of New England. We offer segment we call Wellness Innovations. This weeks Wellness Innovation is National Farm to School Month. October is National Farm to School Month, a time to celebrate the connections that are happening all over the country between schools and local food.
Farm to school is broadly define as any program that connects school K-12 and local farms with the objectives of serving healthy meals in school cafeterias, improving school nutrition, providing agricultural health and nutrition education opportunities and supporting local and regional farmers. Farm to School program exist in all 50 states, but since Farm to School is a grassroots movements, program are as diverse as the communities that build them.
To find out more information about Farm to School, please visit their website at farmtoschool.org. For more information on National Farm to School Month visit farmtoschoolmonth.org. For more information on the University of New England visit une.edu.
Male: This portion of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast has been brought to you by the University of New England, UNE an innovative health sciences university ground in the liberal arts. UNE is the number one educator of health professionals in Maine. Learn more about the University of New England at UNE.edu.
Lisa: From the beginning of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We are focused on the importance of healthy foods, and bringing healthy foods into our lives and to our children’s live. We consider healthy foods, to be really whole foods. Foods that are not processed, foods that don’t have a lot of additives. Lisa Silverman is right in our camp, we thought we would bring her in today. She is a Whole Food chef, not the chef from Whole Foods but she actually works with Whole Foods.
She is also a Breath worker, and a Shiatsu practitioner and is the owner of the 5 Seasons Cooking school. Lots of different things, plus I know she has a few other jobs. She’s all about the whole life and the whole living. Thank you for coming in Lisa Silverman.
Lisa S: My pleasure to be here.
Lisa: Now, I’ve known about you Lisa for awhile. Your reputation procedure, you’ve been in a community a long time, teaching.
Lisa S: Yes, over 20 years.
Lisa: You’ve been doing this since before Whole Foods were popular but obviously we’ve been eating Whole Foods for a long time in our culture. It’s just that 20 years ago we really had gotten into more of a process sort of food.
Lisa S: Let’s see about, 20 years ago we have the good day market, and the whole grocer. I grew up with more of those sort of smaller health food stores and they were great, because they made their own food right there, and it’s just amazing.
Lisa: This was a movement before Whole Foods became the big Whole, and we have nothing against Whole Foods, let me just say that. We like the fact that they’re out there in the community and we’re happy to have them. Before the big Whole Foods came in to being, you were all about?
Lisa S: Food.
Lisa: Vegetables things from the earth, and I think that your background is in Macrobiotics.
Lisa S: Yes.
Lisa: Tell me about that.
Lisa S: Yes, well I went through a change in my life like 23, just looking at a healthier lifestyle from the kind of crazy lifestyle I’d had before then. I was looking at how food can help balance out of addiction. I was going to school in Orono at the time, and I met a woman, and she said “You need to go to the “Kushi Institute to study.” I never made miso soup anything before I went through a five week course there.
I bought the little book, and tried to make miso soup, before I went. I wasn’t practicing Macrobiotics before I went there for five weeks, and it was an amazing experience.
Lisa: Who are the Kushi? Tell me who they are.
Lisa S: The Kushi Institute was founded by Michio and Evelyn Kushi. They’re from Japan, and they studied with somebody named George Ohsawa. He discovered that Hippocrates said “Food be your medicine, and medicine be your food.” You can discover how somebody illness came about by just looking at what they eat pretty much. Patterns of eating and that, and if you ate more foods that were centered like simple brown rice, vegetables, beans, some transformational.
What do you want to call them. Transformational process foods, not process foods like we called today, but things like miso, Tamari soy sauce that’s been brewed for a long time. This is some of this traditional healing foods along with simple whole food that he could heal anything. They came over here to the United States and started the Kushi Institute which is training on visual diagnosis, cooking, Shiatsu massage, and lifestyle.
For five weeks I not only learn about cooking but I learn about Macrobiotic philosophy. It’s really based on Taoism. Allso, Shiatsu massage, sometimes I would get three to five a day which is good for anybody.
Lisa: I mean in your training you actually got massage yourself.
Lisa S: Yes, because we were practicing on each other and then the cooking itself and then diagnosis, like looking at somebody and seeing how to balance your diet based on what you see in their face or hands or way they walk.
Lisa: Now it seems like they’re maybe a cross over. Well I actually I’ll say I know there’s a crossover, because I practice this type of medicine, but there is a crossover between 5 elements in traditional Chinese medicine in what you’re describing.
Lisa S: Yeah, we got 5 transformations, and 5 elements, and so the way of eating is based on seasonal. I call it 5 seasons cooking school based on the 5 elements of wood. We call it wood, I don’t know you can call it tree. We know we call it tree, the wood. Then fire, and then late summer that fifth we’re in right now kind of which is stomach pain and pancreas which is more that energy.
Then fall, which is metal, and then water which is the winter time. Basing your diet on the seasons, and basing it on the organ systems that are more prominent in that season to heal is all that Macrobiotics is about. It’s totally tandem.
Lisa: Yes, there’s a lot of crossover between the five elements, and the five transitions you’re describing and of course this whole five seasons idea.
Lisa S: Yes.
Lisa: What was It like when you started doing this 20 years ago, before there were so many acupunctures, there were so many 5 element practitioners, there were so many people that were doing this type of work here in the Portland area.
Lisa S: Yeah, well at first I felt alone, in Orono, because there wasn’t much out there for support. I think my first winter by myself, eating this way I went a little bit nuts. Because I have a very narrow view, and I thought I got scared of food for a little while if it wasn’t brown rice, and tofu, and vegetables. I thought I was going to go crazy, but I was just getting a little bit too narrow in my thinking and in my diet.
That’s what happens sometimes in the beginning you get too fanatic about it. I did reach out to some other people that I met in the Macrobiotic community who had more of a whole person approach. They were able to sort of guide me back. I did end up seeing Tow Bowman which is a 5 element acupuncture. He was really helpful with the different aspects of my own energy getting it unstuck along with the food, but with the meridians and the needles.
It goes this is the only side effect right now, but he was great. You could just talk to him and I mean it really was about his whole person, not only the needles but the philosophy and the 5 elements. Because I was attracted to 5 element because of the 5 transformations of what I was learning.
Lisa: It’s interesting to me about you first got into this because of this idea of addictions. Why was that the case?
Lisa S: I had this idea that healing, for me it was alcohol and drug addiction that there must be a way of eating that with support that and help limit cravings. When I went to the Kushi institute setting Yin and Yang setting contraction and expansion. At first it was little tricky, I thought “Oh well if I eliminate meat, and if I eliminate a lot of salt maybe I could drink again.
It kind of mess with my mind a little bit, but then after awhile there really isn’t any place for that in my life anymore. By eliminating some of the really contracting food, you’re not driven necessarily towards the more expensive things like alcohol and drugs and sugar. It wasn’t necessarily about just eliminating those things, those eliminating the stress which is the contraction, who’s eliminating the meat which are really contracting to the body.
Really salty foods, baked, dry, whatever product type things. Almost by eliminating that, it sort of opens up your whole body. It can relax more in yourself, and not feel like you need a fix, or you need something at the end of the day. It meets you because you says you don’t have to meditate eating this way, you become meditation.
Because your body isn’t fighting anymore, it’s just hooked up with heaven and earth and all the things move through you in a freeway as suppose to having to fight all the time to find balance.
Lisa: Macrobiotic itself, the definition has something to do with large living.
Lisa S: Living, eating for longevity. Living large life but also living a long time. If you read the book the Blue Zone, it talks about what are the elements of longevity in different cultures in Okinawa Japan is one of them. That’s very in line with Macrobiotics or thinking and philosophy is eating whole natural foods. They’re not necessary vegan, they ate some fish, and it’s really about making balance with your constitution at this moment and your condition growing up.
There’s not one meal plan that’s for everybody. It’s really looking at the individual and seeing what would make balance in their life right now, what would make balance and what they’ve been doing up to this point, and how do we restore homeostasis so that the body can heal itself.
Lisa: Some people take advantage of Macrobiotic eating for true healing. Some people who have cancer, I know Meg Wolff is a mutual friend of ours, and she had breast and bone cancer and she’s written a few books about that. Initially this was a healing diet.
Lisa S: Yes, yes. Initially it was a traditional diet, before people got sick. Then when people start getting sick, by getting away from it. It became a healing diet, and Meg was one of my students and she never thought she could teach her cooking class, and one time I couldn’t go to the cancer community center. She goes, “We’ll they ask me to go but I never thought a quick classes and Meg you live it.”
You live it, you can do this and it’s just amazing, every person that I help to work with, and see their transformation it just reminds that I have a tool that can help save lives too.
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Female: As you know the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is focused on the mind, body and soul. Sometimes our bodies are given us a little indication that maybe things aren’t quite right. Here to talk to us about some particular things that we can listen to when our bodies are acting up, is Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialist in Falmouth Maine. Today’s diagnosis is Lateral Epicondylitis. Dr. John?
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Lisa: For people who are listening who aren’t quite ready to sort of go the whole way with this. What are a few simple things that they can do to get started with Macrobiotics and whole food.
Lisa S: There’s a couple of great books out there, my friend Jessica Porter wrote the book Hip Chick’s guide to Macrobiotics. A lot of my recipe’s are in that, and I’ve done the test kitchen. She really has a fun way of explaining Macrobiotics that’s light hearted and she also wrote the Kind Diet with Alicia Silverstone which is more of a Vegan book but has some of those same principles. Finding a book, or Christina Pirello has a great website called christinacooks.com
There’s a great recipes on there, trying one new recipe a week, or I do these crazy things like going to brown rice fast for 7 days. We did a winter rice reset, although arsenic and rice you might want to do barley or millet or quinoa now I want them to fix the whole rice thing. Chewing whole grains and having the a little bit of vegetables for 7 days can kind of bring you to a place of center to see how food really affects you.
Because sometimes we’re just eating stuff everyday, kind of unconsciously and don’t really know how would affect us. By having a period of time off of processed foods, sugars, coffees and then reintroducing them maybe or maybe not and see how they really affect you can be an awakening. You know anybody can eliminate sugar, coffee, a lot of meats. I mean looking at the movie Forks Over Knives can be experience or Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.
I mean some of these movies are crazy, but they just gave me an idea of. “Wow a period away from the way that you eat everyday like a break from that.” Giving your body high nutrient dents food, I mean I have a bumper sticker eat more kale. Just go to the Farmers Market and eat stuff that’s in season, that’s organic, that’s locally grown, that has this vital energy in it. Choosing high quality food is really important.
If you ate more kale, if you ate high nutrients dents food, it’s almost like the suboxone of food people. It sort of syncs in to the receptors of your hungry crazy ghost. That feels it needs to eat all the time, and it satisfies them on a level where then you need such process foods. Eating more vegetables, eat plants, just eat plants.
Lisa: I like it. How can people find out more bout you Lisa, and what you do?
Lisa S: I have a website, fiveseasonscookingschool.net. I’m kind of lazy, keeping it up to date, but it has ways of getting in touch with me, and we also have a Macrobiotic potluck, usually every month. If you want to be in the mailing list for the things that are going on in Portland, it’s [email protected]. If you e-mail me, I’ll put you on the list, and we have things like Warren Cramer comes every four months to teach dinner and a lecture and a cooking class and he does consultations. He gave Meg her first consultation of Macrobiotics.
He comes every four months, and we have teachers come from around.
Lisa: Well, I’m so glad that I was finally able to meet face to face with you. I’m really happy that you brought Macrobiotics into the Portland Community and I guess the Orono community before that. Because I think it’s an important thing for people to explore if they need healing, or even if they just want to live full of their lives. It’s something that I practice myself or I attempt to.
People who are interested go see Lisa Silverman website. We’ve been talking with Lisa Silver Silverman Whole Food Chef Breath worker, Shiatsu practitioner, and founder of the Five Seasons Cooking School here in the Portland area. Thanks for coming in.
Lisa S: Thanks for having me.
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Male: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, is brought to you by the following generous sponsors, Mike LePage, and Beth Franklin of Re/Max Heritage, in Yarmouth Maine. Honesty and Integrity can take you home. With Re/Max Heritage it’s your move. Learn more at Rheritage.com.
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Lisa: I first learn about the Yarmouth Community Garden about the time it was founded I think. My friend Marjory introduced me to the concept that actually have a plot there for a few years, and it’s my great pleasure to have with me today, a representative from the Yarmouth Community Garden this is Christine Slader. Whom I’ve also known for quite awhile. She’s a fellow Yarmouth person that also helped me with a book Our Daily Thread that we put together for our safe passage.
Christine like myself has a son that went down as a long term volunteer for Safe Passage. We’re talking about the Yarmouth Community Garden, but we’re starting with the idea of community and how that’s important on our Healthy Harvest Show. Thanks for coming in Christine.
Christine: Thank you, its very nice to be here.
Lisa: Why are you involved with the Community Garden, and what is the Community Garden?
Christine: Community Garden is a wonderful opportunity to bring many different ages and abilities and types of people together to form community. I’m involved because I have grown up in Yarmouth and love my town, and I love to Garden and I love Children. Yarmouth Community Garden is a wonderful place and opportunity for me to bring all my passions together, and help my talent give back to my town.
Lisa: Describe what the Community Garden layout is.
Christine: Okay, it’s about two and a half acre plot on town owned property, right near the Frank Knight Forest which is on East Main Street. It’s between S Brooke Greenhouse and the town transfer station which is local like to call the dump. It’s a beautiful piece of property. It’s got sunshine, great fertile soil, and it encompasses three different sections. One is the, mental plot one is The Community Garden, and one section is the Children’s Garden.
That’s the part I’m most actively involved in. The mental plot consist of about 140 10 by 10 plots. Where people anyone from our town, or non residents can come and grow a garden, The Community Garden is set to grow vegetables and flowers for people in need, and then the Children’s Garden we also do that but its also considered a Learning Garden where we offer classes for children to come in and learn about gardening become future gardeners and also get started becoming community members.
Lisa: What do you think that gardening is important for children and adults.
Christine: It gets you back to your roots, I mean literally and figuratively. It’s for me, it’s very therapeutic and I find that children or people of all ages and abilities can find some sense of peace and satisfaction when they’re in the garden, when they’re allowed to get dirty, and dig around, and see something grow from a tiny little seed to a plant that can actually be given away and help others. It’s also really fun to garden.
It’s the chance where your parents don’t mind if you get dirty, and you get to eat what to grow, I’ve seen children who come into the garden, and don’t like vegetables, before our classes start. By the end of the season they’re asking for more. Had a little girl this year who ask her mom if she could have more salad because she grew the vegetables and her mom was thrilled of course.
It’s just a great place to hang out.
Lisa: Do you notice there’s a difference between boys and girls. I mean you’re involved with the children in this garden. Is there a difference between boys and girls and the way that they approach gardening?
Christine: I’m so glad you ask that question. Because we offer two classes and over the years we’ve had a younger class, and we’ve had an older class. We started the younger classes with four or five and six year old. The older class was for 7, 8, 9 10 year olds. Then we ended up combining the two age groups, because it was more convenient for parents and we are little worried about the boys specially in the older class.
The boys love to garden just as much as the girls. The older boys especially love to be in the Community Garden. I have returning campers who come back every year and I actually have one boy who, if I have time for a story he was very reluctant the first year his mother signed him up. His name is Ben and he was mad that his mother signed him up for the class. I had him eating out of my hand at the end of the class because he loves art, and I was doing my first class was on Vincent Van Gogh and how you can intertwine art into the garden with sunflowers.
His mother just so happen to be an art major, art history major so he knew about Van Gogh and he’s like “oh, maybe this class isn’t so bad”. He has returned every year to the garden class and this year he was one of my counselor helpers, so it’s very cool and I paid him a little money and gave him gift certificate and he came in and the kids loved him. He loves teaching them what he knows and has learned. He shows the boys especially that boys can hang out in the garden and enjoy themselves.
Lisa: How many years does that community garden been going on Yarmouth?
Christine: Almost 10 years, we were established in 2003, so we’re celebrating an anniversary coming up.
Lisa: Christine, you and I both have older boys or out of the house now. What kind of an impact has this garden and the work that you’ve been doing with the Yarmouth Community Garden had on your boys as they’ve grown up?
Christine: Well, my boys have always been part of my gardening experience from the time they were born and could walk. They’ve been helping me in the garden. When they were little they used to give me a gift at Mother’s day and they would go to the transfer station and get the free mulch there and they would sift it out and bring it home and that was called Mother’s day mulch. They would help me spread that on the garden. They have learned to like their vegetable a little better knowing that their mom helped grow them and they helped grow them.
I think throughout their young adulthood, they have seen me work very hard and have learned and its probably influenced their work ethic. Both of them are very hard workers, Wilson, my son who’s in college right now is working in a restaurant and likes to be around food and vegetables, he loves to cook and eat vegetables and works through his school career so he is very busy and has a good work ethic.
Alex who doesn’t like vegetables quite as much still appreciates them, and he is also involved in a restaurant work and has enjoyed the cucumbers from the Yarmouth Community Garden. This summer he has been mending from a snowboarding accident and would go up to the garden with me a couple of times and just hang out with me when it’s peaceful in the evening and there aren’t so many people around. Just kind of have a chance to rest and restore being around the garden.
He likes the birds up there and the view. The sounds of nature.
Lisa: It sounds like a very healing place.
Christine: It is. Is it. For me especially, I mean, we all have our stress, this has been a very busy summer for me. I’m restoring a house and I work at four different jobs and when I go to the community garden whether it’s with people around or by myself, I just feel rejuvenated and take time to pause and watch the birds. Listen to the sounds. There are beautiful sunsets at the Yarmouth Community Garden. If the mosquitoes don’t drive me out, I’ll stay there and just be by myself.
Then again if people show up, that’s also very restorative for me because the people there are amazing. I have made some of the most wonderful friends and they are from all walks of life. We have older volunteers there. We have children of course who I’ve got to know very well and their families. We have people who are first gardeners. We have people like Norm, who is we call him the Onion man. He’s one of our older gardeners and he has so much knowledge of the garden that I just love, just gardening alongside him and hearing what he has to teach and spending time with him.
He has taught us everything from how to grow things to make sure you put the tools away clean and don’t leave them upside down in the path, where somebody might step on them. There’s just a wealth of amazing people that get involved in the community garden and I love being around them.
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Lisa: I understand that you have this upcoming event where people can maybe meet some of these amazing people.
Christine: Yes.
Lisa: You’ve already alluded too a little bit but tell us about this?
Christine: Well it does take place on Wednesday, October 17th from 5:00 to 7:30, it’s at the Yarmouth High School Cafeteria and the menu is of garden produce. We have pasta with marinara sauce made with our own tomatoes. We have Chef Stephanie from the Seagrass Bistro and she takes all her tomatoes and volunteers her time to make the sauce, so it’s amazing. We have pesto that all the volunteers help make. We gather up the basil throughout the season and make our own pesto.
We have fresh salad. Unfortunately, that isn’t from the garden because it’s gone by by then, but we get that from local sources. We have local artisan bread. We have an army of helpers who peel and make apple crisp. Peel the apples from my local, I think Sweetser often times gives us apples and they all work together. We set up the cafeteria in a beautiful harvest style. This year, we have a really nice wonderful new volunteer. Her name is Mary Webber.
She lives in Yarmouth and has been growing flowers in her garden her whole life and giving them away, which is another example of the amazing kindness and generosity of our community. This year she’s been giving flowers to the Meals on Wheels program, which is one of the recipients of our garden produce, so each time people get a meal from Meals on Wheels they also get a little posy made from her flowers, by some of the volunteers, like Ted and Jane.
She will be making the centerpieces for the dinner. They’re going to be sold or given away I think. We have an amazing raffle. All local goodies like gift certificates, we have beautiful, original artwork, jewelry, garden people, little wooden garden people. I make a garden lady who sits in a chair and we sell that or auction that off. It’s just a really fun night, and I always have a table set up for the kids so we have coloring and crafts and they get to take all my pumpkin, as long as the supply last, so it’s a great night.
It is our major fund raiser, it’s how we support the community garden.
Lisa: Well, I encourage all of our listeners to take advantage of your harvest dinner and they can find out more about your community garden and the harvest dinner on the website?
Christine: Yes, it’s www.yarmouthcommunitygarden.org.
Lisa: Do you have a Facebook page as well?
Christine: We do. Like us.
Lisa: Very good. Well thank you so much for coming in and talking to us today. We’ve been talking with Christine Slader, who is the children’s garden coordinator at the Yarmouth Community Gardens and also a personal friend of mine. So it’s been a privilege to have you in the studio with us.
Christine: Thank you. It’s been a privilege to be here.
Lisa: For those of you who are listening. You know that we spent a lot of September talking about education and the relationship between education and health. What I’ve loved to see over the past I don’t know, 10 years or so is an increased emphasis on nutrition in schools. I think we’ve seen this from a larger standpoint with the USDA with the Department of Agriculture, but we’ve also seen a Farm to School Movement.
Of course, Ken Morse is going to talk more about the Farm to School Movement but with us we also have Craig Haims who is a long time alternative educator who works at the REAL School. As a co-founder of the REAL School Lunch program, which is an ongoing service learning project. Craig you have a very varied background and you’re doing a lot of different things. First I want to talk about what is this REAL School.
Craig: That’s right.
Lisa: What’s the REAL School, where is it?
Craig: The REAL School is a school on Mackworth Island in Falmouth. We’re a program of the Windham Public schools. However saying that, we also accept students from all over Southern Maine. We’re the only special purpose, dual purpose, alternative ed, special ed school in the state. We’re certified as both which makes us somewhat unusual. We draw students from all over Southern Maine. We work with students who have struggled in mainstream placements. They’re largely at risk. Kids that have struggled in mainstream placements and basically we work with them at the REAL School and engage them this year particularly in service learning projects.
Lisa: What is a service learning project?
Craig: Service learning is multi-faceted. Typically it’s a long-term project that integrates the various different subject areas through real meaningful and purposeful work. One of the projects that we’re most excited about this year is called the REAL Lunch program. It’s a program whereby we’re trying to integrate as much local food into our school lunch program as we can. We’ve involved students in basically growing food right on the island. We’ve established two gardens on the island. One is a winter garden where we can grow greens throughout the winter and fall season. The other one is a summer and fall garden.
We’ve broken program into two components. One component is the agriculture component. The other program is the culinary arts component. The students are very involved on many different levels. Engaging them on many different levels with local food, from planning the gardens, to ordering seeds, to sowing the seeds, to everything it takes to prepare the garden beds all the way through the harvesting process, and preparing and the cooking process which is a whole another big event in itself. Students do this Wednesday through Friday throughout the school year.
Lisa: If you have a summer garden and a winter garden, who’s taking care of the garden when nobody is in school?
Craig: Good question. This is why it’s helpful to have teacher to live close by the island, myself included. Christine Caputo is one of the co-founder of this program along with myself, and she and I took turns throughout the summer coming and checking on the gardens. Bringing students with us, we try and involve our students throughout the school year. We’d bring students with us to help harvest, to help weed and do whatever needed to be done in the gardens throughout the summer.
It’s a little bit more labor-intensive, having to drive out to Windham and pick up students and bring them back to Falmouth but they need to be involved in the summer. It’s a great way to involve them, continue your relationship with the student over the summer, make sure that there isn’t any kind of regression that might happen in the summer, I just keep them involved.
Lisa: Tell me about what types of students actually end up at the REAL School. How old are they and why do they end up there?
Craig: Well it’s a 7 through 12 school. We work with students who have struggled in mainstream placements. Now they may have struggled because the academic difficulties, socio-emotional difficulty, learning disabilities. There’s a whole variety of reasons why students may come to us. The common denominator is they have not found success in the traditional channels. They’ve struggled often mightily before coming to us. Then our task is okay, we have a student that has not resonated with traditional school, how are going to integrate this student into our program and find whatever gift they may bring.
Amplify that gift and figure out a way to be super creative and get them recharged up about school and about their won lives and becoming contributors. I think the REAL Lunch program is a good way to take somebody who may be more accustomed to being a consumer, to a producer. Teaching them how to produce, make something, make something real and eventually develop some price in that, eventually develop some ownership in that. That’s what we do.
Lisa: What would you say to those who might be a little bit cynical about the high cost of educating students in an alternative way?
Craig: I guess I’d say to those folks. We all live in our community together. Everybody is a valuable member of our shared community, and the alternatives of not educating our kids and whatever means it takes to educate them can be severe and it can lead to all kinds of social problems that none of us would care to carry the cost of. It’s critical and it’s critical that we step outside the bounds of traditional education to engage the kids who have just not thrived in that system.
There is a handful of kids that have not thrived in traditional settings. Despite the excellent amazing dedicated efforts of their teachers and their administrators, they still have not responded to the traditional approach. At the REAL School, we see it as our responsibility to be completely different because anything that’s been tried before hasn’t worked with our population of kids. That we see it as our responsibility to be different. We do that in many ways.
One of the foremost ways is relational education and doing whatever it takes to find the good and whatever kids steps through our door and amplify it and make it shine a light on it and amplify it. That’s what we do. Using service learning and relational ed, we have great results.
Lisa: How can people who are listening find out more about the REAL School and the REAL Lunch program that you’re doing?
Craig: Okay, well, we have a website www.realschool.org, that’s one way. Another way is to visit our school. We’re on Mackworth Island. We have an open door policy. We’d love to have visitors come to our school and see what we do, it’s very unique. It doesn’t look like traditional school as you would imagine. It’s very dynamics. This year, the Windham RC14 district has hired a videographer, who’ll be doing videos all throughout the district including videos at the REAL School. There are links to videos on our website as well. If you can’t get to the school, certainly check out our website.
Lisa: For those people that I go out to Mackworth Island I walk around there, and I think there are lots of people who walk around, those people who are listening, kind of peak over and see if you can see the garden out there.
Craig: That’s right. That’s right. As you walk around that lovely nature trail, which I think is about a mile and a half loop. When you hit your second field, not your first field but your second field, I guess this is if you’re walking counterclockwise around the island from the parking lot. Then you can see our low line brick building and one of our gardens off in front of the school. Then the other garden is if you were to drive to the interior of the island pass the gate house on the left, there’s a hoop house there and that’s where we have our fall and winter garden.
Lisa: You also have a Facebook page?
Craig: We do have a Facebook page, that’s our service learning page. It’s called the REAL School AmeriCorps Service Learning Program on Facebook and we’ve recently returned a contingent of students and our Director Pender Makin and AmeriCorps members went down to Florida to do a sea turtle rehabilitation project and just yesterday we loaded photographs from that experience in Florida, it’s pretty exciting.
Lisa: Thank you so much, we’ve been talking with Craig Haims of the REAL School and the REAL Lunch program. I encourage all of our listeners to go check out the website, the Facebook page, watch some of the videos, walk around Mackworth Island and get a sense of what’s going on over at the REAL School.
Craig: Thank you so much.
Male: We’ll return to our interview after acknowledge the following generous sponsors. Robin Hodgskin, Senior Vice President and Financial Advisor at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Portland, Maine. For all your investment needs, call Robin Hodgskin at 207-771-0888. Investments and services are offered through Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, member SIPC and by Booth, Accounting and Business Management Services, Payroll, and Bookkeeping. Business is done better with Booth. Go to Boothmaine.com for more information.
Lisa: Today on our Healthy Harvest Show. We are speaking with Ken Morse of the Maine Farm to School Network. Ken has a wealth of experience in other areas as well in which we’ll talk more about but we’re very pleased to have you coming in to talk about Farm to School. Why is this so important to you Ken?
Ken: Well, I mean there’s a lot of reasons and it’s a real cultural shift thing, it’s not a simple one kind of thing. It’s more cultural. We were talking about it this morning at our staff meeting, we were talking about walking school buses. Why kids don’t walk to school more? There’s some safety issues. I think part of the childhood obesity epidemic which most everybody knows how serious it’s become is that kids are not as free to play outside as kids used to be.
When some of us were younger, we’re outside all the time. Not only that but then they fill their time playing with digital toys. Kids really take to Farm to School to get out and get dirty on school time and it’s really especially helpful for kids that may not thrive in the classroom. More and more learning is being integrated for every subject through the gardens, through working in gardens and learning about food and agriculture.
It’s multiple things but just getting kids out active. At the school project in Norway, they put heart monitors on the kids when they’re building raised beds and they track how much physical activity they’re getting and stuff. The kids love it. They just really enjoy getting out working in the garden and then of course it begins to really impact the school meals too, which have been our problem for quite some time.
They’re very important. Some kids don’t get great meals outside of school. Some of the food in the school meals has probably been more important to support commodity growers who grow surplus than necessarily for feeding kids well.
Lisa: Part of your interest I think in the health and your knowledge of the obesity rates in children comes from the work that you’ve done with Healthy Maine Partnerships.
Ken: Yeah. I’m the Director of a local Healthy Maine Partnership in the Oxford Hills area, Healthy Oxford Hills. Have found that Healthy Maine Partnerships have gotten more and more aware of food system work as part of the solution to the nutrition issues and one of the keys there is that up until very recently one of the changes made by the governor and the legislature, the coordinated school health program was part of the Healthy Maine Partnership System.
All the Healthy Maine Partnerships or HMPS as we call them, have do their works through community partnerships and the one that’s the most important, the most required and funded through the program are the schools. That’s partly why the Healthy Maine Partnerships have tended to be some of the most active community groups with the Farm to School Movement.
Lisa: Given that Maine has traditionally been an agricultural state. Why do you think it took so long for us to get back to the idea that there should be a link between farms and schools.
Ken: You’re right. Maine was a huge agricultural state and but starting when agriculture became more industrialized around the time of World War II, that begin to shift. Actually shifted somewhat before that was as they built canals and railroads, and opened up the Midwest because at one point when Maine was considered the bread basket of the East. That whole industrial agricultural transformation which now to some degree Farm to School is part of a larger movement to reverse that and bring food supplies back closer to home.
That was a pretty radical shift in terms of the way America fed itself. Now as more and more people understand, there’s some real problems with that model. It creates cheap food although the price of the industrial ag products don’t really reflect all the cost, the health cost, the environmental cost that the some of the social justice costs in terms of way people are paid. The climate change implications with food being transported so far.
In one way, we look at Farm to School is bringing a whole new generation of folks that really are into growing food and cooking food and eating food. That’s fresh and local. There’s kind of a lost generation or two between like our grandparents or even some of us when everybody cooked in can and bottle out of their food locally. In the last 50, 60 years or so, that got reverse and all the fast-food places and everything. This is partly a part of a movement of reversing that cultural trend.
Lisa: Ken, how can people find out about the Maine Farm to School Network?
Ken: There is a growing website. You can find it. It needs a number of work. There is a national website, that’s pretty robust. Right now, there’s a national Farm to School month website, which has lots and lots of good stuff on it. There’s the Maine School Garden network website. Those are all ways and then getting in touch with their local Healthy Maine Partnership or other sort of natural partners like the cooperative extension which are the coop extension is very involved with school gardens and Farm to School, pretty much all over the state.
Lisa: This is a University of Maine program?
Ken: Right. Yeah.
Lisa: Cooperative Extension. Great. Well, thank you for coming in. We’d been talking with Ken Morse of the Maine Farm to School Network. We really appreciate all of the work that you’re doing to get kids into gardens and gardens into kids and good food into kids and adults and helping our state be healthier.
Ken: Thank you. Thanks for helping us spread the word.
Lisa: This is Doctor Lisa Belisle and you’ve been listening to the Doctor Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 57, Healthy Harvest. Today’s show has featured Lisa Silverman, Macrobiotic Instructor from Five Seasons Cooking School. Christine Slader from the Yarmouth Community Garden. Craig Haims from the REAL School. Ken Morse from the Maine Farm to School Network. We hope that you’ve enjoyed our conversation with these individuals and thought a little bit about how you might spend some time bringing more real food into your real life.
Whether it’s thinking about a garden for next summer or going to your local farmers market or maybe encouraging your children to get a little bit more involved in the cooking. We know that there are many different ways for us to reconnect with our food and we know that you’ll find just the right one for yourself and your family.
We encourage you to go back and listen to our past Podcasts through iTunes. All of these may be downloaded free at Doctor Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Also sign up for our newsletter through our website doctorlisa.org where you can find more information about our guests. Like us on Facebook, the Doctor Lisa page or get in touch with us when you see us on the street and let us know how you think we’re doing.
We really appreciate your feedback. We also truly appreciate you’re letting our sponsors know that you’re happy that they’re helping us build a better world. This is Doctor Lisa, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for being part of our world. May you have a bountiful life
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The Doctor Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the office of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Doctor Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C McCain. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at doctorlisa.org. Download and become a Podcast subscriber of Doctor Lisa Belisle through iTunes. See the Doctor Lisa website or Facebook page for details.