Transcription of Plenty #38
Speaker 1: You are listening to the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland, Maine and broadcast on 1310 AM, Portland, streaming live each week at 11 a.m. on WLOB radio.com. 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.
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Dr. Lisa: Hello, this is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast, show #38, Plenty, which is airing for the first time on WLOB radio on June 3, 2012. Gen, you and I talk plenty, that’s for sure.
Gen: We do talk plenty, don’t we?
Dr. Lisa: Yes and we seem to enjoy eating plenty, which is kind of what we are talking about today. We are talking about the fact that we live in a state that has lots of farmers and fish and resources but also has some significant problems with hunger.
Gen: It’s pretty shocking when you actually look at the numbers of how many people in our state are food insecure, which means that they don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
Dr. Lisa: That is why we have asked John Woods, the chair of Share Our Strength Maine and Jeff Landry, the chef and owner of the Farmer’s Table and John Naylor from the Rosemont Market and Bakery to come in and talk to us about all of his local plenty that we have and how we could perhaps make it more available to the children in our state who don’t have the plenty that we experience and also how we, ourselves can continue to bring locally grown foods onto our tables, continuing a theme that we began the year with, really.
Gen: I think it’s a really important topic for people to pay attention to because the children who are children today grow into the adults who are going to run our country in the future and there’s a lot of problems with kids, a lot of cognitive problems, a lot of physical problems with kids who do not get enough to eat on a regular basis. I don’t know if you want to go into some of the specifics of that.
Dr. Lisa: We have talked about the levels of need that people have. You need food. You need shelter. You need emotional connection and these are things that psychologists have been dealing with for years but really food, sustenance, you can’t to too long without something to eat, something to put in your belly. When you don’t have that very basic foundational something in you, it makes it hard for you to even function in your life.
Gen: I think kids nod off at school, they can’t pay attention. Certainly, if they are not getting enough protein, they can’t build muscle. If they are not getting enough carbohydrates, the glucose to their brain starts to suffer and their actual neuro development suffers. We have problems here with lead poisoning in some of the older homes and part of that is because kids aren’t getting enough nutrition, the right nutrition that actually keeps lead from binding to their molecules in their blood. They become at much higher risk for actually manifesting lifelong problems from lead poisoning. I think hunger in an age of abundance is one of those chronic and underreported problems.
Dr. Lisa: Also, you talk about hunger we have seen this rise in overweight and obese children in our state and across the country and people then start to say, “What’s the issue?”
Gen: Right.
Dr. Lisa: Kids, how hungry can they be? They are fat, but just because children are overweight or obese, does not mean that they are not hungry. What they are suffering from is a different sort of food insecurity and that is the inability to access the types of foods that will get them learning correctly, and becoming strong, healthy bones and growing properly.
Gen: Isn’t there a correlation between food insecurity in youth and then a propensity for diabetes later on because of the way that your biochemistry works. If you’re eating foods that lack nutritional density and eating a lot of white food and white flour and white processed sugar, that kind of wreaks havoc with your biochemistry, right?
Dr. Lisa: Yes, that’s absolutely true. The things that you do when you’re younger in your life set your up for whatever is going to happen later in your life and I don’t know how much of this has been proven but we know that the adolescent brain, for example, when it’s exposed to alcohol and drugs, it changes the patterning and it makes it that much more addictive alcohol and drugs. I suspect the same thing is true in childhood with regard to the types of foods that you eat and additives and processed foods, the high fructose foods. I suspect the long-term exposure to not the right type of foods can lead to problems down the road and we know that childhood obesity leads to diabetes in adulthood. I think you’re right.
Hunger; whether it’s hunger for better foods or whether it’s hunger for any foods, it’s a significant issue. It is one that we need to address and whether we are addressing by feeding the children who have nothing or whether we are addressing it by exposing our own children to locally grown foods like those at the Rosemont Market, it is something that is going to be, should be on our radar screens always.
Gen: I’m glad were bringing it to everybody’s attention today.
Dr. Lisa: Yes, and those of you are listening to the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast this week will enjoy our interviews with John Woods, the chair of Share our Strength chef Jeff Landry from the Farmer’s Table and John Naylor from the Rosemont Market and Bakery. Keep on listening.
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Dr. Lisa: Today’s Dr. Lisa radio and podcast is about something that’s pretty near and dear to my heart and that has been for a long time. The show is called Plenty, in the recognition that there is plenty out there, but also in the recognition that it may not be evenly distributed, so there is also hunger, and in the studio with us today we have John Woods, who is the chair of Share our Strength Maine. I have heard John’s personal story. I am familiar with the story of Share our Strength. I’ve been to these events and I think it is something that our listeners, that you who are listening are really going to want to hear about. Welcome to studio, John.
John: Nice to be here.
Dr. Lisa: Then we have Genevieve Morgan sitting next to me and Genevieve is my co-host. She’s the wellness editor for Maine Magazine, so she has spent a lot of time thinking about food and how food impacts health and I know that I do this we have talked about this on the show a lot, but the interesting thing is your you’re coming out from a different direction that food impacts health and sort of the lack of food really impacts health and overall well-being.
John: Right.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me a little bit about how you came to be involved, you personally. Tell me your story because it’s fascinating. It’s a great story.
John: I probably have three versions of this answer, but the one I probably go to the most is about the children in Maine. My wife and I, my wife is from Cape Elizabeth here in Maine. We moved here just about ten years ago, and Diane, my wife, works at Timberland and they are a national sponsor of the organization Share Our Strength. At the time, they did not have a presence here in Maine, and so when they started here seven years ago and she found that out, we decided to attend Taste of the Nation. That was out on Great Diamond Island were to be again this year for the first time since and in all the information that we are receiving about the organization, it came to our attention that in Maine alone there are over 69,000 kids who will go to bed tonight, likely without a good, nutritious meal and as a father of four, we thought how is this possible? How in this country where we have so much, the wealthiest country in the world and a state like Maine, can this be? How can there be so many children? We found it unacceptable.
The next question was if we are going to attend this first event and see what it is all about, is that the right place for us? and so over the last seven years, my involvement has changed from being someone who attended the event someone who now oversees it and helps execute it so that we can raise as much money as we possibly can. What I like about the organization or the reason I decided to get more involved is it is an all-volunteer effort. There is no office here in Maine. There is no place that we have to spend a lot of money on. In fact, all of the money that’s raised for the Taste of the Nation is then given back to organizations here in the state that do the hard work of finding these kids, these 69,000 plus kids and getting them the food they need to live a healthy life.
Three years ago they asked me to become the chairman of Taste of the Nation. I am told not to tell this story told but I tell the story. Everyone took a step back and I was the only standing up front, but that’s not true. I really was looking forward to it because my background is hotel and restaurant management. I have also started a successful company that is in sales and marketing and there are other ingredients in my background that say I think really I am the right person for this job at this time.
Dr. Lisa: It’s those ingredients that I think people are going to be so interested in. When we talk about food insecurity, because that’s what you’re talking about, it is hunger. It’s food insecurity, not knowing where the next meal is going to come from. You have a very intimate knowledge of this.
John: Oh yeah, growing up outside of Boston, I grew up in a family five and my father passed away quite young. He was 42 years old and so my mom, like many moms out there, found herself in a situation where should feed five kids and you know you turn to your left and your right and you try to get your family to help out the people living their lives. My grandmother was great. My aunts and uncles were great and they helped out but all that together wasn’t enough and so my mom had to turn to public assistance for some period of time until she figured out the best way forward. During that time, I can remember personally and again, this is probably my second story that I tell about my involvement. I can remember ketchup sandwiches at night, but being a 10 year-old boy coming home from school and being able to make a ketchup sandwich, personally I thought that was terrific.
You know, where is mom? She’s out somewhere. Great, awesome I’m going to have a ketchup sandwich for dinner. I am kind of a glass half-full person, so I’m going to figure out how to make the best of these things. I think if you talk to some of my siblings, they may not have that same memory.
Dr. Lisa: They didn’t like ketchup sandwiches quite as much as you did.
John: I guess they didn’t. You know, I think there are some that thought that things were a little tougher, but through these things for me, they were opportunities. I went out and I started to work in a young age. I worked in restaurants and it led me to all these great experiences where I worked for Sheraton Corporation and then ultimately for Ritz-Carlton hotels for 10 years and learned from the best, so the idea of throwing this one day event where we can go out and try to get as much as we can donated to the event so we don’t have to spend and take in all the proceeds from the event and giving it back to organizations, again, like the Good Shepard food bank and the Preble Street Teen Center and cultivating communities and the opportunity alliance I think that all those ingredients we talked about led me to a place where I think we are very efficient, beyond just throwing this great party, this great event creating this marketplace in which we can raise money to then apply those dollars to end childhood hunger in Maine is only possible because of my life experience.
Dr. Lisa: Have you seen in the three years you’ve been sharing this event the actual manifestation of some of your dollars? Have you seen kids get meals based on what you have done?
John: I try to stay connected to our beneficiaries. I know the folks at Good Shepherd food bank very well. I know the great work that they do. Mark Swan at Preble Street, Gary Craig at Cultivating Community, we have become closer I think than we had been. I think if I could, I will share one story and it is about our Cooking Matters program. Share Our Strength is the overall organization, but within Share our Strength we have very specific platforms in which we try to either raise funds to end childhood hunger or we have an educational program. What we have found out was we are going to give our dollars to the Good Shepard food bank, they are going to go purchase food items that allow families to supplement their groceries for the month and what we found very quickly was the families that are coming in to pick up your groceries often don’t know how to cook what is in the box.
If you think of the life of a mom, like my mom with five kids, it’s pretty busy and so she didn’t have the time in her day to go back and prepare this great meal. I have to think, if I search my memory that we stopped at McDonald’s or we stopped places where the food is not as nutritious, as we would like to think kids can get access to. At the Good Shepard, we see that everyday. I don’t see it because I’m not at that location, but when I do go there I know the when families comer in, very often they can’t identify what a potato is. They don’t know what a tomato is and because we are removed from that night and for those families who haven’t been passed along the skill of cooking, often times they get the end product, they don’t get the raw product. When the families come through, we will say, “Take these home. These just came in from the farm.” “What are those?” “Those are potatoes.” “I don’t know how to cook those.” Even further, they don’t have the facilities to cook them. One of our chefs, all of our chefs, without whom none of this would be possible to participate in not just a Taste of the Nation but in the different programs that we run.
Cooking Matters is this amazing program where we put a chef together, a volunteer chef, together with a volunteer nutritionist and they go to food pantries around the state. When the families come in to pick up their supplemental groceries, the chef and the nutritionist teaches them how to cook what is in the box and in some cases to identify what’s in the box. One of our chefs, I like to circle around behind them sometimes and make sure things went well and I went into Chef Matthews down at the Back Bay Grill and Larry is a quiet guy anyway, but I walked in and he says, “John, what are you doing here?” I said, “I know you had your first class last night, I thought I would check in and see how it went.” His head went down a little bit. It sunk down a little bit and I thought, oh my gosh, I hope it was okay.
Larry is such a great supporter of Taste of the Nation and we are introducing him to this new platform. He took a minute or so, and when he raised his head, he said, “You know, John, I’m going to do this for long time. Those families need our help so badly.” He said, “I had a mom who had two small kids with her and I went in thinking I’m going to teach them how to cook a whole chicken and make four meals out of it and make it last” and as part of program we interview asking questions about what are their facilities at home and this mom was living in a cabin at Old Orchard Beach, a single mom, two young kids, and she can only afford something that was seasonal cabin. There’s no kitchen. How do you cook a chicken when you don’t have a stove? She’s working either out of a crockpot or a microwave, and that changes everything. Think about just the cleanup. You’ve got to clean everything up in the sink in the bathroom.
You know, there are obstacles out there for families, moms, kids, to deliver those nutritional meals, not just access to the food.
Dr. Lisa: You really have to go where people are coming from. You can’t really assume that they know what a potato is. You can’t assume that they have kitchen facilities. You really can’t assume anything. You are starting from ground zero.
John: We cannot.
Dr. Lisa: That’s sounds like one of your challenges. Tell us about some of the other challenges you have encountered?
John: Overall, I lam pretty thrilled with how things are going. Taste of the Nation is approaching a sellout this year. Our sponsor support from companies like Hannaford and Bill Dodge Auto Group and many others, the list is long, has been very, very strong this year, still plenty of room for others to come. I often say, last year I was interviewed at the event and they said, “John, amazing event. How did it go?” I guess I paused and someone said “Why the pause?” I said, “Because I am proud of who is in the tent. I am thrilled with the people that come to support us but I have to think about who is not in this tent.” We do our event in a beautiful tent by the water. Who is not here? Where is everybody else? I’m telling you there are 69,000 kids in Maine that need our help. If they were here in the room, we would open our lunch bag or take them down for sandwich. I’m telling you that these kids don’t have access to nutritional meals. If you are a corporation in Maine, how do you not find us? How do you not get involved?
Genevieve: In my research, what I think is so startling about hunger in Maine is that we are only a population of 1.6 million people. That is not even the population of a major city in this country, and we are only talking about children here. There are also elderly and several other walks of life that are food insecure. It doesn’t seem hard for a population of 1.6 million people to feed everyone.
John: Billy Shore, if he were here, he founded Share Our Strength 27 years ago. He’s a Kennebunkport part-time resident and what Billy often says is any hunger, hunger for all people is hard but feeding a child is not. This is a winnable fight. We know where these children are. We know that we can get on the food or access to the food they need to live a healthy life. Billy, who has also written several books, one of which is called The Cathedral Within writes about the premise which kind of inspires me always is that in ancient times when people designed the cathedral, they knew the day they started that they would never see the completed product. Seven years ago we started building our own cathedral and we call it the No Kid Hungry Campaign, and I know that there will be someone after me that will come in and lead this. I have no question.
I hope I’m around to see the completed product, No Kid Hungry, and we are going to build this cathedral and we are going to find a way to make sure that the kids in Maine have access to the food they need to deliver good healthy life.
Speaker 1: We will return to our interview after acknowledging 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 Hodgkin at 207-771-0888. Investments and services are offered through Morgan Stanley -Smith Barney LLC member 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.
Dr. Lisa: This shows airing on June 3rd, which is right before, actually several different things that are happening that will raise awareness and money for Share Our strength. One of them is the Kennebunkport Festival. Tell me about your involvement with the Kennebunkport Festival, which happens to be important to us because we record out of the office in Maine Magazine, Genevieve Morgan is with me and from Maine Magazine, and they sponsor this event. They put it all on and I don’t think people realize that Maine Magazine doesn’t make money off of this. The money that is made goes to the organizations. Talk to me about this.
John: I think this is the radio hour, so I don’t know if I have enough time to talk about how grateful I am to Maine Magazine and Kevin Thomas and Susan Grisanti for what they’re doing with us. It is a great example of a perfect collaboration. It has also inspired me to collaborate with other events, so if you if you think of the Kennebunkport Festival, they bring together like the Taste of the Nation does, our own event, the best chefs in the state and they celebrate food and get together for this, in this marketplace to bring the chefs together. When I first met Kevin, Susan and Ken, I introduced them to Share our Strength and Kevin, who can be a little bit quiet sat at the end of the table and I said, “Kevin, you know we have thousands of children in the state and in the past four years I’ve been educated myself about this. I think I can think I can do something about that and I want to know if Maine Magazine would come in and help support that effort.” We chatted more about it and at the end of it, he said, “What do you need from us, John? What do you need from Maine Magazine?” I said, “Kevin, I need everything. I want your writers to write about it and I want your photographers to tell a story and pictures. I want you introduce us to your advertisers and sponsors.”
I think if people understand what’s happening out there, we are going to get together. We are going to find a way, right. I know in my career with Share Our Strength and again I am a volunteer, but am in my experience with Share Our Strength, if there are ten things we need to be successful in what were doing, we are probably really strong with five or six of them. The culinary community understands. You tell a chef that a kid is hungry; it is completely unacceptable to them. They say, “What can we do?” The volunteers in Maine, people are very giving of their time and energy, and they come and help us out, but with Maine Magazine, “We are going to throw this festival. We would like to donate proceeds to Share our Strength.”
With us it’s two things, it raises funds that we desperately need to support programs like Good Shepard and Preble Street Teen Center, but it also creates this awareness. They touch people that we don’t necessarily get ourselves in front of, or haven’t to date so were able to rally those individuals who go to the festival to this issue of childhood hunger.
Dr. Lisa: It really is sharing of the strength. It really is, this idea of plenty is very integral to what you’re trying to do. It is that there is plenty out there but you’re trying to sort of more equitably distribute it.
John: I would say that it’s really about access to food. In and today’s political climate of Democrats and Republicans, the one thing that I know they have agreed on is that a child being hungry is unacceptable. That is why they have put a program together like free and reduced meals at school and so every child of every household in this state who lives at or below the poverty line has access to free meals or reduced meals at school. In many cases we have not reached 100% involvement in those programs. So in that case too, it’s also letting those families know that they have access to good nutritious meals at their schools so their children can live that healthy life.
It is a collaboration from the federal government and by the way, those dollars are already set aside, so the way the federal government sets spends their money as they say, “We are going to assume that those 69,000 children in Maine and in every state are going to take us up on this offer to pay for their lunch at school” and then it’s up to the local government in both state and local to let those families know about access to those programs. When they do, the federal government sends those dollars to the state of Maine, which of course has a multiplying effect because the food that they are served is purchased locally. It’s spent at the local farms and distributors and producers. One of our goals is to make sure that the families out there just know that Washington and this has been in place for many years, set aside these dollars and if you have not taken advantage of this because new families that are growing up through the program may not be aware of it, if you just sign up your children will get access to those meals.
Genevieve: Just to be clear, this is a program that is available throughout the state in every public school.
John: That is correct, in every public school across the country.
Dr. Lisa: In a minute, we are going to bring in Jeff Landry, who is one of your chefs and we are excited to have him talk about the work he has done with you. First, I want to get a little bit personal. How has this impacted your family, your four children, your wife, the life that you’re living?
John: We are very blessed. We are fully employed. We have healthy kids in our house. When they come home off the bus because my kids are all young, I make them a snack plate and I will cut them some apples and we will sit around the kitchen table a little bit and I know that these kids are well fed. There are times until say to me, “You know dad, what’s Share Our Strength? I know you’re up late. I know you are doing all this work. Tell me more about it.” I share with them some stories that I hear you now, and I think I love to tell stories and I will tell it to my two boys who are 13 and 111. My two girls and younger so I will get to them but one of the stores I shared was from chef Aaron McCarver, the Food Network, who is one of our national sponsors. I heard him speak one time in and I’ll never forget it. He grew up in a hard place too, in New Jersey. He has a little boy and he was telling the story about how his son said, “Dad, what’s orange band you have on?” It says no kid hungry or the Livestrong arm bands that everyone likes, the kids love so much. He said, “That’s the organization I am helping Share Our Strength.”
He’s the national spokesperson. He said, “What’s that about?” he said, “There are kids we know don’t have food and so we are going to try to find a way to get them access to food.” The son didn’t pursue it any further but a day or two went by and he tells the story and the son came home and said, “You know dad, I think Kevin is hungry.” One of his buddies in school and Aaron McCarver stopped right away and he was like, “Really, why do you say that?” He said, “Because I could hear his stomach rumbling at lunch and he didn’t have a lunch bag.” He said, “Really, son what did you do?” He said, “Dad, I hope you don’t mind but I shared my lunch with him.” The chef said, “No, that’s fine. That’s fine, son. That’s the right thing to do.” He said, “I also gave him my snack to take home because I don’t think he has any food at home.” He said, “Why do you think that?” He said, “He said his mom and his brother and he just moved into a hotel and they don’t have any food at home Dad, and so I gave them some of mine.”
Chef goes on to talk about it. That’s what drives him, right because it’s easy. We see comments sometimes that kids don’t need food, they are overweight. The truth is obesity is the opposite side of the same coin of hunger. I know children, even in my life that are overweight, but they are overweight because they are not eating the right nutritious food. The mom is a single mom. Dad is gone or vice versa, and when that child gets home, the mom working two jobs, so she’s not there and she has to pay the bills and so that child eats a sleeve of crackers or a bag of chips or cookies or things that a young kid is going to do but has no nutrition. It is totally void and so they become overweight from that.
Dr. Lisa: Joining our conversation now is Chef Jeff Landry who is the owner of Farmer’s Table. The Farmer’s Table I have been to down near Commercial Street, and it is focusing on fresh local foods. I know you do a lot with fresh local foods and the interesting thing to me is that you are doing that with fresh, local foods now in this organization that John Woods have been talking to us about Share Our Strength Maine.
Jeff: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me how you came to be involved with that, Jeff.
Jeff: We are talking about seven years ago when all of this started. There was an original band of us, we’ve talked about, and I don’t have children of my own. I never had I guess the time or whatever excuse I can make, but when the situation was presented to us, that you know that these numbers were staggering and John was actually correct. You know, when you talk to the chef about hunger, especially a child being hungry, it is not acceptable in any form, so I think that the initial gut reaction was, you know, let’s get involved with this. Let’s see where it takes us and the nice part about the whole organization is that John has taken it to a level that we could not have ever imagined back then and like he said, our first event was on Great Diamond Island and I just remember myself being water taxied over with extra utensils and people forgetting stuff, I’m sure and it was raining right up until the time the ferries arrived.
The stories were endless, just trying to get stuff to the island and it was my first time backing a box truck onto a barge to get stuff off the island, so there was a lot of great memories and there were a lot of great stories that went along with the first event but I think the general feeling of coming off of the island was this made a difference. The second year rolls around, the third year and here we are in our seventh year, every year gets better and better, and that the people that are associated with the entire event are just phenomenal people and John being the leader of the band, basically.
What we concentrate on restaurant again, you know, we talk about nutritious food. We talk about making sure people are fed. We are a business obviously and we are in the business of being a restaurant, but we also recognize that there is … At least my focus is on local foods, and so I know that there are people in Maine growing these nutritious foods that are available to everybody in the state but it’s how do you get this food in front of people that don’t have enough that they just can’t afford or as John said, sometimes it’s just a matter of it’s time then there’s also facilities to cook and then I’ve employed people on my own at the restaurant that don’t have these facilities to cook. They have no kitchens, no anything but they survive. We feed them at the restaurant, obviously, to make sure they are all set. There are so many facets to this problem. You always wonder how you can get it into one to one neat little package and it is difficult for all of us, I think.
Speaker 1: We will return to our interview after acknowledging the following generous sponsor. Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, makers of Dr. John’s granola cereal find them on the web at orthopedic specialistsne.com.
John: I try to tell a compelling story and say to people, “If we can’t help the children, if we can’t figure this one out, then I think we are in bigger trouble, maybe.” We have to figure out how to end child hunger here and have met many. There are a lot of very smart people in this state and once they hear that this is an existing problem and that we are coming to it with really long-term sustainable solutions, they are going to come help us out and we win this.
Jeff: It’s hard to thrown money at a problem when you have to go to the root of the problem, and I believe that you know through Share Our Strength and through programs that we participate in, we are getting to that point where we understand where it’s coming from and the monies that we do raise and the classes that we do teach are all part of just making this come full circle and make sure that every kid is taken care of. I have had good fortune of teaching two classes now for Cooking Matters, one being an adult class, adults at risk and also who have children at home and then also teaching a grade school class. I think both classes were fulfilling in different ways.
I found that the teaching adults-at-risk class where some had diabetes and the children home was more difficult because these people already had their way of life set. They’ve had these habits. This is where they are and there’s not a lot a way to get out of it, unfortunately, whereas when you’re in the classroom with children, they were able to take these basic skills and this knowledge home with them and talk to their parents about it in a great way and they were required to do some basic homework, to cook a meal at home for your parents. We would send them home with a bag of food and they would have to cook the meal that they cooked in class with their parents and they were really there excited about it. There was a waiting list of children to get into this particular class and we could only take so many because we could only teach so many at a time effectively. Aside from the Taste of the Nation, the great party and everything else, I think you know when you see the grassroots of what this organization is about, it really gives more definition to what we do a daily basis for Share Our Strength.
Dr. Lisa: Where are the Cooking Matters classes offered?
John: The Cooking Matters classes are a really a function of the Good Shepard food bank and so were going into our second full year and the way that cooking matters came to me is we were fortunate enough to find ConAgra Foods. ConAgra Foods is the sponsor, nationwide sponsor for Cooking Matters. They provided a grant for the first three years of Cooking Matters to begin here in the state of Maine. So we went over and talked our good friends at Good Shepard food bank and said, “We have an educational program that will bring to Maine. We will staff it with one person, the only full-time staff person here in the state and we already found someone to pay for that person. ConAgra is going to fund it for the first three years and then we have to figure how to do that ourselves. Will you house them here at Good Shepherd?” They said, “Of course.” They looked at the program and said, “We deliver food to over 500 pantries around the state in every corner of the state of Maine and if you can offer classes to those pantries and put a chef together with a nutritionist and teach the families who come in to those pantries to pickup of supplemental groceries, how could we possibly say no to that?”
It is an answer to a question we had for a long time. Cooking Matters, although it’s a Share Our Strength program is housed here in Maine at the Good Shepherd food bank and so they work directly with the good folks over there and they make these classes available to pantries around the state. What I can tell you about that is the last year we did 29 classes. This year we will do four times that. The demand is as great as we thought it would be and now we are rallying sponsors around this program to make sure that we have the funding to support it.
Dr. Lisa: How do people find out more about Cooking Matters?
John: I think for Cooking Matters, certainly they can go to the national website which is www.strength.org and at that site you will find out more about all of our programs. Locally, we have a Facebook site, of course, and you can always e-mail [email protected] and we will make sure we get you the information that you need.
Dr. Lisa: Tell us about some of the other events that are coming up that benefit Share Our Strength Main?
John: We talked about the Kennebunkport Festival. We are really excited for that to come up. We will be in attendance at all the events and personally I will be down there to help support it in any way that I can. Of course, we have our big flagship fundraiser we call the Taste of the Nation. This year it is happening on June 24 on Great Diamond Island. We have been very fortunate that it’s being hosted by the Diamond’s Edge restaurant and Marina, the Princess family has offered us their facilities and we are going to bring 22 of this state’s best chefs out there, put them alongside their chefs from both the Chebeague Inn and Diamonds Edge for this pretty amazing event and tickets for that can be found at www.strength.org/Portlandme.
Yes, volunteers, event managers, chefs, and of course sponsors, organizations around the state that that say, “This is something I think our organization or company can get behind”, we look for those guys every day.
Dr. Lisa: People can make a direct donation as well.
John: Yes, of course you can do that are directly through the national website strength.org.
Dr. Lisa: We have been talking with John Woods, the chair of Share Our Strength Maine and Chef Jeff Landry of the Farmers Table here in Portland who is also a chef chair, I believe honorary, an honorary chef chair?
Jeff: It is.
Dr. Lisa: Indeed, it is a very honorable what you’re doing. We appreciate you coming in today and talking to us about this idea of hunger and the flipside, this idea of plenty, because we do have plenty and we all have the ability to share our strength, so we encourage our listeners to do just that.
John: Thank you for your time.
Jeff: Thank you very much.
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Dr. Lisa: We just spent time speaking with John Woods from Share Our Strength and chef Jeff Landry of the Farmers Table and both of them brought in this idea of local food and the importance of local food, which has become a hot topic across the country as we all seek to eat better. With us in studio today, we have a champion of local food, long-standing, actually within the Portland, Maine area John Naylor of the Rosemont market. Give me your official, Rosemont Market and Bakery.
John: Rosemont Market and Bakery and then we have a new entity, which is called the Rosemont Produce Company, which is down on Commercial Street that we just opened.
Dr. Lisa: That’s right next to a new coffee place as well, Carmines?
John: Carmines.
Dr. Lisa: John, how long has the Rosemont Market and Bakery been in existence?
John: Oh God, we started I think nine years ago, or eight nine years. We are on our ninth year. We are just coming into our ninth year right now. Previous to that, Scott Anderson is my partner, baker extraordinaire. We worked at the Portland Green Grocer. It really came from that. It’s been a while cooking.
Dr. Lisa: Why is it that local foods are so important in your opinion to health and well-being?
John: Freshness, you know nutrients, that whole food aspect of it, how the energy you get from those kinds of things. I also think it’s healthy for the local economy. I think it’s healthy for the community and, my experience over the last couple of years is that it really has developed even more than the foods benefits from it, it’s that the community benefits from it that I have come to really enjoy.
Dr. Lisa: Earlier, we were speaking with John Woods from Share Our Strength, Maine and Chef Jeff Landry from the Farmer’s Table on Commercial Street, and they both talked about the importance of relationships as you attempt to bring plenty to people, children and adults who don’t have as much in terms of eating. It’s all about the relationship building. Tell me your thoughts on this.
John: Relationships with farmers of and what they produce coming from a regular market situation dealing with farmers. The thing that changed for me was the actual person-to-person relationship. It’s loyalty. You’ve got somebody out there who’s doing a production, and sometimes a production works well. We want to be there to actually get that production, to put it in our stores because you know for us that’s important as far as an economic engine, but also to give that to the community, but sometimes for instance, a crop won’t do as well. I don’t want to put the bigger stores on the spot here, but you know a bigger store will be like, “Well, we can’t deal with that” and they will move along and leave these guys hanging and we are more willing to be like, “All right, we can help you here, and what else you have? How can we become more part of the relationship between us and you as a farmer and then take that the move it off to the next step, which is where the in-between people from farm to the community. We fill a role that’s more of an individual role at this point because we are selling one piece of fruit, one bit of vegetables to an individual, whereas you know, for instance, our new entity, they are selling 50-pound bags of potatoes to a restaurant in one sale. The distribution you see is a little bit bigger. The relationship is different.
Dr. Lisa: This is the Rosemont Produce…
John: That’s the Rosemont Produce Company. These are some of the things I have learned from Martha, which is that there are farms in the community in Maine, which when you think about it, there’s three different tiers of farms that exist in Maine. A, the big commodity farmers, which are your blueberry farmers and your potato farmers. They sign big contracts and they move a lot of stuff and then there are the smaller farmers who do the farmers markets. They do a little farm stand and they are a couple of acre farms and they’re really happy doing that. The one farm issue is that middle guy who years ago before we got involved in the interstate system and big farms, there were a lot of these farms that existed twenty or thirty acre farms. There were truck farmers and what they would do is they would get their living from growing a medium amount of acres produce, bring it to the city here.
Commercial Street was a great example. We see some of his old buildings that have the produce company and where the old green grocers used to exist, that was an old produce company or they would go to Chelsea Market. Once those big ag farms started to produce from the Midwest and the West and cheap produce could be had, all these farms went by the wayside. It’s interesting to see because now that’s starting to change, because the idea of transporting that stuff from the West Coast to the East Coast has gotten to be so expensive that it has now opened up a market for local forms to actually participate and be able to make money. What we do with our relationship is I’m not dictating to these guys at the farm what we are going to pay. They tell me what they need to get for their produce and that is a bit of a different switch in the marketplace.
Dr. Lisa: The name of your company, Rosemont Market, speaks of diversity in your wares. That really is tantalizingly going to the store because there’s so much there and I think it is a constant discovery for people when they walk in because this week it will be one thing and next week it will be something new. One thing we were talking earlier with John and Jeff was there’s a disconnect between actually buying whole foods and the ability to cook whole foods and one of the things that you do so well at the market is prepared foods that are actually really good for you. Can you speak to some to some of the things you have available that people can get?
John: Part of when Scott and I got together for this market, the initial idea was that we were going to have a kitchen and we were gong to do bread and we were going to do some value-added products. How we did that was it kind of guided the way that our actual market developed because when we first started out, we didn’t have a lot of money and we wanted to make our best effort so we would sell things that we could if it didn’t sell could go back to the kitchen and we could value add it. We started out with chicken potpie and different kinds of salads and things that made sense for us and you know our kitchen was good enough that these are started to catch on. Eventually what happened is instead of having the seconds, as we would say go back to the kitchen, now the kitchen comes out to the front and actually just takes things right off the shelf and our production has grown so much in the areas like soups. We make great soups.
For instance, our soups are made with real chicken stocks, real beef stocks, and real fish stocks. That all comes from the store kitchen. For instance in our butcher shop, you take apart a bunch of chickens. All the bones go to the kitchen and they make a big batch of chicken stock. The chicken stock gets put in a container, put in the freezer but also many gallons of it go back to our soup maker and she makes chicken noodle soup or whatever with a really good chicken stock, really good ingredients. We don’t skimp on any of that stuff. A good example, last week the bakery and the savory kitchen switched over to Kate’s Butter, which is a Maine-made product. Instead of using Cabbot’s, which Aaron had some questions about, she did her research and she found that Kate’s Butter was a much better product, made in Maine and that’s the product we are going to use.
That’s why our products, I feel like a talented people, good ingredients and part of our motto at the store is we want to get the best products to you and cooking, that’s an interesting thing about cooking. There a lot of great chefs here and a lot of these good chefs will tell you more times than not, it’s sourcing really good product and don’t screw it up on the stove, just simply cook it and let the freshness come out of that product. That’s an important feature I think in my cooking for sure.
Dr. Lisa: Is there also an educational component to the work that you’re doing because I was in the store this past spring buying fiddleheads and buying ramps and I brought them home. My kids know what they are because we’ve eaten them before but not everybody does. Not everybody knows what some of the things are that are available locally and even John Woods was a saying that some people in soup kitchens, which is a different demographic, but they don’t even know potatoes are. Is that piece of what you need to do in order to get your locally grown foods to people’s tables?
John: Oh yeah, I think if any of the stores that you would go to you would find people that work for us are very skilled in the food area. We try to hire people who are very skilled and then teach staff, everybody who comes in, I think one of the things we’re most looking for is A. that they are interested in what we’re doing, that Rosemont attitude. We are looking for good ingredients. We are looking for interesting food. We are looking for people to get all charged up about that and that kind of culture has come from Scott and it has come from Dan, it has come from Joe and all these guys who are managers. When they hire people on, they are always looking for these people who are interested and wanting to learn and wanting to come along. They all teach them about food and about cooking, about all that stuff.
That’s a learning and teaching thing right there and then on top of that you are going to get customers that are gong to come in and they are going to find this is the kind of place they want because they are going to find things out. They are going to find the products. They are going to learn about all those things and I would say most of our staff is capable of passing that kind information along.
Dr. Lisa: What’s interesting to me as that Whole Foods came into town and we like whole foods. They were at one time sponsors and our radio show and they brought a lot of good things in but we saw the disappearance of Portland Green Grocer. We saw the disappearance of Wild Oats, which of course was national. You have been here. You have been getting stronger. You are expanding and the economy has gone downhill but you haven’t. What are the secrets to your success?
John: I think it’s our relationships, which is what we started talking about to begin with. It’s our relationships. If you look at where the stores are, they are located in communities that our main business comes from those communities. People walk to them. On a snowy day, usually know nobody goes out to the grocery store, but where our stores are, people pull their kids on sleds, they put their boots on and on and they walk to the store. We are usually actually busier on snowy days because of that. We have staff that lives in the community. Most of the staff at the Brighton Store, they live in that community. They know a lot of people around there and we get involved in the community. We just recently sponsored with a little league team in Deering. Everybody remembers their little league team. Now we have a Rosemont Market little league team, which is kind of cool.
We get involved in cultivating community and any kind of any kind of projects we like to get involved with are projects that have to do with education and mostly withkids. It’s important that kids know where food comes from, how to cook it and be involved with it. It’s an important part of your life. You spend a lot of time eating. I think that’s kind of the thing that you should be celebrating, you should look forward to and you should know a lot about. It’s important.
Dr. Lisa: John, just remind us one more time about where your locations are so that our listeners can find them.
John: We have a location in Yarmouth, 96 Main Street, and we have another location on Munjoy Hill, which 88 Congress and then we have 580 Brighton Avenue, which is out in Deering. Then we have the newest location is 5 Commercial Street, which is the Rosemont Produce Company.
Dr. Lisa: We are glad that you are bringing the locally grown foods to the local tables. Gen and I can both attest to your success. We’ve had your delicious food and your delicious soup. My Sophie loves her pretzels and so does John McCain. If you’re out there listening and you are in the area, please do stop by and visit one of your Rosemont Markets and maybe meet John. Thanks for coming in today, John.
John: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: You have been listening to Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast show number 3820 airing for the first time on WLOB radio on June 3, 2001. Today’s guests include John Williams, chair of Share Our Strength, Jeff Landry from the Farmer’s Table and John Naylor from the Rosemont Market and Bakery. We at the Dr. Lisa radio Lab podcast encourage you to find ways in which you might share your strength with the community. Visit their website and find out how you can help decrease childhood hunger in Maine. Also, find your way down to the Rosemont Market and Bakery and make an effort to enjoy the local foods, which are so bountiful this time of year. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for listening to the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast. Be sure to download our past podcasts on iTunes, like us on Facebook or visit doctorlisa.org for additional information about our guests. Thank you for being part of our world. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors, Maine Magazine, Michael Page and Beth Franklin at RE/MAX Heritage, Robin Hodgkin at Morgan Stanley Smith-Barney, Dr. John Herzog of orthopedic specialists in Falmouth Maine, Booth, UNE, the University of New England and Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial. The Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the offices of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Editorial content produced by Genevieve Morgan. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain and our assistant producer is Jane Pate. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at doctorlisa.org and tune in every Sunday at 11 a.m. for the Dr. Lisa hour WLOB, Portland, Maine 1310 a.m. or streaming Wlobradio.com. Show summaries are available at doctorlisa.org. Download and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Besile through iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.