Transcription of Trailblazers, #101
Male: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Download past shows and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
Male: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Marci Booth of Booth, Maine; Apothecary by Design; Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of ReMax Heritage; Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes; and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 101, Trailblazing, airing for the first time on Sunday, August 18, 2013. Today’s guests include Billy Shore, founder and CEO of Share Our Strength; and Sam Hayward, chef and co-owner of Fore Street.
In seventh grade we were required to memorize “The Road Not Taken,” by New England poet, Robert Frost. I remember my discomfort with having to choose one road over another. I am a both and sort of person. It is always my inclination to attempt to take many paths simultaneously; doctor, mother, writer, photographer, runner, singer. I hate to miss out on an experience. This has served me well, in that my life is varied and full.
It has also caused me to begin following paths that had no clear destination. Often my only indication that I should be on a given path comes from a strong internal voice, so on faith I proceed. When we began this show two years ago, we had a plan. We planned to meet and interview interesting people who are passionately living authentic lives and contributing to the wellness of the world. This we have done and we have found that one interview has quickly led to another.
The show has become an ongoing discussion of what matters most with people who care deeply. Billy Shore and Sam Hayward are two such people. Billy Shore founded the national organization Share Our Strength in 1984 in response to the famine in Ethiopia. His concern has translated to the desire to end childhood hunger in America no matter what it takes. Sam Hayward, himself an early supporter of Share Our Strength in Maine, seeks to feed Maine people with Maine’s local foods.
Billy and Sam are both people. They’re highly aware of the need to make decisions and follow the roads not taken, but they are not averse pursuing many paths at once. It is a pleasure to speak with the trailblazers who join me on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour each week. I hope you are inspired to follow the road or roads not taken in your life. Thank you for joining us.
Lisa: We are very fortunate in Maine to have connections to people that spend time in other parts of the country and come back and enjoy our beautiful state with us, and not only enjoy our beautiful state with us, but make it a better place to live. One of these people is Billy Shore, who is the founder and CEO of Share Our Strength, which is a national nonprofit, which is ending childhood hunger in America. I specifically say, “ending childhood hunger in America” because I know your goal is to end childhood hunger by 2015?
Billy: That’s correct. That’s correct. We actually started with a goal of ending … and a real strategic plan to end childhood hunger by 2020, and then when candidate Obama back in 2008 was running, he embraced our plan, and in the chaos of the campaign, something got transposed and it turned into 2015. We weren’t going to quarrel with him because it was the first time a president-elect had embraced what we were doing. We got stuck with 2015, but we’re actually going to be very close. We may need a little bit more time, but if so, I think we’ll be able to make the case that we’ve earned it.
Lisa: Well, yeah, that’s five years shorter.
Billy: That’s right, that’s a big difference.
Lisa: Yeah, and you only started doing this in 1984.
Billy: We started Share Our Strength in 1984 and we didn’t start the No Kid Hungry campaign until about 2007. For many, many years we were a grant-maker to other organizations which we still are. Then about, I guess, about six, seven years ago, we developed this very specific campaign of our own and it’s very kind of concrete stake in the ground said we’re going to do this by a certain time.
Lisa: This is one of the things that I was interested in when I was reading the article and, of course, reading more about you because you’ve written four books. You’ve put plenty out there for people who are interested to find out more. That is that you went from largely thinking about hunger relief as food banks and smaller efforts and then you realized you had to do something more systemic. I’m reading this article by Jen Coffin, which is in the June 2013 issue of Maine Magazine, and you called it a naïve notion that raising money and sending it to food banks could somehow end childhood hunger.
You then realized your approach wasn’t systemic and didn’t address the symptoms of the deeper issue. How did you come to that place?
Billy: Well, I think when we started the organization back in 1984, we did have not as deep understanding of the issue of hunger as we do now. We’ve come to understand that hunger is really a symptom of a deeper, more complex problem which is poverty. Poverty is hard to solve and poverty is complex, but feeding a child is not. We try to strike this balance between … even if you can’t end poverty, can you address hunger and can you address it effectively and actually end it at least in certain segments of the population?
As we thought about what we wanted to accomplish, we really took to heart the words of a writer named Jonathan Kozel, who said, “You should pick battles that are big enough to matter, but small enough to win.” Which I really liked because there’s kind of these large campaigns that we would all look to wage and different ways we’d like to change the world, but when it comes to big enough to matter small enough to win, in our world we asked ourselves what was that? We realized that when it came to children in this country, in America, who are hungry on a chronic basis, that was actually a winnable battle.
We got very refocused around not just making grants to other organizations which we continue to do, but to see if we could use our vantage point, our experience, to some degree exert some leadership to see if we could get people to pull in the same direction. Ultimately, that’s what we’ve tried to do around childhood hunger and the effort to end it.
Lisa: What you call it triggering event in one of your books was, I believe, the famine in Ethiopia in 1984, and I believe someone argued that that is an event that was really not easy to win.
Billy: Yeah, for sure. Ethiopia continues to struggle with famine and hunger. In 1984, it was just that kind of serendipitous nature of when things happen. I had worked in government for about eight or nine years at that point for Senator Gary Hart from Colorado. He’d run for president and come in second in the democratic nomination contest to Walter Mondale. This would have been in August of 1984.
I’ve had this very intense period of working with him, traveling throughout all 50 states, sometimes four states a day, then decompressing after that. I was literally stuck in a traffic jam on Interstate 270 outside of Washington, D.C., and probably doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, which was reading the Washington Post while I was stuck in traffic.
There was this story about 200,000 to die this summer in Ethiopia and it just seemed, for me, it was this drawing juxtaposition between all the issues you talk about in a campaign from the kind of the antiseptic venue of a stage and then in the bubble of the limousine and the Secret Service motorcade and so forth, and then thinking “boy, there are real life and death issues at stake in the decisions we make as I learn more about the Ethiopian famine.” For me, that was the catalyst.
Our focus initially at Share Our Strength was international. We quickly realized that there were significant issues here in the United States as well and that a lot of our stakeholders and supporters would want us to focus on those and that we could actually probably realistically make more progress dealing with hunger here in the United States. We continue to make grants to a few places overseas, but most of our focus is here in the US now.
Lisa: Hunger relief and specifically ending childhood hunger is something to you that’s deeply personal, and it’s something that also seems to have some linkage back to a sense of faith. In one of your books you actually write about, I think it was something about the Jewish faith and sort of the points of right idea. Is this something that was hard for you to reconcile working in politics over here and then thinking over here about the bigger picture?
Billy: Well, a little bit. I learned a tremendous amount doing the political work that I did and got to work on a whole variety of issues and thought it was … I would have never done it any other way. At the same time, it did feel removed from a lot of the way people really live their lives. Probably the most personal part of it for me was I had … my father was a district administrative assistant to a congressman from Pittsburgh.
My father was this very unpretentious guy, very casual all the time, never wore a watch, never carried a pen, was not a very meticulous person, but this was a time back in the ’60s and ’70s when members of Congress … Congress wasn’t televised, members of Congress didn’t come home that much. For all intents and purposes for most people my father was the congressman from Pittsburgh, and if we walked two blocks down the street to get a pizza, which we would do typically on a Friday evening, it would take us about two hours. So many people would come out of their houses and say, “Mr. Shore, my aunt lost her social security check.” Or, “My uncle needs to get into the veterans’ hospital, can you help him?”
It was just what my dad did. He did it 24 hours a day in the most relaxed way and kept track of it all somehow. I just grew up thinking this is what you’re supposed to do with your life. You’re supposed to help the people in your community. He never preached about it. He wasn’t a preachy kind of guy, and I don’t remember him ever saying this is what’s expected of you. He just kind of modeled the behavior. In that sense, it was very personal, as you say.
Lisa: Is that somehow part of the reason why you ended up going to Washington initially and being a part of this social revolution that was happening at the time?
Billy: I think so. I was fascinated by Congress, I was fascinated by using public policy to create change in some ways that I’m really, I think, only just beginning to recognize and understand and start to reflect on. Share Our Strength has kind of come full circle that way because we started purely doing private sector work and funding emergency food assistance programs and community efforts, but have more recently come to realize that there is a way that organizations like ours can intersect with public institutions with state governments with the federal government.
There are programs like school breakfast and summer feeding and the food stamp, SNAP, what we now call SNAP program, that private organizations like ours can have a big impact in shaping and making more effective. I think there’s … if you think of kind of a three-legged stool with government, the private sector, and the business community all working together, you can get some pretty big things done that way.
Lisa: You talked about in one of your books your son, Zack, getting on the bus himself. Actually I believe he was striking a pose with two other young men as … well, tell the story about this.
Billy: Well, this was, I think, on Zack’s field … I think it was on his field trip to New York I think you’re referring to when he was a, I think, an eighth grader and I remember it just being this very kind of poignant moment for me as understanding that one of my sons was kind of growing up and was kind of on his own. I remember the kids getting on the bus and all the parents being very anxious and waving to them and trying to get their attention. The minute they stepped on the bus, none of them were looking out the window. They were paying no attention to us. They had really just kind of grown up.
I think there was also a time I wrote about after 9/11 where he had gone down to the mall in a show of just kind of support for the nation on the national mall by the Washington monument, which a lot of people did. Again, I started to realize at that moment though like my father I had not been particular preachy to Zack and not said kind of this is what’s expected of you. Some of that kind of social change work and that notion of being engaged in your community had seeped through and he started to make his own decisions. I was, as a dad, excited and proud to see that he was getting engaged in that way.
Lisa: I’m sure it was exciting for you because you also talk a lot about some of the misadventures of Zack and Molly, especially in one of these books, which is interesting for me because I have children of this age and I definitely have been involved in overseeing some of their misadventures. That interesting contrast between going out into the world and doing something larger and also kind of retreating into your own individual world and doing something equally important, but somehow on a smaller scale with your own children, perhaps even having less control over them, what was that like for you?
Billy: Yeah. Well, that’s the toughest job any of us have, I think, is parenting; there’s no question about it. I’ve had three kids now. Zack’s now 28, and Molly’s 24, and I’ve got an 8-year-old son, Nate. With Zack, in particular, I was probably traveling way more than I should have been. I probably … I think I was a very good father and I think he thinks I was a very good father, but I think I also missed a lot of things that as you get older and wiser you would not do again. You wouldn’t make those kind of sacrifices again.
Zack had a little bit of a rocky path to where he is today. He’s incredibly successful, actually works for a radio station, the all-news station in Washington, D.C., WTOP, and is a father himself, married and with a baby. I think kids have to find their way and I think you have to, again, model it to the degree that you can. At the end they find their way in their own timetable. There’s such pressure, I think, today among so many young people to feel like the parade is marching by and they better get in it in just the right place where or they’re going to have failed.
I think, in particular, so many young people think that a successful life is an unbroken string of successes, when usually it’s just the opposite. Usually it’s your failures that you learn from and it’s your mistakes and the bad luck and the misfortunes, some of which are just unavoidable in life. Sometimes they’re married to bad judgments, but those are the things that if you talk to a lot of successful people about how they became successful, it wasn’t because they never had a misstep; it was just the opposite.
Lisa: We’ll return to our program in a moment. On the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we’ve long understood the important link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the subject is Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
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Lisa: There’s the sense of always going from the internal to the external to the internal to the external. When I’m looking at two of your books, The Cathedral Within and A Light of Conscience, there is the sense that there has to be something in you that you return to in order to know that you’re heading in the right direction, that you’re building this cathedral. This book, The Cathedral Within, I think that it was called initially … you proposed it as something else?
Billy: Yes. Gosh, I’m trying to remember what I even thought about calling it. I think it was something about cathedral building, but what I do remember is meeting with this really wonderful editor at Random House named Ann Godoff, who’s now an editor somewhere else. As she was hearing my kind of pitch, my 30 seconds what this book was going to be about because it wasn’t written yet, she said to me, “Well, if it’s the cathedral within that you’re writing about, then that’s a book that I want to publish.” It really affected my thinking because I realized that she was helping me kind of, again, make this bridge between the book that I wanted to write and the book that she thought people would want to read and how you make it more inner-directed.
At the end of the day for Share Our Strength that’s certainly when you look at who are the most effective supporters and stakeholders are. They’re all people who have been affected and impacted internally, have changed in some way. I always think it’s interesting when people say they been moved by something. Because when you say you’ve been moved, that means you started one place and you ended somewhere else. That’s what all social transformation is really about. We try to create experiences where people have that sense of being moved where they have that sense of being transformed even.
I call it bearing witness, going to places and letting yourself see and feel and share what you felt in ways that you almost kind of sneak up on you that you weren’t expecting.
Lisa: Is it also possible that what you’re doing is connecting them with something inside themselves that already existed so that they aren’t really changed so much as just connecting with that still small voice that people talk about?
Billy: Well, I think that’s a great point. That’s a great way to put it, the fundamental conviction that runs through the whole idea of Share Our Strength is that people … that everybody does have a strength to share. That everybody does have something within them that they want to give, that people are looking for a meaning. This is not an original idea on our part. We all know this, people are searching for meaning all across our society. To create vehicles in which they can access that, and I guess access that part of themselves to your point, I think, has been … whether we were always doing that at the conscious level or not, I think, that’s really what the work has been about.
Lisa: We’ve had multiple people on our show who are working towards the ending of childhood hunger. We’ve actually had John Woods on very early who is with Maine Share Our Strength. We had most recently Kristen Miale from Good Shepherd Food Bank here in Maine. Early on we had Mark Swann from the Preble Street Research Center here in Portland, and a lot of listeners have known him for the last 20 years doing this good work that he does with homelessness and feeding the hungry and teenagers and the new teen shelter that they have.
He was on the Share Our Strength bus just the other day going on Taste of the Nation, and he said to me, “I read Billy Shore’s book. It changed me. It’s something that I’ve kind of held onto and I can’t tell you how many copies I have given out to other people.” It is actually important that you’ve documented in some way your own journey starting in your book 1995 to now, because it gives other people hope.
Billy: Well, I hope that’s the case. I always think of the words the writer and the director, Elia Kazan, who is a movie director, and he once wrote that, “The more personal something else, the more universal that it is.” Usually I find … in my first instinct when I’d start to write a story about my children or something like that I would think like why in the world would anybody care about this? Those types of personal stories really do have … they strike the universal cord and people get them.
Lisa: Is there also the possibility when you put yourself out there this much, when you make it so personal, that you could be more easily hurt when things don’t go your way or when people don’t see what you’re trying to put across or maybe misinterpret?
Billy: That’s a really good question. I don’t know, again, I think vulnerability is kind of an effective place to lead from for those same reasons. I think making yourself vulnerable, because we all are, is really saying that is making yourself authentic and I think authenticity is the key to leadership.
When people lead from this kind of I don’t what, whether it’s a man or woman, this kind of macho sense of having all the answers and having done everything right, I think that doesn’t ring true to people. I think that’s not authentic. I think the idea of being a little bit vulnerable and being a little bit personal, it’s a little bit of risk, but I don’t think it’s a big one because I think, again, people know that basically all of us are like that.
Lisa: You spent a lot of time traveling to different places and you’ve talked about this in the books that you’ve written, and working with the leader of a children’s choir or a group that employs people who are released from prison, and meeting with other people who are involved in social change. What are some of the common denominators that you’ve noticed amongst the other people who are really doing something in the world of social justice?
Billy: Yeah, well, I think that’s a great question. I think often people are leading from a place that relates to where their own need is and I think that’s one common denominator. I think to do this work that usually the odds are so formidable when you’re trying to change something, whether it’s hunger or the environment, climate change, poverty; that you have to have a little bit of a sense of being willing to break the rules as well. If you just do things in the conventional way, you’re probably going to get conventional results.
When people ask what we hire for at Share Our Strength, my first response always is J-walkers. I don’t want people who are just going to stand and wait at the light. I don’t want felons, either. We want people who are going to really do what they have to do to get the job done. I think you see that certainly in a lot of the entrepreneurs that we’ve worked with.
I guess finally where it relates to this idea of bearing witness, people who really put themselves close to the issue. One of the reasons I think we’ve stayed fresh at Share Our Strength is we force ourselves to get away from our desk and get out into the community and see and feel things that we know are going to move us.
My wife, Rosemary, always talks about how if you go to Ethiopia once and then you talk about it the following year and the next year and the next year and you never go back, it becomes what she calls like a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox. It starts to fade, it gets a little bit pale. I think you’ve got to reconnect to that.
Lisa: As you’re talking, it’s kind of interesting. I’m looking at the title of your latest book, “The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men.” That’s what you’re describing. This is the quest and malaria. You’re describing people who have just said, you know what? We’re not going to go with the status quo. We’re going to believe that something like ending malaria, ending childhood hunger is possible.
Billy: Yeah. You’ve got to be a little bit unreasonable, I think, because when people hear it on face value they say things like, “Well, that’s not going to happen. That’s too big of a goal.” It does take people who push, I think, maybe unreasonable in terms of their goals, even unreasonable in terms of their tactics or strategies sometimes. Still somehow stay within at least enough within the mainstream that they can build the support they need and the constituency they need to get that done.
That book takes its title from a George Bernard Shaw passage in play, Man and Superman, in which he says, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him. The unreasonable man tries to get the world to adapt itself to him; therefore, all progress in changing the world depends on the unreasonable man.” I got stuck with that gender bias which was George Bernard Shaw’s, not mine, but I’ve heard about in a few places.
Lisa: At the end of the article that Jen Coffin wrote in Maine Magazine about you, she asked you, “What is the universe trying to tell you?” and your answer was that, “All of us, no matter what we do or where we are, can and want to contribute. All of us have the capacity to share our strength in our own best way.” People who are listening who want to be part of this effort, how do you suggest that they connect back in some way to that still small voice that we were referring to and somehow help you?
Billy: Yeah. Well, I think listening to that voice doesn’t necessarily have to be by helping us, although we would love to have people’s help. I think finding what it is that you care most about, what it is you’re most passionate about. Not just in terms of external issues, what’s going on in the world, but things that you most enjoy doing. We work, as you know, with a lot of chefs and restaurateurs and we do food and wine events here in Maine and around the country. The most common response I get back from chefs is, “I never knew I could make a difference in this community just by being a chef.”
They think of this as their work and as their vocation and their trade, but then when we create this vehicle to say … and also by cooking, also by teaching nutrition education and things you might take for granted, you can actually affect other people’s lives. That’s kind of an epiphany for them. Our intellectual challenge, our design challenge, is how do we do that with other communities? How do we do with architects and writers? At Share Our Strength we’ve had more than 15 books published by Random House and other publishers, where writers donated original work to us.
Actually this is kind of a Maine connection, but back in 1987 when Gary Hart’s presidential campaign came to a very sudden end, I was trying to figure out, okay, how does Share Our Strength go next, and I’ve got two checks in the mail on the same day. One from Stephen King and one from a writer named Sidney Sheldon, who’s no longer alive, but it was one of those moments where I was asking myself what’s the universe trying to tell me? Why did these two checks came from these two writers?
I realize that we need to find ways to get others involved in what we do. I would hope that people would … a good place to start would be our website at Share Our Strength nokidhungry.org and just go to that website and we’ve got a specific kind of a section on how to get involved and we’ve got people who participate in what we call the Great American Bake Sale or the Bake Sale for No Kid Hungry, and we have thousands and thousands of school-age children across the country and others who do bake sales and contribute money to us.
We have people who participate in our events. We have people who are involved in contacting their schools to see if their schools offer the school breakfast program and they’re helping us do a crowd source to school breakfast map. There’s so many ways for people to get involved. Again, what you call that still small voice within, is really the key to it.
Lisa: I appreciate your sharing your voice, not even the still small voice, but the larger, louder voice. It’s really a privilege to be sitting with you, Bill Shore, the founder and CEO of Share Our Strength and I really wish you all the best in your quest to end childhood hunger. I know that you will.
Billy: Thanks. Well, have me back on after 2015 and we’ll see where we are.
Lisa: At Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, proof that our listeners enjoy their work lives the same way we do and fully embrace every day. As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth, Maine, to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: Did you ever wonder why geese fly in a V formation when they head south for the winter? Amazingly, they know that a V pattern increases their speeds by more than 70% versus flying in another pattern, or alone. When in formation they share the leadership and have a mutual respect for their common goal, which is to arrive safely at their destination. They equally divide the hardest tasks, gather their faculties, and combine their resources and talents. This unified effort, their formation, makes the journey easier. Less energy is expended because they are all working together for a common cause.
When the leader tires, he goes back to the end of the formation and another team member takes the lead. Each goose, or a member of the team, uses their voice or quack to encourage the leader to stay focused and to keep organized. How does the V formation of migrating geese apply to running your business or your household? In a word, team. A group working together to accomplish and achieve the same goal with mutual respect and understanding. Those teams will always come out ahead, unlike the lowly seagull who scavenges and shouts, “Mine,” only looking out for its own best interest without ever seeming to get anywhere.
Geese are unified and always looking out for each other applying the law of least effort and gaining the most. It’s a lesson we all could learn. I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need. Boothmaine.com.
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 ReMax Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With ReMax Heritage it’s your move. Learn more at Rheritage.com.
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Lisa: When you think of food in Maine, you think of Sam Hayward. You can’t really think of anyone else or at least you think of him first, how’s that? What a lot of people don’t know is that Sam Hayward has a very rich background including time spent as an R&B musician, and also has an interest in feeding hungry children in the State of Maine, which goes back many years. I first heard Sam speak down at the Kennebunkport Festival at a Tim Harrington dinner and he was very eloquent in his support of Share Our Strength, the organization which is ending childhood hunger. Thanks for coming in and having a conversation with me today.
Sam: Thanks, it’s great to be here.
Lisa: Sam, first, why Maine? I know that you’ve been a musician, you have roots in New Orleans and Tennessee and New York, but you’re here and you’ve been here for a while. You’ve made Maine your home; why is that the case?
Sam: Well, I fell in love with Maine pretty much as soon as I crossed the Kittery bridge for the first time back in the fall of 1970. My wife and I had just gotten married the day before and almost on a whim we came across from the Finger Lakes District of New York where we had both spent many formative years and came into Maine just kind of on a whim and fell in love with it right away. I think it was some years after that when I was working as a musician and not really enjoying it that one of my music students, of all people, who was a Cornell Hotel School student at the time, asked me in the winter of 1974 when Ithaca, New York, is probably not the most desirable place to live, if I’d like to chuck all this and come spend the summer on an island off the coast of Maine.
Jen and I jumped at it and spent three seasons working at the Shoals Marine Lab off Kittery and Portsmouth at the Isles of Shoals. I fell in love with the Gulf of Maine. I fell in love with the resources, the culture, of course, the landscape and the seascape; how can you not? We figured let’s make a life here, and went off to a couple of other cities to get a little professional experience rather than going to a culinary school. By the fall of 1977 we were in Maine and never looked back.
Lisa: In addition to living on an island, you’ve actually spent time in multiple locations throughout Maine. What was the progression?
Sam: Well, I’m surprised it’s of interest to anybody but me. The person who brought me out of New York City in 1977, Maurice Andre, owned a small French restaurant in south Paris, and when I had run into a little difficulty in the kitchen that I was working in in New York, I just felt I was a fish out of water. I was unprepared for much of what I saw there, socially speaking. He offered me a position as the chef at his French restaurant, which I did for a couple of years. He became ill and passed away.
As it seemed with a number of other Maine restaurant people, I took a position kind of in rotation at the Samoset Resort, which was in extremis at the time and worked there for about a year and then made my way down the coast to Brunswick and was employed at 22 Lincoln, and then subsequently purchased the restaurant and operated it for 10 years. That’s a little bit of a condensed version of how I made my way down to the coast from the mountains.
Lisa: Is that when you decided to make Bowdoinham your home?
Sam: Yeah. We were living in Owls Head and I was commuting down to Brunswick and that was stressful. We had our first child while we were living in Owls Head and we made a decision to try to find something in Brunswick. We couldn’t find anything we thought was affordable. Somebody contacted us from this little one-horse town that I didn’t really know much about called Bowdoinham eight or 10 miles away from my Brunswick restaurant. We moved in there and have expanded the house several times since then and live a great life.
It’s a beautiful place to live. Merrymeeting Bay is a, as you probably know, a unique ecosystem. Environmentally it’s gorgeous. It’s changing, it’s in transition, but it was a great place to raise three children, and they’re all grateful that they had the experience of the woods and the bay and canoeing on the bay and sleeping overnight on the islands and being with their friends. Just the freedom that they had there was … as children and teenagers was extraordinary and they all relish those memories.
Lisa: How has your experience in Maine and in various parts of Maine contributed to your interest in building restaurants like Fore Street?
Sam: Maybe we can get into that by talking about how local food found its way into not just my restaurant, but many others at about the same time. In the summer of 1981 a local farmer actually from Lisbon knocked on my back door at my Brunswick restaurant with a basket of produce, the like of which simply I’d never seen before in any of the locations that I’ve been cooking. There were leeks that were blanched, that means the white parts, two feet long; herbs of such vibrant green and incredible aroma, I was just shocked by it; a number of root vegetables; and greens that he was just sort of showing off to see if there was interest on my part in striking up a relationship. As floored as I was by it, there was no way I could say no.
That was really the entre of local food into my restaurant and into my consciousness. Up to that point, I think everybody in our craft around the country knew about the quality of Maine’s seafood; iconic cod and haddock, in particular, and, of course, lobster. Scallops were, again, at that point a very big fishery in the Gulf of Maine and the Banks, and they were everywhere. Less known was that there was some pretty good livestock being grown in Maine. Maine has a lot of pastureland that may be underutilized for growing livestock; we’re trying to change some of that.
We could get all of the fish that we wanted locally, almost none of the livestock products that we wanted locally. Frankly, there wasn’t a great connection with farms that produced produce; vegetables, fruits, herbs, and salads. We didn’t have that connection at that point. It was something very new to me. By the way, I think that was happening all through the state at just about the same time. Remember MOFGA started in 1973, I believe, I think that’s about right.
At the time, the organic farming movement and gardening movement in Maine was very small, but it was clearly growing, and we had the right cultural resources, we had the right land base for it, we had the right conditions for a hands-on form of agriculture, small-scale agriculture and farming. We had the land base because there were so many farms at that point that had been farmed intensively for generations and generations of farmers was ready to retire and sell out. There were inexpensive farms available to kids, if you will, from away.
That phenomenon that happened in the ’70s and ’80s that we now call the back to the land movement really took off. I would just happen to be there kind of in the midst of that, so I was able to in my little restaurant take advantage of it. It was happening other places as well.
Lisa: In the midst of all of this, this abundance of produce and seafood and even the rising abundance of livestock, what you were noticing, however, was that not everyone had access to food.
Sam: That’s true. There seemed to be a real inequality there that the communities that had farmers’ markets, those were pretty well utilized in the ’80s, at least from what I was conscious of. That’s grown, of course; now we have somewhere around a hundred farmers’ markets active in the State of Maine, many of them even in the wintertime. Didn’t really see that much evidence of that in the 1980s.
What was pretty clear to me living out in the south Paris area was that the availability of good, quality food, not just industrial food, but according to somebody’s definition of what’s good and healthfully produced food, that wasn’t that plentiful out there. There seemed to be a lot of inequality in the accessibility of good quality food. That continues now, sad to say.
If I can just bring up one small point, this is in spite of the fact that an outfit in Vermont called the Parade of the Heifers; have you heard about their report recently? I think that’s the name of the organization, recently ranked states according to the accessibility and availability of locally produced food. Naturally being a Vermont outfit, I’m not surprised they named Vermont as number 1, and number 2 nationwide was Maine. Number 3 was New Hampshire, and then there was everybody else. Lowest on that list were states like surprisingly Texas, Florida, and some other Gulf states, which really surprised me.
We’re already known as a state that promotes local food and tries to make local food available to everybody. I don’t think we’ve been completely successful yet, but we’re working toward it. Everybody’s working toward it.
Lisa: The goal of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help make connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world. Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: One of the things that we all think about as we get older and we age is we want to make a difference in the world. We reach the calling part of our life. We start with a job and we go into a career and then we move into our calling years. One of the biggest things we can do is be a good steward; a good steward of the land, a good steward with your estate and your family. Just be a good steward. Stewardship is something that many of my clients over the years have taught me and I’ve learned by example through them.
I have a friend who I worked with for a number of years and we’ve sort of rebuilt her childhood village together slowly, piece by piece, starting with the community center and then the park in front of the town and the church. Her husband, who died several years ago, talked about stewardship and discussed stewardship and was very passionate about that.
I go through that town now and see the trees maturing and the plantings mature and I say, “Wow. This is what Dave meant; this is exactly what Dave meant. This is stewardship.” Through their generosity they’ve improved the lives of many people.
I’m Ted Carter and if you’d like to contact me, I can be reached at Tedcarterdesign.com.
Male: We’ll return to our program after acknowledging the following generous sponsors: Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine. At Orthopedic Specialists, ultrasound technology is taken to the highest degree. With state-of-the-art ultrasound equipment, small areas of tendonitis, muscle and ligament tears, instability, and arthritic conditions can be easily found during examination. For more information visit orthocareme.com, or call 207-781-9077.
Lisa: At Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast we believe we are helping to build a better world with the help of many. We’d like to bring to you people who are examples of those building a better world in the areas of wellness, health, and fitness. To talk to you today about one of these, fitness, is Jim Greatorex, the president of Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical. Here’s Jim.
Jim: Did you watch the Olympics last year and see the athletes wearing that funky tape on their shoulders and wonder the heck is that deal? Well, it’s called kinesiology athletic tape and it works like an orthopedic brace without limiting range of motion. It provides stability for muscles, joints, and tendons, and helps reduce pain while maintaining flexibility for better support and increased endurance.
If you have knee, shoulder, ankle, or foot pain, or have that one muscle that just flares up after increased activity, come in and have our staff help you out. We’ll have you performing like an Olympic beach volley-baller in no time. I’m Jim Greatorex, president of Black Bear Medical. Come on in and see our trained staff down at 275 Marginal Way, and at www.Blackbearmedical.com.
Lisa: Well, I appreciate your efforts because I’ve been to the last three Taste of the Nations. I was at the one that was at Wolfe Neck Farm this past year and, in fact, I remember the rain, the thunder, the lightning, all of the difficulties actually that were associated with really putting on this great party. What I noticed was that people were genuinely happy to be there. They were very excited to be doing this work for this organization.
Sam: Well, the organization really did a great job of making sure that everybody was going to have a great time, so I’m … that was a group-wide effort to make sure that the party was a success. I remember one of the first ones that I did in the latest way was out on Cow Island and having to take the ferry out to Cow Island, there was no place … and by the way, the weather was terrible. It was raining and drizzling and foggy and actually quite clammy and cold, but they had done a great job setting up the party space.
We all have to off-load all of our food in coolers and big crates and boxes down literally a plank of wood from the bow of the ferry down onto the beach where we loaded it into golf carts and whatever else we could haul on and took it over to the dinner site. That was a pretty interesting evening.
We set up a kitchen that was part of … now who’s that … I’m trying to think of the name of the organization that was out there at the time; Ripple Effect, and so we set up the kitchen in their facility in a screened-in building, but when we ran the food out to the tent where people were seated, we had to run it under umbrellas. We had to have two or three people holding umbrellas and running food out to them. That was an interesting challenge, but it came off really well and people really had a great time.
We live in Maine, we know that there’s nothing that’s predictable about the weather and the conditions under which we operate, so you rise to the occasion.
Lisa: Why do you think that people are so passionate about Taste of the Nation, Share Our Strength, Ending Childhood Hunger; what is it that causes people to run across the field with dinner under an umbrella to serve to people?
Sam: It’s a good question; I’m not sure I can answer it fully, but I think that people that live in Maine tend to be incredibly generous and have a strong communitarian spirit. When there’s a need and we find out about the need, I think people really do rally to a cause. I think we also love being in beautiful places and that’s where these parties are generally presented. What’s better than a Maine summer? This is just the sweetest experience anybody can have, so to set up a place along the shore or on an off-shore island or even on a boat and have a great dinner and a great party, it really brings people together in an interesting way.
Add to that the importance of the cause and the fact that these are our communities’ children that we’re really trying to benefit, and it’s pretty irresistible.
Lisa: You began your career as a musician; you were in music school. Can you draw any sort of parallels and/or intersections with your life now?
Sam: That’s a little bit harder to do. When I was a working musician I could look down the line and imagine myself as a washed-up, third-rate failure. It wasn’t going the way I wanted and I was playing kinds of music that I really hadn’t planned on getting trapped in.
I read an article by David Brooks the other day where he was talking the changes in people’s lives as we age and their priorities and their motivations as they age and he talked about how retired people, if I can use this word on the air, demonstrate a certain horniness for service. I love the phrase, I thought it was great, and you quite often see that in retired people. My own father who in his last years became very passionate about delivering Meals on Wheels.
I think now that I’m kind of too old to be a lead line cook or even a strong prep cook at Fore Street, and I leave that to the more talented and more athletic, physically strong younger guys, that I would like to devote some of my time, some of the time that I save by not being slaving in the kitchen every day, to be of some use to the community at large. I think that’s been a motivating factor and why probably I get overwhelmed with some of the nonprofit work that I do, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it.
Lisa: What would you suggest to people who are listening as far as trying to support organizations that end childhood hunger? People who are not chefs and do not work at Fore Street, what could they do in their own lives to be supportive?
Sam: There are plenty of other things that people can do other than prepare food for an event like Share Our Strength. That organization does depend on volunteers to a tremendous extent, and I don’t mean just restaurant people. They can get a hold of Share Our Strength in Maine, Share Our Strength of Portland, and get involved on other levels. There are many other ways in which people can be involved in hunger issues from working with local schools to get gardens going so that students are introduced to the joys of raising food and the joys of eating the food that they produce, which is really important in developing their sensibilities and awareness of what constitutes good food.
People can grow some of their own in their own gardens. People can volunteer with other agencies in their communities. One of the things that I frequently find myself speaking about is the amount of food waste that Americans produce generally. One study that I read estimated that 40% of the food that people bring home, that consumers bring home, actually gets thrown out and not consumed, so building awareness about that.
In a cheap food, thirst society, we don’t value the food resources that we have to the extent that perhaps we should. Make the best possible use of every ounce of food that we purchase and bring home, let alone in restaurants where I see what comes back on plates and pay attention to that. Sometimes adjust my thinking about what it is that we’re serving according to that. There are a lot of ways in which people can get involved, from awareness to volunteering to efforts on their own within their own communities.
Lisa: Sam, how can people find out about Fore Street and the other restaurants that you are affiliated with?
Sam: Well, my partners operate Street and Company, Standard Baking, and a little seafood wholesaler called Upstream Trucking, and those are all on websites. They can go to those. Sadly, Fore Street’s website is 15 years out of date and really bad. It’s a constant embarrassment to me, but I haven’t been able to get around to actually fixing that thing, so I continue to work on it.
Lisa: Despite that, it doesn’t seem to ever be a problem to fill your restaurant, so somehow people find you.
Sam: Right, and maybe that’s an argument for why I shouldn’t spend a lot of money and effort on fixing a website that I think just doesn’t work. It would be great if we could offer some links to people so that people from away and people in Maine and Portland, could learn about some of the other efforts that are going on out there.
Portland has changed so much since I started working in Maine, and if I can just toss out an anecdote that I think demonstrates that, you know that there are a ton of new hotels that have either been just constructed or being renovated or are in the process of being built, which is a shock to me. I don’t understand who’s doing the marketing research to see how many hotel rooms can Portland support.
I was speaking with a developer the other day; I think it was actually at Taste of the Nation. I said, “What’s going on?” He said, “Well, you guys did this.” He was exaggerating, of course, but what he was saying was that the restaurant scene in Portland became so well-known and so well-respected around the country that additional tourists, additional visitors were coming to Maine ratcheting up demand for hotel rooms and the developers responded by building all these new rooms.
It’s incredible to think, and I don’t want to exaggerate that effect, but that a food culture, a local food culture could have a part in engendering that much economic growth in a small city like Portland; that’s astonishing to me.
Lisa: Sam, it’s been a privilege to have you today. I having also lived in Maine for, well, since about ’77 myself, I’ve seen all the changes, I’ve been to your restaurants many times, and I appreciate all the work you’re doing with Share Our Strength. I know the people who are listening can read about you as part of Maine Magazine’s 50 Mainers which is the July issue, and I think it’s a well-deserved honor that they’ve put you in the top 50 Mainers I believe to watch and know about in our state.
Sam: Thank you very much. It’s really been a pleasure to be here.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 101, Trailblazing. Our guests have included Billy Shore and Sam Hayward. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit Doctorlisa.org.
We hope you’ll join us for two important upcoming events. The first is the REV3 sheJAMs Triathlon August 25th at Old Orchard Beach. This unique race will be limited to 300 people and will bring a world-class venue to Old Orchard Beach allowing for the opportunity to create a life-changing experience for women who participate. Proceeds go to the Maine Cancer Foundation. For more information, go to Shejamstri.com.
Also join us on August 24th for the Art by the Sea Gala at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art. The Art by the Sea benefit auction is the museum’s major annual fundraiser. For more information, visit Ogunquitmuseum.org.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. You can also follow me on Twitter and Pinterest Doctorlisa, and read my take on health and wellbeing on the Bountiful blog, Bountiful-blog.com.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle hoping that you’ve enjoyed our Trailblazing show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Male: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Marci Booth of Booth, Maine; Apothecary by Design; Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of ReMax Heritage; Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes; and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street in Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our assistant producer is Leanne Ouimet.
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