Good Fish, Bad Fish

  • Some grocery stores are training their staff on the benefits and risks of eating some kinds of fish. Nels Carson (pictured) answers customers' concerns about fish contamination. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Fish advisories are confusing. Their guidelines change depending on your gender and age,
and on the type of fish you’re eating. Reporter Kyle Norris boils down
some of the information in advisories and comes up with a few things to think about
when you eat fish:

Transcript

Fish advisories are confusing. Their guidelines change depending on your gender and age,
and on the type of fish you’re eating. Reporter Kyle Norris boils down
some of the information in advisories and comes up with a few things to think about
when you eat fish:


So I did a little informal survey the other day where I asked my friends what they knew about
eating fish. Some of my friends said, “Hey, isn’t eating fish good for you?” Well, turns out they’re right. Fish are
great sources of protein. They’re low in “bad” fats and high in “good” fats, or omega-3
fatty acids, which help your heart stay healthy.


And some of my other friends knew that fish were bad for you. Turns out they’re also right. Fish
take in pollutants through their food and water. Toxins such as mercury, PCBs, and
dioxins. If humans eat enough contaminated fish, those contaminants can build up in our
bodies and cause serious health problems. Contaminants are especially threatening for
small children and women of childbearing age because they can affect children’s
developing nervous systems.


Governments put out advisories so we know which fish are safe to eat. But advisories aren’t
the easiest thing to understand. And anyway, what do you do if you’re in a restaurant, or
cruising through the grocery store and you just want some fish?


“Uh we’re standing in front of the seafood counter at Whole Foods and we’re looking at
our fresh case…”


That’s Nels Carlson. He heads up the seafood department at my local Whole Foods
Market. He says people ask him about fish safety everyday:


“It can be kind of a daunting topic, I think, because there is such a variety. It’s not just a
gross generalization. So it really, it takes a lot of dialogue between customers and team
members and having a very knowledgeable team member base here really helps that.”


They’ll ask him about mercury in the fish, a highly toxic metal that occurs naturally but is a lot more prevalent
mostly because of coal burning power plants. Mercury shows up in higher concentrations
in certain kinds of fish. It’s nice to have a knowledgeable guy like Nels to talk with. Good fish vendors, such as
Whole Foods, go through special training on fish safety. But what if there’s no seafood
expert hanging out next to the fish sticks in the freezer section, if you know what I mean?


Anita Sandretto teaches in the Environmental Health Sciences department at the
University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, and she said that my friends are right.
Okay, well, she didn’t really say that, but she said there are good things about fish and there are bad things about fish:


“If you want to have the benefit of the fat and the omega-3 fatty acids, eat fish with more
fat, but the fat will also be where you will see the contaminants such as PCBs, dioxin.
The flesh will also be where you might have the mercury contamination.”


See, that’s the thing about eating fish: it gets complicated and there are no hard and fast
rules. Sandretto says eating fish is all about treading a line between the advantages and
the risks. So, if there is a risk, you want to reduce it as much as possible:


“…Because if you have any risk in a particular type of food, if you only consume once in
while, you have a less risk of anything bad happening.”


So think in terms of moderation and variety. Sandretto says it’s cool if you want to eat fish once or
twice a week, and to try and vary the kinds of fish that you eat. She says moderation and
variety are actually great rules of thumb to apply to your entire diet. So you could eat a
turkey sandwich on white one day, tuna on whole wheat the next, and a veggie burger the day
after that.


If you eat fish caught from local waters, check with your regional or state health
departments for their fish advisories. Just because a waterway looks clean or is in a
picturesque setting does not mean that its fish are harmless. Contaminants enter the
water in all kinds of ways.


One last thought: imagine a little fish with a little bit of contamination in its body.
Now imagine a medium-sized fish, who swims along and eats that fish and 99 of its closest small
fish friends. That medium guy now has 100 times more contamination than the small fish.
And now let’s say a big fish swims up and gulps down ten medium fish. That big fish has a
concentration that’s 1000 times higher than what that origianal small fish had.


So the moral of that story is, eat smaller fish when possible, also called pan fish. And
at the end of the day, keep in mind that the majority of research, including a recent study
from Harvard’s School of Public Health, say that the benefits of eating fish in moderation
outweigh the risks.


For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

Locally Grown Food Sprouts in Restaurants

  • More people want to get locally grown food. Restaurants are picking up on the trend, but there's a shortage of farmers growing local produce. (Photo by Lester Graham)

One of the hot trends expected in restaurants this year is
the use of locally-grown, seasonal foods. But finding those
products can be challenging for chefs, even in the middle of
farm country. Julie Grant tells the story of one restaurant
that’s closing after years of seeking out local meats and
vegetables:

Transcript

One of the hot trends expected in restaurants this year is
the use of locally-grown, seasonal foods. But finding those
products can be challenging for chefs, even in the middle of
farm country. Julie Grant tells the story of one restaurant
that’s closing after years of seeking out local meats and
vegetables:


All Parker Bosley ever wanted was food that tasted good.
He’s a chef and he wanted his food to be satisfying, but
when he got into the restaurant business more than twenty
years ago he thought something was wrong with the food he
was cooking:


“I thought, there’s something wrong with this business in that
I don’t think my food was that great, even though I’m cooking very well.”


Bosley decided the problem was that he wasn’t starting with
good enough ingredients, and that mediocre ingredients
couldn’t create great-tasting food:


“And I thought about it, and I thought, I don’t have real chickens,
I don’t have good tomatoes, I don’t have good lettuce, and so forth…
it’s coming through a commercial source, so I thought, something’s wrong here.
I used to have wonderful chickens and wonderful tomatoes and strawberries when I was
growing up on a farm in Ohio…what happened to that?”


Bosley is probably Cleveland most highly-renown gourmet, but he decided
to put on his boots and headed home to the farm. Well, it wasn’t exactly his farm, but
he started driving around unnamed country roads. He was looking for small farms and road-side stands.
He’d use the chickens, eggs, tomatoes he brought back to
create dishes at his restaurant, and he liked the results:


“Once I got started and into that and realized, I was right, I was correct
your food cannot be better then the food with
which you begin.”


Bosley built his reputation, his restaurants, and his menu by
building relationships with farmers. And now nearly every
ingredient in almost every dish – from the squash and bacon
soup with hazelnuts, the mixed greens with goat cheese and
honey-thyme dressing, and even the beef medallions with
mushrooms and wine sauce – they all come from local farms.


Parker’s restaurant has been recognized more than once by
Gourmet magazine as one of the top 50 in the country, but
it’s not always easy to gather those ingredients. Sometimes
farmers just don’t have as much as the restaurant needs.
Jeff Jaskiel is Bosley’s business partner:


“We have our little qualifier in our menu, if you read it, it says ‘Sorry, we’re out
of this tonight.’ And we’ve gone through periods where we don’t have chicken on the menu for three
or four days and if you go to a restaurant and couldn’t find chicken on the menu, people would think you’re
a little bit strange.”


So, they get a lot of complaints:


“‘Why are you out of this?’ The later tables come in at 9, 9:30 and we’re out of three or four things
and they’re a little bit disappointed and we were only able to get so much in this week and I think they
try to understand and they do come back so I guess what we’re doing still means something to them.”


It’s starting to mean enough to enough people that the
National Restaurant Association expects local, seasonal
foods to be one of the hottest trends in restaurants this
year.


Lots of restaurants in New York or California already identify
exactly where each ingredient on the menu comes from, what
farm it came from, and how it was produced. But as his long-time passion
becomes hot, Parker’s restaurant is closing.


(Sound of talking)


Today Bosley is standing in the wind and cold, but it’s
still sunny outside. He’s at one of Cleveland’s newly budding farm
markets. It’s set up in the parking lot of a new outdoor
shopping mall and it’s near a new upscale neighborhood. There are
about 20 stands, with things like heritage chickens and turkeys, cheese from grass-fed cows,
and lots with apples. All the products come from nearby farms. Bosley’s call for
local produce was a big part of creating what’s now a
network of markets like this throughout the region:


“I’m doing a lot more than just making good food and maybe buying direct from a farmer. I am
doing the right thing for the environment, I am doing the right thing for rural
communities, I am doing the right thing for urban communities. I never start out, oh, I want to
be an environmentalist, and I’m going to out and hug trees and save the countryside. I just
want good food, which, if you pursue it correctly, you will be
an environmentalist.”


Bosley’s 68 now and he sees the next phase of his career in
encouraging more farmers to grow gourmet mushrooms, make
goat cheese, or build greenhouses so that there’s lettuce other
produce available for the growing market of chefs and other
people who want good local food year round.


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Spinach Controversy to Benefit Small Farmers?

Last month, more than 150 people fell sick from spinach tainted with E. coli bacteria. The spinach has been traced to a California-based produce company. While this means trouble for large-scale agricultural producers, Brian Bull reports the outbreak might help smaller, independent farmers:

Transcript

Last month, more than 150 people fell sick from spinach tainted with
the E. coli bacteria. The spinach has been traced to a California-
based produce company. While this means trouble for large-scale agricultural
producers, Brian Bull reports the outbreak might help smaller,
independent farmers:


Bill Warner owns an organic spinach farm. He sells his crop at local
farmers’ markets and restaurants in Wisconsin and to some restaurants
in Chicago. Warner says he thinks the E. coli incident will steer
consumers toward smaller, organic farms like his.


“We just will tell people that in every step of the way we
do, we’re eating our spinach. We drink the same well water that we
water with. So it may get people more back to, ‘Y’know we don’t want
the big conglomerate foods, let’s go back to buying from who we
know.'”


Warner says many, if not most, organic farmers are extra careful.
They don’t seal their spinach in bags, and don’t use manure in their
fertilizer. Instead, they use a vegetable-based compost and wash
their greens with clean well water. Warner says this helps alleviate
the risk of E. coli bacteria contamination.


For the Environment Report, I’m Brian Bull.

Related Links

‘Water Trails’ Mark Region’s History

  • Dave Lemberg from Western Michigan University envisions not only opportunities for water sports, but also opportunities to see historical sites along waterways. (Photo by Tamar Charney)

If you traveled this summer, you might have noticed more and more cars with canoes or kayaks on top. Recreation associations say paddle sports are growing in popularity. And so are efforts to give paddlers places to go. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports some of these places benefit more than just the person in the boat:

Transcript

If you traveled this summer, you might have noticed more and more cars with canoes or kayaks on top. Recreation associations say paddle sports are growing in popularity and so are efforts to give paddlers places to go. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports, some of these places benefit more than just the person in the boat:


It just stopped raining, which has made the air even more thick and humid than it was before. But there’s a slight breeze coming off the water.


(Sound of splashing, scraping, and paddling)


Dave Lemberg from Western Michigan University slides his yellow kayak into the St. Joseph River in Southwest Michigan.


“There’s a heron off to the right.”


We’re at the beginning of a water trail he’s helped to create. It is one of two pilot trails for The Michigan Heritage Water Trail Program.


His idea is that mapped-out water trails will lead you to places where you can put in and take out your boat, places to stop and stretch your legs for a moment, and places where you might want to stop and check out a historical bridge or museum you pass by. Lemberg wants to see these kinds of
water trails created all across the state.


“We are looking at this as a type of heritage tourism. Every river, every piece of coastline in the Great Lakes has a story to tell.”


As we paddle down the river, signs guide us from point to point. Along the way the signs tell about the history of the area, and refer to a trail guide that contains even more information.


“The country was settled on water trails; we just didn’t call them that.”


Water trails are popping up all over the country. Paul Sanford is with the American Canoe Association. Last month, the organization launched an on-line database of trails. There are more than four hundred of them. He says people new to the sport like them because they tell you where to go. And he says these days you don’t just find water trails in beautiful areas.


SANFORD: “You see more and more trails being developed in urban areas as a way to change public attitudes about a waterway that might have historically been pretty industrialized, pretty uninviting to local citizens as a recreational resource that folks are saying, ‘Hey wait a minute, we can have fun on this river.'”


LEMBERG: “Let’s see, let’s back up and go over there this channel seems to have disappeared.”


On the St. Joseph River, the water trail passes ruins of bridges, old mills, and other remnants of early settlements dating back to the 1800’s. There used to be bustling communities along rivers like this, but many riverside towns were left behind when the interstates took a different route. Dave Lemberg thinks water trails can be a way to revitalize some of these bypassed communities.


“So the vision is people paddling from bed and breakfast to bed and breakfast, eating in local restaurants, browsing in local stores. There’s where well be eating, on the deck up there, overlooking the river.”


After a morning on the river, we arrive eight miles downstream from where we started. One of the signs directs us up a creek to the Mendon Country Inn.


(Sound of door)


Gerard Clark is the chef and owner of this historic inn. He says the water trail has been good for business.


“Since the inauguration which was in August last year, we’ve a seen a three-fold increase in our canoe business which has impacted on lodging and as well as our dining facilities. We have a lot of city folk who come in who are so stressed out you can’t believe it, after a couple days on river and good food they unwind.”


Clark says the trail is drawing people from all over the region, and the hope is, paddle trails like this one will become a tourist draw in other places as well.


For the GLRC, I’m Tamar Charney.

Related Links

Eminent Domain Debated

  • The intersection of Devon and Broadway in Chicago, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan. Alderman Patrick O'Connor is concerned that this corner is a bad use of space - not as walkable as the rest of the neighborhood. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Cities are always coming up with projects to improve land or even create jobs, and sometimes existing buildings just don’t fit into those plans. Often, owners of such property won’t sell to make way for new development. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule on the legality of one tool cities use to force reluctant landowners to sell. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee looks at one politician’s use of this legal power:

Transcript

Cities are always coming up with projects to improve land
or even create jobs, and sometimes existing buildings just don’t fit
into those plans. Often, owners of such property won’t sell to make
way for new development. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule on the
legality of one tool cities use to force reluctant landowners to sell. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee looks at one
politician’s use of this legal power:


This big-city neighborhood is the kind of place where shoppers usually park their cars and walk around. Brick store fronts and restaurants are usually just a few feet from the sidewalk.


But there’s a corner that looks different, though. A lot different.


It’s home to three fast-food buildings. The first business is a popular donut shop. Next door, there’s a fried chicken drive-through. And the last building was once a burger joint, but today it’s home to a car title lender.


To hear the alderman, Patrick O’Connor, tell it, the strip looks like a piece of suburbia landed right in his big-city ward.


“There’s no symmetry, no walkability, it’s all car-related and it’s all basically parking lot. There’s more asphalt than there is building in those places.”


He says this corner on Chicago’s North Side is a bad use of space, and he’s hoping to attract new, more pedestrian-friendly businesses or buildings. But what’s to be done about it if these shops are already there and don’t want to sell? One of O’Connor’s options is to have the city force the owners to sell their properties and then redevelop the land.


The power to forcibly buy property is called eminent domain, and O’Connor says the city’s using it to speed redevelopment throughout Chicago. But O’Connor’s concerned time may run out on the use of this power.


Governments have long-used eminent domain for public use. For example, a city or state might condemn a whole neighborhood, buy out the homeowners, and level the buildings to make way for a road or airport.


But the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case called Kelo versus New London, is considering just how far government can go when using eminent domain to bolster private development.


O’Connor hopes the court sides with local governments.


“In our community there’s not too many open spaces. So what we look to do is to enhance what we have to try to utilize space to the maximum effectiveness. That’s really where the court case hinges, you know, Who’s to say one use is better than another?”


And that question – who decides the best use of a property – is the rallying cry of critics who say cities abuse eminent domain powers.


Sam Staley’s with the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think-tank. He says the Supreme Court case is really about fairness.


“Those people that know how to use the system and know the right people in city council really have the ability to compel a neighbor or another property to sell their property whether they want to or not.”


Staley and other property rights advocates are also convinced that cities don’t need eminent domain for economic development. Staley says local economies can improve without government interference.


“The private sector’s just gotten lazy. They no longer want to have to go through the market, so they don’t come up with creative ways of accommodating property rights of the people that own the pieces of land or building that they want to develop.”


Staley says, instead, developers find it easier to have cities use eminent domain.


But most urban planners and some environmentalists say a court decision against this use of eminent domain could threaten redevelopment of both cities and aging suburbs. John Echevarria is with Georgetown University’s Environmental Law and Policy Institute.


“If you don’t have the power of eminent domain, you can’t do effective downtown redevelopment. The inevitable result would be more shopping centers, more development on the outskirts of urban areas, and more sprawl.”


Alderman O’Connor says constituents will always push urban politicians to put scarce land to better use. He says that won’t change if the court strikes down the broadest eminent domain powers; cities will just have to resort to strong-arm tactics instead.


“The alternative is the city then has to become harsher on how they try to enforce laws. They have to try and run sting operations and go after businesses that are breaking the law and then try to close them down and live with empty places until the sellers get tired and they sell.”


The small business community finds this attitude outrageous. They say as long as they improve their businesses and people frequent them, the market should decide whether they stay or go.


On the other hand, urban planners say the market doesn’t always make best use of land. They say local governments need eminent domain powers to control development, and they’re looking to the court to protect those powers.


For the GLRC, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Parking Meters Take Toll on Cities (Part I)

  • "Meter cruising" is when people drive repeatedly around the block to find an open curbside parking meter. A new book says that not only is meter cruising a waste of gas, but a symptom of a larger urban planning problem. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Finding a free parking space on the street is sometimes a big hassle. But cheap parking is beginning to be viewed as an environmental problem. A growing number of city planners say free parking isn’t really free. It just shifts the cost to taxpayers and society at large. In the first of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee has a report on this new view of the ongoing search for a parking space:

Transcript

Finding a free parking space on the street is sometimes a big hassle. But, cheap parking is beginning to be viewed as an environmental problem. A growing number of city planners say free parking isn’t really free. It just shifts the cost to taxpayers and society at large. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee has a report on this new view of the ongoing search for a parking space.


If you’ve ever played the board game Monopoly, you’ve probably crossed your fingers as you approached the spot called “free parking.” If your token lands there, it doesn’t cost you anything.
It’s free.


But a researcher says there’s really no such thing as “free parking,” at least not in the real world. UCLA Professor Donald Shoup has spent 20 years dispelling the myth that free parking is good for everyone.


In his latest book, titled The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup tries to show that empty cars are taking the public and the environment for a costly ride.


“Bad parking policies are connected to a lot of other problems we have in society, but people haven’t been able to trace them to parking, and I think I’ve tried to do that.”


Take one of the biggest traffic issues facing large cities: meter cruising. That’s when drivers circle a block again and again, waiting for a curb-side meter.


“The average time it took to find a parking space was about three minutes. That doesn’t seem like too much for an individual to spending hunting for a free parking space, but it adds up if everybody else does it.”


Shoup says meter cruising wastes millions of gallons of gas every year. It also creates a lot of traffic congestion and pollution. Meter cruising’s common to downtowns, but even neighborhood shopping areas face the cruising problem.


Here’s an example. Devon Avenue is a bustling commercial strip on Chicago’s far North Side. There are lots of Indo-Pakistani restaurants, Muslim book stores and Jewish bakeries there. On a typical Saturday, the area’s so popular that only a handful of parking meters stay open for more than a few minutes. And it’s no wonder. Parking at the meter only costs 25 cents per hour.


The situation’s made worse by neighborhood parking permits. That’s a policy that keeps nearby residential streets off-limits to shoppers and restaurant-goers. Walking down the sidewalk, Grace is toting several shopping bags that heave with fresh fruit and Indian condiments.


“I went on the side streets and found a place about six blocks away without a need for a permit and took it and walked in. It’s one of the first really beautiful days of spring, so it wasn’t a hardship.”


If it hadn’t been such a nice day, Grace might have been circling the nearby blocks, wasting gas, trying to find a space at a parking meter.


Local shop owners say too many customers don’t like the parking situation. So the store owners complain to the local alderman, Bernard Stone. Seated in his office, Alderman Stone says no politician can afford to ignore demand for cheap parking. So he’s come up with a solution.


Stone: “If you look over your head, you’ll see a drawing of a new garage that’s gonna be built at Devon and Rockwell.”


Allee: “When’s that gonna be up?”


Stone: “Well, it should be started very shortly, I’ve been working at it for ten years.”


Developers for that project promised to create 200 low-rate parking spaces. It’s a deal they’ve struck in exchange for free city-owned land where they want to build. But the expert on parking, Donald Shoup says as politically appealing as that type of solution is, it doesn’t work. It really doesn’t keep cruising in check.


His suggestion?


Well, he takes a page from both the free-marketeers and grassroots activists. First, he says raise the price for metered parking. A lot. He says how much takes a little calculating.


“We could call this the Goldilocks principle of curb parking prices. The price is too high if too many spaces are vacant and too low if no spaces are vacant. If about fifteen percent are vacant, the price is just right.”


Traffic engineers say keeping fifteen percent of spots open stops meter cruising. To save money, people leave their parking spots sooner and everyone can find new spots faster. Next, make higher parking prices politically attractive to shop owners by letting the neighborhoods keep the meter money. Critics say that’s a hard sell because many times, people worry the money will go to city hall instead.


But Shoup says it works. He points to some California towns, where the money goes to repair streets and even hire security guards. Professor Shoup’s supporters say he might be too optimistic about the prospects for change in our impulse to hunt for the closest, most perfect parking space.


Shoup says he wants to be remembered as the first who showed, unless you’re just playing games, there’s no such thing as free parking.


For the GLRC, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Urban Vegetable Farm Takes Root in Brownfield

  • Just outside the Greensgrow compound (photo by Brad Linder)

A farm is a strange thing to see in the middle of a gritty, urban area.
But the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder recently visited a small
farm on what used to be a polluted site in an industrial neighborhood:

Transcript

A farm is a strange thing to see in the middle of an gritty, urban area.
But the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder recently visited a
small farm on what used to be a polluted site in an industrial
neighborhood:


One of the first things you notice about this one-acre plot in
Philadelphia is how out of place the farm looks. About a block away is a
busy interstate highway that jams up with rush hour traffic twice a day.


The farm itself is surrounded by rowhouses, a steel galvanizing plant, and
an auto detail shop.


Chino Rosatto runs the auto shop. About 8 years ago, he first met his new
neighbors – a small group of farmers.


”It was weird at first, you don’t see no farm in the city.”


But Rosatto says he got used to the farm started by Mary Seton Corboy
pretty quickly.


“It was an empty lot. Nothing there. Just fenced up, and that was it. She
came up, did something with it.”


Before it was an empty lot, this city block was a steel plant. In 1988
the building was demolished, and the EPA declared the site hazardous.


It was cleaned up, but Rosatto says it was nothing but concrete slabs
until Mary Seton Corboy and her small group of volunteers came and started
the farm they call Greensgrow.


Corboy moved to Philadelphia from the suburbs nearly a decade ago. With a
background as a chef, she’d always been concerned about how hard it was to
find fresh produce. So she decided to grow it herself.


“The question that just kept coming up over and over again was, is there
any reason why you have to be in a rural area to grow food, given the fact
that the market for the food, the largest market for the food, is in the
urban area?”


Corboy says usually food travels an average of 1500 miles from its source
to wind up on most Americans plates. And she says when it comes to flavor
– nothing is more important than how fresh the food is.


“If you eat strawberries that are commercially available,
you have no taste recognition of something that people 40 years ago would
say is a strawberry, because of the refrigeration, because of the way they
are picked underripe, because of the things they are sprayed with to give
them a longer shelf life.”


Corboy says her first choice for a farm wouldn’t have been an abandoned
industrial site. But the rent was cheaper than it would be at almost any
other spot in the city.


And even though the EPA and scientists from Penn State University
confirmed that there were no toxic chemicals left, Corboy doesn’t plant
anything edible in the ground.


She grows some plants in greenhouses. Others are planted in raised soil
beds. And she grows lettuce in PVC pipes that deliver nutrients to the
plants without any soil at all.


Corboy still regularly sends plant samples out for testing. The results?


“At one point Penn State sent us back a report, we talked to
them on the phone about it, and they said your stuff is actually cleaner
than stuff that we’ve seen grown on farms. Go figure that. We feel very, very comfortable
with the produce that we grow. Because, you know, I’ve been living on it
myself for 8 years.”


And restaurant owners say they’re happy to buy some of the freshest
produce available.


Judy Wicks is owner the White Dog Cafe, a Philadelphia
restaurant that specializes in locally grown foods and meat from animals
raised in humane conditions. She’s been a loyal Greensgrow customer for 8
years.


“As soon as we heard about Greensgrow, we were really excited
about the idea of supporting an urban farm on a brownfield – what a
dream! To you know, take an unsightly, unused block, and turn it into a
farm. It’s just a really exciting concept.”


Wicks says she’s never had a concern about the quality of the food,
because of the care taken to prevent it from touching the soil.


In addition to its restaurant business, Greensgrow sells fruit and
vegetables to Philadelphia residents at a farmer’s market twice a week.
The farm also operates one of the only nurseries in the city, which begins
selling plants this spring.


Mary Seton Corboy says running the farm has taught her a lot about food,
the environment, and waste. She says she doesn’t look at empty lots the
same way anymore. She’s learned to squeeze fruits, vegetables and flowers
out of every space of this city block. And she sees value in the things
other people throw out.


On a recent night Corboy was driving home with her farm manager Beth Kean,
and they spotted a pile of trash beside a building.


“But what they had dumped were all these pallets. And Beth
was with me in the car, and we both turned and looked at them and went,
Look at those pallets! Let’s come back and get them, they’re in great
shape!”


Urban farming is tough. Corboy originally had lofty goals for her farm.
Greensgrow was going to be a pilot project, something she’d expand to
include 10 farms throughout Philadelphia.


8 years later, Greensgrow is still anchored on its original one-acre site.
But by keeping her costs low and selling to loyal customers, Corboy sold
200-thousand dollars worth of produce last year. That was enough to make
2004 the farm’s first profitable year.


For the GLRC, I’m Brad Linder.

Related Links

Organic Farmers Look for New Recruits

  • A neighbor feeds Sir Herman, a calf at Beaver Creek Ranch. Herman is a Scottish Highland bull. Highland cattle are raised in the Midwest for their lean meat. (MPR Photo/Cynthia Johnson)

Organic food has become so popular, it’s hard to keep up with demand. For organic farmers, that booming market is a mixed blessing. When they can’t supply as much as the customers want, it puts pressure on the farmers. Some farmers are trying creative ways to fill the demand. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Transcript

Organic food has become so popular, it’s hard to keep up with demand. For organic farmers, that booming market is a mixed blessing. When they can’t supply as much as the customers want, it puts pressure on the farmers. Some farmers are trying creative ways to fill the demand. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:


About a year ago, chef Kirk Bratrud and his family built a small restaurant near the harbor in Superior, Wisconsin. It’s called The Boathouse, and it features fresh-caught fish, local vegetables, and — Scottish Highland beef.


“It’s a very lean but tender piece of meat, it has a slightly peppery flavor, something approaching elk but more like beef.”


Bratrud says his customers love Scottish Highland beef.


“Our problem with beef however is that we wish more of it was available.”


He has to take it off the menu when he runs out. It’s hard to find, and the only way he can get it at all is because three farmers in the area raise it. One of them is Doug Anderson, owner of Beaver Creek Ranch. He says Highlands offer plenty of advantages to a farmer.


“There is no waste in the animal, as the fat is on the back of the animal rather than a heavy marbling. And our animals are not grained at all. We don’t even have a feedlot. When we’re ready to take an animal to processing, it will just be picked out of the herd, put in a trailer, and go for processing.”


The animals graze in pastures. They don’t need the antibiotics that are routinely fed to animals in feedlots. Anderson has nearly 50 Highlands. The herd is growing, but it takes time to raise cattle. About 20 steers are ready for market each year.


When he started selling to The Boathouse in Superior, he realized there was a bigger market out there than he could supply. He’s recruiting his neighbors to help out. Three nearby farmers have bought brood cows and bulls. Anderson says when their animals are ready to butcher, he’ll put them in touch with The Boathouse and his other markets.


Three miles away, another organic farm has a different specialty – aged cheese made from sheep milk. Mary and David Falk milk about 100 sheep, and make about four dozen cheeses a week. The aging cave is a concrete silo, built into a hillside.


(sound of door opening)


Inside, it’s dark and cool. Nearly a thousand cheeses are resting on cedar planks. Mary Falk enjoys the different molds growing on the rinds of the cheese.


“We’ve got a gold mold, there’s a mauve colored mold, there’s a blue mold, there’s a soft green. So each one of those little molds adds a a hint of flavor and complexity to the cheese.”


The Falks used to sell their Love Tree cheeses to restaurants in New York and San Francisco. But after September 11th, the orders dropped off suddenly, and the Falks found new customers at a local farmer’s market. Now, they don’t have enough cheese to satisfy their local retail customers AND supply restaurants and cheese shops.


To boost her production, Mary Falk tried buying sheep milk from other farmers, but it didn’t taste the same as milk from the flock on her Love Tree Farm. So she tried to recruit farmers to buy some of her sheep and sell her the milk. A couple of neighbors tried it, but quit after awhile.


Her latest idea is what she calls the Love Tree Farm extended label program.


“What Love Tree is known for is our grass-based milk. And if somebody is making a high quality cheese on their farm, we are willing to put that into our market for them. We would put the Lovetree label on their cheese, like “Love Tree introducing Johnny Smith.”


Falk says it would give customers a chance to learn about new cheeses from a name they trust, and it would give new farmers access to an established market.


It takes time and ingenuity to match producers and consumers. But more and more people want organic food. Farmers who’ve been successful are trying to recruit other farmers to join them in the organic producers movement… an effort that can be profitable and easier on the environment.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Related Links

Artist Fishes for Inspiration

  • Return of the Sturgeon, by Ladislav Hanka.

The salmon, bass, and other species of fish that swim in the lakes, rivers, and streams of the Great Lakes region provide food for all kinds of creatures, including people. And for the many recreational fishermen, they’re sport. But the life that fish lead is also inspiration for artists. In cooperation with Public Radio International’s program Studio 360, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney paid a visit to artist Ladislav Hanka. His etchings explore cycles of life, death, and regeneration in nature and more often than not, depict fish:

Transcript

The salmon, bass, and other species of fish that swim in the lakes, rivers, and streams of the Great
Lakes region provide food for all kinds of creatures, including people. And for the many
recreational fisherman, they’re sport. But the life that fish lead is also inspiration for artists. In
cooperation with Public Radio International’s program Studio 360, The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Tamar Charney paid a visit to artist Ladislav Hanka. His etchings explore cycles of
life, death, and regeneration in nature and more often than not, depict fish:


Ladislav Hanka asks people to take a look at life from a different angle. He does this in his art,
and he does this in real life as I found out when I asked him how old he was when he started
drawing.


“I’ll show you. (footsteps) We’re going to make a little expedition under my kitchen table. So
get on your back, slide under the table with me here, and look up, and there you see some of the
first drawings I ever did. They’re nothing. They are just chicken scratch, but it’s kind of neat.”


Now that he’s an adult, the kitchen is the only room in his house in that isn’t an art studio.


Ladislav Hanka works where you’d expect the living room to be. But there’s no sofa here. Just
lots of counter space, storage drawers, and the press he uses to print his etchings. The corner
where he sketches is cluttered with cans of colored pencils, sheets of paper, and stuff you sure
won’t find at an art supply store.


“Now here is a vat of pickled fish.”


There’s trout, pickerel, a goldfish and other slimy brown creatures in a smelly preservative. He’ll
draw them and at times even dissect them. But when the lakes and streams aren’t frozen, he puts
the bucket away and heads outside for inspiration. He spends a lot of his time hanging out along
rivers fly fishing and sketching.


“I’ll sometimes put on waders, the fishing gear, and take a sketchbook out and just wade around up
to my chest in the water and sit in the lilies on the edge with a sketchbook.”


He uses the sketches as the basis for etchings. They’re inspired by what he observes outside and
from what he learned in school when he studied zoology. Ladislav Hanka’s etchings are very
detailed, but they’re not what you’d see if you just looked outside. There’s very little, if any color,
just warm tones of black ink on creamy paper. Some are landscapes with tangles of tree roots,
dirt, and rocks. Others are underground or underwater scenes with fish, birds, and bugs,
sometimes in various stages of decay.


“It’s a 14-by-18 plate size – it’s an etching. And there’s a moon, a full moon, shining in a very dark
background, very organic sorts of textures with a feeling of some sticks and roots and unclear
exactly what it is.”


At the bottom of the image lurking in the dark quiet shadows are fish called burbots.


“There’s a skeletal element to this burbot. The head is more defined than the rest of the body. And
it’s obviously moving among the sticks and up the light source and through various little bones
and skeletons. The intent is it is something inevitable, that it has to go up to the moon. And the
interesting thing with the burbots are that they do, indeed, spawn at night. They spawn in the
middle of winter. So there’s something I find very compelling about this drama, this ancient
drama, that keeps recurring and happening every year under the ice, in the cold, and under the
moonlit night. There’s a romance about it. I keep going back to spawning cycles.”


Watching salmon spawn has become his yearly ritual. Every fall he sits on the bank of a nearby
creek to watch Great Lakes salmon spawn. Salmon return to the place where they were born to
create the next generation in the moments before they die.


“It’s a forgotten little place that I think once used to be an industrial waste sight almost. A bunch
of 55 gallon drums and tires and poison ivy and all kinds of stuff. There are the salmon coming
up stream, among the logs, and the tires, and spawning. It’s this grotesque and beautiful things all
at once. It’s a spectacle, a ballet, death dancing lightly among them and picking over them, and
there they are, trying to spawn before they die, before the energy seeps out of their system.
Eternal cycles, I guess that’s what it’s about. We’re so used to thinking as in human terms, of a
linear way of thought – you evolve, society evolves, everything goes forward in one direction.
And yet the fact is every one of us lives life much more cyclically than we really admit to
ourselves, and we are disgustingly like our parents and like their parents, and like our great-
grandparents and you repeat the stupid things you can’t stomach in your parents, and there you are
repeating the same things years later. There’s something cyclical about it, but it is also beautiful.”


But why you keep coming back to fish?


“Why do I keep coming back to fish? Well, maybe there is something in all of us that wants to
migrate upstream and return to the source – the going home business, whatever home might ever
have been.”


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar Charney.

Restaurants Serve Up Less Waste

When you go to your favorite restaurant, you might not realize how many carrot tops, onion peels and potato scrapings end up in the garbage. In the past, most of that has gone into landfills, but one community is trying to change that by running a pilot restaurant composting program. It hopes to serve as a model for other communities throughout the region. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Nora Flaherty reports:

Transcript

When you go to your favorite restaurant, you might not realize how many carrot tops, onion peels
and potato scrapings end up in the garbage. In the past, most of that has gone into landfillS, but one
community is trying to change that by running a pilot restaurant composting program. It hopes to
serve as a model for other communities throughout the region. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Nora Flaherty reports:


Rene Graff tries to run her restaurant in the most environmentally sound way she can. But there
was one thing – she couldn’t do anything with all the peels, rinds and other vegetable waste that her
cooks generated. Her staff suggested composting, but it wasn’t practical to set up a compost pile in
back where it might attract pests. And it wasn’t practical for someone in the restaurant to take the
stuff away.


“The city didn’t have a compost program where they could pick it up, and as a business, you really
couldn’t have somebody driving the waste out to the compost center, so that was a really big
obstacle for us, was having pick-up.”


Graff started talking to people in her town, Ann Arbor, Michigan. They talked about ways to work
it out so that her restaurant, and others, could compost their food preparation waste. Then they all
found out that the Solid Waste Department had been thinking about the same thing. They all
worked together, and in the end, they put together a program where for 2 months, three local
restaurants separated all of their waste from prepping vegetables, along with coffee grounds and
filters, for the city’s yard waste trucks to pick up.


(kitchen sound – chopping)


They found it was easier than they thought it would be. Emily Adkison manages the kitchen at
Graff’s restaurant, The Arbor Brewing Company. She helped create the system that they used for
food prep composting.


“We would have several bins, one at every station, one at the prep area, one up back on the line,
one right over there by the dish area so the servers can put their used napkins in and coffee
grounds. It’s just as easy as having, instead of a garbage can, you have a 5-gallon pickle bucket
and you throw your scraps in there instead of in the garbage.”


The stuff that the workers throw in the buckets gets picked up by the city’s yard waste composting
trucks. Then, it’s taken to Ann Arbor’s Materials Reclamation Facility, or MRF.


The MRF is a huge, windswept area, with a big population of crows and big, long piles of partially-
decomposed leaves everywhere, emitting a lot of steam and a very earthy smell. Nancy Stone is
educational director for the Solid Waste Department. It’s her job to show people what happens to
their yard and now, food waste, once they’ve sent it here. The whole process takes about a year.
The end result is a high-quality compost, that the city sells to local farmers and gardeners.


“It’s rather crumbly in nature. It has a very sweet smell to it and it looks to me like beautifully
ground espresso grounds. It’s just, I like to garden myself. This is the best stuff to garden with.
This stuff is the best stuff to think of putting on that garden.”


The Ann Arbor restaurant compost pilot program ran for 2 months, and in that time, the city
collected 9 tons of stuff that would have been thrown away otherwise. For Graff, whose restaurant
alone generated one ton of food waste, this is a big argument for future programs, and against
people who say that this kind of program is too small to work:


“When I’m dealing with nay-sayers, the biggest thing they say, ‘if it’s such a small amount that
you’re talking about, is it worth the time, is it worth the effort?’ and I think what people should
know is that every little bit counts, as in I think we were shocked to discover that we diverted a ton
of waste in 2 months, and I would say yes, even the smallest little gesture can have a big impact,
especially if everybody’s doing it.”


And more restaurants will be doing it in the spring — the program is starting up again in May, this
time with 3 more partners. And the people involved in the Ann Arbor program hope that if it works
in this community, it will help lead to a change in the way that other communities, all over the
region, deal with food waste.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Nora Flaherty.