Friday afternoon tours have become a standard feature of MFB’s winter conferences: Voice of Agriculture with its focus on Promotion & Education, Young Farmer Leaders Conference and its target audience of 18- to 35-year-olds, and Growing Together, which is just the first two knit together.
At this year’s Young Farmer gathering (Feb. 27 – March 1), the Local Foods, Local Impact tour never left the limits of host city Kalamazoo — nor did it leave any doubt about the imperative role agriculture plays at each stop.
The first of those stops was Loaves & Fishes, an impressive food-assistance organization functioning as a hub of both purchased and donated products that need another chance to land in the cupboards of local families that most need it.
Beyond feeding thousands of area families and distributing food to almost 100 regional locations, Loaves & Fishes offers a sobering hands-on exercise for visitors: sorting through massive totes of donated food products in search of still-good, not-expired food products with time left to fulfill their nutritional mission.
The process begins with weeding out expired and damaged items no longer fit for safe redistribution. Sound easy?
It isn’t.
Expiration dates appear almost anywhere on any package of anything, sometime hiding in plain sight, sometimes just hiding. They’re bold and they’re tiny, legible and not, light and dark (regardless of the background), smudged or wrinkled — you get the idea.
Oh and sometimes they’re not there at all.
Unexpired, undamaged items are sorted into key categories like cereals, canned goods, beverages, etc. Specialty products marketed as low-sodium or organic are separated for the convenience of folks who prefer or require them.
Suddenly the bounty we casually enjoy at the grocery store becomes more of a burden: too much variety, too many choices. Labeling becomes irrelevant, “convenient” packaging an annoyance, or simply ineffective.
The mind wanders and new perspectives take shape as you remember these products have already been, in one way or another, rejected — cast aside — deemed not good enough for some, while still desperately needed by others.
One family’s 'pass' is another family’s entree.
The next stop was the ValleyHUB, an organ of Kalamazoo Valley Community College’s Food Innovation Center. Here awaited a fascinating hybrid of indoor, urban production agriculture and an experimental mindset exploring the efficiencies and variations possible in connecting consumers more directly with nutritious food products.
Indoor hydroponic microgreen cultivation, year-round greenhouse vegetables and innovative packaging trials give the facility an air of scientific experimentation — an urban laboratory focused on maximizing efficiency and nutrition in both the cultivation and distribution of fresh, locally grown produce.
Between the two facilities, members on this tour were exposed to several perspectives on an end of the American food system that production-focused farmers don’t always see — and in an urban environment that receives few rural visitors. It’s one thing to wonder what becomes of one’s livestock and crops, once processed, become in terms of an end product.
Seeing — and experiencing — the challenges at the other end of American food production was an eye-opening lesson for everyone paying attention.
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