For the first time since the mid-1990s, Bates’ lush summer plantings will include a garden dedicated solely to providing food for Dining Services.

A raised bed on the lawn between Commons and Central Avenue will supply herbs to season Dining Services’ offerings. The project is the result of a Short Term collaboration between Bill Bergevin, the college’s longtime landscape coordinator, and Molly Mylius ’11, who helped Bergevin build the herb garden as part of her environmental studies internship.

The idea for a campus “victory garden” was in the air during the fall and winter, perhaps inspired by the yearlong Bates Contemplates Food initiative, which has examined issues around the nation’s food systems and Bates’ own dining and food-sourcing practices.

Mylius was among a group of students talking about a garden early in 2009. Around the same time, Dining Services Director Christine Schwartz and Camille Parrish, learning associate in the environmental studies program, were also discussing the idea.

Mylius, who is designing an interdisciplinary major around environmental studies and politics, raised the victory garden idea when she went to discuss her E.S. internship with Parrish. “I told her that I enjoyed gardening and I thought it’d be really cool if Bates had a garden,” Mylius says. As a matter of fact, Parrish replied, that idea was in the works.

“The fact that I was like, ‘Oh, me too!’ sort of sped it along,” says Mylius.

Mylius knew her way around a garden when she arrived at Bates. At home in Anchorage, Alaska, her mother grows ornamentals, including native wildflowers, and all kinds of produce (Molly favors carrots and strawberries).

While heat-loving crops like corn and eggplant fare poorly in Alaska’s climate, “some vegetables do really well because of the long days,” she says. “In the middle of summer, it never gets completely dark.

“Some plants love that. Every year the Alaska State Fair even features an exhibit with world-record-breaking vegetables.”

She adds, “I’m definitely a big supporter of local food, and it doesn’t get more local than your back yard.”

In the first weeks of Short Term, Bergevin and Mylius removed sod from a site near Commons along Central Avenue. They used heavy timbers, recycled from a fence recently removed from the north edge of campus, to build a frame for the 15-by-25-foot raised bed, and filled it with topsoil and compost.

They started planting herbs during the week of May 18. Basil and parsley seedlings are growing, dill and cilantro seeds are in the dirt and mint will go in sometime the week of Memorial Day. Once the plants get established, Dining Services staff will be able to simply step out the door and pick fresh herbs as needed.

Still in the discussion stage is a Bates vegetable garden, with a possible location being on Bardwell Street where a Bates-owned house was demolished last summer.

These aren’t Bates’ first ventures into raising its own produce. Dining Services created a vegetable garden in the yard at 161-163 Wood Street in the middle 1990s that is now used by Lots to Gardens, a community organization founded by Kirsten Walter ’00. Produce from this well-tended plot occasionally finds its way into Commons, but most is used for Lots to Gardens’ own projects.

For her environmental studies internship, Mylius has also worked with Schwartz on compiling a directory of the local vendors that supply foodstuffs to Bates. The directory Web site will feature a map showing Bates purveyors.

Her Short Term experience has taught Mylius how complicated gardening is and expanded her respect for Bergevin’s work. Also, she says, “a lot of my classes are comprehensive — a world view of problems. It’s really interesting to see them on a local level.”

“The internship is 200 hours, and so for Short Term that equates to 40 hours a week. So, it’s more hours than most Short Term classes, but it’s flexible and it’s fun,” she adds. “I get to play with dirt all day.”

— by Doug Hubley, with Kelly Cox ’11

Fifteen Bates students, sprawled on the comfortable couches in Frye Street Union, have gotten together to talk about their food-related academic work. It’s “Students Talkin’ About Food” — a March 25 event that’s part of Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food, the yearlong campuswide look at issues around food. [More...]

If you think of the yearlong Bates Contemplates Food initiative as an arch built from many stones, Mark Winne ’72 set the moral keystone in place with a lecture on March 30.

In contrast to burgeoning consumer demand for natural and local foods, he said, low-income Americans have less access than ever to healthy foods. Affluent folks shop for pricey organics at Whole Foods while malnourishment, obesity and related illnesses proliferate in disadvantaged communities whose residents lack access to even reasonably wholesome foods. This is the “food gap” that Winne has fought to bridge for the past 40 years– a disparity between the haves and the have-nots, he said, that “doesn’t just divide the nation, but somehow defines it.”

• Watch a WCSH-TV interview with Mark Winne ’72

A sociology major at Bates, Winne served for 25 years as executive director of the Hartford (Conn.) Food System, a nonprofit that developed innovative ways to deliver high-quality and affordable foods to low-income urban families in Connecticut.

Now a resident of Santa Fe, N.M., he writes and consults on food system issues and is the author of Closing the Food Gap — Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (Beacon Press, 2008).

The laid-back Winne (pronounced WIN-ee) shared lessons from his life in food justice in a talk capping a two-day Bates visit sponsored by the Bates Contemplates Food Planning Committee.

Winne’s picture of the American food gap wasn’t pretty. The supermarket industry and public transportation policy have left many low-income people in “food deserts” — locations with no ready access to healthy, reasonably priced groceries. The government food-welfare system is biased toward industry interests rather than those of its needy clients, among whom are 32 million food stamp recipients — a record number.

And charitable emergency food providers, such as food banks, often just manage the symptom of food insecurity rather than addressing the disease of poverty.

Winne’s remarks included a list of recommendations for President Obama — whose administration, he later told a student during a question-and-answer period, gives him hope about the prospects for advancing food security — including:

A major government incentive — Winne estimated $1 billion — to encourage the supermarket industry to build stores in “food deserts,” both to improve the food supply for residents and to stimulate the local economy. “We can actually fix this one,” he said;

More money and better administration for school food programs;

And more support for farmers, including funding for farmers markets, CSAs and similar direct-marketing programs. “We’re in danger of running out of farmers,” Winne said.

At Bates, “food was not something we contemplated when I was here,” a droll Winne said early in the evening. “The only contemplation I can really remember was the evening when there was kind of a slow arc of a plate of spaghetti, moving skyward across the dining Commons, somehow suspended for several minutes above our heads as it moved toward the far wall, where it eventually landed with a tremendous splat.”

More seriously, Winne explained that as a Bates student from privileged circumstances, it was in Lewiston where he first encountered poverty. Working as a Big Brother, he visited the Lewiston home of his young charge — a visit that left him with an indelible memory of the child’s apartment, its smell of decrepitude and the way it shook from the looms at the nearby Bates Mill.

In Lewiston, too, Winne first took on the social justice work that would define his career. He and other Bates students founded a community center to do peer drug and alcohol counseling, then added a breakfast program for children and a food co-op.

Forty years later, Winne shared with the Bates audience some precepts distilled from his long experience, a body of experience that spans working a community farm, collaborating with community organizers in Hartford’s poorest neighborhoods and mingling with D.C. power brokers.

A dominant theme was the need to address poverty as a whole, rather than hunger as an isolated phenomenon. “The role of poverty in causing hunger is paramount,” Winne said. We need creative responses to address poverty more than hunger: “We need to pause, reflect, critique and consider what alternatives might exist.”

Winne concluded with a tribute to Bates and its early leadership in food issues, in terms of both on-campus food service and community food system work.

“We really got started with this earlier than most places,” he said. “I’m very proud to be a Batesie.”

By Doug Hubley

As part of a two-day visit to Bates, food activist and author Mark Winne ’72 gives a talk titled “Food Justice and Good Food — When Shall the Twain Meet?” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The event is open to the public at no cost. A reception and book signing follow in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. This event is sponsored by the Bates Contemplates Food Planning Committee. For more information, please call 207-786-6336.

Winne’s time at Bates will also include visits to classes and meetings with students.

Food, like air and water, is a basic necessity, but stands as a glaring example of how the gap between America’s “haves” and “have-nots” remains deep and wide. No matter what aspect of the subject we consider — hunger, obesity or recent food trends like local and organic — food is emblematic of a promise fulfilled for some but falling ever so short for many.

Winne has worked for 35 years to close the food gap. From organizing breakfast programs for low-income children in Maine to developing innovative national food policies in Washington, D.C., he has dedicated his professional life and writing to finding local, state and federal solutions to America’s food disparities. To this end, and to those whose passion for this purpose is no less than his own, he dedicated his first book Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (Beacon Press, 2008).

Closing the Food Gap tells the story of how we get our food: from poor people at food pantries or bodegas and convenience stores to the more comfortable classes, who increasingly seek out organic and local products. Winne’s exploration starts in the 1960s, when domestic poverty was “rediscovered,” and shows how communities since that time have responded to malnutrition with a slew of strategies and methods. But the story is also about doing that work against a backdrop of ever-growing American food affluence and gastronomical expectations.

From 1979 to 2003, Winne was the executive director of the Hartford Food System, a private non-profit agency that works on food and hunger issues in the Hartford, Conn., area. During his tenure with HFS, Mark organized community self-help food projects that assisted the city’s lower-income and elderly residents. Winne’s work with the Food System included the development of commercial food businesses, Connecticut’s Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, farmers’ markets, a 25-acre community supported agriculture farm, a food bank, food and nutrition education programs, and a neighborhood supermarket.

Winne currently writes, speaks and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community food assessment and food policy. He also does policy communication and food policy council work for the Community Food Security Coalition.

He lives in Santa Fe, N.M., where he serves on the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council and the Southwest Grass-fed Livestock Alliance.

Svitlana Orekhova ’09 of Donetskaya Oblast, Ukraine, poses for photographer Louisa Demmitt ’00 during the annual International Dinner. For the dinner, students prepare dishes from their homelands, often from family recipes passed down through the years. By sharing and explaining their food, and talking about the role it plays in their own culture, “students really get to show where they’re from and, consequently, who they are,” says Demmitt.

Alan Hunt ’03 tells a story about a farmer who raises both vegetables and pigs.

At the end of each growing season, the farmer allows the pigs to nose through his vegetable fields. “The pigs wind up plowing the field for him, because they turn the soil over 12 to 16 inches down,” says Hunt, an agricultural policy analyst at a Washington “think and do tank.”

“And what’s more, because they’re looking for leftover roots and pests, the pigs do a better job cleaning up the field than the farmer could do by hand or mechanically.”

That’s synergy in action, says Hunt. “The farmer has to spend more time managing the pigs on the field — but he’s not spending time on the tractor doing it himself. He’s fertilizing the field, and at the same time he’s feeding the pigs.”

Seeking synergy, in other words, means seeking ways to harmonize needs, means and methods for the best possible outcome. “You need to look at the whole food system,” says Hunt, instead of the input-output view that typifies much of U.S. agriculture.

Hunt works at the nonprofit Northeast Midwest Institute, which promotes economic vitality, environmental quality and regional equity in the Northeast and Midwest states.

“A lot of what we do is consensus-building with stakeholder groups to organize, prioritize, and translate policy recommendations into legislation,” Hunt explains.

For example, he worked with advocacy groups — ranging from anti-hunger to minority food producer to sustainable agriculture — on developing specific policy for the 2008 U.S. farm bill to address “food deserts,” areas such as economically disadvantaged inner cities or rural zones where people can’t find healthy, affordable or fresh foods.

Revised every five years, this legislation is one of the nation’s primary agricultural and food policy tools. Its most recent edition, the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, was enacted last May.

“We developed something called the Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center to work on getting healthier and more-local products into corner stores, and helping producers get those products into their supply chain,” says Hunt.

This concept bears out Hunt’s belief that the most effective approach to food-desert issues is economic development financing. “The Housing and Urban Development department has really great and well-used economic development tools, but their focus is on generating tax revenue and jobs in the community,” he says.

“We might need to look at some of the tools that already exist and change the way the criteria are evaluated.”

Hunt grew up on a farm in New Jersey and earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies at Bates. Knowing he wanted a school with a solid ES program, he was immediately attracted to Bates because of its location.

“I wanted to be in New England,” he says. His interest in food grew after a visit to Nezinscot Farm, a family-owned farm in Turner, which produces, and serves in its own café, a full selection of natural foods.

“I had nothing like it where I grew up, even though I grew up in a farm area,” Hunt says. “It definitely influenced what I’m doing now.”

During his junior year abroad, Hunt researched consumer cultures, including a 700-year-old market in Norwich, England, that sold local farm-fresh foods. “I surveyed some of the vendors there, and read a lot about consumption and identity,” he explains.

“I was thinking it would be important for someone’s community identity to buy local products,” he says. (Hunt pursued that theme in a study of the now-defunct Portland Public Market, working with environmental economist Lynne Lewis, and continued to study Maine food production while doing post-graduate work at Duke. In fact, he found his present position through a contact at the Maine Department of Agriculture.)

“With local foods, the most important thing is a community connection between consumer and producer. The consumer can talk with the producer directly, so the producer gets better feedback and can change their practices to suit the market.

“So if somebody asks, ‘Well, is this organic?’ the producer might go home and consider that. That can change the market and hopefully change the environmental outcome as well.”

By Becca Chacko ’10

By H. Jay Burns, editor

This issue reflects the College’s ongoing Bates Contemplates Food initiative in myriad ways, including eight profiles of alumni who produce food in Maine.

Here on campus, a recent BCF event was food writer Michael Pollan’s lecture in the Chapel. A few hours before speaking to that overflow crowd, Pollan talked informally in Chase Lounge about his writing focus.

In the late 1980s, he got interested in the “messy places where humans and nature can’t be kept from each other.” Food was one of the messiest places, he found, because humans can never retreat from this engagement with nature. “You can’t be Thoreau in your vegetable garden,” he told the students. If you try, you won’t take steps to protect your food — “you won’t firebomb a woodchuck,” he said, alluding to his famous attempt to drive the rodents from his Connecticut garden, as chronicled in his 1988 essay “Gardening Means War.”

In Walden, Thoreau throws in the trowel on his large-scale bean field after one season because he doesn’t believe it’s right to tell nature how to behave. Pollan calls Thoreau “defeatist” for his backpedaling attitude toward food production. “We are in nature,” he told the students. “We’ve been implicated in nature for a lot longer than you think.”

His references to Thoreau, woodchucks, and firebombing sure got my attention. In high school, I used a .30-30 rifle to kill a woodchuck nibbling on broccoli in our vegetable garden — a great shot, really, as the rodent was more than 100 feet away. The woodchuck’s death brought no reprimand from my father, both a Thoreau disciple and avid gardener.

Like Pollan, he had long since revised Thoreau’s operations manual while retaining its essence. For example, Thoreau burned tree stumps for heat. We would drive from our Waterford, Maine, home to the nearby Paris Manufacturing wood factory. Out back, workers dumped kiln-dried blocks of hardwood, which we hauled back to Waterford in our Chevy truck.

Gwen Lexow, who teaches the first-year seminar “Into the Woods: Rewriting Walden,” understands very well that we all make certain accommodations as we live our lives. Her students, however, haven’t figured that out yet. They tend to condemn Thoreau for not staying on the straight and narrow when he chooses his less-traveled path. “They call Thoreau a hypocrite,” she says. “It bothers them immensely when they find out that he lunches with his mother and that he goes back to the village.”

Lexow helps her students move past that monolithic stopping point. “Their a-ha! moment comes later,” she says, as they read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. “They realize that even within a simple life, nothing is simple.”

The seminar, she says, “mirrors the students’ first semester. They arrive thinking it’s their chance to ‘get out from under the man’ intellectually. But it’s not so easy.”

At Walden, Thoreau does kill a woodchuck that has “ravaged” his beans, and then eats the meat. I tossed my dead woodchuck into the woods.

H. Jay Burns, Editor

This anonymous gift from a Bates alum — perhaps the first, and certainly the largest, of its kind to a U.S. college — builds on our strengths and recognizes the additional costs of certain sustainable practices. Before the gift, about 22 percent of our food already came from local farmers and vendors; now we are able to purchase about 28 percent from these sources. Up to 84 percent of the food we don’t use re-enters the food cycle: to a food bank, into compost or to a recycling center, or as “waste” to a local pig farmer to be consumed as food by another species. We have never outsourced our food operations, and for many years staff members have been strong supporters of our environmental and communal ethos.

The purpose of Bates Contemplates Food is to call attention to ongoing programs as well as special events that teach us to ask questions about food. Where does it come from? How is it sourced and prepared at Bates? What is our role in the larger food system in which we are all embedded? Why are sustainable, healthy food cultures so important and so endangered, and what is the relationship between how we eat and how we think? Seeking answers often means confronting how little we know about complex and confounding issues ranging from dependence on petroleum and diet-related diseases in the U.S. to threats like species extinction and global hunger. But by feeding body and mind together, we may learn to make better choices in the face of complexity.

In presenting Bates Contemplates Food to the College audience at Convocation this fall, I juxtaposed two stories, one fictional and one factual. The first story, about two meals the narrator eats on her visit to the fictional university of Oxbridge, is taken from the opening chapter of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where Woolf introduces her argument about the relationship among money, space, and creative thought.

The luncheon meal at one of the men’s colleges is a glorious feast: “partridges…with all their retinue of sauces and salads” and “potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard….sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent.” Consumed slowly and satisfyingly, the sumptuous meal has the effect of lighting a “profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

The meager evening meal, by contrast, is taken at Fernham, the neighboring women’s college recently founded on a small endowment to promote the radical idea of higher education for women. This meal of stringy beef and prunes dampens the spirit, leaving Woolf toher unexceptionable conclusion: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

The second story that I told at Convocation was about Bates dining itself. While the spirit of communal Bates dining has always been strong and willing — notwithstanding the historical reality that Bates women of my generation were the very first to be allowed to eat in the same dining hall with men — the physical space of Bates dining, Chase Hall’s Commons, grew less adequate to our dining needs over the years.

In planning to correct that situation, our architects initially advanced the au courant idea of “distributed dining” — multiple facilities spread around the campus, with food courts and fast-food franchises. To their surprise, Bates students promptly vetoed the idea and insisted on dining as a committee of the whole. True, they wanted a bigger and brighter and better Commons, but their ideas focused on a better space for one and all. And so we built a place where cooks and servers could excel in their work, and where students would be called to the table to eat nourishing food with good friends and great ideas.

Both the new Commons building and our sustainable dining practices are now more visibly than ever at the heart of our educational vision, reminding us that a liberal education prepares a whole human being for life. Today, in the high-speed, high-tech, competitive, and distracting world where we eat too much and too fast and too often alone, it’s critical to ensure that respectful and ethical human interaction is still at the core at Bates College.

By Elaine Tuttle Hansen

Click on the image for a larger version.

The cover of the Fall 2008 Bates Magazine shows Nicolas Lindholm ’86 displaying tomatoes grown on his family-operated organic farm, Hackmatack Farm, in Penobscot, Maine.

The tomatoes, a variety that Lindholm is developing himself called “Baby Brandywine,” have “the flavor, color, and texture of Brandywine but in a miniature size,” he says. Stories and photographs of alums involved in Maine food.

Lindholm sells his produce at local farmers’ markets, in Blue Hill and Stonington.

See this issue’s stories, told in text, photos, video and audio, about Maine alumni who produce food in Maine, all part of the College’s Bates Contemplates Food initiative.

“The science around food,” said Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan to a rapt Bates College audience on Oct. 27, “is basically where surgery was in 1650.”

Then he asked, “Are you ready to get on the table?”

The line drew one of many big laughs from the capacity crowd at the college chapel. Yet therein, too, lay a key theme of Pollan’s talk: In what he calls the “American paradox,” the U.S. obsession with nutrition has actually given this nation “some of the lousiest nutritional health in the world.”

“The ideology that we bring to food and eating decisions really is the problem,” he said. He calls this ideology “nutritionism,” and says its disciples have put their faith in imperfect, even destructive, science and food-industry marketing.

The annual Otis Lecture at Bates, Pollan’s droll, fact-rich talk was titled In Defense of Food: The Omnivore’s Solution. (Because scores of would-be listeners were turned away from the crowded chapel for the evening talk, he reprised the address the following morning.)

His appearance was timely, coinciding with the College’s yearlong Bates Contemplates Food initiative, examining where food comes from and what it means. During Pollan’s two-day stay at Bates, an institution whose dining practices he praised as “light years ahead of many other places,” the award-winning writer and journalism professor visited around the campus community and offered an informal talk about writing on Monday afternoon.

• Read an edited transcript of Pollan’s speech

Pollan summarized concepts from his best-selling Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) and this year’s In Defense of Food. Ultimately, he asked his listeners to shun nutritionism and the Western diet of refined stodge and feedlot meat; seek out food from sources as natural as possible; and remember that “if everybody sought out real food, whole food, cooked it themselves, and ate it with friends and family, [so] much would change in this country.”

Nutritionism sees food as a “delivery system for nutrients” and eating as an activity relating solely to health. It borders on religion, complete with a priesthood — nutritional scientists, food-industry marketeers and their willing acolytes in the press — and a Manichean worldview of good vs. evil food components.

A highlight of the talk was a history of nutritionism, which Pollan linked to late-19th-century grainy gurus like John Henry Kellogg and Charles William Post. And resonating with listeners of a certain age, many of whom still wonder where “draft beer in a bottle” came from, was Pollan’s reminder that today’s nutritionism is rooted in the 1970s.

In 1973, under food industry pressure, Congress repealed a regulation that compelled manufacturers to label certain imitation foods as “imitation.” That opened the door to all sorts of substituted ingredients and such curious products as fat-free sour cream.

Four years later, Sen. George McGovern presented the Senate’s well-intended “Dietary Goals for the U.S.,” calling for fewer saturated fats, refined grains and sugars. McGovern’s report, Pollan explained, put the government for the first time in the role of trying to influence the eating habits of all Americans on the grounds of health.

But in a fascinating sort of ju-jitsu, the food industry took what was in fact a critique of its methods and parlayed it into a “brilliant new marketing strategy”: using the government guidelines, and later the auguries of nutritional science, to build a whole new profit center around nutritionally engineered products like Nabisco’s Snackwells line of diet confections.

The industry found some “magic words: If you put ‘low-fat’ on a food, people will eat a ton of it,” Pollan said, to laughter. “The obesity epidemic and the public health campaign to get fat out of the diet coincide.

“What a public health disaster.”

In short, Pollan said, the “science behind nutritionism has just been completely wrong.” Both the chemical composition of foods and the absorptive powers of the living body are too subtle and complex for current science: “You have a mystery on both ends of the food chain that has thwarted any attempts to really reduce it.”

Where science has gone astray, cultural tradition and family wisdom over the millennia successfully conveyed information people needed to survive on the foods naturally available to them — a surprisingly wide spectrum of foods. Traditional diets are incredibly diverse, Pollan said. “There is no ideal human diet. One of our great good fortunes is that we can do well on whatever nature has to offer on six of the seven continents.”

So “there is no one proper way to eat,” he said. But “there is one way not to eat” — the Western diet. “How could civilization, 10,000 years after the birth of agriculture, have come up with the one way that reliably makes people sick?”

Prior to the question-and-answer session that ended the evening, Pollan reminded listeners of the unbreakable relationship among healthy people, healthy communities and healthy agriculture. “It turns out that what is best for our health is best for the health of our agriculture too. It really is a win-win, because what our agriculture really needs is to diversify” away from its dependence on monoculture and chemical inputs — “and what we need to do as eaters is to diversify, to eat many different real foods.”

He also offered a few of his rules for eating, including the seven-word phrase that has become a mantra among Pollanites: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Suggesting that we avoid “any food that won’t eventually rot,” he described a package of Twinkies that has sat in his office apparently unchanged for two years. “The microbes . . . are not interested,” he said, to laughter. “The microbes leave them alone. And we should, too.”