kitchen - Agra Energy

California Leads the Way in Low-Carbon School Meals

Additionally, the Kitchen Infrastructure and Training (KIT) fund allocates $600 million to upgrade school cooking facilities and train staff to expand on-site meal preparation. And a one-time $100 million fund helps districts implement these and other nutrition- and climate impact-minded measures.

The state support is invaluable to menu transition, Stewart says. While beans and legumes are cheap, procuring and transforming plant-based ingredients into appealing meals—ones that can compete with popular options—can be a challenge, she adds. And the USDA Foods program, which provides schools with subsidized meat, dairy, and other select commodities, covers a limited range of plant-based proteins such as beans and nut butters, “so the [state] funding helps to really offset some of those costs.”

Moises Plascencia, farm to school program coordinator in Santa Ana, says that the new programs help elevate plant-forward menus to a whole new level. The support for local sourcing allows procurement from farms within a 70-mile radius, giving the district access to a greater choice of fresh produce.

With a near-90 percent Latino population, ingredients such as tomatillos, Mexican squash, and herbs resonate with students, he notes, and lets kitchen staff “provide culturally relevant foods.” And that ups the appeal of any school lunch, he adds, “because then, you’re providing folks with things they want.”

“We’re increasingly drawing the connection between food as a driver of climate change … even just a small shift [towards a plant-based diet] could have a profound impact.”

Nevertheless, the tight $5 per-meal federal reimbursement rate often hamstrings budgets. “Nutrition service directors are hugely incentivized to use their pot of money on the USDA foods program,” says FOE’s Stewart, which ultimately skews the menu towards a heavy reliance on federally subsidized animal products.

Further south in Temecula Valley, limited budgets aren’t the only deterrent to embracing a full plant-based menu, says Amanda Shears, Temecula Valley Unified School District’s (TVUSD) assistant nutrition services director, in an email. Overall demand in the 27,000-student district—where nearly a quarter qualify for free and reduced lunches—is “minimal,” she adds, so “my goal is to design menus for everyone . . . using the resources and funds available.”

All district schools offer daily vegetarian options, but most contain cheese and dairy, says Ava Cuevas, a junior at TVUSD’s Chaparral High School. And the two vegan options—the bean burger and salad bar—are served in limited quantities, so they’re “sold out in minutes,” she adds.

As an animal welfare activist, Cuevas sees plant-based diets addressing a range of concerns, including climate impact and access to healthy food. She has also experienced food insecurity in the past, so the value of school lunches is not lost on her, she says. “Knowing that I can’t rely on [it] is definitely a distraction.” She’s stepping up her advocacy this fall—though until things change, she adds, “it’s [going to be] a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

Meanwhile, Shears maintains that “making more plant-based meals available is important to me,” noting that the district is trying to ramp up scratch cooking and local sourcing of fruit and greens. Yet her department faces pressing priorities: Since the pandemic, school kitchens have been “severely understaffed,” she says, and equipment and facilities need an upgrade to better accommodate onsite food storage and preparation. The state funds, she adds, will be definitely helpful in the endeavor.

Statewide, the FOE report found that beef, cheese, and poultry together accounted for more than two-thirds of school purchases through the USDA program. Plant-based protein, on the other hand, made up just 2.5 percent of the pie, despite representing 8 percent of menu offerings. The USDA is currently considering a proposal for expanding credit options to include whole nuts, seeds, and legumes, according to an agency spokesperson contacted by Civil Eats.

Not surprisingly, cheeseburgers and ground beef entrees are among the most popular lunch selections in California schools. Yet, because of cattle’s large methane footprint, those choices result in 22 times more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than tofu noodle bowls or a plant-based wrap, Stewart notes, and account for nearly half the climate footprint of all protein served at lunch.

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Author: Naoki Nitta

These Flower Farmers Are Planting it Forward

Flowers, Food & Lifestyle, Lifestyle, Modern Farmer

As Deanna Kitchen worked in her garden in the summer of 2010, cutting an unexpected bounty of late-blooming sweet peas, she realized she had more blooms than she could use. A lot more. So, she decided to share them. She collected the blossoms in mason jars, baby food jars and any other containers she could find. Then, with her children in tow, Kitchen loaded up a little red wagon and distributed them at a long-term care facility. “In sharing [the flowers], I had actually found a solution to the problem I was facing. It was this opportunity to create connection in our community,” says Kitchen.

Photography by Ryleah Foehl Photos

After having her second child and making the difficult decision to leave her career as a teacher, Kitchen felt isolated in her new role as a stay-at-home mom. “I was in a big season of life transition and feeling really alone,” explains Kitchen. “I took up gardening because it was a place of rest during that season.” She lived on a one-acre homestead in a small town about halfway between Seattle and Bellingham, Washington, and dedicated herself to caring for her land.

Ten years later, Kitchen officially launched the Growing Kindness Project, a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower, educate and encourage individuals to cultivate connections in their communities by growing and giving flowers. She moved from the one-acre homestead to a 10-acre farm along the Puget Sound in 2016 and began growing an extensive selection of specialty cut flowers, at one point cultivating as many as 1,000 dahlia plants alone. She documented her journey of growing flowers and giving them away on social media with the hashtag Growing Kindness.

Deanna Kitchen launched the Growing Kindness project from her home garden. Photography by Ryleah Foehl Photos

“A tremendous amount of joy for me was not so much growing and selling flowers but connecting with people through flowers,” says Kitchen. “[Our farm] could only reach so far, but if we could invite other people to be a part of what we were doing and help equip them to have what they needed to do it, then we could multiply exponentially throughout communities beyond ours.”

The Growing Kindness Project has flourished, and it is now 2,000 members strong, with people from all over the world growing flowers and donating them to folks in need of a boost. With her time focused on keeping the nonprofit running, Kitchen has scaled back her farming efforts, currently growing about 500 dahlia plants on only a fraction of an acre. Under the name Twig + Vine, she sells dahlia tubers, designs floral arrangements for events and hosts workshops. Kitchen donates the majority of her flowers to local food banks and long-term care facilities, giving an average of 500 arrangements per season.

Flower donations ready to go. Photography courtesy of Fern Creek Florals.

Meanwhile, the Growing Kindness Project members give away untold numbers of flowers each year. The organization is open to all, regardless of experience level or yield. It doesn’t matter if you can donate one stem or 1,000 stems. Some members are planting seeds for the first time, while others are working farmers, donating portions of their flower crops. “If you’re a flower-based business, it doesn’t mean you stop selling flowers and give everything away,” says Kitchen. “Make donating to your community an intentional part of what you do in whatever volume makes sense.”

In its online community, the organization provides education and resources for new floriculturists and experienced flower farmers. Interested folks can learn how to plan a garden, set up irrigation systems and grow flowers. There are also resources on how to design floral arrangements and ways to donate flowers.

Once the flowers are ready for gifting, it’s up to the growers to identify the recipients. Some members take their cut flowers to women’s shelters, refugee families and, in the case of Fern Creek Florals, inpatient families at a children’s hospital.

Photography courtesy of Fern Creek Florals.

Jen Koym started Fern Creek Florals, a cut flower farm and donation garden in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the pandemic, as a way to bring some joy to her family. Replacing a 400-square-foot vegetable garden, Koym grew a number of varieties, from sweet peas and stock, lisianthus and poppies to dahlias and roses. When the farm filled with blooms, she decided to share in her bounty, donating a handful of bouquets during its first growing season in 2020. By 2022, Fern Creek Florals cultivated about 2,800 square feet and gave away around 280 arrangements.

Koym learned about the Growing Kindness Project after she had already implemented its mission. She immediately joined as an ambassador, a role that involves championing the organization and encouraging people to join in. “One of the nice things about gardening is that it’s so easy to share. There’s an abundance, so you can collect seeds and bulbs and corms and tubers and pass them on. It’s another wonderful way of spreading kindness,” says Koym. “There are so many ways to sow it forward.”

In addition to operating Fern Creek Florals, Koym runs LilyPads Housing, a non-profit organization that helps locate temporary housing for the families of pediatric patients at the hospital where she also donates flowers.

Photography courtesy of Fern Creek Florals.

Sarah Adams recalls moving into a LilyPads apartment last year while her baby awaited a heart transplant. She received a welcome bouquet from Fern Creek Florals upon her arrival and many arrangements after that. “It was a very dark and scary time, so having gorgeous fresh flowers in the apartment was a bright spot. The thought behind them was even more special,” says Adams, who spent nearly a year with her child in hospital. “I would frequently see a cart with the most beautiful floral arrangements you can imagine. Without fail, they were always a delivery from Fern Creek Florals.”

It’s stories like those of Koym and Adams that keep Kitchen energized to continue the work of the Growing Kindness Project. She wants more people to take part in the joy of this community and in the cultivation of flowers. To that end, she has started developing programs for sponsorships and grants and expanding educational resources to remove economic and educational barriers to access. “If you have a little bit of dirt and a big heart, you have what it takes to grow kindness in your community,” says Kitchen. “What you have is enough. Who you are is enough. Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. It really does have the opportunity to make a huge impact.”

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Author: Laura Drummond

Disabled People Get Support in the Kitchen from a New Cookbook

Civil Eats

As a disabled person who has experienced inaccessibility in the kitchen firsthand, Sherred—who lives in a household of neurodivergent people, himself included—has had to learn to navigate the kitchen in a wheelchair and with hand disabilities as his body has changed over time.

Sherred, who works as a food and lifestyle photographer, recipe developer, and journalist, produced the lush photography throughout the book. As a disability advocate as well, he was inspired to create this resource as part of his search for more disability representation in the kitchen and home garden. As a trans man, Sherred is also active in trans advocacy, including in response to conversion therapy.

“At a minimum, 25 percent of people are or will become disabled. And that’s the people who are willing to admit that they are disabled.”

It’s not all about eating, he says of the text. “I want to give [readers] some food for thought about the violence behind a lot of the food we eat,” Sherred said in a conversation with Civil Eats. He notes that while his home city of Duncan, British Columbia, is the “sixth-most expensive place to live in British Columbia,” it also has an incredibly high poverty rate, particularly in the Indigenous community.

Even as Sherred celebrates vibrant flavors, he acknowledges that cooking should also include thinking about food politics, such as Indigenous people being deprived of culturally appropriate foods.

The politics of the book also include personal body politics for a community that often feels unseen and unheard, especially in the kitchen, where hostile attitudes can make members feel unwelcome for using pre-chopped vegetables, specialty kitchen implements, and simplified recipes. For Sherred, accessibility is a priority as he adapts recipes to make them easier to read and discusses common dietary issues, meal planning, and how to decide which resources are most effective for his readers’ individual needs. “I want people to feel heard and seen and accepted,” he said.

Much of Crip Up the Kitchen draws upon immigrant culinary traditions thanks to the neighborhood where Sherred grew up and the Punjabi family that “adopted” him in his teens. Though he has Eastern European and British roots, the cookbook has a heavy focus on Thai and Punjabi food, with the goal of making these recipes more accessible to cooks who want flexible options.

For Sherred, a turning point was his introduction to an electric pressure cooker, which revolutionized the way he thought about cooking. This implement, plus the air fryer and bread machine, are the cornerstones of this text. Recipes include classic daal, a paneer recipe for those who want to make cheese at home, Thai green curry with chicken, and even an air fryer chocolate cake, all designed to be flexible and adaptable for disabled cooks (for example, leaving out chilis if a recipe is too spicy or swapping vegetables to accommodate dietary needs).

“Sharing is love,” he says. “Cooking for somebody is an act of love. This is an act of love. Here are my recipes . . . Let’s see each other.”

In your introduction, you talk about the kitchen as the “worst room.” Can you say more about that?

Because nothing about it is conducive to cooking when you’re disabled! Whether that be a physical disability, or some type of neurodivergence that makes navigating the [kitchen] “work triangle” difficult.

A really good example is my kitchen. I’m a wheelchair user. Counter heights [are hard], and even before I was a wheelchair user, I’m also a short lad. Unless you’re 5’6” or over, counters are not ergonomically built. It’s a literal pain in the wrists to be preparing at counters.

“I tried to include as many voices as possible and did my best to think of solutions for them.”

Even in my wheelchair, there’s technically enough room between the fridge and counter for [the building] code, but it’s really difficult to navigate safely around that corner. If I’m in my wheelchair and want to open the fridge, that’s impossible, because there’s no room. Even things like the distance to the stove, and the sink, and the fridge, it’s all now done for aesthetics instead of actual function. If you’re able-bodied, it makes no difference. If you’re somebody who’s disabled and has to use mobility aids in the kitchen, it’s unsafe.

Some people might not have the ability to work at a dining room table or an in-kitchen table, [which is] my recommendation [for people who can’t work in the kitchen]. Doing it on your lap is no bueno. That’s super dangerous. But [some people] have no choice—it’s either that or they don’t eat.

It can be really tough to find cookbooks and guidance targeted at disabled cooks. Why?

At a minimum, 25 percent of people are or will become disabled. And that’s the people who are willing to admit that they are disabled. I have a book launch event on Saturday, and one of my questions is, “Do you need any accommodations?” And there are so many people who say, “I’m able bodied, except for this, this, and this.” But they still consider themselves able bodied because society has made being disabled such a dirty thing. You are not [seen as] a whole person. You are less then. Ew! Like being dead is better than being disabled in a lot of people’s minds. Why would you want to make accommodations for something that is so gross and icky? If you have other experiences of marginalization, then that otherness is even more compounded.

It’s slowly starting to change, but 99.99 percent of stuff that is available is written by able-bodied people through a lens of trying to make a disabled person fit into an able-bodied box.

It is interesting that you mention accommodations, since that’s a real challenge for a lot of disabled people.

When I’m meeting with clients [in my capacity as a disability advocate focused on inclusion], I give specific examples, like I’m autistic and I need to take a 10-minute timeout every hour so I don’t melt down, because I get overstimulated. And I also have a spinal cord tumor and have to [take breaks often] so that the pain doesn’t become blinding. When I disclose, it makes it safer for other people to disclose, I find.

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Author: S.e. smith

Are the foods in your refrigerator or cupboard safe to eat?

AG Week

Sometimes kitchen cupboards are kind of dark. You may have a hard time seeing what you have.

Food can get “lost” in the recesses of a refrigerator, too. Have you ever wondered if something stored in your refrigerator or cupboards is safe to eat and high in quality?

Let’s follow a consumer, whom I will call “Connor,” and a health inspector, “Helen,” as they shrink down small enough to take a close look at kitchen storage.

No consumers or health inspectors were harmed in this process, by the way.

“Hello, Connor,” said Helen. “I understand that you want to take a look at your food storage. We will briefly shrink so we can take a close look at the food in your cupboard and refrigerator.”

“Just close your eyes, and I will see you in the cupboard shortly,” Helen said.

“This was more than I was expecting,” Connor replied. “I am ready to take a look.”

“We will begin with your cupboard,” Helen said as she activated the flashlight on her now-miniature cell phone and clasped a tiny clipboard with a list of items to check.

Julie Garden-Robinson, NDSU Extension Service

“I noticed some of the dates on the cans of beans and corn have a ‘best if used by date’ that expired last week,” Connor said.

“That’s a quality date,” Helen noted. “According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, canned vegetables and beans are good from two to five years in your cupboard. Do you remember when you bought these cans?”

“I bought a lot of canned beans on sale about a year ago,” he said. “When do the cans expire?”

“Technically, very few foods have actual expiration dates,” Helen said. “However, infant formula and baby foods should be used by the product dates, because the amount of nutrients present can decline.”

“I will remember that if I ever have any kids,” Connor said.

“I am looking for a date you may have marked,” Helen said as she rolled a can of baked beans on its side.

“I don’t mark dates currently,” Connor said. “I have a permanent marker I could use.”

“I’d advise you to write the date of purchase on cans and arrange your cupboards in a ‘first in first out’ order,” she said.

Helen checked if the can was damaged. She didn’t note any sharp dents in the seams or any bulging or leaking.

Connor began walking on the rolling can like a log in a river.

“Ok, Connor, let’s not go flying out of the cupboard onto the kitchen floor,” Helen said.

He chuckled sheepishly.

“Why does the Nutrition Facts label look different on some foods?” he asked.

“Back in 2021, Nutrition Facts labels were changed on all foods,” Helen explained. “If you have foods that still list vitamins A and C, those food products are getting older. The new labels show potassium, added sugars and vitamin D in place of vitamins A and C.”

Helen detected a rancid odor when she opened a bottle of vegetable oil. She also found a package of opened graham crackers that did not pass the “sniff test.”

“You need to use your sense of smell and sight, but you do not want to taste food if you are doubting its freshness,” Helen remarked. “This rancid oil will affect the flavor of the foods you eat, and I see its best if used by date is two years ago. These crackers need to be tossed, too.”

“Let’s hop over to the refrigerator,” Helen directed. “Please begin by checking the temperature of your refrigerator.”

“It’s chilly in here at 39 Fahrenheit,” Connor said. “I need a sweatshirt.”

“I am glad to see you have a thermometer in your fridge,” Helen remarked. “Refrigerators should be kept cold at 40 Fahrenheit or lower, but not so cold that you freeze the food.”

“By the way, why is there a pound of ground beef thawing in the sink?” she asked.

“I forgot to put it in the refrigerator last night,” Connor said.

“Safe thawing is an important part of safe food handling,” Helen remarked. “You can thaw in the microwave followed by immediate cooking, or you can put the wrapped meat in a waterproof bag and thaw under cool water in the sink.”

“How long can fresh meat be kept in the refrigerator?” Connor asked.

“We recommend using fresh meat such as ground beef up to two days in the refrigerator and roasts up to five days,” she added. “You can freeze for a year, but be sure the meat is properly wrapped to avoid freezer burn.”

Helen opened the drawer where Connor kept cheese. She hoisted a bag of cheese and showed Connor the mold growing throughout the shreds.

“This cheese cannot be rescued,” she said. “Next time put it in the freezer if you won’t be using it.”

“I see that your milk is in the door of your refrigerator,” she noted. “I’d advise you to keep highly perishable foods such as milk in the main part of your refrigerator so you have less variation in temperature.”

“I can do that!” Connor said. “I’m wondering about the safety of some of the condiments such as hot sauce.”

“Looking at the dates, some of these foods are museum-quality,” Helen teased. “For best flavor, try to use opened containers within six months to a year. Sometimes the smaller container is the better buy if you are not going to use it within a reasonable time.”

“Are these leftovers safe? Connor asked as he opened a take-out box. “I ate in a restaurant about a week ago and forgot them, I guess.”

“Unfortunately, you should eat or freeze leftovers within three to four days of preparing them,” Helen said. “No one likes to waste food, but sometimes, we need to toss foods that could make us sick.”

“It’s time for us to resume our regular size, but I hope you learned something new today,” Helen said. “By the way, check out the Food Storage Guide and the Food Freezing Guide at NDSU Extension at

www.ag.ndsu.edu/food

. Search for NDSU Extension’s online cookbook, ‘Spillin’ the Beans’ for lots of ideas for all those beans.”

Julie Garden-Robinson is a North Dakota State University Extension food and nutrition specialist and professor in the Department of Health, Nutrition and Exercise Sciences. Follow her on Twitter

@jgardenrobinson

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Author:

Black Women Are Key to the American Kitchen – But Remain Invisible

Civil Eats

“So what of the millions of other women constrained to the American kitchen for 350 years, and what of their bequest? What of their descendants? Where are our restaurants and our book deals?”

Not at all incidentally, Tiana’s mother in The Princess and The Frog works as a domestic and seamstress in the home of a wealthy white family in New Orleans’ opulent Garden District. When Tiana grows up, she works as a server and baker in a modest restaurant. At least Disney does not lie in this portrayal of Southern racial hierarchy in 1912. Though in 1926, at the height of the Great Migration, Tiana would have been more likely to wake up as a frog than be granted the keys to a restaurant. (Spoiler: in the film’s end, Tiana gets the prince and her dream business.)

But among the many tired anachronisms in the film (racist voodoo tropes, Bayou dwellers portrayed as toothless hillbillies, etc.) the most tired is its repetition of America’s favorite fusty nugget: If you just work hard enough, you can get what you dream of. The film doesn’t mention of the 400 years of work with no pay.

Criminally little about Black history, particularly antebellum Black history, has been told through the eyes of Black people. Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was the first African American woman to publish her own slave narrative, in 1861. She had the extremely rare fortune of being taught to read and write by one of the women who owned her.

In the book, Jacobs recounts the plight of her grandmother, known as “Aunt Marthy:”

“She became an indispensable personage in the household, officiating in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse to seamstress. She was much praised for her cooking; and her nice crackers became famous in the neighborhood that many people were desirous of obtaining them. In consequence of numerous requests of this kind, she asked permission of her mistress to bake crackers at night, after all the household work was done. . . . The business proved profitable, and each year she laid by a little, which was saved for a fund to purchase her children.”

Jacobs goes on to describe how her grandmother’s mistress eventually asked to borrow the $300 she had saved. It was never returned, but the mistress did purchase a silver candelabra with the money, which likely got passed down to her own heirs over the generations. Aunt Marthy’s 10-year-old son was sold for around $700, about the cost of two candelabras.

A formal portrait of Harriet Jacobs.

This description of the condition of the enslaved female cook, housekeeper, waiting maid, and housemaid was a relatively benign experience, compared to the other sadistic abuses described in the book. But it begins to paint a picture of the legacy, or lack thereof, for the Black woman culinary worker in America.

The enslaved domestic servant after Reconstruction didn’t fare much better than the enslaved sugar mill and sugar plantation worker, who had no other choice but to go on to coerced labor or indentured servitude, working in the very same mills and living in the very same slave quarters.

For instance, by the 1880s, about 98 percent of Black women in large southern cities like Atlanta worked as domestics. In the 1912 essay, “More Slavery at the South,” an anonymous African American domestic woman contacted hundreds of other women like her and attempted to present a snapshot of their daily working lives. “The condition of this vast host of poor colored people is just as bad as, if not worse than, it was during the days of slavery,” she wrote. “Tho [sic] today we are enjoying nominal freedom, we are literally slaves.”

She describes 16-hour work days and adds that just as enslaved Black women were expected to acquiesce to rape and sexual harassment by their white masters, as rejecting advances by the man of the house, even under emancipation, was widespread grounds for termination. Many, if not most, Black women were raising children by their husbands as well as by the white men whose homes they worked in.

“You might as well say that I’m on duty all the time—from sunrise to sunrise, every day in the week I am the slave, body and soul, of this family,” the unnamed author wrote. “We are but little more than pack horses, beasts of burden, slaves! In the distant future, it may be, centuries and centuries hence, a monument of brass or stone will be erected to the Old Black Mammies of the South.”

To this day I don’t know of any such monument, with the additional added insult that the “Old Black Mammy” is itself an invented apparatus, in part to explain away the relationship between white men and Black women. In actuality, domestic workers were likely to be underweight, not overweight, thanks to severely rationed food, light skinned, because household work was often assigned to mixed-race women, and young, because less than 10 percent of Black women lived beyond 50 during that time period.

When a Southern movement to erect such monuments and memorials began in the early 1920’s, Black protests voiced that a better memorial would be to extend the full rights of American citizenship to the descendants of these women.

Moving From Service to Ownership

It’s difficult to discern what the turning point was that ultimately gained Tiana ownership of her restaurant in The Princess and the Frog. After being turned into a frog and kissing the prince, she was transformed back into human form, and in short order, the restaurant, and the man, are hers.

Whilst still a frog, she sang, “I’m going to do my best to take my place in the sun when we’re human.” So maybe it was in that moment—when she was at long last recognized as human.

In 2023, when the most recognizable movement for Black rights goes by the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” I think we can mostly agree that we are still fighting for our lives to matter enough to be recognized as fully human.

By the Jim Crow era, as late as 1966, the one job open to Black women was as a maid who cooked, washed and ironed clothes, and cared for children, for as little as $20 per week. Though Black women domestic workers fought for better wages and conditions, Black women’s contributions to the project of American cookery hasn’t been reflected in a way that even begins to scratch the surface of the true history. And the industry seems content with this fact.

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Author: Mecca Bos