Robert Waldrop

This I don't know. We did distribute 4,000 copies of the 5th edition of our Better Times Almanac of Useful Information during December 2004 in the Oklahoma City area, mostly in baskets of groceries handed out by churches and charities at Christmas. The first week of February we are doing a second printing of 11,000, all destined for similar demographic groups. The text of the 5th edition is online at http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/2004index.htm , and tries to present in one publication the essentials that a family would need to transition their cooking to our suggestions. We also have quite a few people waiting on the Oklahoma Food Cooperative to get qualified to accept food stamps for our local foods. The cooperative will give the memberships to them, but alas the food stamp bureaucracy is taking its own sweet time deciding on our case. It's not as if the concept of farmers markets taking food stamps is unusual, our research has found that farmers markets all over the country accept food stamps. But the USDA office responsible for Oklahoma doesn't quite seem to understand this. It is very frustrating.

After reading through the thread, it seems like it has morphed into a long discussion about GMOs. I would like to return to the original thoughts which started the thread. Eating is certainly a political act. It is also a moral act, and an agricultural act. Basically, in the American system, you get what you pay for. Most people having been paying for an unsustainable, fossil fuel intensive, corporation dominated, homogenized, junk food system. That's where the dollars are going, so that's what we get the most of. To change this system, it's important to vote with your dollars. Here in Oklahoma, to facilitate this, we organized the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. We are an association of producers of food and customers of farmers, all of us united by our interest in producing or buying local Oklahoma foods. It has been more than 2 years since I have spent one penny in a supermarket for "confined animal feeding operation" meats. We get all of our household meats through the cooperative. We operate via an order delivery system. THe first Thursday of the month, the producers post their products and prices at our website. Customer members can then log in, establish a shopping cart, and shop for a week, until the 2nd THursday. On the third Thursday, the producers all come to town and the cooperative volunteers sort everything into the individual customer orders. People can pick up their food at pickup location in OKC, Norman, Tulsa, and Muskogee-Tahlequah. (Producers coming into town carry back retail orders to the areas outside of OKC metro.) The producers establish their own prices, we don't limit the number of producers selling a particular item (like ground beef), and when customers order they specify e.g. 2 pounds of ground beef from John's Farm in NW Oklahoma, or 3 chickens from Horn ORganic Farm in Cordell, etc. THe cooperative adds a small charge to each invoice for our expenses, which are minimal because we use borrowed space and volunteers and have no staff. Our original idea was to open a store, but that was beyond our resources. We were above, however, to self-finance our startup as an order delivery service, by each member paying a $50 membership fee. We presently have 308 members, and in December our gross sales were right at $11,000. 2004 was our first full year of operation, we were organized in November 2003, and our gross sales for the year were right at $100,000. In January, 716 different Oklahoma food products were available (we do have some non-food items like artisan soaps and body care products). OK, Wal Mart doesn't have to worry about us yet, but we are just getting started. The point is that we are putting our dollars where our ideas are, and thus directly encouraging sustainable agriculture and viable rural economies.

This varies from place to place. Oklahoma City for example is not a dense city, many poor people live in single family homes with plenty of room for gardens that could make significant contributions to food security. People in densely population urban areas like NYC or Philadelphia have different challenges. Earlier this year we tore down an old detached garage on our property and in the fall we built a cold frame on part of it, the mache, carrots, and chard are growing nicely in their 8 inches of dirt on concrete. In the spring we are building several growing beds on the concrete to see how it works. Container gardening is also a possibility, especially for high value items like herbs or tomatoes. We've also grown potatoes in buckets set on the sidewalk.

This is why we publish periodic editions of the Better Times Almanac. Our initial press run for the 5th edition was 4,000 copies, nearly all of those were distributed in December by various food security groups in the OKC area. We are doing a second printing later this month of 10,000 copies. The text of the publication (format is a 32 page tabloid newspaper) is online at http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/2004index.htm . We send out single copies for free, simply send me a large (9" x 12") envelope with $1.06 postage on it and we can send you a single copy. If anybody would like a larger quantity to give away in a situation such as you describe in your reply, contact me privately.

Thanks for the welcome. This is really a very astonishing nook of cyberspace. I have been reading at the eGullet online Culinary Institute, and have already learned a lot. I have no formal food education, but am an avid amateur cook, so while there are some things I do very well, there are other aspects of cooking that I would like to work on and I hope to learn many useful things here.

I confess I wrote in an "advocacy voice", but I don't know that I left anything out big enough to make the article "less accurate". It was very accurate in terms of figuring the cost of the foods. I ended up developing a spread sheet with the price of ingredients like 1 tbsp sugar, in order to calculate the prices of each meal. The one thing not discussed in the article is the learning curve it takes to get up to speed to the point that a food lifestyle like this is easy. I've been baking bread for 20 years, so I don't work from a recipe unless I am trying some new, and making bread rolls is something I can do second nature. I wish I had kept a food diary over the last 20 years, then I could say something like "well, after I had made 250 loaves of bread, it was so easy it stopped being work", but that last brain cell rattling around my skull fails me at that level of detail regarding events of 20 years ago. My suggestion is that people do one thing at a time, and gradually increase their inventory of skills (and the literal inventory of their pantry) and the size of their garden. I started my garden seven years ago, and it started out about 24 square feet, 3' x 8'. Now my lawns are in full flight, fleeing ahead of on-marching peach trees and blackberry thickets and tomato trellises. Gardening is like compound interest, add a little bit each year over time, and you end up with a lot more than you started with.

Food stamp benefits vary based on family size, income, and housing expense. the basic figure we used for 2 people is a national standard, and is the maximum, assuming that the family has zero income.

The rules for the challenge (which i didn't write, this originated in the Community Food Security Listserv) was that you could use items in your pantry as long as you accounted for their cost and it was within the weekly budget. This is not unreasonable in a test for a food stamp budget menu, as food stamps (actually they are EBT cards now) are given once a month, and many people who receive food stamps do all or most of their shopping once a month, on the day their benefits arrive. In Oklahoma City, I generally pay $9/gallon for olive oil. It's not extra virgin, but it seems to suit my peasant tastes just fine. If olive oil had been a lot more expensive, then I would have made other choices. I think I note in my comments that this challenge was done in a specific place, Oklahoma City, which has very reasonable prices for locally produced foods like buffalo and grass finished meats, and has very competitive prices on other supermarket items like olive oil. We encourage people with low and moderate income to keep some of their household savings in food. The less money you have, in fact, the more important it is that you keep some of your savings in food. This helps insulate you from the regular mood swings of supermarket pricing. One week canned goods are cheap, but meat is expensive, the next week, meat is cheap but canned goods are expensive. If you have some of your household savings in food, you don't have to buy canned goods when they are expensive. You can wait a week or two until the grocery store slot machine shifts around and canned goods are cheap again. So part of the point was to show how food storage is useful for low income people as a grocery budget management tool.

The time calculations were for food preparation time only, but another popular myth is that gardening takes a lot of time. Well, like any other human activity, it can take as much time as you want, but I prefer the less work garden methods. Generally during the growing season I spend about 15-20 minutes/day gardening. This time of year I spend zero time in the garden. I suppose it would be possible to calculate the share of annual gardening time that is representated by the home-grown foods I used during the challenge week, but the amount of time that represents is so small it hardly even merits notice. For example, I have 3 peach trees. Several years ago I spent maybe a half hour each planting them. Since then there is maybe an hour each year per tree of fussing with them, spreading some compost around them, a little bit of pruning. Total harvesting time for each tree is less than an hour (much less, they are semi-dwarf trees). 2 hours to make jam. So 3 hours/year investment in my rack of peach jams, out of which we would have to then calculate the time involved in producing a tablespoon of jam for my morning biscuits. I use the square foot gardening method, www.squarefootgardening.com , which is the least work garden method that I know of. It takes about 1 hour to make a square foot garden bed, and once made, it's made, it doesn't get remade every year, just a new top dressing of compost. No tilling, very little weeding if set up right from the beginning. I water sparingly, and not enough to make an appreciable difference between my winter and my summer water bill. I use thick mulch, which helps conserve moisture. I don't buy any fertilizer, I have a compost pile, and that is my fertilizer. My garden equipment consists of 2 shovels, both of which I bought used at a garage sale several years ago, 1 rake, also bought used. The lumber for my garden beds was scavenged, and cost nothing. So there's not much expense there to account for. Sure, a person can spend a lot of money on equipment if that's what they want to do. I could have bought an expensive shovel for say $30 at an expensive garden supply store, but I don't have that kind of money. So I paid $2 for a shovel from a garage sale and I think it pretty much works as good as the $30 version. The other tool I use is a digging stick to poke holes for seeds, but that is just a stick from the branch pile by the compost pile.

The Oklahoma Food Cooperative is an order delivery service, and all of the local foods used in this week were bought from the local farmers through the cooperative. The first week of each month, the producers post their product availabilities and prices at our website, http://www.oklahomafood.org . The second week of the month, our members order via our online shopping cart system. On the 3rd Thursday of the month, the producers come to town and the cooperative sorts all their products into the various customer orders. We use borrowed space and volunteers, and the producers receive all of the price for their products, the cooperative adds $3.50 to each invoice for its expenses. I am the president of the cooperative, so my involvement with the cooperative is a considerable time investment, but it takes me about 20 minutes to do my monthly order for my personal household. if I was not involved as an officer, it would take about 15 minutes to go from my house to the closest pickup location for the cooperative (there are 3 pickup places in Oklahoma City, 1 in Norman, and one each in Tulsa, Muskogee, and Tahlequah). Because some of the same questions have been asked about this experience here that have been raised elsewhere, I added a short "frequently asked quesetions about this food challenge" section to the page http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/foodchallenge.htm . Robert Waldrop Oklahoma City