Above: Leslie from the garden crew sampling a carrot.
The Community School in South Tamworth, NH and the Rey Foundation are excited to announce a colloborative project: The Farmers’ Table, hot lunches served at the Community School each Thursday starting September 9. The lunches will be available to community members on a voluntary donation basis. One of the target groups for these lunches is young mothers and children. In order to provide an additional appeal to this group,The Rey Foundation will offer Chalk Talk drawing and storytelling sessions during and after lunch. Lunch will be served 12:00 – 1:00, and Chalk Talks will run 12:30 – 2:00.
Please call Lianne Prentice 323-7000 at The Community School to ensures that we make enough food to fill all
bellies without any wasted leftovers.
The Farmers’ Table will use the Community School’s licensed kitchen and the bounty from its certified organic farm to benefit those in the Bearcamp Valley looking to supplement their weekly food budget with a healthly, balanced meal. This program will also provide a multigenerational social outlet, creating an inviting atmosphere for families with young children, teens, and elders alike. In addition, the project will eventually provide classes on cooking and preserving home-grown food, practices which are becoming lost in our modern culture.
For the past four years, The Community School has hosted three dinners each year featuring locally raised foods, one in March using preserved foods and two in the summer months using fresh. There is a marked increase in community participation at these dinners, from 30 or so people to 200 at our latest event. These donation-only meals are reaching a wide demographic, pulling in families with young children, single 20-somethings, and a large number of retirees. With this in mind, we have developed a series of simple-to-implement events, resources, and activities designed to feed, nurture and educate. In addition to the lunches, the Farmer’s Table will increase the number of dinners to five a year.
Our goal is to provide 640 lunches to community members, Community School faculty, staff, students, and families; 500 dinners to community members; and 40 Quarts and 25 pints of canned Community School vegetables are donated to local food bank.
Nevin Scrimshaw, World Food Prize Laureate and President of the International Nutrition Foundation, will be advising and helping to evaluate the program.
Why a Farmers’ Table Program in the Bearcamp Valley?
The Carroll County Collaborative recently published the following statistics for Carroll County: Less than 1/2 of all jobs provide livable wages for a family of four; we have the fewest livable-wage jobs in the state; we have the lowest average wage rate in the state; 14.6% of residents have no health insurance (state average is 11.7%); 15% of kids <18 live in poverty; and 11% of our elders, 65+ years, live alone (state average is 8.5%). A recent NHPR report cited that a family of four making $40,000 a year was in danger of not receiving adequate nutrition. People in Carroll County desperately need access to affordable, nutritious, and delicious food to maintain their health and quality of life. The recession continues to impact our local economy, straining already fragile family budgets. Food security issues are clear outcomes of economic instability; one very real but often overlooked repercussion is the sense, experienced by many, of being disempowered by poverty. When we struggle to make ends meet we often feel isolated. This isolation, in turn, negatively impacts our health. The exponential increase in attendance at our community dinners over the past three years, from 30 people per meal to last week’s staggering 200 people, shows us that there is a need and desire for the physical, economic and emotional well-being that eating wholesome and delicious food, especially when doing so communally, provides.
While there are several organizations providing communal meals, these typically are offered in the evening and may or may not offer, facilitate, or stress intergenerational interaction. The Farmers’ Table lunches will offer budget-supplementing meals, balanced nutrition, education, and real fun. Our community dinners are very social, lively events, which is clearly part of their appeal. This element of participating in a community gathering is as important as the meal itself, for some.
