Many hands make light work

Every year you have New Year's Resolutions that are difficult to keep. This year I resolved to volunteer more, and, of course, to get in better shape.

Today I volunteered at The Food Project. It satisfies both goals! And it's a wonderful way to see how your food gets on your plate. The Food Project invites volunteers to come work the land on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays in the spring and fall. (During July and August, they recruit dozens of high school students to do most of the work.) Each volunteer day, they have between 10 and 60 volunteers each week.

At 9:30, about 20 of us gathered. We played an icebreaker game, and part of it included facts about food production. For example, in a $3.50 box of cereal, about $3 goes to packaging and marketing, and $0.07 goes to the farmer. Yikes. It's like being a musician and selling CDs. We also learned that there are more people in jail than there are farmers in the US.

We split into groups, and I ended up working with five others in a hoop house where the winter share was grown. It was fun to see, since I participated in the winter share. The student leader ran the show, and we had to clear the whole place of plants and weeds. It's possible that I pocketed a bit of cilantro that maybe I had in an egg scramble when I got home, famished. I also learned a bit about using the hula hoe.

Once we cleared the vegetation, we put together a bunch of large tarps to cover the floor. Since we didn't know what to expect when we unrolled all the tarps, we had to puzzle things out a couple times before we could stake everything into the ground. That finally done, we started to build tables for new seedlings to grow on. The main greenhouse already had nice seedlings, particularly a bunch of beautiful onions. One of the students said, "They're so cute...I want to take one home!"

To build the tables, we stood cinder blocks on end, put slats of wood across the bricks, and then put the long flat crates on top of that. I ended up carrying a bunch of cinder blocks! By the end, I was pretty sore, and starving! We all got together and talked about what we did that we enjoyed. Weeding, building tables, finally getting the tarp down.

We ended the day with another game where we learned about healthy food communities, and how they are lacking in most areas. This is especially true of low income urban areas, where there are 30% less grocery stores. It can be difficult to get adequate nutrition when all you have is sub shops and convenience stores. The Food Project sponsors several farmers markets in areas such as these, bringing reasonably priced, homegrown veggies to as many people as possible.

The Food Project grows about 250,000 pounds of vegetables, according to their website. Today, I was a part of that!