This blog post is part of our new series, Perspectives on Food Insecurity in Wisconsin, in support of the Sesame Street program Growing Hope Against Hunger, and WPT programs Wisconsin Foodie (airing Thursdays at 7 p.m.) and Wisconsin Gardener (airing Thursdays at 6 p.m.).
Sesame Street Food for Thought: Eating Well on a Budget is a bilingual, multimedia program designed to help support families who have children between the ages of 2 and 8 and are coping with uncertain or limited access to affordable and nutritious food. Contact WPT to request a free Food for Thought tool kit with tips, strategies, and tools to help families with limited resources eat healthy.
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by Cara Ladd
It is hard not to adopt some sort of food obsession, living in a place like Madison. The foodie culture is rich, the restaurants aplenty, and the unrivaled opportunity to get fresh ingredients at farmers’ markets makes the national spotlight. Especially in the city’s downtown area, there is food just about everywhere you turn. As one of the many college students populating the isthmus, I can confidently say that food is constantly on the mind of the typical twenty-something. Whether it’s where to grab late-night eats or study snacks, or what new experimental dish to try to make in your cozy apartment kitchen, food is omnipresent in our lives. For some, food is less of a luxury and more of a chore, with grocery shopping on a budget a challenge that often leads to compromised diets. But one thing most college students don’t realize, particularly in a place like Madison, is that where there is an abundance of food, especially local and organic, there may also be a food desert nearby.
The term “food desert” has been used to describe the south side of Madison in years past, an area that is just outside the reach of the University’s downtown bubble, but an area that is still a prevalent part of the city. “Food desert” essentially describes a region where the availability of food is difficult for most people to attain geographically and/or economically. For inhabitants of South Madison, a fresh market might not be right down the street, or they may not have the means to get to one for good, healthy food options. It’s hard for many, especially students, to recognize that such a region exists just in our backyard, especially with attractions like the popular Dane County Farmer’s Market flaunting an abundance of cheesy bread and fresh produce.
Nevertheless, there are individuals working to change the food system. The growing South Madison Farmer’s Market, started twelve years ago by Robert Pierce in collaboration with people from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has made great strides in increasing accessibility and affordability of local, healthy food in the “food desert”, with farmers accepting food stamps in order to provide equal eating opportunity for people of all income levels. On the University side, a South Madison project was started through the student organization, Slow Food UW, by a former member and graduate, Aly Miller. Not that long ago, Aly established connections to South Madison through UW advisor Margaret Nellis, and with Robert’s help, pioneered the project that would allow students to work in an area that needed it the most.
One of the offshoots of Aly’s brainchild has been Slow Food’s connection to the Boys and Girls Clubs on Taft Street and Allied Drive. From cooking nights with the teens, started in spring 2011 by fellow South Madison leader Shelbi Jentz, to the gardens that were planted on site just this past season, Slow Food students have become weekly regulars at both locations, and are working hard towards teaching the teens about local food.
This past semester, we started off the year by reinstating the cooking nights every Wednesday at the Boys and Girls Club on Allied. The purpose of these mini-workshops is to expose teens to cooking a healthy meal using local ingredients, and of course the reward is dinner in the end, so long as they participate in the preparation. Often the greatest challenge is coming up with a variety of meals that the kids will be willing to try. They are teenagers, after all. Surprisingly enough, a lot of the students are rather skilled at cooking. It’s just a matter of convincing them that it is an enjoyable and self-fulfilling task in the long run, especially when they are willing to try something new.
Our first cooking night, we wanted to come up with a fun dish that the kids would love with a few creative twists thrown into it. Our solution: pizza. But this wasn’t going to be Pizza Hut style. As a team, we decided to teach the kids how to make pizza from scratch and let them toss in their own toppings. We included everything from broccoli to hot peppers, zucchini to spinach, and topped it all off with mozzarella cheese. We were able to source almost all of the ingredients from the Wednesday farmer’s market on Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, and we even used some of the tomatoes from the garden on site. Doesn’t get much more local than that!
Even though the teens made comments here and there about the nontraditional appearance of the pizza in comparison to generic kinds, every single one wolfed down their slice. If anything is to be learned from these cooking nights, it’s that food education takes lots of practice and patience. I would like to think that some of the students consider making these dishes on their own at home, but I know this is not necessarily the case. Nonetheless, what the cooking nights can teach us more than anything is the necessity of persistent engagement with other students in South Madison. Even if these students still prefer Pizza Hut to the homemade version, if they just become more aware of how to cook with healthy ingredients and where they can get such ingredients, then we will have succeeded in making steps toward eradicating this food desert.
Cara Ladd is a junior at University of Wisconsin-Madison majoring in Spanish and Environmental Studies. She works closely with Slow Food-UW and was part of a team that received a Wisconsin Idea Undergraduate Fellowship for the 2011-2012 school year to do work in South Madison. Cara concentrates most of her work at the new charter school, Badger Rock Middle School.
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