Food and farming
By Dennis Hill
Published in News on February 11, 2015 1:46 PM
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News-Argus/DENNIS HILL
Members of a panel discussion on food and farming at the Wayne County Museum are, from left: Jessica Strickland, June Hoyle, Marisa Benzle, Cheryl Alston and Shorlette Ammons. The event was part of the annual Wayne County Reads program, which this year features the book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle."
Reconnecting with the land and finding ways to grow and distribute fresh food locally was the focus of a panel discussion Tuesday night at the Wayne County Museum.
The event was part of the ongoing series of events associated with this year's Wayne County Reads selection, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," which describes a family that turned away from modern living and lived off the land for a year.
Participating in the discussion were Jessica Strickland, horticulture agent with the Wayne County branch of the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service; June Hoyle, a Wayne County Master Gardener; Marisa Benzle, manager of the small farms unit of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems; and Cheryl Alston of the Wayne Food Initiative. Shorlette Ammons of the CEFS moderated.
The discussion was titled "A Seat at the Table: N.C. Farming and Foodways Then and Now." Each of the panelists talked about their early experiences growing up on farms and learning the value of fresh food. All agreed that people today are more interested in the quality of the food they eat, where it came from and what role pesticides, antibiotics and other chemicals play in its production.
Mrs. Hoyle, a Goldsboro native and retired nurse, talked about how important a healthy diet is to a healthy lifestyle and disease prevention.
"Fresh vegetable are better than any other kind in the world," she said.
Mrs. Strickland, who grew up on a small farm in the mountains, said agriculture in that region is necessarily done on a smaller scale there and that she recalls many days working with other members of her family to grow and preserve food. She said more and more people are becoming aware of the process of preserving their own food through canning and other methods.
"It's a lost art," she said.
Miss Benzle grew up in a rural area of Ohio and said development had taken away much of the farmland near her home.
"You really see changes in a community when you lose that agricultural history," she said.
Mrs. Alston is a lifelong resident of Goldsboro. A former teacher at Goldsboro High, she said she became concerned with the high cancer and diabetes rates in the area and believes that eating better is the key to improving Wayne County's overall health.
She said she has begun to see more people in the city and county interested in growing their own food and she said she is encouraging community gardens through churches and other organizations.
"I can see little places of improvement," she said.
All of the panelists said food is a communal enterprise and that for many people, it is the focus of family and community celebrations.
Each recalled times when family and friends would gather to harvest food and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Mrs. Strickland said life on the farm was centered around the garden.
"It all revolved around what was coming into season," she said.
Miss Benzle said the differences between small-scale and large-scale farming highlight the differences in perspective between people who grown food in a family garden and those who have hundreds of acres of crops to tend.
Finding ways to incorporate the two is the key to the future of agriculture, the panelists said.
Mrs. Strickland said the general public has little knowledge of where their food comes from and that educating people about the importance of knowing what they are eating is crucial.
All agreed that finding ways to incorporate new farming techniques with old ways of thinking about food is going to be the future of agriculture. We cannot go back to the past completely, it is not practical, they said. Much food is grown far away and is transported to local grocery stores for consumption. But some things can be grown locally, Mrs. Alston emphasized.
"Some food travels a long way," she said. "But many things we can produce, I think we should do locally. We have the resources. It's just a matter of coming together."