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Senin, 31 Oktober 2022

Educators, Parents Team Up to Bring Healthier Food to Cafeteria | NEA - National Education Association

In April 2022, a seven-member team from the Jeffco Education Support Professionals Association (JESPA) came in ready to negotiate with their school district over more than pay and additional staff. They were also proposing healthy school meals for students. To drive home this point, JESPA food service workers catered dinner that night for the management bargaining team: A prepackaged, highly processed sandwich.

No one ate it.

“What you see in front of you [is what] I serve my kids,” Zander Kaschub said during the bargaining session. Kaschub is an elementary school kitchen manager in Jeffco Public Schools and president of JESPA. While he runs the kitchen’s day-to-day operations, he has no control of the menu. “It is unacceptable. It’s the easy way out. … We need to [do] better.”

Over the years, food service workers have faced a continuous loop of job-related threats: Parents complain about the unhealthy food choices and opt their child out of the lunch program. School administrators reduce the workforce for lack of student participation and then rely on quick-to-fix meals.

Serving the unhealthy food students eat at school was one of the many strategies that would help JESPA settle their contract with a pilot program focused on healthier school meals, scratch cooking, disclosures to all families about nutritional contents, and more. They even won a $3 pay increase for all JESPA members, bringing starting wages up to $18 by September 2023 from $12.49 in 2021. That’s a 44 percent increase to starting pay!

BARGAINING FOR THE COMMON GOOD

Collective bargaining looks different depending on state laws. Some states only allow for bargaining over wages and benefits, while other states don’t permit bargaining at all. But in Colorado, where there is no state statute, unions can go beyond bread-and-butter issues. It’s called permissive bargaining, and this is where Bargaining for the Common Good comes into play—a strategy where educators and their unions join with parents and other allies to demand changes that benefit not just educators, but students and the entire community.

This means, unions can bargain and win on more student-centered issues that aren’t traditionally covered in a contract, like recess time, mental health support for students and more art and music classes.

And it was this approach that gave JESPA members a winning chance to get the school meals their students deserve.

AN OVERSTRETCHED FOOD SYSTEM

andrea cisneros
Andrea Cisneros

Jeffco Public School administrators have increasingly relied on food that’s low in nutrients and high in saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar.

“We had carrots, but they were sad looking carrots,” says Andrea Cisneros, a kitchen manager at West Woods Elementary School, adding that she’s “never seen those prepackaged meals before the pandemic.”

When the pandemic hit, the USDA extended free meals to every student, but instead of working to provide those free meals, district officials shut down operations and moved to layoff food service workers. JESPA decided to organize, filed a class action grievance, and worked with Coloradans for the Common Good to demand the district reopen kitchens and utilize buses to transport food to communities.

Once schools were back to in-person learning, the district blamed supply chain issues and staff shortages and increased the use of cheap, prepackaged, ready-to-eat meals that typically contain little to no protein and are overly processed, such as chicken nuggets, fish sticks and tater tots.

“We served pizza every day at the junior high and high schools, and we had a shortage of vegetables and fruits,” recalls Cisneros, who’s been with the district for 23 years. “I took a field trip to Boulder Valley schools nearby to tour their kitchens. I learned how that district prioritizes healthy, local food, so they did not have the supply chain issues, constant menu changes, or substitutions that we have in Jeffco.”

Since students have returned to in-person learning and families are being charged for school lunches, parents also want better food options.

POWER BOOST WHEN UNIONS AND COMMUNITIES UNITE

Across the country, more school districts are embracing scratch cooking (freshly cooked meals, using locally sourced ingredients), as part of a food justice movement that empowers communities to have authority over what they eat, how they eat it, and who provides it to them.

JESPA cafeteria workers want to move to this style of food preparation, knowing that higher quality food will benefit their students' health and learning. Parents want the same.

But when the two groups were advocating for healthy school meals separately, zero changes were made to school menus—that all changed when they combined efforts.

Some parents got ahold of our union and asked us how to get better food that’s more culturally relevant to what they eat at home,” explains Cisneros, adding that some kids wouldn’t eat the calzone because the word is too closely associated with the Spanish word calzones, which means underwear.

She adds, “Parents were upset and didn't know what steps to take. They joined us and the Coloradans for the Common Good, … and, together, we set up a game plan.”  JESPA is a member of Coloradans for the Common Good, a broad-based organization comprised of over 30 local institutions, including congregations, unions, non-profits, and neighborhood organizations, committed to the common good of all people.

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Webinar: Championing Healthy Food Environments at Mega Sports Events - World Health Organization

The World Health Organization, Department of Nutrition and Food Safety and the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), Qatar invite you to a joint webinar “Championing healthier food environments in mega sports events” on 1 November, 2022 at 15:00 CET (17:00 AST), organized in the context of the Healthy FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ - Creating Legacy for Sport and Health project.

Representatives of the involved organizations will share how they have collaborated to ensure fans attending the World Cup have access to healthier and safer food within and around stadia, which is a first-of-its-kind milestone in mega sports events.
 
The webinar will address what should be the new norm for the food promoted, served, and consumed during sports events in order to help leverage the power of sports to promote health. 
 
This webinar launches a new webinar series “Healthy foods are not just for athletes – Championing healthy food environments at mega sports events”. 

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Minggu, 30 Oktober 2022

Barbados-Based Logistics Hubs To Support Caribbean Food Security - Forbes

Apply for the Dairy Food Safety & Certification Grant - Vermont Biz

Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food & Markets Are you looking for technical assistance related to dairy food safety? Or are you wanting to develop a dairy food safety plan but don’t have the necessary resources?  

The Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center (NE-DBIC), hosted by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets, is currently accepting applications for the second round of the Dairy Food Safety and Certification Grant.  

This funding opportunity offers support to dairy farmers, processors, and/or producer associations in all Northeast states to improve the safety of dairy products.  Awards will range from $10,000 - $40,000 with a 25% required match commitment. 

Projects should build upon existing state and federal compliance requirements to improve consistency, production safety standards, and quality of dairy products. Projects that use food safety improvements to enhance dairy product marketability or reach new markets will have priority.  

The application for the Dairy Food Safety and Certification Grant is open now through January 19th.

 

New England Farmer Microgrants Program

New England Farmer Microgrants Program

The New England Farmer Microgrants Program seeks to address financial barriers for farmers in New England by offering grants for projects related to land access, farm succession, and the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices.

In 2023, there are two separate funding opportunities: The Western New England Regenerative Livestock Farming funding opportunity provides grants up to $10,000 to livestock producers in select counties in CT, MA, NH, and VT for projects that improve soil health through the adoption of regenerative agricultural practices.

The Farmland Access, Succession, and Transfer Support opportunity provides grants of up to $5,000 to farmers anywhere in New England who are looking to purchase or lease land to farm or pass their farms on to other farmers. 

Application deadline: November 4th

Local Food Purchase Assistance RFA

Local Food Purchase Assistance Grant RFA

The Agency of Agriculture has released a Request for Applications (RFA) for a new competitive grant to strengthen farm and food producers' economic viability and enhance food security.

The Local Food Purchase Assistance cooperative agreement provides funding for Vermont farms, food producers, and organizations to purchase food from socially disadvantaged farmers and producers and distribute to communities in need.

If you are interested in applying, please review the RFA online for eligibility, timelines, and application information.

Please also consider registering for an informational webinar on November 3rd at 2:30pm or contact Julia Scheier at Julia.Scheier@vermont.gov or 802-522-7042 to learn more. 

Application opens: November 7th

Determining Your Farm’s Mission, Vision, and Values

Determining Your Farm's Mission, Vision, and Values

This week on VAAFM’s Marketing and Agritourism Blog, we dive into determining a mission, vision, and set of values for your farm or food business.

Establishing these foundational elements provides a clear direction for your business and is a critical step in deciding how and where you will market it.

Grab a pen and paper and check out the full blog on our website!

A new blog comes out twice a month!

Working Lands Facebook Page

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What Does 'Authentic' Food Actually Mean? - Tasting Table

Chef, author, and activist Jenny Dorsey recently took to Instagram to break down what makes something taste authentic, splitting it into three different categories. 

In the first category, authenticity refers to a specific point of view towards a culture's traditional dish or cuisine at a certain point in time, such as childhood memories of eating Mexican, Italian, Chinese, or other cultural or ethnic food, perhaps cooked by a grandma or other loved one. 

In the second category, authentic-tasting food can refer to whether or not there is an adherence to regional flavor principles or flavor profiles that "tend to situate us in a specific region of cuisines." 

Finally, according to Dorsey, authenticity has become a weapon used by Yelp reviewers because a restaurant isn't "performing authenticity" in a way the consumer is accustomed to. As a result, a lot of restaurants that claim to be a certain type of food — like Qdoba, Outback Steakhouse, P.F. Chang's, or Olive Garden — are then decried as "not actually authentic." 

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UN chief reaffirms support for deals to ensure export food and fertilizer from Ukraine and Russia - UN News

The Black Sea Grain Initiative, an agreement brokered by the UN and Türkiye in July, which was set up to reintroduce vital food and fertilizer exports from Ukraine to the rest of the world, is due to run out in the second half of November, but it can be extended, if all parties, including Russian and Ukraine, agree.

In a statement released on Friday, Mr. Guterres promised that the UN is continuing its active and constant engagement with all parties towards that goal. “We underline the urgency of doing so to contribute to food security across the world”, he said, “and to cushion the suffering that this global cost-of-living crisis is inflicting on billions of people.”

“If food and fertilizers do not reach global markets now, farmers will not have fertilizers at the right time and at a price they can afford as the planting season begins, endangering crops in all regions of the world in 2023 and 2024, with dramatic effect on food production and food prices worldwide. The current crisis of affordability will turn into a crisis of availability.

Mr. Guterres reiterated the positive impacts of the Black Sea Grain Initiative so far: since it was signed, exports of grain and other food products – which are closely monitored by the Joint Coordination Centre, comprising representatives from the Russian Federation, Türkiye, Ukraine and the UN – have surpassed nine million tonnes.

It has also contributed to the lowering of the price of wheat and other commodities, which had soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: the FAO Food Index, which measures the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities, has declined for seven months in a row and, according to UN estimates, has indirectly prevented some 100 million people from falling into extreme poverty.

The UN chief urged all parties to make every effort to renew the Black Sea Grain Initiative and implement both agreements to their fullest, including the expedited removal of any remaining impediments to Russian grain and fertilizer exports.

“Governments, shipping companies, grain and fertilizer traders and farmers all over the world are now looking for clarity on the future”, he declared.

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Sabtu, 29 Oktober 2022

Time for coordinated action to address the food crisis and create a global plan – UN expert - OHCHR

NEW YORK (28 October 2022) – A UN expert said today that despite the international consensus that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated existing fragilities within food systems, there remains no multilateral response to the crisis.

“The problem is not lack of solutions,” said Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. “The international community has a good sense of how to tackle the food crisis; what we need now is coordinated government action.”

This year, an additional 50 million people will face severe hunger, and another 19 million more people are expected to face chronic undernourishment in 2023. Domestic food inflation in more than 60 countries is reportedly 15 per cent or higher year on year, and about 60 per cent of low-income countries find themselves in, or at high risk of, debt distress.

The gender gap in food insecurity widened even further from 2020 to 2021. Women are 15 per cent more likely than men to be food insecure. The poor are the hardest hit, especially in developing countries, where food accounts for half of a typical family’s budget. In 2021, the number of children in child labour globally increased to 160 million, the first rise in 20 years – more than 70 per cent of them working in agriculture. Peoples’ homelands are being stolen, occupied, and decimated at genocidal rates.

In presenting his report to the UN General Assembly on the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on the right to food, Fakhri provided some solutions. “As an immediate response, government should build on what worked during the pandemic. Many governments are starting to end pandemic relief measures. But measures like universal school meals and direct cash transfers provided proof of what is possible to realise the right to food. Make these programmes permanent, do not end them.”

Fakhri outlined structural challenges governments face with rising debt level, a broken trade system, and rising corporate power. To overcome those structural constraints, he recommended governments repurpose their existing budgets to transition to agroecology.

“By ensuring people have strong land rights and equitable access to land, by making sure workers’ rights are protected and their voices are at the centre of policy discussions, and by holding corporations accountable, governments can set the right conditions for a transition to agroecology,” said Fakhri.

“If the General Assembly reaffirms its commitment to the right to food in terms that explicitly address today’s challenges, it can inspire and galvanise governments and people to work together to develop a coordinated global response to the food crisis,” the UN expert said.

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Jumat, 28 Oktober 2022

Farmer Provides Free Apples to Second Harvest Food Bank - erienewsnow.com

Erie News Now: Coverage You Can Count On 

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Kamis, 27 Oktober 2022

World Food Day brings USAID action on food security - ShareAmerica

Smiling woman in field (© Farzana Tabassum/World Vision/Feed the Future)
Through the support of the USAID Nobo Jatra project, Ayesha was trained on climate-smart agriculture farming techniques, such as crop cultivation in tower gardens and utilizing organic natural pest control, that have led to the regeneration of her land. (© Farzana Tabassum/World Vision/Feed the Future)

On World Food Day, the United States announced investment in agricultural initiatives to address food insecurity around the world.

“There is no longer any doubt that food security is an issue of acute global urgency,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an October 16 statement. “So, on this World Food Day, let us be true to its theme — Leave No One Behind — because the health, the stability, and the wellbeing of all our people depends on the food security that we build together.”

At the start of 2022, more than 190 million people around the world were food insecure. The war in Ukraine could add 70 million people to that number, the State Department says.

Coupled with increasing agricultural uncertainty caused by the climate crisis, it is more important than ever to make sure people around the world have the food they need.

USAID takes action

The U.S. Agency for International Development is launching several initiatives to combat food insecurity, focusing particularly on countries hard hit by the climate crisis, such as Somalia and Ethiopia.

On October 19, USAID launched the U.S. Government’s Global Food Security Research Strategy to underscore the U.S. government’s commitment to ending hunger and malnutrition, and to building sustainable, resilient food systems.

“In a world where climate change is leading to ever more disastrous shocks, with so many of the harshest impacts falling on poor farmers, how do we break the cycle of lurching from food crisis to food crisis,” USAID Administrator Samantha Power said at the World Food Prize Foundation’s Annual Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue to commemorate World Food Day. “How we can harness the industry and know-how … to feed the planet without accelerating climate change even further.”

People working with plants in greenhouse (© Nathan Ronoh/CIP/Feed the Future)
Farmers are trained on apical cuttings production in rural Kenya. This new technology was introduced in Kenya through the Feed the Future Accelerated Value Chain Development Program, which is funded by USAID. (© Nathan Ronoh/CIP/Feed the Future)

The new research strategy — run by both USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture — will generate sustainable solutions for addressing the root causes of hunger and malnutrition around the world.

Additional USAID funding announcements included:

  • $27 million to expand the Space to Place initiative across sub-Saharan Africa to improve efficient fertilization application.
  • $3.8 million to support the ISAAA AfriCenter, Kenyatta University, and Addis Ababa University to expand the use of their Nobel Prize-winning genome-editing technology to develop sorghum resistant to weed infestations.
  • $75 million to increase food fortification efforts through the AFFORD project — an ambitious effort to safely and sustainably provide essential micronutrients.

Power also commemorated and honored the 2022 World Food Prize laureate Cynthia Rosenzweig for her work to address the climate crisis and end food insecurity.

“Dr. Rosenzweig’s research could not be more timely, needless to say, because today, we award the World Food Prize amidst the greatest global food crisis of our lifetimes,” said Power.

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Rabu, 26 Oktober 2022

Fuego 505 a unique addition to ABQ's bar food scene - Albuquerque Journal

Meats from the rotisserie grill include duck, pork loin and rabbit rattlesnake sausage. (Richard S. Dargan/For the Journal)

In the old days, creating a bar menu was as easy as dumping a bag of pretzels into a bowl.

Not so today. Bar patrons expect hot food made in a kitchen, and if there’s no kitchen, then there should be at least one food truck outside. No matter if the setting is a swanky rooftop patio, an industrial-style brewpub or a pool hall – the customers want good food with their drinks.

The owners of Fuego 505, a new bar/restaurant on the West Side, understand this.

They built their place around the food; specifically, a selection of meats cooked on skewers over a rotisserie grill. Options reveal an adventurous streak. Alongside the usual chicken, steak and shrimp, you’ll find sausages made from elk, wild boar, and rabbit and rattlesnake. The food is backed up with a full bar featuring an impressive array of local beers on tap.

Fuego 505’s ownership group of Matt Jones, Matthew Barela, Raul Maestas and Ted Sandoval brings considerable experience to the new endeavor. Chef Maestas runs Ohana Hut, the Hawaiian-Japanese fusion restaurant inside Marble Brewery’s West Side taproom, and co-owns the StreetFoodBlvd food truck with Sandoval. Barela used to manage Sidelines Sports Bar & Grill.

Fuego 505 sits on the end of one of the myriad brick- and stucco-faced buildings that make up McMahon Marketplace at the southeast corner of McMahon and Unser. My friend and lunch companion who lives nearby recalled a time when the lot was a dusty, weed-choked patch where rabbits roamed. Over the last decade, it’s been transformed into a sprawling complex made up of familiar chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks with a few local businesses sprinkled in.

Fuego 505’s Borracho Barrio Tacos are filled with braised beef and cheese, and comes with red chile consomme. (Richard S. Dargan/For the Journal)

Fuego 505 is dominated inside by a U-shaped bar that wraps around a display of bottles of booze and a kitchen in the back. Numerous TV screens hang above, all tuned in to sporting events, and high-top tables are scattered around the perimeter. The place was drowsy during a recent weekday lunch.

The menu, presented on an embossed sheet of paper, has food on one side, drinks on the other. Food choices are divided into tacos, skewers, a few salads and some side dishes.

The taco menu samples from Asian, Mexican and New Mexican cuisine. At $5 to $6 each, they’re on the pricey side.

The Borracho Barrio Tacos, served three to a plate ($14), were reminiscent of the birria tacos that are all the rage today. The tortillas, reddened from a dip in consommé and charred from the grill, were filled to bursting with moist, shredded braised beef and cheese. The accompanying cup of red chile consommé was thick, smooth and smoky.

Also terrific were the Carnitas Tacos ($5 each), served open-faced and topped with guacamole, salsa, shredded cheese and queso fresco. The shredded pork was succulent and fragrant with cumin.

The prospect of rotisserie-cooked meat on skewers made me think of Brazilian steakhouses like Tucanos or Fogo de Chão, where servers brings skewers to your table and slice off pieces of meat. Fuego 505 does it differently. You choose from an assortment of proteins and sides, and when the food is ready, a server comes out and offloads the contents of the skewers onto your plate.

There are four skewer choices ranging from $18 to $34. I ordered the Rabbit Rattlesnake Sausage, Duck, Pork Loin combination ($26), which comes with two sides. The sausage, while missing any sear on its skin, was juicy and well-seasoned and not gamey at all.

The hunk of duck breast was cooked rare, as it’s supposed to be. It was juicy and held some citrus tang from the orange-soy sauce marinade. The pork loin was cooked through but still carried a little juice in it along with a hint of the sweet and spicy mango-jalapeño glaze.

Carnitas Tacos topped with guacamole, salsa and queso fresco. (Richard S. Dargan/For the Journal)

Sides accompanying the skewer were nicely done. The Green Chile Mac & Cheese combined al dente pasta shells with a creamy sauce that had a little snap to it. The Elote was served off the cob in a shallow cup – less messy to eat, and the lime and chili powder cut the creaminess of the mayonnaise cream sauce.

Besides the local beers on tap, the drinks menu features an array of hard seltzers and cocktails like the Fuego Margarita that’s spiced up with muddled jalapeño.

Service was solid and we never waited long. Other than the battered and fried stuff, most of the items are gluten-friendly.

Business was slow while we were there, but the server told us things pick up later when the after-work crowd shows up. She suggested there may be some adjustments in the hours of operation in the future.

Fuego 505’s rotisserie grill makes it a unique addition to the city’s bar food scene. The food makes it a draw even for those who don’t drink alcohol.

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A Special Part of the Brain Lights Up When We See Food - WebMD

USDA invests $64M in strengthening local, regional food systems - Agri-Pulse

USDA is awarding $64 million in 185 grants through its Local Agriculture Market Program’s Farmers Market and Local Food Promotion Programs and Regional Food System Partnerships to expand the availability of locally grown agricultural products and expand regional food systems.

Jenny Lester Moffitt, USDA’s undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, said the funding “will improve community access to fresh, locally sourced food and strengthen market opportunities for local and regional food producers.”

FMLFPP is implemented through two grant programs, the Farmers Market Promotion Program (FMPP) and the Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP). The goal of the program is to develop, coordinate, and expand local and regional food systems.

FMPP funds projects that support producer-to-consumer markets such as farmers' markets, roadside stands, agritourism activities, community-supported agriculture programs (CSA), and online sales. This year, the FMPP program is awarding $13 million to 55 projects that will work toward capacity building or community development training and technical assistance.

LFPP grants support local and regional food business enterprises that engage as intermediaries in indirect producer-to-consumer marketing. LFPP is awarding $31.8 million in fiscal year 2022 funding to 94 projects.

Through RFSP, $19 million is being awarded to 36 partnerships across 24 states. The program provides funding to partnerships that connect public and private resources in planning and developing local or regional food systems. RFSP also supports partnerships in developing relationships between local and regional producers, processors, and intermediaries, and institutions, such as schools, hospitals, governments to increase local and regional foods in institutional cafeterias and meal programs.

For more news, go to www.Agri-Pulse.com.

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Selasa, 25 Oktober 2022

How Food Powers Your Body - The New Yorker

How Food Powers Your Body

Illustration of person eating food off of a conveyor belt.
Illustration by Jordan Speer

I’ve always been told that I have a fast metabolism. I stay thin no matter what I eat; it’s only in the past few years, as I’ve entered my mid-thirties, that I’ve experienced growing horizontally. I play squash a few times a week, run with a friend on Thursdays, and walk the dog. Otherwise I spend whole days at the computer, then sedentary on the couch, then asleep. And yet I stay lanky and get “hangry” easily; in the afternoons, after a hearty breakfast and two helpings at lunch, I go looking for another meal. I sometimes wake up hungry in the middle of the night. Where’s all the food going?

Our bodies require a lot of calories, and most of them are spent just keeping the machine running. You don’t particularly feel your liver, but sure enough it’s always there, liver-ing; likewise your kidneys, skin, gut, lungs, and bones. Our brains are major energy hogs, consuming around a fifth of our calorie intake despite accounting for just a fiftieth of our body weight on average. Possibly mine is less efficient than yours: I have an anxious cast of mind—I ruminate—and maybe this is like running in place. I sometimes feel sluggish while writing, after working a paragraph over in my head, and I used to assume that this meant I needed caffeine. Eventually, I discovered that a sandwich worked better. The effort of thinking had run my calories low, and it was time to throw another log on the fire.

Fire isn’t merely a metaphor for metabolism. In the eighteenth century, the French chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier conducted a series of ingenious experiments to prove that our life force was fire. First, he figured out what air was made of; he then, through precise measurements, showed that fire removed oxygen from the air and deposited it in the form of rust. Later, he made a device in which packed ice surrounded a compartment that could be filled with either a lighted flame or a small animal; by measuring how much ice melted, he could relate the energy burned by the flame to that “burned” by the creature. He even created a “respirometer,” an apparatus of tubes and gauges that measured a person’s precise oxygen consumption as they took on various tasks. He concluded that “respiration is nothing but a slow combustion of carbon and hydrogen, similar in all respects to that of a lamp or a lighted candle.” Both flames and living beings exchange energy and gases in what’s known as a combustion reaction. In fire, this reaction runs fast and out of control: energy is ripped from fuel with violent abandon, and nearly all of it is released immediately, as light and heat. But life is more methodical. Cells pluck energy from their fuel with exquisite control, directing every last drop toward their own minute purposes. Almost nothing is wasted.

Clearing up how exactly this is accomplished took another several hundred years. The breakthrough came in the nineteen-thirties, when a brilliant Hungarian chemist named Albert Szent-Györgyi made a study of pigeons’ breast muscle. The muscle, which was strong enough to keep the birds in flight, turned out to be metabolically hyperactive even after it had been pulverized. Szent-Györgyi put some ground-up tissue in a dish, then made careful measurements of the gas and heat emitted as he introduced various chemicals. He found that certain acids increased the muscle’s rate of metabolism more than five-fold. Strangely, these acids weren’t themselves consumed in the reactions: Szent-Györgyi could take as much out of the dish as he’d put in. The acids, he realized, participated in a kind of chemical roundabout, speeding up, or catalyzing, metabolism even as they were constantly being broken down and rebuilt.

A few years later, a German biochemist named Hans Krebs described this chemical cycle more completely, and today it’s known as the Krebs cycle. You may dimly remember the Krebs cycle from high-school biology class—or perhaps you forgot it right after the test. For a long time, the Krebs cycle was a symbol of what I disliked about school—a perfect emblem of boredom and bewilderment. Sitting at desks arranged in rows, we were told the monstrous names of its component parts—succinate, pyruvate, Acetyl-CoA, cytochrome c—while, on the blackboard, we counted NAD+s and FADH2s, and followed “redox” reactions as they “oxidized” or “reduced” elements. I memorized the diagrams in the textbook—arrows, small fonts, tiny plus and minus signs—without ever really understanding what the cycle was for. I was hardly alone in my incomprehension. In the thirty-eight-year run of the modern “Jeopardy!,” the Krebs cycle has been asked about only six times. It has stumped all three players onstage twice.

It’s a shame that organic chemistry has such dread associations, when really there’s so much beauty in it. As the biochemist Nick Lane writes, in his book “Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death,” the Krebs cycle is particularly magical—it’s the foundation not just of metabolism but of all complex life on earth. And it’s not really that hard to grasp. Nowadays, even those of us who skipped A.P. Bio are conversant with genes; thanks to the pandemic, we may even know what we’re talking about when we use words like “protein” and “mRNA.” Lane argues that our DNA literacy is actually a form of genetic chauvinism. The secret of life isn’t entirely written in our genes; it also has to do with how we pull energy out of the world—with our ongoing, lifelong slow burn. Understanding the Krebs cycle is worth it because it helps you better understand what it means to be alive.

It’s through the Krebs cycle that we get energy from the food we eat. To grasp how the cycle works, it’s useful to remember what food is made of. Like everything else in the universe, the stuff we eat is made of atoms. An atom is like a little solar system, with a nucleus at its center. Electrons orbit the nucleus like planets circling a sun. (Although actually, according to quantum mechanics, you can’t know exactly where an electron is at any moment—and so really this orbit is less of a fixed path than a sort of cloud of possible positions.) There might be one electron or several within any given atom; they orbit at certain typical distances, known to chemists as orbital shells. Only a finite number of electrons can occupy an orbital shell at any one time: two in the first shell, eight in the second, eighteen in the third, thirty-two in the fourth, and so on—a pattern that defines how the rows of the periodic table are laid out. All of chemistry depends on the fact that electrons that aren’t part of fully filled shells are less stable, especially as they get farther from the nucleus. It’s as if an electron is not meant to wander too far from home.

From time to time, something bumps into an atom. If it’s a photon—a particle of light—then energy from the collision knocks an atom’s electrons into orbits that are more distant from the nucleus. These “high-energy” electrons are like marbles poised on the lip of a bowl—they want to release their potential energy by rolling back down toward the center or, if another atom is near, by spilling over into its bowl. Which way they fall depends on the precise balance of instabilities in each atom—in other words, which has the shell most desperate to be filled. When an atom poised to give up an energetic electron gets close to a neighbor eager to take it, that electron rolls from the lip of one bowl down into the other. In falling, it releases energy. However abstract this may seem, it is the very essence of life. Photons careening from the sun bang into electrons in chlorophyll in plants; a series of chemical reactions transfers those energized electrons from one atom to the next, until eventually they are stored up inside the sugars or starches in fruits, stalks, and seeds.

On a molecular level, a potato isn’t so different from petroleum: it contains molecules rich in high-energy electrons. Through our metabolism, we hope to capture the energy possessed by those electrons in a manageable way. Szent-Györgyi is often credited with saying that life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest; the marbles roll downhill, and life makes use of their force. The difficulty is that the electrons with the most energy available don’t just present themselves for the taking. Food is complicated and full of different molecules, many of which contain raw materials that we recycle into the physical structures of our cells. Finding the atoms that are especially dense with energy inside our food is like sifting through a heap of wrecked cars to find the still-charged batteries.

A surprising amount of this sifting happens before we even swallow our food, as the saliva in our mouths breaks down its starches. (Try spitting in a cup of Jell-O pudding and see what happens.) We start to feel sated well before we digest, because our mouths tell our brains that energy is coming and that it’s safe to release some short-term stores. In the meantime, acids in the stomach and enzymes in the small intestine start processing what has arrived. By the time they’re through, the energy-rich molecules in food have had their most restless electrons reshuffled and packed into glucose, a simple sugar. Glucose is like a chemical shipping container. It is an ideal electron transporter, in part because it is high-capacity, conveniently shaped, and easily opened up. It’s also unusually soluble, which means that it travels well through the bloodstream. And it consists only of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms. The latter two types of atoms are highly reactive—there’s a reason why tanks of hydrogen and oxygen are marked “flammable”—and many unstable electrons circle each atom of carbon, eager to move into other molecules. Our brains, whose parts have especially unpredictable energy requirements—as neurons fire, they create spikes in demand—depend almost exclusively on glucose for energy. Hummingbirds, which have the fastest metabolism of any animal and no time to spare to fuel their wingbeats, similarly feed on a mixture of pure glucose and sucrose.

When glucose reaches our cells, it is—unlike a shipping container—dismantled systematically. A series of reactions strips its highest-energy electrons and uses them to form a small “carrier molecule” known as an NADH. If glucose is like a shipping container, then NADHs are like delivery trucks. The process of loading the electrons into the trucks is called glycolysis. It’s ancient; in fact, it’s how yeast cells harvest energy. When glycolysis occurs in the absence of oxygen, it is known as fermentation. If your muscles are pushed to their limit and there’s not enough oxygen in your bloodstream, your cells ferment glucose as a stopgap measure for energy production.

If there is oxygen involved, the breaking down of glucose becomes much more refined. Oxygen is so hungry for electrons—its outer shell needs only two more to get a complete set—that in effect it pulls them all the way through the Krebs cycle, which is the real powerhouse of our metabolism. The cycle itself is complex, with sequences of chemical formulas that seem purpose-built to traumatize students. But, essentially, glucose is broken in two, and its halves are fed into a series of reactions that strip them for parts; the backbones are then reused for another turn of the cycle. The main thing is that, along the way, energy-rich electrons are peeled off and loaded up onto yet more NADHs—far more than in glycolysis alone. Almost no energy is lost to heat; instead, it is preserved and transformed. Any electron that had a high orbit in glucose is likewise poised at its full potential in NADH.

These NADH molecules will be further transformed. Inside a typical cell in your body are hundreds of thousands of mini-cells called mitochondria—structures believed to have descended from a free-floating bacterium that was ingested by one of our ancestors long ago and coöpted. A mitochondrion is divided into an internal and external chamber by a convoluted border with many folds, which create a huge surface area. Proteins protrude from this membrane like rabbits poking their heads through a hedge. These proteins capture an NADH, then pull its electrons through to the inner chamber, where they finally come to rest in molecules of oxygen. (When oxygen isn’t present, the electrons back up, and the work comes to a halt.) The movement of each electron is timed and arranged just so to cause a proton in the form of a hydronium ion, which is positively charged, to head in the opposite direction. At the moment that the protein pulls each electron inward, it also disgorges the proton, pushing it from the internal chamber to the external one. This extrusion happens everywhere across the membrane. The result is that many positively charged protons build up outside, separated by a wall from the negatively charged electrons held inside. An electrical field comes into being. Quite literally, each mitochondrion becomes a battery, waiting to discharge.

“This charge is awesome,” Lane writes in “Transformer.” The electrical field generated by the process, he explains, has a strength of around thirty million volts per metre—“equivalent to a bolt of lightning across every square nanometre of membrane.” At any moment, in each of your cells, the clouds are gathering, crackling with potential. And yet even this understates the absolute craziness of metabolism; it is wild what happens to those protons. Pulled by the electrical current, they desperately want to get back to the inside of the mitochondrion, where the electrons are. Their only way back, however, is to squeeze through tiny mushroom-shaped conduits that litter the membrane. In 1962, scientists discovered that these conduits are actually little turbines. Seen in minute detail through electron microscopes, they resemble waterwheels; the protons turn them as they pass.

In hibernating bears and newborn humans, the turbines generate heat, which is stored in fat. More commonly, though, each turn of the wheel assembles a molecule of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP—the energy currency of our cells. By dint of its structure, ATP is extremely willing to give up its energy, but it is prevented from doing so by a few precisely controllable molecular speed bumps—like a loaded-up spring held fast with a lock. The generation of ATP amounts to the generation of order out of chaos. In our food, energy is stored in an arbitrary way. But each molecule of ATP is endowed with a standard amount of energy, created by the physical motion of a molecular gear. ATP is used in every kind of cell, where it’s converted into kinetic, chemical, or electrical energy. Our muscles contract when a protein called myosin climbs along a microfibre, crunching it more tightly—each step along the fibre costs one ATP. In our kidneys, ATP powers a chemical pump that recovers ions from our urine. In our brains, ATP endows neurons with their electrical charge. The thunderclouds in our mitochondria are bottled up, shipped, and uncorked.

Lane writes that the “proton motive force” of those little turbines is one of the few mechanisms present in all life forms. In you and me and everything that lives, high-energy electrons are stripped slowly of their verve. Metabolism achieves something miraculous: through painstaking atomic transformations, it extracts from practically any organic chemical a universal unit of energy, deployable in every corner of every cell, and it does this while wasting nothing. Life’s use of a standardized part like ATP is almost Taylorist; the efficiencies are unfathomable. A body ingests charged particles and sends them through tiny windmills; a brain crackling with a hundred trillion electric connections can be powered for a whole day by a sandwich.

It was bold of Lane to write an entire book about the Krebs cycle. Although “Transformer” is aimed at laypeople, it’s not a particularly easy read: there are diagrams of chemical reactions alongside talk of succinate, oxaloacetate, and the reduction of this and that. Reading it, I had to consult Wikipedia and Khan Academy. And yet Lane is passionate about the complex biochemistry he describes, in part because he thinks that understanding metabolism could help us understand a great deal more, from cancer to the origins of life.

Biologists have been somewhat gene-obsessed ever since the discovery of the double helix, in 1953. The central dogma of molecular biology—it is actually called that, the Central Dogma—puts information at the heart of life, and describes how it flows from DNA to RNA to proteins. In the nineties, the gene’s-eye view culminated in the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project, which promised that genetic sequencing at great scale would answer many of biology and medicine’s most vexing questions. Cancer researchers, accordingly, have tended to take a gene-centric approach to studying the disease: one major effort in the style of the Human Genome Project, the Cancer Genome Atlas, has catalogued millions of potentially cancer-causing mutations across tens of thousands of genes. On the treatment side, the biggest breakthrough in recent memory, immune therapy, can involve genetically modifying immune-system cells so that they target tumors that express a unique DNA sequence. The approach has “really revolutionized therapy,” Raul Mostoslavsky, the scientific co-director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s cancer center, told me. But genes are only part of the story. “It’s very well established that unique features of metabolisms are key in cancer and aging,” Mostoslavsky said. In the past few decades, there has been “an explosion of research done in this area.” Perhaps because it is newer, and rooted in biochemistry rather than genetics, it has had less success working its way into the public imagination.

Much of the new work has centered on the Warburg effect, named for Otto Heinrich Warburg, a German biologist who won a Nobel prize for his research in cellular respiration. The Warburg effect describes the peculiar fact that cancer cells tend to behave as if they’re in a metabolic emergency. When normal cells are short on oxygen, the mitochondrial turbines slow; anaerobic glycolysis, or fermentation, takes over. What’s strange is that cancer cells do this even when oxygen is abundant. The Warburg effect is considered almost universal across cancers; one relatively common sign of a tumor’s presence is a buildup of lactate, caused by the cancer cells fermenting. It’s unclear whether this fermentation is a cause or consequence of the disease. Do cancer cells ferment because they are growing out of control—or is fermentation driving the growth?

Maybe it’s both, but Lane suspects we pay too little attention to the latter possibility. He argues that it might explain the outsized correlation between cancer and aging. From age twenty-four to fifty, your risk of cancer increases ninety-fold, and it continues to grow exponentially from there. A popular hypothesis holds that the root cause of this mounting risk is the accumulation of genetic mutations. But some scientists have argued that the rate of accumulation isn’t nearly fast enough to explain the extraordinary trajectory that cancer risk takes over a lifetime. Nor does the gene’s-eye view explain why some tumors stop growing when moved into a different environment. For Lane, these facts suggest that cancer is best thought of as a derangement of metabolism.

As you age, your mitochondria accumulate wear and tear. Often, the cause is inflammation—whether from disease, injury, or periods of stress. Inflammation itself becomes chronic with age, for reasons that are still not entirely understood. Meanwhile, a process known as mitophagy, in which old mitochondria are eaten by the body so that new ones can grow in their place, slows down. The result of all this is that our mitochondria get tired, and do a slightly worse job. “Overall,” Lane writes, “we have less energy, tend to gain in weight, find it harder to burst into explosive action and suffer from chronic low-grade inflammation.” (“Aging, eh!” he notes.) The conditions grow ripe for cancer: mitochondrial waste products start to pile up, as at a broken assembly line; perhaps, if it gets bad enough, a cell might believe that the backup is due to a lack of oxygen. Alarm signals will be sent to the nucleus to flip a series of epigenetic switches—“we’re suffocating!”—that put the cell into fermentation mode. In that mode, when glucose arrives, the priority becomes stripping it not for its high-energy electrons but for molecular building blocks. The cell reverts to one of its earliest programs, active during embryonic development, in which the prime directive is not to work but to grow. “What actually turns a cell cancerous?” Lane asks. A cancerous environment might “be induced by mutations, infections, low oxygen levels . . . or the decline in metabolism associated with aging itself.”

As a researcher, Lane’s primary interest is in the origin of life, and here, too, an emphasis on metabolism offers a dramatically revisionist account. When we think about how life started, we tend to tell ourselves a story about genes. We say that, in the beginning, shallow seaside pools were filled with a primordial chemical soup; among the chemicals was RNA, a single-stranded, less stable version of DNA. RNA had the ability to catalyze the construction of other molecules, and eventually a version came into existence that could catalyze its own copying. Some energy source must have powered these chemical reactions—perhaps lightning or ultraviolet light from the sun. Regardless, we say, once the copying began, mutations that led to faster or more robust replication won out. Metabolism emerged only later, when ancestors of our cells learned to digest other nearby organic chemicals.

This story was complicated somewhat by the discovery, in 1977, of life in some of the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean. Marine biologists found that huge tube worms were living in places with no light and no plants to eat. How were the worms surviving? It took decades, but scientists eventually uncovered the first link in this dark food chain. Crowds of primitive bacteria live alongside volcanic vents in the seafloor, and they are unusual for being “autotrophs.” The word describes the fact that these bacteria, like plants, build their biomass not by eating but directly from inorganic matter, such as molecules of carbon dioxide floating in water. For autotrophy to work, a steady energy source is required. Plants use sunlight. But these bacteria live in total darkness. How could they possibly be autotrophs?

It turns out that, at the interface between sea and mantle, salt water reacts with the earth in a process called serpentinization. Serpentinization produces energy-rich chemicals, and Lane speculates that they were the primordial energy source that powered the ancestors of the autotrophs. In our metabolisms, the Krebs cycle runs in one direction—food molecules go in, and energy comes out. But the cycle can actually spin both ways, like a turntable. The bacteria surrounding the deep-sea vents run the Krebs cycle in reverse, taking in energy from the vents and using it to assemble the matter of their bodies from simpler parts. They are like candles unburning. Only later, when membranes happened to enclose these reactions, would the need for RNA have arisen. As the first proto-cells floated away from the vents, they lost contact with their energy source; only those carrying the right kind of RNA would have had the tools necessary to survive. The RNA’s job would have been to help catalyze reactions that formerly depended on the vents. Over the next few billion years, the descendants of these primitive organisms would have begun spewing oxygen into the atmosphere as a waste product. Only then would the Krebs cycle as we know it have come into being: by reversing the metabolism of the autotrophs, an organism could take advantage of all that oxygen and turn its body into a kind of furnace. It was this reversal, Lane claims, that begat the Cambrian explosion, an enormous proliferation in the variety and complexity of life that took place some five hundred million years ago.

Any book about just one thing, especially if the author feels like it hasn’t gotten enough attention, runs the risk of becoming a theory of everything. The impression I got from “Transformer” was that the Krebs cycle was the key not just to life and its origins but to aging, cancer, and death. More likely it is just a part of all those things.

Still, there is something to be said for immersion. Recently, I spent a long weekend in a small rented house a few hours north of New York City. The whole time, I had metabolism on the brain. One morning, a friend and I drove to an outdoor restaurant for a late breakfast. The car was running low on fuel; so was I. While we waited for the server, I sat quietly, feeling a little sour and depressed. The sun was beating down on my back—electrons in the wrong form. It was only after the first few bites of my scrambled eggs that I felt the flood of glucose, and became myself again. I could picture what was happening inside my cells. The image would have appealed to an eighteenth-century philosopher: I was a clockwork man charging myself up through the spinning of a billion tiny waterwheels.

Later, back at the house, we played basketball in the driveway. How many ATPs does a jump shot cost? After making a run toward the basket for a layup, I thought about all it had taken to launch my body through the air: a voltage made of protons, a million simultaneous discharges across synaptic clefts. Every motion was an exquisitely controlled lightning strike.

After the game, in the late afternoon, we watched small birds outside the window, their heartbeats racing. I imagined the fastness of their world. If your metabolism speeds up enough, does time slow down? Is that why it’s so hard to catch a bug in your hands?

We decided to make s’mores that night. A friend and I built the fire. We gathered electrons from a woodpile nearby, set them loose with a little butane and a spark, then watched the sun go down. It was strange to imagine that energy from fusion ninety-two million miles away had now taken the form of a marshmallow. Happily, I popped one into my mouth. ♦

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St. George food pantry desperately seeks inventory - SILive.com

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Organizers of the Wednesday food pantry at St. Peter’s R.C. Church at 53 St. Mark’s Place in New Brighton find themselves in a pickle. Since the summer, canned donations have been scant. Volunteers have been pitching in products on their own.

Pantry coordinator Nancy Hally is asking Staten Islanders to contribute all varieties of canned protein, vegetables and soups. A full check list of requested items are below. The St. Peter’s rectory is the drop off point between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Hally said although monetary donations are appreciated, she would prefer her volunteers focus their time on collection and distribution of inventory, as opposed to shopping for it. Each week, she said, she sees a few more new faces at the North Shore pantry, residents of St. George and New Brighton.

The St. Charles’ C.C.D. program has kicked in with some contributions and is running a food drive, said Hally. She is becoming additionally concerned about Thanksgiving considering the dire situation currently. Her hope is for frozen turkeys closer to the holiday and she doesn’t want to ask other pantries for assistance.

Hally said, “I don’t want to go to anyone this year. I want us to do it on our own. I’m sure other pantries are having a similar problem that we are.”

The St. Peter’s pantry operates each Wednesday from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Food pick up is at the front of the church and open to anyone: volunteers ask only for zip codes.

The St. Peter’s food pantry was established originally in 2000 at St. Paul’s on Clinton Avenue under the supervision of the late Msgr. Vincent Bartley with a mostly Spanish-speaking audience. In 2007, it morphed into Assumption-St. Paul as churches folded into each other. As of 2015, it has been overseen by the pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul and Assumption.

The following is a wish list for inventory. Expired or partially opened food is not accepted:

Canned vegetables all varieties

Canned fruit

Canned potatoes

Canned meats (vienna sausage, spam, chili, chicken)

Chicken and beef broth

Baked beans

Peanut butter

Jelly

Pasta

Tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, tomato paste

Spaghetti sauce

Soup – large and small cans

Boxed potatoes, potato envelopes

Rice and noodle mix – envelopes or boxes

Rice tuna

Dry beans, canned beans

Macaroni and cheese

Boxed stuffing – chicken, turkey, vegetable

Boxed milk

Regular and decal coffee (also instant)

Teas bags, hot chocolate

Pancake mix and syrup

Oatmeal (envelopes and canisters)

Cake and muffin mixes and frosting

Applesauce – individual servings or jars

Cereal and pop tarts

Fruit snacks

Granola and cereal bars

Cookies and crackers

Anyone who wishes to volunteer can call the rectory at 718-727-2672 or email nhally199@gmail.com. Email Hally with questions on donations or volunteer work.

Pamela Silvestri is Advance Food Editor. She can be reached at silvestri@siadvance.com.

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Ashland Was Set to Be a Food Paradise. Then Came the Almeda Fire. - The New York Times

Two years ago, the Almeda fire tore through southern Oregon. Many people haven’t fully recovered, but farmers, chefs and others have rallied to sustain the area.

ASHLAND, Ore. — When she decided to leave Texas, Sarah Cook dreamed of her ideal new home. She shared what she imagined with friends: a small city that offered natural beauty, a slower pace and an audience for the kind of artful, intricate food she made at Kyōten Sushiko, a six-seat omakase restaurant in Austin that closed during the pandemic.

“I was describing Ashland before I’d ever even heard of it,” Ms. Cook said.

Her dream seemed to be coming true in June, after she became chef at Nama, a 20-seat restaurant in this city of 21,000, which she calls “perfect in a lot of ways.”

But, she recalled, “there was a day when it was orange outside, and you could see ash falling.”

“It was apocalyptic,” she said.

This split screen — paradise on one side, disaster on the other — illustrates an uneasy tension here in the Rogue Valley, one that has pushed its food community into a period of transition and innovation.

The former site of New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro, opened by Charlene and Vernon Rollins in 1989. The Almeda fire destroyed both the influential restaurant and the Rollinses’ home.Joe Kline for The New York Times

The vision of turning the region into a laid-back alternative to the West’s more celebrated culinary destinations appears on the cusp of being realized, thanks to the emergence of dynamic restaurant and wine scenes and the return of tourism.

But climate change has become that vision’s most imposing threat — one that turned tragically undeniable two years ago, when the Almeda fire tore through the valley, destroying more than 3,000 businesses and homes, according to the Oregon Department of Forestry. As many as 8,500 residents were left homeless.

Ashland is the cultural capital of the Rogue Valley, where wineries, farms and orchards are abundant. Even in years when flames don’t threaten the area, smoke is a perennial problem, carried by wind from fires elsewhere and trapped in the valley by the mountains and warmer temperatures high in the atmosphere.

The new reality is startling for locals who recall a time, not long ago, when the valley was a smoke-free Eden.

Amber Ferguson is the director of Rogue Food Unites, a relief organization she co-founded to help feed Almeda fire victims. It has become a permanent entity. Joe Kline for The New York Times

“We can’t expect that the fire seasons won’t affect us anymore,” said Amber Ferguson, an Ashland native and the director of Rogue Food Unites, a relief organization she co-founded to feed fire victims.

She was sitting outside Mix Bakeshop in July of 2021, on a day when smoke made it appear as if dusk had arrived in midafternoon. The conditions were hazy again last month, around the second anniversary of the fires, when Ms. Ferguson observed, “We’re still recovering from what happened two years ago.”

The Almeda fire started in Ashland, three blocks from Ms. Ferguson’s house, but caused the most damage in the neighboring towns of Talent and Phoenix.

Rogue Food’s initial mission was to use state recovery funds to collaborate with local chefs and restaurants, many shuttered by the pandemic, to provide food to residents living in temporary housing.

“It just sort of came together like this beautiful dream of let’s find money, pay the restaurants, buy from farms, feed the people,” said Ms. Ferguson, who was a manager at the Portland restaurants Beast and Toro Bravo before moving to Ashland in 2016. “It’s a resilience program and feeding program all at once.”

Angelica Sandoval visited Rogue Food’s first mobile farmers’ market, which debuted last month on the second anniversary of the Almeda fire.Joe Kline for The New York Times

It has also become a permanent entity, Ms. Ferguson said, with contracts to feed current and future fire victims in five southern Oregon counties.

The fires laid bare local social and economic inequities by causing disproportionate harm to low-income residents in Talent and Phoenix, which are less affluent and more diverse than Ashland. Coalición Fortaleza, an advocacy group for local Latino and Indigenous communities, has been working to develop affordable alternatives to homes lost in the fire. Locals say the replacement costs for mobile homes far exceed the means of most farm and hospitality workers.

Like Rogue Food, Fortaleza formed after the fires. They are among a number of charity organizations that have helped forge solidarity between hospitality and farm workers, expanding views on what relief work should provide in the process.

Celinés Garcia, 26, a Fortaleza organizer, was raised in a mobile home in Talent by a mother who came from Mexico to work in the orchards. Her father lost his home to the fire.

Rogue Food, she said, “always just seems to be there, giving people food and meals. And we still need them.”

Lucas Wedeman, a Rogue Food employee, helped Maria Jimenez select produce at the market. Mr. Wedeman became a relief worker after his house was spared in the fire.Joe Kline for The New York Times

More than 50 Ashland-area families remain in temporary housing, according to the Oregon Department of Human Services, but relief workers say that number obscures widespread economic pain, particularly for a working class reeling from an affordable-housing crisis the fires aggravated. Rogue Food created a new mobile farmers’ market to meet those customers where they are.

During the market’s debut, at a fair in Medford, Lucas Wedeman, a Rogue Food employee, helped fill customers’ bags with locally grown zucchini, tomatoes and more. The produce, much of it provided by Fry Family Farm, was restaurant quality — and free.

Mr. Wedeman, 27, started doing relief work after watching the fires burn nearly every building around his house in Talent.

“We were so blessed that we didn’t lose our home,” he said. “That reinforced my drive to volunteer.”

Flavio Martinez, 42, was similarly grateful that the fire spared El Comal Taqueria, his restaurant in Phoenix. He was among the local chefs and restaurateurs who started pitching in at Rogue Food soon after the fire. He has since opened a third El Comal location.

“I grew up here,” Mr. Martinez said. “It wouldn’t be fair for me not to help when there is so much need.”

Rogue Food is just one example of the communal spirit and creative thinking coursing through the valley.

Flavio Martinez outside El Comal in Phoenix, Ore. Mr. Martinez, a Rogue Food volunteer, opened a third location of his Mexican restaurant in April. Joe Kline for The New York Times

Pioneering winemakers, especially in the Applegate Valley, have elevated southern Oregon wines, historically overshadowed by the Willamette Valley, to the north. Their work developing techniques for growing grapes in the arid climate is mirrored at small and midsize farms nearby.

Kelsey Jacques moved from her native Michigan to start Orange Marmalade Farms last year. She’s optimistic about expanding beyond the quarter acre she cultivates in Ashland, even though competition for land and water is fierce, particularly from the fast-growing local cannabis industry, and despite an inaugural season in which she, like many local farmers, suspects smoke prevented crops from flourishing.

“There’s so much I can learn here” she said. “It’s just a pocket of knowledge.”

Ms. Jacques’s potential customer base is growing in Ashland, not far from her rows of Siskiyou orange tomatoes and sweet Walla Walla onions. Osteria La Briccola, the Korean-inspired Miss Yoon and the natural wine-focused Bar Julliet have all opened in Ashland since last summer, when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, an important driver of local tourism, was still hobbled by the pandemic.

Carla Guimaraes moved to Ashland from Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2020, in the thick of Covid lockdowns and just before the fires. The next year she opened Vida Baking Company, which specializes in gluten-free pão de queijo, the popular cheese bread from her native Brazil.

She looked forward to the Shakespeare Festival’s returning to its full schedule this year — only to be disappointed when outdoor performances were canceled because of heat and smoke.

“People vanished from the streets,” Ms. Guimaraes said. She figures that Vida’s business was down 25 percent in August and September from a year earlier.

Josh Dorcak, a veteran local chef, preparing scallops at MÄS, his tasting-menu restaurant in downtown Ashland. He is also the owner of Nama.Joe Kline for The New York Times

After more than a decade of cooking in Ashland restaurants owned by others, Josh Dorcak opened MÄS, a 16-seat tasting menu restaurant, in 2018. The California native wanted his first business to be small, in part to insulate it from economic turbulence.

“Today it’s blue skies, tomorrow could be a completely different story,” he said. “If I have to shut down, it’s only me and a few other people I have to worry about.”

The forced discipline, coupled with inspiration from an immersive tour of Tokyo’s izakayas and sushi bars, caused Mr. Dorcak to re-evaluate his cooking and his adopted home.

“It went from feeling claustrophobic and small to like, ‘Wait a second, I actually live in a chef’s dreamland,’ ” he said. “We have so much at our fingertips.”

His cooking, which he calls Cascadian cuisine, highlights local and regional ingredients in precise, tiny dishes, like poached Pacific oysters dressed with cantaloupe aguachile or figs in shiso custard with crème anglaise.

Ms. Cook brings kindred skill and passion to Nama, the 20-seat restaurant Mr. Dorcak opened last fall, next door to MÄS. In a recent meal, amberjack slices came in a slick of grapefruit juice, finished with dried flowers and oil infused with herbs from Orange Marmalade Farms. Ms. Jacques, the farm’s owner, waits tables at Nama on weekends.

“I actually live in a chef’s dreamland,” said Mr. Dorcak, who calls the food at MÄS Cascadian cuisine. Here he added whitefish roe to a dish of scallops.Joe Kline for The New York Times

“If someone thinks the carrot they just had is amazing, I can tell them, ‘Talk to the person who grew it,’” Ms. Cook said.

The new era of vitality that these and other chefs are bringing to the Rogue Valley rests on a foundation built by Charlene and Vernon Rollins, according to Mr. Dorcak. The couple opened New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro in Talent, just outside Ashland, in 1989. It was destroyed by the Almeda fire.

Ms. Rollins was the chef at Sammy’s (named for their son), and Mr. Rollins its host and sommelier; much of the restaurant’s produce came from gardens on the acre and a half of land, where the Rollins family also lived.

“We owe it to Charlene and Vernon for educating travelers who come here about what they can expect from the culture,” said Mr. Dorcak. Bamboo that grew around Sammy’s appears in artwork hanging at Nama.

The charred remains of Sammy’s had yet to be cleared when Ms. Rollins, 74, gave a tour of the property in July 2021. She explained how she spent the months after the fire furiously cooking Sammy’s dishes — paper copies of the recipes burned — before she forgot them.

Charlene Rollins examining new growth in her former restaurant’s garden. In the months after the fire, she cooked from memory dishes she made at Sammy’s. The written recipes were lost in the fire.Joe Kline for The New York Times

“I made so many different ice creams,” she said, standing near a fig tree that survived the fire.

This summer Ms. Rollins moved into a modest, fire-resistant house built on land above her old restaurant site. She walked through her gardens last month, stopping to admire the tomatillos, cantaloupe and tromboncino squash. She looked forward to cooking for friends in her new kitchen, but will not rebuild Sammy’s. The property is for sale.

Mr. Rollins, who died in March at age 77, is buried near the new house. Ms. Rollins planted a fig tree at the center of his grave, she said, “because fig trees never die.”

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