Robert Frazier was incarcerated at age 22 for selling crack cocaine. Years later, Anton’s Taproom gave him a second chance.
Frazier now works as a dishwasher at the local Kansas City, Mo., steakhouse and butcher shop. He calls his boss, Anton Kotar, a hero.
“I’ve got family who won’t do what he did for me,” says Frazier.
Since opening his farm-to-table restaurant in 2012, Kotar has employed approximately 23 former inmates, but his service to others doesn’t stop there.
Watch the video above to see additional ways that Kotar invests in his community.
Tag: farm to table
Thanks to One Mom, Schools Join the Farm-to-Table Movement
In New York’s Hudson Valley, farm-to-table food is no longer limited to upscale restaurants like Blue Hill Stone Barns. Because of mom Sandy McKelvey, fresh food grown on local farms is now bettering the fare in school cafeterias.
The Farm-to-School movement took off in this rural, scenic region north of New York City in 2009, shortly after McKelvey and her family moved to Cold Spring. At Haldane Elementary, her daughter’s new school, she volunteered to introduce a new curriculum centered on a new vegetable each month. For each lesson, kids plant or harvest the produce themselves from a garden, and with instruction from a local chef (often a student from the Culinary Institute of America in nearby Hyde Park), they prepare a hands-on recipe like asparagus and cheese tarts or Delicata squash salad, to be served in the cafeteria that week.
“Over the years, I’ve sensed a disconnect between kids and their understanding of where food comes from. When it’s prepackaged in boxes, they do not realize that everything comes from farms,” says McKelvey, a longtime CSA customer, in which she received weekly shipments of crops from a local farm. “Farm-to-School helps them better understand where food comes from, and it also really encourages healthier eating.” She adds, “It’s making cooking and growing food part of their life.”
If you asked any child in the country to recall the last food advertisement they saw, there’s a 97.8 percent chance that it was for a product high in fat, sugar or sodium. The fast food industry as a whole spends $12.6 million every single day marketing what public health advocates call “calorie-dense, low-nutrient” foods. The Farm-to-School lessons try to undo these commercials by getting kids interested in how fresh produce grows and tastes. McKelvey acknowledges that sugar occasionally slips into the menu, as in her pumpkin bread or strawberry-rhubarb parfait, but she says it’s all a part of getting kids to try something they wouldn’t normally eat, “whether it’s sweet or savory or kind of hidden.”
Happy to spend a day outside, the kids are enthused about the project; some of their teachers, on the other hand, have been harder to convince, as they worried it would take away from precious class time. But after seeing the program work, McKelvey says, even these naysayers relented. One crafty teacher even turned the recipes into a math lesson by changing each ingredient’s amount to a complex fraction.
A chance to learn while cooking? Sure beats mystery meat.
Why This Grocery Chain Wants to Install Beehives in School Gardens
Bees do so much more than make that sweet goop that goes so well with tea and crumpets. They also pollinate apples, berries, melons and about a hundred other crops that make our meals healthier more delicious, and more colorful.
We owe a lot to our honey bees. In fact, they pollinate approximately $15 billion worth of produce in the country each year — or about a quarter of the food we consume.
But, as you might know, honey bee populations around the world are dipping at devastating rates. And if these worrying trends continue, this is what your grocery store would look like: Half-empty.
MORE: Can Spending Millions of Dollars on Flowers Help Save the Honeybee?
That’s why Whole Foods Market is trying to get us — and their youngest consumers — buzzed about bees in their Share the Buzz awareness campaign.
[ph]
The grocery chain also announced a new initiative, the Honey Bee Grant Program, to educate youngsters about the importance of the honey bee.
In a recent announcement, the Whole Kids Foundation said they will award approximately 50 hive grants to school gardens across the country in order to teach kids how to raise bees and tend hives. The added bonus? As kids learn how to take care of their fuzzy friends, they also learn lessons on pollination, agriculture, ecology, and nutrition.
ALSO: Meet the Scientists Who Are Tackling Our Disappearing Bee Problem
“You can’t learn about growing fruits and vegetables without learning about bees,” said Jeff Miller, a beekeeper and educator at the non-profit DC Honeybees in Washington, D.C., in the announcement. “Bees are as important to the process as sun and water.”
As the foundation notes, any parent who is worried about exposing their kids to stinging insects should note that bees are naturally docile and, that with proper supervision, kids and bees can peacefully coexist.
Saving the bees and educating children at the same time — sounds like a pretty sweet deal, right?
DON’T MISS: Help Save the Bumblebees With Nothing but Your Smartphone
Big Bets: How to Grow Healthy Eaters
Curt Ellis’ favorite childhood memory is sitting with his father in the family’s garden, watering tomato plants. “There’s something really special that comes from getting your hands in the dirt and doing something that you know how to do,” says Ellis, who co-founded FoodCorps in 2009 with five like-minded friends to give kids across the country that same experience. FoodCorps deploys service members to work with local community organizations in cities and towns in 15 states. They spend a year teaching nutrition, starting school gardens and working with local farms to bring fresh food into school cafeterias.
WATCH: Our Q&A with Curt Ellis and FoodCorps service member Meghan McDermott
We’re partnering with NBCUniversal to support the greatest innovators who are tackling some of the nation’s most critical issues. Tell us who you think the next biggest changemaker in America is by nominating them to be a 2015 NationSwell AllStar.
Brewers Fight Proposed Regulation That Would End Grain Recycling Initiatives
If you’re a lover of the brewsky, then Denver is the city for you.
The Mile High city brews more beer than any other American city, and the state of Colorado boasts over 140 microbreweries. So it probably won’t surprise beer lovers here in the “Napa of beer” that many brewers are using their drinks as forces for environmental and economic good, donating their spent grains — barley, hops, wheat and other grains that have been soaked in water during the beer-brewing process — to farmers who can use them to feed their livestock, instead of throwing them away.
Oskar Blues, a Longmont-based brewery, runs the Hops and Heifers program. In a process it calls “Farm to Cup,” the brewery grows hops on its own farm, uses the hops for brewing, feeds its cattle with the spent grains, and then uses the meat from these cows in burgers sold at its restaurant.
But newly proposed FDA rules threaten to disrupt innovative recycling programs such as this, forcing microbreweries to send the spent grains to landfills or else engage in a costly process of drying out the grains and packaging them to prevent anyone from touching them before they reach the farmers. For many small brewers, the cost of this would be too great and they’d be forced to choose the landfill option.
According to John Fryar of the Longmont Times-Call, Paul Gatza, who directs the Boulder-based 20,000-member strong Brewers Association, spoke with FDA officials who say they’ll change the rule before issuing new draft of the regulations this summer. “The wording in the original proposed rules was pretty bad,” Gatza said. He estimates that the new rule would cost breweries $5 more per barrel to process the grains before donating or selling them to farmers, potentially putting many small brewers out of the recycling business. That would have been a shame, as a recent Brewers Association survey found that members reuse 90 percent of their spent grains.
FDA spokeswoman Juli Putnam told Fryar that they’ve gone back to the drawing board, rewriting some of the language in the regulation in a way that will hopefully allow this beer positivity cycle to continue. Now that’s good news worth lifting a beer over.
MORE: His Family Lost its Farm. Now He’s Making Sure No One Else in His Community Suffers the Same Fate.
Lessons in Local Shopping: Can You Go From Farm to … Grocery Cart?
One of the biggest challenges for people who want to shop local is that the prices at farmers’ markets and other local stores are often higher than those at large supermarkets. In North Carolina, two new stores are trying to make it easier and cheaper to shop locally. It’s a new spin on farm-to-table: a store that seems to connect farms and shopping carts. Designed by a veteran combat engineer Ben Greene, the Farmery is a “living building” that will start out in downtown Durham and Clayton, N.C. With hydroponic vertical growing systems right on site, as well as local foods from other nearby producers, the store has a business model geared toward lower prices and an educational model that will help food buyers learn about the process and benefits of locally sourced foods.
[Image: Farmery]