Let's Kick and Push and Coast...: A Weekend In The City…

Well it’s done. Conference of Leaders is over. Two long months of planning (many more on the part of the Share Our Strength full time staff) and the conference is done. It was AMAZING!!!! I feel as if I will never be able to fully explain how wonderful conference was. I had such an incredible time and I feel so unbelievably lucky to have been able to be part of something so informational and wonderful. I honestly never thought Conference would happen. We were planning and planning and I never thought the day would actually arrive. Now I can’t believe it’s over!!!

Conference started last Friday at 9 am when I got to my office. From there I headed to the Fairmont Hotel where I stuffed goodie bags, helped assist FEED meeting attendees and boxed materials for Operation Frontline. Now before I continue I do realize how boring these tasks must sound but trust me… they weren’t and they were also just the beginning of the incredibly wonderful things I got to do while at conference. I was given the opportunity to interview OFL’s Hall of Fame chefs (volunteer chefs who teach our nutrition education classes), I sat in on lectures regarding SNAP (food stamps), meals served in school, and I was able to participate in our service day.

I spent service day, an INCREDIBLE day, at Miller Farms in Prince George’s county, Maryland. While there I helped to glean crops. (Gleaning is a term used to refer to the picking of crops left behind by commercial harvesters).

Over forty volunteers, myself included picked mixed greens to be donated to a local school for food baskets for the holidays. The sun was shining, we had our white polo shirts on, and it was a ton of fun working on the farm. I had been lucky enough to be able to help work on the organization of service day and it felt really good to be able to be part of something that would help someone else.

During my time at the farm I learned that more than 10 million pounds of crops a year go unharvested because they are not aesthetically appealing enough to be served in chain grocery stores. How disgusting is that? I’m asking because in a country where 14 million children go hungry every day, wasting 15 million pounds of perfectly edible food seems horrific to me. As does the fact that SNAP doesn’t provide incentives for buying healthy food and the fact that food served to kids in school contain almost no nutritional value.

I don’t want to ramble and I don’t want to turn this week’s blog entry into a rant on the injustices in our country, but I did want to give you some food for thought. This conference taught me a lot about programs like WIC and SNAP, about the issue of obesity and hunger, about school meal programs, and hunger in America. It’s a really important issue that unfortunately is ignored by the mainstream media. So think about these things and I encourage you to do some research because it’s truly a dire situation facing the people of this country.

Back to better fun things about the conference. Along with all the great knowledge that I gained I also got to meet Aaron McCargo from “Big Daddy’s House” on Food Network.

He was a key note speaker at our conference and he was a brilliant speaker. Meeting him was truly one of the highlights of conference for me. His speech was truly inspirational and coupled with the hip-hop choir, Saturday night was definitely a great time at conference. George Stephanopoulos also spoke along with the USDA under secretary and the founders of Share Our Strength. I gained so much from this weekend and if I could, I’d go back and do it all again!!

However now I’m incredibly tired and in desperate need of some relaxation. As wonderful as this weekend was and as wonderful as it was… it will be nice to have some down time in the office. Although its now time to prep for the next farmer’s market event. Work at Share Our Strength has definitely picked up and it’s been great!

This Week’s Top Two Places to Visit:

Miller Farm: Located in Clinton MD, Miller Farm is one of the coolest local farms you will ever go to. You pull up and a beautiful array of flowers decorates the outside of the store, which is surrounded on two sides with fields of green vegetables. Inside the store barrels of fruits and veggie fill the space. There is a bakery to your left that sells a variety of homemade baked goods and ice cream. The walls are covered in signs and unique pieces of artwork. You can watch the staff hand pick crops and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to engage is some truly wonderful conversation with them.

Mie N Yu: This is perhaps one of the coolest restaurants I’ve been to in this city. Located in Georgetown on Wisconsin Ave, Mie N Yu offers authentic Middle Eastern food in a crazy atmosphere. There are two floors this restaurant, one with a bar, a cabana style seating area, and purple lighting. The second floor is more laid back. The Venetian room has chairs made of old tree trunks that are so heavy you need the help of your waiter to pull it away from the table (no joke). The coolest part of this place though isn’t the lighting, the furniture, or the food; it’s the coveted Birdcage table. It’s a table… in a giant birdcage tucked into a corner in a stairwell hovering between the first and second floor.