Food in Greenwood

Every semester, I teach a composition courses that require students to write.  What they write about is entirely up to me.  And, since food is one of the most universal elements of human condition, I always ask them to write at least one essay on an issue related to food.  They might choose to write about how our food is produced, how organic and conventional foods are different, how animals in the food system are treated, how workers in the food system are treated, or any other number of things—what they choose to write about is ultimately up to them.

Inevitably, my students want to know what I eat.  I don’t necessarily want to reveal such things because they are so personal.  I worry about what they’ll think if I tell them my goal is to remain as organic and as local as possible.  A revelation like that might confirm their suspicions that professors are oddballs and somehow elitist; it might make them feel judged if their relationship with food is the complete opposite of my own. 

Despite my reservations, however, there are some beans I’m willing to spill, and when I spill ‘em it often becomes obvious that my students are missing out on some of Greenwood’s real treasures. 

Just last week I explained that my favorite street in Greenwood is Maxwell Avenue, for three reasons:

1.  The Mill House, which has awesome sandwiches including an outstanding meatball sub, a huge selection of craft beers, and a brick oven that turns out the best pizza in Greenwood. My favorite pizza features a pesto cream sauce, fresh mozzarella, and sundried tomatoes.  
2. Kickers, which deserves an entire blog post for a lot of reasons, including a constant array of awesome soups, onion rings, pimento cheese burgers, and samosas.  If you go only once, you should order the samosas.  A friend of mine from St. Croix tried them and said they were just like the ones she used to get back home.  I’ve never been to St. Croix, but I can testify to their magnificence just the same—they’ll blow your mind.  I’m not going to tell you exactly what they are—just order them!
3. The Uptown Market  Stands, which feature fresh produce from growers like Early Bird and Parisi Farms.  Just today I went there and got three heads of broccoli, a half-dozen spring onions, and about a dozen crook-neck squash from Parisi Farms for eleven bucks.  It just does not get more fresh, local, and affordable than that.

My students were uniformly unfamiliar with Maxwell Avenue, so for those that read this blog, here is a map:

For those whose map-reading skills have atrophied with the proliferation of GPS devices and smartphone aps, from Lander University you go south down Montague Avenue/Main Street/Hwy 25 (note Greenwood’s proclivity for complicated street names) until you see Greenwood Community Theater on your right—it’s hard to miss.  Take a right at the first traffic light past the theater—that’s Maxwell Avenue, aka Highway 10/McCormick Highway (yes, another complicated street name).  

For those who just aren’t good with directions, this little video will show you exactly how to get to Maxwell Avenue.

 If Maxwell Avenue is the center of my relationship with food in Greenwood, everything else radiates out from there.  Nearby are my other local favorites:

 T.W. Boon’s , where you can find Greenwood’s best shrimp and grits (I have proclaimed myself an authority on shrimp-n-grits), fried zucchini, and very good live music on the weekends.

Howard’s On Main, which is somewhat like Panera except that it’s a local enterprise, the Howard who gave the place his name is actually the guy in the kitchen making your sandwich, and there is a bar in the back of the restaurant where, again, you can catch some great live music.

Corley’s Market and Grill, where during lunch hours you can get the best burger in Greenwood along with the town’s only fresh-cut fries.  I can’t say enough about the glory of a pimento cheese burger, so I have to say that this local masterpiece can also be procured at the Corley’s Grill. The market also offers in-house specialties like crab dip and shrimp dip, great local products like Happy Cow Milk, and an outstanding selection of (very affordable) beer and wine.  It’s also worth noting that Corley’s employs real butchers who will do whatever you want them to do with your meat.

These are not the only places in Greenwood that play a role in my relationship with food, but they are among the most important.  They are my favorites, and they are places that everyone in Greenwood should enjoy.  If you haven’t been to these places, you owe it to yourself to go.

Food Revolutions, Cafeteria Ladies, and School Gardens

 I would wager a month’s salary that school cafeterias have never received the level of public attention that they have been granted since the first season of ABC’s Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, which aired in 2010.  Since then, ABC has aired a second season of the show, focused on schools in Los Angeles instead of the first season’s Huntington, West Virginia.  Both seasons of the program provided buckets of footage shot inside cafeterias and treated actual cafeteria workers as characters in a drama—some were villains who resisted change while others were heroes who soldiered on against obstacles presented by USDA regulations, school administrators, and basic economic realities.  

Not to be left out, the Food Network has aired shows featuring cafeteria workers.  Chopped, for instance, pitted four “cafeteria ladies” against each other to see who could produce the best appetizer, entrée, and dessert with ingredients commonly found in school cafeterias.

With such attention being paid to school lunches, cafeterias, and the like, it has also become apparent to me that schools are increasingly adopting school garden programs that provide at least a part of the produce their cafeterias prepare.  My wife recently saw an outstanding example of this at Arcadia Elementary in Spartanburg, SC.  When she told me about what was happening there, I wanted to know more about school gardening.  As it turns out, the South Carolina Department of Agriculture has a School Gardens Program, as do many other states. In California, the School Gardens Program is sponsored by the state’s Department of Education.   

While most states seem to have similar programs, school gardening is also supported by a number of impressive nonprofit groups like Real School Gardens (based in North Texas), Food Corps (operating in 10 states including North Carolina) and the California School Garden Network.  The CGSN is especially impressive for its resources on using gardens as teaching tools that show teachers how garden-based lessons can help teachers meet state educational standards. As long as I am doing “teacher-speak,” I should also point out that at least one group of experts has already figured out how school gardens can be put to use in meeting Common Core State Standards (note for non-educators: The Common Core State Standards are a new set of educational goals that have been adopted across the United States except in Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia).   

As I often suggest in this blog, there are many things related to food and agriculture that are deeply disconcerting, but this attention that has been paid to school lunches, school gardening, and the value of food and gardening to curricular issues—all of this is undoubtedly good news. 

If your schools have gardens, share your story below!

Why I’m Glad We Care about BPA and Pink Slime

Over the past several weeks, I’ve written about Bisphenol A and “Pink Slime;” remarkably, considering the speed of our news cycle, these issues are still working their ways into headlines. Last week, Beef Products, Inc. started fighting back against what it sees as a smear campaign against its now infamous processed beef product, and Marion Nestle continued offering some of the best commentary on the issue.  At roughly the same time, Federal Government scientists declared that BPA is not harmful to humans but failed to convince everyone, including other highly credentialed scientists. 

These issues are sticking with us because they have been linked with what we feed our children and how we feed them.   The pink slime controversy didn’t really blow up until it was announced in early March that the USDA planned to distribute 7 million pounds of the stuff to school cafeterias.  BPA came to my attention in late 2006 and early 2007 when my wife was pregnant with our second child and we were shopping for baby bottles.  We chose ones that were BPA-free, just to be on the safe side (we even bought some throwback, retro-ish glass bottles, which shockingly still exist).  Shortly after our son was born, the BPA-free trend spread to other products (and we felt vindicated for buying those odd glass bottles).

In an age when childhood seems to be under such threat—when I won’t give my children the freedom to walk around our (safe) neighborhood unsupervised as I did without a second thought at their age, when we are constantly bombarded with stories of abused and neglected children—I find some comfort in the general social unease that has cropped up around what is served to children in school cafeterias. 

This massive American culture, which is so bifurcated and pulled in so many different directions does care, at its core, about what its children eat.  And I am even more heartened by the fact that public outcry has caused the beef industry and the federal government to adapt to public demands.  In this instance, the public’s voice has been heard, changes have been made, and I am fairly hopeful that once people have become more aware of things like pink slime they might want to know more—rather than less—about how all their food is produced. They might, for instance, wonder what else happens to beef before it makes it to a grocery store case or exactly how orange juice has come to be available year-round when Florida’s orange groves don’t actually produce fruit all twelve months of the year.