For the last few weeks we’ve been working with the Auburn Public Library and Auburn International Farmers Market to create the first citywide “Auburn Reads.”

It’s a unique One City Reads event since we will select a book that will engage both adults and children, and will actively collaborate with school and after-school programs. The official announcement of the event and book selection (it’s about food, of course!) will be in May, before the end of school and the start of the farmers market in June.

Throughout the summer, there will be discussion groups, nutrition education workshops, food film showings, cooking demonstrations, and other related events to increase understanding of what we eat while highlighting Auburn’s rich farm history. The event will conclude at the close of the farmers market on September 26.

Followers of the READERS to EATERS newsletter and Facebook know that we’ve highlighted the innovative Auburn School Nutrition Services in the past and we look forward to working with them as well. Stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted on the book announcement and events.

The recent Atlantic magazine article,  Cultivating Failure by Caitlin Flanagan has fueled impassioned discussions among food advocates and educators over Flanagan’s assertions that schools should focus on teaching basic math and reading rather than having school garden programs.  Her biased argument, racial putdowns, and righteous attacks seem more like Fox News than The Atlantic.

I’ve spent the last six months visiting school gardens throughout Washington State and watched children learn science, art, math, and writing through garden participation. Perhaps Tom Philipott said it best in Grist:

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The sustainable-food movement has matured enough and gained enough force that it’s coming under withering criticism from a variety of quarters. That’s good for the movement—hard questions need to be asked, assumptions questioned, received ideas reconsidered. And authors who perform those tasks will find a market from editors desperate to generate attention with contrarian poses. But I wish we could expect more thoughtfulness, and less hack work, from such critics.
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We are very excited to be launching R2E’s first publishing project—a book on school gardens—due out later this year. Stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted on our progress.

The Christmas holiday is a great time to catch up with reading. The trouble is I couldn’t decide if I should finish the pile from 2009 or start with the new one for 2010. Instead, I dug back, way back, to 1975 when John McPhee wrote “Giving Good Weight” in The New Yorker.

In this classic story (published as a book of the same name along with four other splendid stories), he describes what it was like to work as a farmer in upstate New York, and sell at the greenmarkets of Harlem and Brooklyn. What is remarkable to me is that his vivid description of the personalities, the setting, the conversations, and the concern for the land seems like it was written today.  Here’s the opening passage:

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You people come into the market—the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun—and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your string beans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something wonderful, you are—people of the city—and we, who are, almost without exception strangers here, are as absorbed with you as you seem to be with the numbers on our hanging scales.
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Later this month our mobile bookstore will be at the Washington State Farmers Market Association conference in Renton. This is one timeless book that we will be sharing.