Recipes for Living from Grass Run Farm

I’ll admit I don’t own a bathroom scale, but I’m not immune to cultural influences regarding body image, fitness ideals, and nutrition. Because I grow food for a living, I tend to think a lot about where food comes from–and how it contributes to my body and overall health.
I’m currently fascinated with the relationship between scientific measures of fitness (such as Body Mass Index, or BMI) and quality of food.

At a recent Northeast Iowa Food & Fitness Initiative conference, I learned not only that Iowans eat, on average, fewer than three fruits and vegetables a day (in fact, only 18 percent of us get the recommended five-a-day), but that 61 percent of Iowan adults and 16 percent of the kids–especially the rural ones–are clinically overweight. In fact, kids in Iowa today, as a generation, are projected to live shorter and less satisfying lives than their parents.
Yikes.

This is all the more alarming because we’re known as America’s Heartland, home to “wholesome” values, families, and foods.

Anyway, it’s something to think about when presented a choice between delicious, crisp, hot French fries from my favorite lunch venue and a light sandwich on whole-grain bread from my local co-op.

And, no, I couldn’t resist calculating my own Body Mass Index (BMI) when I got home from the conference. Here’s an easy introduction from the Centers for Disease Control, if you dare to plug in your own height and weight.

Turns out I’m “normal,” at least in this phase of my active life. But, I suspect, the challenges to sensible eating won’t fade until healthy, local foods are on my path of least resistance — daily.

Economist and journalist Ken Meter is a bit tough to follow. As a stats junkie and chart/diagram fanatic, he has a habit of stringing audiences along intricate molecular chains of startling data. But all this can be forgiven because he’s devoted his professional life to the study of agrarian economies and community vitality.

Meter’s most pressing point? Our current farm economy ships billions more out of America’s heartland than it brings in, and there’s a grotesque irony in the fact that millions of acres of food never feed the people who farm them.

Here’s Meter’s latest - a trove of economic analysis that hits close to our home.