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Farming groups help kids learn about nutrition
December 17th, 2008Compare an apple and a bag of chips and decide which is the nutrient-dense snack. Uh, right.
The exercise became surprisingly easy for some midstate kids after they prodded familiar and not-so-familiar fruits and vegetables and learned how the vitamins within each fight disease and nourish growing bodies.
Chips have plenty of salt and fat. Apples have lots of fiber and vitamins. Bellaire Elementary School second-graders got it right away.
“Cauliflower’s good without even cooking,” student Omar Ewideh said.
He was glad to hear that nutrient-dense blueberries are ranked first among foods that power the brain and fight cancer. “I eat them at McDonald’s in their yogurt. Mmm,” Omar said.
As part of a National Farm City Week celebration, Carlisle Area School food service director Kelly Renard put a nutritious spin on a popular Halloween party game. She passed out paper bags and challenged kids to reach in without looking and identity the fruit or vegetable within.
Renard wanted to give kids a fresh view of fruits and vegetables; to see that, in their natural state, they are powerful tools for nourishing growing bodies. It’s a lesson often missed by children whose food comes from the grocery store, processed and sealed in bright, plastic packages.
She had help from Pennsylvania FFA Association, the state Agriculture Department, Pennsylvania Friends of Ag Foundation and PennAg Industries.
It was one of hundreds of functions Britney Marsh will attend as one of this year’s FFA state officers. The 2008 Cumberland Valley graduate and alumni of CV’s FFA club has deferred college for a year. She is traveling the mid-Atlantic region with other high school FFA alumni to deliver agriculture.
Trash to treasure: artful gear with a conscience
December 17th, 2008It’s a long way from this New England village to Jakarta, Indonesia. But the distance is bridged creatively by a company named Monsoon Vermont. Founded in 2005 by Julia Genatossio, Monsoon Vermont sells items made from nonrecyclable plastic collected by scavengers from the streets, landfills, and waterways of Jakarta, the capital city with more than 9 million inhabitants. The trash is triple-washed, then sewn collage style into usable objects such as messenger bags, wallets, umbrellas, computer bags, backpacks, shower curtains, wastebaskets, travel wallets, and more. Dubbed “trashion,” combining trash and fashion, the items create sustainable work for some at the bottom of the economic spectrum.
Before moving to Vermont, Genatossio worked in crisis management for Save the Children UK, where she developed sustainable businesses in Sri Lanka, Ecuador, and with the Bangladeshi community in London. Shopping one day in Brattleboro she found a simpler version of the bags she now designs. Genatossio recalls that when she saw the bag, she thought, “This is a story. Garbage!” She booked a flight to Indonesia and arrived two days after the tsunami hit the region in December 2004. In the chaos, she saw people collecting trash from landfills, and this solidified her vision.
“The idea was to take the original bag I had seen to another level design-wise,” said Genatossio. “I looked at luxury designs by Louis Vuitton and things in Vogue. I wanted to integrate what the Indonesians started with high-end design. They needed that economic niche for this to survive as a sustainable project.” enatossio sends her designs and production orders to a small company in Jakarta that gathers the materials and stitches them. “They have very talented sewers who used to work for Fendi and Chanel when they maintained factories in Indonesia. When these companies pulled out, only ghost factories were left, along with talented people who can do high-end finishing work,” said Genatossio.
The bags use heavy gauge zippers and the interiors are lined with patterned satin fabrics. The exterior is a collage of products in English and Bahasa Indonesia, combining language and color in a way that creates visually interesting cross-cultural references. “Traveling in Asia, all five senses are working all the time,” said Genatossio. “Our products are a microcosm of that, working on many levels linguistically, [and] stylistically . . . and they are useful objects.”
Each piece features an individually made collage. Pak Haris, a man identified on the website as “an artist/master tailor/slum-dweller” who crafts Monsoon Vermont’s toiletry travel bags, is so inventive that Genatossio asked him to sign his work, which is sold in limited editions. “Is it really garbage?” is a common question posed by visitors to the shop. What makes these textiles look new is what makes them potentially devastating to the environment: They never break down. According to Genatossio, there’s so much garbage in Jakarta that the people who live in the dumps can die in avalanches. In the ashen gray fields of garbage, the bright plastic colors are “almost like flowers.”
“My product creates a commodity from garbage,” she said. “The price per kilo is the same as paid for rice. This elevates the scavengers to the level of agricultural workers. It’s unspeakably wonderful. It has a profound effect on their lives. They’re now proud of themselves.” Monsoon Vermont’s warehouse is a small room attached to the Post Office and is open sporadically on work days. The work is sold online and across the street in a boutique set up in the Jamaica Coffee House, where you can sip fair trade organic coffee six days a week (closed Wednesdays), from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Necee Regis can be reached at neceeregis@gmail.com.
Plastic Packaging companies rise
September 3rd, 2008
Shares of plastic packaging makers rose Tuesday after the price of crude oil, a key raw material in making plastics, plunged as Hurricane Gustav appeared to largely spare petroleum installations in the Gulf of Mexico. Light, sweet crude for October delivery fell $7.73 to $107.73 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after earlier dropping as low as $105.46. The last time prices hovered in that range was in early April before a historic run-up above $147 per barrel.
Plastics are made from petrochemicals that, in turn, are produced by processing crude oil and natural gas. When crude oil’s price declines, so does the price of petrochemicals. On Friday, the contract settled at $115.46 a barrel as Gustav approached the U.S. Gulf coast, a key region for oil drilling and refining. But traders were relieved that Gustav weakened as it neared the offshore oil rigs and Louisiana refineries, and appeared to have caused less damage than expected in New Orleans and surrounding areas.
In morning trading, Pactiv Corp. (nyse: PTV – news – people ) rose $1.14, or 4.2 percent, to $28.01. Sealed Air Corp. (nyse: SEE – news – people ) rose 82 cents, or 3.4 percent, to $25.05 and Ball Corp. (nyse: BLL – news – people ) rose 65 cents to $46.57.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.