"A Level Playing Field"

An interview with Megan Palmer, by Miriam Hansen

Born and raised in Michigan, Megan earned a Bachelor of Social Work from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and a Masters in Social Work from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has worked at food banks, homeless shelters and at FareStart, a non-profit organization that trains homeless and disenfranchised people for jobs in the food service industry.

+Click here to read more of Megan's interview Question: What brought you to NECI? I came here because it’s in Vermont and Vermont has a good local economy system and NECI is part of that local economy system. NECI works with local producers and sustainable agriculture. Question: Why culinary school? Ultimately, I want to use food to build community. It was FareStart that brought me here. I got my master’s degree in social work but when I was done, I still felt this yearning to go to culinary school. Part of my job at the food rescue food bank was in the community kitchen. Learning to cook to get a job is wonderful because it’s a source of income but also because it’s a skill that lets you provide for yourself and feed yourself. At FareStart they had social workers in student services but the hands-on work happened with the chefs. It was the chefs who taught the students how to deal with a bad day, how to keep your temper and your job. Part of the FareStart program is to learn budgeting and anger management and conflict resolution and how to keep your job to end the cycle of poverty and homelessness that they’re in. And I love that. Question: What is NECI teaching you that will help you run a community kitchen? The stuff that I’m learning is the foundation. It’s the structure and the building blocks. Chef André’s lecture on flavor is mind blowing. He takes flavor and deconstructs it into very specific words that we can all use. It’s like learning a new language. If you go to a place and have the same language it’s easier to communicate. Question: Are you getting what you wanted? Indirectly, yes. I’ve been working on this idea since 2003. It’s hard to put it together. I love school. I could have worked my way up in the industry but I’m not that patient. I wanted to get it all in one fell swoop. Here I can learn meat fabrication and food theory and the science behind taste and how things cook. I’m not going to learn that succinctly on the job somewhere. I also want to get the business skills so that one day I can run my own non-profit community kitchen. I came here to learn how to use food to build community. I know all about community and now I’m learning about food and how to put those two together. Question: You won a scholarship to NECI? Yes, it was a new scholarship from Share our Strength, whose mission is: No Kid Hungry. I had to write an essay for their Conference of Leaders about how the food industry could help communities end hunger in America. Question: How can the industry help? What I really like about food it that it can level the playing field. There’s a diner in Ann Arbor open 24 hours/day and it’s the kind of place where all the punk/goth kids hang out, but it is also a place where couples come dressed in suits and ties. It’s a great equalizer. Everybody can come in, sit down and get a table. Food also connects with people on an emotional level. It can bring people together who wouldn’t normally sit down together and can create a common vernacular. It can be used to build things up or to break things down. Tell me about your work/study job… I work for the Vermont State Agency on Agricultural Markets and Food. I helped them fill slots at the Champlain Valley Fair with cooking demos. Chef Herve, Johnny Stevenson and Beth Miller did one and I made a tomato, watermelon salad with feta. Question: Tomato and watermelon? It’s a great taste combination- tomatoes give the sour taste and watermelon has a sweet taste and even though the textures are really different, they’re both really juicy. Watermelon tempers out the tomato. Question: What other projects did you work on? I worked with Woodside, a juvenile rehabilitation center and school/residential facility. They’re all teenage boys who are wards of the state. They want more local foods in their menus so I did a survey with the kids to learn what they like to eat. Then I took the survey results and made a six week rotating menu of 2200 calories/day. We worked with Two Rivers, FEED (Food Education Every Day) and a couple of dietitians from CVCH who’ve just introduced more local foods into the hospital. Question: Are you set for your internship? Yes, I’m going to a green restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, a fine dining restaurant and café that uses local products and emphasizes slow food. The restaurant is called Kitchen, and they employ sustainable practices with their space, such as using biodegradable paper products and harnessing wind energy. Question: How does being green connect to your interest in community kitchens? It’s all about the value system that we have. If we here in America really cared about feeding people, we wouldn’t know about the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones, we’d know about how many people are standing in line at the food bank, how many people have food stamps and how many people can’t afford to eat. Question: Do you eventually want to be a chef? I want to be a chef in community and central kitchens. There are about thirty in the country. DC Central Kitchen has a program called Campus Kitchens. They are more involved with college students who run the kitchen and make meals to go out to daycare centers and affordable housing. Question: How is working with college students different from homeless students? With college students, you have to break down the class system. You have to get the middle income folks out of their comfort zones. Seeing homelessness for the first time is a shock to the system. It’s about getting people to see that homelessness has a face and a name and a story. It’s a nine year old little girl who has been to seven different schools in the last five years. Question: You see the two groups as essential to making the change? There’s an aboriginal saying – If you have come to help me then go away. If you have come because your liberation is bound up in mine then let us work together. People only hear you if they’re coming towards you. You have to be ready to make changes; you can’t make the changes for somebody else. The thing that I liked about FareStart; when they get there, they’re ready to make change. They’re ready to go to AA meetings, to make the tough decisions to not be homeless any more. Kids in shelter were not ready yet. You need a lot of support in your life to be able to do that. You need to be ready to do the work.