Feeding Feasible Feasts

Today I'm talking with Angel at Feeding Feasible Feasts. You can follow on Facebook as well.

 

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Angel at Feeding Feasible Feasts. And you're in Washington state, right, Angel? Yes, I am.  Okay. Awesome. How's the weather in Washington state? It is, well, where I am in Washington. It's beautiful today. Yeah.

00:26
Good. was a very, it's very warm here in Minnesota. It's very muggy. Midwest. Yeah. It's going to be warm out there. Are you in the Midwest? Did you say Minnesota? Yes.

00:43
Yes, it's really muggy. It's gross.  And that's par for the course for July 2nd. I don't know why I'm even saying it out loud. Everyone knows it's muggy in Minnesota in July.  So tell me about  yourself and Feeding Feasible Feasts, because I am so curious to know what you guys do. Well,  I'll give you a short version. I'm a little on the older side, so I've done quite a bit in my

01:11
I guess in my world, in my life.  Uh, let's see here, uh, born in Chicago,  1961. So,  uh, here before women could vote and black folks to vote and all of that,  uh, moved here to the state of Washington, uh, Seattle, Washington. And let's see, that would have been 20 or no, 1989. We moved  here.  Uh, my husband and I, and  we have seven children that are all adults.

01:40
Opened my first business here. Well, my second business.  First business here was a  promotional products company and had some pretty nice contracts with  large companies.  Developed a  transportation model where we  folks could get online and order their promotional products and have them delivered directly. So we did that with Labor Ready and  True Value and some of the large companies out here.

02:08
I sold that company, moved on to real estate. My mother got very ill. So I had her here. So I went into real estate so I could control my schedule.  fairly well with that until the downturn in the economy at a time. So I sold my book of business and moved  into another arena here in Washington state at the time was a pretty hot topic, which was recreational cannabis. My husband  in his years growing up.

02:37
enjoyed recreational cannabis. I myself never and still haven't tried it,  but  really felt  that the medical part of that unit to be examined and supported. I became an advocate,  joined our liquor control board  as a board member to help with  oversight for that particular industry.  We still, we actually have at this point two retail cannabis licenses.

03:05
that we have in another county, not where we live.  And  I sit on  the board here for the Washington Food Coalition, which is a coalition  designed by congressional districts. And I am the representative here for that.  As well as I had a chair with our city here  for economic development on their advisory board,  as well as  I was a political delegate this year during the

03:35
the political race.  And now we are  feeding feasible feasts. It came about because I am a heavy gardener. garden,  we have a pretty good swath of property here. I garden my entire  portion of my house  yard is a garden. So I produce quite a bit of food. And one of the things we do with feeding feasible feasts is we do teach folks how to  can, freeze,  hydrate,

04:05
You know, how to preserve food.  I have about 16 fruit and nut trees in my backyard and two in my front yard.  During the time of COVID, well, before all of that, I discovered that my neighbors didn't actually like zucchini as much as I thought they did. So I had to come up with a better method of,  you know, finding a home for all of the food and found a national organization. I don't know if you know about it. It's called Food is Free.

04:35
And it is built for people like me, gardeners like me, who just produce way more food than they're ever going to eat.  And you, it's a simple concept. You just put a card table on a corner with a  sign, handwritten, if you like, that says food is free. Put the food on the table and people who drive by can take whatever they like.  Awesome. I didn't know about that. It's a national movement. It's actually,  we have several pods  of that movement here in Washington state.

05:04
part of the effort during Kovac to rescue, had a  potato onion problem at the top of Kovac when the schools closed down and restaurants closed down. Our farmers  were not able to sell all of the produce. And so we did a huge rescue  movement at that time. Several of the large food agencies here and  lots of small ones  like mine at the time  drove over to Eastern Washington and we brought over,  I don't know how many thousands of tons

05:34
potatoes and onions,  but we were able to do to because he come from rotting in the  field and in arms.  Awesome. Who does free played a pivotal role in that as well as most of the folks who are participating in that with potatoes and onions, put them on the corner and we'll just wrap.

05:52
So, but that is food is free is a precursor to feeding feasible piece.  As COVID kicked in  at the top of that year,  we live in an area where there's a large immigrant population of Russian and Ukrainian folks.  And I noticed  as things were closing down that a small line  began to form across the street from where the table was.

06:22
early spring. So the only thing I was really harvesting were herbs and they were lining up herbs. And I remember thinking to myself, Oh my gosh, do you have a problem? Because people are lining up for simple herbs, rosemary, thyme, things like that. Um, reached back into some friends who were in the grocery industry and said, Hey, what are you doing with your returns? And they didn't have an answer. And I said, well, you can send them to me. And so, um, I began getting food by the pallet load.

06:50
and would line them up in my driveway and along my private road and  developed a small free market on my neighbor's corner because he has a cross street  for people to just come and shop for free for food that normally would have just gone into the landfill.  So that was our beginning.  Neighbors really played a large role in this.  Many of our neighbors donated marine coolers  and the neighbor  to the north of us

07:19
saw ice every single morning for all of those coolers. And we were able to have milk and meat, cheese and butter, things like that that needed to be refrigerated and could not just sit on a table. And it was summer. So that went along swimmingly until the health department came by and said, hey, we love what you're doing, but if you're going to use marine coolers, you will have to come out here and take a temperature every hour.

07:46
And the look on my face told her that I was not going to come out there every hour and take a temperature and all those marine coolers that just wasn't feasible. So  I drew plans for  a  small shed-like building that had a  carve out in it for a refrigerator. And we placed that  unit on top of some pallets,  again in my neighbor's yard against our common fence.

08:14
It became the first food hub. And so people come anytime day or night and pick up food. And I had run this extension cord up my driveway, have a 150 foot driveway. So I ran an extension cord up to keep the refrigerator and the lights running for that first hub. And it was extremely popular and it's undergone several reiterations, several redesigns over the last five years. We have some that are solar powered.

08:44
You have some that are, well, all of them have all, think that solar power is probably the only differentiation truly to find all of them at this point. But they all have self closing doors are available 24 seven. You don't have to register. just show up. The signage on the, on the units illustrates the communities that will most likely take advantage of that hub. So for example,

09:10
Our hub in Renton is English, Spanish and Chinese, our hub in Tukwila is English,  Ukrainian  and Russian.  it just depends on where the... Okay, Angel, I'm going to stop you just for a minute.  Number one, I love your heart. Your heart is so big, you are a giver.

09:31
Number two,  feeding Feasible Feasts is your baby. You started it. Yes. Okay. So I was looking at your Facebook page  and I saw a guy at a church talking about their food pantry.  Do you also provide stuff for food shelves and food pantries? We do. We do distribute food, especially when we get a lot of it.

10:00
to other food banks, food pantries and other  several other types of school districts, nonprofits.  We distribute to quite a wide range. Yes.  Today, as a matter of fact, I got a call from a distributor who had  27 pallets of shredded bagged lettuce  that was rejected at a  outlet store  dock, nowhere for it to go. Of course, we don't want that in the landfill.

10:29
So we had them delivered to us and we have already distributed all 27 pallets. We did it in under three hours.  Wow. Wow. Okay. So  how hard was this to get started and how expensive is it to keep it going?  It wasn't hard to get started.  We were lucky because I had so many ties and so many different stastes. So finding food was not an issue.

10:59
Um, I know about warehousing, so I was able to locate a warehouse that wasn't overly extensive.  Um,  we were able to locate, um, just all of the infrastructure that's needed. That's where the expense really does come in.  Um, we have a fleet of vans and refrigerated troughs that we utilized. Uh, we are running routes, uh, seven days a week, upwards of,  uh, six different routes a day.  Uh, so we have to pay people. So there's, you know, there's that expense along with.

11:29
Refrigeration is probably the biggest obstacle, I think, for all of the food banks because that stuff needs to be kept fresh. So as a result, a lot of my programs revolve around eliminating those needs. So even with the lettuce, for example, today that came in, rather than have it come to my warehouse and sit for any length of time, we just make sure that it goes directly to where we know it can go or we deliver it ourselves.

11:56
We model that in our grocery store rescue as well. We rescue  food from Safeways and Albertsons, Pagans, Tovers. We pick up food from them, ideally.

12:09
Fabulous.  I love you. You  are so important to Washington State.  I don't have words big enough to tell you how I'm feeling right now hearing your story. So not every state has a program like this, but there are lots of people growing food in their gardens and they can't possibly use all of the surplus.

12:34
So what I would suggest, because I live in Minnesota, we have a big garden and we will have metric tons of tomatoes by August. I know we will. We have over 200 tomato plants planted right now. We're gonna donate to our local food shelf. So what I would suggest to people who are growing produce is that if they know of a local church, food pantry or a food shelf or whatever, get hold of them and ask them if they will take fresh farm

13:04
grown produce in their programs because everybody deserves a really good tomato. Agree. And I would even take that a step further and have them investigate that food is free table. And the reason I say that is, unfortunately, food banks operate under very restrictive hours. And generally speaking, folks who need that type of assistance are working. And they miss those hours.

13:34
most often.  There's food banks sometimes they're only open five hours a week.  If it's a really good food bank it's open maybe 20 hours a week. If you're working nights you're never going to make it. If you're working days or rather nights you're never going to make it to a food bank. So if you're growing it yourself and you do have a street where you can put it just a table that says food is free people will take it and you and the folks who will stop I promise you are the folks who need it.  Folks who don't need it don't stop.

14:03
They don't have a need to right now. So they don't, but the folks who need it will stop. Yes, absolutely.  The other thing is this conversation is really timely because our situation in the United States right now  is getting kind of tenuous regarding the cost of food.

14:25
We're really lucky in my home because my husband has a good job and we're really thankful for that and we have a really nice garden going and we're really thankful for that. And we have laying hens so we have eggs and we're really thankful for that because the grocery store prices are so ridiculously high right now. You are doing a huge service for your community because I feel like no one should have to choose between paying their electric bill and eating dinner.

14:56
You're exactly right with that.  I think a lot gets lost in translation when things like this happen  and too often it becomes a political matter and this is not a political matter. I think that the lack of education for the general public  is  important to educate each other.

15:20
When it comes to food insecurity, people hear food insecurity and they hear folks who just want it easy or want something free or  whatever, and that isn't what it is. No. insecurity is defined. has a definition. And the definition is  it represents people who have an income but are unable to stretch that income until the next time they receive a check. That's the definition of food insecurity.

15:46
And so if you really think about it, how many times have you just talked to a regular neighbor, both are working, doing well, and they're thinking, huh, we got five more days. I need to go to the grocery store, but I really, you I don't have much money.  I don't know, you know, what I need to get some inextensive things like  ramen or something along those lines that isn't healthy and isn't good for them. If they have enough money to do that, that's the definition of food insecurity. And what we know in the United States is that seven out of 10

16:15
suffer from food insecurity. Seven out of ten. So that means if you have ten neighbors, seven of them most likely have that issue often.  Yep, absolutely. And  we are going through a minor patch of that right now here.  I wouldn't say it's minor. We're headed, it's on an upward slant, it's at a  vertical  slant. No, no, I meant in my household. I didn't mean in general. We're going through.

16:45
We're going through a minor patch of food insecurity because the gardens aren't quite producing yet. They're  almost there. I'm so excited.  But we have really been doing meal planning on the weekends and we're like, okay, we have 150 bucks to spend on food for the week to supplement what we have in the house.  What am I cooking this week? So we literally sit down on Saturday and make a plan and get groceries on Sunday.

17:13
really looking forward to salads from the garden and zucchini and tomatoes and cucumbers because that's all really good healthy nutritional food for us. Right exactly and you find yourself  not as hungry as often when you're able to pack your body with nutrients like that. I am  astounded that the people lined up for herbs that you were talking about because herbs are great but they're not exactly

17:40
a dinner, they will make a dinner better, but they're not dinner. Right. My feeling is that for those that were stopping on those days, on those early, early days, I think that knowing that fresh food, even if it's put in something like ramen would help, well, it helps it taste better, but also it would get more nutritional value. And I have a sneaky suspicion that's what that was about. Yeah, probably.

18:09
The other thing is that people who aren't from America, like they move here from a different country, they know more about cooking than most Americans know. And they also know they could take those fresh herbs and dry them and put them in a jar and they would have them for longer. And most Americans think that you get herbs in a little tiny container at the store. No,  you can grow a basil plant. You can let it get big. You can strip the leaves off of it.

18:38
dry those leaves, crunch them up and put them in a mason jar with a lid and you have basil for the winter. Exactly. We have, I have a sage bush that I've been growing for about seven years now. It's huge. And my husband keeps saying to cut it back. Well, first of all, when spring comes, it blooms just the prettiest turtled. And the entire plant is edible. You can fry sage with, can, you can batter them and fry them and they'd make a meal by themselves. They're delicious.

19:07
Oh yeah, absolutely. My sage plant is dead. I had a really good one going and it died last summer because it was so, it was just so, it was terrible weather here last year. It was so wet and then it was so dry that the plant didn't know what to do. And it was just like, I give up and it died.

19:27
that day.  This year I'm struggling with,  we will have an incredible overabundance. did not,  this year I didn't take the time to remove some of the like  starts of some of the fruits like the pears and the apples and  now I have branches that are back, they're just bowed and touching the ground and so heavy and so I've got to go through, either prop up the branches so they don't snap or pull some of those off of it.

19:56
I have to give though.

20:00
Yep, I was telling somebody the other day how spoiled I feel because we have apple trees here and they actually have apples on them now. We didn't get any last year because a windstorm came through and blew all the petals off. So the apples never got pollinated. And we're going to have like probably 200 honey  gold apples this fall to pick from our property. And I'm so excited.

20:24
And every time I look at those trees, I'm like, we are so  lucky and I feel so spoiled about it.

20:32
We, we, have so much, we actually have Gleaner, volunteer Gleaners that come and we have the gear, the hip baskets and the poles that reach out and grab them down. think right now we're at a pole. And, um, just on my property, just last year, the apple tree in the front gave us over 900 apples. It's incredible how much a tree can produce in food and the great thing about apples is they have a really long life. They have a great longevity if they're stored.

21:03
Yep, exactly.  Yep. And I don't know if you grow winter squash in Washington state, but we do. And my favorite time of year is autumn because the winter squash is ready to come in.

21:19
We have, you know, Washington state, we're lucky that we can grow pretty much all year round something.  Um, there's very little, um, I don't think there are very, there are very few days or where you wouldn't be able to grow something in this, in this state. So it's nice.

21:38
Uh-huh, I didn't know that. I thought you guys had a cold enough winter that you had a couple of months where you couldn't grow anything. Oh, you can just hoop it. You just sort of it. Yeah, you just hoop that and keep the snow off. And you can grow all kinds of things. Nice. We had to put up a heated greenhouse to do that. I don't have a heated greenhouse. That sounds like luxury. We do have chickens here too, like you do. Uh-huh.

22:07
I do keep the coop as it's actually built very close to our home and where I just run the dryer vent that way. Put a strain on it and it heats it up sometimes. Oh, that's smart. I can't do that. My chicken coop is way too far from the house.  Yeah, I my close by on purpose because I didn't ever some of the chicken, you we harvest a lot of chickens at the end of the season, but there are several that are left.

22:32
that we carry over to the next year. And I don't want them to freeze. The other problem we have is, we have, I'm sure you have two raccoons and rats and things that want to get in there and do harm. And so building it up against the house, that was just one side of the poop I did not have to fortify. That's really smart, Angel. I never would have thought of that. I'm going to have to talk to my husband and be like, this lady told me a really cool hint about keeping chickens warm in the wintertime.

23:01
Yeah, you just run that and then and you don't have to  heat it right you just run your dryer for a minute Yeah, exactly. Here. Where's there are a lot of us in my household? And so we we're running our dryer quite often so they take pretty warm That's brilliant. I would never have thought of that and I have not had anyone mention that on the podcast and I've been doing the podcast for 21 months now, so  um What breed of chickens do you have?

23:27
We do the X brand, is just the regular white chicken that are meat chicken.  And then I have a plethora of chickens that I think they started off as certain breeds and made it and made more chicks. And so I don't know what they are anymore. They just lay eggs. They're moths. All different colors. Yes, they're all moths. They just lay eggs and run around and that's it.  That's the extent of it.

23:51
As long as they're giving you eggs, they're good chickens. And they're great for, I mean, they're great to have if you have a garden. Like I'm sure you know, you can take all of the stuff that you pull and all the vegetation that you're preening and throw it all in there with them, they'll take care of it. Oh yeah. We threw in a whole bunch of basil plants last, I think it was October. Cause in Minnesota, if you grow basil outside,  the minute it gets below 40 degrees, the basil plants are done.

24:20
They get black spots on the leaves and they're no longer good. And chickens freaking love basil. They love it. they had,  they their little. They eat a lot of the compost from the house  after the grandchildren finished eating  watermelon and, or whatever it is that we bought, we throw the rest in there with chickens. Yeah. Chickens  love watermelon. We used to take the rinds out to the chickens.

24:50
And they would lose their minds. My husband would throw half a watermelon rind in and they would, they would fight over it. And I was just like, I can't believe they like watermelon. And if you watch them, if you actually scoop all the watermelon out of the watermelon, out of the rind, so it's still like a bowl and you put the, you put it out in the run, they will eat all of  the flesh out of it. So it's just a skin shaped bowl sitting there on the ground.

25:20
They do that with pumpkin too. They love pumpkin and will fight over that. It's  really fun though to raise chickens. If you're able to watch them and you know, instead of having to run outside all the time when it's cold and just throw something in there and run away.  But they are fun to watch. there's a reason that chickens are the gateway to homesteading, you know. My daughter this year, she has ducks and I...

25:48
She has too many ducks at this point. sounds like  one of the neighbors has ducks and gave her eggs from the ducks through food. They were trading  and  she picked the egg up and looked at it and  they were fertilized. So she put them under the lamp and now she has all these extra ducks. That's fabulous. That's great. I love that.  She said, do you want some ducks? Mom, said, no, I don't any ducks.

26:15
Yeah, and ducks need water. I don't know if you have water on your property, but they need maybe more. But I do not produce.  Yeah, somebody asked me if I wanted ducks and I was like, no, because I don't have any water on my property. And they were like, we just you can just get a kid's.  They're like, you can just get a kid swimming pool and put water in it. I was like, yeah, but then you got to clean it out every day. Right.

26:43
That's my, that would be my issue. Ducks, I mean, chickens are one thing to clean up after and you know, I'm pretty good at shoveling it often enough that I can compost it well. But ducks are a whole nother matter. They, I don't know why, but they seem much messier to me than chickens are. Because they are. They're much messier than chickens. No, chickens are great. Especially if you put down wood chips or straw, you just have to go in there and, and

27:12
Take a shovel and shovel it out, put it in your compost pile. Yep. And that's pretty easy. Yep.  And chicken manure is  awesome for a garden, for fertilizer.  Once you  let it cure, do not ever put hot chicken manure on in your garden because it will ruin your plants.  Oh my gosh, and it smells so bad anyway.  It sure does. It's gross. But.

27:39
We grew the most beautiful garden at our old house one year because we got some chicken manure and  the tomatoes and cucumbers that year, were huge. They were yummy. And I was like, chicken manure is the best ever. It is the best composted stuff.  absolutely. We are gardens. have all my gardens are in braised, all of my  vegetables out front are in raised beds. And so every year I pull from the compost bin, everything that I've composted  and usually, um,

28:08
The dirt does shrink down about half, guess, almost half. And I fill every bed with compost. And then I use my little, I have a little tiny rototiller that I can handle myself. And I just rototiller it in and my garden comes up so amazing every year. Yeah, again, I feel really spoiled that we get to do gardening here. And I bet you sometimes have the same feeling. I, I, when I discovered that I could garden up here,

28:35
as opposed to where  I came from. thought, oh my gosh, I'm in heaven.  And so I have not not garden since I grew up here. Yeah, there's magic in it. And I can't explain it to people who haven't tried it.  I do not have the words to explain to them the miraculous things that gardening does for people. Well, the other thing too, is if you have children or grandchildren and  the learning moments, teaching moments,

29:04
in gardening are vast. Almost every lesson  we hold  is a good word and we had here. And we were able to teach them so much just through the gardening.  mean, math, you know,  percentages  and just all kinds of things that you never would have, you know, really put to, you know, coming from a garden. Yeah.

29:33
Biology, chemistry?  All of it, yes.  is nothing.  Even root words with some of the vegetables, you where does this word come from and how, you know, why is it called this? And just, mean, pretty much everything.  You can teach through a garden. know the children here, the grandchildren here, every year in my garden, there's the first bed, which is right in front of our  stairs as you come out of our home.

30:04
And there's a little sidewalk there.  And when you cross the sidewalk, you hit the garden.  And in the first bed, the first row are all cherry tomatoes. And the reason is because  I let those get really big. I don't ruin them back.  They probably would make more tomatoes than I did, but I don't. They get really bushy, really big. And the children spend the summer eating, walking around handfuls of cherry tomatoes all summer. Because

30:31
That's their snack. That's what they choose for a snack. They go out there and pick cherry tomatoes and eat them. It's actually going to be on our, I'm going to do a Facebook post video about that. huh. Fabulous. Oh my God, Angel, this has been so fun talking with you. I try to keep these to half an hour and we're at 31 minutes. So thank you for your time and where can people find feeding feasible fees?

30:58
You can find us on Facebook. It's just feeding feasible feasts.  Same with Instagram.  You can email us  at www.fffeaststs.org. And those are the best ways to find us in churches. Okay. Awesome. Angel, I loved it. This was great. Thank you so much.  hope you have a wonderful night and as always- you for having me. Thank you for inviting.

31:28
Absolutely. And as always, people can find me at ATinyHomesteadPodcast.com. Have a good night.