For the first time since the mid-1990s, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ lush summer plantings will include a garden dedicated solely to providing food for Dining Services.

A raised bed on the lawn between Commons and Central Avenue will supply herbs to season Dining Services’ offerings. The project is the result of a Short Term collaboration between Bill Bergevin, the college’s longtime landscape coordinator, and Molly Mylius ’11, who helped Bergevin build the herb garden as part of her environmental studies internship.

The idea for a campus “victory garden” was in the air during the fall and winter, perhaps inspired by the yearlong ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food initiative, which has examined issues around the nation’s food systems and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ own dining and food-sourcing practices.

Mylius was among a group of students talking about a garden early in 2009. Around the same time, Dining Services Director Christine Schwartz and Camille Parrish, learning associate in the environmental studies program, were also discussing the idea.

Mylius, who is designing an interdisciplinary major around environmental studies and politics, raised the victory garden idea when she went to discuss her E.S. internship with Parrish. “I told her that I enjoyed gardening and I thought it’d be really cool if ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ had a garden,” Mylius says. As a matter of fact, Parrish replied, that idea was in the works.

“The fact that I was like, ‘Oh, me too!’ sort of sped it along,” says Mylius.

Mylius knew her way around a garden when she arrived at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. At home in Anchorage, Alaska, her mother grows ornamentals, including native wildflowers, and all kinds of produce (Molly favors carrots and strawberries).

While heat-loving crops like corn and eggplant fare poorly in Alaska’s climate, “some vegetables do really well because of the long days,” she says. “In the middle of summer, it never gets completely dark.

“Some plants love that. Every year the Alaska State Fair even features an exhibit with .”

She adds, “I’m definitely a big supporter of local food, and it doesn’t get more local than your back yard.”

In the first weeks of Short Term, Bergevin and Mylius removed sod from a site near Commons along Central Avenue. They used heavy timbers, recycled from a fence recently removed from the north edge of campus, to build a frame for the 15-by-25-foot raised bed, and filled it with topsoil and compost.

They started planting herbs during the week of May 18. Basil and parsley seedlings are growing, dill and cilantro seeds are in the dirt and mint will go in sometime the week of Memorial Day. Once the plants get established, Dining Services staff will be able to simply step out the door and pick fresh herbs as needed.

Still in the discussion stage is a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ vegetable garden, with a possible location being on Bardwell Street where a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-owned house was demolished last summer.

These aren’t ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ first ventures into raising its own produce. Dining Services created a vegetable garden in the yard at 161-163 Wood Street in the middle 1990s that is now used by Lots to Gardens, a community organization founded by Kirsten Walter ’00. Produce from this well-tended plot occasionally finds its way into Commons, but most is used for Lots to Gardens’ own projects.

For her environmental studies internship, Mylius has also worked with Schwartz on compiling a directory of the local vendors that supply foodstuffs to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. The directory Web site will feature a map showing ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ purveyors.

Her Short Term experience has taught Mylius how complicated gardening is and expanded her respect for Bergevin’s work. Also, she says, “a lot of my classes are comprehensive — a world view of problems. It’s really interesting to see them on a local level.”

“The internship is 200 hours, and so for Short Term that equates to 40 hours a week. So, it’s more hours than most Short Term classes, but it’s flexible and it’s fun,” she adds. “I get to play with dirt all day.”

— by Doug Hubley, with Kelly Cox ’11

Fifteen ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students, sprawled on the comfortable couches in Frye Street Union, have gotten together to talk about their food-related academic work. It’s “Students Talkin’ About Food” — a March 25 event that’s part of Nourishing Body and Mind: ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food, the yearlong campuswide look at issues around food. [More…]

If you think of the yearlong ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food initiative as an arch built from many stones, Mark Winne ’72 set the moral keystone in place with a lecture on March 30.

In contrast to burgeoning consumer demand for natural and local foods, he said, low-income Americans have less access than ever to healthy foods. Affluent folks shop for pricey organics at Whole Foods while malnourishment, obesity and related illnesses proliferate in disadvantaged communities whose residents lack access to even reasonably wholesome foods. This is the “food gap” that Winne has fought to bridge for the past 40 years– a disparity between the haves and the have-nots, he said, that “doesn’t just divide the nation, but somehow defines it.”

A sociology major at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Winne served for 25 years as executive director of the , a nonprofit that developed innovative ways to deliver high-quality and affordable foods to low-income urban families in Connecticut.

Now a resident of Santa Fe, N.M., he writes and consults on food system issues and is the author of (Beacon Press, 2008).

The laid-back Winne (pronounced WIN-ee) shared lessons from his life in food justice in a talk capping a two-day ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ visit sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food Planning Committee.

Winne’s picture of the American food gap wasn’t pretty. The supermarket industry and public transportation policy have left many low-income people in “food deserts” — locations with no ready access to healthy, reasonably priced groceries. The government food-welfare system is biased toward industry interests rather than those of its needy clients, among whom are 32 million food stamp recipients — a record number.

And charitable emergency food providers, such as food banks, often just manage the symptom of food insecurity rather than addressing the disease of poverty.

Winne’s remarks included a list of recommendations for President Obama — whose administration, he later told a student during a question-and-answer period, gives him hope about the prospects for advancing food security — including:

A major government incentive — Winne estimated $1 billion — to encourage the supermarket industry to build stores in “food deserts,” both to improve the food supply for residents and to stimulate the local economy. “We can actually fix this one,” he said;

More money and better administration for school food programs;

And more support for farmers, including funding for farmers markets, CSAs and similar direct-marketing programs. “We’re in danger of running out of farmers,” Winne said.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, “food was not something we contemplated when I was here,” a droll Winne said early in the evening. “The only contemplation I can really remember was the evening when there was kind of a slow arc of a plate of spaghetti, moving skyward across the dining Commons, somehow suspended for several minutes above our heads as it moved toward the far wall, where it eventually landed with a tremendous splat.”

More seriously, Winne explained that as a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student from privileged circumstances, it was in Lewiston where he first encountered poverty. Working as a Big Brother, he visited the Lewiston home of his young charge — a visit that left him with an indelible memory of the child’s apartment, its smell of decrepitude and the way it shook from the looms at the nearby ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Mill.

In Lewiston, too, Winne first took on the social justice work that would define his career. He and other ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students founded a community center to do peer drug and alcohol counseling, then added a breakfast program for children and a food co-op.

Forty years later, Winne shared with the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ audience some precepts distilled from his long experience, a body of experience that spans working a community farm, collaborating with community organizers in Hartford’s poorest neighborhoods and mingling with D.C. power brokers.

A dominant theme was the need to address poverty as a whole, rather than hunger as an isolated phenomenon. “The role of poverty in causing hunger is paramount,” Winne said. We need creative responses to address poverty more than hunger: “We need to pause, reflect, critique and consider what alternatives might exist.”

Winne concluded with a tribute to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and its early leadership in food issues, in terms of both on-campus food service and community food system work.

“We really got started with this earlier than most places,” he said. “I’m very proud to be a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ie.”

By Doug Hubley

As part of a two-day visit to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, food activist and author ’72 gives a talk titled “Food Justice and Good Food — When Shall the Twain Meet?” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The event is open to the public at no cost. A reception and book signing follow in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. This event is sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food Planning Committee. For more information, please call 207-786-6336.

Winne’s time at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ will also include visits to classes and meetings with students.

Food, like air and water, is a basic necessity, but stands as a glaring example of how the gap between America’s “haves” and “have-nots” remains deep and wide. No matter what aspect of the subject we consider — hunger, obesity or recent food trends like local and organic — food is emblematic of a promise fulfilled for some but falling ever so short for many.

has worked for 35 years to close the food gap. From organizing breakfast programs for low-income children in Maine to developing innovative national food policies in Washington, D.C., he has dedicated his professional life and writing to finding local, state and federal solutions to America’s food disparities. To this end, and to those whose passion for this purpose is no less than his own, he dedicated his first book (Beacon Press, 2008).

Closing the Food Gap tells the story of how we get our food: from poor people at food pantries or bodegas and convenience stores to the more comfortable classes, who increasingly seek out organic and local products. Winne’s exploration starts in the 1960s, when domestic poverty was “rediscovered,” and shows how communities since that time have responded to malnutrition with a slew of strategies and methods. But the story is also about doing that work against a backdrop of ever-growing American food affluence and gastronomical expectations.

From 1979 to 2003, Winne was the executive director of the Hartford Food System, a private non-profit agency that works on food and hunger issues in the Hartford, Conn., area. During his tenure with HFS, Mark organized community self-help food projects that assisted the city’s lower-income and elderly residents. Winne’s work with the Food System included the development of commercial food businesses, Connecticut’s Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, farmers’ markets, a 25-acre community supported agriculture farm, a food bank, food and nutrition education programs, and a neighborhood supermarket.

Winne currently writes, speaks and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community food assessment and food policy. He also does policy communication and food policy council work for the Community Food Security Coalition.

He lives in Santa Fe, N.M., where he serves on the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council and the Southwest Grass-fed Livestock Alliance.

“I can see the world through food,” said Kirsten Walter ’00, perhaps speaking for all the participants in a wide-ranging ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ discussion of food-related topics on March 16. “I can see all these different issues,” she said, “and how to approach them and how to engage people with them.”

Walter, director of the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center, was one of four Maine-based ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alumni, each an expert in food issues, who took part in a panel discussion sponsored by the College’s Nourishing Body and Mind: ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food initiative.

Walter joined artisanal baker Jim Amaral ’80, founder of , and two farmers: Nicolas Lindholm ’86, who owns Hackmatack Farm in Penobscot, and Steve Hoad ’72, of Emma’s Family Farm in Windsor.

The discussion traced the concept of “good food” — local, nutritious, delicious, natural or organic — across a roadmap of knotty questions. How do you make a living growing food? How sincere is the supermarket industry’s commitment to local, healthy foods? How can food help empower, nourish and be affordable to low-income communities?

An audience of some 40 students, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ staff and local farmers attended the event in Pettengill Hall. Anna Bartel, of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, moderated.

To begin the 80-minute program, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alumni shared how and why they embarked upon their current paths. Amaral, a sourdough breadmaker whose story of success is well-known, focused on one of his proudest accomplishments: the role he has played in re-establishing wheat production in Maine after an absence of about a century.

His early attempts to source wheat in Maine, Amaral said, were discouraging, as the grain was sometimes spoiled or contaminated. Those problems reflected what happens when “you lose a whole industry, you lose the whole network of relationships between farmers and millers and bakers, and the challenges of actually recreating that.”

Lindholm had a good-food conversion experience as a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student, then held several jobs related to sustainable agriculture and now makes about half a year’s living — with carpentry filling the gap — through selling his organic produce directly to consumers.

He plans to build a freezing plant, the state’s first intended for a strictly organic growing operation, for wild blueberries — a fruit native to this region. “Working with a crop that’s native to our land has a lot of meaning for me,” he said.

Hoad and Lindholm expressed a common depth of idealism about farming. Coming to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Hoad left development-wracked New Jersey for a relatively unspoiled Maine, bringing with him with visions of working his own land with his family.

Hoad explained that his farm is deeded back to 1820 and are only the fourth family to occupy it. The first owners had the place from 1820 until 1950. “You can feel those people in this land,” he said.

Now he and his daughter Rose raise poultry, pigs and produce that they sell from the farm, with the goal of making the food affordable to all comers.

Walter, who has dedicated her career to food justice, picked up Hoad’s theme of accessible food. She traced her interest in food justice to her youth in California, where her early concern about farming’s impact on the environment gave way to the realization that she needed to consider “the people in that environment” — migrant farm workers.

Walter may be best-known at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and in Lewiston for founding , an organization that uses community gardens in Lewiston to empower young people and their neighborhoods. “I really wanted to see how we could use [the work of] connecting people to their food, connecting people to their landscape and each other, as a means of building a voice and power.”

Walter described a food assessment, undertaken by the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center and local colleges including ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, that has revealed the difficulty of putting together a nutritious meal in downtown Lewiston. Of 67 stores that sell groceries, only seven sell all the basics for a well-rounded meal. And small downtown markets, she said, charge almost 50 percent more than the supermarkets, which are away from downtown, for the same basket of foods.

“Everybody deserves access to good food,” Walter said. “It shouldn’t be a privilege. It’s a right.”

Much of the conversation revolved around the supermarket industry and its efforts to meet the increasing demand for local and organic foods. As Amaral pointed out, the industry is willing to pay lip service to local food as long as consumers demand it, but at root, the current model — based on inexpensive commodities, large-scale processing and far-flung supply networks — is making money for them. If Maine was growing half or more of its own food, he said, “I’m not sure that the supermarkets could really prosper in that environment.”

Farmers in the audience, meanwhile, pointed out that even as supermarkets turn more to local growers for produce, they are imposing requirements on small growers and processors that make it impossible to profit. Mandates, such as liability insurance or certain security and sanitation measures, that make all kinds of sense for industrial-scale producers make none at all for small, hands-on operations.

Steve Hoad offered a telling example. At his roadside stand, he sells sweet corn grown by a farm that also supplies a local branch of a major supermarket chain. His customers are always surprised to hear that, Hoad says, because the corn from his stand tastes so much better than the supermarket’s.

The reason is simple. Corn loses flavor rapidly once it’s picked. The corn that Hoad sells is no more than a day and a half old, if that. But the supermarket chain, fearing that one fine day the farm might fail to deliver on time, insists on keeping as much as a seven-day supply on hand.

The farmer can’t convince the chain “that he’ll continue to show up,” even after 10 years of working together, Hoad said.

Svitlana Orekhova ’09 of Donetskaya Oblast, Ukraine, poses for photographer Louisa Demmitt ’00 during the annual International Dinner. For the dinner, students prepare dishes from their homelands, often from family recipes passed down through the years. By sharing and explaining their food, and talking about the role it plays in their own culture, “students really get to show where they’re from and, consequently, who they are,” says Demmitt.

Alan Hunt ’03 tells a story about a farmer who raises both vegetables and pigs.

At the end of each growing season, the farmer allows the pigs to nose through his vegetable fields. “The pigs wind up plowing the field for him, because they turn the soil over 12 to 16 inches down,” says Hunt, an agricultural policy analyst at a Washington “think and do tank.”

“And what’s more, because they’re looking for leftover roots and pests, the pigs do a better job cleaning up the field than the farmer could do by hand or mechanically.”

That’s synergy in action, says Hunt. “The farmer has to spend more time managing the pigs on the field — but he’s not spending time on the tractor doing it himself. He’s fertilizing the field, and at the same time he’s feeding the pigs.”

Seeking synergy, in other words, means seeking ways to harmonize needs, means and methods for the best possible outcome. “You need to look at the whole food system,” says Hunt, instead of the input-output view that typifies much of U.S. agriculture.

Hunt works at the nonprofit , which promotes economic vitality, environmental quality and regional equity in the Northeast and Midwest states.

“A lot of what we do is consensus-building with stakeholder groups to organize, prioritize, and translate policy recommendations into legislation,” Hunt explains.

For example, he worked with advocacy groups — ranging from anti-hunger to minority food producer to sustainable agriculture — on developing specific policy for the to address “food deserts,” areas such as economically disadvantaged inner cities or rural zones where people can’t find healthy, affordable or fresh foods.

Revised every five years, this legislation is one of the nation’s primary agricultural and food policy tools. Its most recent edition, the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, was enacted last May.

“We developed something called the to work on getting healthier and more-local products into corner stores, and helping producers get those products into their supply chain,” says Hunt.

This concept bears out Hunt’s belief that the most effective approach to food-desert issues is economic development financing. “The Housing and Urban Development department has really great and well-used economic development tools, but their focus is on generating tax revenue and jobs in the community,” he says.

“We might need to look at some of the tools that already exist and change the way the criteria are evaluated.”

Hunt grew up on a farm in New Jersey and earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Knowing he wanted a school with a solid ES program, he was immediately attracted to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ because of its location.

“I wanted to be in New England,” he says. His interest in food grew after a visit to , a family-owned farm in Turner, which produces, and serves in its own café, a full selection of natural foods.

“I had nothing like it where I grew up, even though I grew up in a farm area,” Hunt says. “It definitely influenced what I’m doing now.”

During his junior year abroad, Hunt researched consumer cultures, including a 700-year-old market in Norwich, England, that sold local farm-fresh foods. “I surveyed some of the vendors there, and read a lot about consumption and identity,” he explains.

“I was thinking it would be important for someone’s community identity to buy local products,” he says. (Hunt pursued that theme in a study of the now-defunct Portland Public Market, working with environmental economist Lynne Lewis, and continued to study Maine food production while doing post-graduate work at Duke. In fact, he found his present position through a contact at the Maine Department of Agriculture.)

“With local foods, the most important thing is a community connection between consumer and producer. The consumer can talk with the producer directly, so the producer gets better feedback and can change their practices to suit the market.

“So if somebody asks, ‘Well, is this organic?’ the producer might go home and consider that. That can change the market and hopefully change the environmental outcome as well.”

By Becca Chacko ’10

By H. Jay Burns, editor

This issue reflects the College’s ongoing ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food initiative in myriad ways, including .

Here on campus, a recent BCF event was food writer . A few hours before speaking to that overflow crowd, Pollan talked informally in Chase Lounge about his writing focus.

In the late 1980s, he got interested in the “messy places where humans and nature can’t be kept from each other.” Food was one of the messiest places, he found, because humans can never retreat from this engagement with nature. “You can’t be Thoreau in your vegetable garden,” he told the students. If you try, you won’t take steps to protect your food — “you won’t firebomb a woodchuck,” he said, alluding to his famous attempt to drive the rodents from his Connecticut garden, as chronicled in his 1988 essay “Gardening Means War.”

In Thoreau throws in the trowel on his large-scale bean field after one season because he doesn’t believe it’s right to tell nature how to behave. Pollan calls Thoreau “defeatist” for his backpedaling attitude toward food production. “We are in nature,” he told the students. “We’ve been implicated in nature for a lot longer than you think.”

His references to Thoreau, woodchucks, and firebombing sure got my attention. In high school, I used a .30-30 rifle to kill a woodchuck nibbling on broccoli in our vegetable garden — a great shot, really, as the rodent was more than 100 feet away. The woodchuck’s death brought no reprimand from my father, both a Thoreau disciple and avid gardener.

Like Pollan, he had long since revised Thoreau’s operations manual while retaining its essence. For example, Thoreau burned tree stumps for heat. We would drive from our Waterford, Maine, home to the nearby Paris Manufacturing wood factory. Out back, workers dumped kiln-dried blocks of hardwood, which we hauled back to Waterford in our Chevy truck.

Gwen Lexow, who teaches the first-year seminar “Into the Woods: Rewriting Walden,” understands very well that we all make certain accommodations as we live our lives. Her students, however, haven’t figured that out yet. They tend to condemn Thoreau for not staying on the straight and narrow when he chooses his less-traveled path. “They call Thoreau a hypocrite,” she says. “It bothers them immensely when they find out that he lunches with his mother and that he goes back to the village.”

Lexow helps her students move past that monolithic stopping point. “Their a-ha! moment comes later,” she says, as they read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. “They realize that even within a simple life, nothing is simple.”

The seminar, she says, “mirrors the students’ first semester. They arrive thinking it’s their chance to ‘get out from under the man’ intellectually. But it’s not so easy.”

At Walden, Thoreau does kill a woodchuck that has “ravaged” his beans, and then eats the meat. I tossed my dead woodchuck into the woods.

H. Jay Burns, Editor

This anonymous gift from a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alum — perhaps the first, and certainly the largest, of its kind to a U.S. college — builds on our strengths and recognizes the additional costs of certain sustainable practices. Before the gift, about 22 percent of our food already came from local farmers and vendors; now we are able to purchase about 28 percent from these sources. Up to 84 percent of the food we don’t use re-enters the food cycle: to a food bank, into compost or to a recycling center, or as “waste” to a local pig farmer to be consumed as food by another species. We have never outsourced our food operations, and for many years staff members have been strong supporters of our environmental and communal ethos.

The purpose of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food is to call attention to ongoing programs as well as special events that teach us to ask questions about food. Where does it come from? How is it sourced and prepared at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½? What is our role in the larger food system in which we are all embedded? Why are sustainable, healthy food cultures so important and so endangered, and what is the relationship between how we eat and how we think? Seeking answers often means confronting how little we know about complex and confounding issues ranging from dependence on petroleum and diet-related diseases in the U.S. to threats like species extinction and global hunger. But by feeding body and mind together, we may learn to make better choices in the face of complexity.

In presenting ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food to the College audience at Convocation this fall, I juxtaposed two stories, one fictional and one factual. The first story, about two meals the narrator eats on her visit to the fictional university of Oxbridge, is taken from the opening chapter of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where Woolf introduces her argument about the relationship among money, space, and creative thought.

The luncheon meal at one of the men’s colleges is a glorious feast: “partridges…with all their retinue of sauces and salads” and “potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard….sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent.” Consumed slowly and satisfyingly, the sumptuous meal has the effect of lighting a “profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

The meager evening meal, by contrast, is taken at Fernham, the neighboring women’s college recently founded on a small endowment to promote the radical idea of higher education for women. This meal of stringy beef and prunes dampens the spirit, leaving Woolf toher unexceptionable conclusion: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

The second story that I told at Convocation was about ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dining itself. While the spirit of communal ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dining has always been strong and willing — notwithstanding the historical reality that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ women of my generation were the very first to be allowed to eat in the same dining hall with men — the physical space of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dining, Chase Hall’s Commons, grew less adequate to our dining needs over the years.

In planning to correct that situation, our architects initially advanced the au courant idea of “distributed dining” — multiple facilities spread around the campus, with food courts and fast-food franchises. To their surprise, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students promptly vetoed the idea and insisted on dining as a committee of the whole. True, they wanted a bigger and brighter and better Commons, but their ideas focused on a better space for one and all. And so we built a place where cooks and servers could excel in their work, and where students would be called to the table to eat nourishing food with good friends and great ideas.

Both the new Commons building and our sustainable dining practices are now more visibly than ever at the heart of our educational vision, reminding us that a liberal education prepares a whole human being for life. Today, in the high-speed, high-tech, competitive, and distracting world where we eat too much and too fast and too often alone, it’s critical to ensure that respectful and ethical human interaction is still at the core at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

By Elaine Tuttle Hansen

Click on the image for a larger version.

The cover of the Fall 2008 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Magazine shows Nicolas Lindholm ’86 displaying tomatoes grown on his family-operated organic farm, Hackmatack Farm, in Penobscot, Maine.

The tomatoes, a variety that Lindholm is developing himself called “Baby Brandywine,” have “the flavor, color, and texture of Brandywine but in a miniature size,” he says. Stories and photographs of alums involved in Maine food.

Lindholm sells his produce at local farmers’ markets, in Blue Hill and Stonington.

See this , told in text, photos, video and audio, about Maine alumni who produce food in Maine, all part of the College’s ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food initiative.