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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: corn, Most Recent at Top [Help]
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1. Harvest


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2. FOODFIC: Maggie Vaults Over the Moon - Grant Overstake



Maggie Vaults Over the Moon retells the story of Maggie Steele, a gritty farm girl from tiny Grain Valley, Kansas, who pours her broken heart into the daring and dangerous sport of pole-vaulting. Kirkus Reviews says the novel “…exudes sweetness; in some ways, it feels as if it takes place in another era, as it lacks the dark edge seen in other popular YA stories…”

A morsel of this story’s other-era sweetness can be tasted in a nostalgic food scene in which the stressed and grieving Steele family takes a break from a long day’s harvesting to savor a fresh, home-cooked dinner – transported from the farmhouse kitchen to a half-cut Kansas wheat field.

I chomped the buttery corn and chewed the fried chicken clean off the bone, wiping my hands on my napkin. Looking out from where we sat, I could see about a third of the wheat field had been cut.
“We still have a lot of work to do before dark, but we’ve made a good start of it,” Dad said.
Mom and Grandma took our empty plates and put the leftovers back in the basket. There was easily enough food left over for a hungry teenager, but if anybody else was thinking about Alex, they didn’t say so.
Even as full as I was, I still felt empty. But I kept the feeling to myself.

Now just before that scene, heroine Maggie Steele, for the very first time in her life, drove a fully-loaded grain truck from the wheat field to the Grain Valley Elevator, eight miles distant on the county blacktop. Driving the huge truck was a chore that her older brother, Alex, had always done, but that was before Alex and his friend Caleb had both been killed in a car crash one month before. 

On the way to town, Maggie made a driving mistake and barely managed to keep the fully-loaded truck from overturning on the highway. She arrives at the elevator shaken and frightened about taking her brother’s place on the family farm, but sits down to dinner with family members who seem to believe that if they don’t acknowledge who’s missing, everything looks, tastes, and smells as if all is okay. Maggie indulges her sense but isn’t fooled. After what she experienced on the highway, she knows everything has changed. And even a heaping plateful cannot fill the empty space she feels inside.

My years spent as a newspaper reporter in Kansas wheat country provided most of the scenes in the story. And while I'd heard-tell about harvest field dinners like this, I'd never seen one. Today, even the smallest towns have a place where Maggie could pick up some hamburgers and fries on the way back to the field, and so they do. Womenfolk like Grandma who felt compelled to fix such big dinners are mostly gone. Moms like Maggie's now work in town or drive the big grain trucks themselves. 

I heard from an older reader who especially liked this scene because he'd experienced field dinners just like these, with clean linen napkins, cold metal tumblers and everything. He said Maggie touched him so deeply that he cried when he finished reading it, because he didn’t want the story to end.

As for me, I felt like I needed to write this scene into the story because I wanted an eating event that went beyond the kitchen table and took on the feel of a mythic meal. I wanted you to taste the goodness, and believe that there really is a place called Grain Valley, Kansas, with a golden wheat field like this one – where your Grandma still fusses and fills your plate with fried chicken, potatoes and gravy, and Oh! fresh-baked bread, buttered with love. Where you, too, can taste the sweetness again.

Thanks for sharing your food for thought, Grant!


Former Miami Herald Sportswriter Grant Overstake is a lifelong participant in the sport of track and field who competed in the decathlon for the University of Kansas Jayhawks. A multiple award winner for excellence in journalism, Maggie Vaults Over the Moon is the author’s premiere work of sports fiction, and is now available in paperback and e-book at Amazon.com.

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3. Do Farm Subsidies Cause Obesity?

Lauren Appelwick, Publicity

Robert Paarlberg, author of  Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, is a leading authority on food policy, and one of the most prominent scholars writing on agricultural issues today. He is B.F. Johnson Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College and Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. He was invited to testify in front of the House Committee on Agriculture on May 13th, and shared his thoughts with us here last week. Now, after presenting his testimony on obesity, Paarlberg reflects on the experience.  You can read an excerpt from his book here.

Picking up the story, recall that I was invited to testify before the House Agriculture Committee on May 13, to share my views on new farm legislation for 2012. I was expecting a frosty reception, since I have expressed some disparaging views of farm subsidies, and also of the House and Senate agriculture committees, in my newest book. Yet the hearing took a surprising turn. The Committee wasn’t that interested in my views on farm subsidies (they have well established views of their own). Instead they wanted to talk about obesity.

In both my written testimony and in my oral statement I bravely repeated my view that farm bills were too wasteful of taxpayer money, thanks in part to the “logroll” tactics used by the House Agriculture committee. When I was asked by a senior member what I thought the chances were that this tactic could work again in 2012, I said “100 percent.” He said he “took it as a personal compliment” that I had noticed and remarked on the success of this strategy.

What got the committee’s attention, however, was my warning that drafting another business-as-usual farm bill in 2012 was going to be more difficult, because of a strengthening belief that the farm subsidies are contributing to our nation’s obesity crisis by making unhealthy foods too cheap. The committee knew, and I confirmed in my testimony, that this is in fact an unfounded charge. When the farm bill places restrictions on sugar imports to protect the income of American sugar growers it actually make all sweetened products – from candy to ice cream – artificially expensive rather than cheap. And when Congress enacts subsidies and mandates to divert 30 percent of our corn crop to the making of ethanol for auto fuel, it is making both corn and other animal feeds – and hence all meat products – artificially expensive as well. Nor is it true that corn-based sweeteners are more obesity-inducing than natural sugar. Nor is it true that the price of junk food has fallen in America while the price of healthy foods (fruits and vegetables) has remained high. All of these misconceptions about farm programs are explained in Chapter Eight of my Oxford book, my chapter on “The Politics of Obesity.”

Yet the House Agriculture Committee also knew, and I confirmed, that over the past several years a number of highly influential non-scholarly books such as Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, plus vari

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4. Happy Thanksgiving!


Here's an oldie but goodie drawing I did back in 2006. Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

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5. Check out the Picture Bookies Blog

The Picture-Bookies are discussing our favorite children's illustrators right now. It's always fascinating to me to see who other artists favor.
My top favorites are listed there, and are: Howard Pyle, Bernie Fuchs, Kinuko Craft, Leo and Diane Dillon, Helen Ward, Gennady Spirin, and Jerry Pinkney and David Diaz

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