Photo above: by Gareth Hubbard
Asparagus brought me to Northern Michigan eight years ago, and the promise of using local food to improve public health and personal wellness continues to hold me here.
In 2008, I was living in Pittsburgh, and my then boyfriend invited me to the Empire Asparagus Festival. “It’s small town quirky,” he said, of Empire, Michigan, where he had family ties. “We can march in a kazoo band for the parade and enter the asparagus recipe contest.” So that May we left Pittsburgh and drove, and drove, and drove until we reached Empire, on the shore of Lake Michigan, near Traverse City.
The weather was cold, the atmosphere was joyous, and the asparagus was farm fresh and plentiful. We enjoyed fried asparagus from the famous Glen Arbor landmark Art’s Tavern, noshed on decadent asparagus focaccia bread from the fine dining restaurant BLU, and had a few tasty asparagus bratwursts from Deering’s Market. Local food brought the community together with vibrancy, and it was clear that the local food system was a key economic driver for the tiny town of Empire that weekend.
The Empire Asparagus Festival remains a turning point both personally and professionally for me. In the spring of 2016, I made a big life change. My family made the decision to move to that same tiny northern Michigan town to support my boyfriend-turned-husband’s aging parents. That part was the known reason for our move, but it turned out there was an unknown reason too. I soon discovered that I was on a path and heading into a deeper journey. I embarked on an exploration of a lifetime with Groundwork and its Farms, Food & Health project, which, at the time, was in its early years. The project’s aim was bringing together health practitioners, employers, schools, hospitals, farmers, and others interested in connecting the dots between health care, wellness, and locally grown food. I haven’t looked back—untiI I sat down to write this series of articles reflecting on our 10-year history.
Take a 60-second video spin through 10 years of Farms, Food & Health highlights.
Back in Pennsylvania, I worked with young adults and college food services for many years. I supported food and nutrition services on campus, both in helping individual students in a health clinic and at the food service operations level. I facilitated the campus Slow Food club, participated in the “Real Food Challenge,” launched several campus community gardens, participated in university-wide “green teams,” and helped connect the institution to urban farms in the region.
My work in Pittsburgh was happening over the same time as Groudwork’s Farms, Food & Health program was starting up. Groundwork launched and hosted two gatherings—one in 2014 and one in 2016. These events highlighted the people, places, and foods that we call our “regional food system,” making the case that we must seriously engage the region’s health care systems and all the individual workers within these systems, and ask those individuals to serve as champions in this conversation.
In the early years of the program, many people in health care considered it novel and even fringe to use local food as part of a comprehensive health promotion and disease prevention strategy. Of course, treating human diseases caused by nutrient deficiencies is not new and has been common practice in medicine for 100s of years and goes back even further in indigenous food ways, but in more modern times, the idea really took off in the 1930s, when Albert Szent-Györgyi discovered Vitamin C, and we began to understand the vital importance this dietary chemical plays in our health.
Today, we still diagnose and treat health conditions related to diet. Iron and Vitamin B12 deficiency cause anemias. Vitamin D and calcium deficiencies lead to rickets in children and osteoporosis in adults. We use nutrition therapy and dietary interventions as treatments. This is part of Medical Nutrition Therapy—nutrition-based treatment planning that can help manage many health conditions. What was new was clearly talking about FOOD, not just the chemical constituents of food—and the need to be more committed to using “food as medicine.” This is an emerging area and is finally getting the recognition it deserves at all levels of government and within the medical profession. We agree with the related guiding principles discussed at the White House Conference on Hunger and Nutrition in September 2022 and supported by the National Institutes of Health and, my professional home, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Food is Medicine Principles
In our region, we started this discussion 10 years ago—it was early in the national movement—and we began by asking some important questions. How can we educate our health care colleagues to have earlier discussions with patients around food? How can we improve health outcomes by connecting with our local farmers and the fresh, nutrient dense foods they grow? When and where should food and nutrition interventions be employed? At the community level only? In schools? Grocery stores? Farmers markets? Health care settings? Food pantries? All of the above?
Advocates of “food as medicine” started to promote these concepts across the entire human lifespan and throughout the continuum of health care services. They implemented the approach before, during, and after disease processes were occurring, and at all the places we access food. This concept has been the key idea that Groundwork has been moving forward for over 10 years.
In the early years, for many, this was the first time community and public health sectors came together around this topic. Health care providers rarely had deep conversations with elementary school food service providers. Hospital food service providers rarely had meaningful conversations with the local farmers who carefully grow the food. And all of us as “eaters” are eager to have—and deserve to have—better ways to think about and discuss our local food and eating cultures with our doctors. What food means to us as society is sometimes referred to as “food literacy,” and it is a key component of the “food is medicine” and culinary nutrition movements.
It is powerful to understand who is growing and feeding us in our communities—how food is grown, what growing practices mean to the food quality, how food is best cooked and served, and what that all means for our own personal health and our communities’ overall wellness. The knowledge furthers the transformative big goal of building a Farms, Food & Health culture throughout Michigan.
We have many examples of these transformations over our 10 years of working in this space, and we are excited to share them with you. Keep an eye out for the next installment of our 10-year retrospective on the Farms, Food & Health work of Groundwork and the movement in northern Michigan, when we look at specific initiatives around educating health care professionals and others in our communities! 
Paula Martin, Groundwork’s Community Nutrition Specialist
paula.martin@groundworkcenter.org
