Community Corner
Mercer Island Community Harvest Dinner a Healthy Success
Three local organizations bring Island residents together through food.
The Mercer Island Community Harvest Dinner put on by Mercer Island PTA group MI Food Revolution, TENDER: farmers, cooks, eaters, and Experience Food Project on Thursday, Sept. 22, brought a huge turnout.
So much so, in fact, that the event at , which was prepared to serve 200 people, filled to capacity almost before they were done prepping the food. Doors opened for dinner at 6pm and by 6:25pm, families were being turned away by droves.
According to Linda Floyd, PTA volunteer with MI Food Revolution the Community Dinner is a way to "spur a culture change on the Island with kids and foods." Their ultimate goal is to get fresh, local, organic food into the school cafeterias.
Find out what's happening in Mercer Islandwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Chef Tom French, director of Experience Food Project, said he has noticed over the years that the obstacles to reaching these goals are "never the kids, but the adults' capacity to accept change."
For the authors of TENDER, whose recipes were used for the dinner of chicken, chard, apple bread stuffing and rice pudding, the goal is to "help people to develop their own intuition" about cooking. In fact, the recipes in the book by chef Tamara Murphy are designed so that one can just as easily prepare them for a romantic dinner of two as for a party with a couple hundred closest friends.
Find out what's happening in Mercer Islandwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
This partnership between the three groups to bring Island residents together over a meal of healthy, freshly prepared food is a bit out of the ordinary. For French and the EFP, whose main focus is operational change in school lunchrooms, Community Dinners are a sort of by-product of the work they do with their school district partners. Mercer Island, however, is under a contract with a food service provider, so the Community Dinners are a way to connect on a family level rather than through operational changes in the schools.
With the advocacy of the PTA Food Revolution group, change at the school level is already occurring. Although they've only been around since the spring of 2010, the group said it has already succeeded in persuading the Food Service company under contract with Island schools to provide more fruits and vegetables and reduce unhealthy sweets from school lunch menus.