Recently, I visited a culinary school as part of a stakeholder advocacy training through American Farm Bureau’s Partners in Advocacy Leadership (PAL) program.
My PAL classmates and I gave a presentation about our farms and involvement in agriculture to first-year culinary students. Each of us was asked to bring some unique goodies from our home states. We had a pretty impressive spread from sweet potatoes and rice to pistachios and jalapenos jam.
Kansas is known for our grain and beef, which are common ingredients in many foods. It is overwhelming to decide what single item best represents those ingredients and is fun to share like my classmates’ chocolate milk straws and hazelnuts. Luckily a group of culinary students is the perfect group to showcase some of Kansas’ finest ingredients. I took both Hudson Cream wheat flour from Hudson and Nu Life Market sorghum flour from Scott City.
Flour was a great idea until I had to figure out the logistics of getting 24 pounds of it to Chicago. Luckily, I was able to have my Nu Life Market order shipped, but the only way to get the Hudson flour was to take it with me on the plane. I made a strategic choice to take the three 5-pound bags of flour in my carry-on so I wouldn’t go over the weight allowance for my checked bag.
Unsurprisingly, my carry-on was selected for additional screening while going through security. Bags of flour probably don’t rank near the craziest thing that TSA agents have seen, but I like to think that the mystery powder in my bag made their morning a little bit more exciting.
My favorite part of visiting with the culinary students was taking questions. We had expected questions about food production practices like what is the difference between grass-fed and grain-fed beef. We discussed the misconception about the differences and frequency of corporate versus family farms. A great conversation thread about rising food prices led our group to share about farm economics and that farmers don’t necessarily make more money when retail food prices go up.
One of the most unexpected questions was about fuel. I mentioned in my introduction that our cooperative has a fuel division, which led to a question about why a cooperative sells fuel. It seems simple to us to know farms have tractors, combines, trucks and all kinds of other equipment. But a 20-something student from Chicago has probably never thought about needing fuel to run equipment. In their mental picture of Old McDonald’s farm, he is not in a semi-truck, combine or utility vehicle. His little old tractor is way off in the background and when he rides it he smiles and waves like in a parade.
The students at the culinary school weren’t ignorant or incompetent, they genuinely didn’t know and were curious about what happens on our farms. We take for granted people in a city know anything about rural life at all. We brace ourselves for the tough questions about GMOs, organic labels and animal welfare. People do care about those topics but they probably have a ton of simple questions to ask before going that deep.
It was great that the aspiring chefs felt comfortable asking us questions about our lives. We need more of these interactions in our society — seemingly different worlds connecting through conversation, asking simple questions, getting to know each other and finding connections.
“Insight” is a weekly column published by Kansas Farm Bureau, the state’s largest farm organization whose mission is to strengthen agriculture and the lives of Kansans through advocacy, education and service.
