UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- An urban farm rising out of concrete and land-fill, a 300-year-old family farming enterprise and Philadelphia's premier food recovery program were stops on the "Many Faces of Food and Agriculture Tri-State Bus Tour," held recently.

Hosted by the Pennsylvania Nutrition Education Network (PA NEN) of Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences, the tour followed the footprint of the region's food system from Philadelphia into northern Delaware and the farm country of southern New Jersey.

Aboard the bus were 30 health communicators, nutrition educators, emergency food providers, agriculturists and food policy experts from points as distant as Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Washington, D.C. who shared a common interest in regional food, farm and community issues.

PA NEN coordinator Dorrie Lisle said the tour was created to give participants an up-close look at how well the local food system serves low-income populations. Pete Ferretti, professor of vegetable crops in Penn State's horticulture department, added that the tour was long overdue. "Opportunities are being missed in and around cities like Philadelphia to find solutions for critical problems of sprawl, loss of farmland and the growing numbers of food insecure," he said.

Audrey Maretzki, Penn State professor of food science and nutrition, observed that "there is a consensus in the food and farm community that the local food system can support nutrition education objectives and goals that are being addressed by educators throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. The Pennsylvania Nutrition Education Network wanted to provide a forum to enhance communication and stimulate dialogue among those people who are involved in the food system. What better way than to conduct a bus tour!"

Tour sites were chosen to allow participants to see, hear and learn about new things. For example, the USDA Eastern Regional Research Center in Philadelphia conducts a wide range of research projects, such as studies that led to low-lactose milk, low-fat mozzarella cheese and Pringles potato chips. Linvilla Orchards in Media, Pa., is one of the last working farms in the Delaware Valley. The Port of Wilmington, Del. has the nation's largest dock-side cold-storage facility.

Sheppard Farms in Cedarville, N.J., is a family agribusiness dating back to 1682. The Rutgers Research and Development Center in Bridgeton, N.J. has served the state's commercial growers since 1996. Seabrook Brothers and Sons Inc. in Seabrook, N.J., has pioneered the commercial freezing of vegetables. Philabundance, a food rescue organization, provides food for more than 3 million meals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The tour also stopped at Philadelphia's Asian and Italian Markets, which specialize in exotic ethnic specialties, and at Greensgrow, an urban farm on a reclaimed industrial site in the Port Richmond area of Philadelphia.

Participants questioned site hosts on a range of issues including food safety and technology, sanitation and food-handling techniques, profit margins, and worker's wages, rights and working conditions. Insights gained by the tour participants will be shared with low-income participants in their respective nutrition-education programs.

Zakiyyah Ali of the Greater Philadelphia Food Bank will be looking to develop similar tours and will create slide presentations from her own snapshots to enhance her clients' knowledge base and to help them identify career opportunities in the food industry.

For Liz Tuckermanty, director of the USDA Community Food Projects Competitive Grants Program in Washington, D.C., the importance of local agriculture was reinforced. "People can be empowered to understand that they don't have to rely solely on the larger food system," she says. "Even in a community where virtually everyone receives food stamps, residents can work together and create a food system over which they can have some control."

Berry Friessen, executive director of Harrisburg's Hunger Action Center, noted that "if we want to find solutions to food insecurity, seeing key components of the larger food system and how most of us get food on our table is a start. The question is not how can we change the food system, but how can we get the system involved in improving the opportunities for low-income people to participate in it, whether through conventional channels like supermarkets and grocery stores, or through local farms and farmers markets right there in their own neighborhoods."

The "Many Faces of Food and Agriculture" Tri-State Tour was an educational experiment, noted Lisle. The Pennsylvania Nutrition Education Network will be planning annual multi-state food system tours. The 2003 tour will start in Pittsburgh and include locations in West Virginia and Ohio.

For more information about the tour, The Pennsylvania Food Stamp Nutrition Education Program or the Pennsylvania Nutrition Education Network, call Dorrie Lisle at 814-863-0074, or contact her by e-mail at dsl10@psu.edu.

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EDITORS: Contact Dorrie Lisle at 814-863-0020 or Audrey Maretzki at 814-863-4751.

Contact: Gary Abdullah gxa2@psu.edu 814-863-2708 814-863-9877 fax #252