The Downtown Farm Stand proved to be the “hub of local food” in Muncie when local farmers, authors and environmentalists gathered for an Earth Day celebration there.
Dave Ring, owner of the Downtown Farm Stand, said he wanted to host an event for author Kelsey Timmerman’s new book release. Timmerman wrote the freshmen reader “Where am I Wearing?” and signed copies of his new book “Where am I Eating?” at the event.
“I’d never really realized how important the first Earth Day was to the American environmental movement,” Ring said. “I’d always kind of been one of those people who’d say, ‘Well, everyday should be Earth Day,’ but when I saw the documentary, it inspired me.”
Timmerman’s books are about his attempts to learn about the places and people that make our clothes and food and the importance of being a responsible consumer.
“So much of what I write about in ‘What am I Eating?’ is about how our choices in the grocery store affect other people on the planet,” Timmerman said.
The idea for the second book partially came when Timmerman met many factory workers during his travels for “Where am I Wearing?” who had left farms.
Timmerman met Ring when he started researching local food in Muncie for his book. Timmerman mentions Ring and the Farm Stand in his new book.
“The Farm Stand is a really great place, and there aren’t a lot of places like this in our area,” Timmerman said. “Get educated about where your stuff comes from.”
Ring also invited local farmers and environmentalists to meet and talk to participants at the event.
Skip Robb of Gospel Trails Farm talked about the steps the farm has taken to produce healthier beef and lamb.
“We raise our animals in a way that’s restoring to the land and that fits in with the Earth Day mindset,” Robb said. “Our philosophy is that if we produce good soil, we’ll produce good plants, which will make healthy animals, then healthy people.”
Robb said responsible farming can produce an extra inch of topsoil per year, which lessens the effects of flooding and droughts.
Barry Banks, founder of Red-tail Land Conservancy, also discussed the importance of taking care of the Earth.
“We’ve already lost almost 90 percent of our natural area in this part of the state,” Banks said. “The natural areas that remain are even more precious and it’s more important to preserve what once was here.”
Since being founded in 1999, Red-tail has worked out 18 conservation agreements that protect at least 1,939 acres.
“The major natural cleanser of the air is trees,” Banks said. “Restoring trees when we can and maintaining the tree cover that is already here is extremely important to maintain our quality of living.”
Timmerman signed freshman natural resources major Derek Tepe’s copy of “Where am I Eating?” which Tepe has already begun reading.
“People nowadays have a sort of disconnect between the source of their food and their kitchen, and I think it’s important that people understand where their food is coming from,” Tepe said. “More often than not, we take it for granted what it takes to get the food from point A to point B. In places like this where it’s locally grown, I think it gets people a little more attached to the food they’re eating.”
While buying local and organic food can be more expensive, Ring believes it is better for everyone from a long-term perspective.
“There are no tax subsidies for organic food, but you also don’t have the environmental clean-up costs or the health problems,” he said. “All that ties into making organic food look much more expensive than it appears at the cash register.”
While the spotlight of the event was on local food and land, Tepe agreed that the worldwide impact is not to be overlooked as well.
“It’s interesting because we’ve almost seen this movement of locally grown food as a grassroots movement, but its consequences reverberate globally. If everyone did this, we’d cut back on greenhouse emissions, people would be healthier, there’d be less disease,” he said. “We’re looking at it at a small-scale level, but it has these big-scale implications.”
