Roots Watering Hole Podcast Series

January 2025 Food Literacy Podcast

Baba Orrin Williams Season 6 Episode 1

Introductory podcast for the 2025 season. Tune in for updates about what to expect in 2025. Also, please share topics you would like to see us cover beginning in February 2025. We are looking for guests as we will offer video episodes with content experts in February or March of 2025. Stay tuned for that, in the meantime let us prepare for a healthy and happy gardening and food literacy season!

National Seed Swap Day is January 25, 2025. Check out the Cool Beans website for more information. Thinking of doing a seed swap this year check out the Cool Beans video on the topic?

Many of us who are advocates of home and community gardening, as well as urban farming, do so because we believe the future is a diversified food system, check out this video regarding why planning for the future is urgent.

Check out this interview on unlocking the secrets of longevity and healthspan from the Center for Food as Medicine. Here is another article to consider regarding the treatment of diet-related diseases versus prevention.

Finally, (and again I am not promoting Traditional Chinese Medicine), is food enough, or are other considerations required for health and well-being?

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker’s own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the OCEAN-HP, the CPHP, the CUT, or the RWH podcast series. The material and information presented here are for general information purposes only. While the podcast is about food literacy, we offer no health advice and encourage our listeners to seek guidance from their healthcare providers.

Baba Orrin  Williams (00:05)
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are when you're listening to this podcast episode, the Food Literacy Podcast, January 2025 edition. Coming to you from Chicago, I am Orrin Williams, also known as, I hope affectionately, as Bob Orrin Williams.

here in Chicago and I am the neighborhood coordinator for the South Shore South Chicago communities with the Chicago Partnership for Health Promotion at UIC that is an extension of and program of the Office of Community Engagement and Neighborhood Health Partnerships at UIC.

I'm the executive director of the Center for Urban Transformation in Chicago, co-host and co-producer of the Roots Warden Hole podcast series with my esteemed co-host, Dr. Akilah Martin, soil enthusiast and all around wonderful scientist. And so, yeah, here we are January 2025.

And you know, I'm going to pretty much go unscripted today. And I'm going to start off with, well, let's see, it's as I speak today, which is the 13th of January, 2025. It is 15 degrees. As you can see, I got on a hoodie and a hat and all of that in the house.

furnace going. It's cold in here in this room. But I had to get this done for everybody. So again, here I am. And as cold as it is and as wintery as it's been here in Chicago, even though a lot of neighborhoods like mine, we haven't had a lot of snow, but we have a bit. It has been cold, colder than for certain last winter.

and been pretty bitter. Even the mailman was complaining today. And you know that old saying about rain, snow, yada yada, blah, blah, blah. But he was complaining today because the wind was whipping pretty good and it was cold out there for sure. Nonetheless, I'm excited. Most of the people I know are excited. And the reason for the excitement is

The fact that

We are embarking upon the season. We're excited about that. A lot of things going on. We've been in planning meetings since we returned to work last week with several of our partners. So a lot of good things are happening here in Chicago. anticipation, excuse me, in anticipation.

of the upcoming growing season. So I'm looking across the room here. I got a big bag hanging on the door full of seeds this year in addition to the seeds for the African Diaspora Crop Program, where we have seeds already in stock, like mustard and turnip greens and collard greens and

some tomatoes and other stuff we got. Let's see, we got peppers that we're ordering, tomatoes, purple hull peas, sea island red peas, Ethiopian green mustard, Carolina broadleaf mustard, fish pepper, red okra, old man's okra. So we will...

have a lot of seeds to distribute. We talked to one of our seed partners today and they're going to give us a special discount if we buy things in bulk. We're looking forward to that. And that was reading some of the things off the list that we will purchase from them in bulk. One of our partners at Urban Growers Collective, Gina Santana, we wanted to add

seeds this year that may have been of interest, or may be of interest to our partners from Latinx communities like Puerto Rico, Mexico, whatever the case may be. And she weighed in with that. And so we ordered some of those seeds as well for our other community partners and the Latinx, Spanish speaking community.

look forward to working with them, had some really good early meetings with people from that community and the projects that we're working on with them. So we look forward to supporting that. So you're going to find in your show notes from a company that or an organization that

It's called Seed Masters and they have a seed starting chart, seed saving chart. So we will put that in the show notes as well for you to deal with that. I think basically we're gonna cover here and in the show notes.

Watch out, the days are getting longer. You can tell a little bit and in the next, I'd say three or four weeks, it'll really be noticeable. We went through this winter solstice and of course that was the day with the most nighttime of the year. And every day after that, the days get longer and longer and longer until we get to the summer solstice. So it's time to think about.

what you're going to begin to plant, seed starts and all that stuff. So we'll cover some of that. Moving forward, and we keep saying that, but we will get into this more as the year unfolds. And right now we're in the beginning of the year, but the whole thing around eating and what we eat and how we eat. And here we have,

No bias with respect to that. We don't think one side, one size fits all. You have people that advocate for being vegan or carnivore or whatever the case may be. We think that there's no one size that fits all. The problem becomes your diet, what you eat and all that should be.

dictated by all the things that make you who you are. So some people may require more.

animal protein or less animal protein or more veggies or less veggies and more carbs or less carbs, more protein, all that stuff. I know as an elder and dealing with some of the health stuff I'm dealing with, sometimes I hear I need to eat less protein, but then I hear, well, you're an elder, you actually need more protein. So who knows, right?

And the only way that we can really deal with this stuff is to find healthcare partner or partners that can help you process what your particular needs are. And, you know, we don't give any other information except for that. You know, you have to kind of navigate that by yourself. And unfortunately, that's the case for me.

Personally, in terms of figuring that out, I'm looking forward to an upcoming visit with a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. Doesn't mean it's for you. It works for me and has for decades since the 70s, in fact. One of the issues is that I'm coming up on my 76th birthday, so many of the people that

I began dealing with traditional Chinese medicine as practitioners and as consultants have retired or made their transition or, you know, no longer available. And so we've tried to navigate this process. I knew, went from

a process that was pretty low key and even secretive to a certain extent. We were doing this stuff when the acupuncture schools and traditional Chinese medicine schools and all that were just beginning to open up here and things were pretty inexpensive or even free. And you kind of had to navigate yourself around

various communities to find practitioners who would treat you. I know people got arrested for things like practicing medicine without a license because they were practicing acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and that kind of stuff. so people would show up under the pretense of looking for treatment and practitioners were being arrested.

one practitioner I had who was like fifth generation practitioner, her great great grandfather and grandfather and father and all kind of folks in her lineage have been practicing traditional Chinese medicine for a very long time. And so she was required to stop practicing. And because she didn't have a certificate, this was after

the schools open and as it turned out she had to get certification and of course that meant she just had to spend some money because she knew more about the traditional or classical Chinese practice. She knew more than and forgot more than the people that were supposedly teaching her knew.

So kind of lost track of her and reconnected and but it's a long way to go. mean, so we've had to navigate all that stuff. so we think we've found a new practitioner. And so again, we're anxious to get started with that. And one of the features of traditional Chinese medicine when you meet with a skilled practitioner and

you know, pay attention to the word skill. One of the things you get is dietary recommendations. And so you may be told to eat this, not that. And then when you go back in six weeks or 12 weeks or whatever the case may be, they may completely reverse because of

things that are happening in your system. And of course, you've prescribed herbs and perhaps acupuncture and in some cases, you know, body work or what's called Tweena, which is a massage therapy practice. And so I'm going to reintroduce myself to the modality with dietary recommendations and

some herbal formulas to address some of the things that I'm dealing with. One practitioner that I've been studying and researching and made an excellent point. And again, please, please, please, please, I am not advocating traditional Chinese medicine for you or anyone that may be listening. Again, I emphasize, you know, speak with your healthcare provider or providers.

and do your own research. Don't listen to or believe a word that I'm saying, you know, do your own research, do your own thinking about it and make up your own mind about how it would be, what you want to do to approach any kind of health issues or that you want to deal with. again, as an elder, about to approach my 76 trip around the sun.

This is what I've decided to do to improve the health conditions that I have so that I can age as gracefully as possible, if you will. the point was made that we often hear food is medicine and we think and

the practitioner sort of confirmed what we were thinking is food is medicine, it's great, that's fine, but it may not be enough. You may require some other kind of intervention in terms of restoring your health or managing any health conditions that you may have. So look for the help you need and look for the help that

suits you and your situation. And so, yeah, so that's what we want to deal with here. Ready to go in terms of the upcoming year, ready to support our home gardeners, ready to do workshops, particularly workshops related to

We've been practicing and advocating for several years now, and that is the use of fabric grow bags as the equipment you use for your gardening needs. I'll reiterate that one of the reasons why we went to that platform was because noted in Chicago and

you know, particularly in terms of different communities, where I live on the South Side was a heavy industrialized area. Not that long ago, I'm old enough to remember the steel mills and the auto plants and the supplied plants and all the stuff that was manufactured here when the United States and particularly the Midwest or the rust belt as they called it, that wasn't just

the Midwest actually, that rust belt actually ran from maybe Minneapolis on down through Wisconsin and the Chicago and into Northwest Indiana through Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, on to New York City. And as some people say, as far south as Baltimore.

So the United States was a heavy industrial and manufacturing center. The industrial manufacturing center for the world. And all of that began to change around 1970. And now you see the container ships and you see all the stuff coming from China and Vietnam and other places as the industrial, the manufacturing base.

that was the United States has been replaced by offshore companies and were able to replace the workers in this country because of things like container ships and computers and all of that stuff that made globalization possible.

So because of that, much of our ground is contaminated, much of the soil. if not that, being urban communities and soil not being cared for, if it's not contaminated, oftentimes it's a poor quality. And so the recommendation has been that unless you know

the content of your soil in terms of potential pollutants that you don't grow directly in ground. And so rather than tell people not to garden, we decided to come up with a strategy and process by which people could grow safely. And one of the things that we landed on in terms of doing that, other than raised beds and that sort of thing, was to use grow bags and our sort of default grow bag.

is a five gallon grow bag. There's some smaller ones, some larger ones, whatever the case may be. And this process has been an ongoing one. so myself and other people that we've worked with now and over the years have tried to figure out how many plants you can put in a five gallon bag. If it's the collard green or broccoli or whatever the case may be. We've also tried to figure out

What flowers that you can use to attract pollinators and beneficial insects grow best in the grow bags. What herbs grow best in the grow bag. Understanding what the medium needs are or the soil needs are. You can't use topsoil in your grow bags. You need to have a potting soil.

that's aerated, you can make it yourself, you can purchase it. So there's a lot of things that we're trying to do to get people invested in growing their own food and our program along with Chicago's food and our partners in that ecosystem. We've...

done a lot in terms of increasing the number of people who doing home gardening and using grow bags and are really happy to have the opportunity to grow. Some people thinking that they didn't have the opportunity to grow because they rented or weren't sure about the space or what their capacities are. The other thing that we are beginning to look into

in earnest is how people can grow indoors as well as outdoors and what that might take and what kind of things grow best indoors and what kind of things you would need to consider, what kind of equipment you need to consider such as grow lights or trays or bags or whatever the case may be. So

It's a work in progress is what I'm saying. And we're excited about offering the opportunity for people to grow their own food and whatever that means. Another thing we're excited about is looking for opportunities to engage a whole block, for example, or different households on a block to grow.

home gardens in these grow bag systems. again, the grow bags are really versatile. Our default grow bag is five gallon. So if you want to look them up online to find a source for them, it's fabric grow bags. And so it will tell you all of the different denominations or sizes that are available for you.

They come in seven gallon and 10 gallon and 20 and and on up and in fact their bags that you can't move Because they're hundred gallon 200 gallon Bags so as you get into it as well You will think about all the ways that you can utilize the bag depending on the size to do many different things, so

some of the things that we've discussed and are interested in dealing with is how do you grow kind of a herbal garden, for example, and a 20 gallon bag and what goes in there? What can you grow in a shady area and a bigger bag or a smaller bag or whatever the case may be? Do you need a

five gallon bag to grow your favorite herb for cooking or herbs for cooking. So those are some of the things that we're going to deal with and cover as we move through the year. I know next month we will be preparing you to begin seed starting if that's something you want to do and have the capacity to do or interest to do.

And so we will spend some time in the February podcast covering that round with links to information about seed starting, what to start when. We will talk about last frost dates and of course, first frost dates. And so this year we didn't have

our first frost, a real frost, into November, which was really interesting. And so even now, again, at 15 degrees, not sure when our last frost date will be. But for the most part, my experience here in Chicago is you're pretty safe around Memorial Day of the 1st of June, even though

last few years we've had some really hot weather in May or whatever the case may be and have caused us to actually rethink some of the things that we do because some of the things we start in the spring are cool weather crops and once the heat spell even for a couple of days hits then all that stuff boats or goes to sea also known as boating and so

It's time to pull it out and switch gears or whatever the case may be. There's some things like kale and collard greens and those sorts of things that are really adaptable. so we've planted collard greens and kale, for example, in April. And they started growing and got snow on them. And I remember one year got a couple of snows and they took it off and kept going. And actually

those are some of the best greens we ever grew. And so those things can survive and adapt to colder temperatures and warmer temperatures or whatever the case may be.

So really excited about this year. Not going to ramble on any more, quite frankly. We'll have some content again in the show notes. So take a look at that. We're not going to belabor this today, but again, just overjoyed with the prospect of having a really good season this year. I mean, last season.

We got a late start, you know, this household. We dealt with flu and COVID and all kind of stuff. And so we got a late start. But we had a really nice garden. So this year we intend to be more expansive. And again, we have purchased seeds and are looking at doing a lot more in terms of flowers and pollinators and that sort of thing.

including milkweed to attract pollinators, in particular monarch butterflies and that sort of thing. So really looking forward to that. So January 2025, happy new year to everybody. Happy gardening season. This podcast will be sent to you via

the Chicago's food newsletter, but also I'll send it out separately to people. If you have any ideas in terms of shows and episodes moving forward, February through next December, regarding gardening, regarding food, regarding health or wellness, anything you want to cover, you want us to cover.

you have any guest suggestions we would like to begin to integrate guests into our show. That's why we switched to this platform, even though most of you will receive the audio of this particular show, but we're going to start doing them audio and visual so that we can accommodate guests and perhaps even audience on this platform.

So again, look forward to 2025, the gardening season, improving our health, collectively improving our health, whether we are little ones, newborn, toddlers, preschoolers, teenagers, young adults, old adults, middle-aged, whatever the case may be.

we are looking to promote the health and well-being of our neighbors and friends and families. So I'm going to sign off. Orrin Williams, Baba Orrin Williams, signing off for the January 2025 episode. And so we will say peace.


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