For her effort to nudge Timmins to eat healthy, this week’s mid-week mugging goes to Michelle Goulet, the executive director of the Anti-Hunger Coalition Timmins (ACT) and all the coalition partners and supporters.
You are what you eat. Most of us have heard this quote, and it makes sense that eating healthy foods makes you healthier – eating unhealthy foods makes you unhealthy.
Even Hippocrates, the father of medicine, had his own take on food as the basis of health.
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food,” he said.
It’s a never-ending challenge, but one worth taking up.
“ACT is a coalition of local groups concerned about food security and health local foods,” explained Goulet. “It has been in existence for 10 years and I basically it came out of a need to address poverty and food security or access to food is no one else and so difficult.”
“Some of our partners include The Timmins Native Friendship Centre, Together We Inspire and Grow (TWIG), City of Timmins, and the Porcupine Health Unit,” Goulet added. “There are many individuals in Timmins who also invested their time in helping people eat healthier – people who run hot meal program at various local churches and organizations.”
ACT’s vision and mission is to increase access to healthy affordable food, by making affordable, healthy food available and by educating and skills building in the community about what are healthy foods.
“We worked with over 50 different partners throughout the year, and we have a core group of individuals specifically that we work very closely with where people can go in and order good food boxes every month including The Timmins Native Friendship center, TWIG, City of Timmins, and the Porcupine Health Unit. It's not only the people in low income brackets that are not able to access healthy for that there's a variety of different reasons why somebody wouldn't be able to access healthy food.
"We lead very, very busy lives and many find it easier to go to a fast food restaurant or pop a prepared frozen food packet in the oven than eating healthy," said Goulet. "So making sure that we all have access to healthy food and know what healthy food actually is, is very important."
One of the programs that ACT is involved with is the Good Food Box, launched in 2009.
"It’s basically a bulk purchasing program, so we take orders from different individuals, and provide a healthy collection of food," explained Goulet. "It's not just for people of low income or for people accessing food banks, it is for everybody, and we work with different retailers and farmers, and they are amazing partners because they are able to pass along savings to the customer anywhere from 25 per cent up to 35 per cent."
Subsequently, ACT has held cooking classes through their collective cooking workshops that emphasize the importance of using local foods in meals. Local foods are healthier because they retain more of their nutritional value as they are picked at full maturity and have less distance to travel before they reach your table.
"You can taste the difference. You can see and you can taste the difference,” remaked Goulet. “You're really not getting the full nutritional value of some of these items that are picked before ripening and imported from long distances away."
Goulet admits there are challenges to buying local foods in Timmins, with the shorter growing season, but ongoing research in establishing northern agriculture is focusing on the foods that can be grown in the local climate, which can substantially increase the kinds of crops that can be grown in colder weather.
Last year, ACT took over the management of the City of Timmins’ community food garden lots from the Timmins Economic Development Corporation. That is another example of how people of Timmins can eat locally grown food that they themselves grow and harvest.
For those who want to savour the bounty of the local harvest and also contribute to the work of ACT, they will be holding their 8th annual Harvest Moon Potluck in September.
“It's a celebration of the harvest and also a celebration of local individuals who are helping work in the food security sector,” said Goulet.
The event also acknowledges the individuals who have had an impact on food issues in Timmins and have been an ambassador for organization. This year it will be held on Sept. 30 at the Covenant United Church on Eighth Avenue.
Tickets will be available soon so check ACTs website or the Harvest Moon potluck dinner Facebook page.
