Food Security
I applaud the message in your article "Buy a Pound, Save 13" [Aug. 1, 2007] about buying local to reduce carbon emissions. I would like to add that by buying local, you're doing more than simply helping to "preserve the planet." You're actually strengthening sustainable local agriculture so that we are not dependent exclusively on the global food industry. You're also strengthening community food security for us all, including the least fortunate in our communities who often don't have access to affordable and fresh produce. Thanks to Massachusetts taxpayers' support, The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and three other food banks in the Commonwealth distribute about $600,000 worth of Massachusetts-grown produce annually—mostly from the Pioneer Valley—to families and individuals struggling to put food on the table. Thanks to community support in our region, we distribute from The Food Bank Farm—our own Community Supported Agriculture Farm—half of the harvest, or approximately 200,000 pounds annually, to these same members of our communities across the four counties of western Massachusetts. By supporting local agriculture, you're making local produce more affordable for everyone.
Andrew Morehouse, Executive Director
The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, Inc.
Dino Tracks
I was happy to see your sidebar on the dinosaur tracks at the Amherst College Museum of Natural History. These fascinating and eerily beautiful fossils were not widely publicized for many years, so the current museum display is truly something to celebrate. Thanks to Amherst College for putting the tracks on display for the public rather than keeping them aside for academic study only. Not only are these tracks the first dinosaur tracks found in America, they are the first known to science anywhere in the world and are also, I believe, the first scientifically documented dinosaur finds of any kind in the western hemisphere. However, it was not Pliny Moody's discovery that brought them to the attention of science. In Greenfield, in 1835, a day laborer named Dexter Marsh found a track in a slab of stone he was laying for a new sidewalk; his neighbor, a physician named James Deane, realized that the scientific world—not the theological one—should know of their existence. It was due to Dr. Deane's dogged persistence in sending letters and plaster casts of the tracks to Edward Hitchcock at Amherst College and Benjamin Silliman at Yale that geologists began to study the fossil tracks. A large portion of the collection held by Amherst College was quarried in Franklin County by Marsh, Deane, and a Gill farmer named Roswell Field.
The story of the tracks is not (yet) well known, but with the new display at Amherst and the growing recognition among organizations up and down the Valley that they have connections to the tracks' social and natural history, this is beginning to change. Thank you for helping to get the word out.
Sarah Doyle
Turners Falls
