Cooking Light blog: Corbin, on the diverse and delicious community in which he serves, Lewiston Maine

by Corbin Lichtinger

I live in America’s whitest state, and one of the fattest. I moved here over a year ago to serve with FoodCorps, a national service organization that sets out to connect kids to real food and help them grow up healthy.

I never expected to move to Maine, to a city of roughly 35,000, sit in packed coffee shop and be the only English speaking patron; to walk out of my building into a sea of kids at play, sporting their hijab and playing ‘schlepp,’ a version of jacks played with stones from the sidewalk.

For the past 10 years, people from Somalia, Sudan, Congo Ethiopia have been coming to Lewiston, Maine for the promise of work, refuge from war, and religious freedom. Once here, all of their cultures have all kneaded together to produce a food culture both a little bizarre and definitely beautiful.  With FoodCorps, I build school gardens, cook with kids, and generally help develop healthy food relationships at a young age. So I thought I’d be working with overweight kids (like I was when I was a kid), but instead I found something very different.

Click here to read the full post on Simmer and Boil, the blog of Cooking Light magazine.