Winter Bulletin 2003 Vol. 19, No. 4

Introduction
Plenty Boardmembers Visit Belize
Solar-Powered Lights for San Jose School
Clean water for Chimachoy, Guatemala
Central American Food Security Initiative (CAFSI)
Making More Plenty
Dorothy Bates Memorial Endowment Fund

In her final 15 years, Bates wrote sixteen popular vegetarian cookbooks, including "Kids Can Cook," "The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook," "The TVP Cookbook," and "The George Bernard Shaw Vegetarian Cookbook." She also wrote a classic real estate text for Prentice Hall that is still in print after 30 years.

Bates grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, daughter of the late Dr. Frederick Roost, a physician, and the late Helen Roost, once a soprano with the New York Metropolitan Opera. Her first book, "Adventures of Andrea" was penned (and illustrated by its author) at the age of nine. She was an Assistant City Librarian in Sioux City at 14. Ms. Bates graduated from Iowa State University where she enrolled at the age of 15 and was active in the Pi Beta Phi sorority. Her degree in home economics with a minor in journalism foreshadowed two of her lifelong interests, food and writing. She rose to an executive position in Swift & Co's research kitchen, was the company's top paid woman employee, and maintained professional public relations contacts with senior editors at Life Magazine, Good Housekeeping, The New York Times, and other media outlets.

She married award-winning newspaper Editor-Publisher Albert W. Bates in 1945. They resided in Honolulu, Hawaii for several years, pursuing careers in public relations for Castle & Cook, where they took instrumental roles in transforming the island economy from its historic plantation basis to one of tourism, hosting visits from hoteliers, restaurateurs and developers. The song, "Take Me Back to My Little Grass Shack" was written by a guest in her home in 1946.

During the fifties and sixties, Bates was a prominent real estate professional in Wilton, Connecticut, forming her own agency (the first in her State to be headed by a woman), teaching real estate ethics, establishing local and state Boards of Realtors, serving on the National Board, and writing a college text ("How to Run a Real Estate Office"), a classic now. Because of her work in transforming real estate licensing through a code of ethics, she garnered countless professional awards, including her field's highest honor, Realtor of the Year.

Always a community activist, she founded a nursery school, served on the Planning and Zoning board, the United Way committee, the PTA and her church vestry. She was den mother to a Cub Scout pack, served school lunches, worked Red Cross blood drives, and starred in theatrical productions of The Wilton Playhouse. She won backgammon tournaments and earned Master Points at contract bridge. Bates often pursued her love of travel, leading Lindblad Travel's tour groups to favorite destinations in East Africa, India, Antarctica, Thailand, China and Japan.

After selling Dorothy Bates Real Estate in the early eighties, she moved to Summertown, Tennessee, where her son was starting his own family on "The Farm," the largest spiritual community to arise from, and survive, the sixties counterculture movement. The Farm's spiritual foundation prohibited meat-eating in response to globalhunger and environmental degradation. Bates learned to appreciate tofu and other soy products, but tinkered with their preparation to make them palatable to beef-eaters from Iowa like herself. Near the commune, she built a cutting-edge passive solar house, which became her permanent home. She went on to several new careers in this rural farming region of Tennessee, as a tax preparer, investment strategist, financial advisor, editor and publisher, vegetarian cook, and high school literature teacher. Always a leader and innovator, she had prominent roles in establishing The Farm Historical Society, Deer Park (a nascent assisted-living facility), Kids to the Country Childrens Garden, Highland Woods, Global Ecovillage Network, and the Swan Trust (a nature conservancy).

Toward the end of the eighties with interest in communal living declining, she was among the first to recognize a threat to her local economy as the 1200+-member commune's cottage industries dissolved or relocated. To preserve small-town jobs, she took it upon herself to revitalize The Farm's small publishing house, The Book Publishing Company (BPC), a niche publisher in Native American lore, eclectic spiritual topics, midwifery, and a few cookbooks. She was able to put BPC on a sound financial footing when it was approaching extinction along with The Farm's tie-dye factory. In those days there were very few vegetarian cookbooks in print. To revitalize BPC's list, she set about creating new titles, writing "Kids Can Cook" (1987), which received a favorable New York Times review. She bought the rights to "The George Bernard Shaw Vegetarian Cookbook," a British classic, authoring her own American edition (1987). She updated the company's most popular title, the 1975 hippie standby, "The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook" (1988), to reflect changing eating habits (less sugar, lower fat).

All sixteen of her cookbooks are still in print and are characterized by meticulous research; for each project she turned her home into a test kitchen, rejecting accepted shortcuts and refusing to borrow from other cooks, personally inventing and revising each recipe, refining measurements, and developing clear, easy instructions. Most works are vegetarian, including "The TVP Cookbook," which has sold over 84,000 copies.

In addition to writing new books and revising old ones, she hosted visits from new vegetarian authors, inviting them to complete their work in her home; coordinated food photography sessions while furnishing the location, the dishes, linens, silver, and large format camera; and went on promotional tours, interviews and television appearances. She financed the printing bills out of her own pocket, and applied meticulous copy-editing and proofreading skills to each manuscript. Under her leadership the employee-owned Book Publishing Company, now in its 29th year, grew to prominence and security in its market.

Bates's interest in nurturing the next generation of health-oriented home cooks and professional chefs was spurred by her concern that today's youth are no longer exposed daily to healthy home cooking, as her generation had been. At The Farm, she developed a program whereby impoverished Nashville children were taught to bake their own apple pies from scratch. Recently her program expanded to allow at-risk urban children to pick their own apples and prepare their pies near the orchard, to help them make the connection between the health of the planet and their own diets, through a nonprofit summer camp, "Kids to the Country." Her first cookbook, "Kids Can Cook," was an outgrowth of a vegetarian cooking class for sixth-graders, which she taught for The Farm School for many years. She was an active member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, where for a decade she has enthusiastically promoted healthy vegetarian cuisine and enjoyed meeting the most respected chefs of the day. She was deeply involved in an outreach program for inner-city youth through IACP's Kids in the Kitchen Network.

For many decades Bates endured severe health problems, but remained cheerful and indomitable in the face of every setback. She continued to adventure abroad regardless of pain and disability. She took up sailing in her fifties, fearlessly facing gales at sea in small sailboats--and feeding their crews. She spent every February in her beachfront apartment in Mazatlan on the Pacific coast of Mexico. She continued to travel throughout her life, in recent years visiting China and Russia, and favorite parts of the Caribbean, plus culinary excursions to California, New Orleans, and anywhere enticing flavors beckoned.

An assiduous correspondent, she maintained close ties with legions of friends, including several dating back to her college days in the thirties, and those newly met. She lived a life of love, sharing good food and wisdom, good cheer and courage with all around her. To the final moments of this existence, she exemplified wisdom and service, and was an adored mother, cherished grandmother, favorite aunt and sibling, central to the lives of her family members, dearly loved and deeply respected by all who knew her. Bates's survivors include her son, Albert Bates, of Summertown, Tennessee; her daughter, Kathryn Hill, of Norfolk, Virginia; and three grandchildren, Pagan Hill of Juneau, Alaska; Gretchen Bates of New York City; and Will Bates of Nashville, Tennessee.