Natural Disaster

While my own little shire of Middlebury remained just slightly affected by Tropical Storm Irene, much of the state of Vermont was devastated. This set of video clips is but the tip of the iceberg, and I encourage everyone to look at the updated aerial videos on www.wcax.com and the WCAX facebook page.

Flash flooding caused intensive, almost unimaginable damage to the state's infrastructure. We watched in horror as historic buildings and old and new bridges were ripped off their footings. Graveyards gutted with coffins floating downstream. Cars tumbling end to end in the waters as everyone tried frantically to see if there was anyone inside. Thirteen Vermont communities were wholly cut off from the rest of the world for several days. Most of those are now connected only by rough ATV paths. Crews are working around the clock to improve the access to at least temporary 4 wheel drive accessible roads.

Fortunately while the flash flooding was horrible, the wind and fury of the storm had dissipated by the time it got here, so areas not directly impacted by rising water remained intact. This is giving our state the resources to scurry through immediate clean up and disaster relief, and then longer term rebuilding. Had high winds impacted the rest of the state we would be looking at a much more sinister situation.

Vermont is very resilient when it comes to food security. Many people have gardens, and pantries full of home-canned goods. Those resources were put to the test here as many communities that had been cut off ran low on food. Through generosity and practicality people shared the contents of their melting freezers and the jars and cans from their water-soaked basements. But had it been slightly worse, or in a slightly different configuration, food and potable water could have become serious issues. As it is, they are strained commodities.

Rain barrels and home gardens will not resolve all ills of all natural disasters, but they help.  Obviously if it all gets washed down the river, it won't help. But a few rain barrels full of water in a landlocked community can sustain many people for many days. Dried beans and corn, as well as home-canned pickles, dilly beans, applesauce and relishes, last for years all with no additional electricity. A well-stocked freezer will last quite a while after the electric goes out, and feed you for a long time afterwards. My freezer is bigger than my needs, so I've lined the bottom with milk jugs full of water. It'll buy me an extra day or two without power, and give me over 20 gallons of water if the electric is out for longer than that.

Redundancy is one of the primary keys of disaster planning. Have a woodstove, and a camp stove, and a firepit. Have a main garden, and a few cherry tomato plants on the patio and a few cucumber plants in hanging baskets. Or put in some storage crops like onions or pumpkins at a different location -- in a community garden plot or in an unused corner of a neighbors field, or in a vacant city lot.

I keep thinking about the community gardens in Harlem that I talked about a few weeks back. Had Manhattan born the brunt of this storm, they would not have been enough to feed many people for very long -- especially if they were under water. They would have helped though. Emergency rations rarely include fresh produce so the greens and fresh tomatoes would have been welcomed by most folks. But I compare this to the cities I've seen in Italy and Spain, where every apartment has a balcony, and every balcony is a garden. If the Tiber flooded Rome 6 feet deep, like our Vermont cities are flooded, everyone in their apartments would have still had enough to eat for several days from the lettuce and tomatoes and miniature fruit trees on their balconies. I'm not saying it wouldn't be boring -- but they would be in a better position to survive and patiently await assistance.

I'm not an outright survivalist. I don't think we need to bury tanks of water and dehydrated rations in sealed pits in the back yard (that we then can't shovel out when the ground freezes). But having food and water resources at hand makes sense.

Pesto Heaven

"Tis the season, and I am drowning in basil. All those little tiny seedlings I set out -- twice as many as I need, since in past years sometimes the basil has had weather problems and not grown -- are now three feet tall and broad as a barman with a bushy handled moustache. And so I'm in pesto-processing-purgatory until it's all gone.

I'm going about it one row at a time. I had 6 rows, 6 to 8 plants each. Tonight I'm officially through half -- but only kind of cheating. The first two rows were lemon basil and lime basil, which grow to only half the size of the Aroma, Genovese, Large Leaf, and Sweet Basil that fill the other four rows. I used a light-flavored parmesan cheese for the lemon and lime, and included cilantro in some of the lime, parsley in some of the lemon, and used walnuts in some of the lemon just for grins and jollies.

I don't have a recipe. I lightly fill the glass container of my two-speed, genuine reproduction original metal-based Waring blender with basil leaves that I have washed and lightly spun in the salad spinner, so they still have a little water clinging to them. Yes,  I have a food processor, and no, I don't like to use it for this. It macerates the basil so badly that it practically loses its flavor, and becomes quite a different product. I suppose the folks who make their pesto in a mortar and pestle feel the same way about my blender. I do have a mortar and pestle, and use it for lots of things -- but I have a lot of basil to get through and then a crop of amaranth seed waiting to be winnowed after that so I just can't make all this pesto in my mortar and pestle.

Then I pour in enough olive oil in a light steady stream until it reaches about a half-inch up the side of the glass container. Good olive oil is key -- and the brand or label does not necessarily tell you if it's good olive oil. I've purchased expensive organic olive oil at the food co-op and had it taste horrible and rancid. Try different kinds until you find a brand you like -- then watch for it on sale and buy enough for a whole pesto season.

Then I blend that to a bright green liquid. Then I pour in about that many nuts -- if I had to guess, I'd say a quarter cup or less. I do like pine nuts, but can rarely afford them, so I usually use almonds. I watch for these on sale at my co-op, too. Walnuts have a stronger flavor; pecans have a nice creamy texture. A friend with a nut allergy uses breadcrumbs, which yields a fabulous light flavorful pesto with a smooth texture. Another friend uses sunflower seeds, which are also healthy and inexpensive.

Then I throw in garlic. One big clove or two or three smaller ones, then I taste it. I like a lot of garlic, so I may throw in another. Lastly, the cheese. I grate an Italian sheeps milk pecorino-romano and put in about a handful. At this point the pesto is getting clay-like in the blender, and I'm stopping the blender, pushing the pesto down with a wooden spoon, starting it again briefly, and repeating the process. Sometimes I add just a few drops of water, or a little more olive oil. If the garlic flavor seems overwhelming, I'll stuff in some more basil leaves.

From there it goes into quart-sized zipper-type freezer bags, marked with what kind of pesto it is. I flatten these down on their sides, squeezing all the air out before sealing it. Thus far I have a dozen such bags in the freezer; I expect I'll have about 40 when I'm done. I'll probably take some of those to the food shelf and keep 26--enough pesto for every other week of the year, which sounds about right.

 Uses? Pasta, of course. But don't stop there. Spread it on pizza crust or in bread dough; spread it on sandwiches. Throw some into minestrone. Spread it all over some halibut and quartered potatoes and bake it in the oven. Dab it into an omelet.

Pesto heaven!

Gardens in Harlem

Last week my band O'hAnleigh was honored to play in the Fertile Ground Music Series at the National Black Theater in Harlem, New York City. Growing up on Long Island, I visited Manhattan many times for shows, to the Hard Rock Cafe, museums and so on downtown but never made it north of Central Park. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but what I found was a complete surprise: Gardens. Everywhere.

Little did I know that New York City's Green Thumb program is the largest community gardening program in the world. Just get enough people to sign up to take shifts and the city parks department makes available city-owned vacant lots for planting, along with resources like compost and workshops. The program's website provides a forum for local groups to exchange information, posts photos, and announces programs like farmers markets and the upcoming NYC Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners conference.

I did not see any of these gardens in the sterile streets of Central Park West or the area around Columbus Circle but the vibrant community of Harlem was rich with lush green gardens--and full of gardeners excited to talk about them. The video above is just a quick bit of conversation at one such garden on 126th Street near St. Nicholas Avenue, but there were many more. As in the original Garden, the food is just free for the taking. People sign up for short shifts to work in the garden through the week, then the gate is open through daylight hours for anyone to come pick some produce. Further up the block was a larger garden running alongside a building for about half a block that included cherry trees and a large patch of sweet corn.

I guess I should not have been surprised that a town with so much faith, heart and soul would also be full of gardeners!

Supply Line Economics: The Cost of Getting Food To Table

An army moves on its stomach, the old adage goes. It means that any military action is only as good as its supply lines,  no war can be fought by soldiers who don't have food and water. If your army moved on horses or elephants, that also meant food, water and bedding for the animals. If your army moves on Humvees and helicopters, it also means fuel, oil, antifreeze, spare tires, fan belts and a mess of other wee bits likely to fail along the way. Many a military strategist has determined that cutting off an army's supply lines is a lot easier than battling one's opponent head on.

The Subaru is the Ubiquitous Vermont Food Supply Line

Cities too, from Ur to Miami, have their necessary supply lines. The water for the showers, toilets, fire hydrants, cooking and car washing of New York, Los Angeles, and other metropolises, come in through a pipe or culvert from reservoirs and rivers hundreds of miles away from the urb. Relying on a small number of water sources at a great distance would seem to me to be a rather weak link, but the urban planning departments of America's major metropolitan areas don't call me for advice, so there you have it.

Food, too, travels to most Americans over supply lines, and those supply lines start with the truck that picks up the food at the farm or slaughterhouse and continues through either the truck that delivers the goods to your urban neighborhood store, or the car that delivers the groceries into your driveway in the small towns, vast suburbs and urban regions outside of dense city centers. For most of our food products, this means thousand of miles of foreign-fuel burning transit, billions of taxpayer dollars supporting road construction and maintenance, and the vast spacial and economic inefficiency of millions of Americans each sitting all alone in a several-thousand-pound, several tens of thousands of dollars worth of machine every day to obtain a 20 pound bag of bread, milk and cookies.

There is admittedly some strengths in this system. Most notably, it's more a web than a line, with enough inherent redundancy that if one thread of the supply system fails there are some others to man the gap. If, for example, my car breaks down and I'm out of celery, I can borrow my neighbor's car or ask her to pick me up some celery while she's doing her own shopping. The food will still get to my house.

Further up the ladder this resilience is less strong. A leap in fuel prices, a trucker's strike, or a bad round of weather at the source (or a cloud of radiation from Japan) cold nip off one supply line of food, creating upward jumps in food prices if not outright scarcity in the market. We've seen hints of this with things like particularly bad winters in Florida that have put a dent in the citrus crop. But none of us starved in those years when the citrus crops failed, we just skipped fresh oranges and bought apples from New Zealand instead.

The downside of all this supply line system redundancy is its expense.  We pay for highways and bridges and tunnels, car and truck purchases and maintenance, and that's just the start. Air pollution. Landfills. Deaths and injuries in car accidents. Political wars over where it's appropriate to drill for oil. Ecological disasters when oil rigs rail. Wars over oil-rich foreign lands. All to move food along the supply line to our table--or to earn the money to buy the food and pay for the vehicle that brings it home. 

If you don't know how we created this mind-shatteringly expensive car-and-truck dependent food supply line system, take a read of James Howard Kunstler's now iconographic book The Geography of Nowhere. If you're unfamiliar with the history of American landscape architecture, it provides a brilliant overview (though be prepared for the author's insertion of strong personal opinion regarding certain architects -- fans of Mies Van Der Rohe, take warning). Suffice it to say that the Federal government and General Motors played major roles, but you'll have to read the book to find out exactly how.

Being more of a pragmatist than a finger-pointer, I have to note that the public obligingly leapt to buy those Levittown houses and shiny new Mustangs. I tend to focus my efforts on trying to understand what was so attractive about the automobile-shaped landscape rather than whose fault it was. Fact is, it's here, and we can't afford it. So how can we use the best elements of it to build a better, more economically realistic model for the future?

Growing food in the suburbs and urbs--and harvesting water in those urbs, too--would seem the most logical approach. Every time I pick a salad from the front yard for dinner, I've diminished the number of times my ubiquitous Vermont Subaru Forester (nearly 200,000 miles and running just fine) leaves the driveway and runs the 4 miles to and 4 miles from the supermarket.

About a quarter of my little neighborhood has substantial gardens; if the other three-quarters grew their own veggies, too, then over time the local economy would only bear smaller supermarket spaces, with smaller parking lots. There'd be fewer trucks of produce running from California and Florida to Vermont.  We would lighten our dependency on the very expensive supply lines in favor of food produced at hand. The advantage of redundancy would still be in effect, as now we'd simply have multiple food sources within a 100 yard radius. If I was out of celery, I could knock on the door a neighbor who grows great celery and ask to swap for some spaghetti squash.

Now that's an inexpensive, secure supply line.

Gardening With Blurred Edges

Gardening is really a lot less about what you plant than about how you think about things--and what you decide to weed around.

I do have my raised vegetable beds, and my mess of perennial-flowers-and-weeds out front, but my garden is so much more than that. Out back, for instance, there was this small patch of wild beebalm, Monarda fistulosa, growing when we moved in. Whenever I'd cut some for drying, we'd also pull out a few of the other things that were growing around it, giving it a competitive advantage. The patch is now maybe 8 feet by 12 feet and growing, the plants reaching 5 feet high, and many of the scarlet flower heads sporting these interesting double-decker puffs. I leave these and harvest the singles for tea, encouraging the double heads to seed in.

Now that patch of beebalm is large enough to easily dry a year's worth of tea. My two beebalm cultivars that I have planted in the 'garden' out front don't do half as well. The bright red type I picked up at a nursery somewhere is being overrun by the lemon balm, and rarely clears 3 feet high. The lavender purple bergamot that I have in the flower bed blooms in a lovely shade over dusky gray-green foliage, but it suffers from mildew and expands only very slowly. I cut a few heads from it to throw in the tea mix for color, but that's about it.

I could order beebalm in various colors and configurations from any number of nursery catalogs, but why would I? Clearly none would grow as well and be as perfectly suited for the local growing conditions as the native variety that has adapted itself to this precise environment aons.

Other vegetative inhabitants of my yard that I've weeded around include red clover, a big patch of white yarrow that enfolds one corner of my lettuce bed, a couple of random mulleins that I always let grow each year (I pull out many of these from the raised beds but let some live at the bed corners, in the lawn or the flowers beds -- release them from competition and they will easily tower 6 feet tall or more).  Medicinal herbs like Heal-All (Prunella vulgaris) and Gill-Over-the-Ground (Glechoma hederacea) I pull out as weeds in some patches of the garden, and pull other weeds around to let grow in other patches. When I weed it out, I stick it in the dehydrator or hang it to dry if the weather is cooperative, for valuable immune-boosting winter tea come flu season.

Clumps of black eyed susans move around my yard each year depending on where I decide to yank them out and where I don't bother.There's some lovely pink mallow blooming under the birch tree that I weed around every year, and it slowly spreads. We've planted sunflowers several times, but don't really need to anymore. They also self-seed, and i pull them out when they are in the middle of a veggie bed but let them grow at the corners and elsewhere around the yard, often transplanting the young volunteers before their deep roots take hold.

Am I just lazy, or are there benefits to gardening without bright-line edges between what is cultivated and what is wild? I feel like the benefits in attracted honey bees, butterflies and songbirds (who love the sunflowers) probably does help the garden productivity, and it also makes it a lush and aesthetically wonderful, alive place to be. This state of mind also blurs the edges between my garden and the living world beyond where my deed says my property ends. A circumnavigation of my block this morning added a whole dehydrator full of red clover blossoms to the stash I'd picked in my yard.

I suppose my yard is 180 degrees from the artistic suburban landscape wastelands I've seen in the upscale neighborhoods of the greater New York area, and folks who prefer that highly structured look of exotic shrubbery with red mulch between and not a weed growing would view my garden as a mess. They'd likely hire landscapers to bulldoze the beebalm, heal-all, yarrow, mint and marrow and plant a proper yard of mugho pine and dwarf weeping cherry. While that might satisfy the realtors, I prefer the life and soul of this flourishing, diverse landscape that blends seamlessly with the surrounding natural environment (though admittedly not so seamlessly with my neighbor's stunning, impeccable lawn, but he seems a truly good sport about that).

Famine on the Horn: Starvation and Politics

I am sitting on my front porch surrounded by my own miniature Eden, with beds full of lettuce and basil and beets, garlic about to be harvested, squash and tomato vines taking over the neighborhood. The surrounding houselots, fields and farms are rich with nut trees, wild cherries, and escaped apples and pears. An afternoon stroll may bring back mushrooms, wild garlic, wild grapes, serviceberry, raspberries or blackberries depending on the season, along with lesser-known wild edibles like trout lily bulbs, cattail tubers, or fiddlehead ferns. Even my perennial bed is full of good eats and drinks: daylily flowers, bee balm, burdock and chicory. I consider the lilies of the field--and I eat them.

Amidst this abundance, famine seems unimaginable. Yet as I sit here, tens of thousands of people from the region of Somalia are walking days and weeks across burning desert to reach the largest refugee camp in the world -- Dadaab, an outpost in nowhere, Kenya, originally designed to hold 90,000 refugees of the Great African War and now holding over 400,000 people.

The present famine in Somalia is the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent. But to call it a famine, suggesting that it is merely a product of random unlucky rainfall cycles or maybe a crop failure, does not begin to accurately describe the situation, any more than the expression 'potato famine' describes the political and sociological disaster that occurred in Ireland in the mid 19th century.

I've heard folks quip cynically, "It's a desert, and it's always been a desert -- you don't want to starve, don't live in a desert." Not true on all counts. This is not the place to debate world desertification, other than to say that much of the world we now know as desert was not desert at one time (check your old testament for its descriptions of hanging gardens, flowing fountains, and towering cedar forests in the Middle East, for example). But many Somalis lived in villages built around wells, rich in cattle and crops plentiful enough to feed everyone amply and have grains, meats and vegetables left over to trade in markets for goods or cash--a permaculture Eden-like environment not unlike my green front yard. Until someone crashed through with tanks, killed the cattle, poisoned the well, salted the fields and raped the women.

Local food security vanishes with the speed of a flame in the face of war.  Just ask an American from the South about the impact of Sherman's burning march. The tactic of destroying food resources goes back thousands of years; something about Carthage springs to mind. Permaculture is hardly permanent in the face of tanks and guns, unless one has the bigger guns to protect it, or the cash or gold in a bank account to buy the land and seeds to start over, assuming your bank does not also collapse.

On top of the disaster of war, Somalia has experienced lower-than-usual rainfall for several years. With freedom of movement and trade, Somalis may have resolved the hardship on their own, or with a minimal boost of some temporary food aid, much as those Americans hit by natural disasters like floods rely on. However, militant groups have precluded foreign aid from reaching those affected, escalating the impacts. The press says these groups are 'associated with Al-Qaida,' but I have no way to assess this information--my apologies for the cynicism, but not long ago we were told that all revolutionary groups were associated with Russian Communists; now they seem to all be associated with Al-Qaida. To the mothers watching their children starve to death, it hardly matters.

Political, social and economic security and food security are intimately intertwined. The ancient city of Rome rioted for bread, not because the wheat crop had failed or drought had destroyed farmlands, but because Cleopatra was involved in a pissing match with the powers that be and stopped shipping wheat. The actions of the people who occupy the White House and Capitol Hill, the actions of the people they appoint to our embassies and the United Nations, the wars our nation chooses to get involved with or not get involved with, all play out on the ground not only in terms of soldiers lost on either side, but in terms of which mothers walk for weeks with their dying children to beg for food aid in a desert camp of 400,000 starving, desperate people.

The U.S. has engaged in some half-hearted intervention in Somalia over the last several decades, none of which has worked out terribly well.  Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, the U.S. quickly withdrew from Somali intervention, despite declaring the situation in Darfur to constitute a genocide.  We have made the decision to commit to very expensive ongoing military action in these two locations, and not in other locations. On such decisions, people live and die.

Few if any among the 400,000 in this one refugee camp--and hundreds of thousands scattered at other camps across Africa--had anything to do with causing the violence which has shattered their lives and left them starving. Certainly the kids who are dying played no role in the global posturing and shoving matches that played a greater role in creating their circumstances than any lack of rain.

This Garden of Eden in my front yard, these rolling green fields and forests, are truly a blessing. On this glorious summer day, it seems impossible that anything could happen to take this wealth of food security and self-sufficiency away. Yet I'm sure that many wise and peaceful farmers throughout the ages have felt the same.

Please consider making a donation to the UNICEF Horn of Africa Emergency Appeal or any of the church, nonprofit or service organizations working on the effort to relieve the worst of this crisis including the Red Cross/Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, and many local religious organizations. And plant a garden, including an extra row for the food shelf -- it is a precious liberty indeed.

Put Obese Kids in Foster Care?

Today's Journal of the American Medical Association contains an editorial opinion by Dr. David Ludwig, whose work focuses on childhood obesity at Harvard's reknowned Boston Children's Hospital. In other words, a very knowledgeable, concerned, and influential physician in the realm of obesity, particularly pertaining to children and young adults.

Dr. Ludwig suggests that obese children be removed from their families and placed in foster care.

I can understand Dr. Ludwig's frustration, but since his days are spent looking at obese kids rather than the bigger picture of food marketing, consumption and health in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world, I can see how he might reach the point he expresses in this editorial. From where I sit, I can't help but be horrified. My hope is that the editorial may spark widespread dialogue, about food, about families, and about the role of government intervention in regards to both.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (that regulates food labeling and food additives and develops nutritional education information in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture), Federal Communications Commission (that regulates broadcast advertising and children's television programming), Federal Trade Commission (that regulates product advertising), along with our state's attorney generals, education curriculum and school lunch programs committees, and local, state and federal surgeons general and health departments, have been utterly ineffectual at communicating the basic foundations of good nutrition and food choices.  The poor USDA nutritionists and a few school nurses have been running around out there saying, Eat More Vegetables! and having about as much impact as holding back a hurricane with an umbrella.

Actually, 'ineffectual' is an understatement.  The regulating agencies which we have created and engaged to try to protect us from unscrupulous business practices have not only allowed but subsidized and encouraged the production and marketing of substances extremely detrimental to our health. 

They have allowed High Fructose Corn Syrup, clearly demonstrated by Princeton University researchers to lead to fat and weight gain as well as serum triglyceride increases even when consumed in modest amounts, to pervade every food product on the shelf. 

They've approved the use of sythentic fat substitutes, now sold in 'fat-free' everything, but that interfere with the absorption of necessary nutrients and actually wind up making consumers fatter.  This threatens to create malnutrition and increased obesity in precisely those kids whose parents think they are doing the best thing by buying them fat-free cookies.

They have allowed sugar alcohols to be included as ingredients in 'sugar-free' foods, even though they not only cause gastric distress in many people but can spike the serum cholesterol in diabetics.

This is not a matter of saying, "Well parents should exercise responsibility and read food labels." You can read the label of a product that says it's natural, fat-free and sugar-free, and still feed your child something that damages his or her health and leads to obesity. And now that these agencies have failed to protect ordinary families from the harmful products they were directed to regulate, we arrive at the suggestion that parents who don't somehow figure this all out should have their kids taken away from them.

What, I'm left wondering, would the qualification requirements be for foster families for such children? Would foster parent volunteers be screened for BMI? What about households that follow vegetarian, or various religious or ethnic food practices?

And what would the social service agency plans for family reintegration look like? Would the parents have to lose X amount of pounds and attend cooking classes before the child could be returned to the household? Would Child Protective Services now hire a team of nutritionists to evaluate the shopping list of parents before parental visitations could be initiated?

Instead of pointing fingers--fingers that will inevitably get pointed along socio-economic lines--we need to all insist that the federal and state agencies that we send our tax dollars to actually look out for our health and welfare, since that is what we've hired them to do.  Then we need to help one another -- all of us, young and old, employed and unemployed, urban and rural -- to establish healthy food traditions that include links of family and community, like holding pot-luck suppers in your neighborhood or town-wide,  and volunteering to give cooking and canning classes at the local food shelf.

And mainly, we--ALL of us--need to just say "no" to buying this processed crap at the supermarket.  In my public speaking classes at the Community College of Vermont I always have students do an impromptu persuasive presentation trying to convince the other students to try their favorite cookie. Of the hundreds and hundreds of students I've had do this over the years, about 85% state their favorite cookie as a homemade chocolate chip--often made by someone in particular like their mom or grandmother. Kids are not going to become obese on homemade chocolate chip cookies despite the sugar, butter and real chocolate in them--but they probably WILL on the fat-free, sugar-free packaged varieties that they didn't really want in the first place.

So fight childhood obesity by baking some chocolate chip cookies with your kid -- and let's bury the talk of taking obese children away from their parents.

Chanterelles

Golden chanterelles, as precious as summer sunshine. Dinner tonight: Salad of fresh greens, a bowl of green peas in the pod, sumac and raspberry leaf tea, and chanterelle puffs, a light simple little fritter that lets the delicate earthy flavor of these mushrooms shine through.

I have a confession to make: I did not pick these chanterelles myself. There are a small number of mushrooms that I am confident picking and eating--dryad's saddles, morels, angel wings--and every couple years I add one or two more to that list. Chanterelles have not quite made it onto my complete confidence list. I have found carpets of them a few times... I think...but at the last minute I was not totally certain so I let them lie. Maybe in a year or two...

Meanwhile I bought this batch from a gentleman who sells wildcrafted foods at the Middlebury Vermont Farmer's Market. With my own gardening and foraging, it's not too often that I actually buy produce from someone else, so I was really excited about this.

Then I had to decide how to cook them. A simple saute in butter is always splendid with wild mushrooms, as is an omelet. Mushrooms and eggs just seem to go together. I opted for this suggestions from the Mycological Society of San Francisco Cookbook, and I'm glad I did. The buttery simplicity, the melt in your mouth texture of the dough against the chewy woodsy flavor of the mushrooms -- pure heaven.

Recipe: Golden Chanterelle Puffs

1 cup chicken broth (I used my fresh-made vegetable stock instead)
1/2 pound or so minced chanterelles
1 stick butter
1 tsp. sea salt
1 cup unbleached flour
3 eggs

Preheat oven to 450 and lightly butter a cookie sheet. Heat the broth in a saucepan; add mushrooms, butter and salt and bring to a boil. Slowly stir in flour a little at a time. Remove from heat and beat in eggs one at a time. Drop dough by tablespoons onto the cookie sheet, and bake for about 15 minutes until lightly golden brown on top. Cool them on a rack, then try not to devour them all at once. They are splendid slightly warm, and even better cold for lunch the next day.

Taking Stock: Table Scraps to Soup Broth

You may as well get every cent of value and every molecule of nutrition and flavor possible out of those organic vegetables that you either paid a fortune for or sweated hours in the garden over. Keep a big food-grade plastic bag in your freezer, and throw in all the onion ends, celery tops and bottoms, garlic peelings, tops and cores of bell peppers, mushroom stems, and twigs of herbs that you've dried. If you are so inclined, you can chop these bits into small pieces before freezing them, which makes your stock cook up faster and more flavorfully--but in the midst of dinner or salad preparation I must admit I usually don't take the extra time, but just toss them into the freezer.

I don't use brassicas like broccoli or cabbage leaves in my stock, as I don't like the taste. I like brassicas, just not in my stock, to me they impart a bitter taste but I know other cooks who use them and like the flavor. I don't eat meat, but occasionally eat fish and one summer after fishing I did make a batch of stock with the fish bones etc. in it as well, and it was really delicious; I used it later for making a fish chowder.

When the bag gets full enough, dump the contents into a large stock pot. Just cover the foodstuffs with water, add a bit of sea salt if you are so inclined (I do this, as I sort of feel it helps break the food down a little better and adds flavor, but I don't eat any processed or canned foods and don't really worry about excess salt in my diet; by all means leave it out if you prefer).

Simmer--don't boil--until there's nary an ounce of life left in the veggie scraps and they are all a brownish, colorless mass. Add water to bring the level up to just covering the vegetables if it starts to evaporate and boil off, but don't add too much or you'll wind up with a watery broth. Better to have a nice rich broth that you can water down later if need be.

Pour the hot broth through a colander into another big pot or bowl. Remember to put the pot or bowl under the colander. Yes, I say this through experience--my brain is so used to dumping pasta or things of that ilk into the colander where you save the stuff not the broth that I once poured the stock right down the sink. Sigh.

Send the veggie bits to the compost pile. Strain the stock once more if you like, through a fine mesh seive or cheesecloth. Stir well and pour it into quart or half gallon freezer containers and pop in the freezer to await your fall and winter soup and stew making. Freeze up a couple smaller batches for sauces and gravies if you like.  While I usually do this on cool autumn nights, my freezer was jammed full and I needed to make room for incoming vegetables, so I pulled the bag of stock veggies and took advantage of an unseasonably cool July evening to cook up this batch.

Happy thrifty cooking!

Sumac Tea: Free Summer Refreshment

The staghorn sumac, or Rhus typhina, grows as a 'weed tree' around these parts. It expands into islands about 20 feet out from the edges of woodlands in abandoned meadows, like the forest advance-guard, clearing the way for the aspen and birches to follow. As a kid I loved to play inside those island thickets, the tropical-looking leaf fronds forming a perfect roof and the open spaces between the trunks creating so many imaginary rooms.

Beginning in mid-July the staghorn sumac puts out distinct fuzzy red cone-shaped flower and berry clusters. Different stands seem to develop these velvety flower cones at different times from mid-summer to early fall, and I've not detected any particular rhyme or reason to the timing. The nice thing is, some patch nearby is always at its peak.

I use a pocket knife to snap off the whole berry clusters. You can just break them off with your hands, but sometimes the supporting twigs are a little tough, and you wind up either getting a mess of sap on your hands or breaking off a larger branch unnecessarily. Granted, sumacs are common as house cats so a small broken branch is not a huge disaster in the scope of the world, but still, it seems gratuitous, and besides, I like using my pocketknife.

At home, gently stuff the whole red berry cones into a glass jar. Fill with cold water. Let steep in a cool place, either just sitting indoors or, if it's not too hot out, in a sunny spot, but don't let it get too warm. The longer it steeps, the stronger it gets. Initially the brew will be a light pink with a mild refreshing flavor. As it gets darker it takes on tones of a hibiscus or rose hip tea, which it also resembles in its crisp, thirst quenching flavor. Strain the tea out through a cheesecloth or fine tea strainer, as the fuzzy bits from the berries can be irritating to the throat. You can sweeten it with simple syrup, honey or agave syrup, or drink it as is (I like it plain). It also makes a nice mix with green tea, or with a bit of lemon. 

If you leave sumac tea for a day or two, the color will turn black. This doesn't affect its flavor at all but it's not quite so appealing looking as that rosy pink freshness. I've read that sumac tea is high in Vitamin A and Vitamin C, though wild foods like sumac have not been the subject of much in the way of serious nutritional and medical research. The tea certainly has that high-vitamin-C red tanginess about it, and it has been consumed by residents of North America for thousands of years, so it stands to reason that, at the very least, it's not bad for you.

I've seen instructions on the internet saying boil water and make sumac tea like you would a hot herbal tea. Give it a try if you like but I don't think you'll like it; boiling releases the tannins and gives you a nasty bitter brew. If you want hot tea, steep the sumac at cool temperatures, strain out the sumac, then heat the tea in a mug in the microwave.

As with any new food, some people may have unexpected allergic reactions or intolerances, so don't go drinking a few gallons of sumac tea the first time you try it. Make a small glass and see if you experience any adverse effects at all; if so, leave it at that. More importantly, make sure you harvest sumac berries from a location that has not been sprayed with agricultural chemicals or road-and right-of-way clearing herbicides. These are much more likely to cause you ill effects than the sumac berries themselves. Sumac that is growing as part of a formal landscape is probably off limits both from an aesthetic and trespassing point of view as well as by virtue of likely having been doused with chemicals.

That said, sumac is abundant and often grows in neglected places where picking a few berry cones will do no harm at all. Its delicious tea is healthful, refreshing, and free, the perfect antidote to sugar and artificial color laden tubs of fake iced tea and lemonade mix. Better yet, it's an easy way to step into wildcrafting, and sharing the seasonal bounty of the local landscape.

She Can Bake An (Organic) Cherry Pie

Cherries are one of life's most precious ephemeral culinary joys. Sweet, tart, glossy, dripping from deep-green long-leaved trees perched on emerald hillsides under azure skies--nothing says summer like cherries. Except maybe a cherry pie.

The only conceivable way to improve on an honest-to-goodness fresh cherry pie is to make it from organic, or mostly organic, ingredients. Cherries are so rich in vitamins, anti-inflammatories and anti-oxidants, it seems a shame to mix them up with agricultural chemicals and food additives.

Cherries
 

The hardest part about baking an organic cherry pie is finding organic cherries. Check your local farmers market, and be sure to ask farmers about their growing methods--many small farmers and orchardists use organic or low-input sustainable farming methods, but don't go through the expense and difficulty of obtaining a USDA organic certification. Check your local natural foods market, and if you've won the lottery recently, you may also be able to mail-order organic cherries from places like The Fruit Company.  Or scout around and forage--many folks grow cherries as an ornamental tree and never harvest the fruit, but don't spray it with anything. Abandoned farmsteads may also have feral cherry trees still putting out glistening burgundy orbs for your eating pleasure. Use sour cherries if you can find them, as they make the most delicious pies.

Dry Goods
 
Organic, unbleached white flour is available in most natural foods markets--just smell it and make sure it doesn't smell like much of anything, which says it's still relatively fresh. If you can't find certified organic flour, unbleached flour like King Arthur All Purpose White Flour is a far sight better than the bleached kinds. Use a fine-grain sea salt with no additives for your baking salt. Organic, GMO-free cornstarch is available boxed from Rapunzel Organic, and in bulk at most natural food stores and co-ops. Rumford also puts out a GMO-free cornstarch although it's not USDA certified organic. American-grown, certified organic sugar is available from Florida Crystals. This is available packaged or in bulk at health food stores.

Other Ingredients
 
A good sour cherry pie should have a touch of lemon and lemon zest; shop for organic citrus at your local natural foods store. I like a shortening pie crust for cherry pie, as an oil crust gets hard to work with doing the lattice top, which can start to break apart.  I use Spectrum Natural's Vegetable Shortening which is certified organic palm oil shortening. I know that coconut and palm oils are saturated fats, but they are medium-chain fatty acids that work differently than lard does; long and short of it is they aren't really that bad for you.

Recipe

Unlike baking cakes with organic ingredients, baking an organic fruit pie does not call for any special techniques. I adapted this pie filling recipe from Ken Haedrich's classic book "Pie" and the pie crust from my falling-apart Betty Crocker Cookbook. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and pit 6 cups of cherries.

Crust: 

Mix 1 tsp. sea salt into 2 cups organic white flour with a fork in a medium bowl. Cut in 3/4 cup organic vegetable shortening. I like to work this in with my hands. Add 4 to 6 tablespoons very cold water one tablespoon at a time, tossing the flour mixture after each addition.

Roll out a large half of the dough into a circle and fit it to a deep 9 inch pie pan. Roll out the other half into a square  and cut it into 8 1-inch wide strips, using either a knife or a ruffle-edged pastry wheel.

Filling:

Place 6 cups of pitted organic cherries in a bowl. Mix with 1 and a 1/2 cups organic sugar  and 1/3 cup organic cornstarch.  Add 2 tsp. fresh squeezed organic lemon juice and the grated zest of 1 lemon.  Stir and pour into pie crust. Top with 2 tablespoons organic butter, cut into small pieces. 

Assemble the lattice strips in a woven pattern with 5 strips running in one direction and 3 in the other. Brush the top with milk and sprinkle with organic sugar. Bake at 400 for a half hour. Rotate the pie 180 degrees in the oven, drop the temperature to 375 degrees, and bake for another half hour or until golden brown on top and the filling bubbling over the edges. Cool for at least 2 hours to allow the juices to set. Serve with ice cream or fresh whipped cream with vanilla.

Book Review: Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning

Interesting point to ponder: People in the past ate a lot more than we do today. They weren't obese eating 8,000 or 10,000 calories a day, because they walked everywhere and nearly all labor was manual labor. The round belly of a banker or fleshy arms of a noble woman were indeed the unusual signs of prosperity, an indication of the exemption, not the rule.  Everyone else consumed what must have been vast quantities of meat, fish, fruits and vegetables to make their daily fuel needs, given the lack of high fat, high calorie snacks we can pack on today.

So where did all the food come from--especially in winter?

When we think of home food preservation today, we usually thinking of sticking things in the freezer or home boiling water bath or pressure canner two-piece-lid glass-jar canning methods. That's if we think of home food preservation at all, since nearly everything you could want to eat and more is available in the freezer section or in a steel can at your local grocery store. Both of these methods are relatively new inventions of the modern post-industrial era. But are they improvements?

Government health agencies warn constantly of lurking dangers in home canning like botulism, yet people get sick and die from commercial fresh and steel-canned goods as well. Take a step back in time from the home canning, and the food industry professionals really go apoplectic, insisting that a long bath in boiling water is the absolutely minimum that food should ever undergo before consumption, just to make sure everything in it is dead as a doornail.  Open the jar of green beans, and cue the horror movie soundtrack theme music.

Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning by the Gardeners and Farmers of Terre Vivante (Chelsea Green Publishing 1999) paints a different and much less frightening picture. Drying, lactic fermentation, oil, salt, sugar or alcohol are just a few of the old-school methods of food preservation still used by rural food fans in Europe, and now making a comeback amongst the American Localvore crowd. These methods retain more of the natural flavor and nutrients of the produce they preserve, transforming those elements into new food products different but just as worthy of enjoyment as the original fresh produce.

The book is less a how-to than a collection of letters from the horticulturalists and cooks of Terre Vivante, a non-profit ecological agricultural center in France. The book's warning page about food safety notes that common sense should apply--keep cooking surfaces and utensils clean, use only fresh, unspoiled produce, and if something smells or tastes 'off', then don't eat it.

Whether or not you dive in to make Lacto-Fermented Green Bean Soup or Sun-Cooked Cherries in Brandy, Preserving Foods Without Freezing or Canning is well worth a summer read, while the earth's bounty is bursting its buttons all around you. The sheer pleasure of contact with creative gardeners and farmers who have not leapt unquestioningly into modern food preservation methods, and who are generous enough to share the recipes and techniques passed down by their parents and grandparents in the language of friends and neighbors sharing the makings of their favorite dishes, is just delightful.

The take away lesson: The way we do things now is not necessarily the only, or best, way. And people in the past who dined on Pear Jam with Cinnamon or a stew of sun-dried tomatoes and eggplants are hardly the deprived, food-ignorant savages we often assume our ancestors to have been.  Read up, take heart, and dig in!

Break Free from Boredom: New Taste Sensations

Chocolate Mint, a Strong Peppermint Cultivar

One of the joys of loving real food is the adventure of new taste sensations. Once your tastebuds re-awaken to the myriad delights of real herbs and spices, tangy pickled and fermented vegetables, fresh fruits and whole grains that are not doused in salt and chemical preservatives, a whole new world opens up.

Paging through a magazine to avert waiting-room frustration two days ago I stumbled on a recipe that sounded like such an odd combination I had to run right home and try it: Mint pesto. Better yet, mint pesto served over strawberries.

Seeing the title of the recipe I immediately thought they were using the word 'pesto' loosely and that the ingredients would be mint and sugar, or something of that ilk. But no, it was basically a simple pesto recipe substituting mint for basil. I had made sage pesto before as a condiment for winter squash, but I could not for the life of me envision how mint and garlic were going to taste blended together.

Here's how I assembled it:

1 cup of fresh peppermint or chocolate mint leaves (I used the latter)
1/4 cup almonds (milder flavor than the traditional pine nuts or walnuts--cheaper, too)
1/4 cup mild grated parmesan cheese
1 garlic scape, woody bits removed (because these are in season; a clove or two of garlic would do)
Place all in blender and pour in enough light olive oil to let the blender mix it all together into a thick paste.

I served it with freshly sliced strawberries and Greek-style yoghurt; a nice neufchatel cheese with crusty bread would be another option. The result: fascinating. I'm not used to mint as a savory, rather than sweet, flavor. The mint oils and garlic create a lingering taste sensation that is tangy and energizing while at the same time so odd and different as to make you stop in your tracks and think about it.

As an anti-dote to slavish meat-and-potatoes, oatmeal-on-oatmeal with a side of fries dining, that's really not a bad thing. Cut loose this Independence Day and try a new flavor of real food. It just might start a culinary revolution.

Mint Pesto with Greek-style Yoghurt and Fresh Strawberries from Douglas Orchards

Food Security: Is the FDA Working For Us?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services charged with the tasks of regulating and promoting safety in foods, drugs, medical devices, cosmetics, radiation-emitting items, tobacco products, and animal foods and veterinary treatments and products. 

I am concerned with increasing indications that the FDA is not working for us appropriately in fulfilling these tasks. Controversies have long abounded regarding whether the FDA's institutional culture contributes to approvals of both drugs and food products, for example certain artificial sweeteners, on insufficient or questionable industry representations of safety. The many horrors and toxins present in our cosmetics, as described in well-supported detail by The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, certainly create the impression that the FDA just blew off cosmetic regulation on the theory that cosmetics aren't supposed to be ingested, so who cares if there's lead in lipstick (which there is).

Most Americans, and people elsewhere around the world, used to assume that products sold in the US were most assuredly the most modern and safe consumer goods in the world. Now, it is increasingly clear that the EU is taking a much more stringent line on protecting consumer safety with restrictions on chemicals in food, cosmetics and tobacco, and limitations on pharmeceuticals, far more stringent and protective than those in the United States.

When it comes to food security, now even the FDA itself is admitting its shortcomings.  In a newly released report entitled Pathway to Global Product Safety and Quality, the FDA notes that about 66% of American's vegetables and 80% of our seafood is imported from foreign countries. (Half the medical devices and over 80% of active pharmaceutical components are also imported.)

While at least some American consumers are concerned that our American food safety and agricultural chemical regulations are not adequate to protect our health, these imported foods are not even subject to these insufficient American regulations. We have no idea whatsoever what growing methods or chemicals or processing techniques have been used on garlic from China and asparagus from Argentina. While in theory there are FDA spot-checks of stuff coming in, in reality most of it passes from shipping port to plate with nary a glance by anyone other than grocery store shelf-stocking clerks.

The increasingly complexities of this import system are described well in n a June 22, 2011 article in The Atlantic by New York University Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health professor Marion Nestle.  

What I don't understand, however, is why in the most fertile and agriculturally productive nation on the planet, we are importing 66% of our produce, and with two long coastlines, why we are importing 80% of our seafood. If the FDA called me and asked for suggestions, I suppose I might propose we grow less high-chemical-intensive lawns and less dubiously-efficient ethanol and feed our people instead -- helping to make fresh fruits and veggies and seafood and affordable, healthy part of our daily consumption, improving our health and lowering our health-care costs in the process.  But hey, they don't call me. 

I have to concur with the suggestions of Mike Lieberman, author of the really fun blog The Urban Organic Gardener, that we grow our own food, shop farmers markets, join a CSA, and when that isn't enough, buy organic, American produce at the grocery store. (Ditto for seafood -- take your kids fishing, buy from fisherman at the dock and local seafood stores, and be sure to ask what the origin is of any seafood you buy elsewhere.)

But beyond that, I think it is seriously time to make restructuring the FDA and redefining its mission a top priority. Years ago, environmentalists targeted the USDA Forest Service, as it had developed an institutional culture that was far too intertwined with the large-scale wood products industry and had blinders on regarding making appropriate decisions to safeguard our public lands and natural and timber resources. While it was a bumpy ride for a number of years, the Forest Service today is a whole new agency, and my experience with them is that they now have a fabulous institutional outlook, dedicated to serving the public and making supportable, transparent decisions supporting the resources they have been entrusted to manage. (That's not to say I always agree with them, but boy, dealing with the USFS from the 1970's to today is like night and day.)

It is time for American citizens to turn their sites on the FDA in the same manner, demanding accountability and transparency. Get the conversation started with a note to your Congressional representatives linked to the recent FDA report, and let them know you want safe food -- and confidence in the folks who are supposed to be guarding the garden gate.

Guerilla Gardening

I'm about to suggest that you do something that might be a little illicit: Guerilla Gardening.

Live in an urban area with little more than a fire escape and a narrow windowsill on which to enact your gardening dreams? Renting a house but lacking permission to dig up the lawn for a garden? Don't despair.  Plant on somebody else's land.

Now yes, that's trespassing, but hear me out first.

In every developed region of the planet from small towns to huge cities, there are disturbed but abandoned sites covered with local opportunistic vegetation (also known as weeds, but that's in the eye of the beholder, I don't want to be overly judgmental). It may be a spot where a building was torn down, or a site prepared for a building but the owners were unable to secure permits or financing. It may be a corner dug out for a new highway interchange that got put off for a few years due to budgeting constraints.

What better place to throw in the fast-spreading herbs that thrive on poor soil and that you don't have room for in your own garden, like mint, lemon balm, bee balm, yarrow, parsley, dill, oregano and marjoram.

The trick is this: Throw in seeds or plants you get for free as splits from friends or relatives--you don't want to spend money on an ephemeral planting with no guarantee of how long it will be around to reap the harvest. This still leaves a lot of cheap and free planting choices that will yield culinary and tea herbs to delight you for months to come.

The personal safety rules are this: Don't climb or sneak under fences, approach a barking dog chained to guard the site that looks like it was borrowed from an old junkyard, go near any unstable pits or dirt piles, or dodge no-trespassing signs.  This still leaves a lot of available spaces.

The personal health rules? Watch out for poison ivy, and wash plants well before consuming, as you don't what car exhaust or passing stray dogs may have done to the plants when you weren't watching over them.

The ethical rules are this: Do NOT, ever, plant in a wild undisturbed area or in parklands. Invasive species, even those you love like chocolate mint, can wreak havoc on the natural environment and out-compete endangered local species or plants needed for local wildlife habitat. The idea is to plant in areas that are already disturbed and are slated for further disturbance--development, paving, etc.--in the foreseeable future. You are creating your own temporary foraging zones. Also be prepared to share -- should anyone else notice your plantings, they may well dive in and harvest too. Don't fight about it, in fact obviously you share common interests and might make good friends. The plants are not really 'yours,' you are just facilitating their existence in a place you can access.

Not quite at a comfort level for guerilla gardening? Start small -- the little patch of dirt around your street tree, or a small weedy strip between the street and sidewalk.  The benefit? Your green plants provided beauty and soil stabilization while they were growing, and left you with a potentially huge harvest of culinary and tea herbs for absolutely free.

And of course, you got a little thrill doing it, too, didn't you...

Waste Not, Want Not: A Thrifty Use for Every Leftover

About a third of America's food available for consumption is thrown in the trash, about a pound a day for every American, according to a report in the New York Times. And this while over 20,000 people a day die of hunger, 16,000 of them children. Saving your leftovers won't directly save the life of a malnourished child, but it will save you significant time and money on your grocery bills--resources that you can then re-direct in any number of positive directions.

The over-abundance of food constantly available in farmers markets, supermarkets, pharmacies and minimarts has numbed us to food's sacred value, much less its economic value. The cost of grabbing an iced coffee and a bunch of munchies on the road adds up quickly, both in dollars and negative health effects, but because it dribbles out a few bucks at a time we tend to ignore it.Getting used to using leftovers stops the hemorrhage of snack money and lets you squeeze every penny's worth out of your food budget in a significantly healthier way.

Here's a laundry list of leftover techniques to get you thinking about it:

Freezing.  I freeze leftovers of just about every variety both for reasons of frugality and health. Bake a traditional two layer cake recipe, for example, but just top one layer with frosting and fruit and slide the other layer in a zipper-close freezer bag, suck the air out of a corner, and pop it in the freezer for another occasion. You won't over-eat dessert, and you already have a nice treat made for another night. I freeze even the smallest leftover bits of icing as well as gravy, bechamel, and cheese sauce. But removing a cup of these rich sauces from the pot and freezing them before they even hit the table, I have dinner started for another night and that's one cup less to needlessly devour at that night's meal. Baked beans, grain pilafs, muffins, soups, casseroles, pasta sauces and cooked vegetables all freeze just fine. When we've inadvertently bought two containers of milk or buttermilk, I just stick one of those in the freezer too, unless I can foist it on a neighbor.

Label your freezer goods well, and group them together by use, such as putting all the sauces and all the desserts together. If the day promises to be hectic, take a peak in the freezer in the morning and pull out a container of sauce, veggies, rice pilaf, some leftover baked beans, and stick them in the fridge to thaw through the day. A quick heating at night and you have a nice balanced meal.

Omelets.  Eggs are getting redeemed in the eyes of nutritionists, who have realized that their cholesterol is not as bad as they once thought, and they provide valuable protein and micronutrients that protect vision health. Improve the healthful qualities of eggs by whipping up an omelet with last night's leftover vegetables and rice. Even a couple tablespoons of leftover green beans, cooked carrots or peas add vitamins and fiber to eggs and don't cost you an extra dime.

Pizza. Throw leftover spaghetti sauce and vegetables onto a homemade pizza. Go crazy and throw on leftover fruit, mushrooms that are getting beyond where you'd eat them fresh in salad, or leftover fish, chicken or beef.

Muffins. Bananas going bad, fruit that's got brown soft spots on it, a bag of cranberries or half a can of pumpkin puree never cooked at Thanksgiving, are all perfect fodder for muffins. Cook up a basic bran muffin recipe and throw in the extra fruit. If it's very juicy you might cut down slightly on the liquid in the recipe; if it's more than a cup of chopped fruit you might also add another egg to make sure it holds together.

Loaves and patties. Add an egg and some breadcrumbs to leftover mashed potatoes and beans, roll them into patties, spray lightly with cooking spray and bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, until they are golden brown, for an easy-to-grab lunch treat. Throw leftover mashed potatoes into a bread recipe for a high-rising loaf, or use whatever chopped vegetables you have in place of zucchini in a zucchini quick-bread recipe.

Soup.  Dump last night's leftover vegetables, rice and beans in a pot, add stock, and call it soup.

Sandwich Spreads. Most folks think a leftover turkey, cranberry and stuffing sandwich is even better than the turkey dinner the night before. Leftover meats sliced thin, or fish mixed with mayo and celery make obvious sandwich material, but leftover beans and veggies thrown in the blender -- with a touch of hot sauce if you're into that sort of thing -- make a fabulous sandwich spread or hummus-like dip.

What's YOUR favorite way to use up leftovers?

Garlic Scapes: Eat Them Now to Reduce Foreign Food Dependence--and Because They Are Delicious

Garlic scapes appear in gardens and farmers markets in mid-June. These curling, prehistoric looking false flower heads of the hardneck garlic rarely appear in supermarkets, but for garlic growers and folks lucky enough to live near garlic growers, scapes are an exciting marker of the harvest season. I look forward to my scapes all year with as much enthusiasm as I look forward to strawberries, sweet corn or pumpkins.

Garlic grows by cloning. In September, garlic growers plant individual cloves from their best garlic heads harvested earlier in the summer. The garlic heads that grow from each of those cloves are genetically identical replications of the heads that they came from. All the garlic grown is effectively one huge organism that keeps replicating over time, with subtle local variations in flavor or color. Despite the enticing photos on pages of catalogs offering countless garlic varieties, the best garlic to grow is that kind that already grows well in your area, so buy your garlic for planting locally, from someone else who has been doing it successfully. Just look for organically grown heads that haven't been treated with a sprouting inhibitor.

Cut when they are tender, around the time they make one single loop, garlic scapes can be used like garlic in any recipe from pesto to soup. Chopped fine and mixed with olive oil, scapes make a fabulous spread for bread. stirred into non-fat yoghurt that has been drained to leave a thick farm cheese, with just a pinch of sea salt and black pepper, along with whatever other fresh herbs you care to add, makes a delicious non-fat dip for veggies or pita chips.

Left on the plant, scapes become woody, and sap energy and volume from the garlic bulb below the soil. Eventually the false flower opens into tiny bulbils. These can also be grown into garlic, but it takes a minimum of two years to do so. You plant the garlic bulbils and grow them into single cloves one year,  then plant those cloves the next year to let them develop into heads of garlic.

Garlic is rich in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants and is touted for near-magical healing powers due to its antibiotic effect. Garlic heads store well hung in a mesh bag in a warm dry place. Garlic can be dried and ground into garlic powder, or peeled and chopped and placed in a jar covered with olive oil and stashed in the refrigerator for easy use in winter recipes. 

Growing your own garlic allows you to reap two fully harvests from the same plant--the scapes in June, the garlic heads in August. It's easy to grow a full years supply of garlic for a family of four garlic-lovers, plus enough garlic to replant in the fall for next year's crop, in a single 4' by 8' raised bed. Garlic plants are incredibly dramatic, almost tropical, and can be grown attractively mixed in with flower beds or landscaping. On a balcony garden, garlic can be grown as single plants in the center of a 5 gallon bucket, surrounded by greens like chard, spinach and lettuce. Even a windowbox can support a few garlic plants as a backdrop for summer flowers; when you harvest the garlic midsummer, substitute in your fall mum plants.

More and more garlic in American supermarkets is being imported from China. This humble, delicious and powerful bulb that can easily be grown in all climate and hardiness zones all across North America, that takes up little garden space and is even suitable to container gardening, is getting loaded onto container ships and, at the cost of vast quantities of petroleum, shipped half way around the world to wind up on American plates.  I urge everyone to plant some garlic for themselves this fall, improving our food security by reducing our dependency on foreign food imports. If that's not practical for you, go buy some garlic scapes at your local farmers market now to help support your local garlic growers.

Food and Life Expectancy

A report issued this week by Washington University's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that in the decade from 1997-2007, American life expectancy effectively stagnated, with significant drops in life expectancy in nearly a thousand rural counties. Preliminary data through 2009 indicates a precipitous drop in the national life expectancy in just those two years, from 75.5 years to 73.5 years for men and from 81 to 80.8 years for women. 

What's more interesting to me is that life expectancy in Victorian England, when you pull out infant mortality that skews the stats, is 75 years for men, and 73 years for women, according to a detailed study published in the 2008 Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. So in the intervening years, we've drastically decreased infant mortality due to the advent of antibiotics, and we've decreased maternal mortality with fewer women dying in childbirth, and women having fewer children with the advent of birth control, which also adds to women's lifespans.  Men's longevity effectively has not changed.

Moreover, people of the Victorian era in England ate about twice as many calories as we do each day--but all of it was non-processed, unrefined foods with little added sugar and no additives, preservatives, coloration, no pesticides, insecticides and herbicides, just all real food. They were healthier, the researchers at the Royal Society of Medicine concluded, as they were constantly exposed to biota that challenged, and then strengthened, their immune systems; their diet was rich in omega-3s and a wealth of other nutrients, with no such thing as empty calories; and, they moved all day. Walking, riding, lifting, digging, carrying, whatever it may be. All labor was manual labor, and merely going to the store involved walking there then carrying your packages back. These folks were strong.

The reasons for our present drop in life expectancy? The press coverage of this present report release emphasize lack of health insurance and the need for more mammograms and other screening machinery and techniques. Those explanations would bolster the interests of the medical industry which has exploded in size and cost during precisely the same time period that our life expectancy has been dropping. The other explanations from the report have been barely mentioned. They are obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, and smoking.

When the agribiz lobby fearmongers about food security, they talk as if the US is going to starve to death if we don't ensure that more chemical laden wheat gets turned into refined white flour products each year. But that is not the problem we are faced with. The problem we are faced with is that we are eating far too much of the wrong types of foods, and it costing us tons of money and killing us off before our time. A return to a saner diet rich in non-chemical-laden, non-processed, unrefined foods will make us healthier and wealthier. Walking to the garden or the local farmers market to procure it rather than driving to the box store wouldn't hurt, either. Hanging on to our burgers-fries-cola American lifestyle in the face of skyrocketing health care costs and plummeting life expectancies is the height of folly.

Eat your veggies, and save the nation.

The Price of Gas: Stop Eating Petroleum

Shop Your Local Farmers Market and Save Fuel

 

As I write this, gasoline is topping $3.50 a gallon.  According to quite a number of media reports, by the time you read this, that price could be well on its way to $4 in time for peak summer travel season.  That’s like $50 for most folks to fill the tank of gas.

Ouch.

When you think about the relationship between gas prices and food shopping, the first thing that probably comes to mind is the gas you put in your car’s tank.  Rising prices may mean that you become more conscious about the efficiency of your shopping trips, hitting all your errands on the same drive in as your grocery-gathering trip to local supermarkets or area box stores.

But the fact is, you are consuming far more gasoline with the products in your shopping cart than you are in your car’s gas tank.   No, I don’t mean you are actually eating oil – though you are, in small amounts. Rather, the amount of petroleum required to grow and, more importantly, to ship, much of the food you are purchasing is astronomical. 

According to Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based global home-food growing movement (www.kitchengardeners.org), “Ingredients for the average meal travel between 1000-2500 miles from field to table, 25% farther than they did 2 decades ago, using up to 17 times more fossil fuels than a meal made with local ingredients.”  And while in 1907 between a third and a half of the food consumed in the United States was home-grown on farms and in gardens, today 100 years later, that figure is nearly zero.  

The Idea Was Suburban Homesteads

The original concept for suburban development was the notion of “for every man, a farm.”  The point was to enfranchise people by ensuring that all were landowners, meaning that all had the inherent political power and freedom which comes from self-sufficiency: that half acre to five acre lot was originally envisioned as being used to grow all the produce, fruit, and small livestock and poultry a family could need, meaning citizens would not be reliant on government and corporate organization of food production and distribution. Land and food are wealth; the person who is growing much of their own food on land they own themselves can not be starved out, subjected to ‘clearances,’ or sent to forced labor in factories and mines, as happened time and again to the landless tenant classes of Europe.  

Ironically, today we have more landowners in the U.S. than ever before, and yet home food production has fallen to nil.  Those suburban lots have been turned over to lawn, itself a huge consumer of petroleum products and producer of little but pollution and the color green. Lawnmowers in the U.S. alone consume more than 800 million gallons of gas annually, and the EPA says 17 million gallons of gas are spilled in refueling mowers every year, which is more than was released in the Exxon Valdez disaster.  Studies indicate that an hour of mowing puts out as much air pollution as a 100-mile drive in an average sedan.  Use a hand mower.  Stop mowing and plant flowers for bees.  It’s not laziness.  It’s good global citizenship.  Better yet, turn at least part of that lawn into a vegetable garden. And when you do go grocery shopping, buy local. 

Why ‘buy local’?  Why not just ‘buy organic’? 

 If you want the full-blown answer, pick up a copy of Michael Pollan’s newest book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.” A New York Times journalist and professor at U.S. Berkeley, Pollan set out to discover the roots and paths that led from ingredients to four different meals on his plate.  The first is a McDonald’s meal, and the last a dinner comprised almost exclusively of things Pollan hunted (a wild boar) and foraged (mushrooms, fruit hanging over a neighbor’s fence) himself.  In between are two farm-based meals. 

The book explores nearly every moral food question you can imagine, from the political economics of subsidized commercial corn and livestock feedyards, to vegetarianism, animal rights, and hunting.  (I use this book as a text for an Introduction to Ethics class I teach at a local community college.)  As a vegetarian of over 30 years who prefers organic when practical, I thought I already knew a lot of what there is to know about food production.  But Pollard’s well-researched assessment of commercial organic farms taught me a thing or two. 

Pollard visited the grounds of the two biggest organic produce growers in the U.S., Earthbound Farms and Cal-Organic. The good news is that he found these companies to be far better than most commercial agricultural operations in their pay scales and treatment of farm labor and business employees. And the other good news is that, of course, these operations are growing organically.  That means less petroleum-based pesticides are going into the ground, and you don’t have to worry about nasty trace chemicals left on the produce and going into your body or into your kids.  To those ends, the Cal-Organic carrots and Earthbound lettuce is certainly better than non-organic commercial produce.

But from a petroleum-consumption standpoint, the commercial organic and commercial non-organic products come out virtually even.  Pollard’s research led him to the conclusion (double-checked by economists from Berkeley) that at the end of the day, organic commercial produce utilizes about 4% less petroleum in its production than nonorganic commercial produce.  While the petroleum is saved in the course of pesticide choices, it is matched and even lost in the refrigeration, packing, and shipping processes.  That organic lettuce, without preservatives sprayed on it, is whisked into refrigerated processing buildings instantly upon picking, is packaged in plastic, and kept in refrigerated cars right up to your plate, all fueled with petroleum (and cooled with CFCs to boot). 

Fuel Savings Is Food Security

About one-fifth of the petroleum used in this country is used to ship food.  It takes about 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of California lettuce that winds up on a Vermont dinner plate. Fuel savings and food security go hand in hand – and national security, in the form of greater energy and food self-sufficiency, is one more benefit of buying local.

Fact is, we live in a place blessed with rich productive soil and talented people who have not forgotten the skill of gathering and coaxing food from the land around us.   Whether from your own garden, the farmers markets and farmstands, or food co-op , buy local, and stop wasting gasoline in the supermarket check-out line.