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. 

Food Security: Preparing for Emergencies at Home

Housewife manuals and home economic teachers used to preach the benefits of having a 'paper cupboard' -- a back corner of your kitchen cabinets that you'd fill with tinned and dried goods that required no cooking or minimal preparation in event of emergency. You'd tape butcher paper over the corner after added things like emergency candles and matches, creating a false wall so that you would not accidentally use up your stash. Once a year you'd rip the paper down, have a fake hurricane party roasting marshmallows over the candle, and re-stock the paper cupboard. Unless, of course, a real disaster had occurred in the mean time.

I don't have an official paper cupboard, but I often ponder the appropriate definition and scale of home food security. It's reasonable to think ahead to likely potential disasters like massive storms, power outages, or an economic crisis that creates a run on banks and supermarkets. On the other hand, I'm not prepared to dig a full-scale bomb shelter out back and stock it with a year's worth of provisions. I'm not saying that folks who do that are unreasonable, and there may come a day when I say gee, weren't they the smart ones. But it's a question of weighing the odds of circumstances occurring where that would be necessary against the time, money and effort that would have to be transferred from other things in life to do it.

I think every New Englander has a stash of emergency candles and matches, and we've got oil lamps as well, though we should probably make a point of storing up  more lamp oil. The new-fangled version of emergency candles are these nightlights that you leave plugged in to an outlet, and when the power goes off, their flashlight beam automatically comes on. Then you can pull it out of the wall and use it as a regular flashlight. This has been of use to me on several occasions.

A wood stove is invaluable in an emergency. It provides heat and you can cook on it and dry your clothes around it, and it will burn just about anything. I'm not worried about storing only foods that can be eaten uncooked in my emergency stash, because I can cook just about anything on the wood stove. If you don't have a wood stove, a Coleman camp stove is the next best thing. You can take it camping or to tailgate parties, but if you keep your fuel supplies well-stocked, you can also get through a week's power outage with hot soup and baked beans every day. For less that $100, it's a fine investment. Even with the wood stove, we have a few of these as well as small backpacking stoves.

I figure water is the most critical thing to ensure you have enough of in an emergency. I'm fortunate enough to live in an area that has an abundance of water running in the stream beds even in the dry season of late August, and even more fortunate to have discovered that the town water in my area flows into my sink taps even when the power is out due to some fluke of gravity feed in the system. But a big storm, earthquake, deep freeze or nuclear fallout might well make those water sources unusable for a bit, or at least make it unattractive to go out in a minus-zero blizzard to lug in snow to melt and filter for water.

I gathered up plastic milk jugs for a while (I rarely buy these myself as I hate plastic, but plenty of other folks were happy to give me some), washed them out well, and filled them with the beautiful water from the spring up the road that has a bit of a local following. Not quite a fountain of youth but people say good things about it. I put all these milk jugs in the bottom of my 14 cubic foot chest freezer (picked up for free three years ago courtesy of FreeCycle , a resource I highly recommend). Then I laid some pegboard over the milk jugs to create a new false bottom for the freezer. I figure this does triple duty: I save on electricity by having the freezer fuller; it will help keep my frozen goods frozen longer in a power outage; and it serves as an emergency water supply. There are over 20 gallons of frozen water in there. After that, I'll have to lug snow.

Next there's food. Fortunately, I don't have to do a lot of tweaking of my larder for emergency preparation. I can all of our salsa, chutney, spaghetti sauce, relishes, pickles, sauerkraut, applesauce, jams and jellies, and stock for making chili, so there is always a good supply of these. If disaster strikes in May or early June, we might be a bit low as it's the time of year I'm running out the old supplies in preparation for the new round of canning in the coming weeks. But except for running out of the odd favorite or two (pickled beets, the black bean salsa) there's always at least a couple weeks of food in the pantry.

In addition to the canned goods, my larder is well stocked with dried staples bought in bulk at the natural food co-op. These include:

--Grains. Several types of brown rice, along with quick-cook grains like bulghur, quinoa and couscous. These latter can actually be softened up just by soaking if for some reason I run out of books and junk mail to keep the wood stove going. I also always have a huge jar of popcorn on hand.

--Beans. Several types of beans, split peas and lentils. I've been experimenting towards the direction of growing these myself but haven't yet reached the point of being able to produce any real quantity of them in my limited growing space. Beans and water simmering on the wood stove can be easily morphed into chili, baked beans, or soup depending on what else I dump into it.

--Sweeteners, oils and vinegar. I always have sugar, brown sugar, honey and molasses on hand, and of course a big jug of maple syrup. Canola and olive oil along with peanut and sesame oil. A wardrobe of vinegars including white, cider, balsamic, red wine, and rice. Honey and olive oil seem the hardest to keep stocked up. I try to follow the old rule of buying two, then buying a replacement when the first one is empty, but depending on weekly finances that doesn't always work.

--Flour and baking supplies. We buy our white flour in a 50 pound sack and keep it in a big plastic tote. I also always have whole wheat and rye flour and cornmeal. For the last year, the cornmeal has been my own home-grown. It's amazing how much cornmeal you can get from a small plot of heirloom dent corn. My whole wheat flour is grown and milled here in my county, and I'm partial to King Arthur unbleached white flour, which is at least sourced in my region and sold through a Vermont company. I do have to make conscious note to keep the baking soda, baking powder, and cornstarch well supplied. One thing that helps both in baking and keeping track of this is that I keep all three of these, as well as meringue powder and cream of tartar, in one big rectangular Tupperware container on the shelf of my little baking cart. This makes finding them to bake supremely simple, and I can make note of what's running low any time I open the container. I do try earnestly to keep doubles of all these on hand. I've also always got yeast and a sourdough starter going.  Bread, tortillas, biscuits, pitas and pancakes can all be cooked up on the wood stove.

--Herbs and spices. My dad made me a beautiful spice shelf years ago, from a limb of a black walnut tree that had fallen down at my great grandparent's farm. It is stuffed full of herbs and spices in alphabetical order--but don't be impressed, it's the one and only place in my house that is organized. Any jar that runs low I set on top of my bread box on the counter so I can easily note it next time I run to the co-op, or next time I'm stocking the dehydrator with herbs from the garden.

--Coffee and tea. For a caffeine addict like me, my biggest fear is running out of coffee. We usually have enough of the good stuff to get us through, but I confess that I do stash a jar of instant coffee way up on the top shelf of the pantry in a back corner where I will forget about it until I am in a desperate caffeine-starved state. I  have thought about filling one of those milk jugs in the chest freezer with coffee instead of water, just in case. We also have a large stash of black and herb teas, and a whole shelf of jars of dried herb teas from the garden.

--Dairy and Eggs. We buy cases of butter and cheddar and monterey jack cheese from a Vermont manufacturer when they have an annual caseload sale, and stick them in the chest freezer. Freezing does not seem to do them any harm, although the cheese can sometimes get crumbly when it thaws. Since I mostly grate it into sauce or over nachos, this works fine for me. I grab some canned condensed milk and sweetened condensed milk when it's on sale at the supermarket now and again and try to keep a couple cans of each on hand, as well as a box of powdered milk packets. I use the canned milk in baking a few things (like pumpkin pie) so it's handy anyway. As for the powdered milk...let's be honest, it's to put in my coffee in case the power is out and I'm snowed in and can't go get milk. I have my priorities. A couple aseptic packaging boxes of soy milk are also there in a pinch. I've also got chickens, and several dozen eggs in the fridge with more coming daily. I suppose if things got terribly desperate, the chickens could be renamed Stew...

--Veggies. I've got tons of veggies, all the time. From May to November, there's plenty fresh in the garden. From November to about February, there are plenty of winter squash, celeriac, carrots, potatoes, beets, turnips and other root crops stored in crates. And all year round there is an ample stash of veggies in the freezer, from beet greens to green beans to cubed butternut squash, broccoli and cauliflower, and chopped tomatoes. I slice, bread and fry eggplant and freeze it in freezer bags so they can be pulled out and layered for eggplant parm. Huge vats of borscht, lentil soup, corn chowder and a variety of mixed veggie soups are frozen in pint, quart and half gallon containers so we can pull them out for individual meals or an impromptu dinner party. If the power goes out, we'll eat a lot of veggies but it will be several long weeks before they'd start to go bad. I've also got canned and frozen fruit, from berries to apple pie filling and halved pears, along with apple rings dried in the dehydrator when they are in season.

The irony is, this isn't a special stash of food for emergencies -- this is just the ordinary inventory of my larder. No processed, refined, packaged goods. Not much that's going to go bad, other than the milk in the fridge and veggies that are always being replenished. I'm not worried about running out of chips or cookies or lunchmeat, as I never have those things anyway.

Food security at home for me is not so much a matter of special emergency planning as it is a consistent peace of mind, knowing that whatever happens in the world, from a personal financial disaster to a massive natural disaster, food will not be a worry for me for quite some time. My pantry shelves are full of real, nourishing food that will sustain me and my family, and probably several neighbors, through whatever befalls. If, when a crisis hits, it looks like it's going to last more than the month or so it'll take for me to eat through my larder, then I'll rethink what can be planted in the short term and ponder rationing out the supplies on hand so that they'll last several months instead of dining in elegance for three full meals a day.

Just as long as I have my coffee...

Eggs

An ivory box without hinges or lid, but inside a golden treasure is hid.

As every Tolkien afficionado knows, the answer to this Hobbit riddle is ‘eggses,’ the calcium-coated chicken ovum eaten all the world over.   

Chickens were reputedly domesticated more than 8000 years ago, and chicken eggs are a nearly ubiquitous element of human culture. Hundreds of different varieties of chickens have been bred, some with exotic feathers just for show, others for meat production, and still others – like Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds – for superior egg production.   

Most small-flock local egg producers choose varieties with mixed characteristics, including Plymouth Barred Rocks and Wyandottes that are consistent layers but also look pretty. Araucana chickens are also popular with home egg producers as they lay those crowd-pleasing blue to olive-green eggs, which is so much fun that it’s well worth the fact that they don’t lay as consistently as something like a Rhode Island Red.  Contrary to legend, it is not necessary to have a rooster in order for chickens to lay eggs – but many home egg producers keep a rooster nearby anyway, believing that it gives the hens “encouragement.” 

Happy Chickens Make the Best Eggs

Chickens are inexpensive to raise, and, weather permitting, can roam and forage on their own through the day in many different environments, then come home at night to roost in nearly any snug dry place, laying their eggs in the morning right where you can find them before heading out to forage again.  Happy chickens are sociable creatures, seem to enjoy human company and make a full range of ‘chitchat’ sounds that are downright conversational.  

I have seen chickens kept under tiny residential stairwells in a small white stucco town high in Spain’s Andalusian mountains, and stashed into basement window ledges of modern urban buildings in Karachi, New Delhi, and Islamabad. In the Middle East and India, hard boiled eggs are sold by street vendors the way pretzels or nuts are sold in New York City.  The egg comes wrapped in a newspaper cone, with your choice of spice mixture at the bottom to dip it in, from herbed salt to firey hot pepper melange. 

Here in Addison County we suffer from an embarrassment of riches when it comes to eggs.  While folks in urban areas have to make do with bland, less-than-fresh eggs from their supermarket shelves, we have a local commercial egg producer, Maple Meadow, just down the road, as well as numerous small farm and home producers that grow eggs for personal use or farmer’s market and natural food co-op sale. 

Fresh eggs from healthy chickens who eat a varied diet and are free to walk around are distinctly different from factory-farm eggs. The fresh ones usually have thicker shells, brighter yolks, and a thicker, ‘meatier’ feel. There is one small disadvantage to fresher eggs though – the shells often stick to the whites after they are hardboiled, so if egg salad won’t do and lovely deviled eggs are absolutely necessary, you can always swap a dozen fresh local organic eggs with a dozen someone has bought from a  supermarket, and rest assured they’ll be better off for it.  Or just stick a dozen local eggs in the back of the fridge for a few weeks, and then make your deviled eggs.

Nutritional Treasure

Like meat, eggs contain complete protein.  At only 70 calories per single large egg, they also pack a nutritional wallop, including 15% of the RDA of Riboflavin and Folate, and 30% of the RDA of vitamin B-12 as well as significant amounts of vitamins A, D, and E.  Nutritional controversy rages, however, over eggs cholesterol content.  For several decades, nutritional guidelines have recommended stringently restricting the intake of dietary cholesterol on the theory that dietary cholesterol intake corresponded with blood cholesterol levels, and high blood cholesterol was associated with heart attack risk.  More recent studies call this correlation into question, and in 1999 the Harvard School of Medicine published an extremely extensive study in the Journal of American Medical Association indicating that of 177,000 people studied for 8 years, no difference whatsoever in heart attack incidences was found between those who ate less than one egg a week and those who ate more than one egg a day.  (JAMA 1999;281:1387-1394) If you are unconvinced, or your predisposition to heart disease makes you reasonably cautious, skip or minimize egg yolks: the white contains many of the positive nutritional components of eggs, but has no cholesterol.  With the rich, meaty texture of fresh eggs, you can easily make an omelet or scrambled eggs with three or four egg whites and perhaps one yolk, and not miss a thing.

Other recent nutrition news suggests that eating eggs has other previously unknown advantages. Dietary studies show that eggs for breakfast provide such a nice filled-up feeling that dieters tend to eat significantly fewer calories through the rest of the day.  And egg yolks have recently been discovered to be great sources of lutein and zeaxanthin, two substances that reduce the risk of cataracts and macular degeneration.  These nutrients are also present in green leafy vegetables, but may be more easily absorbed into the bloodstream when consumed in eggs.  Best yet, combine leafy greens and eggs in a wilted greens salad or spinach and broccoli quiche, and double your nutritional punch.

WILTED SPINACH SALAD

2 large bunches of fresh spinach

2 hard boiled eggs

2 tablespoons chopped chives or green onions

1 tomato

2 tablespoons crumbled strong blue cheese

juice of one lemon

2 tablespoons olive oil

optional – 1 tsp capers, or crumbled crisp bacon or tofu bacon substitute

fresh black pepper and sea salt to taste

Rinse spinach; place in large pot with just the water that clings to the leaves.  Heat on medium low just until wilted but still bright green.  Remove from pot, squeeze out excess water, and place in salad bowl.  Peel and chop hard boiled eggs.  Cut tomato in half, squeeze out and discard seeds, and chop the pulp.  Add eggs, tomatoes, and all remaining ingredients to wilted spinach and turn with two wooden spoons until well mixed.  Serve while still slightly warm.

Eating Lean--On Your Pocketbook

Food prices are up. Fuel prices are up. Unemployment is up, again. Income and equity are down. Many families are feeling the pinch--often right around the waistline. The irony is that some of the most processed, least healthy foods out there are also the cheapest. My heart aches to see parents at the grocery store with a cart loaded full of instant noodle packages, liters of soda, and generic cookies, but I know that it would have taken three times the money to buy enough fresh fruit and vegetables, orange juice and whole-grain baked goods to feed the whole family.

The good news is that by planning ahead and embracing the natural cycle of abundance that rolls through the seasons, you can eat well and even feed a family well on healthful foods on a very modest food budget. Eating lean can be a boon to both your waistline and your pocketbook--if you make it a priority to learn about natural foods and how to cook them and are willing to embrace a lifestyle that focuses on food and family economic security. I realize these changes may not be easy for some, but they are well worth it.

Growing any food you can on your own is always worth it, even if it's just a cherry tomato plant in a 5 gallon bucket on a tiny front stoop and a few heads of lettuce in a windowbox. But even if you can't grow your own food, there are cheap, secure options for ensuring your family eats healthy foods in lean times.

One option is foraging, anything and everything you can. Find a knowledgeable naturalist; even in the urban landscape, cress, lamb's quarters, dandelions and other greens poke through the sidewalks while plums, apples and pears go unpicked in decorate suburban landscapes. I've knocked on many a suburban door and asked if I could pick the plums on the landscape tree out front in exchange for returning a few jars of plum jam. Some folks have shooed me off like I was nuts, muttering about potential liability, but others have been thrilled to learn that the bush some landscape company planted in the front yard is really a delicious fruit tree. (Just wash this stuff well; urban and suburban landscapes tend to be chemical-intensive.)

Hunting and fishing go hand in hand with foraging, and are a time-honored traditional way of putting food on the country plate. Check with your state's fish and game department regarding laws, seasons and licensing requirements. Also check with them about the disposition of road kill and poached game--seriously. Here in Vermont, many a family eats well off the deer and moose meat dispersed by Fish and Game to the folks who sign up on a list to receive seized and freshly road-killed animals. In coastal areas, those day-fishing trips can be a great food investment, as if you plan your timing right you'll inevitably wind up with fish for your freezer that would have cost way more at the supermarket than you paid for the excursion ticket.  Hunters and fishermen are also universally generous folks, and often can't convince their own families to eat all the game or fish they bring in, so asking at the local fish and game club if anyone has any spare bounty to share or perhaps to barter for can often fill your freezer.

Filling your freezer is also the name of the game for fruits and vegetables. But in season, and just give fruit a quick wash and vegetables a quick blanching and throw them in the freezer in plastic bags. Suck the air out of the bags before sealing for your own imitation vacuum-packing that helps prevent freezer burn.

Asparagus, zucchini and green beans are pricey in February, but gardeners and market farmers literally give them away at the peak of the season. Berries and tree fruit are often free for the picking, or inexpensive at pick-your-own joints. I buy huge bags of apple drops from a nearby orchard for just a few dollars, picking up perfect fruit off the ground after a windstorm. I make all our applesauce for a year plus several cases to donate to the food shelf on way less than $20 worth of apples.Market farmers sell canning tomatoes by the bushel box during August; if you don't can your own sauces, just chop them up and freeze them for winter cooking.

Buying grains, pasta and beans in bulk from a food co-op or natural foods store rather than buying packaged rice pilafs and canned beans saves money and eliminates all the salt and other additives in the packaged, processed products. Brown rice and dried black beans, kidney beans and black eyed peas are all way less than a dollar a pound when bought in bulk. With these dried goods, just a bit of oil, cooking water, and your cheap in-season vegetables, you are well on your way to a healthy well-balanced meal for very little money.