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.