Eating isn't optional

I've had the opportunity to have a number of conversations recently with people who care passionately about the food they eat and how it was raised. Interestingly, these are people who came to these positions (and in two cases, to producing their own foods at least in part) by somewhat different routes, but they share a conviction of not going back to "the way things were." They have made conscious choices and are committed to standing by them.

Food and food choices are important for a number of reasons - but none more succinct than one that occurred to me a while ago. And that is: eating isn't optional. We all have to do it. We need nourishment every day or certainly quite regularly if we are to live. Nothing is much more basic than that unless it's air and water. Food can be tasty or bland, nutritious or junk. It can be fresh or stale, prepared or raw (at least in some cases...), local or from a foreign country. And for all the choices we seem to have about the foods we eat in this country, we actually don't have too many unless we grow our own food.

With the limited varieties of produce that is grown to withstand shipping and the incorporation of corn and soy in products of all kinds we limit ourselves. By eating prepared foods rather than cooking from scratch, we limit ourselves. By choosing the familiar and not taking a chance on a new vegetable, we limit ourselves. And by buying food based primarily on price in the big markets we further limit our choices because we miss out on what smaller growers and producers may be offering. No question it is a challenge in these times to stretch budgets for food as well as everything else. But although you don't have an option of whether or not to eat, if you have the option to choose healthier, tastier, more nutritious food, why not?  

Another voice of concern...and what one person can do...

OPINION

An Almanac of Extreme Weather

By JACK HEDIN

Published: November 27, 2010

The unexpected forces that reshaped my farm.

This article clearly articulates concern. And it tells the back story, about how this person and his family met the adversity that climate havoc (to which he admits his own contribution) wrought in the past. More importantly, he talks about his willingness to tackle that havoc again. 

It made me think about the importance - too often forgotten or not believed - that what one person does, matters. While we certainly need more than one person to address the challenges we face, choices you and I make about how we live, what we buy or discard, what we choose to eat, how we travel and more do have an impact. They can influence others as well as lighten the load, however minutely, of the burdens our world bears. 

Shore of Plenty

There is a grass roots organization right here in Southwest Michigan that has held seed swaps, seedling sales and a growers market in an effort to encourage better eating, to support local growers and to just have a heck of a good time.

Its an eclectic group and if you are interested in finding out what we're doing, please visit the group's Ning site or Facebook page. shoreofplenty.ning.com or search Facebook for Shore of Plenty. We'd love to have you join us and become active in one of the most important things that we do - eat!

More rational regulation

SB 510 is something that has a lot of people up in arms. Having safe food is important to everyone. The source of tainted food - when it happens - is less obvious than we might hope, and the current way of ensuring safety doesn't make sense on many levels. The above bill is making its way - with amendments - through the Senate. I hope that it passes, with the Tester Amendment.

Links:
Michael Pollen on SB510

Thoughts on the Tester Amendment

Small Cheesemaker Defies F.D.A. Over Recall

New Food Companies

I spent most of Tuesday at the Making It In Michigan Conference in Lansing MI. It is an annual event that showcases the state's food entrepreneurs and their products - Yum! But more than a treat for the tastebuds, it's a testimony to the grit required to take a good (food) idea and get it into production - even if that production is small and local. The Product Center at Michigan State University helps people through the maze of regulations, laws, requirements and business issues that - in all honesty - they probably don't even want to deal with. They just want to make their product.

I have no issues with people being held to standards that ensure that their products won't kill others. But it seems that we've gone into overkill. How many times have you been sickened by eating at another person's home by their bad preparation of something? I suspect the answer is "0" to very infrequently. I'm not talking about ingesting something you are allergic to, but bad cooking skills or bad food products.

People who enjoy cooking for others seem to be a group that care that their audience both enjoys their food and comes back for more. So I would suspect they are pretty competent in terms of keeping people healthy who eat their food. Now I understand that scaling up production has a challenges, however I really wonder if every individual hoop that these food entrepreneurs had to jump through was really absolutely necessary....might food be less costly if regulation were less? Did regulation become necessary because food processing/production became a business? Hmmmm.....

Happiness

I love simple pleasures and an author who captures them for me is Verlyn Klinkenborg. Here a taste...

Hickory Rain

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: October 18, 2010 in the New York Times

It can be hard to explain where happiness comes from. But come it does.

Food for thought...

There is an assumption that says that food should be cheap. Ideally to feed the masses, but as it turns out, the process of making food inexpensive has enriched a few (companies like Monsanto that patent seeds, for example), impacted our health and environment and made a global business out of a fundamental human need.

Eating isn't optional. The link between garden (or farm) and table, should, in my opinion, be as short as possible for a host of reasons. Carbon footprints, freshness and nutrition are all good reasons for a distribution chain with fewer links. Increased connection to the seasons and the "terroir" of various foods, as well as the specialness of items only available in season are others.

When anyone anywhere can have anything anytime, what is "special" anyway?  

60 pounds of tomatoes

Last week I processed 60 pounds of tomatoes. By myself. Some were canned, some were dehydrated, and some were made into my favorite "soup starter" and then canned. This experience is something that took two full days to complete. With help it might have been done more quickly, but even so, it still would have been an investment of time.

It was also an investment of money. I ran out of jars and had to run out and get more. Years of giving my canning efforts as gifts resulted in too many unreturned jars. I wonder if those jars ended up in the trash. I really must do a better job of asking for them back. And even though the tomatoes were inexpensive ($.50 per pound), $30 for tomatoes is probably more than I would spend on all the canned tomatoes I would buy at the store in a year.

So why did I make this investment?

Although my mother canned many things and made jellys, preserves, pickles and applesauce, she never canned tomatoes. And I didn't learn to can from her. I was introduced to the joy of canning more than 20 years ago by a younger friend, Holly. It was a social experience that produced edible results. Over the years I canned with friends and enjoyed laughs, ate mistakes and sipped wine as we worked through the annual ritual. Now that I have moved away from those friends, I still can, even alone. I remember. I still enjoy the process and I still produce a result that makes me smile when I see the jars lined on the shelf of my pantry in the dead of winter.

What is a "right"?

I recently posed a question on LinkedIn. So far I've had a handful of replies from people I don't know. Wouldn't know if they walked in the room. Chances are there is all kinds of bias in these answers and the ones still to be posted. However, it is a start to a discussion that I think is long overdue. My question?

Do you think access to healthy (fresh, nutritious, safe) food is a right? Why or why not?

What's your take on this? Click the link above and reply to a survey on Survey Monkey or comment here. I'll circle back to this in the future. 


(Sorry for the problem with the link since it was posted! It works now....) 

All Consuming § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

All Consuming § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

Important decisions for our future.

Some statistics on farming in Michigan

Michigan is a state that has a long legacy of growing wonderful fruits and vegetables. In fact, Michigan taught California how to grow. According to the Friday, August 13, 2010 issue of The Farmer's Exchange newspaper, Michigan:

• Has agriculture as its second largest industry, generating $71.3 billion annually and serving as a key part a diverse economy for the state.
• Is home to about 10 million acres of farmland. Although this is a lot, it is much much less than even a few years ago as farmland has been turned over to developers and younger generations choose not to continue farming.
• Has 56,014 farms averaging 179 acres each. This means that there also farms in the 1000s of acres and I'm not sure if it counts the "farming" that gets done by backyard gardeners who feed their families and friends from what they raise. Including chickens, eggs and more. According to the article which cited a 2007 USDA census of agriculture, "there has been significant growth in the number of small farms over the past few years."
• Is comprised mostly of family farms. Ninety percent of the farms are owned by families. Many of , these families raise crops specifically for a limited number of large food processors. 
• Has 271 farmers markets; the fourth greatest number in the country, following California, New York and Illinois.  

Not such a good deed after all

I admit a guilty pleasure of salty snacks. I try to be as healthy as possible with my unhealthy behavior, and as responsible too. So when I saw a "compostable" bag with Sun Chips, it assuaged my guilt just a bit. At least I wasn't creating more trash.

Not so fast.

As this press release states, the bags are not really, truly compostable in a reasonable time. They don't meet the guidelines set out by the Walkers Gore(TM) composting facility, a large commercial operation in Canada. A little more investigation gave me an insight into high volume composting using the Gore Techology. (No, not "that" Gore....) If large scale composting facilities whose business it is to compost can't get the bags to disappear in a timely way, my little compost pile isn't going to do so well with them either. One more reason to get my salt hits from popcorn made at home.

Rights and responsibilities

For some time I've been inserting the thought into conversations that maybe, just maybe, the epidemic of obesity and health problems in the US are related to both how we eat and what we eat - mostly on the run and prepared foods. And that it was scarily amazing that food went from being something nutritious and absolutely necessary to being "the problem" to be dealt with by low fat, low carb, low sugar products fortified with nutriceuticals, because food in its "natural" state wasn't nutritious enough. This happened in the last 25 years or so it seems to me.

A recent article on the SuperMarket Guru website describes the next stage in this process. A process that first took cooking out of the kitchen and now seems poised to take responsibility for eating well away from the individual. Rather than say "no" to prepared foods and eating freshly cooked meals at home (no, it is NOT boring to do this) there may be a movement afoot to medicate the problem away, absolving eaters from the responsibility of what they put in their mouths.

Admittedly it isn't possible for everyone to walk out to their garden and harvest their next meal. However, it certainly wouldn't be a bad thing if it were possible. However it IS possible to act more responsibility in terms of the food we eat and to vote with our purchases whenever possible, showing that we want naturally nutitious, fresh foods. And to lobby to erase food deserts wherever they exist - in other countries or our own. Eating healthy is both a right and a responsibility.

A meditation on why I garden

The following is from one of my favorite occasional contributors to the New York Times. It captures how I can get lost in a parallel universe of time in the garden and why that is so attractive to me....

OPINION

Garden Time

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: July 24, 2010

The garden is particular to time and place, yet it feels timeless.

As good as cherries?

All my life I've loved cherries. Cherry anything. Waiting for fresh cherries each year was a trial. Not having the place for my own tree (past the one in yard of my childhood) was punishment. Then a few years ago I saw ground cherries listed in a seed catalogue.

They couldn't be as good as cherries, but then I still didn't have room for a tree. Or the patience to wait for one to grow even if I had the room.

This year I decided to try them. The plant is in a bit of an inopportune place, thanks to an error in judgment on my part and an amazing growing season. It is shaded a bit by towering tomatoes yet it is bushing out and set lots of cherries. They look strangely like tomatillos as they grow on this shrub.

Time came for a taste test. I can see now that the one I tasted wasn't fully ripe, yet it was - while not at all cherry-like in taste - quite true to the description in the catalogue: clean and citrusy. Immediately I knew I had a new ingredient to work with and began to consider how to use my harvest (which will be small).  I still love cherries now have added this variety to the list: Bing, Ranier, Sour and Ground.

How many plants have we lost the opportunity to taste and enjoy and be creative with? Yet another reason to seek out and try the new as well as plant the old favorites.

Ingredient "pellets"

Recently I was in the presence of some people who do "food science". The term "pellets" was used to describe an ingredient in a mass produced food product. The first thing that came to my mind was the poison that was used to kill rats - pellets.

      Then I thought of food pellets for animals and fish.

Never did it occur to me that the food products for human consumption were made using anything but raw ingredients. (And of course, depending on what one buys, the required litany of multi-syllabic, tongue-twisting chemicals.) Naive of me wasn't it?  I'm sure it's much less costly to transport pellets of dehydrated stuff (e.g. tomato sauce) than all the tomatoes, onions, garlic and other ingredients of tomato sauce, but somehow it just seems wrong. Think about it. Tomatoes on the vine, processed into sauce, then dehydrated, bagged and shipped who knows where to be rehydrated into something that probably has the words "natural" and "fresh" on the label. Why not just make the sauce and be done with it? Why transport twice?

Zucchini bats

It's that time of year. You watch and wait and wait and watch for things to blossom, set fruit and ripen. Zucchini are notorious for growing only when not watched. A few days ago I had several small four inch or so squash so I decided to let them enjoy the sunny days. Today I have huge baseball bat zucchini, of multiple pounds each. I wasn't watching close enough and they had a run away growth spurt.

Lot's of people wouldn't touch a vegetable that looks like it's on steroids so they really aren't good to sell. But this variety doesn't have lots of seeds that grow proportionately, so the flesh of these monsters is great to dehydrate and make into sizable chips (replacing potato chips!),  or shred for bread, or puree for a velvety cream of zucchini soup.

And the other vexing thing about selling seasonally, everyone has their bumper crop when you do so there is an abundance and everyone knows the laws of supply and demand...

What can you get for two pounds of locally grown Thai Purple garlic?

I just delivered my first order of garlic to a local chef. I grew three varieties and he's taking all I can provide. It sounds like a great way to enjoy the garden, make a little money and get closer to the wonderful world of food, right? As they say, two out of three ain't bad.

Thai Purple food garlic sells for $7/lb retail (Filaree Farms website - 7/4/10)
Say that wholesale (to cover the cost of seed garlic, labor and selling costs) my locally grown Thai Purple garlic is $4/lb (which still sounds like a lot for garlic to me....)
2 lbs of garlic X $4 = $8 or the price of a glass of Brumont Rose wine at Soe Cafe in Sawyer MI.

That little equation provides a context for understanding the conundrum we are in. We used to eat closer to home, with less variety and perhaps less quality in some things. We knew the seasons, understood scarcity and acted accordingly. Now we are aware that we eat from around the world, spending less on food than most if not all other countries, yet we aren't consistently eating well as the tainted food stories attest; the costs are higher to eat fresh local foods than fast, carb/fat laden foods; and we're paying for it in higher medical bills. Is eating healthily a right or a luxury?