Gardens Urban and Rural

Posted on August 28, 2007 by cmf

Grist links to a piece on urban gardening and the class divide that still plagues the sustainable food movement. The article covers why the folks who run the Food Project decided to keep selling in their own neighborhood and not at the fancy downtown market where they could make more money, and perhaps assure the sustainability of their own organization.

Steve Sando tours industrial bean fields and comes to understand why people are so astonished at how great his beans taste (really folks — his beans are delicious). I ordered several packages of beans from Steve last spring when we were all talking about Farmer’s Markets, and planted some. They’re growing great guns — the white cannellini runner beans are blooming and waving away out there. I just hope the frost holds off long enough for them to really get ripe.

Michael Pollan tells Trivalley Magazine what he’s growing in his garden, and the author of that article demonstrates, with this little blurb, the smugness problem that plagues so much of the real food movement:

Pollan practices what he preaches in his garden and in his diet. He favors locally produced, organic whole foods. Living in Berkeley makes eating local easier because there is so much locally grown fresh food available year round. He visits the North Berkeley Farmers’ Market on Thursday and shops at the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace, Whole Foods, and the Monterey Market.

Gack. I like Michael Pollan’s work — and in fact, I’m working on a post about one of his older books, but gack. Maybe it’s my general dislike of Berkeley but give me the urban garden in a bad neighborhood in Boston over the self-congratulation that infects so much of the rest of the movement. (I have the same issues in our local food co-op — really people, get over yourselves. It’s just a peach. You’re not going to heaven over it.)

In Honor of Grace Paley

Posted on August 24, 2007 by cmf

Let’s all try to go out and affect some kind of change today — no matter how small. (Me, I’m still trying to figure out how to recycle that plastic — can’t do it in Livingston, so I’ll have to check next time I drive to Bozeman. Otherwise, I’m mailing it to one of you who has plastic recycling in your town …)
From “All My Habits are Bad” the Salon interview with A.M. Homes (via Bookslut)

Do writers have a moral obligation?

Oh, I think all human beings do. So if all human beings have it, then writers have some, too. I mean, why should they get off the hook? Whatever your calling is, whether it’s as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there’s a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it. Most writers do that naturally, see that more lives are illuminated, try to understand what is not understood and see what hasn’t been

The New York Times had this interesting piece on how communities of faith are turning their spiritual attention to food and food production. I particularly loved the bit about the guy who runs the Christian slaughterhouse and his collaboration with the Hasids … Here’s a quote from the article:

The two Hasidim oversee shehitah, the Jewish ritual slaughtering of meat according to the Book of Leviticus. The meat is then shipped to Wise Organic Pastures, a kosher food company in Brooklyn owned by Issac Wiesenfeld and his family. When Mr. Wiesenfeld sought an organic processor that used humane methods five years ago, he found Scott Lively, who was just beginning Dakota Beef, now one of the largest organic meat processors in the country.

Mr. Lively adheres to a diet he believes Jesus followed. Like Mr. Wiesenfeld, he says the Bible prescribes that he use organic methods to respect the earth, treat his workers decently and treat the cattle that enter his slaughterhouse as humanely as possible.

“We learn everything from the Old Testament,” Mr. Lively said, “from keeping kosher to responsible capitalism.”

Salon again, with “Oil and Food Don’t Mix”

Voted on by Congress every five years, the farm bill has dramatically changed the American way of eating in just the past half-century. Its corn subsidies have given way to the tidal wave of high-fructose corn syrup that fuels the nation’s obesity epidemic, its corporate-friendly policies led to the growth of major agribusiness and the death of family farms — and it continues to affect quality-of-life issues ranging from food stamps to school nutrition programs to clean-water, -air and -energy initiatives.

And to round out the week, the worlds least-likely activist (and a guy I have a big soft spot for –he looks SO much like an old old family friend of ours) — Prince Charles, with Highgrove, his 26-year-long experiment in organic gardening.

“Organic” is never out of the picture at Highgrove. The tone is set at the entrance by signs reading “Beware, you are now entering an old-fashioned establishment” and “This is a G.M.O.- free zone,” referring to genetically modified organisms.

Prince Charles has developed quite a reputation for his regard for nature, and Highgrove is deliberately designed to illustrate the way it works in practice. Thus the emphasis on avoiding pollution and waste, which extends even to recycling water by use of a reed bed purifying system, and of course avoiding anything that smacks of genetic engineering.

Apparently, he’s written a book, The Elements of Organic Gardening, which looks really fabulous ….

What do I do with the plastic?

Posted on August 23, 2007 by cmf

I had a small fit earlier this week and decided, after mulling it for a long time, that I have to get rid of all my plastic food containers. Even though they’re #5 plastic, which from what I can find on the internets, aren’t leaking bisphenols into my food — but how do we really know? They said those hard, clear, polycarbonates were better than the softer plastics, and now look what they’re finding out. So I had one of those moments on Monday where I decided they were all bad, I cleaned out the drawer where they lived, and scoured my cupboards for all the small ceramic and glass containers that I already have — and then I went on eBay and ordered a bunch of old pyrex refrigerator dishes with glass lids. They weren’t exactly cheap (especially when you take shipping into account — they’re both heavy and breakable), but they’ve already lasted 30 or 40 years out there in the universe, they’re nice looking, and they’re made from materials that we know to be absolutely inert.

But the question is, what do I do with the shopping bag full of old plastic containers (there are some new ones in there too, still in their wrappers). It seems a waste to throw them out, but if I really do think they’re toxic, is it right to take them to our community thrift shop?

What do you all think? Let me know in the comments …

Close Call …

Posted on August 22, 2007 by cmf

Monday night I got a phone call from my cousin Jason’s wife. I thought she was calling to thank me for the baby present I’d sent a few days earlier, but it turns out she was calling because my 95 year old grandmother, who lives on our farm with Jason and Jackie and my Aunt Molly and her husband had been taken to the hospital and was going in for emergency surgery.

She’s 95. Surgery is always daunting when you’re that old. She’s been pretty open the last couple of years about being ready to go … “I wish I lived in Oregon,” she told me when I called on her birthday. “Then I could just get a doctor to put me down.” My grandmother has raised horses her whole life, and considering how deaf she is now, how bad her sight has gotten, and how difficult it’s become to get around, I can see why she’d feel this way. I laughed at her — “Don’t tell Molly that,” I said. “You’ll hurt her feelings.” “Well,” she replied in her usual crabby way. “It’s true.”

So I have to say I was a little surprised to hear she’d opted for surgery. Turns out she had a perforated ulcer — Molly found her passed out on the floor of her apartment at six that morning (my grandmother has the ground floor of Molly’s house). Her choice was surgery to fix it, or to live with terrible pain and a condition that would kill her. She went for the surgery — although she went into surgery armed with all her living wills and DNR paperwork on the bedside table. Molly left her at two in the morning, after having reiterated to the hospital staff that there was, under no circumstances, to be a ventilator put in should she start to crash.

By the time Molly got to the hospital yesterday, my grandmother was out of bed, sitting up in a chair, her hair washed, all clean and tidy and looking very pleased with herself. If there’s anything she loves, it’s to be the star pupil — and there she was, older than anyone else in the little community hospital near the farm, and recovering more quickly and miraculously. We all just laughed. She’s always been the toughest bird in town.

As one does in these situations, I had a long talk with my cousin Jennifer on the phone yesterday morning. Jennifer lives in Arizona now, where she has two daughters who look so much like she did at 12 and 14 that their photos make me a little misty. I haven’t actually seen Jennifer since she was that age, and I was in college, and her mother (my grandmother’s daughter) died. Jennifer told me she is in no way ready for MommyJane to die — and I told her that although I know in my head that she’s going to — she’s so old, after all. Even MommyJane can’t live forever. But, I told Jennifer, it’s inconceivable to me — I really can’t imagine a world without her in it. She’s been our rock. She raised half of us cousins. Whenever things went weird, which they did a lot, we got sent to the farm.

And so, it was a great relief to hear that as always, she’s being remarkable. She’s astonishing everyone. She’s being MommyJane.

I went to bed early last night, exhausted from a day of family worry, and unlike the night before, when my grandmother was in surgery, I slept like a baby all night.

“You have to eat it, to save it.”

Posted on August 21, 2007 by cmf

Last spring, I was driving back from my morel bonanza, when I came across a small herd of buffalo. There were maybe twenty or thirty of them — cows with calves, a few bulls — enormous, shaggy beasts standing in a swale that green we only get in the spring, with the backside of the Absaroka range rising behind them. It gave you a sense of what it must have been like when this country sustained great herds of buffalo. It was at once an inspiring and disheartening sight. They were so lovely, and there were so few of them.

Last week, the New York Times food section had an article “Home Again on the Kitchen Range” on the second coming of the buffalo market. Buffalo are interesting as a ranch animal, since they are not actually domesticated. They remain wild animals, even on a ranch. Personally, I don’t eat as much bison as I do elk and antelope, mostly because you can’t really hunt them (there’s a small and controversial hunting season on bison that cross out of Yellowstone Park into Montana). You can buy bison easily around here, and it’s delicious — I’m particularly fond of Cinnamon-Chile Short Ribs made with bison. What I found interesting in the NY Times piece is that part of the reason bison didn’t do so well the first time around is that people wanted just the prime cuts — the steaks and chops. In the intervening years, braising has made a comeback in both haute and ordinary cuisine, and if you’re going to eat game, or if you’re going to really use those domestic animals we eat for meat, then you’re going to have to learn to cook more than a steak or a chop. As Rick Bayless said when I interviewed him a couple of years ago: “you have to know how to cook. The job of the cooking schools is to teach how to utilize other cuts. I mean,“ he continues, “anyone can sauté off a lamb chop.”

While the New York Times article focuses primarily on the grain- vs. grass-fed controversy among bison producers, and the way that bison appeals to consumers because it’s not as industrialized as beef, Dan O’Brien in his book Buffalo for the Broken Heart advocates for the return of bison to the great plains as a way of restoring the entire ecosystem — both human and natural. O’Brien was a cattle rancher for years (as well as a falconer) and he was going broke trying to raise cattle without destroying his land. In a fit of desperation, he tried buffalo. Buffalo, he discovered, can not only take care of themselves, but because the prairie grasses and the buffalo co-evolved over millions of years, running buffalo not only doesn’t damage the land in the way that running cattle does, but actually helps to restore it. I loved Buffalo for the Broken Heart when I read it a couple of years ago — not just the story of a man saving his ranch, it’s really the story of a man saving his own life. Sometimes it’s easy, I think, for people who don’t have much experience with the kind of deeply rural life that ranching entails to fall into the easy binary of “wild nature = good,” “ranching=bad” and O’Brien makes a good case for how by saving the buffalo, we might also be able to save a rural ranching tradition that is a crucial part of our cultural heritage.

Eggs and the People who Produce Them …

Posted on August 20, 2007 by cmf

The San Francisco Chronicle had an article a couple of weeks ago about pastured chickens, followed closely by this article in the NY Times questioning whether “cage free” as it’s practiced in chicken houses around the country is really any more humane than battery chicken.

I’ve been buying eggs for a couple of years from a local outfit called Willow Bend Eggs. They are the most astonishing eggs I’ve ever eaten. They’ve ruined me for all other eggs. They’re brown, and large, and the yolks are the deepest marigold color you’ve ever seen and they stand up all perky and beautiful. And they’re expensive — at least two-fiftly more a dozen than commercial eggs, and at least a dollar or dollar-and-a-half more than other local ranch eggs. But they’re worth it.

A few weeks ago, a small basket with a single-page flyer in it showed up at our local grocery store next to the eggs. It was about this time too that the egg cartons started stating that these eggs cost “9 food miles.” (The egg cartons that are so low-tech that all they say is “Willow Bend Eggs” in magic marker.) The flyer said that Willow Bend produce was registered organic in 1988, and that they grow potatoes, garlic, salad greens, locker lambs, and that have a small herd of Jersey cows.

I was intrigued, so when I saw these recent stories on eggs, I looked up the name on the bottom of the flyer and called. I didn’t hear back and I had nearly given up on talking to the person who raised my great eggs, when the phone rang on Sunday afternoon and it was Isabelle, calling back. She apologized for sounding out of breath, she was making honey.

We talked for nearly an hour. Isabelle’s primary concern is that we’re ruining the earth at an unsustainable clip. She was a little off balance because she’d gone shopping for clothes in Bozeman the day before with her twelve-year old son, who wanted a pair of new sneakers for school. This is a person who has been living off the grid for a long time, and the clamour of shopping had her nearly undone (to say nothing of the extravagent price of a pair of new sneakers). This is someone who is really living small, unlike me — she told me she did put in running water when she was about to have her last child, who is now five, so the midwife wouldn’t have to haul it … but that she’s still not convinced that it was a good idea.

I asked her what’s been going on lately — there isn’t an egg of hers to be found in town. She said that’s because she’s in between flocks (and because it’s been so hot). She’s got one flock that’s about layed out, and the new pullets aren’t big enough yet to be really laying. It’s one of the things that makes her eggs so good — she doesn’t overwork her chickens. She’s having a really hard time right now because with the ethanol boom, the price of chicken feed has gone through the roof — and because she’s in between flocks, she even had to buy a dozen commercial eggs the other day. “How’d that go for you?” I asked her, after telling her about the egg in California that nearly made me cry it was so bad. “Well,” she said. “I’d been feeling really bad about having to raise my prices, but I feel a little better about it now.”

The other thing she said that people don’t take into account when they’re looking at the price of her eggs is that the price of land has gone so high, that it’s getting more and more difficult for farmers and ranchers to stay on their land. Especially organic producers … it’s one thing to be organic, but harder when someone builds a McMansion next door to you, and starts spraying herbicides and pesticides that can’t help but drift across on the breeze.

All I know is that I’m happy to pay a fair price for a dozen eggs raised by chickens that are truly free — chickens that are let out every morning to go mess around in the creek, or head into the barn to scavenge for grain dropped by the cows, or to sit in the middle of the yard and take dust baths. (I’d get you a picture, but Willow Bend farm is up that road where my brother died in the wreck, and I just can’t go up there). I’m also happy to pay a fair price to keep a farmer on that land instead of a ranchette, or a McMansion, or some rich person from someplace else who is going to fence the whole thing off and not allow hunting out of some sentimental sense that they’re “protecting” the “wilderness”. I liked Isabelle. I like knowing that I buy my eggs from a real person, and that I’m helping her support her kids and her chickens and her cows and her pigs. In fact, I might buy half a pig from her next year, especially if, as we discussed this afternoon, she’ll take all those apples that fall off my trees and feed them to the pigs.

Thanks Constance …

Posted on August 19, 2007 by cmf

After last week’s post on cleaning out my freezer, my old friend Constance emailed me from Taiwan (where she has lived ever since she married the Chinese Pop Star). Constance wrote:

I suggest that you go Vietnamese with your Game and Pork burgers- I did an Indochine Burger thing with Buffalo and pork at my parents’ this summer. Very tasty, basil, fish-sauce,green onions,ginger and peanut butter or sesame paste. Nice with a little parsley and basil mayonnaise

Hmm. I thought. Yum. I thought. Constance has always been one of the best cooks I know, so this afternoon when I took the thawed package of ground elk out of the refrigerator, and the package of pork sausages that had been in the freezer for a very long time, I thought about Constance’s suggestion.

I went out to the garden and pulled four small red onions out of the ground. I gave them a rough chop, including the greens. I put the elk, sausage, onions and a few cloves of roughly chopped garlic through the fabulous Kitchen Aid Meat Grinder I bought a few months ago so that everything would be amalgamated.

I took about half the meat and mixed in a soupspoon of Sambal chile sauce, a knob of grated ginger, two or three rosettes of basil julienned, a big squirt of fish sauce, and a squirt of soy sauce. I mixed it all together, made patties, and while I froze most of them, kept one out for dinner.

So there it is — a delicious Elk Burger Indochine a la Constance, some sauteed beet greens (with ginger and garlic) and a little rice … it was delicious. Juicy, spicy, yummy and the beet greens were a good contrast … it was all very yummy. Thanks Consuela!

Friday Links …

Posted on August 17, 2007 by cmf

Since I seem to have lost the day to a series of lighting fixtures I put up (don’t even ask about the screw with the stripped threads, and the hacksaw, and the swearing …), here’s some Friday Links to keep everyone entertained:

Had lunch today with another Livingston Blogger: Go check out Livingston, I presume

Found an interesting piece over at Ethicurean on the sort of small meat processers that we depend on around here. I’m planning to buy a lamb this fall from my dog groomer, and without Sheep Mountain Processing, I’d be sunk. Check out Postcards from Cowboyland

The Real Dirt on Farmer John released on June 22. I caught this documentary on PBS one night last spring and just about fell off the couch. I know that guy! When I was an undergrad at Beloit College he threw wild parties out on his farm (vague flashbacks of a front end loader with the bucket up in the air and full of college kids, a bonfire, and a bunch of us in the silo pretending to be John Cage and making a racket). There’s a good article about the movie, book, and organic farm over at The Sustainable Table The movie is terrific — southern Wisconsin has some of the most fertile soil in the world — a gift from the last ice age glaciers, and there’s one heartbreaking scene where a farmer is looking across the fields to a new subdivision and he says, with tears in his eyes: “They’re pouring concrete in that dirt.” Killed me. Just killed me.

Marion Nestle has started a blog, appropriately called What to Eat. It’s fabulous, and full of great info — if you haven’t checked out the book by the same name, you really should.

Old-Fashioned Green Beans

Posted on August 16, 2007 by cmf

I had my friend Margo over for dinner tonight and I experimented with this recipe from the LA Times Food pages: Braised Romano Beans with Pancetta and Cherry Tomatoes. Except, in my usual fashion, I messed with it a little. I don’t have a ton of tomatoes right now (and the Whippersnapper Cherry isn’t worth growing — it’s has no flavor — it’s like a little tiny grocery store tomato — very disappointing. Unlike Galina, which is a sprawling yellow indeterminate cherry tomato that will take over your whole garden, but which will reward you with fabulous, juicy, tomato-y yellow bundles of mouth-joy). Anyhow, I made this recipe with Romano beans from the garden (mixed with a few scarlet runners and runner canellinis that I didn’t recognize), a couple of big fat gorgeous carrots pulled from the garden mere moments before they went into the pot, and four slices of local bacon from Matt’s Meat’s instead of pancetta.

It was delicous. We’ve become unaccustomed to eating well-cooked vegetables. These beans were not bright green. They were not crunchy. They were, as the recipe promised, unctuous, meaty, delicious. I have a lot of them. I might be eating them in everything for a while — or I’ll be freezing them in small batches. But I have to say — not only were these delicious — but they were so easy — cut everything up and let it cook for the same amount of time it took to roast a chicken.

I also made a little salad of arugula, orange, fennel, and black olive to go with it. Roast chicken, green beans, salad, a little white wine outside under the apple trees, and blessing of all blessings — a little rain even moved through after we finished eating. A perfect evening.

Seasonal Meat

Posted on August 15, 2007 by cmf

There’s no ground lamb in town right now. You don’t think of meat as being a seasonal product, but around here, lambs are slaughtered in the early fall, and last years supply seems to have run completely dry. I was looking for lamb because it’s also that time of year when we all look into our freezers and see what’s lurking in there. It’s time to clean out/use up last year’s stuff before we put up this years vegetables and meat. So I was downstairs last week looking at the:

glut of chicken carcasses. It’s still too hot to think of making stock, so they’re going to lurk in there a little longer
mystery packages of frozen leftovers — most of those went in the trash
dearth of salmon — I have one package of salmon left — like meat, the salmon comes in in the fall when Chris and Posy get back from fishing off the Alaska coast
random packages of ground elk, venison and antelope — both plain and sausage meat

I was thinking I’d make up a batch of “Greek” burgers — they’re good to have in the upstairs freezer (the one attached to my fridge) because if you haven’t planned ahead, they thaw out pretty quickly for dinner. I usually mix equal parts game and lamb, since the game is too lean to be much good on its own, and the lamb can be pretty fatty. Half and half is about right. Then I add in some finely-chopped onion, garlic, mint (although I have a lot of nice oregano out there right now, and some lovely summer savory that might be good), salt, pepper and a generous sprinkling of the Baharat spice I bought in at The Spice House in Chicago last year (although, come to think of it that Zahtar from World Spice in Seattle might be good too). As you can see, this is an improvisational process. I like to crumble in a generous handful of feta cheese into the meat mixture as well, before mixing it all together, forming patties, and freezing them for later.

But there’s no lamb right now. At least not in the stores. Tonight is our Farmer’s Market, so I’ll have to see if anyone has any lamb. If not, perhaps I’ll buy a nice fatty piece of Miller Farms Pork and make porky-game burgers … I haven’t tried that mix yet, but really, can anything be too bad with a lot of nice clean local pork ground into it?

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Monthly Archives: August 2007