Monthly Archives: August 2007

Gardens Urban and Rural

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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.)

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In Honor of Grace Paley

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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 ….

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What do I do with the plastic?

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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 …

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Close Call …

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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.

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“You have to eat it, to save it.”

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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.

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