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This is a wonderful project, and one that I would love to join at some point:
http://www.serveyourcountryfood.net/ via http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009025.html
K and I this past Saturday took some liberties with our August Challenge, as we were only actually outside for an hour or two. We remained in the spirit of bringing seasonal ecosystem occurrences into our lives, though, as we traveled to a farm just north of Chicago to pick and then can fresh, local tomatoes.
Getting our produce primarily though a CSA this growing season, we’ve learned more about the seasonality of vegetables, especially the narrow window during late summer to enjoy fresh tomatoes, and the versatility of dishes that rely on the ripe fruit. Not wanting to rely so much on store-bought “fresh” and canned tomatoes in the coming year, we decided to try our hand and the craft of canning, and picked a half-bushel of tomatoes, which yielded ten quarts of canned tomatoes.
This being our first year canning, I’d rather not try to offer a guide to safe canning, but will point readers in the direction of Ball’s comprehensive Blue Book of Canning, and suggest researching the plethora of canning tips that can be found online, including this clear guide from Chow.com: Make Your Own Preserves. I will mention that our day of canning was a very rewarding experience, and that all went well as far as we can tell, save for two jars that didn’t seal properly, so are now in the refrigerator for use this week.
Our trip to the u-pick farm in the morning proved an interesting experience, as we observed the trend of small farms rapidly being engulfed by suburban development. It seemed paradoxical that in an effort to live more sustainable ourselves, K and I had to travel to an area that was developing in a largely unsustainable manner, with automobile-culture an expectation and the measurement of prosperity based on conspicuous consumption. There was a notable lack of walkability in the area teeming with new housing development, and central shopping and eating areas in the community came in the form of strip-malls surrounded by large parking lots and consisting mostly of chain-businesses that will do little to sustain the local economy.
While the farm we visited managed to survive through development, I wonder at how many acres of land in the area that once were home to rich food crops and seasonally-shifting landscape had now been morphed into monotonous topography widely disjointed from the natural terrain and clime. At what point had moving out to the country no longer meant seeking a life more in-tune with nature and instead meant keeping up with facile trends?
A week or so ago, K and I, along with some friends of ours, made a vermiculture kit, or worm bin. Our apartment doesn’t come with any yard space, and we don’t know of any community composting available, so for us, vermiculture seemed the best option for returning our food and other organic waste to the earth rather than sending it to a landfill where it would not have the proper conditions to decompose. One of our friends had just been taught about setting up a vermiculture kit, and I checked out a book from the library called Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Applehof. Setting up the worm bin was surprisingly cheap, easy and fun. I won’t go into the details here but will instead recommend interested persons to read Worms Eat My Garbage to get a concise and detailed guide on vermi-composting.
After almost two weeks, our worms seem to be thriving and have devoured beyond recognition the first couple days worth of food that we gave them; I’ve noticed that even with a plastic bin full of worms and food, our apartment smells decidedly better than when we were throwing our food scraps into a garbage bin; and since we know we need to gather food scraps for the worms, we keep an old yogurt container by us while we cook and put the scraps in there, making cleanup a breeze. When the yogurt container is full, we simply burry its contents under a bedding of damp, shredded newspaper and the worms have at it! As I understand, they’ll continue to digest the scraps for two to three months, at which point we’ll have a tub of worm castings rich in nutrients for our houseplants, or to dump in an empty lot to fertilize the plant-life there.
A goal I have for myself as winter approaches is to preserve some of the fresh local foods I can get now so that come winter I won’t be so dependent on supermarket food. I had a brief introduction to canning last year when I made a batch of strawberry freezer-jam, and to further ease myself into the craft of canning, I recently made a batch of homemade sauerkraut.
The recipe I used for my sauerkraut comes from Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food and was surprisingly simple. After breaking off some of the tougher outer leaves of a head of cabbage, I chopped it in half then in quarters and then thinly sliced the cabbage to get thin strips. I put the cabbage in a bowl with 3 and 1/2 teaspoons of salt and worked the two together with my hands. After a few minutes, the cabbage started creating its own juices. I then transfered the cabbage to a quart-size jar (might need larger depending on the size of the cabbage) and filled a smaller jar with water to hold down the cabbage to keep the brining liquid over it. I covered the jar with a towel, left it at room-temperature and skimmed off any scum that appeared on the top of the liquid over the next week.
After a week, the sauerkraut is ready for tasting. It can be left to brine for a few more days, or if it’s to your liking, it can be stored in the refrigerator for about 6 weeks. Though the smell of the sauerkraut initially worried me, my mom assured me that it’s suppoed to smell like bad cabbage, and after tasting it I knew that I all had gone according to plan. I’m pretty proud of my homemade sauerkraut, which K and I are enjoying on reubens for lunch this week, and will have with sausage and applesauce if any is left-over.
I’m looking forward to whatever my next canning opportunity may be. I’m especially looking forward to tomatoes, which have been slow-growing in the area this year, and of which I plan to can an ample supply for chili and pasta-sauces throughout the colder months. Do you have any canning tips, stories, etc. you’d like to share? I’d love to hear some success stories or cautionary tales before my next project.
As we drove from the front of the farm back to the crops, we learned about Sandhill Organics, and the land that they lease to other farmers to give them a safe place to start growing, where they can get support as they run into unforeseen issues in their first crops, and where they have certified organic land so they know the vegetables are growing in untainted soil and they can farm using sustainable practices from the outset of their farming career.
Our farmers grow on the last lot on Sandhill Organics – just over the crest of a small hill, so it feels more secluded than the rest of the land. The farm is much smaller than I had anticipated (5 acres in total), and I was amazed to think that all the food I’ve already seen at the market each week had come from such a small plot of land, and that there was still so much growing on the land that would feed us and the other CSA members for another three months. There was such a variety of plants growing on the land, too: a couple rows of one vegetable growing right next to a couple rows of something else, with flowers scattered throughout. It was such a beautiful farm as compared to large-scale industrial farms that I’d seen on family vacations when I was younger.
Our farmers gave us some scissors and put us to work filling a large box with fresh onions. Supermarket onions and some of the onions from our farm are cured so they can be stored in a cool, dry place for longer periods of time, but these onions would be eaten fresh, so we simply pulled them up, knocked off some of the dirt, trimmed the roots, and cut down the stalk, leaving the scraps to fall back to the ground were they will provide nutrients to the soil as they decompose. After the larger onions, we moved on to the last of the purple scallions for the season, bunching them up and trimming them to be ready for the market the next day.
Our last harvesting duty for the day was helping one of our farmers gather flowers for the bouquets she sells at the market. We got to talk with her then about how they got started with farming, and she told us a little more about their farming philosophy. Both of our farmers are passionate about the food they grow, and about living in a sustainable way and helping to educate others to be similar “future-minded stewards of the land” as they explain on their website. K and I chatted on our way home about how glad we are about our choice of CSA farm this year, and how our visit to the farm further peaked our interest in growing our own food, something that we’re looking into even more seriously than ever before, and that I’ll be writing about later.
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Be sure to check out my previous post in which I discuss helping with the eggs and chickens at Red Tail Farm.
I’ve mentioned before that K and I take part in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). We paid up-front to receive a half-bushel of vegetables each week over the course of the 20-week growing season. Many CSA farms ask that members come to the farm a few times during the growing season; this wasn’t a requirement of our program, but this past weekend we decided to spend some time on the farm anyway to learn more about how our food is grown and where it comes from.
Red Tail Farm is an organic farm run by two wonderful farmers and their two interns about about 40 miles away from our apartment, a little over an hour’s drive on Chicago’s I-94. On saturday, K and I traced the same path that our food takes each Sunday morning from the farm to the market; not via boat or plane or a semi-truck from another part of the world, but just 40 miles north of the city. I might not be a biologist or physicist, but I do know that a simple 40-mile journey means our food is much fresher, and that much less fuel is burned to get our food to us as compared to the industrial food and even the organic food that is shipped to Chicago from various parts of the world to the supermarket produce sections.
When we arrived at the farm, one of our farmers showed us some of the buildings they use for starting the seedlings growing, curing onion and garlic, hatching chicks, etc. We went into the egg-preparing room (just a little free-standing room with a large two-basin sink, and lots of counter space) where we finished washing the eggs that would be brought to the market the next day, and packed them into cartons. I had never thought before about the care that is put into each individual egg: washing and drying each egg by hand after a very mild detergent is used to remove the initial grime, checking the eggs for hairline cracks or abnormalities, and one-by-one placing each egg into its carton. We also learned an interesting fact: Chickens love to eat eggs! We watched as one of our farmers tossed an egg over to some of the chickens that lived just outside the egg-prepping room and the chickens gobbled it right up, shell and all.
Later in the day we went into the field and got to meet the chickens who laid the eggs, and to collect the eggs that they had laid since the last collection. Most industrial eggs come from chickens living on factory farms with a sole drive on production and no concern for the living-conditions of the chickens; knowing this, it was so wonderful to see all the chickens (maybe 30-50, though they were moving around so much it’s hard to get a good estimate) roaming around their large fenced-in area (more to keep the foxes/coyotes out than the chickens in) just grazing on the grass or taking a break in a shade-tent the farmers built for them, and hoping we’d brought them even more food. The chickens’ area is moved every 2 days to make sure they have fresh grass to graze and that they fertilize the soil more evenly, and their fed and watered everyday by hand. These chickens were happy, and you could tell by the way our farmers loving called them their “sweet ladies” that there was a real relationship here, not simply that of coldly taking the eggs the chickens laid.
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Check out Part 2 of our visit, in which K and I harvest onions.
A friend pointed me to an interesting article earlier this week from the New York Times entitled A Locally Grown Diet with Fuss but No Muss. I wanted to cover this article more in-depth than just a link in my Friday News Roundup, and after reading through some of the comments from No Impact Man’s post about the article, I had even more to say about the topic of the “lazy locavore.” I encourage you to check out the article first, then come back to read my thoughts. I’m sure others will have more to say, so please add to the conversation in the comments.
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While the article points to a rise in the demand for local, organic food – a shift that many see as incredibly important in reducing our negative impact on the planet, getting healthier and fresher food to our tables, and spurring local economies – my worries about the “lazy locavore’s” means of participating in a localized food-system are manifold:
(1) that having a third-party work one’s private land does nothing to engage the land-owner in a relationship with the land through which he or she might learn more about the fragility of the earth and how to take care of it;
(2) that while the Modern Era marked a time of specialization, calling for different tradespeople to attend to different tasks, this system has shown itself to be largely unsustainable and a Postmodern Era ought call for more self-reliant or cooperative living in which people grow their own food or have access to land on which individuals have a hand at growing publicly-available local food;
(3) that while I applaud those who are helping build the service economy, a focus on the service described in the article increases the supply of local food only to those who can afford it; focus should be put instead on services that can increase the supply of local food for all;
(4) that while it could perhaps be said that the system in which the “lazy locavore” takes part is a stepping-stone to a more thoughtful system, I think it more likely that it is a means of taking part in a movement without actually taking action to progress that movement, making it, perhaps, malproductive.
Again, I realize there is so much more to be said about this topic, so please leave your comments below.
The Real Dirt on Farmer John is the documentary of a man’s journey from being the son of an industrial farmer in the 1950s to becoming a celebrated organic farmer and operator of one of the largest CSA farms in the US. Through his narration, Farmer John (John Peterson) recalls the many struggles he faced as he reconciled his connection with the land on which he was raised, and the uneasy relationship he endured with his community.
After inheriting a multi-generational family farm when his father died, a young John Peterson attended Beloit College and returned to his farm accompanied by a barrage of hippie subculture. John’s farm became a haven for those interested in art, expression and a desire to connect with the land, but as one of the women of the local community explains: they didn’t know how to work the land, so they did a whole lot of nothing. John’s farm later succumbs financial hardship, and he is forced to sell all but a small portion of the land. As the film continues, however, it becomes clear that while John will not have an easy time re-creating what land he still owns into a profitable organic farm, nor at reaching an understanding with a community that has oft demonized his eccentric lifestyle, he will not give up.
The filmmakers were fortunate to have a plethora of material from John and his mother, who documented their lives on film since John was a young boy. From these clips, the viewer gets a clear, honest vision of the changes that occurred both in John’s life and on his farm. The documentary does a good job of showing the viewer the important connection between people and the land on which they live and depend, and of showing the potential struggle one might face should his or her ways of connecting with the land differ from the social norm; a message that I feel is incredibly important to understand in a time when many people seem to have a total disconnect from the land, and when forging a true relationship with the land can seem to many an unnecessary eccentricity.
Imagine no industrial agriculture. No monocrops depleting the soil of its nutrients, no politics driving food production, no unsafe nor unsanitary conditions for farm workers and animals. Imagine instead that your kitchen is full of a variety of fresh vegetables, fruits, dairy, eggs and meat; that each time you sit down for a meal you know where and how each ingredient was grown, and that you are eating the freshest and most healthful ingredients for the season. Imagine that these ingredients also had a positive impact on the quality-of-life of all involved in the food system, from the farm workers, to the animals in their care, to yourself, and to the land on which the food was grown.
Rising food prices and regular threats of unsafe meat and produce are evidence that the industrial agriculture system is collapsing. Organic food has come into vogue in the US, but coupled with a refusal to shift one’s mindset away from that of the consumer, a large portion of the organic food available in supermarkets today still comes from industrial farms that require energy-intensive farming practices. Local, sustainable agriculture is a necessity, and requires a shift in how one views food supply.
My partner, K, and I this year bought into a local farm’s Community-Supported Agriculture program (CSA). Each week we walk to our neighborhood farmer’s market and bring home a pre-paid half-bushel of their locally-grown organic produce. We see the people who grew our food face-to-face each week, and we experience first-hand what nature has to offer as the growing season progresses, and what recent weather patterns have meant for the crop. Participating in a CSA was an important decision that K and I made months before we would be getting any of the food we paid for. It was a decision that has led to wonderful experiences as we explore and learn about vegetables that we had never cooked before, and a decision that has begun to shift our thoughts away from earlier notions of food as a product that follows the patterns of supply and demand to food as a fragile necessity that depends on the well-being of an ecosystem that we too often neglect.
Changing habits and changing the way we think about food can be a difficult process, but go back to the imagined image of fresh, healthy, sustainable food; now find out where your local co-op or farmer’s market is located, ask your grocery store to stock local produce, or find an area where you can start your own food garden and make that image a reality. Imagine no industrial agriculture.
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Per a call for ideas from solutions-based online magazine, WorldChanging, this entry explores “the end of some outdated aspect of contemporary society and its replacement with a better way of doing things.” Read more about the challenge here.
