Food, Farms, and Revolution

Have you ever come to the realization that you are part of something larger than yourself? A movement, or even, dare I say, a revolution?

Food. Where it comes from, how it's grown and processed, how we prepare it, and how (or whether) it nourishes us... these have become big issues. Concepts like locavore, flexitarian, farm-to-table... were these even part of our vocabulary ten years ago? There is such a growing awareness of the perils of fast and processed food, along with the real long-term problems created by large-scale factory farming, and I feel like I have been waking up to these issues right alongside the rest of America.



For me, my learning curve over the past few years has gone something like this: Super Size Me, Fast Food Nation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, The End of Food, In Defense of Food, Nourishing Traditions, Food Matters, Food, Inc., King Corn, Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. With a lot of great blogs, articles, gardening books, and cookbooks along the way.

And where it's led me is to a passionate belief that our children must know where their food comes from. This is truly essential to our survival on this planet.



One of the ways I am trying to teach this is to grow our own food, which we have done with some modest success in the past and this year are taking to the next level. We also cook together, eat as many whole foods as possible, and are trying more and more to limit the amount of processed food in our diets.

But one of the simplest ways to connect children -- and anyone! everyone! -- to the source of a food is to visit a farm. I am really excited to be forming a relationship with a farm by joining a CSA this year. But anyone can visit a farm. Find a pick-your-own farm and make a weekend outing of going to pick strawberries. Find a farm with a petting zoo or hayride. Or at the very least, chat with the farmers at your local farmer's market.

Food doesn't come from the grocery store, or through a drive-thru window. If our children can truly absorb this, if they can internalize the importance of what they're eating, and where it comes from, they might actually turn this thing around.



I can feel it in the air. You might even call it a revolution.

This post was hammered out in 30 minutes as part of Jamie's Moms' 30-Minute Blog Challenge, hosted over at SteadyMom. Whew!

5 Reasons to Join a CSA

First, what is a CSA? CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and it is a way that we as consumers can support small, sustainable farming in our own communities. In a CSA, you pay a sum of money up-front to the farmers, usually around this time of year, in exchange for a share in their harvest. This means that the farmers have the cash in hand to get their crops planted. It also means that some of the great risk that our small-scale farmers inevitably must take (due to unpredictable weather, pests, etc.) is softened somewhat. You agree to share some of the farmer's risk. Then, during the growing season, you pick up a weekly basket that represents your share in the harvest. If it's a bumper crop, you share in the bounty! And if there's a drought or a pest situation, your basket may be on the lighter side. And of course, you don't get to pick and choose what's in your basket -- but what you get will always be seasonal, local, and fresh.

So, why is my family buying a share in a CSA? Especially considering the amount of food I plan to be growing right here in my very own backyard? Just how many vegetables can one family eat, anyway? Here are five of my reasons:

1. Farms that participate in Community Supported Agriculture are exactly the kinds of farms I want to subsidize. Even those that are not certified organic (mine is) tend to practice sustainable small-scale farming that is exactly what we need to see more of in this country. Even if I wasn't getting 20 baskets of produce out of the deal, I would want to be giving these people my money, just to help ensure that they can continue doing what they're doing. The best way to support a system is with your consumer dollars -- I am voting with my money for local, sustainable farms.



2. Joining a CSA gives you a relationship with a local farm. In our case, we will pick up our share every week from the farm itself. It will be part of our routine to visit the farm, and see exactly where our food is coming from. In some cases, you can even volunteer your time during times of greatest need (harvesting a fast-ripening crop, or getting a crop planted before the rains) in exchange for a larger share. Particularly for families with children, a CSA is a great way to demonstrate that food doesn't really come from the grocery store.



3. Produce from a CSA share will invariably contain things you've never cooked, or possibly even eaten, before. As adventurous as your palette may be, I'm betting that you haven't bought and prepared every single fruit or vegetable available. All of us tend to fall into food ruts, serving green beans every week. A CSA share guarantees variety, because different veggies are ready for harvest at different times. Consider it a culinary adventure. Don't know what to do with turnips? Hey, what better time to find out?

4. Even if you have a garden, you can't grow everything. Participating in a CSA frees you up to focus on those vegetables you know you can grow well. Maybe your yard's not big enough for sweet corn, or you haven't had time to establish an asparagus patch. Let the CSA share fill in the gaps, and enjoy growing your tomatoes and peppers.

5. Food from a CSA, unlike food from the grocery store, is guaranteed to support good health. Shopping for healthful food can be confusing, with competing health claims contradicting each other every other week. Low-fat? Gluten-free? Fish oil supplements? But guess what -- fresh vegetables are always in style. And, again, variety is assured by the reliance on what is local and seasonal.



If you're interested in joining a CSA this year, there's no time to waste. LocalHarvest has a good directory of CSA programs across the USA, or you can try the USDA's information on finding a CSA as well.

Chickens in the Backyard

The other day I opened my newspaper to not one, but TWO articles about backyard chickens. I sighed and once again cursed the HOA restrictions against poultry in our community. While having a snack that afternoon, I showed my five-year-old the picture of chickens that ran with one of the articles and explained what the article was about (the trend among jurisdictions to loosen restrictions against backyard fowl). Then she said something that absolutely floored me.

"We should write a letter!"

My initial reaction was to think, what's the point? I mean, this isn't a law, it's a home-owner's association restriction -- one we knew about before we bought this house. And who in a suburb like this is going to listen to the goofy crunchy family who wants to keep backyard chickens? And yes yes, that's all true and blah blah blah... but what would it hurt to ask?

I realized that she was absolutely right -- we should write a letter! We should ask them to bring up the topic at the next HOA meeting. And we should actually attend said meeting (something we have never done, ahem), and politely, respectfully, and convincingly make our case. Why not? What do we have to lose?

Once again the five-year-old reminds me to be true to my convictions. It's so handy to have a moral compass in the family.

So she composed a letter, and I helped her spell it. She was very proud to write the whole thing out herself. And now my task is to write a slightly more detailed letter to accompany hers, with a bit more explanation as to what we're requesting and why.

But really, I think her letter says it all, don't you?

Feasting Season

I've been busy feasting. In more ways than one. It seems that sometimes, one is too busy actually living life to be able to take a step back and reflect on it all. Which is as it should be, truly. What else are January and February for?

Meanwhile, a glimpse of all of the various kinds of merriment that have been going on in these parts.

We journeyed to Maine, where we visited a farm, knitted, walked on the beach, and cooked yummy things:

The sheep at Wolfe's Neck Farm:


The headband I knitted on a cozy afternoon by the fire (bliss):


Popham Beach on Thanksgiving day:


Upon our return, we seemed to be thrust directly into the maelstrom of Christmas preparations. We have decorated, and shopped, and baked, and wrapped, and created... and of course there is much more to go! A busy time, but one filled with such delight.

And a brief pause to celebrate my birthday, amidst the holiday craziness. Speaking of craziness, my friends and family thought I was a nut for wanting to cook my own birthday feast. Thankfully, it was my birthday, thus I was able to do what I pleased. Spinach salad, with parmesan-encrusted broccoli and cauliflower croutons, sweet potato gnocchi with brown butter and sage sauce, and a birthday couronne (just a wreath-shaped baguette, but it looked festive!).

Apple Harvest

Hmm, what do do with ten pounds of gorgeous Stayman apples? They are lovely for eating -- as crisp as a Granny Smith, but sweeter. But they are also, apparently, great for cooking and baking. This week I am determined to make my way through these apples!



Yesterday I made an apple spice cake. It was insanely delicious. Like, I can't believe I just made that delicious. The recipe is from The 1997 Joy of Cooking, and I still can't get over how good it was. Interestingly, there are no eggs in the batter -- just flour, butter, buttermilk, brown sugar, and spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and ground cloves. And of course, chopped apples! I hesitated about adding the 1/2 cup of chopped pecans, because I thought the kids might balk at the texture, but they were perfect. I topped it with a quick white icing, also found in the Joy of Cooking. Fab-u-lous.

Unfortunately, the 1 cup of chopped apples called for by the recipe only dispensed with ONE apple. Ahem. We're going to have to pick up the pace. Ideas for what to do with a lot of apples, besides apple pie?

Breakfast Reading

Over breakfast this morning, two articles zinged to my attention. Both in the Food section, what a shocker...

First up, an unscientific but quite thorough and eye-opening study a mom did to prove to her teenage son and his posse that eating fast food is both less healthful and more expensive than the same exact foods prepared at home. Even if you still eat crappy burgers and pizza and whatnot, with all the same exact fixings (including the 21 grams of mayonnaise on a Double Whopper that makes me want to hurl), those exact same foods are both healthier at home (since you can't even buy Burger King's amazing 35% fat ground beef), but will also save you significant amounts of money. So much for the "yeah, but it's cheap..." argument in favor of fast food: it will cost you both now and later! Lose lose!

Then another headline on the same page grabbed my eye: "Just Say No to Antibacterial Burgers." It turns out, we have a problem in this country with antibacterial resistant germs! And part of the problem is the constant dosing of our livestock animals with antibiotics! Which we wouldn't have to do if we would just raise our livestock animals humanely! Can I get a resounding, "Duh"??? File this under Things We Know Already and Don't Want Brought to Our Attention, Thank You. I wonder what kind of flak that reporter is going to get for pointing out such an unpleasant truth. In the Food section no less, gasp!

We're Jammin'

I made jam today. Seriously. Made. Jam. Myself! I know!

For some bizarre reason, there is a whole host of knowledge out there that I was raised to believe was a) arcane (why know how to make jam when you can buy any kind you want in the store, at any time of year?), b) somehow beneath the well-educated career woman that I would surely turn out to be. Just like, why on earth would you bother?

So there's a great deal of attitude adjustment required, as I become more and more interested in reclaiming some of these tasks. Okay, I still can't really muster up a whole lot of enthusiasm for cleaning -- vacuuming just isn't one of those homey arts I like to take pride in -- but I now can see the true value in cooking, baking, and making things (clothes, toys, etc.) for my family from scratch.

As I've learned from my recent research, one of the key ingredients to being able to eat locally (whether that's just buying food grown within a 100 mile radius, or actually growing your own food) is preserving the harvest for the long months when there *isn't* any local produce. There are myriad ways to do this, of course, from freezing to pickling to smoking, but I decided to start simple. Jam. What could be simpler than jam?

Well, truly, it is surprisingly and amazingly simple, but for some reason it has this aura of something that only grandmothers with centuries of kitchen folklore behind them could possibly get right. And of course, looming over the head of the would-be novice is the possibility of, oh, poisoning your family with improperly processed jam. But, hey, no pressure.

First, I found this extremely helpful how-to (oh, thank you, internet). And then I pored over the instructions on the inside of a box of pectin from the supermarket, and after a few days of thinking it over, decided I was ready (gulp).

Step 1: Acquire fruit. For the true preserving-the-harvest experience, we went to a pick-your-own farm and, well, picked our own. Thankfully, they had thornless blackberries, so the experience was painless and... well, quite delightful, actually. We filled a basket with blackberries, and then I had to ask the cashier to repeat himself twice because I couldn't believe how little they cost. Let's just say that those tiny little containers of blackberries you get at the grocery store are roughly ten times more expensive than the ones we had such fun picking. And, I have never, ever tasted a berry so good. It took superhuman restraint not to eat all the berries before we made it home, let alone got ready to make jam.

Step 2: Acquire other supplies, namely jars, pectin, and sugar. I got jars at the grocery store that were, in retrospect, way too big. I should have bought the adorable little half-pint jars, but instead I got 12 ounce jelly jars because they looked so retro and quaint. Oh well, lesson learned. Pectin comes in a box and costs like $2. And then I got a 5-lb bag of sugar just in case I didn't have enough in the house (turns out I didn't need it, but it won't go to waste).

Step 3: Find a really tall pot. I happen to have a stock pot that is really tall -- it may have been a lobster pot at some point, not that I've ever cooked lobster. Set that on the stove with a whole lot of hot water in it, and bring to a boil.

Step 4: Put the jars and lids in the boiling water to sterilize and to get them hot enough so the hot jam won't crack them.

Step 5: Mash the berries up. This part was quite fun and messy, and of course required assistance from my four-year-old sous chef. We ended up with not quite enough blackberries to make a half recipe of jam (hmm, I guess we nibbled a few more than I thought), so I mushed up some raspberries too. Yum.

Step 6: Cook the jam. I poured the precisely-measured crushed berries into a big saucepan and stirred in the pectin. Turned the heat to high and brought it to a "rolling boil," which happened surprisingly fast. Stirred in an insane amount of sugar -- in my case, it was 2 1/2 cups of crushed berries to 3 1/2 cups of sugar. Day-um. Anyhow, I brought it back to a rolling boil for precisely one minute, per the "Sure-Jell" instructions, and took it off the heat.

Step 7: Fish the jars out of the pot of boiling water without burning yourself (success! tongs are a lifesaver with this part), and pour the hot jam into the hot jars. Fill to within an 1/8 inch of the top, and secure the lids. I should have had the exact correct amount to fill 3 12-ounce jars, and I almost made it... my third jar had a good 3/4 of an inch of space at the top. I sealed it anyway, hoping it would still work.

Step 8: Gently lower the jars into that huge pot of boiling water you've still got going. My instructions said something about a canning rack and blah blah blah, but I just popped them into my good ole lobster pot. Boiled for precisely 10 minutes (again, per the "Sure-Jell" directions), and fished them back out with those handy tongs. Apparently one can buy "jar tongs" that are specially designed for this task, and I can see the usefulness if you were doing a lot of canning. But seriously, regular tongs and a dishtowel worked just fine.

Step 9: Allow the jars to cool, and check the tops to make sure they're sealed. Verdict: all three of mine are sealed, even the not-quite-full one! Woohoo!

The total kitchen time was maybe 45 minutes, start to finish. I wish someone had told me it was that easy! So now that I know that this is completely do-able for someone of my level of kitchen prowess, I'm eager to experiment with other kinds of preserves. It seems ridiculous to buy $5 tiny boxes of berries at the supermarket for the purposes of canning them -- the whole point is to preserve the things you have way too many of to eat. I have a lot of cucumbers coming along right now, so maybe pickles? Who knows. But the point is, I have penetrated the veil of mystery.

Tomorrow, I will spread some on some of my own home-baked bread, and contemplate just how rarely I get to eat something that I have been so fully involved in creating.

Would You Like a Side of Atrazine With That?

Wonderful! An article in The Washington Post this morning reports that the dangers of a common herbicide may be greater than previously thought. Another hip-hip-hooray for conventional agriculture and the petrochemical industry that keeps it going! This quote I found particularly disturbing: "Atrazine has been found to cause limb deformities and hermaphroditism in frogs at concentrations as low as 0.1 parts per billion." Whereas the "safe" level for human drinking water is "an annual average" of 3 parts per billion. Ohhhhhhkay.

Why do I not get a warm fuzzy feeling reading the reassurances issued by the manufacturer that even temporary spikes higher than the level limit "are not going to be injurious to human health"???

Entrusting the health and safety of our food supply to people who have a financial interest in selling more and more chemicals is just plain foolish. Period. I'm reading a fascinating book by Joel Salatin that describes the in-the-trenches how-to of getting away from the broken model of conventional agriculture, but I'm still wondering how we, as a planet, can recover from so many decades of unbridled arrogance?

Just Do It

Today was an exciting day because 1. we went to our favorite local park which just also happens to be a farm, so we visited with goats, chickens, turkeys (hilarious!), pigs, sheep, and cows; and 2. because our dear friends at Amazon sent us books! Any day that involves the acquisition of books is a good day.

First up was Mudpies to Magnets: A Preschool Science Curriculum, a book recommended in The Well-Trained Mind for teaching young children about science. It has about a gazillion science projects to do with young children. Susie and I pored over it this afternoon and decided we're going to do at least one project every week. I am so excited! We do a lot of science and nature-y stuff in our normal course of business, but I feel like this will help us stay a bit more focused, as well as providing a seemingly unending supply of fresh ideas.

But the really exciting arrival was Joel Salatin's You Can Farm, which I have been devouring all evening. I won't lie, there's some nutty stuff in this book. I can't say I agree with everything Salatin has to say. But the majority of what I've read so far has been informative, inspiring, and inventive. The most important lesson so far is not to wait until you have the perfect property, all the time in the world, and plenty of money stashed away in the bank. If you are interested in farming, if you think you might somehow someday want to make a living from farming, just start doing something about it. Grow stuff! Turn your backyard into a kitchen garden and learn from experience what works and what doesn't. Don't wait around for perfect opportunities, just start with what you've already got.

Well, what I've got is a whole bunch of really annoying HOA covenants that won't allow me to have chickens. Hmph. But... I also have a decently-sized yard, and my husband and I have had terrible luck with the whole maintaining-a-pretty-lawn thing. The front yard will probably have to stay pretty conservative (except for the vegetables I'm growing in the flower beds, shhh), but who's to say we can't just take over the back yard and start growing some fun edible stuff among all the pretty perennials? Oooh yes, this could be exciting.

Beauty

These are the things I find beautiful. These are the things I keep coming back to. The light in a barn. The smell of hay. Chickens being their busy, silly, chicken-selves. I know it's terribly sentimental and goofy for a city girl to have such a longing for the pastoral, but there you have it.

I know the reality is that farms are dirty. There's a lot of poop to deal with. I get that. But there is something achingly beautiful about a split-rail fence, with a few cows grazing beyond. There is such a friendliness to the images connected with an old-style, diversified farm. Some would say that such a small-scale farm is part of our history, completely impractical in the economies-of-scale modern agriculture business. There are a thousand practical, ethical, well-researched ways in which I disagree -- and I'll get to many of them, I'm sure. But for now, while I sit here and daydream, the beauty is enough. I want to know that such beauty still exists. I want to be part of making sure it continues.