b o t t o m l a n d

green goodness

I've been breaking my locavore eating habits and buying bananas en masse to feed my new green smoothie addiction.  Yes, I said green, folks!  That's spinach with bananas, apples, strawberries, flax seed, fresh lemon juice, cantaloupe, whatever else I want to throw in there, but the main ingredient is spinach!  I did a raw cleanse last week, eating a smoothie for breakfast and lunch and a big salad for dinner.  In between I snacked on nuts, dried fruit and fresh fruits and veggies.  I ate whenever I was hungry, but I ate raw, and I felt incredible!  I woke up feeling rested, I had great energy all day...  I could never convert to raw food permanently and exclusively, but many doctors recommend a diet of about 80% raw, and I think that would be good for me.  Last weekend Dave and I took a getaway (just the two of us!) and I ate a bunch of "regular" food, all of high quality and fresh ingredients--not super processed, but still...  I felt so sluggish and bloated afterwards.  It was kind of incredible, actually.  I became so powerfully aware of how much I'm affected by what I put into my body.  I've been getting a lot of inspiration from the happy foody blog by Sara, whose Walk Slowly, Live Wildly blog I used to read a lot.   She had a Green Smoothie challenge a few months back, and her first post has lots of great ideas for varying the basic smoothie.  I tell you, LOOK OUT!  Once you start feeling how healthy your body can be eating fresh, whole foods, you'll never go back to processed "food"!  Happy eating!

Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in the free republic for which it stands.

My good friend Eden has a wonderful post on her blog highlighting some devastatingly unfair government restrictions of small family farms, and the value of protest.  If you are a reader of this blog, you know that food is a justice issue for me, one that I feel very passionate about.  There is a groundswell of interest right now in safe, healthy food that does not destroy the environment in it's production and distribution, thanks in part to books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma.  And yet our government, in the form of The Farm Bill and other means, actively works to restrict small, diversified farms, choosing instead to subsidize corn, soy, rice, wheat and cotton, all highly extractive and grown mainly by huge agribusinesses.  I can't go into it all here, now.  Check out the Sustainable Table web site for more information.  The New York Times article that Eden links to is a short introduction to the lunacy of our nation's farm policy.  I'm also including a short letter to the editor from our local paper that concludes with a powerful quote (emphasis mine):

Do You Know Where Your Meat Comes From?
Letter to the Editor, Concord Monitor, February 28, 2008

Last week an undercover video taken by the Humane Society at a California slaughterhouse received a lot of attention. I hope those who saw it will give some thought to the real cost of the inexpensive meat we buy in supermarkets.

In the video, a live, conscious cow that was too sick to walk was dropped headfirst from a forklift from a height of 5 or 6 feet. The rest of the video can be viewed on the Humane Society website, hsus.org. According to the Humane Society, it shows workers "kicking cows, ramming them with the blades of a forklift, jabbing them in the eyes, applying painful electrical shocks and even torturing them with a hose and water in attempts to force sick or injured animals to walk to slaughter."

We would be naive to accept the beef industry's claim that this sort of abuse is an isolated incident in an industry that is more or less un-policed.

It is painful to learn about this kind of misery and feel powerless to stop it, and to see New Hampshire lawmakers reject bills such as HB 1522, which would prohibit the confinement of animals so that they cannot move freely.

But there are a few things we can do, like visiting factoryfarming.com to find out what's going on in factory farms and buying our meat at stores like the Concord Co-op, where meat from local farms is sold. As Matthew Scully, a former speech writer for President Bush points out, while none of us wants to know how our meat gets to the dinner table, if we consider ourselves moral beings we have a responsibility to find out.

KAY McCALLION

It is a falsehood that there is nothing we can do.  Our dollars are our vote.  We can send a powerful message to the government about where we want our food to come from, though we might not be able to change policy.  But we need to continue to resist in any way we can, for the most important thing is to maintain our own integrity, our own physical and spiritual health.  Success is not our goal as much as sanity is.  Eden's post quotes a powerful passage from Wendell Berry along these lines:

Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence...

So here's to not acquiescing.  I'd love to hear about your own acts of resistance, whatever they may be...

 

Not that I'm a raw milk junkie, but...

Here's another article from last Saturday's Boston Globe about raw milk!  It's always nice to see positive press for something that gets such bad press most of the time.  Also, Ben linked to a fascinating article about the disappearance of bee populations that has major implications for our food supply (as bees play such an important role in pollination.)  Thanks for the link Ben, and it can be found in the comments section of my previous post.

Homesteading article

Here's an interesting article from the Boston Globe on a couple who homesteads in VT.  What an amazing thing it is to be able to grow the food that feeds you all winter!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

I've been wanting to write more about this book for a while now, and am not entirely sure how to do it.  Quite simply, this book covered so much ground, and it was so thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, it's difficult to cull out highlights.  At it's heart it is the story of one family as they attempted to "wring the petroleum from their food supply" (more on that here) by buying all of their food for one year from local producers or growing it themselves.  It is a wonderful combination of personal narrative, well-researched facts, cooking and gardening tips, hilarious insights into family life, ecological wisdom, an ode to rural life (though not a sentimental one) and a stirring call to action.  Barbara Kingsolver is at her best in this type of material, though I confess to loving her fiction as well.  She really lays out the case for why our current food habits are not only bad for us, but bad for the economy, bad for family farms, bad for the environment, and bad for the future of our planet.  Pretty much, they're only good for large corporations like Monsanto.  Kingsolver's training is as an environmental biologist, and her science background comes through in her writing.  She is very thorough as she builds her case, but winsome, too.  Ultimately, she concludes that the irony of making our eating practices more sustainable is that it is anything but deprivation:

Doing the right thing, in this case, is not about abstinence-only, throwing out bread, tightening your belt, wearing a fake leather belt, or dragging around feeling righteous and gloomy.  Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.  Why resist that?

People will write her off as being too extreme or naive or elitist.  Let me assure you, she is not remotely extreme.  Her family chooses their "splurges" such as coffee, olive oil, whole wheat flour from Vermont, dried fruit, hot chocolate.  I found her perspective to much more "down to earth" (literally) and common-sensical than what we usually hear about food supply.  She exposes the insanity of our unsustainable and in-humane consumption patterns.  As she says, "Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel!"  The Kingsolver/Hopp family's project hinges mostly on hard work and restraint, qualities that should not be considered extreme under any circumstances.

The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude.  The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint--virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy.  These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in face, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans.  Furthermore, we apply them selectively:  browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example.  Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value.  "Blah blah blah," hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now.  We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.

What could possibly be elitist about mucking around in your own backyard growing tomatoes and "processing" chickens?  Somehow "organic" has come to be equated with "snobby" but it's how the entire human race has survived for millennia!  What we have failed to realize is that the artificially low prices we "enjoy" at the supermarket (deflated by government subsidies and monopolies of agribusinesses) are costing us hugely in environmental degradation and health care costs.  When Kingslover comments on the novelty of enjoying fresh raspberries in the middle of winter, her host replies, "This is New York!  We can get anything we want, any day of the year."  Kingsolver insightfully muses (emphasis mine):

    So it is,  And I don't wish to be ungracious, but we get it at a price.  Most of that is not measured in money, but in untallied debts that will be paid by our children in the currency of extinctions, economic unravellings, and global climate change.  I do know it's impolite to raise such objections at the dinner table.  Seven raspberries are not (I'll try to explain to my grandkids) the end of the world.  I ate them and said "Thank you."
    Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people before me have said so.  But this one takes the cake:  the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point this out.  The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners.
    Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity.  We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods.  Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers.  Acceptable: its prohibited by a holy text.  Set down a platter of country ham in front of a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, and you may have just conjured three different visions of damnation.  Guests with high blood pressure may add a fourth.  Is it such a stretch, then, to make moral choices about food based on the global consequences of its production and transport?  In a country where 5 percent of the world's population glugs down a quarter of all the fuel, also belching out that much of the world's waste and pollution, we've apparently made big choices about consumption.  They could be up for review.

Okay, it's time for me to stop illegally quoting huge portions of the text and go to bed.  It's way past my bed time, and I'm losing my ability to be cogent.  Did you get the message that I loved that book and that I think it's an important read for anyone who cares about food or the future?  It's pretty popular right now, and I guarantee you can pick up a copy at your local library.  Here is a delightful review by my friend Byron Borger who owns a bookstore and is a wonderful choice of someone to support other than the conglomerate, Amazon.  I'll close with this quote about what we have to lose when choosing local:

Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and a winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm.  It's a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses.  The green spaces surrounding your town stay green and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you.  But before any of that, it's a win-win strategy for anyone with taste buds.  It begins with rethinking a position that is only superficially about deprivation.  Citizens of frosty worlds unite, and think about marching past the off-season fruits: you have nothing to lose but mealy, juiceless, rock-hard and refusing to ripen.

For more information, check out their website which has tons of resources for eating locally, excerpts from the book, responses from readers, and recipes for eating in season.

Raw goodness

There it is, our beautiful raw milk, supplied by our neighbors and new friends Zach and Marianne.  We get two of these 1/2 gallon Ball jars full of deliciously sweet milk with the cream sitting on top.  One gallon of standard, industrially produced milk in the grocery stores is $4.39 right now.  We happily pay Zach and
Marianne $5 for a gallon, which feels like a steal to us!  We like knowing that their three Milking Short-Horn and Jersey cows are pasture-raised, eating hay and alfalfa in the winter, and that they are treated with respect and care.

Not all milk is created equal.  This is something that I've known for a long time, but am only learning about from a scientific perspective more recently.  When I was a kid we got raw milk for a while from a local farm, and I have fond memories of skimming the cream off the top to have with fresh-picked strawberries in June.  That was when I first learned how much better raw milk tastes.

Then, when I was a senior in high school, I had my first education in factory farming via an outraged friend.  After seeing graphic photographs of what the chicken and beef looked like before it reached my plate eliminated any appetite for meat for the next few years.  Over time I began to eat meat again, (prompted at the time by international travel and a lousy break up) but have remained an uneasy carnivore ever since.

What many people don't know is that the dairy industry is just as industrialized as the meat industry.  The modern dairy farm has thousands of cows who live in very tight quarters in enormous hangers.  Most of them literally never see the sky or eat grass.  Cows are grazers, but on modern dairy farms (even most small ones) they are now fed a corn-based diet with plenty of other nasty scraps mixed in, which changes the acidity in their stomachs, causing heightened levels of bad bacteria.  This then necessitates that the milk must be highly processed.  When milk is pasteurized is is heated to temperatures as high as 280 degrees Fahrenheit, which kills not only the bad bacteria, but all of the good bacteria and most of the vitamins and nutrients as well.  The calcium that remains has been so transformed by that point that it is difficult for our bodies to process it.  Vitamin D is then added back in artificially, but much of the immune-boosting benefits are lost for good.  Additionally, because cows weren't designed to thrive in close quarter eating non-grass food they need heavy doses of antibiotics to keep them healthy, which are certainly passed into the milk.  Furthermore, recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) is used to up the amount of milk each cow produces.  RBGH has been blamed for altering the hormonal balance of humans, especially women, and bringing the age of the onset of puberty down into the single digits for girls.

Raw milk has it's risks, but when you know it's source and trust that the farmers are using careful sanitation and able to keep close track of the health of their cows, the risks are vastly diminished.  Many raw milk producers are unable to find any traces of E-Coli and other dangerous bacteria in their milk or cows.  When the FDA freaks out about raw milk, they aren't talking about the product we get from Zach and Marianne, but about industrially produced milk on it's way to pasteurization.  I wouldn't drink that stuff either!   There are lots of good resources available about the health benefits of drinking raw milk.  Check out the Sustainable Table web site's Dairy section, or the Weston A. Price Foundation's Real Milk campaign.  Also, I highly recommend this article from Salon.com.  The article concludes:

In the end, it seems, raw milk is a lot more complicated than the FDA and the AMA would have consumers believe. Like sushi, raw milk is a nutritionally rich food that can be contaminated if it's not fresh and prepared in an immaculate, sterile environment. Just as raw milk devotees buy their milk from farmers they know and trust, so sushi connoisseurs tend to patronize the same few high-end restaurants -- and know which days the fish is freshest. But the government isn't lobbying to make raw fish illegal (yet). That may have everything to do with sushi's status as an exotic Japanese import -- a food usually enjoyed (in this country) by city-dwelling adults. Milk, on the other hand -- wholesome, nourishing cow's milk -- is more than just a healthy beverage; it's a symbol of the American heartland. It's a drink Americans of all income levels feed their children unthinkingly. And the behemoth dairy industry -- in 2006, it made $20 billion from milk alone, according to the National Milk Producers Federation -- would like to keep it that way. As Dalrymple put it: "Milk is big business. When you think milk, think Exxon."
...
Meanwhile, the FDA has just announced that it's safe to eat meat and drink milk from cloned animals. In such an Orwellian universe, where raw milk from cows that have two biological parents is considered dangerous, while pasteurized milk from cloned cows is safe -- is it any wonder that a growing band of consumers don't trust FDA decisions?

What a crazy world we live in!  So, got milk?

Eggs In A Nest

I have been "devouring" the newest Barbara Kingsolver book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle which chronicles her family's year-long adventure in limiting themselves to eating what they can grow themselves or procure from local producers. What they find, and what I know to be true from my own experience, is that the limitation is no sacrifice.  Food grown locally is better for you and just plain tastes better.

I am only about half-way through the book so far, but one feature that I have been enjoying is the recipes provided by Camille, Kingsolver's college-aged daughter.  We have made this spring-inspired recipe twice now, to rave reviews from all.  I don't know where my swiss-chard comes from right now, but I'm glad it's spring somewhere!

I'll be blogging more about this book, but I wanted to share this recipe and see if anyone else has read this book.  What are your food-purchasing practices?  How available is local food to you?  What is your motivation in the choices that you make about food?  (Money, location grown, organic...?)

EGGS IN A NEST
(This recipe makes dinner for a family of four, but can easily be cut in half.)

2 cups uncooked brown rice
Cook rice with 4 cups water in a covered pot while other ingredients are being
prepared.

Olive oil – a few tbsp
1 medium onion, chopped, and garlic to taste
Sauté onions and garlic in olive oil in a wide skillet until lightly golden.

Carrots, chopped
1⁄2 cup dried tomatoes   
Add and sauté for a few more minutes, adding just enough water to rehydrate the
tomatoes.

1 really large bunch of chard, coarsely chopped
Mix with other vegetables and cover pan for a few minutes. Uncover, stir well,
then use the back of a spoon to make depressions in the cooked leaves, circling
the pan like numbers on a clock.

8 eggs
Break an egg into each depression, being careful to keep yolks whole.  Cover
pan again and allow eggs to poach for 3 to 5 minutes.  Remove from heat and
serve over rice.