Eating Local and Fair Trade

An article in Sunday’s Chronicle (Farmers in Developing World Hurt by ‘Eat Local’ Philosophy in U.S. by William G. Moseley) pits Eat Local advocates against poor farmers in Africa. According to Mr. Moseley, it’s our fault that farmers in third world countries can’t get a fair break even when they turn to Fair Trade practices.

You know, I just can’t see it. In the first place, very few Eat Local advocates insist one must never buy anything from someplace else. How many of us live next to salt flats? How many can grow cinnamon or cumin or other spices? Have all of us given up coffee or tea? Chocolate?

The very people who want to eat local, are the same ones most likely to buy Fair Trade organic food when they need or want something they can’t get locally. We’re the ones who insist on food grown with fair labor practices and living wages for workers. But that doesn’t mean I have to buy all my food already processed and packaged at the grocery store, in order to support a farmer somewhere.

If I choose to buy my potatoes from a local farmer, I’m not putting a farmer in Africa out of business. If I decide to make my own spaghetti sauce from tomatoes grown by the farmer selling them at the farmer’s market, instead of the Fair Trade Organic brand found at Trader Joe’s, am I really responsible for starving children in China?

I think it’s a stretch.

In the second place, and this is the biggie, these third world farmers are put out of business because America subsidizes our own corporate farms at a horrendous rate and we flood the world market with our subsidized mono crops. Solve that problem!

Africa’s problems are a lot bigger than the elite of America shopping at the farmer’s market on Saturday. I’m not about to get into it on this blog, either. But the farmers there need more choices and freedom and markets, there, where they live. Their whole answer is not selling to a niche market in Europe or America.

Look, it’s hard enough to get people to think about where their food comes from and what’s in it. Let’s not let all the air out the movement before it even gets off the ground. Our own farmers are going out of business. Charity is fine. But I want to keep the farmer down the street in business before I’m going to worry about the farmer in Africa or Mexico.

Meat Recall

21.7 million pounds of meat?

My stars and whistles, people, what are we doing to ourselves? Is it really necessary for one company to produce that much meat and send it all over the country? Why can't we have smaller, localized processing plants that handle the meat from a few ranches? I don't how many ranches would be necessary to make a profit, but I don't think we need one company doing this much.

We're asking for trouble. No - we're begging for it.

So if you have this meat, dispose of it like they've instructed. Then run to your nearest farmer's market or Slow Food connivium and ask them to help you find pasture-raised local meat. Or go to www.localharvest.org and search for meat by your zipcode.

STOP buying meat at the usual grocery stores. Insist that your meat not be raised in a feedlot and fed on corn, soy, and the parts of other animals.

Don't depend on the USDA. You are the only one who can make sure the food in your house is safe food.

Pumpkins!

I love pumpkins. I like squash in general and winter squash is sweet and yummy. I love the autumn feel that comes with seeing a grouping of vibrant, colorful gourds on a table or in a bowl. And we can do so much with this fabulous food!

For me, there's nothing better than pumpkin soup (unless it's French Onion Soup - I'll have to get back to you on that). Orange, warm, smooth pumpkin soup served in the shell: wow. And so good!

How about Pumpkin Mashed Potatoes? This great idea comes from Jessica Prentice of Wise Food Ways and I make it every Fall. Just peel up some butternut squash, white potatoes, and sweet potatoes, boil them up, drain the water, and mash them with creme fraiche or buttermilk or yogurt, salt, nutmeg, mace, or allspice. These are fabulous!

A big hit at my house is Cooking Light's Sweet Potato Casserole. Feel free to substitute butternut squash for this, too. I'll pass on the marshmallows (fake food - sigh) but I'll use the brown-sugar-butter-pecan topping.

This is all great comfort food, but remember that these orange-fleshed foods provide nutrients needed at just this time of year. They're good for you! Be sure to look for them at a farmer's market or find a farmer who's growing them. Buy them local and hopefully, organic. You'll really notice a difference in taste!

The Truth in Cartoons

I thought today's Pickles cartoon was kinda funny in a hopeless, cynical kind of way:

Pickles Sept 27

How many people live their lives doing exactly this thing. Eating what's convenient and never giving a thought to where or how or why the food got there. Which is exactly how the food industry wants it.

Our Farm Bill

Sunday morning. We get two papers on Sunday, the SF Chronicle and the Contra Costa Times. A leisurely breakfast and time to read them both.

So there’s a great article in the Chron about the farm bill. Yeah, that one.

I know the House passed it and sent it on to the Senate. I know they made some important but very small changes. We continue to be in deep doo-doo, folks.

The crux of the article is that the farm bill is archaic. It had its use at first and hopefully, solved the problem it was created to solve. But like a lot of programs, it wasn’t supposed to live forever. Congress’s continual renewal of it is destructive and expensive.

We lobbied. We wrote letters and emails and sent faxes. We told our representatives over and over, what was wrong with the bill and what they needed to change. They aren’t listening. They continue to let the various food industries write their own portions of the bill. They continue to give billions of dollars to large-scale agriculture and corporate farms. They continue to subsidize, cotton, soy, corn, dairy, sugar, peanuts, etc. They continue to subsidize monoculture and fertilizer and pesticides.

They don’t subsidize vegetables, nuts, or fruit. They don’t subsidize organic. Sure, California complains about that because California grows most of the vegetables, nuts, and fruit, and not so much of the other stuff. But the point is not which state gets the money. The point is the damage done to our health and to the economy because our government subsidizes Big Ag.

This is also the bill that pays farmers to not grow something. Umm… how do I get in on that?

A lot of us question whether subsidies are good at all. Personally, I’d like to see them go away just on simple free market principles. The example in the article was about salad: if people are demanding a variety of nutritious, dark greens for their salads, but Congress is subsidizing iceberg – guess what a farmer grows? If he wants the subsidy, he grow iceberg. Sure, stubborn people scrounge around until they find a farmer who grows what they want. But why should it be so hard?

And because the market can’t control what’s available to buy, we have to pay much more for those nutritious greens. The subsidies for iceberg means it costs the farmer a lot more to grow them. (This is just an example - the farm bill does not subsidize iceberg lettuce.)

We want organic, we want fresh. We want research and innovation. We want rotated crops and farming methods that nourish the land.

We get monoculture. We get factory farms and sludge piles and fertilizer and pesticides. We can corn syrup as a way to use up all the corn that’s grown and the corn syrup gets put into nearly every kind of food that’s available to buy. We get diabetes. We get fat. We get cancer.

Follow the money.

My Weekly Meals

I've been enjoying my cooking this week. It's always fun to pick out a few seasonal recipes and then be able to purchase about 80% of the ingredients at the farmer's market. I bought everything I needed on Saturday it's worked out great, as usual.

Yesterday, I made a batch of stuffed piquillo peppers. Yum! Brown rice, a tomato, some parsely and a smidge of saffron (nope, that's not local). Cover 'em with cheese and bake for about 20 minutes. Those peppers were spicy, which I really like!

This was a variation on Marion Nestle's recipe in last month's Cooking Light.

I served them with leftovers from the night before: grilled tilapia with a pinto bean salsa. Also a Cooking Light recipe.

Today, I've got some pork sausage from my CSA order and I'm going to cook it up with some roasted mushrooms and butternut squash that I have leftover from another meal. Don't know this recipe yet - I'm winging it.

School gardens

I think it's encouraging when I hear about people planting gardens in odd spots. I think they are great for the community and we really need to expose our children to the Real World of our planet's ecosystems.

Even the rich are doing it. An article in today's Times talks about a prep school in Delaware that has started a garden. The students do the work, they use the food in the cafeteria and include it in the science curriculum.

Call me crazy, but I think every school in America should do this and that includes the high schools. It can be part of vocational training (gardening, farming, cooking, etc.), science (soil science, food science, biology, ecosystems...). I would even go so far as to suggest working in the garden should be a requirement. This can be flexible, obviously, for disabled students, but nearly everyone should be able to do something. There's also the benefit of getting the kids outdoors. We never get too old to need that.

Think of the fun: the kids plant some seeds, grow a plant, harvest it, cook it and eat it. When they go home and see the box of Hamburger Helper, don't you imagine they're going to start asking Mom and Dad why they can't eat Real Food? Like they do at school?

Cooking at Home

I've been trying to include a lot of local food in my diet for a couple of years, now. It's been a great experience and there's no doubt I love the food. Yesterday, I talked about my canning frustrations, but when all is said and done, the simple truth is: I love to cook. So I'm always trying to make my own... whatever. I like to buy local ingredients and go from there.

This includes my quest for the perfect yogurt. I wasn't interested in yogurt with "fruit" or anything else in it. I wanted plain, true yogurt. I'd add my own mixings at home.

The baseline was the yogurt I had for breakfast in 2003 at Glenloe Abbey in Galway, Ireland. It was creamy, rich, and fresh. It tasted like the milk had just come from one of the cows we could see outside the restaurant window, grazing in the Abbey's pasture.

Back home, the search began. And failed. And failed again.

Okay, it's a no-brainer that Lucerne or Dannon or Yoplait weren't going to make the grade. In fact, it wasn't always easy to even find plain yogurt in those brands. Everything was loaded with sweeteners and flavoring (rarely with any actual fruit, mind you - but lots of flavorings). So I moved on to Strauss (not bad), Nancy's (still not bad), and Pavel's (too strong). But none of them came close. It's true that by this time, I no longer remembered the exact taste of my baseline yogurt, but I figured I'd know it when I tasted it.

As I got more into buying local foods, the search was complicated by the location factor. Technically, Strauss is local, but can I really be sure the yogurt in the store came from a cow in California? Certainly the milk was mixed in a factory with milk from other parts of the country. Not good enough. Then I found Redwood Hills Goat Yogurt and that came pretty darn close. About as local as I could get, it was creamy and rich. I loved it. I had a hard time finding it sometimes, but it was great.

Except... not quite there. I was content, but a little bud of dissatisfaction kept nudging me on. What if, I occasionally thought, WHAT IF - I made my own yogurt?

I don't always move quickly. The thought fermented (hee) in my mind for a while and when I read Barbara Kingsolver's marvelous book "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral" I came across her chapter on making cheese. Which led me to http://www.cheesemaking.com/ and the New England Cheesemaking Supply Co. Okay, I know. It's not local. But I could buy a yogurt maker from them, couldn't I? See, just like with canning, I needed some hand-holding when it came to making yogurt. They not only sold a great yogurt maker, they had lots of instructions.

So I jumped in. Fresh raw milk from Claravale Farms (which I could get at Whole Foods or pick up with my occasional grocery order from Three Stone Hearth), a little bit of powdered milk, some yogurt starter and...

Oh yeah. If this yogurt is not at the baseline, it's too close to call. I'm hooked.

Preserving

September is Eat Local Challenge month, and of course, I signed up. I try to do this even in months when there is no challenge.

I like this month's theme, though: the beginning of the harvest and turning our thoughts toward preserving our food. I love all the blogs about people canning their harvest, and all the wonderful pictures of glorious jars on shelves, but let me be honest: I'm food preservation challenged in the biggest way.

I grew up typical 60s American suburban. Our food came from the grocery store - in cans, boxes, and preferably frozen. TV dinners were the rage. Add to that a mother who worked full-time and who hated fish, cheese, and mushrooms. When it came to most of our meals, it needed to say Swanson or Chef Boy-ar-Dee. I was 16 before I saw a fresh strawberry.

My mother grew up on a farm in Texas and she hated everything to do with it. She hardly ever talked about it and I never heard her pine for the fresh vegetables of her youth. Except for okra. When okra was in season, she bought it by the bushel-full and mixed it up with cornmeal and salt, deep-fried it, and we'd sit at the table eating pounds of it. I still love that stuff. She also bought yellow squash and cooked it with a cream sauce and lots of pepper. I loved that, too.

So you can see it was unusual to ever get "fresh," let alone freshly grown. And the idea of canning anything - well, the idea just never occured. I didn't even know the average human being could do that kind of thing. If you had asked me, I probably would have said it came from a factory somewhere. Everyone knows that!

I've done some canning over the last few years. Just fruit - chutneys, sauces, butters - easy stuff. I've never even tried jams because the idea of using pectin makes me nervous. I'm not sure what it is, you see. Any other food I want to preserve, I do by freezing. I'm the freeze queen, or I would be if I actually had something other than the side compartment to our Amana. I'd love to buy a chest freezer but what do I do about our famous California brown-outs and blackouts? Does a freezer need a separate generator?

So here's my problem: I'm totally enamored of Real Food. I would love to spend days cooking and canning all kinds of fresh produce, in all kinds of exciting ways. But I need a teacher. I need people to do it with, who'll talk and laugh and have a good time while we work. Who'll show me what pectin looks like and how to use it. Who know how to use a pressure canner or what the saurkraut is supposed to look like after a few days. People with Experience.

It would be so cool to really know how to do it.

Food Values

The life of a food purist is not an easy one. Take shopping day, for example. I first must go to the farmer's market, since that's where I'll find local, fresh, and organic food. Local is the key word, here and it's usually my first criterian. Not only am I not going to buy fruit and vegetables from Mexico or South American (or China!) I'm going to try not to buy them from Georgia, either. Or even Washington or Oregon. I'm going to first look for food that's grown within 100 miles of where I live. And yes, I'm really lucky in that regard, since I live in the Bay Area. It's amazing what's grown or found within 100 miles of here.

So after the farmer's market, it's off to Whole Foods for whatever I absolutely must have that wasn't at the market. I'm usually pretty lucky there, 'cause I can still find most of my produce from local farmers. Whole Foods puts up signs telling you where the stuff was grown. Try looking for that at Safeway!

In general, the local thing works pretty well for me. I only buy what's in season, so there's no need to get the asparagus from Peru. I got it when it was harvested in California. After Whole Foods, then I hit Safeway for the few items my husband refuses to give up, like Mocha Mix, cereal, turkey bacon, etc. That list is getting smaller and smaller, thank goodness.So three stops for groceries and beyond that, I also belong to a meat CSA which distributes once a month. That requires a trip to Berkeley, but I get grass-fed meat from local ranchers, as well as eggs from chickens that got to scratch for their food, and I'm hoping for a heritage turkey or ham for the holidays.

My last stop will probably be Peet's coffee (a non-local item I'm not giving up!) to pick up a 2 pound bag of beans. But I'll get that tomorrow when we go see a movie. Peet's is next door to the theater.The taste of the food is so far beyond what's sold in normal grocery stores that I hope I never have to go back to them. It can be a challenge, but it's worth every minute!