Thursday, July 30, 2009

Locavore Activism: Oppose Factory Farming

The Food and Water Watch is asking people to sign a petition asking the USDA to stop offering guaranteed loans to new pork and poultry factory farms. The petition reads, in part:
USDA is currently guaranteeing loans to new production facilities, which contribute to over-supply in an already saturated marketplace. At the same time, USDA is using taxpayer dollars for bonus pork and poultry buys in order to stabilize prices resulting from overproduction. (On March 31st, USDA committed to a $25 million bonus pork buy, and in May the industry asked for an additional $50 million pork buy.)
They argue that this is an irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars. I would also argue that factory farms cost taxpayers even more by damaging the environment. More relevant to this blog, this USDA policy makes it difficult for small, local, more sustainable and ecologically responsible farms to compete against big factory farms.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Know Your Wild Edible Plants Tomorrow Evening

Russ Cohen is giving a walking lecture on wild edible plants of New England at Blue Heron Farm in Lincoln, MA tomorrow from 6-8pm. This is awfully tempting, especially if it gives me a better clue about identifying wild mushrooms, but I don't know if I can make it. We shall see.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Jennifer Hashley Speaks

Here, in its entirety, is the letter Jen sent us as a thank you after the dinner. In addition to helping run Pete and Jen's Backyard Birds, Jen works for the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project. Some very interesting stuff in here.
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Hi Friends,
I would like to thank everyone again for taking the time to attend last week’s delicious donor appreciation dinner at Beacon Hill Bistro and especially for your leadership support of the MPPU project through the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at the Tufts Friedman School. It was great to meet many of you in person and to see all of you in this context - sharing in the delicious food made possible through your contributions and support of this vital project. For those of you unable to join us for the dinner, you were certainly there in spirit and we hope to catch you at a next event.

Since the restaurant venue was a bit loud, I didn't get the opportunity to share a few highlights of what New Entry is all about and how much it means to me, both personally, and to the new farmers we create through our programs and how all of this ties in with your gifts and leadership support of the MPPU project (an update of where the MPPU project stands is below).

I hope you've had some time over the weekend to explore the information about the project we shared with you on the thumb drive and I'd love to share with you some of the thoughts I had hoped to verbalize during the dinner (get cozy, read on!). In my role with New Entry, (the other "hat" I wear in life), I have the opportunity to work with all of the incredible individuals New Entry has helped train as new farmers in Massachusetts. I have gained an incredible education from the amazing individuals we work with on a daily basis – helping them achieve their farming dreams and goals and truly become the next generation of culturally diverse farmers.

New Entry was originally founded to assist socially-disadvantaged immigrants, refugees, and asylees with agricultural backgrounds “re-enter” agriculture in Massachusetts. We have worked with individuals from Southeast Asia, Latin America, African Countries, the Middle East, and beyond. Many of our participants are low-income, many with English as a Second Language, varying degrees of education and literacy. This has been an incredibly rich experience where folks who had no idea (living in urbanized areas in Massachusetts) that there was the potential to farm here and to grow their traditional crops. It’s been a learning curve for everyone – for the farmers – to learn what will actually grow here (most of them are from tropical climates) in our short and finicky growing season, and for staff to learn all of the exotic crops and growing methods such diverse farmers bring to the project. Over the past two years, with the growing interest in local food production, we have expanded our target audience and are now also working with traditional US-born individuals (gringos) who want to farm. This has increased our ability to serve additional clients and expand our current network of food producers. We are now an extremely multi-cultural program with participants hailing from over 30 different countries. It makes for interesting celebrations and meetings – we all learn from each other and it’s a truly rich experience!

You might wonder what we do and exactly how we do it. Briefly, we offer a series of training programs and services for new farmers:
  • An Explore Farming! Program to provide folks with an orientation to our programs and services and what it means to operate a farm business in MA
  • We have a 6-week Farm Business Training course that helps prepare folks with a first-year business plan they use to develop their markets, crop production, equipment and supply resources, and figure out how they begin to farm.
  • The project leases over 30 acres of “Training Farms” from private landowners and Land Trusts that we develop with all the infrastructure a new farmer needs to get started (storage, greenhouse space, small equipment, irrigation, etc.) where individuals can rent land from the project for up to 3 years to build their skills and capacities in production and marketing.
  • We offer practical skills training – a series of 12+ on-farm workshops throughout the growing season to help folks get the hands-on training they need to succeed with the latest technology and approaches.
  • And, we offer hours and hours of individual technical assistance to help people address all the farming-related needs they have –whether production, business planning, market access or preparing for the “transition.”
After farming on a training / incubator site for the 3-year period (if they choose), we help folks transition to independent farmland that they can continue to grow their business on their own indefinitely. In doing so, we are continuing to keep scores of acres of farmland in active production. Our other programs include:
  • Our World PEAS CSA program – to help new farmers with market access, we coordinate a multi-producer CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) where we combine the products of 30+ farmers in our program and deliver 218 shares to over 300 families in the Greater Boston area. What’s unique about our CSA is its ethnic flair where folks get exposed to veggies they might not be familiar with – we of course provide recipes and instructions!
  • Farmland Matching Service– we help landowners find farmers and we help farmers find land to expand, or grow their business.
  • Farm Employment Connections– we also help folks connect to farm jobs if they need more skills development or need to work for a paycheck before they start their own farm business.
  • Agricultural resource development – we also produce training materials, resource guides, and other educational resources on agricultural related topics.
People always ask me – “what do you do in winter?” I always have to chuckle and inform folks of all the program areas I just mentioned – and noting that developing new farmers is a full-time / year-round job. We do much of our trainings, ag conferences, and one-to-one planning and marketing work with individuals in the winter months. And part of my focus is ongoing development work. Our biggest obstacle to farm training is ongoing funding and we rely on the generosity of private donors like you, foundations and grants to carry on our work.

MPPU Update:
You might also be asking yourself, how does New Entry's work relate to the MPPU project? Over the years at New Entry, we always have individuals (new farmers) who would come to our program and not be exclusively interested in vegetable production (which is the bulk of our training curriculum)…so, we began to think of ways we could incorporate a livestock production training component into our programming. Me, being a pragmatic optimist, thought we could easily start with a poultry project at our training farms. Poultry is an “easy entry” livestock product that is great for beginners learning new skills – it doesn’t require a significant amount of land, it’s a fairly limited financial investment to start up on a small scale, there is incredible market demand, and if someone realizes it’s not right for them – in less than 8-10 weeks, there is a harvestable product and it is possible to recoup most of the initial investment.

Then reality set in, and I realized New Entry would be setting ourselves up with the same challenge Pete and I were having with the lack of processing infrastructure, and I determined that before we begin training new farmers in livestock production, poultry in particular, we should begin to address the infrastructure piece of the equation. Thus the MPPU project was born! My entire goal for this project was not just to meet an immediate “Pete and Jen” need, but a growing statewide need for us to truly have a sustainable local agriculture infrastructure. We need access to processing facilities that are in decline in the Northeast and across the US. I’ve been working for the past 2 years in my role as New Entry director to secure funding to address the regulatory aspects of the MPPU and to get the existing unit “up to snuff.” We accomplished that and we are ready for expansion. We were recently awarded a training grant to help train new producers in the MPPU regulatory protocol and food safety components, and we had over 25 producers attend our first May 29th training event. The challenge has always been that there is only 1 MPPU currently serving all of Mass, and as we continue to reach out to more farmers (and the market demand is creating interest among more farmers every day) – we need more capacity. The best part is – you’ve already put your resources where your values are and recognized the importance of this project – hopefully not just for Pete and Jen's Backyard Birds, but also for New Entry who can help take this project and expand it to a broader farmer audience throughout the state (and beyond – we have folks from RI, CT, NH, NY and others looking at our model). Currently, there are 4 farms using the MPPU in Massachusetts – but we expect that by 2010, there will be at least a dozen, if not more, producers licensed to use the MPPU and it will continue to grow exponentially. This will mean more local, tasty chicken at farmers’ markets, being served at restaurants, such as BHB, as meat shares in CSAs, and elsewhere. It means more demand for more MPPUs and the continual rebuilding and energizing of a vibrant local food and farming system. It’s pretty exciting stuff!

So, our next steps with this MPPU project is to leverage the funds we’ve raised and get the next unit constructed. We currently have $27K raised toward our $35K goal (which is now turning into a $45-50K goal to build the next iteration of the unit we want with a few upgrades and fancier bells & whistles than we originally envisioned). We have submitted a proposal for a USDA Community Food Projects grant that may provide additional resources toward a new unit and help us get our New Entry Poultry Demonstration project off the ground at our training farm sites in Dracut, and we are submitting a USDA Rural Development grant this week in partnership with the New England Small Farm Institute (who owns the existing unit) to fund 2 additional units throughout the state and develop a better management and business model for ongoing operations. With your contributions toward this project, New Entry would then lease and manage one of the units for our Eastern Mass farmers to share.

Need for continuing support: I wanted to wrap up my update with a quote from the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture - "A dollar spent on food from a local farm buys more than just groceries. In addition to sustenance, real nutrition and good flavor, it also buys vibrant rural communities, food security, and confidence in your food supply." That said, I can assure you that your dollars spent toward the MPPU project are supporting more than just a trailer that processes chickens – we are helping recreate vibrant communities of food producers, keeping farmland in active production, and assuring the future of our food supply. The generous contributions from all of you provide New Entry with the critical resources needed to expand in new directions and help us cover our continuing expenses related to these types of new initiatives that we are developing now and into the future. So thank you once again for your generosity and support, and I hope to have your support of New Entry for years to come!

If you have any questions about your gift to the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at the Tufts Friedman School, please contact me or Sean Devendorf, sean.devendorf@tufts.edu.

I hope to see all of you at our August 6th Farm Tour in Dracut - if not before.
Thanks so much again!
Best, Jennifer

The Ultimate Locavore Meal: Beacon Hill Bistro

As a wonderful side benefit of donating money to the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project for a new Mobile Poultry Processing Unit, my husband Alex and I were invited to a locavore meal on Thursday, July 16th, prepared by Executive Chef Jason Bond at the Beacon Hill Bistro, located in the Beacon Hill Hotel on Charles St. in Boston.

And it was spectacular! Aside from getting to sit next to Jennifer Hashley (of Pete and Jen's Backyard Birds) herself, the food was phenomenally good. Of course, all of the ingredients came from Pete & Jen's own livestock and Verrill Farm's vegetables, so they were fresh and wonderful. The meal also came with an impressive selection of (regrettably not local) wines.

The Beacon Hill Bistro is a smallish restaurant with lovely arches and wood beams. It suffers a bit from poor acoustics - we had to shout to be heard throughout the meal, and I noticed that felt had been tacked to the undersides of the tables to help absorb some of that noise - but it's also cozy and comfortable. Be warned that the restrooms are not handicapped accessible (down two flights of stairs in the basement). The wait staff was wonderful and attentive with a well-informed somalier describing exactly where and how each of the wines was produced.

As we stood or sat down to chat, we nibbled on appetizers from three platters of pates and terrines (I had never even heard of terrine before - it's essentially upscale meatloaf made of finely chopped meat, cooked in an earthenware dish called a terrine, and served at room temperature, and it's as different from meatloaf as pate is from devilled ham). The pates were made from chicken or rabbit liver, and the terrines were made of pork, including one stuffed into the hoof of a pig. All were utterly delicious with amazingly smooth texture. There was an aspic that made the rounds of the tables but somehow never got back to me - o, woe! This was served with a selection of fresh breads and mustards. (Mustard was a recurring theme throughout the meal.)

The first course was an arugula salad with seared rabbit livers, grained mustard, and creme fraiche. This is according to the menu, and I have to say that I don't recall the creme fraiche at all, but the liver was tender and delicious in the mustard, and it was accompanied by a rabbit heart and kidney, both of which were astonishingly good. This was accompanied by the best wine I have ever tasted. Seriously. It was Jim Barr "The Lodge Hill" Dry Riesling, Clare Valley, 2008. Smooth, dry, and utterly without aftertaste, I could have happily drunk nothing but that wine the entire evening. Alex and I are planning to lay in a case of it.

The second course was the best chicken noodle soup I've ever had - no offense, Mom! Incredibly tender dark chicken meat with homemade egg (of course) noodles, carrots and peas and other vegetables in a strong, subtle broth. Marvelous. This was accompanied by a chardonnay that was probably pretty decent but suffered by comparison with the riesling (Domaine Talmard Macon Chardonnay, Bourgogne, 2007). I should also say that I've never really liked chardonnay, and this was no exception.

The entree knocked Alex's socks off; smoked Tamworth ham with glazed new carrots, kohlrabi, and cabernet radishes. Alex is a serious ham fan - his favorite breakfast these days is breakfast burrito with scrambled eggs, chunks of ham steak from Chestnut Farm, shredded cheddar cheese, and green chile. This ham blew away every other ham we'd ever tasted. It was almost sweet, it was so tender and flavorful, so the inevitable mustard balanced it very well. To our astonishment, the radish was roasted and utterly delicious. Alex was convinced it had to be a sweet onion and not a radish. I am dying to try this trick myself with the last few radishes in my garden. The ham was accompanied by a fairly nice syrah (Clos la Chance "Black Chinned" Syrah, Central Coast, 2005).

For dessert, we had "Just Dug Carrot Cake," and it totally lived up to its name. Carrot cake is my favorite kind of cake, and this one had carrots so fresh and wonderful, I almost didn't notice the cake. I was also distracted by the accompanying creme fraiche and cream cheese ice cream (this must be tasted to be believed - it's as creamy as you might imagine something with "cream" twice in its name, but not very sweet) as well as several candied herbs. We all had a great time trying to guess which herbs. The tarragon was easy, but we were stumped on the other two, which turned out to be shiso and angelica leaves. Wow! This was accompanied by a tiny glass of slightly effervescent strawberry wine every bit as good as the Riesling. This was not on the official menu, and I couldn't here the somalier's explanation of it, but I will be keeping my eye out for strawberry wine in the future.

It turned out to be Jen's birthday, with Pete's coming on the following week, so Chef Bond also brought out a chocolate cake for them, which the rest of us refused to touch on the grounds that a) it was theirs and they deserved to have all of it, and b) we were utterly stuffed. I did, however, get to taste some candied angelica stem (had to be removed in order to put the cake in a box), which was lovely. I've never had candied herbs before, and I'm deeply intrigued. The candied shiso really surprised me, and now I find myself wondering: candied sage? Candied cilantro? Hmm...

Chef Bond came out with the cake and spoke to us about his commitment to local food sources and the MPPU project. Apparently, he has gone out and helped Pete and Jen slaughter their chickens in the past. He described how wonderful it is to have this deep connection to the food he works with, and about the superior quality of locally-sourced meats and produce. Pete and Jen presented him with a framed set of photos of their livestock in appreciation of the meal.

Of course, this was a special dinner with special ingredients, but knowing the chef's commitment to local, sustainable food, I'd return to the Beacon Hill Bistro in a heartbeat. While the dinner menu is pricey ($20-30/entree), the lunch menu is nicely affordable, offering dishes like Tea-Cured Gravlax, Herbed Potato Salad, Green Beans, Baby Greens for $13.00 (intriguing) and Local Grass-Fed Beef Steak, Frites, Watercress and Madeira Butter Sauce for $15.00.

I highly recommend the Beacon Hill Bistro for its excellent food and commitment to local, sustainable food.

Worthy Cause: New Entry Sustainable Farming Project

In our search for the ultimate local eggs, my husband and I stumbled across the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project (NESFP) at Tufts University. This program "was originally founded to assist socially-disadvantaged immigrants, refugees, and asylees with agricultural backgrounds 're-enter' agriculture in Massachusetts," says Jennifer Hashley, better known as Jen of Pete & Jen's Backyard Birds. Today, NESFP helps anyone who's interested in starting a farming business, even "gringos." My husband is planning on attending the Explore Farming! course at Tufts someday (when the girls are consistently sleeping through the night, and we have enough brain to think about such things).

Right now, NESFP is trying to raise money to purchase a new Mobile Poultry Processing Unit (MPPU), a movable chicken slaughterhouse. Currently, if you're a small farmer raising chickens, you have to bring your chickens to a large commercial slaughterhouse and pay to have them processed for you, but these slaughterhouses are few and far between. With an MPPU, farmers can slaughter the chickens at their own farms and sell them directly to their local customers, reducing transportation and processing costs and ensuring an incredibly fresh bird.

A month ago, my husband and I donated $500 to this worthy cause, and we did so at just the right time, because last week, Pete and Jen hosted a dinner at the Beacon Hill Bistro for all donors who contributed $500 to this cause (more on the dinner later). We actually got to sit next to Jen and discuss local, sustainable farming and the needs of the New England farming community. The MPPU will vastly improve the independence and sustainability of many small farmers, who tend to use far more humane and healthy chicken farming practices than large, industrial companies. It will also encourage more people to start small farms and raise high quality chickens in our local area.

If you would like to donate to this worthy cause, you can donate online through the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Please scroll to gift designation 3 and specify that you would like your donation to be directed to the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project or NESFP.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Backyard Local: When It Pays to Consult an Expert First

Today, I did an exceedingly stupid thing. I ate a wild mushroom without consulting an expert first.

Before you gasp in horror, I'm (obviously) perfectly fine. I knew immediately, with the first nibble, that I had the wrong fungus in my mouth and washed it out before ingesting it. The mushroom turned out to be the rather well-named False Chanterelle. It had me totally fooled, although it did not have the characteristic apricot smell and was rather more orange than I'd expected. I found them growing on the side of the driveway into my work and gathered a few this morning to test. They really, really do look like chanterelles, but the giveaway (I found out later) is that the gills do not extend down the stems.

False chanterelles are not terribly poisonous. Some people even consider them edible, but they're known to cause gastrointestinal upset. The tiny nibble I took was spicy and peppery in flavor, rather than fruity as a chanterelle should be.

So the moral here is to be properly trained in the identification of wild mushrooms. I have contacted the Boston Mycological Club for more information on their classes and guided walks and will let you know when they get back to me. I'm also planning on attending a workshop or two on mushrooms at the Northeast Organic Farming Association Summer Conference in August.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Free Local Cheese Tasting on Thursday

Boston Localvores is sponsoring a local cheese tasting at the Growing Center in Somerville on Thursday from 6 to 9 pm. While the tasting is free, they encourage you to donate $3 to cover costs and perhaps bring some bread/crackers/jam to go with the cheese.

See http://bostonlocalvores.org/blog/ for more info.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Don't Trust that Organic Label: Another Reason to Buy Local

An article in today's Washington Post reports that the standards by which a food product can be judged "organic" by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture has been significantly watered down.
Three years ago, U.S. Department of Agriculture employees determined that synthetic additives in organic baby formula violated federal standards and should be banned from a product carrying the federal organic label. Today the same additives, purported to boost brainpower and vision, can be found in 90 percent of organic baby formula.
This is just another reason to get to know your food by buying local and talking to the people who produce your food. When you go to farmers' markets, don't be afraid to ask questions like, "What, exactly, does integrated pest management mean? Do you ever use pesticides? What do you feed your chickens?" Remember, these foods are about to become part of you, and you have a right to know what's going into your body.

Towards a Local Food Culture

My trip to Sweden changed my perspective in so many ways, but the one thing relevant to this blog is the extent to which Swedes have a local food culture. We happened to be in Sweden for Midsummer, which is a very big holiday celebrated in much the same way that Memorial Day is in the U.S. as the official start of summer. It's actually a much bigger deal there, where the winters are so terribly dark and cold. And how do they choose to celebrate it? They weave garlands of wildflowers to wear upon their heads, dance around a maypole-like structure festooned with ivy and pine branches, hold a bonfire to ensure there's light through the shortest (and not terribly dark) night of the year, and they eat local food. Lots of it. In particular, strawberries and new potatoes.

Because of the unseasonably cold and wet weather, locally grown strawberries were less abundant than usual and thus in high demand. Strawberries are a key symbol of midsummer, and if you dare to show up to your midsummer party toting strawberries imported from Poland, oh, my! The sneers and jeers. Far better to pay $10 for a local pint. In grocery stores, the wooden strawberry baskets were stamped with an elaborate Made in Sweden symbol. Along the highways, local farmers set up farmstands selling strawberries, potatoes, and bouquets for garlands. Every restaurant we went to offered local strawberries and cream for dessert and pancakes with strawberries as a kid's meal.

Swedes also take tremendous pride in locally grown new potatoes. Ask any Swede, and he'll expound at great length on the superiority of the Swedish new potato in flavor, texture, and abundancy. I have to admit, they were tasty and creamy. Swedes even have special potato tumblers - they look rather like salad spinners - in which you place a dinner-sized amounts of new potatoes and turn a crank to remove all the peels.

Swedes take pride in several other local foods, such as lingonberries, shrimp (particularly in Stockholm) and crayfish (particularly in Gothenburg). What astonishes me, however, is that they take pride in their food at all. Aside from New England maple syrup and clam chowder, and chile in New Mexico, I've never experienced this kind of fierce loyalty to one's regional food. Sweden has a deeply ingrained local food culture, of the kind that Michael Pollan discusses in his book, In Defense of Food.
...the "What to eat" question is somewhat more complicated for us than it is for, say, cows. Yet for most of human history, humans have navigated the question without expert advice. To guide us, we had, instead, Culture, which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother. What to eat, how much of it to eat, what order in which to eat it, with what and when and with whom have for most of human history been a set of questions long settled and passed down from parents to child.
Somehow, Swedes have never really lost this culture. Yes, I saw Mexican food in grocery stores, passed a sushi restaurant, ate at a pizzeria in Gothenburg (bleh). And Swedes love their coffee and are the highest per capita consumers of bananas in the world. And yet, nearly every meal I ate while in Sweden had its roots in Swedish food tradition, from the herring appetizers with nubba (shots of aqua vit) to the hot dogs (korv) sold on street corners.

And Swedes can be inventive when using local food. On the one day of the vacation when I utterly succumbed to jet lag and stayed home instead of visiting yet another castle, my husband brought me back an enormous tub of horseradish soup. That's right, horseradish. Apparently, he and his various relatives had gone to a restaurant where the cook knew a local farmer with a bumper crop of horseradish. She blithely made a creamed soup out of it, using cream, creme fraiche, butter, eggs, and herbs and spices. This is so quintessentially Swedish, where nearly every dish has some addition of butter, cream, or both. And the soup was utterly delicious. I can't wait to start hunting through farmer's market stalls for horseradish so that I can try it myself.

This all reminds me of New Mexico, where I grew up. New Mexico also has a strong local food culture, particularly centered around chile and corn. My mother is Hispanic, and in my grandparent's house on their farm in Albuquerque, I ate very traditional New Mexican cuisine: enchiladas, tamales, posole, chicharones, sopapillas, calabacitas, papitas con carne al caldo, carne adobada, biscochitos, empanaditas.

And, just as described in Michael Pollan's book, my mother cooked almost none of these with the notable exception of enchiladas. (A favorite family story is how my Anglo father used to wash my grandparents' ceilings for seven-layer enchiladas with a fried egg on top. My dad is 6'4", and the ceilings were 7 feet high.) Instead, my mother made chicken cacciatore, chicken imperial, spaghetti and meatballs, salmon croquettes, Hawaiian hot dogs. And they were all wonderful - my mother is a fantastic cook. But they weren't her culture, nor were they local (with the exception of homegrown vegetables and beef from the farm). When my family eats out, and they do that more now than ever, they eat Chinese, Indian, Italian... anything but local cuisine, until I come to town and demand a run to Los Cuates or El Pinto. And yes, there are lots and lots of New Mexican restaurants in Albuquerque, all doing a fine business. There is still a local food culture in New Mexico. But it's not what it used to be.

Other regions of the U.S. have retained their local food culture, most notably the South. Living here in Boston, however, I have to look hard to find any remnants of a New England food culture. It's easier to find on the coast, in places like Hull and Gloucester and Cape Cod, though I have to wonder how much the tourist industry has tainted this cuisine. This seems tragic to me, that we have no real local cuisine. One of the things I love about Boston is the abundance and variety of restaurants: Greek, Chinese, Ethiopian, Himalayan, you name it. But I can't think of a single restaurant that serves only traditional New England cuisine. Has it died out altogether?

I think it's time to create a new New England food culture and cuisine, one that builds on old traditions and makes use of new techniques but always and particularly makes use of locally available foods. If you know of a restaurant that specializes in traditional New England food, let me know. If you're an nth-generation New Englander with recipes passed down through the generations, please share them! Let's revive our local food culture and make it stronger and better than ever.

Back to the Blog

Sorry, folks. I've been on vacation in Sweden and just returned last Sunday. I've been working and battling a Swedish virus my daughter brought back with us, but now, finally, I have time to blog again, and I have so much to write, I don't even know where to begin. Here's a brief synopsis:

  • Local food culture in Sweden
  • Farmshares are back!
  • Locavores on WBUR
  • Harvest Coop sponsors first ever ShiftMob
  • Duck eggs from Golden Egg Farm found at Arlington farmers' market
  • Backyard local: picks from the veggie garden
  • Cooking with garlic scapes
Okay, now to tackle these head-on, and not necessarily in the above order.