Know Your Food, Boston

Not Your Average Joe's Goes Local

2011-09-07T14:26:00.000-07:00

We were in Arlington Center yesterday to pick up our meatshare from Chestnut Farms, and we decided to hit Not Your Average Joe's for dinner. To our surprise and delight, Joe's is in the middle of their Summer's Best Fest, and all of their specials include local ingredients. I spoke with the manager, and he told me that he and the chef had hit the farmers' market last Wednesday and bought vast quantities of local produce and other ingredients for their menu this week.

On their specials menu:

Tomato and watermelon gaspacho
Chatham stuffed quahogs
Corn, arugula, and tomato pizza
Watermelon steak salad
Grilled pork tenderloin
Chicken paillard
Free-form vegetable lasagna
North Atlantic swordfish

We sorely tempted by the quahogs, which the menu described thusly: "rhode island clams, locally made chourico, grilled corn from wilson's in lexington and tabasco aioli." But our ravenous children convinced us that we should eat swiftly, so we went straight for the entrees. My husband ordered the chicken paillard while I ordered the swordfish. The kids both ordered pasta with butter, and I ordered them a side of sweet potato hash to go with it.

The swordfish, when it came, was grilled to perfection, topped with a cilantro and pumpkin seed pesto, accompanied by a roasted cob of corn (from Wilson Farm in Lexington) sprinkled with cotija cheese and watercress with a lemon vinaigrette. I am in no way exaggerating when I say here that it was the best swordfish I have ever tasted. It was astonishing. The fish was perfectly cooked, just slightly crispy on the outside, tender and moist and delicious on the inside. The pesto complimented the fish beautifully. The pumpkin seeds gave it a nutty flavor without overwhelming the flavor of the fish. I almost didn't notice the watercress, but it was fresh and crunchy and refreshing. The corn, what my children did not claim for themselves, was also delicious, the cheese adding some nice saltiness.

For all that, my husband's chicken was actually better. The menu describes the dish as "chicken paillard with a panzanella salad of brioche croutons, tomatoes from ward's in sharon, cucumbers, capers and red onion, topped with locally grown arugula and romano cheese." My husband had serious doubts about ordering what he took to be a chicken salad. His doubts vanished when the dish arrived. The chicken, like the fish, was grilled to perfection, cooked through but moist and tender with a sauce that he could not get enough of. When he had finished the croutons, he was reduced to filching uneaten bread from our daughters to sop up the very last bit. To complement, he had a glass of pinot gris 2008 from Nantucket Vineyard which he liked quite a bit.

The downside to the meal was the lackluster service. Our dour waiter seemed to be perpetually annoyed that we wanted anything at all, though he was prompt and refilled my water glass frequently. The food was slow to arrive given that we were there quite early and the restaurant was nearly empty. What annoyed me most, though, was the thorough lack of imagination applied to the kids' menu. Pasta with butter or tomato sauce, no sides? For $5.99? That's absurd. I would have loved to see some locavore offerings for the kids. I'd like kid's meals that integrate vegetables. But their menu seems to consist of stereotypical kid food (mac 'n' cheese, cheese pizza, burgers, pasta) or cut down versions of adult fare (sirloin tips, balsamic-glazed salmon.) How about a kid-friendly stir fry? Maple-roasted root vegetables? Pasta with chicken and broccoli or asparagus in a mild cream sauce? Even the sweet potato hash, when it arrived, turned out to be too spicy for the girls to eat.

Well, regardless, I'm delighted to see a chain restaurant, even if it's a semi-local chain, jumping onto the locavore bandwagon. Best of all, their prices were quite reasonable: $13.99 for the chicken, $21.99 for the swordfish and worth every penny. Not Your Average Joe's Summer's Best Fest lasts until September 20th.

Why You Should Ask Who Picks Your Food

2011-06-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of weeks, I've been buying organic blueberries from Georgia, reasoning that this is more local than California or Mexico. However, a blog post today about the farming crash in Georgia informs me that those blueberries were most likely picked by illegal immigrant laborers, who are now fleeing the state in the wake of new anti-immigrant legislation.

Jay Bookman writes,

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

It turns out that illegal immigrant migrant laborers earn an average of $8/hour for their work. Only 7.7% receive health benefits.

Now, I have little objection to illegal immigrants working in fields in the U.S., since they're providing a useful service, contributing to a troubled economy, and since few legal Americans would work so hard for so little. I do, however, have a serious problem with this degree of exploitation.

So here's another reason to buy local: that pint of blueberries has no label stating "produced and picked by fairly-compensated labor." But at a farmers' market, you can talk face to face with a farmer and ask, "Who picked these blueberries? How many people work for you? Do you offer health benefits?"

I also have a suggestion, or perhaps a challenge, for the folks in Georgia, particularly the unemployed: it's an incredible waste to allow these fruits and vegetables to rot in the fields. So talk to your neighbors and raise a crop mob. Get out there, bring in the harvest, and then donate what you earn to a workers' rights advocacy group such as the United Farm Workers of America, or to an immigrant legalization advocacy group such as the Farmworker Advocacy Network.

Farmers, if you can't get workers to pick for low wages, don't just throw your crops away. Contact some area gleaners groups, such as Mid-Atlantic Gleaning Network in Alexandria, VA. Volunteers will come pick your crops and bring them to area homeless shelters and food banks, and you'll at least get a nice tax write-off.

What It Means to Be a Locavore

2011-06-16T06:34:00.000-07:00

Boston.com today has an interesting and pretty well-reasoned article today arguing against locavorism.

However, the article misses a crucial point about locavorism. Being a locavore means more than just buying locally grown food. It also means being mindful about what food reasonably grows in your area.

The article argues:

One recent UK report found that the greenhouse gas emissions involved in eating English tomatoes were about three times as high as eating Spanish tomatoes. The extra energy and fertilizer involved in producing tomatoes in chilly England overwhelmed the benefits of less shipping. Even New Zealand lamb produced less greenhouse gases than English lamb.

This sounds like a good argument, but it misses several points:

True locavores are mindful of their regional limitations. If you're buying tomatoes at Massachusetts farmers' markets right now, you should know that they were either grown in a hothouse, which isn't terribly efficient and probably produces more greenhouse gases than shipping them up from Georgia or California, or they were, in fact, shipped in from out of state. Which means that if you want to be true to locavore ideals, you must resist those plump, juicy heirlooms and wait until late July before buying tomatoes. Cherry and grape tomatoes may be ready sooner.
If you're using vast amounts of artificial fertilizer to grow tomatoes in England, you're doing it wrong. Organically grown tomatoes use compost and well-composted manure, which do not contribute significantly to greenhouse gases or watershed pollution.
Comparatively, Spain is closer to England than Florida is to Boston, and tomatoes from Spain are likely shipped via rail or boat, rather than by truck, which is also a more efficient use of fuel. So for England, from an environmental standpoint, Spanish tomatoes are, in fact, probably a better idea than English tomatoes. As long as they actually are from Spain.

Really, what it comes down to is this: do the research. Find out what it takes to grow a particular crop in your area, and then determine when it makes sense to start buying that crop locally.

You also need to determine for yourself what local means. Many locavores set the limit at 100 miles from home. But if you can't live without bananas in your cereal each morning, you're violating that limit. Ditto olive oil, chocolate, or coffee. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver wrote that each member of her family was allowed to choose one non-local food to buy. If you can stick to that rule, you'll be reducing your footprint significantly.

To be honest, my family isn't there yet. We buy organic produce from California and prepackaged pastas and canned tomatoes. But whenever possible, we try to buy local. We buy 90% of our meat in a meat share from Chestnut Farms. We buy almost all of our eggs locally from Chestnut Farms and Pete & Jen's. We plant and pick in a communal garden in my cohousing community. Until this year, we bought a CSA farmshare from Brookfield Farms. We buy almost all our dairy locally through the Dairy Bar or Sherman Market (exception: we have not found a good local source of goat milk for my lactose-intolerant daughter). Now that the farmers' markets are open, we gleefully buy fresh greens there (kale!) every week. And in a month, we're moving to a new home in Beverly with plenty of land where we hope to grow most of our own food.

The path to locavorism is a tricky one, but the most crucial skill you need to become a locavore is this: ask questions, find answers. Ask the farmers at the market where they are, whether they grew the produce themselves, how they grew it, whether they use a hothouse, how they heat that hothouse, and whether they use pesticides, herbicides, or artificial fertilizers. Talk to them about the pasture area their cattle have, or what they feed their pigs, or how they slaughter their chickens. Ask the farmers who works for them, whether they're paid fair wages. Ask them how far they have to travel to come to the market, how much fuel they use, and whether they partner with other farmers to save on transportation costs (I spotted Pete & Jen's eggs at a Blue Heron farmstand yesterday).

The more you know, the better and more sustainably you'll eat.

"I am a conscientious parent. I am not a HEPA filter."

2011-06-10T16:07:00.000-07:00

Here's a remarkably well-written argument, not just for eating organic foods and using organic practices on lawns and farms, but to push for legislation to ban dangerous chemical use. Sandra Steingraber writes:

But Faith and her brother, Elijah, do not live solely within the bubble of my kitchen and property lines. They occupy a much bigger ecological niche, and I cannot verify the agricultural origin of every food item served at every birthday party, summer camp, sleepover, recital, and library summer reading program event. I can’t ensure that every backyard soccer field, every patch of lawn, and every pet in every neighborhood home they run in and out of are free of organophosphates.
Nor can I stop the wind from blowing.

See the full article at http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6162/

Keep Big Ag from Hiding Their Inhumane and Unsafe Practices

2011-05-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

Currently, several states are trying to pass legislation that makes it illegal to take photos or film of farms. That's right, Big Ag doesn't want you to know what they're up to.

Transparency is the consumer's best protection against unsafe business practices. You can join Slow Food USA in petitioning to withdraw this legislation here: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5986/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6675 .

To further support the petition, Slow Food is encouraging people to take pictures of farms they visit and post them on their Facebook page. They will then take the best of the pictures, create a booklet, and send it on to legislators to make their point. Which is a great excuse to go visit your local farm!

I Ask, the Lantern Answers

2010-06-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

After a long winter hiatus, I'm blogging once more.

Last fall, I asked the Slate's Green Lantern about cage-free and free-range eggs. On Tuesday, the Lantern answered. Interestingly, cage-free and free-range eggs turn out to be less green in some respects that penned-up hens, but the Lantern recommends raising your own chickens to reduce transportation costs.

Mushrooms Day 12: Almost Edible

2010-01-20T17:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the primordia had grown enough that the individual mushrooms were becoming obvious:

Holy mycelia, Batman! There must be 15-20 mushrooms in that one big primordium, and it looks like there are around 20 primordia all over the kit, which translates to 300-400 mushrooms total! Anybody want to buy some mushrooms when they're ready? I'm not convinced we're going to be able to eat them all while their at their peak. I know, we can dry them, but what's the fun in that?

By yesterday evening, they had grown significantly:

Today, the mushrooms are noticeably bigger, more distinct, and more mushroom-like in shape:

I noticed some shrooms sprouting under the label, so I peeled it off to let them grow:

Next time, I'll remove the label immediately. There are new primordia showing up everywhere on the bag where there is no mold. It's quite impressive, and also sort of nice that we'll get the mushrooms in stages, so they won't all peak at the same time. We're probably two or three days away from edible shrooms!

Zing! Pizza Announces All You Can Eat II - Tuesday, January 19, 6-9pm

2010-01-18T09:23:00.000-08:00

Mark Ostow, owner of Zing! Pizza, has declared a repeat of his very successful All You Can Eat night. For some small fee, you can go to Zing! Pizza and eat as much as you like, trying all their amazing, delicious, locally-sourced pizzas. My personal favor is the Blue October with butternut squash and blue cheese - mmm! For more information, see http://zingpizza.blogspot.com/.

Mushrooms Day 10: Primordia Galore

2010-01-18T09:17:00.000-08:00

Okay, dark patches in the straw are NOT primordia. On day 8, I turned the kit around to check for primordia on the back and found an enormous green splotch:

That's mold, not primordia, which means we've been keeping the humidity too high. I had just sprayed the kit (oops), so I resolved not to spray on day 9.

However, there were clear signs of primordia developing on day 8. You can see one poking out a bit on the far left of the moldy photo. Here's a clearer shot, showing popcorn-like growth:

On day 9, these had grown noticably:

There were similar primordia all over the front of the kit.

Today, day 10, the primordia do not appear to have progressed much:

So I misted the kit again. While the primordia don't appear larger, they do appear more bifurcated (split into lots of little knobs). We'll see what they do with a little more moisture.

Update: More Shiitakes on the Way

2010-01-15T10:26:00.000-08:00

I received an email response asking me to call Fungi Perfecti (pronounced Funj-eye Perfect-eye, apparently). The customer service rep I spoke to there was very helpful and immediately offered me a replacement, which will arrive here in about a week. Meanwhile, she instructed me to put the failed kit in the compost. Hmmm... will we have shiitakes growing out of the compost come spring?

Well, this way, we won't be inundated by mushrooms all at once.

Mushrooms Day 7: Primordia and Other Mushroom Vocabulary

2010-01-15T08:10:00.000-08:00

Day 7 of our great mushroom experiment, and there's a big dark patch on the side of the pearl oyster mushroom kit:

According to our instruction manual, this is the first sign of the development of primordia - "the youngest stage of mushroom formation, usually appearing as small bumps or clusters."

Here's some more mushroom terminology for you:

flush - a crop of mushrooms
fruit - to cause mushrooms to form
initiate - to stimulate mushroom formation by dropping temperature ("cold shocking"), adding more moisture, or providing air or indirect light
mycelium - the fungal network of thread-like cells that gives rise to mushrooms
spores - microscopic "seeds" of mushrooms which appear as a white dust around and below mature Oyster mushrooms

Note that other species of mushroom may have differently-colored spores: black, brown, even red, blue, orange, or purple.

At any rate, I expect that we'll see the small bumps of primordia in the next day or two. A correction to my last post: the instructions say that we should see primordia within 14 days of starting to mist the kit. The photos in the manual show primordia at 7 days, so we're doing just fine. If all continues as expected, we'll have mushrooms ready for harvest in about four days.

The shiitake mushrooms look pretty much the same as last night. I've had no word back yet from Fungi Perfecti on what to do with them, so I misted them as instructed, just to be on the safe side.

Try This At Home: Grow Your Own Mushrooms

2010-01-14T18:25:00.000-08:00

Over the long, slow winter, when our garden is bedded down with snow, we decided to try growing mushrooms. We had heard Paul Stamets speak at the NOFA 2009 Summer Conference and had picked up his Fungi Perfecti catalog. After much deliberation, we chose to try out the Pearl Oyster mushroom kit ($24.00) and the Shiitake mushroom kit ($26.00). These are pretty standard, tried-and-true shrooms, and they looked fairly easy to care for. They arrived six days ago on Friday, January 8th. We waited until we got the girls to bed, then gleefully unpacked them and figured out how to get our shrooms growing.

Each kit came packed in a plastic bag with an instruction manual and an additional, larger plastic bag with holes punched in it:

The pearl oyster mushroom kit (left) came as packed straw inoculated with mushroom spawn. The shiitake kit (right) turned out to be a pressed brick of wood chips. It looked remarkably like popcorn. Reading the manual and checking the date on the bag (Nov. 20 was less than 40 days from the date of arrival), we learned that the shiitakes were not yet ready to bloom. We were advised to keep them in the refrigerator for 3-5 days (picture was in fact taken in the fridge).

The pearl oysters, however, were ready to go. I placed them in a clean pink hospital tub:

Then, according to the directions, I used two wire coat hangers to create a tree, straightening out the hook ends and pushing them firmly into the straw.

I misted the kit all over with water. The water cannot be chlorinated; the instructions recommend rainwater, but since it's January in Massachusetts, I filled a pot with snow and melted it on the stove, then let it cool before spraying the kit.

Once I misted the kit, I covered it with the large plastic bag provided:

We mist the kit every morning. We keep it in our second floor bathroom with the blinds down, where it benefits from low natural light and steam from morning showers.

After keeping the shiitakes in the fridge for 5 days, we took them out. The instructions say to open the bag they come in and fill the bag with water. Alternatively, you can soak them in a 5-gallon tub. Since we chose to melt snow, the 5-gallon tub sounded like a good idea. We unwrapped the brick and placed it in the tub full of snowmelt... where it floated. (I completely failed to take pictures of this, sorry.) We weighted it down with a pyrex pan and a rock inside it so that it would stay submerged, and let it soak for 24 hours as recommended.

Today, I tried to take the brick out of the tub, and it disintegrated in my hands. I strained the crumbled block out in a colander and did my best to press it back into shape with the popcorn-y outer crust on the outside:

The bag provided had also disappeared, so I made do with another bag, punching holes in it approximately the size and frequency of the bag on the pearl oysters. The instructions say to use skewers or chopsticks pressed into the block to keep the bag open over the shiitakes, but there was no way they'd stay in. So I used four angle brackets that were lying around and hung the bag over the remains of the block.

At this point, I have very low expectations for the shiitakes. If they bloom, I'll be amazed. What went wrong? Did I miscount the days and kill off the shrooms in the fridge? Was there something in the snow? We took it from the garden, and we don't use salt on our walks. We also cleaned out the tub first. Should we have left the block in the bag? Been more careful removing it from the tub? I'll write Fungi Perfecti and ask.

The pearl oysters, on the other hand, seem to be doing fine on day 6:

There's clearly a lot of moisture inside the kit bag, but not too much. Misting appears to be working well. I see no sign that the shrooms are beginning to form, but we're not supposed to see anything until day 7. I'll post again as soon as something comes up.

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth

2010-01-13T08:26:00.000-08:00

I'm back. My apologies for the long hiatus. I went on vacation to New Mexico in late October/early November, and then the holidays just steamrolled right over me. But I've got tons of new stuff to share with you, including:

Giving farmshares as Christmas presents
The latest from Lexington Community Farm
Growing mushrooms at home (with pictures!)
Upcoming locavore meat deliveries

Media: Argument Against Locavorism in NY Times

2009-10-02T10:53:00.000-07:00

This seems like a specious argument to me, that the quality of the experience doesn't necessarily justify locavorism. Of course it doesn't, but it certainly does add to its value.

Sherman Market Opens in Union Square

2009-10-01T17:09:00.000-07:00

At long last, Sherman Market opened yesterday in Union Square. A spinoff from the nearby Sherman Cafe, Sherman Market features locally sourced foods. It's roughly twice the size of the Dairy Bar in Davis Square, so here's hoping they have a broader selection of local foods. When I went in today, they had local, organic produce such as heirloom tomatoes, tomatillos, garlic, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and fresh herbs. They also had jams, jellies, teas, coffees, ready-made soup stock, and a freezer full of Giovanna gelato made in Newton. We picked up one pint of coffee gelato and one of chocolate. Mmmm... I think this may be the same gelato we ate at Stone Hearth Pizza last weekend. Next week, I hope to chat a bit more with the owner and find out where they get their products. Actually, their twitter feed says a great deal about their sources. (Their web site is currently under construction.)

ASIDE: I found wild hen of the woods mushrooms at flora restaurant's stall at the Arlington Farmer's market yesterday. These wonderful, seasonal mushrooms are a real treat, so keep an eye out for them again next week. Other lovely surprises included our favorite ham steak from Chestnut Farms on sale, organic numex green chiles, and lobsters on sale for $4.99-$5.99/lb. Wow!

Restaurant: Stone Hearth Pizza, Belmont, MA

2009-09-28T19:28:00.001-07:00

It's not often that I get the opportunity to write one post for two blogs, but Stone Hearth Pizza in Belmont, MA fits the bill. We've dined at the Stone Hearth Pizza in Cambridge near Porter Sq., but the restaurant there is small, cramped, and suffers from slow service. We'd heard that the Belmont restaurant was larger and had better kid amenities, so we decided to check it out.

The Belmont restaurant is indeed about three times the size of the Cambridge location and rather more plush, but it had no kid amenities at all. And where the Cambridge location has one wall covered with placemats colored in by their underage patrons, the Belmont location has no such kid-friendly atmosphere.

The food, as always, is quite good. Stone Hearth Pizza uses local, mostly organic ingredients. Their menu and their pizza boxes feature a map of New England showing exactly where their ingredients come from (see a complete list here). Their pizzas are inventive and tasty. Our favorites are the Sausage and Carmelized Onion pizza and Bacon and Blue pizza.

This time out, we tried the Farm Fresh pizza, which sounded great on paper: "Garlic oil, cherry tomatoes, charred red/yellow peppers, Yukon gold potatoes, artichoke hearts, green/black olives, fresh mozzarella, topped with salad of arugula/red onion/prosciutto." Unfortunately, the olives completely overwhelmed the flavors of the other vegetables. When we picked the olives off (to our omnivorous two-year-old's delight), we discovered that the pizza without them had hardly any flavor at all.

The girls had better luck with their pizzas. Our five-year-old practically inhaled her cheese pizza, and our two-year-old had to compete with her daddy to finish her cheeseburger pizza. We knew from past experience to stay away from the mac 'n' cheese, which was oddly too spicy for the kids to eat. I like it that way, but the kids won't touch it.

The kid's meals included drinks (lemonade and chocolate milk, respectively) and desserts, a choice of cookies or gelato. Both girls chose the gelato, vanilla and chocolate respectively, and my husband also ordered the hazelnut. The vanilla gelato's vanilla flavor was overpowering, and my five-year-old gratefully traded her sister for the chocolate when she was done with it. My husband's hazelnut gelato was chunky with bits of hazelnut but also somehow over-flavored. The chocolate, however, was quite good.

Regardless of how good the meals were and the quality of the ingredients, we got some mild sticker shock from the price: $8.50 for a kid's meal is a bit much, especially when we paid only $12.50 for our own pizza. Then again, when you do the math, an 8" cheese pizza is $5.60, a drink is $2, and gelato is $4 (two cookies are $1), for a total of $11.60, which means the kid's meal is actually a bargain. I do wish, however, that just one of the kid's meals had included vegetables.

Overall, while I applaud Stone Hearth Pizza's commitment to local, organic foods, I'm not all that impressed by either their pizzas or their prices. Zing! Pizza in Porter Sq. also uses local, organic ingredients, has more interesting and inventive pizzas, is less expensive, and they deliver. Their restaurant is seriously tiny, though, so if you want to eat out, Stone Hearth pizza is a better bet. If you're eating in Cambridge, I recommend that you call ahead and order in advance to compensate for the slow wait staff. For the record, the service at the Belmont location was fine.

Poll: Lexington Community Farm

2009-09-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

This week's Lexington Minuteman online poll asks whether Community Farming is a good idea for Lexington. Please take the poll and let Lexington know that you support local, community farming.

Fundraiser - Urban Barn Dance for Farmers' Markets

2009-09-17T10:35:00.001-07:00

Received this today from the Mass. Farmers' Markets newsletter:

The Second Annual Urban Barn Dance

A lively celebration of the 2009 growing season featuring
Chef Bob Sargent of flora restaurant.

Friday, October 16
(just a month away!)
6:30 -- 9:30 pm
Kendall Square, Cambridge
Dante Alighieri Italian Cultural Center
41 Hampshire Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

Proceeds from the event will benefit the work of the Federation of
Mass Farmers Markets

NOW'S THE TIME TO GET YOUR TICKETS!
$50 each

To purchase your tickets,
call Mass Farmers Markets
at 781-893-8222
or e-mail Martha.

Event Details:

Guests will toast the hard work of their favorite farmers with a hearty locally grown supper, and then continue the celebration with live music and dancing. Music will be provided again this year by Sean Smith, with musical accomplices Janine Sirignano and Peter Buchak. Contra caller David Titus returns to lead us in dances that new and experienced dancers will enjoy.

Dinner will feature several different preparations of locally raised pork from Austin Brothers Valley Farm, vendors at the Central Square Farmers Market in Cambridge.

Chef Bob Sargent of flora restaurant is once again generously donating his time to create mouth-watering pork dishes as well as hearty sides to accompany them. There should be plenty of food for hungry vegetarians as well!

Guests will also enjoy a silent auction with prizes donated by local businesses.

Libations will be available at the Dante Alighieri Center's cash bar.

Please consider being a sponsor for this event at one of the following levels:
Golden Watermelon ~ $400 (includes admission for two)
Silver Queen Corn ~ $250 (includes admission for two)
Bronze Fennel ~ $100 (includes admission for one)

Urban Agriculture Fair in Harvard Square

2009-09-16T16:50:00.000-07:00

This came in Henrietta Davis's mailing list:

Please come to Cambridge's 1st URBAN AG FAIR in Harvard Square, Sunday, Sept. 20th 11 am - 4 pm.

Celebrating Local Gardens, Growers & Foods!
Sample recipes, get tips on composting, community gardening, rain barrels, and bee-keeping! Cooking demos from local chefs, and "Cambridge School student-growers" will be held throughout the day. Enter your own items in a judged competition of home-grown fruits, veggies, home-made baked goods, honey, flowers, preserves, pickles and eggs! All Events are free, open to the public and family-friendly.

Visit www.harvardsquare.com http://www.harvardsquare.com/ for entry form and more info.

Resource: Green City Growers

2009-09-15T05:30:00.000-07:00

I spotted a flyer in a cafe across from my daughter's elementary school for Green City Growers.These folks will come to your house, build raised beds, and plant organic vegetables for you. They also make rooftop beds and work with schools, hospitals, and nursing homes. There was no word on their web site on whether they offer a maintenance plan (i.e., someone comes and weeds the bed for you), so I'll send them email for clarification.

This comes as a great relief to me. I was starting to think I would have to start up this business myself. Nothing is more local and sustainable than growing food in your own backyard, and nothing's as nutritious and tasty as food picked and eaten immediately. If you have any interest at all in growing your own vegetables, but you have no idea how, I encourage you to contact these folks.

If there's enough interest from do-it-yourselfers, I can also write up a series of posts on how to create your own backyard garden with a minimum of work and fuss.

Pete & Jen's Pig Roast at Verrill Farm, Concord, MA

2009-09-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

Speaking of local meat, Pete & Jen are providing the pork at an event on Sunday, September 13th:

On Sunday 9/13 from noon - 4 pm, at Verrill Farm, you can enjoy our very own Pete and Jen's Pastured Pork at the Pig Roast and BBQ! Yes, it will be our very own delicious Tamworth pig on the spit. Music and hayrides will be sure to entertain.

Meat Share Round Up

2009-09-12T10:54:00.001-07:00

A friend recently asked me about meat shares, and I promised to put together a list of local meat shares for her (a week ago). Here they are - sorry about the delay, Laura!

Chestnut Farms, Hardwick, MA - my own meat CSA, and we LOVE them! I pick up in Arlington Center on the first Tuesday of every month or the following Wednesday at the Arlington Farmers' Market, but you can also pick up in Natick, Waltham, or at their farm in Hardwick, MA. Cost of the meat depends on how much you buy: $80 for 10lb, $115 for 15lb., $150 for 20lb., $175 for 25lb. Shares include chicken, beef, pork, and lamb, with a promise of goat in the future. You can opt out of pork or lamb, if you wish. You can also order turkeys, and they frequently have eggs for sale at their pickup locations. Last I heard, they had a 6-month waiting list.
Stillman's Farm, Lunenburg and New Braintree, MA - pickup locations in Jamaica Plain, Brookline, Cambridge, Quincy, and Lunenburg. They also offer chicken, beef, pork, lamb, and seasonal turkeys. Their pricing model gets cheaper the more you pay in advance and is otherwise comparable to Chestnut Farm. They do offer a 5lb quarter share for smaller households, and they give their shareholders a 20% discount when they buy additional meat at farmers' markets.
Austin Brothers Valley Farm, Belchertown, MA - This relatively new meat CSA just got started in August, so they may actually have shares available. They've sold meat in the parking lot by Harvest Coop in Cambridge for years, and I've found the meat quality to be quite good. Pickup locations in Cambridge, Amherst, Belchertown, and Worcester. 5lb/month for $9/lb, 10/month for $8.25/lb, and 20lb/month for $7.75/lb. They offer only beef and pork.

Remember that there's also a fish share now available, too. Pick up in Harvard Square, Cambridge.

In researching this, I came across this (slightly out of date) list of local CSAs: http://fitfool.livejournal.com/143862.html.

Hmm, so few meat CSAs. Is this an opportunity for aspiring farmers?

Eat Local to Reduce Health Care Spending

2009-09-12T08:13:00.000-07:00

Michael Pollan makes a well-reasoned argument that eating more local, healthy foods will help reduce the cost of health care in his NY Times article today, with references to his sources for fact verification. I love the Internet and the ease with which writers can connect their articles to their sources of information.

Time to Order Winter Shares

2009-09-08T17:55:00.000-07:00

A friend recently asked me for recommendations for winter shares. This interests me, too, because our CSA, Brookfield Farm, will not deliver its winter shares from Amherst. Here's what I came up with. Be aware that I'm biased towards CSAs that deliver to the Arlington/Cambridge/Somerville area.

Drumlin Farm - requires that you spend 10 hours working on the farm, which is kind of cool. No word on pickup location, but Lincoln isn't very far from Cambridge.
Enterprise Farm - has an autumn share that just started yesterday and a year-round share - pickup at Kick*ss Cupcakes in Davis Sq. Wed. 2-7. They also offer home delivery.
The Food Project - pickup in Lincoln for Nov. and Dec. only.
Heaven's Harvest Farm - Another fall share until just before Thanksgiving, pick up at Cambridge Harvest Coop.
Red Fire Farm - has a winter share and delivers to Cambridge and Somerville for a small fee. May be sold out.
Stone Soup Farm - has a Nov-Dec winter share, pickup at Democracy Center in Cambridge.

Creative Use of Farmshare

2009-08-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I made a massive, insanely ambitious dinner, given that my kitchen faucet is broken and I have no running water in the kitchen. But we were being overrun with vegetables, and something had to be done. Our farmshare buddy is exceedingly pregnant and not at all in the mood to be cooking veggies. My plan was to cook as much of the farmshare as possible in one meal, invite my pregnant friend and her family over for dinner, and then freeze the remains for use after the baby is born.

First, I thawed a frozen lamb shoulder from my meatshare. I'd been saving it months for a special occasion, but I just threw up my hands and decided that the lamb was a special occasion in itself. I rubbed it with olive oil, shallot salt, Spanish thyme (three of only five non-local ingredients in the entire meal), and homegrown rosemary and roasted it at 425 degrees F.

While that roasted, I chopped up a variety of root vegetables: Yukon Gold new potatoes and shallots from the farmers' market, carrots and yellow onions from the farmshare, red and golden beets from my own garden (I saved the greens). I sliced these very thin, going for roughly quarter-sized pieces about an eighth of an inch thick. This I drizzled with Kate's Homemade Butter, olive oil, maple syrup from North Hadley, and table salt (non-local ingredient number four). Using both olive oil and butter is key - trust me. I laid this out in a very shallow layer on a large baking sheet and popped it in with the lamb.

Next, I looked at what was bursting out of the veggie drawer of my fridge: eggplant, zucchini, onions. Aha! Ratatouille! I ran out in the rain and picked two tomatoes. Into the skillet: olive oil, homegrown garlic, farmshare yellow onion. Once they were translucent, I added the tomatoes, chopped. And once that had broken down into a nice stew, I chopped up and tossed in three japanese eggplants, one fat zucchini, and basil from the farmshare, seasoned with salt.

I left the ratatouille on the backburner and turned back to the beet greens. I pulled out my All-Clad everyday pan (something between a skillet and a paellero, indispensible), and tossed in some chopped Applewood Farms bacon (non-local ingredient number five, but at least it's all natural and uncured). I added to this some chopped red onion from the farmer's market and sauteed until translucent, then tossed in the beet greens and swiss chard from the farmshare, seasoned lightly with salt.

While this was cooking down, I pulled out the farmshare spaghetti squash I'd roasted earlier in the day because my husband, mistaking it for a cantalope, had cut it open. I scooped out the flesh into a glass baking pan, topped with more Kate's Homemade Butter, and popped it into the oven beside the lamb to reheat.

By then, the lamb had reached 120 degrees F, the root veggies were starting to crisp up, the ratatouille was done, and the greens had wilted nicely. Time to set the table. By the time I got everything else out, the lamb was up to 140, but smelled done. I suspected the meat thermometer, so I pulled it out and made a couple of experimental slices. Turned out that the top of the roast was quite nicely done, but the muscle beneath was not. So I carved what was ready and brought it out.

Caveat: two out of three of the children refused to eat any of this except the spaghetti squash and had to be supplemented with Barilla Plus penne and melted cheese, so technically, the meal had two more nonlocal ingredients. (My two-year-old eats anything and loves vegetables, just as my picky five-year-old did, when she was two.) Otherwise, by volume, I'd guess that over 90% of the meal came from within 100 miles of our table.

The dinner was marvelous. The lamb was probably the best I've ever cooked (hurray for Chestnut Farms!), the root veggies delicious, just slightly crispy and sweet, the ratatouille perfectly cooked, neither underdone nor soggy and infused with the marvelous flavor of the basil, and the greens nicely counterpointed by the bacon. The one problem: we had almost no leftovers! I still have a bit of the lamb, and I froze about 3/4 quart of the squash and 1/2 quart of the ratatouille. But it did nicely solve the problem of my overfull refrigerator. Now, if I can just get rid of that red cabbage...

Afterwards, our dinner guests commented on how good the meal was, and I asserted that it was the ingredients, which they pshawed. But it's true. These are all dishes I make all the time, and they were just so much better with high quality, fresh, local ingredients. Hmm... now I need more lamb. Thank goodness the meatshare is coming on Tuesday.

Farmers Markets Need Farmers

2009-08-25T07:57:00.000-07:00

As an indication of how well the local food movement is doing, the Boston Globe today has an interesting article on how farmers' markets are having difficulty finding enough farmers. This helps explain why we see things like local bakeries, coffee companies, and Taza Chocolate vendors at the markets - they help fill out the available space as well as offering a nice variety of goods to shoppers.

Farmers are also making a lot more of their profit from farmers' markets, which is extremely cool. But clearly, there's a pressing need for more local farms in Massachusetts. Anyone care to start a farm?

It's August. Time to Talk Turkey.

2009-08-24T18:49:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, if you want a locally raised turkey for Thanksgiving, now's the time to order. Kim Denney of Chestnut Farms just sent out the following email to her meatshare members:

We raise turkeys once a year - for Thanksgiving for our CSA members. The turkeys are raised in fresh air and sunshine from birth to plate. Over the years we have become more and more adept at predator control and use an automatic light and radio to keep foxes, coyotes and fisher cats away. We have also learned to have a smaller, but still comfortable dance floor. Last year our turkeys danced across nearly five acres of pasture. This year we will offer them a space of about 1 acre and move them more frequently. We have also planted field peas in an experiment of turkey self-feeding. The peas are higher in protein than grass so we shall see if the grain consumption declines as a result.

The turkeys go for $75/bird, regardless of size, which I thought was interesting, and they're only available to CSA members. However, there are lots of other places around Boston that offer locally raised turkeys. There's a good list available at http://www.mass.gov/agr/massgrown/turkey.htm. A slightly better resource for free-range, organic, heritage birds can be found in Yankee Magazine. And Local harvest has a good search engine that yielded these results.

Here's a little more information on some of the farms.

Bob's Turkey Farm in Lancaster lists having Broad Breasted White turkeys, famously too stupid to reproduce. The web site also implies that they are fed antibiotics for the first four weeks.
Stillman's Farm in Lunenberg practices conscientious farming and raises free-range birds. They offer broad-breasted white turkeys at $65 for a 10-15 lb. bird and $80 for a 16-22 lb. bird. They also offer a few, small heritage breed turkeys: $100 for a 6-15 lb. bird. They have convenient pickup locations throughout Boston and Cambridge.
K&M Farm in North Andover has much better prices for organic, heritage birds: 10-12 lbs $65.00 14-16 lbs $75.00 18-22 lbs $110.00. This farm also offers Indian game bird, cornish hens, and rabbits, which, I think, merits a visit sometime soon.
Stone Pony Farm in Westford offers a small number of organic, free range, heritage turkeys.
Many Hands Organic Farm in Barre raises broad breasted whites organically and sells them for $4.50/lb. They're quite far from Boston, though, and do not deliver to the Boston area.
Green Meadows Farm in Hamilton raises free-range, organically fed Bourbon Red turkeys. No word on how much they cost or how to order them.

If you don't have a Chestnut Farms meatshare, it looks like Stillman's Farm and K&M Farm are your best bets. If you can't drive up to North Andover, Stillman's is the place to order your bird.

Chicken 3 Ways! A Benefit Dinner for the MPPU Project

2009-08-24T18:34:00.000-07:00

Pete & Jen are at it again. They're sponsoring a chicken dinner to benefit the NESFP's Mobile Poultry Processing Unit project. Here's what Jen said in her email announcing the dinner:

Join Pete and Jen &
SLOW FOOD BOSTON at Allandale Farm for Chicken Grilling Extravaganza!

August 30, 2009
5:30 pm until the moonlight guides us home....

The summer heat is in full swing! We hope you are all busy enjoying the bounty of seasonal, local food. In the spirit of summer, we would like to extend an invitation to load up your picnic basket with a comfy blanket and a bottle of your favorite beverage - but don't worry about the food. Slow Food Boston has got that covered! SFB is hosting an outdoor gastronomic fundraiser (a Chicken Extravaganza one might say) on Sunday, August 30th in the fields of Allandale Farm. Join us and relax on your blanket watching the sunset, relishing the smell of grilling chicken, and contributing to a good cause! Chef Andy Husbands (of Hell's Kitchen fame) and the amazing Tremont 647 will be preparing three different chicken dishes, plus bbq appropriate sides (greens? yup. corn bread? check!) plus a fruit dessert luciously ripe from local orchards... OH, and we're not talking your mother's chicken here - instead think banana guava ketchup, sweet & spicy bbq glaze, and a red pepper aioli! Though it's not Pete and Jen's tasty, tasty chicken (we sold out long ago), it is sure to be divine!

So why this 'fowl' celebration you ask? Well, beyond the phenomenal food, we're also continuing to raise funds for the Mobile Poultry Processing Unit, eliminating the need for MA farmers to share the ONE unit that's available throughout the entire state. These mobile units are one of the few ways that small producers have to guarantee that the quality & care of their work is maintained all the way from the farm to your table. We will be at the picnic to share first-hand how the MPPU project is making it easier for us to produce and process our birds and for you to buy local, healthy, sustainably-raised food.

This event is a double BYOB - bring your own blanket, as well as the beverage of your choice. Cost is $40 for adults and $20 for children under 12. Reservations & payments must be made in advance on the Slow Food Boston website.

Plan to arrive early! Starting at 5:30pm, John Lee, Allandale's farm manager, will be giving hayrides of Boston's last working farm - concluding in time for dinner to be served at 6:30PM. Oh, and if it happens to rain, we'll convene the next night Monday, August 31st same time, same place.

Pete & Jen's Egg Carpool Mailing List

2009-08-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

We love our eggs from Pete & Jen's Backyard Birds, but their store in Concord is just a bit far for a casual shopping run. Some time ago, we noticed that Pete & Jen had put out a signup sheet for an egg carpool mailing list. The idea was to connect customers that live in Lexington, Arlington, and North Cambridge so that they can arrange to pick up eggs for each other as convenient.

Since we run a data center, BaseSpace.net, it's easy for us to create mailing lists. So we offered to set it up for them, Jen send us the list of email addresses, and voila! My husband set up the pjeggpool mailing list.

Now we can post when we make the journey out to Concord to see if anyone in our area would also like some eggs. If anyone responds, we can then arrange a pick-up location for the eggs. While the folks currently on the mailing list are all in Lexington, Arlington, and Cambridge, I see no reason why people from other areas around Boston can't also arrange pickups in the same way.

If you'd like to get in on the EggPool, send email to pjeggpool-subscribe@basespace.net.

Poultry, Poultry Everywhere

2009-08-24T18:07:00.000-07:00

Sheesh! I got busy for a few days, and when I looked up: poultry!

Here's a brief synopsis of poultry-related topics that I'll elaborate upon as time permits:

Pete & Jen's Egg Carpool Mailing List - send email to pjeggpool-subscribe@basespace.net.
Chicken 3 Ways! A Special Farm Dinner to support the MPPU project
Order your Thanksgiving turkey from Chestnut Farms NOW

Busa Farm Conceptual Drawings - Tuesday, August 11 at 7:30pm

2009-08-10T18:06:00.000-07:00

The Lexington Community Farm Coalition is meeting tomorrow to review conceptual drawings:

Come find out more about farm plans, learn what you can do to help, and see a conceptual sketch of our farm! Come to a Farm Planning meeting for updates on our progress and dark brown refreshments. Meet at Lexington's Cary Memorial Library community room, Tuesday August 11 7:30 pm.

Early Impressions of the NOFA Conference

2009-08-08T16:12:00.000-07:00

My head is spinning from all the information I've been gathering at the NOFA Summer Conference. I've attended workshops on how to start a CSA, how to make the most of your forested land, and, of course, lots of workshops on mushrooms and mycology. One of the two keynote speakers, Paul Stamets, is a recognized mycological expert, and the projects that he's detailed have been wide-ranging and utterly fascinating, including:

Counteracting bioterrorism
Cleaning up toxic oil spills, in soil and in the sea
Finding better treatments for tuberculosis and smallpox
Growing crops like corn twice as strong and productive
Finding treatments for neurological disorders such as Altzheimer's
and so much more...

The conference has had fantastic child care for the kids, including grooming Jersey heifers, painting banners, marching in a parade, and putting on a play, so this has been something of a vacation for my husband and I. Well, a vacation in which we are constantly racing from workshop to child care to workshop to child care to lunch to child care to workshop, etc.

Aside from the sheer amount of information I'm gathering, a couple of things have really surprised me. One is the number of cool things I'm now thinking, Hey, I could do that. The other is the sheer number of random people we've connected with, including a CSA family from New York and a couple from Santa Fe trying to start a community farm.

And there's the amazing range of niches and markets represented here: alpaca farmers, black walnut orchards, raw milk dairies, and yes, I even found a farm that produces sunflower oil. Too much to describe right now, and it's time to put the girls to bed. More tomorrow.

Locavore Media: Boston Globe Article on Mass. Wine and Cheese

2009-08-05T06:46:00.000-07:00

This morning, the Boston Globe had a nice article on wine and cheese produced in Massachusetts. Some of the stories of how these businesses got started are fascinating. Now, if only there were a list of where we could buy these products. I'd really like to try some blueberry wine.

Locavore Activism in Cambridge: Henrietta Davis Goes Local

2009-08-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

Henrietta Davis is kicking off her election campaign to retain her seat on the Cambridge City Council by hosting a "locally inspired potluck supper" and a screening of the movie, "Fresh." The event is titled "All Politics is Local" ad will be held August12th at Davis's house, 120 Chestnut St. The potluck starts at 6pm, and grilled foods will be provided. Attendees are asked to bring a salad, dessert, or "other local dish." The movie starts at 8pm. Her invitation came with a guide to Cambridge Farmers' Markets and a list of Local Food resources.

I encourage locavore residents of Cambridge to show up and let Henrietta know you support her efforts.

Locavore Activism: Lexington Selectmen Discuss Busa Farm Tonight

2009-08-03T08:08:00.000-07:00

The Lexington Selectmen are scheduled to discuss the Busa Land Lease Agreement tonight under “Items for Individual Consideration” starting at 7:50 pm: see http://ci.lexington.ma.us/Selectmen/agenda.cfm for the complete schedule. The Busa Land Lease likely refers to the the town's plan to lease the land back to the Busas for two years following the town's September 17 closing on the land. Selectmen's meetings take place at the Selectmen's Meeting Room, 1625 Mass Avenue (Town Office Building), second floor.

In the Media: Video of Butter-making in Maine

2009-08-02T16:21:00.000-07:00

Boston.com today has a great article accompanied by a video on Kate's Homemade Butter, which really is made in the owner's home garage in Maine. You have to see it to believe it. I love Kate's Homemade Butter, but I almost never shop at Shaw's anymore, and thus never see it available. Perhaps I'll make a special effort for this award-winning butter.

Locavore Activism: Busa Farm in Lexington

2009-08-02T14:41:00.000-07:00

Today, I visited Busa Farm in Lexington. Located just over the border from the Arlington Reservoir, Busa Farm is 7.85 acres of severely neglected farmland. When we visited, it had a tiny farm shop which supplemented the farm's produce with eggs from Chip-In Farm, honey and preserves from McClure's, and fruit from California. I did buy an enormous zucchini for only 25 cents that I intend to stuff for dinner (tonight, homemade pizza with locally made fresh mozzerella).

Outside, the flats of perennials, annuals, and patio tomatoes showed that Busa Farm has definitely fallen on hard times. The paths were overgrown with weeds, all the seedlings showed signs of stress, and the tomatoes were dying in their pots. The greenhouses were missing many of their panes of glass, and not by design, and these, too, were overgrown with weeds. Of the three greenhouses we saw, two had been abandoned to nature. The buildings other than the farmstand were in various states of disrepair, and the chicken coop we spied down the road looked forlorn and empty.

Which is why, in May, the City of Lexington purchased the land from its owners. The owners will continue to run the farm and maintain the property until at least Dec. 31, 2010 while Lexington figures out what to do with it. Lots of ideas have been floated: recreational parkland, community gardens, affordable housing, community farm.

Yes, you read that correctly. A group of citizens is pushing to turn the space into a community-run farm. Apparently, this model has precedent. Newton bought Angino Farm in 2005 and operates it as a community farm. During the summer, much of the farm is maintained by volunteer middle and high school students from Newton.

Our mission is to preserve and improve this historic open space site for the benefit of the community, to provide local, sustainably grown produce, and to educate the public about sustainable use of land and other natural resources.

This sounds like a fantastic option for Lexington. I'd be contacting the Lexington Community Farm Coalition right now, offering to get involved and start raising awareness amongst my neighbors... if only I lived in Lexington. If you are a Lexington resident, I encourage you to contact your local representatives and urge them to preserve Busa Farm as an educational, community resource. Also see the web site for other ways to help this worthy cause.

NOFA Conference: Mission for Missin' Local Products

2009-08-02T09:29:00.001-07:00

I try to eat as much local, organic food as I can, but there are some things I have to buy nonlocal. A few of these are preferential - I have New Mexico green chile on my breakfast burrito every morning. I've tried growing it here, and it just doesn't come out right. Then there are things that just can't be grown in New England that we consider essential: coffee, black tea, chocolate, bananas, olive oil, cinnamon and similar spices.

And then there are the things that ought to be available locally that I can't find: nuts, mushrooms, oils, and sugar. I was delighted to find a workshop at the NOFA conference on growing black walnut trees for nuts and timber. Hopefully, I will meet other nut growers there and find out where I can buy local nuts the way I used to buy pinon nuts on the side of the road in New Mexico. Similarly, there are lots of workshops on mushrooms, which I have yet to spot at a farmers' market anywhere.

Oil and sugar are the two that burn my noodle most. In the land of maple, you can find lots of maple syrup and maple candy, but no actual, commercial granular maple sugar. Why? And beets grow prolifically in New England. Why is there no beet sugar available? Admittedly, cane sugar from Florida is not a terrible compromise, but it just bugs me.

Finally, I have yet to find, anywhere, locally produced cooking oils. Olive oil is admittedly impossible (and the top on my list of crops I'd grow if I ever return to New Mexico), but surely there are plenty of other sources: corn oil, sunflower. Does rapeseed grow here for canola oil? And cycling back to the discussion on nuts, what about walnut or almond oil? Of late, I've been substituting locally produced butter, but there are a lot of cases where I'd much rather use a good oil instead. With any luck, I'll find a source of locally produced oils at the NOFA conference.

What are some other examples of things you ought to be able to find locally and can't? Please comment.

Buying the Farm

2009-08-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

Right now, my two-year-old is chanting "Old McDonald Had a Farm" just as I'm contemplating becoming Old McDonald myself. It's a tough question: do I want to become a farmer?

My husband and I have been exploring the possibility in the last few weeks, ever since we returned from Sweden. There are a lot of pros and cons.

PROS:

I grew up on a farm. I run a community garden. I have a clue what it takes to successfully raise vegetables.
Local CSAs have absurdly long waiting lists, on the order of years. Many won't even advertize their shares anymore. So there is huge demand.
The New Entry Sustainable Farming Association has a list of farm properties near Boston available for lease or sale but not enough farmers to work them.
It would be highly satisfying in many ways. We'd have the freedom to grow our food (produce, eggs, meat) any way we like.
It's a healthier lifestyle and would encourage us to get a lot more exercise.

CONS:

I grew up on a farm. I know how much work it is, and that's rather daunting.
I grew up on a farm in New Mexico. That's an utterly different climate, and I'd have a lot of learning to do. It was a cattle farm, and I'm unlikely to want to raise cattle here, though I did have a herd of goats growing up and know how to care for them from birth to butchering. We never milked them, though, so that would be an interesting learning experience right there. And I know almost nothing about the use and maintenance of farm machinery.
My husband did not grow up on a farm. He was utterly astonished the first time a seed I'd planted sprouted. Nor does he have any desire to be a farmer. He doesn't like outside work, he doesn't like the smell of dirt, he doesn't even like houseplants. He says he's willing to take care of the business end of farming: finances, hiring labor, etc., but I'm dubious. I do not want to be stuck with all the work, and I'd miss the family- and community-building aspects I know and love.
My health is not the best. I have multiple chronic illnesses, almost all of which I control with diet, and I sprain joints at the drop of a hat. While more outside work would undoubtedly be very good for me, our business could outright fail if I sprain an ankle again.
We have two small children, one just about to start kindergarden. They're a full-time job in themselves right now, and at the very least, we should wait until they're old enough to contribute to the farm in a meaningful way. (My five-year-old wants goats.)
We live in a wonderful, supportive community, and we're not sure we want to leave it, although there are good reasons why we might, farm or no farm.

My current inclination is not to buy a commercial farm. It's too risky, and I don't think we have the proper resources. Microfarming, on the other hand, makes some sense to me. Defined as mixed-use farming on two to five acres, this seems like a manageable amount of farm to me. My grandfather's farm was five acres, and on this scrap of land, he grew alfalfa for his cattle, orchards consisting mostly of apples and pears, a large amount of corn, and two good-sized gardens for family and friends. Pumpkins grew up into his macintosh trees, the strangest apples you ever saw.

He couldn't and didn't make his living off of it, but he did make our lives much richer, healthier, and more fulfilling. It's the kind of life I can imagine being extremely satisfying. I could grow my own vegetables, trying different varieties and preserving heirlooms. I could have a greenhouse for fresh produce all winter long. I'd have orchards of fruit and nut trees chosen for easy maintenance and flavor. We could have a small goat herd and some chickens, maybe even ducks if we have a pond. Herb beds. Grape vines. Mushrooms. Corn.

I still have my doubts, which is why our whole family is attending the Northeast Organic Farming Association Summer Conference next weekend. We received the program booklets just a few days ago, and I'm fascinated and frustrated by the workshops listed. Should I attend the Backyard Medicinal Herb Walk, the Easy No-Knead Artisan Bread at Home workshop, the Farm and Garden Native Bee Habitat Creation workshop, or the Simple Gifts Farm tour? ARGH!

Just the fact that I get this excited about these topics tells me I'm on the right track. And perhaps the conference will help me figure out which less-traveled path I should take.

Backyard Local: Fight Tomato Blight

2009-08-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

Warning to all backyard gardeners: there is a serious epidemic of late blight this year affecting tomato and potato plants. This is the same fungus that caused the Irish Potato Famine, and a combination of conditions this year (wet weather and contaminated tomato plants sold at places like Home Depot) have made this the worst outbreak of late blight in decades. Our CSA, Brookfield Farm, just mowed down all their potatoes in the hopes of saving the tubers and preventing the spread of the fungus to their tomatoes.

What makes this fungus particularly pernicious is that its spores are airborne, passing from plant to plant on the breeze. If you have tomatoes in your garden, regardless of where you got them, please go out and check them for blight. See www.longislandhort.cornell.edu/vegpath/photos/lateblight_tomato.htm for pictures of late blight. Look for brown patches on the stem and wilting leaflets around it. If you find blight, remove ALL affected foliage immediately. If it's in the stem, you will likely have to remove the entire plant.

Do NOT put infected foliage in your municipal yard waste, where the fungus can infect their mulch and compost. Bag it and throw it away. In New Mexico, we'd burn it, but I doubt that's allowed around here.

If you have other tomatoes or parts of tomato plants that show no blight yet, spray it with fungicide immediately and after every rainfall (yes, this is a pain, but, o! the horror of a summer with no tomatoes). There are many recipes for homemade fungicide, including:

http://site.cleanairgardening.com/info/recipe-for-home-made-fungicide.html
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090619125802AABbIUf (you can substitute dishsoap)

Or you can buy this organic fungicide: http://www.cleanairgardening.com/greencure.html. Brookfield Farm is using copper as a fungicide.

Here's a good FAQ on late blight and how to deal with it: http://www.longislandhort.cornell.edu/vegpath/lbfaq.pdf

Also, keep in mind that there are plenty of other fungi around to prey on your tomatoes. The tomatoes in my community garden have early blight, and I'll be directing our gardeners in foliage removal and fungicide spraying this afternoon. Early blight is much less deadly than late blight, but it can transfer to other species like eggplants. It's treated in the same way as late blight, although treated plants are much more likely to survive. Tomatoes are going to be precious and rare at farmers' markets this year, so it will be well worth it to maintain your own love apples. And squash plants of all kinds are likely to be affected by fungus as well, so it's worth checking your squash for a white dusting on the leaves and treating it with fungicide or at least soapy water.

On the plus side, all the rain has had other benefits. Our greens, carrots, cucumbers, beans, and squash are going crazy, and despite the cool temperatures, I've got a lot of peppers and eggplant (hurray for black row covers). And for the first time this year, we had a noticeable blueberry harvest (we suffer from alkaline soil, but we seem to have finally brought up the acidity enough - sulfur helps, too) and will harvest our first lingonberries ever!

Side note: if you have midsummer-bearing raspberries, they should be running out of fruit right now. Once the fruit is gone off the canes, you should prune away the fruitbearing canes, leaving the new canes (those with no little stubs from the fruit) to grow as much as possible before winter. These non-fruiting canes will bear fruit next year. Removing the old canes means the roots only have to support the new canes, and they will be healthier and more prolific next summer.

Locavore Activism: Oppose Factory Farming

2009-07-30T19:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Know Your Wild Edible Plants Tomorrow Evening

2009-07-29T16:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Jennifer Hashley Speaks

2009-07-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-25T07:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-25T07:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Backyard Local: When It Pays to Consult an Expert First

2009-07-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

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.

Free Local Cheese Tasting on Thursday

2009-07-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2009-07-03T07:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-03T04:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-03T04:30:00.000-07:00

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.

A Local Egg Community Writ in Cartons

2009-05-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

My husband recently returned from his much-anticipated "midlife crisis" walkabout in Vermont with 25 dozen eggs. Not quite the outcome I'd expected. It turns out that Cobb Hill Cohousing, where he was staying, was experiencing an egg crisis. Their egg manager had quit, and they had dozens of eggs piling up. My husband sent out email to our friends and managed to sell about 22 dozen eggs for them (which means we have 3 dozen or so extra, in case you'd like some.)

So our dining room table is now covered with cartons of eggs. And here's the interesting thing: every one of those cartons has been reused. The cartons come from all over New England, some from grocery chains like Shur-Fine, some from large commercial egg businesses like Pete & Gerry's Organic Eggs, and some from much smaller farms. The most intriguing carton is entirely blank with a handwritten label: "Maple Knoll Farm."

Not a single one of these cartons has anything to indicate that it contains eggs from Cobb Hill Farm. All the folks at Cobb Hill added were small pieces of tape with the collection date on them. The cartons of eggs I buy from Chestnut Farm are also unlabeled. In both cases, these eggs have no need of labels because they are bought directly from the farm that produces them.

This is locavorism at its best. Looking at the pile of cartons, you know that customers brought them in to the farm to be reused, not just because it's the best thing to do for the environment, but because they have a personal relationship with the farmers and thus with the food they're eating. I certainly enjoy gathering cartons from my cohousing neighbors and bringing them to Chestnut Farm every month. Boy, will they be getting a surplus of cartons next week!

If you'd like to become part of the supply chain for your eggs, but you don't have a convenient farm to donate your used cartons to, consider bringing them to your local farmers' market, now that they're open again. I'm sure the egg vendors there will thank you.

HFCS vs. Cane Sugar

2009-05-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

Slate.com today has a very interesting article on whether cane sugar is environmentally better than high fructose corn syrup. The simple answer is yes. Beet sugar is also better than HFCS, but it's unclear whether cane or beet sugar are better. Sugarcane produces more sugar per acre, and its byproducts are used to power the plants that process the sugar, making it rather efficient, but it requires a huge amount of water to produce and can only be grown in tropical climates. Beets grow happily in northern climates but require more processing.

Which raises the locavore question: is it possible to get locally produced beet sugar? If so, would the reduction in transportation costs offset the processing cost? Does anyone know of a source of local beet sugar? And how does this measure up to maple syrup and honey as sweeteners?

The general conclusion of the article, incidentally, was to use less sweeteners overall.

First Farmers' Market of the Season Tomorrow!

2009-05-18T06:43:00.000-07:00

The first farmers' market of the season starts up tomorrow in Copley Sq. from 11am to 6pm. Check out the revamped Mass Farmers' Markets website for more details. Don't raise your expectations too much, though. It's mighty early in the season, and you're not likely to find much other than greens (lettuce, arugula, swiss chard, etc.). If you get there early, you might find some asparagus, garlic scapes, rhubarb, and fiddleheads (edible fern shoots).

The City Hall and Davis Square farmers' markets will open on May 27th, Central Square starts on June 1st, and Framingham Village Green on June 11th. From there, it's probably open season everywhere. Hurray! Time to cancel my Boston Organics box.

Know Your Stuff, Too

2009-05-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman's column in the NY Times today presents a compelling argument that any efforts we make toward stemming our carbon emissions will be insufficient in the face of China's rapidly growing carbon emissions.

How can we convince China to make improvements to their infrastructure? Simple: vote with your dollars. China can churn out junk that is cheap because they use highly polluting coal-burning power generation facilities, passing on the cost of environmental degradation to the rest of the planet, including their own people.

If we refuse to buy their products and instead buy locally, thoughtfully, sustainably made products, we not only support our local economy, we promote better environmental standards worldwide.

So before you buy that cheap plastic toy stamped "Made in China," think again. I will do some research over the weekend to find locally made products that are sustainably produced.

Packaging

2009-05-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that another compelling argument for buying local goods is packaging. My very first job out of college was working as a technical editor for Kraft Foods in some suburb of Chicago. I was editing recipe specifications for various products (Blueberry Morning cereal, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, etc.), and while there were generally two or three specifications for each product that were actual recipes, the vast majority of the specifications were packaging. For Mac'n'Cheese alone, you have the foil bag for the powdered cheese mix, the small paperboard carton for the macaroni and the foil bag, then a corrugated cardboard carton in which 12 or 24 paperboard cartons go, and sometimes there's an even larger corrugated cardboard carton in which four of the smaller corrugated cardboard cartons go, and finally, a pallet on which the cartons are stacked, frequently with more cardboard between the layers of cartons, and wrapped in plastic wrap.

Pallets account for an appalling amount of lumber usage and are rarely fully recycled. Vast amounts of cardboard are used to protect the product while it is shipped over large distances. And foil packets are completely unrecyclable.

By contrast, locally produced foods have almost no packaging, and most of that packaging is reused many times before being recycled. Our farmshare comes in reusable waxed corrugated cardboard boxes, which we save and return to them each week. Occasionally, loose greens will be packaged in plastic bags, but other than that, even the rubber band used for bunches of vegetables like kale can be returned for reuse.

Meat from our meatshare does come vacuum-sealed in plastic, but it is delivered in wholly reusable coolers. And their eggs are packaged in reused egg cartons. I've organized my cohousing community to save all their egg cartons and deliver them to Chestnut Farm each month when I pick up my share.

Produce brought to farmers' markets is typically brought in reusable plastic totes or bushel baskets. If you plan ahead and bring reusable bags, you can avoid taking home plastic bags as well.

Even locally produced goods such as maple syrup, honey, cheese, soaps, jams, jellies, flours, and breads probably use no more packaging than is needed for the product itself. That means far fewer trees felled to produce pallets and packaging cardboard, and far less energy consumed in producing the packaging.

I'm curious to know whether glass milk bottles are more energy efficient than plastic or paper bottles. They're heavier and more costly to transport, but they use renewable materials more effectively and, in my opinion, better preserve the flavor of the milk. Does anyone have information on this?

The Story of Stuff

2009-05-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

The New York Times today reported on a wonderful little web documentary called "The Story of Stuff" on consumer economics and how it is trashing our environment and destroying communities and cultures. On the Story of Stuff web site, they briefly list buying local as one of the ways to reform the system:

When you can, buy local products from local stores, which keeps more of our hard earned money in the community.

This inspired me to do a quick search on "buy local reduce waste" which turned up a great article on Bright Hub. Food for thought.

Cocoa Mulch from Taza Chocolate

2009-05-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

I send email to Taza Chocolate asking how to buy their cocoa mulch. Laura Cere responded, saying that you can "call and order for pick up at our factory. The cost is $25.00 for 40lbs."

This a great, highly sustainable product. Cocoa mulch is made from the shells of the cacao beans. Since this is a natural byproduct of the chocolate-making process, it's sustainable. The beans are shelled locally, so you're not buying mulch that has consumed extra fuel to travel here. And the price is quite competitive. Best of all, it makes your yard or garden smell like chocolate.

Two warnings:

Cocoa mulch contains high levels of theobromide, which is toxic to cats and dogs. While cats generally aren't all that interested in chocolate, dogs will happily eat the mulch, which can cause serious illness and even death. So do not use cocoa mulch in spaces frequented by dogs, probably not even in a front yard without a fence.
Cocoa mulch is fairly alkaline. If your soil is alkaline, as, alas, mine is, you may not want to use this mulch. However, if your soil is rather acidic, for example, in a yard with lots of pine trees, this could be a very useful amendment.

Weekend of Locavore Mania

2009-05-04T18:59:00.000-07:00

Ye gods, I don't even know where to start. This weekend, I packed entirely too much locavore activity into three days (I don't work on Mondays). Rather than sock you with a ridiculously long posting, I'll give you the highlights and flesh them out over the next few days.

Saturday

Noon: Toured the Taza Chocolate Factory. Cool new thing I learned: locally available, sustainable cacao mulch can be bought there.
3pm: Visited Pete & Jen's Backyard Birds. Bought soap made with "saponified local pork tallow."
4pm: Verrill Farm's temporary farmstand. Mmm... their own hothouse greens and spinach, plus locally raised and highly seasonal fiddlehead ferns and ramps.

Sunday
Collapsed. Well, cooked fiddleheads and ramps, along with delicious london broil from last month's meatshare.

Monday
Got two great things I heard about in email:

http://tinyfarmblog.com/ - Organic micro-farming. What a great concept.
http://www.namanet.org/csf/cape-ann-fresh-catch - A fishshare! I just told my husband last week I wanted one, and lo! one appears. Amazing. Hope they have herring.

Summer in April

2009-04-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

It's 11:30am and 82 degrees F. Summer has arrived in the midst of April. I washed all our winter coats and went out to hang them on the clothesline, passing the vegetable garden as I went.

The garden is a field of blooming dandelions. My goodness.

I checked on the peas, a little concerned that the snap peas had not yet sprouted, even though the snow peas have been up for nearly two weeks. If they don't come up in this weather, they never will. To my relief, I spotted one solitary pea shoot amid the straw. Snap peas in June. I can hardly wait. Last weekend, I planted lettuce and radishes, now quietly germinating under row covers to protect them from flea beetles and neighborhood cats, and scattered parsley seed in the herb bed.

The overwintered kale has shot up into a purplish-green bush of leaves, and an overwintered mustard actually had the temerity to bolt into bright yellow bloom. The garlic is perking up, sending out new shoots. Soon we'll have garlic scapes for salads and stir fry. The sage is greening up and needs pruning, now that it's obvious which stems survived the winter. Chives are poking green fingers at the sky. The rhubarb has exploded into a rippling mass of leaves, and the stalks might be ready in as little as a couple of weeks. The strawberries are blooming, the blueberries are sending out their first new green leaves, and the peach trees have burst into blossom. And, strange but wonderful, the fennel planted last year has come back from its roots in a little olive green hedgerow. Does anyone know whether such fennel will set good heads for harvest? I had no idea that fennel could be grown as a perennial.

Growing your own food has more compensations that convenience and environmentalism. Gardens in spring are surprisingly, stunningly gorgeous. I can't wait to see what comes up next.

TODAY: Free Local Food in Harvard Square

2009-04-24T06:21:00.000-07:00

Green Streets is sponsoring the following Earth Day event in Harvard Square today, which includes free food from Henrietta's Table! Enjoy.

Join in the Big Green Walk/Ride Day Party in Harvard Square THIS FRIDAY!

Drop by between 11:00 am to 4:00 pm at Winthrop Park (Mount Auburn Street and JFK Streets) in Harvard Square. There will be a variety of events and activities, including a computer and cell phone recycling drop off, organic compost from Boloco, green food samples from Grendel's Den, Henrietta's Table, Upstairs on the Square, and Om!, and a "Spring Clean" at 1:00pm.

Green Streets will have stencils and paint for anyone who wants to decorate shirts, bags, hats, socks, bike flags, etc. with Walk/Ride Day themes. This will be BYOC (Bring Your Own Clothes). Give life to old clothes and create a one-of-a-kind look!

We'll also have our popular buttons for sale!

Click [http://www.harvardsquare.com/Home/Articles/Great-Big-Green-Party-in-Harvard-Square.aspx] here for event details!

Taza Chocolate Factory Tour - Saturday, May 2nd

2009-04-23T18:33:00.000-07:00

Taza will be hosting another of their open houses on Saturday, May 2nd, and I plan to attend with my daughters in tow. Hope to see you there! Here's what they said in their newsletter:

Tour Taza Chocolate on Saturday May 2nd
Visit the factory, learn about our process, shop for Mother's Day.

Eight days before Mother's Day, we're opening our doors for chocolate tastings and tours of the factory. Join us at our Somerville facility on Saturday, May 2nd 2009, and learn how bean-to-bar chocolate is really made. We'll have plenty of samples for snacking, and a coloring table for the kids.

Check out our gorgeous Barth Sirocco cocoa roaster, learn what the heck a winnowing machine does, and run your fingers over the grooves in our millstones of our Mexican molinos. Plus, you'll get to taste every one of our products, and sip a tasty chocolate drink made with Taza Chocolate Mexicano.

Taza Chocolate Factory

561 Windsor St
Somerville, MA 02143

Open House Factory Tour
Saturday, May 2nd 2009
10am to 6pm
Click here for directions

Just a reminder - we're expecting a high turn-out, so there may be a short wait in between tours. Families and children are warmly welcomed, but encouraged to come early, as we will be busiest from 12 pm to 5 pm. We'll have a gift shop set up for all your Mother's Day gifting needs - trust us, moms love chocolate.

The Great Locavore Meal - Part 2

2009-04-22T21:03:00.000-07:00

Well, the meal was an enormous success. Despite the fact that the root veggies came out a little crispy, the whole wheat bread was not completely cooked through, the pork also did not quite completely cook, and I never got around to dipping the strawberries in chocolate, all of the diners were extremely satisfied and happy with the quality and flavor of the meal. I was very pleased by the moist chicken, probably the best I've ever tasted. One diner proclaimed the pumpkin pie to be the best she'd ever had. While it was a huge amount of work, I'd happily do it again.

Here's what I posted to my community about the meal. Note: for those of you who don't know me, I live in a cohousing community with a large common kitchen and pantry stocked with staples like baking powder and spices. We hold common meals three times/week, and I was cooking this as a common meal. Thanks to the cleanup crew for dealing with the messy aftermath! For more on cohousing, see http://www.cohousing.org. Now, on with the post:

Here’s a little more information about the local foods in Sunday’s meal, along with recipes for the bread and pie. Really, I can’t take credit for the fabulous taste of the food. Most of that came from the outstanding ingredients we obtained, so if you want to reproduce that flavor, BUY LOCAL!!!

The pork and chicken came in our meatshare from Chestnut Farm: http://www.chestnutfarms.org/. They were rubbed with canola oil from the coho pantry and seasoned with Maine sea salt and herbs from our garden. I stuffed the chicken with organic onion from Trader Joe’s and apple from the Boston Organics Dogma Box: http://www.bostonorganics.com/fresh/thisweekbox.html to keep it moist.

The vast majority of the root vegetables came from the Dogma Box. The remainder were more organic onions from Trader Joe’s (likely grown in California), locally grown but not organic new red potatoes bought at Pemberton Farms, and locally grown organic parsnips bought at Lionette’s Market (http://www.lionettesmarket.com/). These were tossed with thoroughly nonlocal olive oil, melted garlic butter from Mendon Creamery (not organic but local in Mendon, MA) bought at the Dairy Bar in Davis Square (http://www.kickasscupcakes.com/Dairy_Bar.php), Maine sea salt bought at Lionette’s, maple syrup from Ewen’s (http://www.farmfresh.org/food/farm.php?farm=2252) bought at the Dairy Bar, and fresh thyme, sage, and chives from our garden. I sliced the vegetables fairly thin and roasted them a bit too long (almost 90 minutes) at 375 degrees F.

The organic greens came primarily from Pete’s Greens (http://www.petesgreens.com/) bought at Lionette’s with a small contribution of greens and broccoli sprouts from the Dogma Box – all organic. We added the stems from the mushrooms. The dressing was homemade by Alex using locally produced blue cheese bought at the Dairy Bar, a raspberry-infused vinegar we got as a free sample in our Boston Organics box over a year ago, more Maine sea salt, and canola oil from the coho pantry.

The mushrooms were all grown in Pennsylvania. The white mushrooms came in the Dogma Box, and I bought the crimini (not organic) at Pemberton Farms. We stuffed them with sauteed kale and onions that had overwintered in our veggie garden and topped them with more of the local blue cheese.

I made the bread from scratch (see recipes below) using mostly flour from Littleton Grist Mill in Littleton, NH (http://www.littletongristmill.com/), which I ordered through Boston Organics but supplemented with some King Arthur’s Whole Wheat flour from the coho pantry. The eggs were from Pete & Jen’s Backyard Birds of Concord, MA (http://peteandjensbackyardbirds.com/default.aspx) bought at Lionette’s. The butter was Kate’s Homemade Butter (http://www.kateshomemadebutter.com/) bought at Shaw’s. The cream was from Shaw Farm in Dracut, MA (http://www.shawfarm.com/) by way of the Dairy Bar. I also used Maine sea salt and maple syrup for sweetener. All other ingredients came from the coho pantry.

The pumpkin pie was made from pumpkin I had either received in farmshare or bought at the farmers’ market last October, all organic, which I roasted and froze. I simmered it to cook out much of the moisture before blending it up for the pies. Oddly enough, the freezing process leeched most of the orange color out of the pumpkin. I’d never seen that before, but it tasted just fine. Eggs were Pete&Jens, cream and milk from Shaw Farm, sweetened with honey from the Boston Honey Company (http://www.bostonhoneycompany.com/) and just a little Ewen’s maple syrup. I used spices from the coho kitchen. I made the crust using Littleton Grist Mill flour, a Pete & Jen’s egg, Maine sea salt, and ordinary Crisco shortening because I was running out of butter.

The strawberries came from North Carolina by way of Heaven’s Harvest Farm (http://www.heavensharvestfarm.com/). I had planned to dip them in Taza chocolate (www.tazachocolate.com), but the meal had gotten a bit pricey by then, and we were also flagging a bit by the end.

Many people commented that it must have been a lot of work to put this together. Actually, it was pretty easy. With the exception of our outing to Lionette’s Market, which we’d been wanting to do anyway, we got most of the food quite easily. We get our meatshare once/month, Boston Organics delivers to our door, and we make regular stops at the Dairy Bar for eggs, milk, cream, and butter. This is a lifestyle we’ve consciously chosen, to eat locally. For more on why a locavore diet is a good idea, see:

http://www.locavores.com/how/why.php

http://www.lifebeginsat30.com/elc/2006/04/10_reasons_to_e.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_food

And here’s how to become a locavore:

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/344/locavore.html

http://www.lifebeginsat30.com/elc/2006/04/a_few_tips_for_.html

Recipes:

Honey-Maple Pumpkin Pie

1 medium sugar pumpkin, roasted, or 2 cups cooked pumpkin

Pie crust (below)

½ teaspoon ground ginger

½ teaspoon ground nutmeg

½ teaspoon ground allspice

1 teaspoon salt

4 eggs lightly beaten

¾ c honey, slightly warmed

¼ c maple syrup, slightly warmed

½ c milk

½ c heavy cream

Make pie crust and place in a 9-inch pie pan. In a food processor or blender, combine all other ingredients and blend well. Pour into pie crust. Bake at 400 degrees F for 50-55 minutes or until a knife inserted one inch from edge comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.

Pie Crust

This recipe is actually intended for quiche and makes enough crust for two pumpkin pie shells or the top and bottom of a fruit pie.

3 c flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 egg

1 Tablespoon vinegar (cider vinegar is recommended)

1.5 c shortening or butter

~7 Tablespoons ice water

Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Blend in shortening with a pastry blender or fork. Combine egg and vinegar separately. Add to mixture. Add ice water as needed. Avoid touching the mixture with your fingers! Roll to thickness desired.

Quick Irish Soda Bread (adapted from the Joy of Cooking)

Preheat oven to 375.

Sift together in a large bowl:

2 c sifted all-purpose flour

1.5 teaspoons double-acting baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

Cut into the flour with a pastry blender, until the mixture has the consistency of coarse cornmeal:

¼ cup chilled butter

Stir in ½ to 1 cup raisins

Mix together:

1 beaten egg

2/3 c heavy cream

1 Tablespoon maple syrup

Add to dry ingredients and stir well. Knead briefly and place on a greased sheet or in a greased 8-inch round pan. If the latter, press down so the dough fills the pan. Cut a bold cross over the top and sides so the bread will not crack in baking. Brush the top with milk.

Bake 35 to 40 minutes or until the bread sounds hollow.

Quick Sweet Whole Wheat Bread (adapted from the Joy of Cooking)

Preheat oven to 375.

Mix:

2.5 c whole wheat flour

¼ teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons double acting baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

Combine:

1 beaten egg

½ c maple syrup

¼ c brown sugar

¼ c vegetable oil

Optional: 1 teaspoon grated lemon or orange peel

Add the flour mixture alternately with 2/3 c. heavy cream, buttermilk, or yogurt. Note: you may need to add flour if the mixture is too sticky (I added about ½ c more). Pour into a greased pan and bake about 50 minutes.

The Great Locavore Meal

2009-04-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

Today, I'm cooking an almost entirely locavore meal for 20-24 people. It's been a bit challenging, especially this time of year, but I think it's going to turn out great. Here's the prospective menu:

Roast Pork Shoulder and Roast Chicken (didn't have enough of either to make the meal) - Chestnut Farm meat share
Chevre-stuffed Mushrooms (vegetarian entree) - Shrooms from PA, Chevre from MA, kale from my own garden
Maple-roasted root vegetables - most veggies from the Boston Organics Dogma Box, plus an overwintered onion from my garden, maple syrup from Lunenburg, MA, roasted garlic butter from Mendon, MA, and sea salt from Maine, plus dried herbs from my garden
Tossed salad - all greens either from the Dogma Box or from Pete's Greens in VT.
Homemade bread - probably Irish soda bread using flour from Littleton Mills, VT.
Pumpkin pie - a combination of farmshare and farmers' market pumpkin I roasted and froze last October, cream from Shaw Farm in Dracut, MA, eggs from Pete & Jen's Backyard Birds, and honey from the Boston Honey Company
Chocolate-covered strawberries - Strawberries from North Carolina, chocolate from Taza Chocolate in Somerville, MA

Shopping for this meal might sound like it was an ordeal, but it was actually surprisingly easy. All the meat came from our meatshare with Chestnut Farm. The bulk of the vegetables and the flour came from the Boston Organics Dogma Box. The pumpkin has been sitting in my freezer all winter, waiting to be used. The cream, butter, honey, and other ingredients came from the Dairy Bar, part of Kick*ss Cupcakes in Davis Square, which we go to at least once/week for Shaw Farm milk in glass bottles.

The rest came primarily from Lionette's Market, a tiny Mecca of local foods located in the South End. My husband took our daughters there on Friday and found the greens, some fresh parsnips, and the sea salt from Maine. I also went by Pemberton Farms yesterday because they have interesting seasonal vegetables like fiddlehead ferns, and I was hoping that they'd have chanterelles. Sadly, it's still a little too early in the season for those, but I did find some nice new red potatoes from Chester, MA and the chevre. Pemberton does have a great selection of organic foods, but I do wish they'd label their local foods.

We're now going to make up a more formal menu, and my husband wants to make a spreadsheet of ingredients and distance in miles from home. I'll post these and a full report on the dinner tonight or tomorrow.

Ultimate Local: Planting Peas

2009-03-22T18:07:00.000-07:00

Nothing could possibly be more local than food you grow yourself. I'm an avid gardener, and I coordinate the vegetable garden for my community, Cambridge Cohousing. I'm not going to explain cohousing here, but I should explain that this is not your typical community garden. While only a few people work in the garden, everyone in our community is encouraged to come and partake of the harvest. If you think that's unfair, realize that I never, ever have to mow the lawn. Someone else who enjoys mowing does that, and someone else manages cleaning the common spaces, and someone else makes up the trash rotation, etc. We all help out as best we can, and right now, what I can best contribute is gardening.

This year, I have a nearly full time job, so I called a meeting of the usual gardening suspects and a few eager newcomers and got everyone to take on a plot or two. For myself, I reserved peas, lettuce, and strawberries. Traditionally in the Boston area, peas are planted on St. Patrick's Day, but I was working Tuesday, so I didn't get around to planting until yesterday. At least three of my neighbors stopped and asked, "Planting already?" Yes, indeed. They're called snow peas for a reason. Peas are a cold weather crop. They're the first crop planted in the spring and among the first harvested. Peas can handle an occasional frost or even snowfall.

I picked out a bed that has hosted eggplants and tomatoes for far too long and needs a good nitrogen boost. I would have liked to add compost, but our compost isn't quite ready yet, and I'm not getting any delivered until April 5th. Instead, I lightly amended with Cockadoodle-doo, which is to say, composted chicken poop. It's organic and safe even for my almost-two-year-old to handle. We raked the straw off the bed and sprinkled our doo all over. Then I set up the fences, and my elder daughter and I got to work planting peas.

I suddenly remembered that the squirrels had eaten all the sugar snap peas last spring before they had a chance to sprout. We took a break for lunch, and when I came out later, I brought onion skins with me. I don't know if they mask the scent of the pea or if the squirrels just don't like them, but it keeps them away from my tulip bulbs, so I'm hoping the skins will also protect my peas. One of the community kids came out to help me plant, and we finished up and covered the newly planted peas with straw.

Along the way, I notice a couple of little green spears poking up, and I actually dug up a small onion bulb at the end of one pea fence. Oh, no! Did I forget where I had a neighbor plant the Egyptian walking onions last fall? A quick web search when I got home confirms that they look just like those spears when they sprout. Well, this shouldn't be a problem. The onions shouldn't be ready until June or July, when the peas are already gone. And perhaps the onions will ensure that the squirrels leave the peas alone. We shall see... and this means I have a spare plot for the parsnips after all!

Next weekend: lettuce.

Restaurant: Kitchen on Common

2009-03-21T13:35:00.000-07:00

Last night, we decided to celebrate the vernal equinox by finding a new locavore restaurant and trying it out. My husband selected Kitchen on Common in Belmont's Cushing Square. I drove there directly from work and was hit with a deep sense of deja vu: Kitchen on Common happens to be located just two doors up Common St. from my former workplace, Firespout, a dotcom company long since gone bust.

Kitchen on Common's web site touts it as a restaurant that specializes in excellent food made from local ingredients. They list the following companies as their partners:

Gretta Anderson/Belmont Farm CSA – Belmont, MA
Iggy’s Bread of the World - Cambridge, MA
Baer’s Best Beans - Hamilton, MA
Vermont Butter & Cheese Company - Websterville, VT
Coming Soon - Tea from The Thymely Gardener - Belmont, MA

I'm curious to know where the lamb I ordered came from, though there are certainly plenty of local sources. I think I'll email them and ask for the sources of all the ingredients in our meals.

Kitchen on Common turned out to be a small, homey restaurant with about eight tables and two servers, one of whom looked like he may have been related to the owner who was working in the kitchen. My husband had called ahead, and the restaurant had arranged to have a table for us - a kind couple actually moved from a table for four to a table for two for us. They started us with a basket of Iggy's bread, fresh and tasty, but we would have enjoyed it more if we'd had knives with which to spread butter on our bread.

We ordered macaroni gratin and maple-roasted carrots for the kids. My husband and I started with split pea soup. I ordered the Grilled Lamb Steak with Sauteed Cabbage & Israeli
Cous-Cous Risotto, and my husband ordered the Farfalle with Roasted Mushrooms Pecorino and Roasted Garlic Cream, both of which are right up our alleys: my favorite meat is lamb, and my husband loves creamy sauces over pasta.

The food was amazing, consistently excellent. By far the best dish, surprisingly enough, was the carrots. The maple glaze roasted into them was not excessively sweet and served instead to accentuate the natural sweetness of the carrots. My husband and I gleefully finished what the girls could not.

Similarly, the macaroni gratin was some of the best mac'n'cheese I've ever had, with a nice sharp pecorino romano. My one complaint there is that the romano may have been too strong for the girls, because they inexplicably failed to eat it all.

The spilt pea soup, by contrast, was a little disappointing. I think that if it hadn't followed such excellent dishes, it would have been fine, but by comparison it seemed bland. I had expected the bacon to give it a good salty base, but I ended up adding salt, which I almost never do.

Our main dishes, when they finally came, were also wonderful. I never knew that cabbage could taste that good, but it was utterly marvelous, and I actually liked it more than I liked the lamb. The lamb, while tender and cooked perfectly medium as requested, was somehow boring in comparison with the other offerings, like the lovely Israeli couscous, about the size of tapioca with a firmer consistency and in a nice, savory sauce.

The farfalle pasta was surprisingly wonderful due to the excellent quality of the mushrooms. I'm pretty sure they had been dried, but they were moist and tender in the dish with a wonderful wood flavor that was not overpowered by the sauce. I completely fell in love with the dish, and fortunately my husband similarly fell in love with the lamb, so we ended up trading dishes.

For dessert, we got one chocolate chip cookie and one raspberry oatmeal bar. They were served heated, gooey and delicious. It's a testament to how good the main dishes were that we had to take some of the dessert home.

This might have been one of the best meals I had ever had if only the fabulous food had been matched by the service. But the service was frankly terrible. We had no silverware and no water even well after we had ordered our food. Our waitress failed to take our drink order, so we had to wait until she had brought the water to order chocolate milk for the girls and San Pellegrino for my husband.

The food came out very, very slowly. We had them bring out the girls' food first, which turned out to be a horrible mistake because it was another half hour before our main dishes came. Meanwhile, the girls got more and more restive, loud, and cranky. My almost-two-year-old, who is cutting her two-year molars, became increasingly inconsolable. When our food finally came, we had to fight to get the waitress's attention to order dessert so that the girls would have something to munch on while we tried to finish our meal in peace. But then, of course, they heated the desserts, which meant that we were largely done eating by the time they came.

We did not even check the bill, just paid the tab and a straight 15% tip and fled. Now, I know our children were loud and disruptive, but that's exactly when a server should pay more, not less, attention to the table. Keeping the food moving and the kids happy makes dinner a more pleasant experience for everyone in the restaurant. And even if we hadn't had the kids along, I would have considered the service slow. There was actually one couple who had arrived before us and were still there as we left, likely because we rushed to get out as quickly as possible.

This actually seems to be a common theme: we've had a similar experience at Stone Hearth Pizza. It seems like a restaurant can be either local or family friendly but not both, unless you want to pay exhorbitant amounts of money and go to Henrietta's Table. And even then, that's cheating - there's a nearby hotel lobby where high-energy children can run around and burn off the calories they've just consumed. At one point in our meal, my husband turned to me and said, "I miss Boloco," referring to the failed restaurant in Davis Square with a nice kids' corner, now taken over by Green Tomato II, which still has the kid's corner but offers miserable cafeteria-style food.

Ultimately, while we loved the food at Kitchen on Common, we were seriously disappointed by the service. It would be fine for a leisurely meal for two adults, but it's a terrible venue for kids. If you want to your kids to dine on their fare, I recommend takeout.

Readers' Challenge: Where is your favorite place to eat with your children that offers local fare?

Does a Locavore Diet have a Smaller Carbon Footprint?

2009-03-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

A quick post on my lunch break. A recent article in the Boston Globe argues that eating less red meat will reduce your carbon footprint more than eating local. I say, why not do both? By only eating the meat that comes in our meat share, I've significantly reduced the amount of meat my family eats and ensured that we only eat local.

Reader's Challenge: Local Corned Beef

2009-03-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

Hi, all. It's nearly St. Patrick's Day, and I got to wondering whether it's possible to find locally-raised corned beef. Yes, I know I can get a local beef brisket and corn it myself. That's not the point. Is any of the corned beef that we're about to be inundated with locally produced?

Please do me a favor: in the next few days, whenever you go out shopping, check out the corned beef and post back here if you've found some locally-raised beef that's already corned.

Thanks!
Jenise

Heads Up: New Research on Commercial Pig Farming

2009-03-13T17:44:00.001-07:00

Check out the NY Times article on Commercial Pig Farming and the spread of antibiotic-resistant staph infections. Here's yet another really good reason to choose local, sustainably-raised meats to grace your table.

In Search of the Perfect Egg

2009-03-12T18:18:00.001-07:00

These days, there are so many different types of eggs available, it's dizzying. Even among local eggs, you can choose between conventionally farmed eggs (read: hens stuck in cages), cage-free eggs (hens let out of cages for an hour or so every day), free-running hens (hens never in cages but still confined to a barn), and free-range hens (allowed outside during the day and brought in at night to protect them from predators).

Then, there's what the hens are fed: conventional chicken feed, vegetarian chicken feed (nothing but grain or corn), organic chicken feed, and feed supplemented by whatever the chickens scratch up outside.

But what does all this mean for your breakfast table? Which of these eggs is more nutritious and more tasty? Well, I decided to find out, empirically.

This morning, I compared one egg from each of the following local sources:

Country Hen, Hubbardston, MA - free-running hens fed vegetarian organic feed, bought at Whole Foods
Chestnut Farm, Hardwick, MA - free-range hens that happily eat insects, bought when picking up meat share last week.
Coll's Farm, Jaffrey, NH - cage-free hens fed vegetarian conventional feed, bought at the Dairy Bar in Davis Square.
Chip-In Farm, Bedford, MA - free-running hens fed vegetarian conventional feed, bought at the farm

I checked the eggs for two critical parameters: color and taste. Yolk color is determined by what a hen eats. A more orange yolk can mean one of two things: a coloring agent such as marigold petals has been added to the feed, or the hen's diet is naturally rich in carotenoids such as beta carotene. Read more about this here.

An earlier taste test between scrambled Chestnut Farm eggs and Chip-In eggs failed miserably due to adding too much water to the eggs, resulting in runny eggs. Note, however, that the eggs on the right, from Chestnut Farm, are much darker in color than the Chip-in Farm eggs on the left.

So this time around, I chose to fry them sunny-side up. Here are the eggs, happily cooking in the frying pan together. They are, starting from the top right and moving clockwise, from Chestnut Farm, Chip-In Farm, Coll's Farm, and Country Hen. Note that the eggs from Country Hen and Chestnut Farm look noticeably more orange than the eggs from Coll's Farm or Chip-In Farm. My husband and I then tasted the yolk of each of the eggs. The yolks from Chestnut Farm and Country Hen clearly had a stronger, better taste and texture. The Coll's Farm yolk had a very mild flavor, and the Chip-In Farm yolk was nearly tasteless. Of the two tasty orange eggs, we both agreed that Chestnut Farm's egg had a slightly better flavor.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Country Hen eggs. I had expected them to come in near the bottom, despite their brandishing of the high-omega-3 content of their eggs. According to them, their eggs are highly nutritious, and judging from the color and flavor of the egg, I have to agree. But here's the kicker: they were also the most expensive eggs. Here's a cost comparison of the eggs from most to least expensive:

Country Hen - $2.75/half-dozen
Chestnut Farm - $4/dozen
Coll's Farm - $3.75/dozen
Chip-In Farm - $2.30/2 dozen

For the difference in cost, flavor, and humane treatment, I declare Chestnut Farm the winner. Incidentally, the Chestnut Farm eggs were also, on average, bigger than all of the other eggs, making them an even better value. Unfortunately, those eggs are available only once/month, on meatshare distribution days. When I run out, I plan on buying Country Hen eggs. I'm going to shop around area stores and see if I can't find them at a better price than at Whole Foods.

Reader's Challenge: Got a favorite locally-produced egg? Do your own taste test against Country Hen eggs or Chestnut Farm eggs if you can get them, then let the rest of us know your results.

Fossil Fuel Use - Boats, Trains, Trucks, and Refrigerators

2009-03-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

I've been investigating my assumption that buying local foods reduces fossil fuel usage, and the results so far are really interesting.

First, it depends on how the food is transported. Apparently, shipping by sea has been found to be far more polluting than previously thought (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/13/climatechange.pollution). The main culprit here appears to be that ships in international waters are poorly regulated, and so they use the cheapest, dirtiest fuel available. Purchasing kiwi shipped from Italy or New Zealand contributes far more to global pollution than purchasing kiwi from California (unless the Californian kiwi is transported by boat as well).

This report is supported by a study in Seattle that actually measured the amount of greenhouse gases released by essentially identical plates of locally- and internationally-produced foods. The locally-produced plate wins, hands down. The report is well summarized by Tim Crosby, who writes a fascinating blog on food systems in the U.S.

The results for transportation of domestic foodstuffs is more murky, perhaps because it's difficult to compare transportation of food in a semi from California to transportation by multiple consumers' cars. In Energy Use in the U.S. Food System: a summary of existing research and analysis, John Hendrickson argues that, while it's very difficult to determine the true cost of transporting foods, there are other good reasons to buy locally:

"Regardless of the actual miles or the relative proportion of energy used in transporting food products, it is important to realize that transportation is an especially vulnerable sector of the food system. In contrast to the other sectors of the food system, transportation is almost exclusively dependent upon liquid fuels derived from oil. International supply disruptions and price fluctuations can have a more marked and immediate impact on this sector (OECD 1982). And this vulnerable sector is, experts agree, the most critical sector of the food system. What the modern food industry hails as the “global supermarket” depends heavily on cheap and efficient transportation. Without cheap and efficient transportation, there can be no “global supermarket.” Subsidies in this sector (highway maintenance for example) are significant and help keep food affordable for the average American. If fuel were priced so as to reflect its true costs (including environmental impacts) food prices would rise accordingly. Already, 6-12 percent of the consumer dollar spent on food eaten at home represents transportation costs (Rhodes 1993). True-cost pricing for gasoline has been estimated at $4.50/gallon by the Worldwatch Institute (1989). Another study has suggested an increase of over two dollars (World Resources Institute 1992). These and other considerations have led many analysts of the food system to suggest at least a partial return to a more decentralized system of distribution, in which individual states and/or regions are more self-reliant in food (Tansey and Worsley 1995; Kloppenburg et al. 1996). See Paxton (1996) for a review of the environmental and social consequences of long distance food transport."

I also discovered, much to my surprise, that transportation is only the second largest source of energy consumption in the U.S. food system (not including the cost of producing the food in the first place, which is far, far more energy-intensive than transporting the food). According to Swivel.com, transportation accounts for 14% of energy consumption, but 35% of energy consumption is caused by home refrigeration! This is making me rethink getting a standing freezer to store more food. Who could have guessed that how we store our food is more important than how we get it in the first place?

First Farm Visit - How Not to Do It

2009-03-08T03:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we spontaneously went out to Chip-In Farm in Bedford, MA, and it was quite a learning experience. On the one hand, we could just walk into the store and visit their petting zoo. On the other hand, there was no farmer on hand, and the store was being run by a girl who looked to be somewhere between 12 and 15 years old. So we had no access to the chicken barn to check the conditions, nor could we get very close to the cattle, nor could we ask any questions.

Clearly, from now on, we need to either go on Open House days or call ahead to arrange a visit, although neither of these options really satisfies me. In both cases, the farmers have a chance to clean up and present their best face. I want to see ordinary daily activity: dirt, manure, and all.

Here's what we did learn. Chip-In Farm is tiny. I'd guess it's about three acres of land being actively farmed, although the property probably extends back into the woods somewhat. It's tucked behind Hanscom AFB in an area of swampland, scrubby new-growth forest, and military housing. I suspect that this was all farmland in the not-too-distant past, judging by how young the trees were.

The farm store was rather disappointing. While they did have their own eggs, milk from Shaw Farm in Dracut, MA, honey produced locally in Bedford, and locally-produced maple syrup for sale, most of the rest of their offerings were non-local: strawberries from Florida, blueberries from California, Idaho potatoes, lots of conventional penny candy for the kids. And I saw no organic offerings at all.

On the positive side, their eggs were incredibly cheap. We bought two dozen for a mere $2.30!!! We will perform a taste test on the eggs later this morning. And they had a lovely petting zoo that seems to be a local attraction for kids. Inside the store, they had a bin of shredded produce, clearly store products that were no longer saleable, to feed to their livestock. Each child is allowed to bring in one basket of produce. We went with our two daughters, 5 and almost 2, and our elder daughter's best friend, almost 5, who were delighted with the animals and their ability to feed them. The zoo consisted of three sheep of two breeds, one exuberant goat, two very mellow bunnies, a large pig of a longhaired breed I've never seen before named Lilac, and four chickens. Above us, we could hear (and smell) the laying chickens. All of the windows on the second floor of the barn look like they're fenced in with chicken wire, so my guess is that they laying hens have the run of the second floor.

Outside, just as we were leaving, we spotted three head of cattle in a field with electric fencing. Again, they were a breed I've never seen before, solid color in the body with a white stripe down the spine. Either they're a very small breed, or these were immature cattle, two heifers and a young bull. My guess is that they were calved in late spring of last year and are intended to be meat cattle. I'll try to call the farm and ask.

Overall, I was a little disappointed. Among other things, I'm annoyed with the photos on their web site. Although they show chickens running around on the lawn, they also explicitly state that their chickens are indoor chickens because they're concerned about disease, particularly the Asian bird flu. So the chickens in the photos are almost certainly from the petting zoo and did not produce any of the eggs we bought. To me, this seems a bit shady, not quite false advertizing, but not entirely truthful either.

The trip did make me realize that, while I know something about raising livestock, I only know about a few breeds, and in fact, I don't even know which breeds those were. I know that my grandfather's cattle had some Black Angus in them because I vividly remember the Black Angus bull he brought in to breed the cows one year. His body proportions were very different from the cows', so the cows were a different breed altogether, but I have no idea which breed. They might well have been several other breeds. I'll ask my mother, but I doubt she knows, either. And since my grandfather really didn't write things down, I doubt that I'll ever know what those cows were.

So now, I'm determined to educate myself on different breeds of cattle and why one breed might be selected over another. A neighbor brought me a flyer from High Lawn Farm making grand pronouncements about the superior quality of milk from Jersey cows (over Holsteins). If that's so, why don't all dairies raise Jerseys? What's the trade off? I want to know.

My husband and I did a taste comparison of the eggs this morning, but I'd like to expand it to include other local eggs, so I'll likely post my results later this week.

Why You Should Believe Me

2009-03-06T19:09:00.000-08:00

My husband, Alex, wrote this up about why he thinks I can pull off this blog:

"I need to tell you about my wonderful wife Jenise's grandfather's farm: five acres on the Rio Grande's flood plain in Albuquerque, NM. Max, Jenise's grandfather, who died last year at the ripe old age of 90, ran the farm on the side of his lifelong job as a mail carrier. They raised alfalfa, and fed it to beef cattle, which they ate themselves, but Max also brought in other animals from year to year as education for his grandchildren. Jenise got her start as a writer standing on the manure pile telling stories to the cows. But she lived with the cows on a daily basis for much of her childhood, and helped with farm chores like baling hay and feeding it to them.

"When I met Jenise at MIT, no one I knew had that kind of experience. In fact, in our social circles of mostly highly educated professionals, it is very nearly unique. (A lot of folks I know come from small towns, but very few grew up on farms.) So Jenise can make a good guess about whether a cow is healthy just by looking at it. (She claims she can do this for goats and sheep, too, which I mostly believe, but the cows I saw with my own eyes). In addition, she is an MIT-trained technical writer and graduate of the Clarion Workshop. So I think she has a better chance than average to be able to accurately assess a farm we visit, and the skills to write it up coherently and entertainingly.

"The thing we don't have is any formal agricultural training. So in that sense we are outsiders, still very definitely consumers of farm products."

I'd like to add that having grown up in New Mexico did not prepare me for agricultural conditions in New England. My very first backyard garden in Somerville washed away in a nor'easter. At the same time, it is a constant source of astonishment to me how things just grow here. I have a lot to learn.

Becoming a Locavore Detective

2009-03-06T17:11:00.000-08:00

Recently, I bought some bacon prominently labeled "Made in Vermont." But after I got it home and read the label more carefully, I saw the small print: "Made using pork from the U.S.A. and Canada." Which means that while it's possible the pork was raised in New England or nearby Quebec, it could just as easily have come from Florida, California, Vancouver, or Hawaii. And while I like supporting a local Vermont business, that food's just not local enough for me.

Why do I care? Well, there are lots of good reasons to eat local foods. You can read about a locavore diet more thoroughly in books like Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and draw your own conclusions. You can also read the reasoning of other Boston-area locavores at BostonLocalvores.org. Here are a few of my personal reasons:

Nutrition - Locally-produced food is more nutritious. This is particularly true of fruits and vegetables because they do not need to be picked well before they ripen in order to be shipped halfway around the world. Local foods can be picked when ripe and full of vital nutrients.
Environment - Food that does not have to be shipped far consumes less fossil fuel en route to my mouth. And local foods tend to be grown sustainably and even organically, which reduces chemical pollutants in our water and soil and, coincidentally, also makes the food more nutritious.
Economy - Buying locally keeps money within the local community and supports small farmers.
Biodiversity - Small farmers tend to grow diverse crops and unusual varieties of livestock. This promotes biodiversity and offers greater variety in my diet.
Taste - Quite simply, locally-produced food tastes much, much better. Last night, I had the most tender, delicious roasted chicken in my life, and it came from Chestnut Farm in Raynham, MA.
Ideology - I don't believe that I can take my food at face value any more. There is nothing more intimately tied to my health and well being. Food becomes me. The food I feed my daughters becomes them. We are literally what we eat. How food is grown affects what we drink. How food is transported affects how we breathe. To be a responsible consumer, to take real control of my health and my life, as well as the health and lives of my family, I want to know my food: where it comes from, how it is produced, and how it arrives on my plate.

But how can I tell if my food is truly local? And even if it is local, how can I tell if it's sustainably farmed? If it's a food product like bread or jam or bacon, how do I know its ingredients are local? If I eat at a restaurant that claims to use local ingredients, how many of those ingredients are local? And are they sustainable/organic/humane?

The simple answer: ask.

I intend to spend a little time every week getting to know my food. And as I investigate the origins of my meals, I'm going to report my findings here. Like a locavore detective, I intend to ask questions and visit the places where my food is produced to verify the answers. Here are some of the things I want to investigate:

Local farms - About once a month, perhaps more in the summer, I want to visit a local farm. Initially, these will probably be the farms where I have CSA shares (Brookfield Farm, Chestnut Farm), but I'll also visit farms that are easy to reach from Boston and farms that sell food at Boston-area farmers' markets. I was raised on a farm in New Mexico, so I actually know a fair amount about vegetable farming and raising cattle and goats. I will report back on the conditions I find.
Restaurants serving food made with local ingredients - More of these are springing up all around the Boston area. I'll visit restaurants like Henrietta's Table, Stone Hearth Pizza, and many others. Suggestions for restaurants to visit are welcome. I'll also call the owners and ask them exactly what was in the dishes I ordered and where they get their ingredients. That may lead me to more local farms.
Locally-produced foods - Like the "Vermont Bacon," I want to check out locally produced foods, like Taza Chocolate, Maria and Ricardo's Tortillas, and Littleton Grist Mill's flours and mixes.
Local organizations that support local foods - Boston Organics recently began offering a Dogma Box of all local produce. How local is it really? And how about the local offerings in area grocery stores like Whole Foods and specialty shops like the Dairy Bar?
Where to find odd local foods - It seems to me that, being right next to the ocean, it ought to be possible to find locally-produced sea salt, but dang if I can find it. How about local vinegar? Local kosher foods?
Producing your own local foods - I'm an avid gardener, and I act as the coordinator for a community garden. Inevitably, my gardening habit will leak into this blog, but I'm also hoping to investigate things like how to make my own cheese, can my own vegetables, make my own maple syrup, heck, even my own sea salt.

It's my intention to make this blog useful to folks in the Metro Boston area who are also struggling to attain a local, sustainable lifestyle. I hope that you'll contribute your findings, ideas, and requests for information. I'll do my best to answer all our questions.

Happy reading, happy eating!
Jenise Aminoff