field notes: news & resources for re-linking the food chain

In talking to people about why they buy or would consider buying locally-grown product, I consistently hear four main reasons:

1. I cook. Locally grown food simply tastes better.
2. I support my community, including farmers.
3. I want to eat healthier and locally grown food has more nutrients.
4. I’m scared about the overuse of pesticides on conventionally grown produce. I feel more comfortable buying from a farmer I know.

The interesting thing is that I used to think of the buyers profiled above as distinct groups: health conscious buyers distinct from foodies distinct from people advocating food justice.

Give Me a Reason to Buy Locally

But the reality is that you can start at any one point above, and within a short period of time—sometimes days, sometimes months—slide right into another. Care about taste most? Great! But then it’s harder to spray pesticides on the berries you grow in your garden or spray that toxic cleanser you use on your kitchen counter.

Like to support local farmers? Hurray! And you know what? It turns out their food tastes amazing. Funny how food tastes so much better when it was dug out of the ground that morning. With something like a tomato it’s not even a fair fight when you try local vs. a tomato that is picked “dead green” and shipped 1,500 miles.

Big CPG (that’s consumer packaged goods to you and me) companies didn’t focus on green for the longest time. Not big enough they said. Not enough scale. A niche market.  Now everyone is jumping on the green bandwagon.

But before that word “ green” gets completely mangled beyond recognition, there is real cause for hope. Imagine that Hellman’s is coming out with a mayonnaise using cage-free eggs. Okay, that’s not local, but it will have an impact on growing practices. Next McDonalds will be featuring organic beef. Actually there was a rumor that was going to happen last year.

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The conversation about fixing our food system continues to move further into the mainstream.  Last week, Oprah did a great show on Food 101 with Michael Pollan on Food Rules, Alicia Silverstone on changing her diet (including a funny exchange on poop), and excerpts from Food, Inc.

[UPDATE 2/4/10 - looks like Harpo Productions took the videos off YouTube and are making the Food 101 show available on DVD.  A shame they won't allow this information to be distributed more freely, but at least they did produce great content.  You can get more info on the Oprah site.

Just wondering - do you think Food, Inc. will get a share of the revenue from DVD sales of this episode that include excerpts from the film?  Sure - they get great PR, but still..... ]

Here’s video from YouTube, in 5 parts. No additional commentary needed!

Part 1

continue to watch the rest of Food 101

Ezra Klein talks to Ezekiel Emanuel, health care policy advisor to the Office of Management and Budget, in a recent Washington Post article. Emanuel doesn’t address the impact of corporate food marketing on our eating habits, but he offers excellent perspective on the disconnect between the health care debate and food, as well as cultural obstacles to encouraging better food choices.

The Obama administration is raising awareness about healthy eating through the high profile White House Garden and new local food campaigns such as Know Your Farmer.  It’s a good start, but, as Emanuel notes, “lifestyle issues are hard for the government to address.”

Along these lines, Adam Corner proposes that psychology is the missing link in the climate change debate: …while the consensus may be growing on the need for changes in behaviour, we’re no closer to understanding how we’re going to do it. Attempting an unprecedented shift in human behaviour without the input of psychologists is like setting sail for a faraway land without the aid of nautical maps.

Excerpts from What’s Missing in the Marketplace:

Our political system is a lot more comfortable talking about health care than about health. We’ll pay enormous amounts of money to treat diabetics, but we don’t do much to change people’s diets to prevent diabetes. That’s a strange use of resources: Focusing on health-care coverage without doing more to address the factors, such as diet, that determine our health is a bit like buying fire insurance while ignoring the fact that you have a gas stove and a large fireplace in a wood cabin. A dry wood cabin.

…”My own view,” says Emanuel, “is we know there are large parts of health that are primarily best approached as a public-health issue and not as a doctor-patient issue. Nutrition, wellness, exercise and smoking, for instance. But lifestyle change is hard to accomplish. What smoking showed is it’s not a single thing. It changed from being socially acceptable and doctors would recommend it in the ’50s to being scorned and barred indoors.”

The smoking case is an interesting one. Emanuel brings it up repeatedly as one of the few examples where public-health advocates managed to change the culture around a previously unexamined act, which is exactly what they’re going to have to do with diet. “On smoking, there are a combination of things that had to happen,” he says. “We had to make smoking socially unacceptable. We took it outside the building. We raised taxes on it. It became linked to cancer.” But as he admits, “you can’t take eating outside the building.” Nor can you demonize it entirely. Certain products can be attacked, but in a world of organic Oreos and Splenda with added fiber, it won’t just be an uphill climb. It’ll be a climb with constantly changing footholds.

Moreover, as Emanuel says, lifestyle issues are hard for the government to address. They’re personal, for one thing. Whether it likes it or not, the government is fiscally invested in the way we eat because it pays for the consequences of a bad diet. But few feel comfortable with the government’s involving itself in the choices that lead to that bad diet.

…So where does that leave us? “You have to change the whole culture around this stuff,” Emanuel sighs. “That’s a complicated thing. It’s even more complicated than how to change the health-care system, if you can believe it.”

Klein piece via ethanagri4 on the Comfood listserve

Corner piece via the foodtimes

work picnic (11)
via David Clow on flickr

The Toronto Star sent Margaret Webb to find farms that produce the raw materials for junk food. The result of her search is a compelling and unsettling piece about the journey of food from field to factory to snack.

Ultimately, however, Webb articulates what many of us already know and are working toward in the way we eat, produce and distribute food:

Food is powerful. Change is possible with every purchase we make, in every link we forge between good food and good farming, and in every bite we take.

From Where they grow our junk food:

Follow the flow of food. That’s what any farmer will tell you. Because apples don’t grow in supermarkets.…to get to the root of the exploding obesity epidemic, I went in search of a junk food farm.

Such farms are not so easy to spot. No fields of Dorito bags waving in the breeze, no orchards blooming with soda pop, no soil bursting with 99-cent burgers.

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from The Hunger on flickr

I ordered 5 dozen ears of corn last week from Valley Family Farm in Milan, Michigan. I usually get 3 dozen ears to freeze for the winter.  But farmers Patricia and Ken grow super sweet corn that barely needs cooking, and at $15 it was pretty hard to pass up the very heavy burlap bag of 60 ears they had waiting for me.

So I had to figure out what to do with it all – quickly.  I froze some (blanched for a minute and then cut it off the cobs). Gave some away. Roasted some (in an open pan, slathered in olive oil and sea salt).  Boiled some.  And still had more corn. Big ears of corn.

Which lead to an experimental corn chowder pulled together from whatever I had in the house, mashing up recipes from a half dozen cook books and web sites.  It was a successful experiment by all accounts – not least because the corn was so good.

read on for the chowder recipe and a lovely way to cook smelt; served together with a baguette, this is a really good dinner

Following up on my last post, I ran across another resource in the quest for transparency.

What’s On My Food is searchable database that uses research from the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program to rank the toxicity of fruits and veggies (fresh, canned and frozen), meats, grains, dairy products and water. (via Bitten)

I’d love it if someone could turn this into a mobile tool for people faced with the choice of $8.99/lb for organic, local garlic vs. $2.99/lb for conventional, domestic garlic, as I was yesterday.  I chose the cheaper garlic because my budget is limited.  And while there’s no specific data on garlic in the database, I learned that onions, a similar crop, have extremely low amounts of pesticide residue, which made that choice a little easier.

Peaches and apples, on the other hand, are a different story.  Armed with data on the residues found in these fruits, it was an easy choice to buy the more expensive local, pesticide-free options.

As I’ve noted before, when we get cheap food, we aren’t necessarily paying for its true cost.  There are hidden costs to the environment, to individual health, and to local economies.  With an unlimited budget, I’d always choose the local, pesticide-free option.  Most of our food budgets, however, are limited.  Easy to use, data-driven tools can make it a little easier to spend wisely and eat well.

Post script on the price of garlic… read on

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Carl Sagan

Henry David Thoreau once wrote that “it is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.” Michael Pollan

from Orang1na on flickr

It’s apple season.  My family ushered in the Jewish New Year last weekend by dipping apples in honey with a blessing for fruit trees, renewal and a good, sweet year. I thought of a cookbook, written by women in Theresienstadt, the Czech concentration camp.

Fighting hunger and malnutrition, the women wrote down the recipes they remembered, an act of defiance that created a cultural legacy.  One of the women, Mina Pachter, gave the recipes to a friend on Yom Kippur in 1944, just before she died.  The recipes were published in the 1996 book, In Memory’s Kitchen.  65 years later, I’m looking at a recipe for apple dumplings (below).

Alan Turing, a mathematician and cryptographer, is considered to be the father of modern computer science.  Turing was also gay, and in 1952 he was prosecuted by the British government for the “crime” of homosexuality. Instead of going to prison, he agreed to be injected with estrogen to “curb his libido.”  In 1954, at the age of 41, he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.  Turing was persecuted for his desires.

Apples, Pollan writes, satisfy our desire for sweetness. “…sweetness has proved to be a force in evolution. By encasing their seeds in sugary and nutritious flesh, fruiting plants, such as the apple hit on an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth: in exchange for fructose, the animals provide the seeds with transportation…Desire, then, is built into the very nature and purpose of fruit.” (The Botany of Desire)

Decio, which dates back to Roman times, is the oldest known variety of apple.  Cox’s Orange Pippin, introduced in England in 1825, is my absolute favorite apple; I’ve found it in Michigan at Christmas Cove Farm.

Stats from the Lansing State Journal’s Interactive Guide to Michigan Apples:

• Pounds of apples the average U.S. consumer eats in a year: 46.1 (at 5-6 ounces per apple, that’s about 138 apples per person)
• Top apple producing states: Washington, New York, Michigan, California, Pennsylvania and Virginia
• Number of family-run apple farms in Michigan: 950

No post on apples would be complete, of course, without a simple and fabulous recipe:

Apples with honey and salted butter – from Larousse Gastronomique

1. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees.
2. Peel, halve and core 8 dessert apples.
3. Pour 3/4 cup liquid acacia honey into a flameproof baking dish, spreading it evenly.
4. Place this dish over a brisk heat and arrange the apple halves in the dish with their curved sides underneath and a small knob of salted butter in each.
5. Cook for 10 minutes and serve immediately.

From the women of Theresienstadt: Apple Dumplings

Make an ordinary dumpling dough with 1/2 kilogram flour, 2 eggs, 1/2 decagram yeast some fat. Now cut fine delicate apples into small pieces. To prevent them from darkening, pour some white wine over apples. When the dough is kneaded, add apples and make ordinary dumplings. Serve with stewed prunes. It is a good supper.

I’ve been looking at visualizations of local food systems and ran across Aaron Newton’s 2007 post on the bullseye diet. It’s one of the clearest, most pragmatic approaches to being conscious about eating food that’s produced closer to home – while taking into account the realities of our global food system. Making good food choices can be complicated – but this approach simplifies the process.

Newton, who co-wrote A Nation of Farmers, …needed a conceptual way to organize my increasingly entangled way of thinking about local food…imagine sourcing your food as a good game of darts where the dart board represents your geographical region. A great shot ends up in the bullseye- your own home- eating food you have grown yourself. As you move outwards on the board, your next nearest food source is usually your best bet. How much food can you grow in your neighborhood? How about buying food from a farmer just outside of town? Can you get other foods from your surrounding region? How much can you obtain from within your own state? The idea is that the closer to home – the closer to the bullseye – the better.

Sharon Astyk, co-author of A Nation of Farmers, adds:  Like a darts game, you won’t always hit your circle. But with practice, you can get a little closer every time. The more food you create in your community, the better off we all are.

From the Nourish Network article, Eat Chocolate.

Dark chocolate. An ounce or so a few times a week (to borrow Michael Pollan’s formula). For many of us, this little prescription flies in the face of a decades-deep divide between what we want to eat (chocolate) and what we feel we should eat (carrot sticks and celery). But nature didn’t intend it to be that way.

The cocoa in chocolate, like most plant-based foods, boasts a cocktail of compounds that fall under the collective category of phytonutrients (which simply means “plant nutrients”). There are thousands and thousands of phytonutrients that impact our health in all sorts of ways, from lowering blood pressure to preventing cancer to boosting the immune system. The irony is, these little powerhouses are also what make plant-based foods look and smell and taste the way they do. Think about that a second; the very stuff that makes food pleasurable is also making us healthy. Now there’s a paradigm shift.

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Loving Mark Bittman’s simple, flexible ideas for using the bounty of the season in his Minimalist column. I’m a sucker for savory recipes that use fresh fruit and three recipes, in particular, jumped out.

1) Mix wedges of tomatoes and peaches, add slivers of red onion, a few red-pepper flakes and cilantro. Dress with olive oil and lime or lemon juice.

read on…