Farmville Gets Real

This article by Peter Smith discusses the new phenomenon of land sharing for gardening. He tells the story of Peter Rothbart, who started We Patch, a garden sharing social network in Seattle:

"Two years ago, Peter Rothbart was riding through Seattle on his bike. He came to a traffic circle. In the center was a 15-by-20-foot patch of soil where the city allows residents to garden. A man was standing there, looking down at a sorry-looking bunch of plants that had been run over and obliterated by a late-night driver. Later that evening, Rothbart went to a barbecue and overheard a woman talking about how she had an expansive lawn that she didn’t have time to take care of. “What if that guy could garden her land?” he said. “It just seemed like a good idea.”

So he started We Patch, one of a dozen new websites designed to connect wannabe gardeners with landowners who have available garden space. Let’s say you have an unused space that might make a good pumpkin patch, you offer it up on the website. If you’re a gardener without a garden, you can find available space—and contact the landowner. Sometimes, it leads to a rendezvous and a handshake agreement. Other times, gardeners and landowners spell out exactly how they’ll share produce and labor from a shared plot of land. It’s like a Craigslist devoted exclusively to gardeners—without the used car parts and hopefully with fewer missed connections."

There are now loads of similar sites across the country. I've written before about using public spaces to grow food for hungry people, but I wonder how we could use a network of shared private spaces to accomplish the same goal. Could organizations that are already working to feed people--shelters, food pantries, faith and community groups--start a network of land sharing that would allow them to feed people with local whole ingredients? Can we add another player to this equation? We're connecting land owners to gardeners. How do we connect gardeners to people who don't have access to fresh local food and don't have the skills or resources to grow it?

Brainstorm with me here, people...

Eleven-year-old Birke Baehr's Speech on Our Food System

Check out this Tedx speech on our food system by Birke Baehr. Sure, it's probably scripted, but the kid's making decent points anyway.

The Sacramental Table

"We can not live harmlessly or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament; when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration...in such desecration, we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want." --Wendell Berry

Maybe I'll write more about this when I'm being less lazy...

What's the Problem with GMOs?

I just stumbled upon the blog, "A Month Without Monsanto," by April Davila, and I highly recommend checking it out. April took on the challenge of going a month without using any products that could be traced back to agricultural giant, Monsanto. The blog is fascinating and a remarkable example of how consolidated modern agriculture has become.

She does a great job of illustrating the struggles of trying to avoid Monsanto products and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), but maybe we need to ask why we should avoid them at all? Are we in the local food movement just a bunch of traditionalist Luddites? Are we missing the potential in what could be the next greatest human innovation? I don't think so. Here are just a few reasons why GMOs seem dangerous to me:

• There is virtually no research on their long term health effects in humans (though they've been shown to cause organ failure in other mammals).




• The increase in the use of GMOs has caused an increase in seed prices for farmers.




• Because Monsanto owns the genes it alters, farmers can no longer save seed from season to season. This pushes family farms out of business and leaves us with corporately owned factory farms.




• Genetic modification (and the ownership of genes concentrated in the hands of one company) creates a monoculture that is extremely susceptible to disease and pests.

These are only a handful of the numerous reasons to avoid GMOs, and Monsanto products in particular. April's blog demonstrates, though, as Monsanto's power grows, it will become harder and harder to do so.

Image courtesy of Jamblichus's Weblog

A Pig's Ass

As long as I'm on the topic of filling out petitions and urging you to sign letters, here's a link to a pretty alarming story from Sustainable Food.

A private agency that assigns foster children to homes in Baltimore has refused to place children in a Muslim woman's home because of her beliefs against eating/buying/serving pork. It is illegal for such an agency to discriminate against someone on the basis of religion. The article points out that plenty of value systems prohibit pork consumption--Judaism, vegetarianism, even some sects of Christianity. I work in interfaith cooperation at my day job, and sadly, it does not surprise me that this agency's "policy" is only affecting a Muslim family.

In conclusion:

A Real Life Conversation at my Parents' Dinner Table:

Mom: Mmm, delicious. Where did this ham come from?

Wacky Uncle: A pig's ass.

Do You Know What You're Eating?

Not for long. It soon may be illegal in the U.S. to label foods as free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This would eliminate all avenues for consumers to seek out food that is not genetically modified.

Go and sign the petition at Food Democracy Now if that makes you angry.

They're not asking for GMOs to be banned--or even labeled. They just want organic growers to maintain the right to label their products as GMO-free.

Smoothies (Happy, Mom?)

At my mother's request (which cannot be ignored), I will post a few smoothie recipes today. I have a smoothie for breakfast a few times a week--sometimes with oatmeal on the side, sometimes alone. I mainly use a fruit+yogurt+milk+occasional extra flavor formula.

I make them with an immersion blender, which I'm afraid is on its last legs, but you could use any blender. If I had to make a recommendation (and I don't have to, but I will anyway), I think the Magic Bullet blender is particularly drool-worthy. However, it has some drawbacks. It is pricey, especially considering that it only blends small portions at a time. It seems useful mainly for drink blending--so it may be worth it if that's your primary blending need. I do a LOT of blending/food processing, and I have a kitchen policy against singular-task items (think: melon baller, panini press, avocado slicer). My current blender consists of a hand-held motor piece which attaches to three different components: a food processor, electric mixer, and the immersion blender. It's versatile, simple, small, and gets a LOT of use.


On to smoothie recipes! If you still have local summer fruits in your freezer, bless your frugal heart. If you are getting fresh local fruits already where you live, I hate you. I've moved on to Wegman's frozen fruits. Here are some of my favorite recipes:


Mixed Berry Smoothie
Combine and blend:
1/2-3/4 cup frozen blueberries, raspberries, strawberries
1/3 cup yogurt
1/3 cup milk
1 tsp honey (Make sure your honey is local and organic! Bees are dying, people!)
Dash of salt (and I really mean just a dash)


Peach-Blackberry Smoothie
Combine and blend:
1/2-3/4 cup frozen peach slices and blackberries
1/3 cup yogurt
1/3 cup milk
1 tsp honey
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
dash of salt


Cucumber Melon Smoothie
Combine and blend:
1/2-3/4 cup sliced frozen cucumber and cantaloupe (honeydew would work, but I like cantaloupe better)
1/3 cup yogurt
1/3 cup milk
dash of salt
(Add some fresh dill for a more savory treat)


Chocolate Peanut Butter Smoothie
Combine and blend:
2-3 tbsp homemade chocolate syrup
3-4 tbsp peanut butter
3/4 cup frozen yogurt
1/3 cup milk

And when it's late April and it snowed this morning and you've totally given up on eating locally until the asparagus comes up...

Shamefully Tropical Smoothie
Combine and blend:
1/2-3/4 cup frozen mango, pineapple, strawberries
1/2 cup orange juice
dash of salt
tiny splash of hot sauce

These make about one serving each, but they are very approximate measurements, so feel free to play around with them--adding more of what you like and eliminating what you don't. What are some of your favorite smoothies recipes? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Earth Day Eating

Earth Day was this week, and in addition to organizing a group of kick-ass teenagers at an interfaith recycling drive this weekend, I've been thinking about how to practice earth-friendly eating. (Step one: blog more often, slacker). We seldom think about the impact of our eating habits on anything but our own bodies, but this week I'll be posting about how the way we eat affects the world.

There's a great post on Design*Sponge (a site I love to drool over) about "earth day eating, every day." Ashley put together a great list of ways to be earth conscious in your own kitchen.

Some that I'm already doing include:
*Composting kitchen scraps
*Keeping a kitchen garden
*Canning & Preserving
*Making my own dairy products
*Recycling all paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum products
*Repurposing used glass bottles
*Supporting CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture)
*Patronizing farmer's markets
*Carrying my own shopping bags to the market
*Reusing plastic food bags
*Seeking out locally grown and processed foods
*Buying/eating foods in season
*Running the dishwasher only when full
*Using homemade and/or non-toxic cleaning supplies
*Seriously minimizing the use of paper towels
*Storing foods in glass, ceramic, or metal containers instead of plastic

She had some suggestions that I'd love to do when I have more space--like keeping bees and chickens. She also had some suggestions I haven't been doing, but should--like bringing my own containers to the market for meat and fish and buying biodegradable trash bags.

These are pretty simple practices that someone like me can implement while working (more than) full time and living in a tiny city apartment. For those of you who have a little land or maybe a kitchen that fits more than one person in it at time (seriously, my kitchen is that small), think about what kind of impact your food habits can make!

Pissing Off Vegetarians

Boyfriend's de facto sister-in-law is newly vegetarian, and I have to confess to trying to convert her back to omnivoriousness. I know this is like the root of all food justice evils, but hear me out.

Being anti-vegetarian is practically blasephemous, especially in the whole/local/organic foods community. But I kind of am. When I hear someone is vegetarian, my first question is, "why?" Some common answers are:

1. "I'm making a religious choice. My religious beliefs mandate it." I pretty much leave that alone. First, because I don't want to be in the habit of arguing beliefs and practices that are integral to a person's identity, and second, because a culture containing a religious mandate against meat-eating usually also contains a food culture (cuisine) that is healthy and full without meat.

2. "I'm making an ethical choice. Killing and eating animals violates my personal values. Animals have rights similar to human rights." I tend to leave this alone too, since I generally think it would be offensive to argue against it. However, I don't really think it is a particularly logical argument. Humans have clearly evolved as omnivores, and meat is part of our natural diet. This argument for vegetarianism seems to put humans and animals on the same level in terms rights, because humans, of course, are animals. It then demands that humans not act like animals by choosing to modify their natural diet.


And then the flimsiest two reasons:

3. "I'm making a healthy choice. Meat isn't good for me." This is just false. Meat is part of our natural diet; we've evolved to eat it for millions of years. It's true that most Americans eat more meat than necessary (it needn't be present at every meal and should certainly not be what meals are centered on). It's also true that meat that's raised in factory farms--with antibiotics, growth hormone, and animals ankle-deep in fecal matter--is not healthy. But the meat I eat comes from farmers I know personally who raise animals ethically, organically, and outside. And (considering its higher price) I only eat it a few times a week.

4. "I'm making an environmental choice. Meat-eating isn't sustainable, and it's harmful to the environment." That's certainly true of factory farming. And vegetarians who can't get meat anywhere but the supermarket are vegetarians I support. But there is a way to raise meat with consideration for the animals' wellbeing, their natural diet and habitat, and the effect of animal treatment on human consumers. If you can find local farmers raising animals like this, I urge you to support them.


There is no escaping the truth that all life subsists on other life. Frankly, it's not a truth I'd care to escape. It is a sacred cycle that should be treated with honor and gratitude. As such, I make an effort to know that my meat comes from someplace honorable, natural, and sustainable. Do you know where your tofu comes from?

Food Desert Awareness Week

Today's the last day of Food Desert Awareness Week. The National Center for Public Research defines a "food desert" as:

"A large geographic area with no or distant grocery stores. Often, food deserts have an imbalance of food choice, meaning more nearby fringe good such as fast food, convenience stores, and liquor stores."

It often goes unmentioned that today's ever-so-popular food movements--eat local, eat organic, eat whole food, eat fresh, not processed--are movements of privilege and require the freedoms of time, mobility, geographic location, and income that are only afforded to a certain socioeconomic class.

Could I eat the way I choose to eat now if I were a single parent? Maybe. If I were a single parent earning minimum wage? Probably not. If I were a single parent earning minimum wage, living in a city with no car and no grocery store within ten miles, having been raised by parents who did not cook meals from scratch or grow food in the back yard or ahve aplace to teach me how to pick out good vegetables? No effing way.

But that's the kind of scenario facing far too many people today. People in the public health arena (my own mother included) are desperately trying to convey the message that if you eat crappy, processed food, you will get chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc. Lower class populations suffer from these diseases at alarmingly higher percentages than anyone else. But if the only places you can access food are convenience stores and fast food restaurants, of course the food you eat will be crappy and processed.

We've cut the impoverished off from a healthy food supply and guaranteed that their socioeconomic status will limit their access to healthy food for generations. And I'm not exaggerating when I say, it is literally killing them.

Food Blogging Legitimacy

I wrote an email to my two very best friends alerting them to/explaining/defending my new blog, and this post is more or less what I wrote. I realized as I wrote that my need to defend food blogging was meaningful and merited a more public account.

So, I studied political science in school and used to write a political blog--and by "write," I mean "hardly ever write." I was too much of a perfectionist about political theory, logic models, structured arguments, gross stuff like that. It felt too much like work to put together regular cohesive political essays.

I do a lot of reading on food issues vis-a-vis political theory/philosophy, and there is a large emerging genre of such writing. There is also a trend in popular culture of analyzing our collective and personal food habits. Then "Julie and Julia," a movie about talking about cooking, came out and is hugely popular, and I had the realization that everyone's talking about food right now.

And I realized that I eat interestingly, with a more ritualized food ethic than most Americans. And I think American food culture may turn out to be at the crux of the great struggle of 21st century. And if I'm really a feminist and if I really assert that the "personal is political," then my personal interactions with my world are more relevant political commentary than engagement with theory and logic and all of the traps of "reason" and "truth" and "reality" that the patriarchy controls. And what's more personal than what I put into my body to sustain it? And what's more intimate than sitting down and breaking bread with someone? This story is important. Stories of breaking bread together always are. And everyone enjoys some good food porn.

So I gave up on the pursuit of truth and the confines of logic, to embrace the primal, the spiritual, the pleasures of the flesh and all the other erotic and delicious indulgences The Man wants me to demurely eschew.

Or maybe, I'm just a narcisist writing a food blog, and trying to make it sound less lame.

So if you are a passionate food voyeur, a connoisseur of wholesome food and mediocre writing, or a merciful real world friend of mine, read on. Comment. Encourage my narcissism. Maybe it'll suck balls. Maybe it won't.

Food "Rules"

I live with my boyfriend in a tiny apartment in the moderately sized city of Rochester in upstate NY. We decided, upon moving here, to be more conscious eaters. This means, for us, that we follow some rules when it comes to selecting our food and eating it. They aren't always strictly enforced (at the moment), and are subject to change. We're just dipping our toes in the whole foods, local foods water, so to speak. But here they are:

1. We buy local food whenever we can.

This means we go to farmers' markets in the city and farm stands around the city. This rule is fun and easy in the summer and early fall, but nearly impossible during the long, frigid winter here.

2. If it comes in a package, we don't buy it.

In other words, we buy whole foods, not pre-processed, pre-packaged foods. We'd rather do the processing of foods--cooking, blending, mixing, preserving--ourselves, and control what gets done to and added to what we eat.

3. We buy organically grown food if it meets our first two rules.

The first two rules are more important than the third. We would rather buy from a farmer down the road who can't afford organic certification than from a certified corporately run agri-business in California. It is important, if it's available locally, to eat food that's grown sustainably and animal products without antibiotics and growth hormone.


Exceptions to the Rules

We are okay with buying items from far away that can't be or aren't produced locally--and can't be replaced by something that is. These items (for now) include coffee, tea, chocolate, flour, sugar (though we replace with honey when possible), various spices, rice, and olive oil.

When winter arrives we will have to buy non-local produce. We have not had the resources this harvest season to preserve, freeze, or dry the amount of produce we'll need for the winter. Unless we plan to eat jam and pickles until June.


So, to sum it up, we are in our early twenties, with a limited budget, in a city, in a tiny kitchen, in the soon-to-be frozen tundra of the northeast, and we are doing this! You can do it too!