Rants « boston localvores

Posts Tagged: Rants

Corn / Rants / Tomatoes — 3 Comments
6
Jul 10

Why is there corn now?

We spent the holiday weekend camping with some pals in the western part of the state. It was a swell time. Last week, as we were exchanging frantic emails with each other to make sure we collectively had our gear and, most importantly our food organized, one of our friends suggested someone grab corn at a farmers’ market, for grilling purposes.

We local eaters smugly replied: it’s a little early for corn.

But as we local eaters drove out Route 2 to Route 112 and on the winding roads to our rural destination, we passed several farms and their farmstands offering, yup, corn!

Now, corn, at least as I conceive of it, is a treat reserved for high summer. I have very fond memories of living in the Pioneer Valley, pedaling through the rocking corn fields of Hadley, Mass. in the stiff and slow heat of August. *August.* I mean, I can’t be sure it was August, but it definitely was not the Fourth of July.

But this scenario is, I think — I am going to say it — may be, a casualty of the popularity of the local foods movement. What I mean to say is, local farmers are growing stuff earlier than they used to (and perhaps earlier than they should be) to accommodate a consumer demand for Those Most Precious and Adored local crops. That is what the “local foods movement” is asking them to do.

A couple weeks back we were having a conversation with a farmer at the Cambridgeport market. (She is young and awesome and well-known in the community.) We got to talking about how, thanks to the swell of local eaters and the demand for a steady, nearly year-round supply of local food, what used to feel like a healthy lull in winter now feels like not much of a break at all. She’s got to work harder, in part because the bureaucracy is bigger, in part because her customer base has grown and also, in part, because she’s got to get stuff to seed … earlier than ever before.

Hmph.

Remember the first or second week of the Copley Square market and how a bunch of different growers had hothouse or greenhouse tomatoes? There’s another treat that, at least as I conceive of it, is reserved for high summer. I don’t even think that last year I saw them so early.

Now obviously there are some incentives for the local farmer if local customers will pay a premium for a local tomato on June 1. And hey, it was great for us to have corn on the cob over a fire this July 4th. Maybe there’s nothing at all to complain about here, but perhaps there is something curious worth noting. But a lot of do this local food thing with integrity and a commitment to eating things when we’re supposed to eat them.

Also, this is a position we take often: The movement has got to be about feeding people. I mean everybody, including the people who think they are too poor (and actually are) to shop at farmers markets and the farmer working her butt off all year to actually enable a transformation of our food system. To make that possible — that = sustainability = I am wondering do we need tomatoes in June?

Updates — 6 Comments
1
Jun 10

Growing Triscuits and ire

A couple of weeks ago, we had a pretty fantastic debate over on Facebook about this community garden project at a church in Somerville. We’ve been thinking a lot about our own anti-corporate position, our own objection to the world’s second-largest food corporation co-sponsoring a local initiative to reconnect communities to fresh veggies and all of the interesting and passionate things our localvore community on the FB had to say about this. (As a side note, I’ve been reading very fascinating stuff about what it means to be a corporation, and the history of such things, in Thom Hartmann’s Unequal Protection. Highly recommend.)

Anyway, I was recently invited to write a column for OtherWords, an op-ed syndicate that is affiliated with my day job. I chose to write about this topic. So, um, here it is.

Community Gardens Don’t Excuse What Kraft Did to American Food
Big Food won’t be absolved by tossing a fraction of its fortunes toward urban plots.

by Kristi Ceccarossi
A few weeks ago, a churchyard near my city apartment was converted into a garden. A group of local volunteers hammered together raised beds, trucked in new soil, and planted berries, tomatoes and greens with the hope of growing fresh food for a local soup kitchen.

It doesn’t get much warmer and fuzzier than that, but I’m pretty repulsed by it.

As someone who advocates for a more localized food system where we can all have a stronger connection to what we’re eating and to the backstory of how it was grown, you’d think I’d support this kind of project. And I would, were it not for the fact that it was built in partnership with Triscuit. Yes, the cracker company, which is owned by Kraft Foods, Inc., the world’s second-largest food corporation.

This spring, to mark what is the start of the growing season for most of us, the marketing machine at Triscuit is breaking ground on more than 50 gardens like this in dozens of cities around the country. According to spokeswoman Allison Goldstein, that’s because Triscuit believes in the simple joys of growing your own food in a local garden, “no matter where you live.” Apparently, Triscuit also believes in emblazoning gardens with its logo and highlighting the joy it yields through organized press events.

It’s hard to find something bad to say about any garden, and even harder to fault one that will feed hungry people. But it’s just as difficult to reconcile what could and should be a genuine community initiative with sponsorship from a corporation with about $50 billion in annual sales.

For one thing, there’s the irony. Food giants like Kraft are largely to blame for the woeful transformation of our food system over the last 50 years, and the lost connection my grandparents’ generation had to what they ate and where it came from. By churning out Cheez Whiz, Cool Whip, Oreos and other highly processed foods, which require immense farms, Kraft and its ilk have allowed us to forget how to cook every day with fresh produce and bury the memory of what it means to grow our own food.

But now, through a confluence of contamination scares, Michael Pollan books, and the obesity crisis, thousands of Americans are questioning whether we should have forgotten how to cook just because we could heat up frozen dinners. We’re taking our money out of the supermarket chains and back to local farmers and independent shops, like our grandparents used to do, and we’re supporting a food system that’s better for the planet, our economy and our health in the process. Clearly Kraft has taken note.

Perhaps Kraft officials think Big Food can be absolved by tossing a fraction of its fortunes towards urban plots that will, realistically, feed very few people. Maybe they hope that we’ll forget the dozens of food recalls it’s been subjected to over the last two years alone, and see this gesture as a step in the right direction–that Kraft is on our side.

I don’t care how many seed packets Kraft stuffs into its Original and Reduced-Fat Triscuit boxes. I don’t trust companies of this scale when they tell me they care about gardening or fresh food or my neighborhood, because everything that preserves their bottom line tells me the opposite.

But more importantly, I don’t need the mammoth corporation that manufactures Velveeta to help me clear a bit of earth and prepare it for cultivation. None of us do. If we want to build community, change our food system or plant a garden, we don’t have to look beyond our neighborhood and its collective resources to do that. And that’s true, no matter where you live.

Meat — 10 Comments
10
Feb 10

Eating animals

Regularly, with some relish, and for the better part of the last two years — as long as I’ve been dedicated, in earnest, to eating only meat of known origin — I’ve interrogated every vegetarian and vegan that has crossed my path. My line of questioning has been consistent. Roughly as follows:

1. Why did you stop eating meat?
2. What good do you think it is doing?
3. Don’t you think you could do more good by eating meat exclusively from local, sustainable farms?

I am hereby acknowledging that this has been a simplistic and self-righteous act, and I am sorry to all of the veggievores I’ve misunderstood over the years. I still stand by the belief that it is a far far better thing to eat meat, if you choose to eat it at all, only from small and traceable producers. The animals on these farms are living a safer, happier, healthier and (often) longer life and if you are ever in doubt, you could make a daytrip and lay eyes on them yourself.

But, …well… they’re still being raised to die. And although I’m fairly certain the circumstances under which they face death are much less terrifying than their factory-farmed brethren, there is something terrible and universal about the ultimate reckoning. I am suddenly having some trouble making sense of “life as commodity” with my trusty “local = sustainable always” position.

Incidentally, we organized this event with the Jamaica Plain Forum to try to get a bunch of people in a room together to talk through some of these issues, with a couple of experts in the field guiding the discussion. This seems more useful than me watching and re-watching those chicken dinner videos with Jamie Oliver on YouTube (see above). Though they are quite instructive.

I have no plans to stop eating meat. If I were to object on ethical grounds, I think I’d have to throw out all animal products — and a world without cheese is not one I want to live in. It seems a bit defensive to say, but Darry and I have reduced the amount of meat we consume to a responsible once-a-week, mostly the remains of a large ground beef order we got from Stillman’s around Christmas (16 lbs or so). I know this is not practical for a lot of people, but I guess I think they should do it anyway.

Maybe I should have been interrogating local meat-lovers all this time. Because there seems to a sort of worship of obscure and decadent carnivorous fare that excuses one set of ethical problems (the value of life) as long as another (the value of local) is covered.

Updates — No Comments
10
Dec 09

Taking back what Big Food stole from us

If you are here you probably already know this narrative: How, about 50 years ago, a confluence of women’s lib, the rise of food factories and masterful marketing of “convenience” killed our kitchens. Or, anyway, our necessary and personal relationships with them.

You probably are familiar with this other narrative too: The one where people realize that when we traded our kitchen bondage for a box of Hot Pockets and a roll of cookie dough, we got the shit end of the deal: We’ve accelerated the destruction of the environment, our health, our family farms and our economy. And all that time saved not cooking went to working more, watching the Food Network and getting fat.

We like that second narrative. And for us it is sort of the fundamental objective of the local foods movement: To give people the tools to look at the greater context of fake food and reclaim the agency (also happy bowels, happy farmers, happy soil, happier animals, etc) that is implicit in eating Real Food.

This is why we are really pleased to celebrate this community cookbook, which originated on a Boston-based message board, and is a shining example of that kind of attitude. Cook Food Every Day contributors are local artists, musicians, writers and home cooks and the book features their own recipes and their artwork. And all the proceeds are going to the Greater Boston Food Bank. (Get one for a suggested donations of $15-20.)

Take a look at their site and see what’s in the book. Also, consider going to PA’s Lounge in Somerville next Wednesday to meet the people involved, get a copy, eat a little and have a drink or three.

Fish — 2 Comments
15
Oct 08

Tuna fisheries a “disgrace,” Boston Localvores go fishless

Actually, we hardly eat any fish at all. It’s not that we don’t like fish - I have fish and chips and greasy newsprint in my DNA, and Kristi has been known to Doyle a Meal (a phrase we picked up in Ireland from a tiny, delicious chip shop there). It’s that the seas are possibly an even bigger disaster than the land at this point, and most every major species — especially predator species — are fished to collapse. I’m reading about this stuff in Bottom Feeder, an immensely depressing book. But today the BBC reports that major tuna fishing nations are actually backing calls for a closure of the Mediterranean tuna fishery.

It’s such a disgrace that JAPAN - the biggest consumer of tuna in the entire world, yes-you-heard-me-right JAPAN - voted in favor of closing the fishery. Read the article here.

Cod, by the way, that old friend that we here in New England like to delude ourselves is always local, is in rough, sad shape. The greatest fisheries, off of Newfoundland and Iceland, are close to eliminated, and our hunger for fishsticks has altered the ecosystem by basically removing one of the oceans great predators, the swimming garbage truck that is cod. Now, smaller fish are becoming the top of the food chain. Good work, school cafeterias and ketchup-smeared fourth graders.

There are three other things that stick in my craw about eating fish. Briefly, you cannot guarantee much about a fish (i.e. talk to the farmer), including A). where the fish is coming from, if it’s been legally caught or even if it’s the species it purports to be. B). The trendy practice of alerting folks that fish are “line caught” is a bit of a misnomer. These lines are miles long and have tens of thousands of hooks. They are only slightly better than the ocean trawlers that roam the seas with giants nets, decimating underwater landscapes and catching everything in its path, much of which will be thrown overboard, dead, because it’s not the species the fisherman on that boat are looking for.

And C). This should stick in every craw. I’m sure that, like me, many of you have met those who are ethical “vegetarians” but who eat fish. I suppose that, like me, these pescetarians have never seen a big fish like a tuna or cod caught. It’s a revelation; a brutal, man vs. fish fight to death. These tuna, for example swim, no joke, like 70 miles per hour. They don’t give up the ghost without a battle….

Several people have inquired about whether we’ll be adding a fish page to our site: they wanna know where they can get the goods and feel OK about eating them. Well, we wanna know too. It’s just that so far our efforts have been delayed by me getting a 9 to 5 and Kristi trying to write a thesis. (More on that later; it has to do with all of you, blog reader types.) But do stay tuned, OR, better yet, DO volunteer to help us realize this research.

Updates — 6 Comments
10
Aug 08

The trouble with this local-foods thing: Filthy lucre

“Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences” —Susan B Anthony

I read this the other day and it got me to thinking about what’s been happening here, at Boston Localvore HQ, and out in the greater world of the local food frenzy.

We don’t have a mission statement, because those are for real organizations, not just couples posing as real organizations, but if we did it might say something about how the glories and tastes and good health side effects of eating local food should — must — be accessible to all income levels, or else this whole shift in the food system ain’t gonna fly. So it is with heavy hearts full of complicated feelings that we post announcements here for local foods events that cost between $80 and $150 per person.

On the other hand, as I was politely reminded by the organizer of one such event when I asked the other day, farms and growers and people involved in this whole shebang should be able to make money. Isn’t that part of the message here? That the real cost of food is high, that people in this country pay a ridiculously small percentage of their incomes on eating, that, if we’re to staunch the agricultural bleeding and the dying of so many small farms, it needs to pay?

This is from the email I exchanged with Diana at Green Meadows Farm in Hamilton which is hosting a Localvore Lobsterbake this month. Tickets are $80 each:

“We believe farming should be an actual business model and not a non-profit seeking constant donations, because our customers are willing to pay for the quality of produce and believe in how we run our business. We do not believe farms should be subsidized by anyone but their customers, and that people should learn the real cost and value of small scale organically grown vegetables and animals.”

And it’s not as if some nice fresh, crisp lettuce costs $80 a head. There is still plenty of food that can be had on low incomes. I do understand that. But there is a perception problem out there, and I’m not sure that any other “organizations” are standing up, a la the radical and unstoppable Ms. B Anthony, and saying, you know what, let’s wipe some elitism off this and make it even more viable by making it even more universal. So here we are, wiping elitism (I know, weird analogy) off local foods.

We may reassess how to make this happen. Maybe it’s less event driven work and more getting-local-foods-into-local-grocery-stores-in-poorer-neighborhoods kind of work. Not sure yet. Any words of wisdom would be very welcome.

On a different note, this goat/Sistine Chapel piece of art posted above is was taken today at Red Fire Farm in Granby. The goat is Bridgette. The hand of God is Kristi’s. Red Fire is our CSA farm, and members are encouraged to make trips for pick-your-own fruits and veggies. We succeeded in our goal of making ourselves sick on cherry tomatoes, and would recommend a trip to your own CSA (or any farm whose produce you’ve been enjoying this season).

Updates — No Comments
4
Jul 08

Localvores don’t get E. coli! and etc…

It’s crap like this that makes me even happier to stand in the blistering sun at a farmer’s market and spend $9/lb for ground beef from Stillman’s, a rockstar operation in Hardwick, Mass. Yes, we dropped about $23 for a localvore July 4 feast of mini-burgers, but the wallet wincing is abated when you hear about dozens of people getting sick — AGAIN — because they bought the bright pink stuff from a Grocery Store.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nebraska Beef Ltd expanded its voluntary recall of material used in making ground beef to 5.3 million lbs, 10 times the initial recall, because it may contain disease-causing bacteria, the U.S. government said on Friday.

E.coli, glorious E.coli!

OTHER STUFF: Thanks very much to Adam for lending us his beer wisdom. You too can reap the benefits of it by observing our expanded beer page.

And as of July 1, Darry and I have embarked on a new experiment. We’re keeping a food log. Every night, listing all the stuff we ate that day…and all that we spent on it. The idea is we’re trying to get a real set of numbers: the actual cost of sourcing food as locally possible, year round. We’re pretty sure this data will one day be summoned for Congressional hearings, or a court case, whenever Monsanto figures out a way to sue local, organic food proponents. But until then, we’ll make it available here, on this blog, when we calculate something meaningful.

Meals — 2 Comments
27
Jun 08

Preaching to the would-be converts

Very happily, Wednesdays have become a junket of local food pickups, which invariably punctuate with a feast, best enjoyed with others on the wobbly table we’ve got on our patio. Usually our friends showup when it’s time to eat, but yesterday, for the first time, we took someone — our friend Rachael — along for the pre-feast tour.

The fun for us nerds begins Wednesdays in Inman Square, in an apartment house on Tremont St, where we get our Just Dairy order. Rachael watched me punch in the code on the combo lock, duck way down through the doorway, and into the basement where there’s a fridge filled with glass jars of raw milk and cartons of eggs. I scanned the goods for our order. She asked, more than once, who lives in the house. But I couldn’t tell her. I don’t know. “Sketchy” was the response.

Barely a moment later, we were back in the car and headed for the parking lot outside Harvest Co-op in Central Sq to fetch our CSA share. Per usual, there was a line of very hungry looking types checking in, gathering the week’s veggies with gusto and grace. Rachael wanted to know how all of these people , who looked roughly our age and basically like us, found out about the business of buying a CSA at all. This a good question, I think, and any thoughts on it are very welcome.

We got home and here’s what we ate: 2 hard boiled eggs each (from Just Dairy), a salad with carrots (CSA share) and goat cheese (Vermont Butter and Cheese Co), sauteed zucchini, summer squash and garlic scapes (CSA). And some leftover bread from Hi-Rise.

Rachael is not a self-described localvore. She is, however, an awesomely curious and open soul, and she is actively trying to eat well, and better all the time. And here is the point of all of this so far directionless chatter about how we spent last evening: We talk a lot about this local eating thing with Rachael, and she asks great questions about it that make us clarify and articulate (in our own heads) why we do this stuff and what it means. But it’s not actually that easy to transfer the core of this compulsion to another person who doesn’t precisely have it herself.

There was a time, not long ago, when I gave an ex a load of crap for shopping at Whole Foods because I thought it was elitest. She politely told me not eating poison had nothing to do with class. And so this is to say, I wasn’t always the convert I am today. But trying to identify when and how exactly I went from the chipped-shoulder type who bought the cheapest ground beef in a Grocery Store to save a few bucks to what I guess I am today is tough. I’m sure it was a series of moments (like the ex rightly putting me in my place) that got me here, but I wonder about the trajectory other eager local eaters followed. Anyone? anyone anyone.

All in the name of getting Rachael (and everyone else who sits down to eat with us on our wobbly table) fully on board…

Updates — 1 Comment
17
Jun 08

The other end of the revolution

A few weeks ago, the NYTimes published a loving, lengthy tribute to Richard Reynolds. He’s a youngish British fellow who leads a group of so-called guerrilla gardeners around London. Under the cloak of night, they plant flowers and lush annuals on public property (think medians, sidewalks or dodgy, unkempt parks) that have gone untended and gotten ugly. This blog documents their fine work.

Of course we think this is very cool, because it sort of speaks to the spirit with which we practice (and dream that others will practice) local eating. For his part, Reynolds says he mostly does the illegal planting because he likes things to look pretty, but the gang he’s got working with him seem to be in on it because of the revolutionary element it provokes: Imagine! people reclaiming the land owned by the government, and cultivating it — for love of the land, or for aesthetics or, perhaps, even for FOOD.

There’s a long and storied history behind this reclaiming-the-land kind of protest; The best tale, according to us, is rooted in the UK, just like Mr Reynolds and friends.

Picture it: Surrey, 1649. Food prices are at an all-time high. Feudal law is out of control. England’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few. A group of people (aka The Diggers) got sick of it and started planting veggies on public land. Hundreds of them showed up. They believed that if they, the country’s working stiffs, were able to grow their own gardens, raise their own livestock and keep self-supporting neighborhoods, there would be no way the richies could jack up the price of food (and everything else) and keep them down. Why? Because the working stiffs wouldn’t be working for them anymore. They’d be working for themselves.

The Diggers cultivated plots in various parts of England, but what do you know, within a few years, the government and the richies saw to it that these gardens and farms were burned down, literally. And The Diggers who kept on digging were thrown in jail. “The World Turned Upside Down,” a song by Billy Bragg, captures this bit of history beautifully. Listen to it and you will surely have your own revolution brewing momentarily. I recommend it on an iPod in the back of a crowded redline train. [nerd, yes]

Certainly we are not opposed to a late night visit to the Rose Kennedy Greenway with some stakes and cherry tomato plants. But so far we have thought of this localvore business as another version of that same kind of activity — without the risk of arrest. See, if hundreds and then thousands and then millions of us stop buying electric orange Kraft cheese and petro-chemically treated produce and factory farm raised beef from the Grocery Store, and instead give our money to kick-ass farmers and co-ops and the fancy shoppes that carry local goods, eventually those Poisoned Food Producers and those Grocery Stores won’t have anyone supporting them — incidentally, the big oil companies that work in tandem with them won’t either.

And we, the working stiffs, us good eaters, will have a huge stake in what kind of food is available to us, how much it costs, and probably also what we pay at the pump.

Updates — 2 Comments
16
Jun 08

Improper props

Thank you, Improper Bostonian, for delivering us your current issue which includes three lovely pieces on the local foods movement and precisely none of the smug cynicism we are accustomed to when too-cool- for-school publications tackle this topic.

For one more week, you can a find copy of the issue in your neighborhood stack of free glossies and see for yourself: a story about the in-house mozzarella they make at Scampo on Charles Street; a loving tribute to Will Gilson and his herb garden, featured at Garden at the Cellar; and a bit about two chefs with very healthy direct farm sales relationships: Tony Maws from Craigie St Bistro and Tim Weichmann from T.W. Foods.

You will also find this nugget:

Massachusetts is a leader in providing consumers with fresh produce without the help of a middleman. The state ranks first nationwide in direct sales per farm, with the average farm selling $24,900 worth of goods at markets and stands, according to the New England Agricultural Statistics and the U.S. Census of Agriculture 2002. (There’s more about this sort of thing here.)

Two things stand out here: Massachusetts is No. 1. And that the average farm sells $24,900 worth of goods. That’s pretty great, because it seems to indicate those loyal to the Commonwealth do lots of shopping at farmers’ markets and farm stands. But $24,900? I’m not sure the last time any business tried to stay afloat on $24,900 (or less), but I can report from personal experience, it is sometimes a little scary, particularly when the student loan bills start arriving in triplicate batches. Which is to say, we should shop at farmers’ markets and farm stands even more.

ALSO, for all of the joy it brought us that such a fine and shiny magazine as Improper Bostonian would write about a subject so near and dear, it is a bit frustrating to see, one more time, local food fun is interpreted exclusively as a phenomenon reserved and served directly to, well, you know, the very rich. Craigie St, T.W. Foods, Scampo are fine establishments, but we can’t frequent them. The Garden, admittedly, is a bit closer to our price range and when we can swing it, we iron our Nice Outfits and go. But still.

IMPORTANT POINT that we cannot emphasize enough — It is actually quite affordable to source foodstuffs locally: you don’t need to go to a fancypants restaurant to observe how it is done. You can simply find a shoppe on our website nearest you, or a co-op, or a farmers’ market and buy the raw materials at a much more reasonable rate and make the magic yourself.

Even if you are dressed in your most ill-fitted cut-off shorts, after a long day of working in someone’s yard, with manure and other assorted earthy things under your fingernails, vendors at the Central Sq farmers’ market (where we’ll be today, Monday) will sell you a pound of beef, a baguette and some mesclun mix. You can go home to eat a very respectable and delicious meal for under $10.