The Wind Is At Our Backs

From what I have already posted on this blog you will understand that sustainable food is very important to me. I also think it is directly related to the experience of middle class Americans attempting to subsist in today’s economy. With that in mind I am reposting Zachery Adam Cohen’s (with his permission) recent call to action.

The Wind Is At Our Backs

The community of people brought together by their commitment and passion for local sustainable food has matured in ways I could not have imagined in the past months. I think it has surprised all of us frankly. On Twitter, on Facebook, on FriendFeed, on LinkedIn. In countless phone conversations and late night emails. This community is so alive, it is so real. And with each passing day we gain strength.

New voices have emerged, new partnerships have been forged, new friendships made. Many differences have already been overcome.

And it’s time to take it to the next level.

Which is why today I am calling on the local sustainable food movement to join me in starting something new. It’s an idea I, along with others, have been kicking around for a few weeks. I want to start a new website that will conglomerate all of our voices, all of our stories and all of the wonderful content that people all over this country have been unearthing. Essays, Podcasts, Video, Recipes, Narratives, Photos, Live Forums…Farmers, chefs, entrepreneurs, foodies, home cooks, moms, dads, children. All of us.

The only way for us to break through to the next level is to join together. Banding together will make our sum far greater than our individual parts.

I’ll tell you what I am willing to do.

I am willing to walk away from the Farm to Table blog, and I am willing to take my amazing audience with me. I am willing to start from scratch in order to make a difference.

Why? Why would I walk away from a personal project that has given me a purpose in life far beyond anything I could have imagined? Why would I walk away from something successful and which holds the potential for personal profit?

Because I want to write and publish alongside the people who make up this community. The people who have shown me that together we can effect the changes we all know this country needs to make. I want my name alongside all of you. I want to be your partner.

So what am I asking for?

I am asking this community to consider the greater good, something I know that each and everyone of us is capable of. We know that improving American food will improve the lives of countless people, of countless communities. It will make us healthier as a society, it will heal the land, it will enrich the brave farmers among us, it will create new jobs, and it will put us on a path to prosperity for the next hundred years. The best way for us to bring about this better society is to band together. We need to create a tribe.

The funny thing is, we already are a tribe. We already are a disparate band of brothers and sisters out in the scary wilderness. Well I want us to take that next big step together and create something lasting, something that will be remembered as a starting point.

I am asking this community to contributing their amazing content to this new site. We want to take all of our amazing readers and wrap them up in one big package. This is how we’re going to evolve, by working together, by using the tools of social media to break through into the mainstream. I want every non-professional blogger and content creator to join me in this project. We’ll create a brand new website where all of us will have the same rights and permissions as any others. It will be completely transparent. Because that is a hallmark of the social world in which we live. We will all manage it. We will all share in its successes.

At the end of the day, we are the ones that are going to take this movement into the mainstream. And we are so close. WE ARE THE AVANT GARDE.

The local sustainable food world is a people powered bottom up community.

And there is an incalculable source of power in this kind of community. I want to unleash it. We all want to unleash it.

So will you join me? Will you put aside your own personal projects to join something different, something new, something experimental? Will you put aside your ego in order to do the heavy lifting that our country needs?

I AM! If you are willing to join me, and the others who have already expressed their support, let us know! It’s a tall order. It’s a risk. But I think we all know that without risks, there are no rewards.

The only question is what do we call the darned thing?

Frog in the Pot

I had an epiphany last weekend. Being the frog in the pot isn’t always a bad thing. My wife asked if we would have time Sunday to make the trip to the nearest Costco thirty five miles away. When you live in a small Northern California city and want to shop at any large non-specialty store other than Wal-Mart you have to drive. She doesn’t normally ask to make that drive on weekends; she makes it on weekdays to teach at a local college. That may be why we hadn’t been to Costco in two or more years.

Costco is such a unique experience; stacks of products, furniture, clothing, produce and box upon box of room-filling plasma televisions. Carts loaded to the point of spilling, abandoned in the aisles by shoppers pulled mid-stride to the scent of mini pizzas baking in a toaster oven. Traffic rules apply at rush hour, but no such etiquette exists at Costco on a Sunday afternoon. All these things ran through my mind as our schedule was planned, that and any trip to Costco is guaranteed to cost five to six hundred dollars. When last we made the trip to Costco we knew the economy of size. If buying one in a conventional market was sufficient, there we could buy a case, store it in our pantry and save. If I dig deep I’m sure I’d still find some Kirkland products frozen in the permafrost of our freezer surrounded unidentifiable bones. We were convinced we would save money when we brought that product home. It had taken us years to develop that philosophy, but economy of volume was important, and our freezer and pantry bulged under the excess. Our home had become a warehouse.

Well Costco isn’t so bad, and it hasn’t changed much. You enter to discover stacks of HD and plasma televisions, you battle your way past jewelry, cell phones, clothing, and cookware, you break free of the strolling shoppers to find yourself entering the liquor dept. For a moment economy of volume takes over, if I buy all those I can save. Beef and Pork come in multifamily packs, farmed Salmon and Chilean Sea Bass are packaged for family dinners of twenty. Produce comes in wonderful packages that dare you to try and finish it before it expires. Bottled water, beer and soft drinks seem to come in the multi-case package. Freezers are loaded with boxes of Pot Stickers large enough to supply an Asian restaurant for a week. Frozen waffles and pancakes are packaged to supply the next Kiwanis pancake breakfast, with maple syrup is in bottles a small person can’t lift. We used to buy it all. Nearing the front end checkout my wife realized we had just walked past nearly every aisle. It wasn’t rebellion, or dislike for the products, we just didn’t need any of it.

Somewhere in the past two or so years we stopped being consumers of industrially produced foods. I wouldn’t say people who need that volume shouldn’t buy it, restaurants and charitable organizations need easy access to pre packaged foods. As the frog in the pot we hadn’t decided to not buy those things, we just started making them ourselves. It had started simple, we made Kim chi, I had found a recipe and tried making my own. Over the following years we began making and growing nearly anything we desired. Changing to local, organic, and sustainable foods requires a logical progression, you simply commit to the first step by changing one product. Each improvement is a stepping stone to the next. Purchasing local and seasonal tomatoes leads to canning so “you can still taste the sunshine in winter” as my wife says. Peaches, plums, okra, all followed, bread and pasta were made in advance, pesto waited in the freezer for quick meals on busy nights. Suddenly we found nearly anything we wanted to buy we could make. We no longer had to read ingredient lists with every container we opened, we knew what it contained, because we added it. We found ourselves comforted knowing that recalls, preservatives, natural flavors, and food coloring was in our control. We had been the frog in the pot with the first steps being only a sight warming, now the water is like a hot tub and still rising as we progress to partnering with another family to raise our own livestock.

Today our home is a warehouse, the pantry has been doubled in size and still bulges. The freezer’s overflow is moved to my parents’ house for storage in theirs. We have become convinced by the economy of size, but now it’s our economy to control. Today we build our meals around seasonal availability and wait eagerly for the end of tomato season so we can move on to the greens and root vegetables. We never recognized how dramatically changed our lives had become in the past few years until that stroll through Costco. Lifestyle changes need not be difficult, they just need to be the slow building of heat as the pot comes to a boil. You just need to light the burner. It was a slow process; we were goaded by the need to know what we were eating and have choice over the quality of the food and chemicals we consumed.

Can anyone and everyone take control of their food supply? Sure just climb into the pot and start warming the water.

p.s. we were going to Costco to buy some plushy bath towels. Haven’t figured how to grow those yet…

How Fat is Fat?

It’s no wonder that in my home we grow and preserve our own produce while helping supply as many others as possible. I’ve been a label reader for years and the more time I spend reading even the simplest product label the more dedicated I become to the philosophy of food independence.

I picked up three gallons of organic 1% milk at the store today, not a difficult task but for some reason I read the nutritional information which is always a mistake; it follows that I automatically move to the 2% and then homogenized labels. So let’s start there. Homogenized milk is often referred to by consumers as “whole” milk which is a misnomer. Whole milk would contain the full fat content and cream as it came from the cow, yet to the average consumer the product on the shelf is as whole as milk gets. Most consumers have no need to understand that milk, like cream, comes out of the same cow and even out of the same teat, and then is separated with a centrifuge.

What stopped me on the food label was total fat content. 1% milk contains 2.5g of fat per serving, and this is good. Humans need milk fats to properly metabolize some essential amino acids and fat-soluble vitamins. So why did that stop me; because I started wondering what it was 1% of. Is it 1% of what homogenized milk contains? No. Homogenized milk contains 8g of fat, and as poor as my math suddenly seemed to be that would have caused 1% to contain .08g per serving. Is my milk 1% the fat content of the whole, raw, warm, milk that comes out of the cow? That would require the cow to produce 4000g (8.8lbs) of fat/cream per gallon of milk. I can’t be certain but I think any dairy would be totally ecstatic with that because that’s about the weight of a gallon of milk.

After some consideration I came to realize that 1% is a reference similar to an ingredient list; fat content is 1% of total weight per serving. Marketing is nothing if not confusing. Homogenized milk is 3.2% and it seems only reasonable that we should be able to expect consistent presentation of information. Wouldn’t it seem appropriate to have milks labeled the same on the face of the container displaying 1% low fat, 2% reduced fat, 3.2% full fat, rather than calling it whole milk?

The mixed standards of consumer information, education and marketing have long allowed for information and claims that can become confusing to the uninformed or unconcerned consumer. They have been presented with a collection of information that can be useful to a consumer educated in nutrition yet, provides little easily accessible information to consumers without technical expertise. We expect consumers to choose appropriate amounts of calories while encouraging the misinterpretation of dietary information due to package claims. Consumers are often left with only the most available information at hand for guidance, the popular diet book of the moment. Clear, direct and honest information should be the first priority of our food system and regulators. It seems reasonable that front label information should conform to the same standards as the nutritional facts labeling.

My obsession with labels and ingredient lists has been a strong part of our family’s transition to home canning and the purchasing of local products. We now know what is contained in our food; we have control and the option to choose any extraneous materials that are added to them. It has become one of the most comforting parts of our lifestyle, the freedom to choose.

American Dream

I can’t identify the American Dream any longer. I grew up understanding that the American dream was fulfilled through hard work and perseverance. If we followed those precepts we would be able to gain home ownership, security and satisfaction. This may have been an archaic idea even as I reached adulthood in the 1970s. Already we were accepting appearance of substance and possession as ownership. We were beginning to believe ease of lifestyle was the American Dream. By 1984 the popular water cooler-conversation program was “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”. The Idol lifestyle may have remained out of the reach of 99% of the population but we vicariously indulged weekly, and began dreaming of ways to emulate it. We found ourselves able to purchase houses at flexible interest rates, considering them investments not homes. We began sacrificing ownership for mere possession. Our fathers often worked for one company or in one profession all their lives, but with the explosion of the Silicon Valley industries employment changed throughout the economy. We now could change jobs every six months without seeming to be a risk to lenders, or future employers.

We began focusing on our recreation, not as vacations and weekends but the constant activity of our lives. We filled mornings with trips to the club, and our evenings with games. We sacrificed family activities for the enthusiasm of action. We pressed our children into a life of constant activity; Little League, Soccer, Swimming, Music lessons, and if they were lucky they still had time for an ever increasing load of homework. We had made a choice; life would be fast and exciting, like the rich and famous.

I agree with Zachery Cohen: all social movements are driven from the bottom up. The changes we accepted in our lives were driven from the bottom up; we demanded them. For most of us to appear affluent we needed to buy cheap. We bought cheap products, cheap food, all purchased with cheap money and cheap credit. The consumer desire had changed from quality and value to low price at any cost. Food industries were more than happy to deliver; they began seeking out new labor markets, new manufacturing methods and new ingredients to use in our food, anything to reduce cost, price and the time we invested in food preparation. We allowed the bulk of our food dollars to be transferred from those who produced our food to those who provided us with a greater value time. Food processors now received the bulk of food dollars we spent, because we were happy to eat by only applying the heat.

For the last thirty to forty years we’ve had an exciting time of excess consumption. We’ve been able to live the life of the rich and famous, to the detriment of our manufacturing sector and the quality of our food. Now in a time of recession more people than ever are reevaluating the lifestyle and food system we have invested in. Do we care about homeownership, security, and satisfaction, are we satisfied with cheap materials and goods, or do we want back a bit of our heritage in the American Dream as our ancestors understood it? Are we willing to live once again a less lavish lifestyle at a slower more sustainable pace so that we can rebuild our dreams? Will we begin to rebuild our dreams with a social movement from the bottom up?

Preparing food is a uniquely human action; it demands one thing of us that we have avoided our time and attention. We have carelessly delegated our food preparation to others until we began to believe the ads of Stouffer’s and think we were making a home cooked meal when we opened a box and heated it in the oven or microwave. Food preparation was the first thing we sacrificed as we sought the appearance of wealth, and it’s the first thing we must restore. It’s time we sit down and begin to explore the kitchen again. We need to regain the connection to our Grandparents and Great Grandparents. Taking products from raw materials to meal isn’t the realm of chefs and trained cooks; it’s the magic that was performed by our ancestors, cooking on wood-fired stoves. Food preparation is within reach of every adult and child. It’s time we look back to the tradition of experimentation and teaching, passing skills and explorations on to others. The American Dream can once again be an attainable goal, through our persevering work and taking ownership of our food. It must be the base of a social movement; moving toward a sustainable society focused on the attainability of the American Dream for all people.

To make this dream a reality, let’s all plan our meals: prepare a few days’ menus based on what is in season, what is in our area, what is the outside temperature (do I really want to turn on that oven?). If we start with a whole chicken, even if you didn’t raise it yourself, roast it on the BBQ, maybe grill some zucchini and onions that you just harvested today or are in season at the grocery store, slice tomatoes from the garden and sprinkle with basil (also today’s harvest), add some feta and a baguette of sourdough and voila! A family of four will probably only eat half of that chicken so tomorrow we can pack chicken salad sandwiches in our lunches or use the chicken for tostadas for dinner. The chicken carcass can be boiled with herbs, reduced a bit and the broth can be saved in the freezer for winter-time soups like minestrone. Do our children or younger co-workers know how to do this? Or will they spend as much for a bucket of the colonel’s best and call it a meal? As the elder-wiser ones, we are duty bound to share what we know. We should be encouraging and mentoring; we’ll all be the better for it.

testing new apps

This is my test of Live writer and IE8. I may be totally unhappy

Grammy got run over...

Grammy got run over by McDonald’s… on her way from the market the other day. Okay bad Christmas songs come to mind on 100º plus days, but the premise is true. Grammy had been out picking up a few groceries with our five year-old grandson and was heading home when he spoke up and asked for lunch at McD’s. We eat fast food so seldom that I’m surprised he even thought to ask, but more important: he knew a Happy Meal would come with an Ice Age toy. That’s it. Grammy was crushed under McDonald’s marketing machine. A week passes and they’re together again for the day, and what happens, Grammy can we go to Burger King? Guess what? Burger King’s kids’ meals have Transformers in them! That truck missed. She was a little quicker on her feet that day. Besides Burger King’s marketing is much less effective because we don’t even know what they call their meals. But Wait, There’s More! I find out that when they go down the cereal aisle at the store he usually asks for Gummy Bear cereal. When asked how he knows about it he jumps right in and says “I saw it on TV”. But Wait There’s More! That healthy, natural, enriched, preserved, everlasting shelf life, weevil- scaring, customer-demanded cereal is on the bottom shelf, right next to every other preserved and colored box of technological advancement. In fact anything that resembles food is on the top shelf. It hurts my neck trying to get the bifocals pointed high enough to read the labels.
But Wait Their’s More! I’m sure it’s easier to market for five year-olds than adults; in fact I am positive it’s easier. They market child-targeted products at the less expensive times. If you want to reach the truly mature knowledgeable adults you go for high dollar slots, like the Super Bowl. Average price for a thirty second slot in 2009’s Super Bowl? 2.7 million dollars. This is for the one event during the year that we don’t TiVo so we can skip the commercials. This is the one we TiVo so we can skip the game and watch the ads. It isn’t limited to companies doing product sales to consumers. It includes corporations selling appearance to a tertiary market. After this year’s game I once again knew BASF had nothing to sell me but they made the things I purchased better. General Electric knows how to provide us with a smart energy grid so we can move into the future. Were these companies selling me a product or showing that they were changing, in an attempt to change my attitude about life?

Every discussion about food, food production, and our industrial food manufacturing system brings up the tsunami of obesity we are facing in this country and rapidly sharing with the world. And in every discussion some jump to the defense of our exciting food system. It’s consumer choice, It’s people without self-control or judgment, and the best is Its consumer demand; we only make what customers want. Consumers are demanding a toy in their Happy Meal? Customers are demanding that their children be bombarded with ads for colored, sweetened, modernized food products that can’t even be called what they emulate? I doubt that we as consumers have much of a chance against multimillion dollar advertising budgets designed to manipulate our wants, needs, and desires. Just as I doubt that many consumers buying bottled water care if BASF made the bottle “better”. The next time I buy an electric grid I am sure I’ll consider General Electrics switches, breakers, and meters. Marketing systems have worked long and hard to direct our spending, our attitudes and our desires, and they have done a great job. We can’t remember any longer that we once thought McD’s burgers were bland slabs of semi- edible stomach-filling product. Now they’re the standard of quality burger that I’m sure comes also from “happy cows”. (Aren’t slogans great? I love that one.)
Personal choice is part of the problem with our food system as it is today; I know this because I have been told by so many food manufactures they only deliver what we ask for. My problem is that I think that some of what we believe is only a result of great propaganda. I’m still waiting for that fresh Brussels sprout commercial during the Super Bowl so that I can replay it after the boring game.

So I have a proposition. No, sorry, propositions are a ridiculous California problem. I have a proposal for all those who wish to blame our problems on consumer demand, on a consumer-driven food system which is driven from the bottom up: If you own any common stock in any food company that wastes its dollars, no, make that your dollars on advertising to people who already demand their product, contact the board of directors and insist your dividend be increased and that they stop wasting company profits on advertising to people who demand their product. It just makes business sense.

Post script: As I completed this post today I discovered that Rob Smart had just posted a much more detailed and clinical post on http://www.everytable.wordpress.com involving the effect of marketing on children, and I invite you to check that post. However, agree, or disagree, please come back and let me know what you think with your comments.

Sustainable foods

The body of our food system has a mutated gene. It places volume before safety, and consistency before quality. It demands we trust it, and requires that we as consumers be responsible for contaminants. It’s time we all become viral and start fixing the body we call a food system. (Bear with me. I’ll try to make this come together before we’re done.)
According to the Human Genome Project “gene therapy is a technique for correcting defective genes. A normal gene may be inserted into … the genome to replace a nonfunctional gene”; a mutant allele is replaced with a functional one.
My wife and I didn’t begin adult life convinced that organic sustainable agriculture was important. We didn’t begin raising our children on exclusively home made foods. We didn’t begin that short empty nest period taking control of our food supply. We began our life together eating fast food and cooking “home made” meals out of the box. Our children began their growth afraid that when Mom cooked the food it wouldn’t be the same (read processed) as it was supposed to be. (It wasn’t like “the Colonel’s” chicken.) We haven’t been able to put a date on when the change began but we’ve seen the changes in our family. Our adult children have done interesting things, like no longer drinking sodas and paying close attention to nutritional values in their foods. These aren’t changes we preached, they’re changes they saw and questions they asked.
As exciting as seeing our kids change has been, it has been far more exciting to watch friends and co-workers change. It starts with questions about our bag lunches at work. “What is that? Don’t you eat anything normal? Your beef is grass fed and organic? This is homemade bread? Your garden is how big? Can I have a bite?”
Our friends are starting to think that control of their own food supply is important. We’ve been the virus. Our enthusiasm and conviction is the new genetic material replacing the mutant allele which told them everything they bought was good, safe and healthy. Our friends are now planting their own gardens. Others are realizing the advantages of grass fed, pastured livestock. One friend that has five unused acres is considering raising livestock. The change hasn’t been instant; it has been the process of a growing infection. They’ve heard our discussions, they’ve asked questions, they’ve sought out more information and they've begun to change. We were the virus. We infected them by inserting corrected DNA into their genome. Now they function like us as a virus, spreading the corrected DNA to new cells.
We aren’t changing the system instantly, but as the infection and genetic correction spreads we will create a tipping point where the body must change: a point where the food system will focus not just on convenience and price, but also on quality, sustainability, variety and openness. We shall be the virus creating change in a sick mutated body. We are actively trying to bring about the change. We keep setting the example for those around us while they are spreading it further. Change will come as we work to alter the roots of the system because we can change the growth of the plant with our actions. We will continue to be the virus delivering corrected genes to a damaged food system