Change

I hope that I am never too old to learn new things about myself, even if they are uncomfortable to think about.

Had you asked me, 5 or 6 years ago, if I was actively protecting the environment, I would have assured you that yes, indeed, I was. We gardened, we composted, we didn't litter. No fur, no ivory, no teak or mahogany. When we bought new appliances, we got energy saving ones. In the summer we mostly grilled, so as not to turn on the oven, and in the winter we kept the thermostat turned down. I mean, we were old hippies, with subscriptions to Mother Earth News! Of course we were environmental. We were part of the solution.

Then I was introduced to Colin Beavan's blog, No Impact Man, and from that I found Riot 4 Austerity. I began to realize that we were, indeed, part of the problem. Granted, these blogs represent extreme examples of environmentalism, but they gave me a lot to think about. Things that were uncomfortable. I realized that while I was environmental in theory, laziness and ignorance were keeping me from practice. Once I realized I was faking it, I was able to change things so we were making a real difference. I realigned my activism with my core values.

This morning I read a post at The Green Phone Booth that caused me to think about those core values regarding environmentalism The author, known as the Green Raven, ends her post by saying "How about you? How much has "religious" thinking—be it God-centered or non-theistic ethical thought—inspired you to feel responsible for the earth and its inhabitants? Does your spiritual practice reinforce your commitments? How much has it motivated you to act"

Raven's post reminded me of a couple of books that were fundamental in helping me crystallize a plan about how I wanted to live on this earth. Both are cookbooks, commissioned by the Mennonite Central Committee.

Years ago, probably 25 or more, I bought a cookbook from a food coop where we chopped. It was called More With Less, and focused on frugal living and whole foods. My copy is battered and worn- I have used it a lot. I bought copies to give to at least two of my sisters.

Even the rabbit enjoyed the cookbook, as evidenced by the missing corners. When we moved here to Central Pennsylvania, I was amused to find contributed recipes from women with familiar names- we live in the midst of a large Plain community and many of the recipes came from towns close by.






More With Less was a good cookbook, but not life changing. However, the sister publications Extending the Table and Simply in Season ARE life changing books. The recipes are good, but for me, the most important part are the comments from recipe contributors. Read for pleasure, these glimpses into other lives illuminate and inform.


For example, on page 166 of Simply In Season, under a recipe for Vegetable Pizza Bites, you find this:
"A crop of healthy children. For us as CSA farmers, having direct contact with our customers is incredibly meaningful and rewarding. We learn so to know many of their favorite vegetables and often have specific people in mind when we are planting or tending a crop.
"It's a pleasant surprise to find that many people, especially those with young children, will spend hours at the farm when they come to pick up their produce. They'll sit in the shade, swing on the rope swing and pick basil until their fingers are pungent.
"From year to year we get to see the children of our returning customers grow up and we have a sense of privilege in knowing that our vegetables are helping their bodies grow strong and healthy. This feeling is especially keen as we watch expectant mothers select their vegetables and know that we are contributing to the health of their growing babies."
Jon and Beth Weaver-Kreider, Goldfinch Farm CSA, York, PA


I was wary at first about Extending The Table- I don't have much use for missionaries. In my mind, missionaries are always dressed in clothing inappropriate to the climate, frowning and insisting that the poor pagans need to adopt modern Western ways. I was so humbled by the stories and descriptions included in this book- it was so respectful of the people and their lives. On page 94, I read this "Mbodangaaku, the tradition of the Wodaabe, is the way we hold hands with one another. This is the way we feel attached to each other.

"Mbodangaaku is the only wealth of the Wodaabe. It is their true wealth. When we go to the villages of the sedantary people, we are hungry and thirsty because no one gives us anything without money. But when we travel in the bush, wherever there is a Wodaabe camp, we are at home.

"When someone comes to your camp, it is because of the tradition of Mbodangaaku that you welcome him. You take a mat for him to the west of your camp. You take him water to drink. You light a fire for him even if it is not cold. You take him food.

"Even if you yourself do not like your guest, when his foot comes to your camp, you go to welcome him as if he were your God. The proverb says "Your guest is your God!" Bodaado man of the nomadic Wodaabe tribe of Niger.

As much as that subscription to Mother Earth News, these cookbooks affected the way I see and interact with the world. This time, instead of buying copies for my sisters, I bought them for my children and their families. I hope they find as much benefit as I did.

A Local Dinner for Mother's Day

Allium

Sunday was the jewel of the weekend- beautiful weather, pleasant activities and a yummy, 90% local dinner. The highpoint of the day, of course, was the phone call from my sons, who were spending the weekend together in St. Louis, attending something called Beer Fest. I'm told there was a lovely Blueberry beer served.

Here in PA there was no Beerfest. Instead we took the dog for a walk on our local Rails to Trails. Juniper was excited to be out in the woods, Chuck and I were excited to see a Baltimore Oriole. We checked on the progress of the wild black raspberry and wineberry bushes along the verge, with June in mind. I noticed how much wild garlic mustard was growing alongside the path as well. It was idyllic.

Later, we drove over the mountain through the orchards to visit a friend's farm. Such a peaceful spot, just a few miles outside of Gettysburg. We walked along the edge of her orchard to get a view of the pond; her horses frisked around in the pasture, keeping en eye on Juniper from a distance, just as she kept her eyes on them. It was so quiet there. I think of our area as rural, but the traffic noise from the interstate a mile or so away creates a constant, almost subliminal, drone.

She tells me that while they have been feeding the beef cattle on grain, next year they will make the change to grass finishing. She says they will raise two grass finished steer; I'm hoping it won't be much more trouble to make it three. I don't know yet if I will go to meet him...

And then back home for a local dinner- grilled pork steak, roasted asparagus, salad and for dessert, a rhubarb custard. Everything was local except the olive oil to lubricate the asparagus and the Girl Scout cookies used for the crust of the rhubarb custard.

It was a good day.

The Lost Posts and a bunch of other stuff

I have written some amazing cogent, coherent, down-right excellent posts for this blog. You have never read them. Written in my head, as I drive to and from work, by the time I got to the computer, they were gone like the memory of a dream.

Recently, I did this with a post that tied together an article I read in Mother Jones Magazine, something I heard while listening to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and something else about marketing to children. Believe me, it was superlative. I was so impressed. Of course, now it's vanished, completely gone. So I will write this post- not the same, but what the heck.

My sisters and I used to play that game, where you listed the people you would most like to have dinner with, and why. Somehow, most of my supper guests were women authors- Alice Walker, Rita Mae Brown, Elizabeth Moon, Sharon McCrumb, Mercedes Lackey . And Barbara Kingsolver. Right now, my top number one choice for dinner would be Barbara Kingsolver.

I've read all of her books, and love them all. In addition, Barbara is leading the life I dream of living- pastoral, bucolic, and it looks like her kids still are young enough to live at home. She has a book coming out in May, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, in which she chronicles a year of local eating.

In the article Seeing Red, in the May-June issue of Mother Jones Magazine, Kingsolver talks about the politics of food and agriculture through the medium of tomatoes. She talks about the growing disconnect between eaters and the producers of the food we eat. She says "When we walked, as a nation, away from the land, our knowledge of food production fell away from us like dirt in a laundry soap commercial."

I've seen that disconnect. When we first moved here to rural PA, and were looking for a house, we rode around the county with the real estate woman. Ant one point she said "I wish the farmers would sell this land fronting the roads so we could develop it. They don't need it anyway." I was sitting in the front seat, and I felt my husband's hand on my shoulder- apparently I was about to fly out of the car in indignation. I remember thinking "Who on earth does she think is going to feed her if the farmers sell the land for new houses?" Sadly, more people here think like the real estate woman than like me, and new houses pop up like mushrooms. Mushrooms, by the way, are among nature's clean-up crew- feasting on the dead and rotting.

Kingsolver goes on to quote Wendell Berry saying "Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." And she gives an example of that disconnect through the lens of tomatoes packaged under the name Appalachian Harvest, and marketed to supermarket chains in Virginia, North Carolina and Virginia.

In this example, she tells how collection of approximately 37 farmers in Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee, working with a nonprofit group called Appalachian Sustainable Development jumped through all the hoops involved in selling produce to chain supermarkets; organic certification, "appropriate" packaging, training. Things were looking good, until midsummer 2005, when they were ready to reap what they had sown, turning the red tomatoes into greenbacks, grocery store buyers backed out. Cheaper organic tomatoes, trucked in from California, went on the grocery store shelves instead of the locally grown. The farmers took a loss, the surplus locally grown tomatoes were donated to the poor, and the supermarkets made money.

Kingsolver says that 81 cents out of every food dollar we spend goes to processors, marketers, transporters, with the remaining 19 cents going to farmers. Corporate farms take most of that, she says, adding "We complain about the high price of organic meats and vegetables that might actually send back more than two dimes per buck to the humans putting seeds in the ground, harvesting, attending livestock births, standing in the fields at dawn."

According to the Alabama Farmers Federation, Americans spend about 10.7 percent of their deisposable income on food, compared to the 14.9 percent Australians spend, and the 51 percent spent in India. Like cheap gasoline, we demand cheap food, without thinking of the hidden costs. Perhaps not even realizing there are hidden costs.

Next week Chuck and I are going to be participating in the Penny-wise Eat Local Challenge. This challenge seeks to provide an answer to the complaint that eating local is too expensive for most people.

During this week, we will be eating as much as possible from a "foodshed" defined by a 100 mile radius of our home in South Central Pennsylvania, reporting on the cost of the food. We will be using a budget of $144.00 for the week, with 2 people in our family. We are still under frost here, so much of what we will be eating will come from the things I canned, froze or dehydrated last year. Somethings simply are not grown locally- grain crops come to mind. For those, I have decided I will buy them from locally owned businesses rather than chain grocery stores.

I've always been a big advocate of Voting With My Dollar, or as I read on some website recently, Voting With My Fork. For so many reasons, keeping a supply of fresh, local food available to Americans is very important to me, from food safety issues, to emergency preparedness issues, to simple health reasons. If we continue to demand the cheap food regardless of hidden costs, we may wake up one morning to find we have no local food available. Let me urge you to vote with your dollar, or your fork, as well.

And, if any of you ladies mentioned above would like to drop by for dinner, I usually eat around 7.

Carnivore?

Tomorrow we are getting a lamb. And that is something about which I have mixed feelings.

This morning, when the sun came up, this lamb was out in the field, thinking sheepy thoughts, looking for edibles in the snow. By now, dinner time, it is no longer alive, and on Saturday, it will be in my freezer as chops, roasts and ribs. That is an awesome realization, that this lamb is no longer alive simply because I like to eat lamb chops.

All of my sisters are vegetarians, and they chant “No food with a face.” I understand why they chose that path, and was, in fact, a vegetarian for several years. Pregnant with my first child, however, inexplicable cravings for Sonic’s chili cheese coneys brought an abrupt end to that, and since then I have been a carnivore. And besides, as I have pointed out to my sisters, if everyone was a vegetarian, then cows and pigs would become extinct.

But I feel that eating meat carries an enormous responsibility. I have to understand that I am responsible for the death of this animal. And equally, I am responsible for the life of the animal, as well.

Recently I read an article that voiced my feelings about this exactly. Why I Farm, by Bryan Welch, was published in the February/March issue of Mother Earth News, p. 78. In it he says “People often ask ‘How can you eat your own animals?’ Sometimes it’s a sincere question, meant to explore the emotions associated with raising your own meat. But often it’s more of an accusation, as in ‘How can you be so callous?’ So in response I might ask ‘How can you be so cruel as to eat animals without knowing them? Without knowing how they lived? Without making sure they were treated kindly and with respect?’”

A paragraph later, he says “I don’t mean to suggest that everyone should raise their own meat. But it’s perverse, isn’t it, that many people in our society seem to consider it more civilized to eat animals they don’t know? Meanwhile, industrial agriculture treats meat animals as nothing more than cogs in the machine, without regard for their happiness or basic well being.

“There’s a Buddhist wisdom in the stockman’s cool compassion. The best of them seem to understand that our own lives on this Earth are as irrefutably temporary as the lives of the animals, and that we should provide as much simple comfort and dignity to our fellow creatures as we can. After all, aren’t simple comfort and dignity among the most important things we wish for ourselves and our children?”

When I read this article, I wanted to shout “Yeah! What he said.” If I am going to eat an animal, I have to respect its life. And yet, I don’t raise my own meat. Despite living within walking distance of working farms, the covenant for my subdivision rules out farm animals. Since that is the case, I take another approach.

I’ve always been a great proponent of “voting with my dollar.” Shopping and the purchases I make are political statements for me, and the money I spend stands behind my beliefs. To that end, as much as possible, we purchase meat that has been raised locally. Sometimes we buy at the local 4H auction, other times we buy from local farmers who share our philosophy. Our lamb will be coming from an Amishman who milks the sheep and makes artisan cheese; our pork is raised by his son. We are currently eating beef raised by a local high school boy, who used the money he got from the auction to buy a car. We have the option of visiting the animals, of seeing them living out their lives before they end up on our plates. We are voting against factory farming.

The consequences of this have been greater than I expected, and in fact changed more than the way we eat at home. Eating out has become very different. We eat next to no fast food, we eat very little meat in restaurants, and in fact, we don’t eat out often. Lunchmeats are a rarity, purchased perhaps 4 times a year. Meal planning takes more, well, planning than it did when we could pick up a bucket of KFC and head home for dinner. And the meat we purchase tends to be more expensive than supermarket meat, so we eat less.

I am not perfect at this- we do still eat meat out occasionally; I still crave an occasional chili-cheese coney or Supersonic burger. I’m not at all sure that, given the opportunity, I am in a place where I could raise my own meat. But I feel that I am eating consciously, responsibly, and very well.

Pigs waiting to be shown at the 4H auction

Hello

I've been planning the garden this week. The seed catalogs arrived before the Solstice, and I've flipped through them, lusting after enough varieties to plant a garden the size of Toledo. Now I have to winnow them down, picking what I can fit into approximately 99 square feet of raised beds.

We have created good soil here, composting and occasionally buying bags of soil and composted manure. Some years we only manage to plant tomatoes and peppers, other years we branch out and put in more. Last year we had an excellent patch of potatoes, beautiful garlic, tons of swiss chard, about a million leeks, way too many tomatoes and peppers, and 2 varieties of patty pan squash that succumbed to squash bugs after a pretty good run. We also had 2 varieties of salad turnips and some terrific volunteer sunflowers that fed the birds.

Our failures- the eggplant never did much of anything, and the okra produced approximately 4 pods. The zucchini was overwhelmed by the patty pan squash. I was too soft hearted and allowed the volunteer tomatoes to take over an area, and I didn't thin the leeks so my harvest, while numerous, were all small. Next year we'll do better.

But here's the thing- between our garden and our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscription, we were able to eat local vegetables from early May until, well, I pulled carrots out of the garden on Sunday. I have a freezer full of (pencil thin!) leeks waiting to be made into soup, as well as escarole, spinach, chard and kale. My grocery bill dropped dramatically, and we ate well.

So- what will go in the garden next year? I discovered Collards and Kale this fall, and have reserved a place for them. I'd like to try some black-eyed peas and lentils; it's hard to get local dried beans. I've got my eye on a variety of soybeans called Jet Black, and some purple and some red carrots. After visiting a Bosnian grocery store last week and purchasing a pepper relish called Ajvar (pronounced EYE var), I have decided to put in a bunch of sweet non-bell peppers so I can make my own. And of course, tomatoes, hot peppers and squash.