Around the World in 100 Miles

Friday, September 7, 2012

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Hey folks! Just wanted to give a reminder I will be giving a FREE workshop on cooking with herbs at the Roger Williams Park Community Garden just outside the Botanical Center in Providence, September 8th at 10 a.m. There will also be a recipe swap, so bring copies of your favorite fall recipes to share! I will have some food samples and hand-outs as well. This is also part of a larger garden tour organized by URI Master Gardeners.

In other news, the cookbook is DONE aside from tweaking the very thorough index. We did not meet our Kickstarter goal and I need to buy my ex a used car as part of our divorce settlement, so publication will be delayed about a year. I hope it's worth the wait! In the meantime, I'll keep posting recipes here.

Autumn olives and peaches are in season. If T-Bird, our very developed chicken, starts crowing, I will need to make him "delicious". I've decided the best way to honor his presence is to prepare him in the dish below. (I have made it with a whole chicken, but it will take longer to cook and be fattier with the skin.) I now collect dried plant materials for creature sculptures and could certainly add a beak and feet. I told my daughter she could have most of the feathers. We've inched our way into discussing the possibility of eating T-Bird. We want eggs from our "pets", but if we must eat one, let us use as much as we can, with a meal, paté, and art. (Perhaps a Martha Stewart "sled" with the bones?) Maybe eliminating the male of the brood is what I need right now, processing the divorce. T-Bird will be honored for all that he was.

Low Sodium/Gluten-Free Option

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Chicken and Peaches

Taste of Tunisia

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2 tbs. oil, divided

2 cups diced red onion

1/2 cup sliced almonds

1 tsp. white pepper

1 tsp. cinnamon

2 lbs. boneless, skinless chicken thighs, fat trimmed

3 cups reduced fat, low sodium (gluten-free) chicken broth

2 organic peaches, cut into wedges then halved*

2 tbs. honey

1 pinch saffron (optional)

couscous (not gluten-free) or rice

This recipe is based on the sweet tangine dishes of North Africa, but has less sugar and fat than traditional recipes. By using boneless chicken thighs instead of whole chicken, it also cooks faster and costs less to prepare. In a covered skillet or Dutch oven, heat 1 tbs. of oil on medium-high. Cook onions, nuts, and spices, stirring frequently, about three minutes. Remove mixture and set aside. Add another tbs. of oil and brown thighs, about 2 minutes per side. Add stock and onion mixture and bring to a boil. Reduce heat slightly, cover, and poach gently 20 minutes. Uncover and add peaches, honey, and saffron, crushing spice with your fingers and sprinkling on top. Cook another 10-15 minutes, allowing liquid to thicken, until chicken flakes apart easily with a fork and meat thermometer reads 165ºF. Serve over couscous or use rice for gluten-free option.

* In other seasons, use peaches canned from summer pickings, using a tested recipe such as “Honey Peaches” from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

Saturday, September 8th

OPEN GARDEN DAY TOUR and

HARVEST PARTY

OPEN GARDEN DAY TOUR

10:00 - 1:00 PM

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Cornucopia

My lovely friend Holly shared her corn harvest with us when we celebrated the harvest this past weekend. I made ratatouille (again) and herb bread. Other friends shared their bounty. We found a wandering dog, then its owner. There was a nice fire where we shared what sacred space means to us. Then there was a lot of leftover corn...

Here is my revised corn chowder recipe. I skipped the cranberry beans since i didn't grow any this year and didn't want to wait to soak dried ones overnight. I ended up freezing most of it in a bag laid over a cutting board in the freezer until it was solid. Here's a gluten-free clam cake recipe as well. Enjoy!

Gluten-Free/Vegetarian Option

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Corn & Bean Chowder

Taste of New England

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Prep: 15 minutes Cook: 35 minutes Makes 10 servings

2 tbs. butter or olive oil

1 onion, diced

1 tbs. whole wheat flour or corn starch

2 cups (gluten-free) chicken or vegetable broth

2 cups low-fat milk

4 potatoes, washed and diced with skins on

1 cup carrots, cut into half-moons

1 cup fresh cranberry beans (soak dried beans overnight)

3 cups fresh-cooked or frozen corn

10 sliced of bacon, cooked well and drained (optional)

3 tbs. chopped fresh parsley or cilantro

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. cayenne

1 tsp. cumin

1 tbs. brown sugar

1 cup half-and-half or light cream

Melt butter or heat oil over medium heat in large stock pot. Sauté onions five minutes. Stir in flour, cooking two minutes. Slowly pour in broth and milk. Add potatoes and carrots and bring to boil. Reduce heat to simmer and cook 15 minutes, or until vegetables are tender. Meanwhile, bring water to boil in sauce pan. Cook cranberry beans until just soft, about 20-25 minutes. Reserve. Add corn and mix with immersion blender (or run half of mixture through blender and return to stock pot). Crumble in bacon, then stir in drained beans, herbs, spices, sugar, and cream. Serve immediately.

Gluten-Free/Lower Sodium

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Clam Cakes

Taste of Rhode Island

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Prep: 10 minutes Cook: 10-15 minutes Makes 40 cakes

1 egg

1 cup chopped quahog (or clams)

1/4 cup grated carrots

1/2 cup milk

1 1/2 cups corn meal

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper

1 tsp. dried oregano

1 tsp. garlic powder

oil for frying

What would summer be without Rhode Island clam cakes? Rather than a heavy, doughy blob, these cook up light and don’t skimp on the seafood. The carrots add to the sweetness of the seafood. Steam open quahogs, cool in cold water, and chop. Beat egg, then add all other ingredients. Heat about 2” of corn oil in a sauce pan on high.* When oil sizzles when batter is added, drop one tbs. of batter at a time until a single layer of cakes floats on oil. Cook one minute, then remove with slotted spoon to paper towels or designated oil towel.

* I fry cakes in my smallest sauce pan to reduce the amount of oil needed. In my pan, I can cook five cakes at a time. After oil cools, it can be strained and kept in the refrigerator for future use.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Bowdish Lake and Attempting Waste-Free Camping

Set up the new tent. Started a fire. Hot dogs, chips, S'mores. Our giant figures overlapping the pines in front of the Coleman lantern. Shadow puppets. Stories. The story of the chipmunk who stood up to the bear and called in the light to the forest. Talking. Sleeping on an unyielding field. Awake a dawn and another fire.

Three days of camping in the middle of the week. We were the only people in the field. apparently, if you want the sports activities, karaoke, art shack, etc., you need to come on the weekends. But we did have animal encounters...

Chipmunks left my story and scurried in and out of the rocks nearby, the bear claw stripe scars still fresh on their backs. A million dragonflies, in green, gold, and brilliant blue: the true summer Olympians. A hummingbird quick quick over the playground slide. At the small beach we also had to ourselves, some school of small fish that followed us in the water. A heron. Ducks. A mother duck bringing her babies over to us, with one duckling running over my foot. We learned to bring bread to the beach.

Breakfast was oatmeal, cocoa, and coffee. Most of our food involved boiling water. I made a homemade bread, wrapped in foil. Brought peanut butter, nuts, granola, salsa, chips. We burned the oatmeal and cocoa packets, then the boxes. A short walk, and we disposed of the hot dog packaging. We don't buy many convenience foods, but camping while keeping kids happy makes it difficult. Marshmallows only come in plastic bags. I could have made granola bars instead of buy them, but Job Lot had them and my daughter had camp the previous week on her own and needed a daily snack. Couscous was one of the best suggestions we got from a friend, cooked in 5 minutes after adding boiling water. A large bunch of bananas. Homemade apple sauce. Cloth napkins, of course. They do a much better job than paper towels any day. We also foraged, finding wintergreen and white pine to chew on, and high bush blueberries to add to the oatmeal. I couldn't catch any fish. I only tried a net and we foolishly did not bring a knife except the one to slice the bread.

All our food and gear were in reusable shopping bags, which also made it all easier to carry. We had one cooler and reused four gallon water bottles and five small water bottles. Plastic silverware and plates with lips were washed and reused. The plastic containers you get from take-out are perfect to use as a plate or bowl, and then the lid used to save unfinished portions.

We tried out our crank radio. Success! More than two sleeping bags and a pile of blankets would have been more comfortable for five people. We collected pine cones, branches with bark beetle trails resembling Elvin runes, one root that looked like dancing faery legs, interesting rocks, and the wings of a red admiral butterfly found in the woods. We swam several times. I found a blueberry gall. At night, bats. By day, a phoenix rises.

TEN DAYS TO GO!!! KICKSTARTER NEEDS $3723. Donate if you can.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Blueberries!

We are up to $1447 in our Kickstarter to publish our cookbook, with only 15 days to go! PLEASE tell your friends, donate $10, support local food! Oh, look, a doe and two fawns just ran through my yard...I've seen the tops chewed off my hostas, or "deer magnets", which to be honest, I planted as a decoy to my crops if we ever got deer. They are beautiful! O.k., digression over. Link to donate here.

We did our annual blueberry pick at Rocky Point Farm this week. The new owners are very friendly and prices are still low (although higher than last year). We picked 25 pounds, at $1.80 a pound. (Prices drop the more you pick.) We did a little measuring later and determined a pound to be about 3 cups of blueberries. There are 2 cups in a pint, which can run $4-$5 in the supermarket. Do a little math, and we paid $1.19 a pint. Yesterday, I used 6 cups to make blueberry jam with Grand Marnier. Along with the sugar ($3.80), new canning lids (66¢), Certo ($4), Grand Marnier ($5) and organic lemon (99¢), I spent $18.05 (reusing last year's jars) making almost ten half-pints of jam. Can you buy that in the store for $1.81 each? No, no you can't. Now I have plenty for my family and some to give away, not the mention a freezer full of blueberries to use throughout the year. I double-wash the berries, filling a sink with water and carefully scooping them out in layers into a colander, a large bowl, another bowl...to pick out stems and squished ones. Then I clean out the remaining stems from the sink, rinse, and repeat.

I also made blueberry lemon poppy seed muffins at the bequest of my step-son. The only splurge item for that was the poppy seeds, at $5.34 for a spice jar. Here's the recipe (variation with blueberries and lemon poppy seeds at bottom) and another variation on the jam:

Vegetarian/Wild Option*

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Rhubarb Goldberg Machine

Taste of Earth

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1/4 cup butter, melted

2 eggs

1 cup strawberry yogurt*

1/4 cup buttermilk

1 1/2 cup unbleached flour

1/2 cup white sugar

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1 cup rhubarb stalks, sliced 1/4” thick*

1 cup old-fashioned oats

1/4 cup sliced almonds (optional)

This muffin has it all, but bakes light and fluffy. Melt butter. In a small bowl, whisk in eggs, then yogurt and buttermilk. Sift dry ingredients in large bowl. Mix rhubarb, oatmeal, and nuts into dry mix. Stir wet ingredients into dry until just moistened. Fill 12 greased muffin tins. Bake at 400ºF 20-25 minutes.

* Substitute plain or other yogurt flavors depending on fruit selected. Try adding a teaspoon of vanilla or orange extract with autumn olives, blackberries, blueberries, cranberries, or strawberries, peeled apple or pear with cinnamon or ground ginger, or cherry with chocolate chips. Make lemon poppy with 2 tbs. lemon juice, zest from organic lemon, and 1 tsp. poppy seeds.

Vegetarian

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Blueberry Chambord Jam

Taste of France

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6 cups washed and stemmed blueberries

1/2 cup water

2 tbs. lemon juice

zest of one organic lemon*

7 cups sugar

2 pouches liquid pectin (such as Certo)

1/4 cup Chambord black raspberry liqueur (one nip)

New England summers would not be the same without blueberries. This jam is punched up by the French raspberry liqueur and lemon zest. Combine berries, water, lemon juice, and zest in large sauté pan and let sit ten minutes. Add sugar and mix well, until sugar completely dissolves. Bring mixture to boil and boil hard one minute, stirring constantly and skimming off any foam. Remove from heat and stir in pectin and Chambord. Using a measuring cup, pour into sterilized pint jars, leaving 1/2” head-space. Wipe rims if necessary and attach lids securely. Process in pressure canner according to manufacturer’s instructions, for 10 minutes at 10 psi. Makes 9 pints. (Process 8 and keep one in fridge.)

Try these in the winter, or any time:

1. Mix blueberry preserves with ricotta or other soft cheese (such as yogurt cheese, page 180). Use as spread or crêpe filling.

2. Warm preserves and spoon over ice cream.

3. Mix with yogurt.

4. Spread on toast.

5. Serve with pork.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Bastille Day and Basic Rights

Happy Bastille Day, where the French had had enough with the huge discrepancies between rich and poor. (Even recent past President Nicolas Sarkozy was hugely unpopular for his rich-favoring policies.) Back then, Louis XIV set up his palace at Versailles with plenty of room to house the wealthy aristocrats he wanted to keep tabs on. Louis XIV was also the one responsible for the American lawn. Having huge areas of simple grass that had to be babied and watered frequently was a sign of luxury, since the wealthy had no need for land to grow food on (aside from the land they rented to peasants and then taxed and took their produce from on top of that).

Today, the Versailles symbol of wealth lives on in cloverless lawns achieved through chemicals that can contaminate water supplies and landscaping that is sometimes a minimum of non-native shrubs to hide the foundation of a house. This is the American Dream of people who see raised beds as eye-sores and shriek at the sight of chickens. But for what I believe are many more, there are those who's dream is to create food gardens in vacant lots, on roof tops, on the corners of streets. This is a basic right to have access to food of our choosing. This is in the continuing Victory gardens of England, all over France and Germany, and of course, America. Driving around construction to get to the Farmer's Market last week, I saw many such sidewalk gardens. This IS the new norm.

There will always be those who do not want to see where their food comes from, even when you drop it off at their door wrapped in a ribbon. This is the growing revolution. The French stitched secret messages on quilts and hung them over the front rail or passed them from house to house. We do the same, a shovel-full at a time, a shared seedling at a time. More and more, communities are banding together to teach about planting, harvesting, canning, pollination. Check the RWP Community Garden and Southside Community Land Trust pages to learn more. I will be leading a workshop on cooking with herbs and there will be a recipe swap September 8th at 10 a.m. here.

We are still very short of our goal to publish our local foods cook book. Teach a person to garden, and they will have food and community. Teach them to cook it, and they will have more. Please donate at the "cook book" link above if you can. Meanwhile, here's a great (French peasant) way to use those seasonal veggies:

Gluten-Free/Vegan Option

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Ratatouille

Taste of Mediterranean France

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Prep: 10 minutes Cook: 30 minutes Makes 8 servings

4 cups mixed summer squash (crook- and straight-neck,

patty pan or scalloped, zucchini, etc.)*

1 medium Italian eggplant (I love Rotonda Bianca Sfumata

di Rosa, an heirloom variety with few seeds)*

1/2 yellow onion*

5 Roma tomatoes*

4 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced width-wise

1 tbs. double-concentrated tomato paste

2 tbs. olive oil, divided

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

1 tbs. fresh stemmed and finely chopped lemon thyme

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. white pepper

This dish cooks up fast with the aid of a mandoline. Preheat oven to 375ºF. Slice squash, eggplant, onion, and tomatoes 1/4” thin, keeping each vegetable separate. There is no need to salt the eggplant first or even peel it. Cutting the vegetables this way is fast, attractive, and saves on cooking time. In a covered skillet or Dutch oven, heat one tbs. olive oil. Sauté garlic one minute, stirring frequently. Add onions and tomato paste, stirring well. Cook until onions wilt, about five minutes. Add eggplant and tomatoes, cover, and cook 10 minutes, stirring occasionally and adding water if necessary to prevent sticking. Stir in herbs, salt, and pepper. Sprinkle with cheese. Layer with squash and drizzle with another tablespoon of olive oil. Cover and cook at 375ºF 10-15 minutes, until squash are soft. Serve by carefully spooning onto plates to retain layers. Great with pasta or warm crusty bread. Use leftovers in a frittata or on a pizza. Tastes even better reheated.

* Cut flower end from vegetables and hold stem while slicing on mandoline. Mandoline blades are very sharp, so take care to keep fingers clear. Although many models are pricey, a 4-piece set can be found for less than $20. Use safety guard to slice onion on mandoline, or slice by hand.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Fireflies and Fireworks

Now that fireworks are legal in RI (with tent vendors exploding everywhere), we don't have to go far to see them. Last night, we sat on our back lawn and watched the displays west and east as two different neighbors lit up the sky. In our darker yard surrounded by trees the fireflies raced back and forth. Was it the warm summer night, a confusion or curiosity of sparks? We were captured and even the mosquitoes kept their peace.

Now I long to spread independence from factory foods and farms and publish my cookbook. It has over 100 recipes inspired by many ethnic cuisines, all using local New England ingredients. Even if you're not in the NE area, most regions can grow what we do, so someone in France, Germany, Australia, even Russia can make a lot of this food from their own local ingredients. This book can only exist with your help! Plant it forward, and send out this link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/475787940/sustainable-cookbook Even if you can only donate $10, if 500 people did that we'd have a 1000 books! As an added incentive, a friend will MATCH everything donated by July 14th (French Independence Day). Below is a sneak-peak at the lay sermon I will be giving about eating locally. If you can, join us at at the First Unitarian Church on Benefit Street in Providence August 19th at 10 a.m. All are welcome!

Ethical Eating & the Interconnected Web of Life:

How Eating Locally Helps Us Build Community and Live Sustainably.

August 19th, 2012

Walking along an urban sidewalk from the bus, I see fast food wrappers, vehicle waste, and weeds. Through research and training, I see that weed is chicory, that one lamb’s quarters. Hanging over the bridge atop the stinking stream are fox grapes. All these are edible were it not for the pollution they’re mired in. The plants speak to me as I walk past. The trash does not, except to speak for those who have not made the connection between what they eat, themselves, and the world.

Waiting for my order of hash browns from Dunkin Donuts, I watched them remove a box from the freezer, cut open a plastic bag, remove a smaller portioned bag (apparently because employees cannot count to ten) and open it onto a throw-away tray, place the tray in the oven with gloved hands, remove the tray and place the food in a bag using wax paper, place the bag into a bag with a paper napkin, and hand it to me. Eleven articles were thrown away for a small order of hash browns.

At work, I started a “Waste-Free Lunch” program. Food scraps get composted. We have monthly raffles where students who come in with lunches that create no trash get tickets toward recycled art supplies, bug collection kits, bird feeders, and the like. An example of a waste-free lunch would be a sandwich in a reusable container, a reusable water bottle, cloth napkins, reusable utensils, and whole fruit. Not by coincidence, these lunches are usually healthier than the single serving snack bags, the Lunchables and Capri Suns. There are few or no ingredients that are unknown or hard to pronounce. It’s hard to break old habits, but small changes occur. We will continue to do audits and spread the word.

Food choices affect so much more than generating trash. A case in point is eating meat. I rarely eat meat not so much because I am ethically opposed to eating the animals themselves, but I am ethically opposed to supporting industrial farming, where animals are kept in confined areas, fed GMO corn they didn’t evolve to eat, and loaded with antibiotics and other chemicals to off-set illness due to the poor diet and cramped conditions. I’m opposed to giving chickens arsenic to combat intestinal flora and think vegetarian chickens are ridiculous. Let them eat bugs! There’s more protein in a grub than in a food-lot grade ear of corn. While I wouldn’t eat a grub directly if given the choice, I don’t want the majority of my food chain to be based on Monsanto corn. Instead, I will enjoy the rich yellow yolk of free-range eggs, soon from my own back yard, and get my chicken meat from the farm down the street. I will not get a corn-fed burger or salmon or ham while their waste piles up in cesspools rather than composted as organic fertilizer. I will eat less meat and I will pay more for sustainable meat, because if I don’t pay more now, I will pay later in environmental clean-up fees and my health.

One way I am able to support my family so we can eat organic and local food is by growing it at home. In the spring, we have Vietamese-style rolls with our herbs, lettuces, and rhubarb, as well as strawberries in our cereal. Summer is full of harvesting, drying, and canning. The garden bursts with tomatoes, squash, eggplant, and flowers. We get some blueberries and blackberries off our young bushes and hope to see fruit on the trees next year. We pick enough at orchards to have blueberries and peaches year-round and always use up the 60 or more pounds of tomatoes that go into sauce, relish, salsa, and more. If there is extra, as anyone who’s grown zucchini will tell you, we give it away. Smith Hill Center, which I found through ampleharvest.org, has accepted our fresh tomatoes. My students donated their basil plants right here at UU. Family, friends, and neighbors also benefit. Now, the RWP Community Garden I volunteer at has expanded and will donate the harvest from their “teaching plots” to the Open Table of Christ Church. URI has an entire orchard manned by volunteers that donates to RI Food Banks. Together, we really can affect the world, one meal at a time.

We cannot do it alone, however. Bumblebees take their impossible flights, filling the satchels on their legs with pollen from my blueberry and squash flowers. I never noticed the many colors of bees until I started gardening. Now, this microcosmos occupies my eyes. Blue wasps buzzing, ants herding black aphids, pleasing fungus beetles found under logs, the once invisible I now capture on film like I’m photographing faeries. The bees, wasps, and ants pollinate it all. Without them, a third of our food would not exist. When colonies collapse, we are next. Pesticides, genetically modified crops, over-worked hives forced to forage monocultures, weakened immune systems, and lack of habitat across pristine lawns – these are the beds our society has made. Do we now lie in them, or stand up against them?

Pill bugs abound in the litter of leaves, the great recyclers breaking down the detritus of the garden. My daughter collects them to feel their crab legs tickle her hand. We know how helpful worms are with their vermicompost and aeration of the soil. They are as obvious as rain. But who gives a thought to worms as they dose roses with Imidacloprid to kill everything they don’t understand, or add herbicides and over-lime their lawns to prevent a single dandelion from growing, killing the microflora and fauna below and polluting the ground water. (Dandelions and roses are edible as well, both high in vitamin C.) Now think of acres of crops laden with pesticides, grown as monocultures where they are dependent on fertilizer the excess of which descends into the water supply and eventually the ocean, creating huge and expanding “Dead Zones”. Imagine eating something that was cut off from all symbiotic relationships, the very ecosystem developed between other plants and animals, and think if that can be considered a “whole” food. Imagine cutting something off from its own evolution. Do you want that to become a part of you, both in the food sense and the spiritual sense? Imagine a butterfly that no longer flaps its wings, and the ripple effect of that.

The supermarket isolates us further. Each item is arranged by sometimes artificial categories, grown for its shipping qualities over its flavor or nutrition. We don’t often speak with the employees other to ask where something is or how much it costs, never mind where and how it was grown. Then we get home and throw away the packaging, the plastic bag. Changes are made with small but important steps. Step up your shopping by bringing a reusable bag, or ten, mesh bags for produce, and buying food in bulk, with recyclable packaging, or no packaging at all. One small step for man and giants like the plastic bag companies and the Koch brothers (who make many products designed to be thrown away) go down.

We live in a world of negative reinforcement. Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, discusses the reduction of the freedom of the individual in this year’s June 4th & 11th edition of The New Yorker. He describes B.F. Skinner’s research that man is motivated by positive and negative reinforcements. Most of us operate under fear: fear of losing a job, disappointing loved ones or authority figures, of looking bad or different or weird. We avoid change out of fear. Instead of banning Big Gulp soft drinks, shouldn’t we be promoting all-natural fruit smothies? Which really benefits you: not drinking soda or eating healthier? We need to change our way of thinking not to avoid the bad but to seek the good. Burgess writes, “Given the right positive inducements...we shall all become better citizens, submissive to a state that has the good of the community at heart...We need to be conditioned in order to save the environment and the race.” Of course, we must also have a government that promotes positive changes in the community. The amendment to the recent Farm Bill to give subsidies to organic farmers using sustainable practices rather than just King Corn and Queen Soy passed; making it mandatory to label GMO ingredients as such did not.

So much of our choice of food dictates all the choices we make to access it, such as what we buy, where we buy it, what waste we generate from consuming it, what jobs we work to pay for it, and who we vote for to keep everything the same. In the hunter-gatherer society of the !Kung San bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Botwana, they spend about 15 hours a week getting food and the rest of the week resting, embroidering, visiting others, or entertaining (Ryan, p.176). Not a bad-sounding life. Psychologists and Anthropologists Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethà argue that when foods are available in the natural environment, no one can control people’s access to what they eat (p. 176). I would also argue that when healthy foods are available in school cafeterias, convience stores, and local Farmer’s Markets, people will eat it. In “food deserts”, only processed foods are available to the local population, who often have limited access to transportation. One Providence convenience store had a “make-over”, placing healthy foods front and center so they would sell more produce than bagged chips. Two small supermarkets have opened in former Providence food deserts to carry local foods: Urban Greens Food Co-op and the Fertile Underground. Supporting these businesses, either by buying from them or becoming a contributing or sustaining member, helps the community grow as well. Society becomes more egalitarian and leaders arise not from coercion but respect. I didn’t force anyone to accompany me to the Farmer’s Market for their first visit, nor did I coerce them to return on their own. No one is making me teach my friends how to preserve foods. They just asked. When your neighbor is growing zucchini, you will not know scarcity.

How similar are the words “scare” and “scarcity”? Where there is scarcity of resources, misinformation, and fear, we turn against each other. We’ve been conditioned to want every new gadget, the right label on our clothes, the quick and easy solutions to dinner. We let corporations decide things for us, giving them our respect as our leaders without even casting a ballot. We are constantly told we live in the best society in the world, so why change it? But we can make our own choices. When Captain Robert FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle (yes, the one Darwin travelled in) took three natives from the hunter-gatherer community of Tierra del Fuego to England to expose them to “civilization” and western farming practices so they could then act as missionaries to the rest, he returned a year later to find the natives had reverted to their own ways and been happier for it (p. 163-165, 181). Conversely, farmers in India today, talked into Round-Up Ready GMO seed from Monsanto, have lost everything and even resorted to suicide. The slash and burn agriculture too-long prevalent in Rainforests to grow cocoa and coffee is slowly being abandoned for organic, shade-grown farming closer to the way these plants actually grow. We can promote these sustainable practices by buying organic, free-trade coffee and chocolate, now easily available. I know I certainly prefer the taste of Green & Black’s 70% dark over a Hershey’s bar, which contains soy lecithin (a filler), PGPR (made from castor oil), vanillin (derived from petroleum products), and artificial flavor.

This is a war on many fronts, but it need not be stressful. In the garden, I find serenity, a deep connection to the earth. The sun shines bright as a deity, the orbiting moon reflects his light and she pulls the tides. Rain is a blessing, bird song a choir. The earth is my altar, a table set with her bounty. And look, a neighbor I’ve never spoken to is leaning over the fence, asking about the flowers. It’s time we talked.

Citations:

Burgess, Anthony. (2012, June 4 & 11) Life and letters: The clockwork condition. The New Yorker, p 69-76.

Ryan, Christopher and Cacilda Jethà. (2010) Sex at dawn: How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships. New York: Harper Perennial.

Around the World in 100 Miles

Friday, September 7, 2012

Free Workshop Saturday!!!

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Major Changes

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Cornucopia

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Bowdish Lake and Attempting Waste-Free Camping

Friday, July 20, 2012

Blueberries!

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Bastille Day and Basic Rights

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Fireflies and Fireworks

Books from Sacred Fools Press

About Me