At the end…

Well, we’ve come to the end of the official Local Foods Challenge. Finals craziness has begun and we decided that it’s time to become real students and stop being ‘local tards’. I walked into the kitchen a few hours ago and one of my housemates was making quinoa! “Where’d you get that?” I asked. “Oh I brought it from home at the beginning of the semester” she replied. That poor unwanted bag of quinoa sitting in our cabinet for three months was finally being loved.

It’s been quite a ride and I have to say that I’ve really loved the experience. Eating 100% (well, almost) locally for three months truly was not as hard as I thought it was going to be. While I have certainly been enjoying cups of coffee and being able to eat cookies that my friends have made as study treats, being back in the ‘grab and go’ world of sandwiches and granola bars really isn’t as satisfying as I had made myself believe it was. We’re still eating pretty much locally in our house. For instance, Noah and I had some homemade bread with an egg and some brassica greens (delivered to us from our farmer friend from Vermont last weekend) cooked with garlic for dinner, and it was delicious. But I have to say the pint of Ben and Jerry’s for dessert really topped it off.

So, what now? For me, the most important part of this project is the discovery that local food tastes good and eating locally creates meaningful relationships between consumer and producer that are lost in the conventional food system, but eating locally isn’t everything. Local food shouldn’t be a fade, a passing fancy. It should be the way we approach food, naturally. By eating locally, we weren’t trying to make a political statement or “live on the edge” we were creating an ideal food environment for ourselves. We processed, cooked, and ate communally. We picked up our food by traveling to the farms where it was produced. We helped our friends the producers and fed our friends the consumers. What could be better then that? No, I don’t consider myself a “locavore”, I’m just a person trying to eat food that I love with people that I love. Not bad for a semester’s work, I’d say.

Tanksgivin’

When I went to boarding school I remember trying to explain the holiday of Thanksgiving to the roommate of one of my close friends who was Korean, “Well, we all go home and cook a big meal with our families and then eat it and it’s really wonderful.” I remember her responding with a question like “So, you and all of your family get together to eat and this is considered a holiday? What do you do the rest of the time?”

It’s a good question. To my Korean friend, there was nothing more normal than getting together with all of your extended family and eating together. Certainly, for her it is not an event that warrants a national holiday. Is our culture so starved of the practice of communal food preparation and eating that we need to set out a certain day of the year to do so?

I’ve never really understood the history of Thanksgiving. The pilgrims and Indians story is nice, but I’ve never really been able to get into it. But it seems that the simple act of gathering together to eat food that has been prepared with care and love automatically calls for the giving of thanks. I’m not sure that there has been a meal in our house that hasn’t included the vocal appreciation of the cooks, the food, and the gathering itself. It seems so natural, and even though sitting down for a big meal with people I love is a common occurrence in my life I feel lucky to be a part of it every time.

Although not everything I ate for the four Thanksgivings that I attended this year were local, I found that I really could care less. The food that I ate was planned and made by my friends and family to share with others, and that’s what mattered the most. So what if my grandmother’s pea casserole was made with (most likely) frozen peas from California? It’s what she makes every year and it is delicious.

It was fun to make pumpkin pies from the pumpkins my friend grew on his farm, but not because they were “local”, but because I got to go the farm to pick them up and then bring them back after I had made the pie and say to him, “Thank you David for growing pumpkins. Without YOU these pies would not exist.”

A Recovering Vegetarian

So, it’s been relatively uneventful for the last couple weeks here in Local Foods land. Yes, we’ve been eating a bit more cabbage, winter squash, potatoes, and kale than we probably normally would be around this time of year, but we’ve still got fresh asian greens, roasted root vegetables are still delicious and our supply of eggs, milk, cheese, flour and meat is neverending as usual.

Speaking of meat…this semester has been quite has been quite a carnivorous adventure for me and some others in our house. I am what we have dubbed a “recovering vegetarian”. I ate a meat-free diet for nine years with the exceptions of international travel. There are a few people doing the challenge who are recovering from life-long and eleven year vegetarian lifestyles. My reasons for being a vegetarian were purely political, so in the past few years if I had the opportunity to eat meat from farms and farmers that I knew I was definitely all for it. So, before starting this challenge I was prepared to completely shed my vegetarianism knowing that due to their locality, I would be able to account for the way the animals that I was eating were treated and how they were fed during their lives.

It became clear to me very quickly that eating locally almost necessitates eating animal products. Using lard and bacon grease is definitely the cheaper option for cooking oil and pan grease than butter. And although we have meat rather infrequently due to our budgets it’s really great way to bulk up a meal or have for a special treat. In a way, from an agricultural point of view, meat is a more efficient source of protein than cheese or other dairy products. It takes less effort and costs less for the farmer to raise meat animals than it does to raise dairy and produce the necessary value added products. And now that i think about it, organic local meat costs less per pound than high quality farmstead cheeses.

For me it comes down to utilizing our local food community to its highest potential. There are so many high quality animal farms in the area, including our own Hampshire Farm Center, that it seems silly not to take advantage of the good food that is being produced here. Last night Noah cooked up some venison steak from a deer that was killed on his property this summer. This morning some neighbors brought over sausage that they bought from the Hampshire farm, made from pigs that I had helped care for.  A couple of years ago I would not have even considered consuming such products, simply because I had deemed myself a vegetarian. These animals were not treated badly, they were fed well, and killed humanly. In my opinion being a conscientious eater and supporting food producers who value their products and the lives of their animals is more important than rejecting an entire section of agriculture and food production, just because its industrial counterpart is so completely perverted.

Terra Madre whoa.

Hello!

I apologize for hopping off the blog train for a while, but I think that I have a good excuse. I have just returned from a ten day trip to Italy as a student delegate to Terra Madre. Terra Madre is the international Slow Food Movement gathering that happens every two years in Turino, Italy. It is a gathering of over 8,000 people representing world food communities from 153 countries in the world. It was a five day gathering of farmers, chefs, food producers, seed savers, musicians, crafts people, students, and educators from every corner of the globe coming to together to talk about the situation of the world food system and to share their products and practices with each other.

The primary principles of the Slow Food Movement is to promote food and food production that is “good, clean and fair.” I have been interested in the movement for a while, and I am friends with and work for people that have gone to previous Terra Madre events and last spring I jumped at the chance to apply as a youth delegate. The experience of this event is a bit hard to explain, just the simple act of bringing together all of the thousands of people from all over the world to share and talk about food is powerful in itself. The opening ceremony was a parade of flags, a musical performance, and a collection of speeches from a representative of the UN, to the Prince of Wales, to Vandana Shiva, to Sam Levin a 15 year who started a community garden in his highschool in Massachussetts, to Alice Waters, to the Ethiopian director of the Environmental Protection Agency.

I was housed with 600 other youth delegates in the Olympic Village Complex in a small Alpine town on the French border called Bardonecchia. We were bussed to and from Turino everyday on huge charter busses. And I got to stay with young farmers, chefs, students and activists from all over the world. In Turino, everyday there were a set of workshops offered. I went to talks about the biodiversity of potatoes, the current threat to  honey bees world wide, the food crisis and global climate change, and the preservation of traditional raw-milk cheese making. I went to a regional meeting with all the U.S. delegates and went to meetings with other youth delegates to talk about motivating and networking the Youth Food Movement.

People from all over the world were encouraged to bring and sell their traditional crafts and fiber work, and at every corner of this complex of olympic stadiums were musical groups performing their traditional music. The Salone Del Gusto was happening congruently with Terra Madre where hundreds of producers from all over the world (mostly Europe) came to sell their traditional products. I wondered the aisles for hours and was able to tasting southern Italian olive oil, a sample of Belgian chocolate, a glass of Polish meade, a slice of Italian prosciutto, a cup of buffalo milk gelato and a wedge of French blue cheese one after the other. I don’t think I even got to a third of it. Incredible.

So, you may be wondering how this fits in with the Local Foods project. I certainly wasn’t eating locally. However, I was able to meet with and if not communicate with (due to severe language barriers) at least thank the producer of every sample of food I consumed. Terra Madre was a gathering of people committed to the preservation of traditional food and culture. It is the honoring and sharing of this knowledge that is going to save us from the mess of our industrially based food system. I met youth from all over the world who are ready to reclaim our food cultures, to learn from the farmers and producers of the world to bring production back to the people. I met people who are committed to making good food accessible to all people and people who are committed to  making sure that the people who work the land are given the voice and respect that they deserve, not only as hard workers but also as the valuable resource that they are. These are all of the values and messages we are trying to explore and obtain with the Local Foods Challenge.

Terra Madre was an inspiring experience and I hope to continue the momentum that I found there in our own smaller food community.

Okay, I’ll stop here for now, but I hope to learn how to put pictures on this thing for you all. Woooo!

Community Part II

I just finished reading a book called “The Revolution will not be Microwaved” by Sandor Ellix Katz and there was one passage on the issue of diversity within the new local food, food justice and small agricultural movements that really spoke to me.

“Praise of the local, the small, the self-contained can be terrifying to people whose history includes being drummed out of small, local, and homogeneous communities. An expanded bioregionalist vision must include a deep, well-integrated commitment to ethnic diversity and must regard this diversity not simple as a thing to be ‘dealt with’ but as a fundamental feature of the environment that is every bit as important to it as is the diversity of its plant life.”

As a group, we are trying explore the validity of a local foods diet for health and nutritional reasons but also for environmental and political reasons. We have to make sure that our nostalgia for the agrarian culture that once dominated this country does not override the fact that we must include issues of ethnic and cultural diversity and food accessibility. It’s easy for me to get caught up in the tangible act of processing, cooking, and making food and I have to continue to remind myself to consider the broader issues of local foods systems.

Community part I

This is a big one. It is very clear to me that most of us decided to do this challenge because we love the community that making and eating good food creates for us. It gives us a way to not only interact with the local farming community as I have mentioned before, but also a chance to interact with each other. I grew up in household where all responsibility was shared between family members equally. I attended a summer camp for many years where one of the most celebrated philosophies was that “work is love made visible.” I went to a high school where every student had a job to do daily for the community whether it was washing the breakfast dishes, clearing the tables, vacuuming a classroom, or watering the plants in the greenhouse. College can be isolating. Especially at Hampshire where we all here to our own thing, creating our own academic paths and programs, it can be hard to find that common goal or community ideal that I am so familiar with from other parts of my life. For me, the Local Foods Challenge not only to be an experiment in eating and exploration of our region, but also as a medium with which to create community.

This has turned out to be as much as part of the challenge as procuring and preserving enough food for the winter has been. While the people in my house and the participants of the challenge perceive our project as challenging but fun. It seems that the project is intimidating for those outside the realm of our little community. I am positive that I would not know my house mates half as well if we hadn’t been forced to spend hours boiling tomatoes, cutting peaches and grinding cornmeal together. Our common goal of providing ourselves with food has brought us very close. If I ever want to socialize I just have to head down to the kitchen and someone will be there. I love it. But as a group we are faced with the challenge of opening our little community up to everyone else. It’s not easy to have to make all of my food from scratch, be a full time college student and then have to figure out how to create a community space on top of it all.

So, how do we make this project more accessible to those who aren’t doing it everyday? How do we share our love of food with others without being overwhelming? Personally, I need to start getting over my “survival instincts” of saving and preserving food for the winter and start realizing that we really do have plenty not only for ourselves but also to share with others. Clearly, it’s time to start hosting some potlucks.

why does good food take so long?

As my load of school work gets heavier and heavier, the amount of time I have to make food gets less and less. I find myself going to the kitchen in search of food, opening the fridge and looking at all the fresh vegetables, eggs, cheese and milk and shutting the door. I open the freezer and gaze at all the frozen produce, meat and sauces and close the door. Then I look around the counter for some bread and when I can’t find any I wonder back to my room to do more homework. Clearly it’s not that there isn’t any food in our house, in fact there is so much food I’m overwhelmed by it.

I wanted to get a head start on my work this morning so I got up early, did some reading, went to a meeting, and then found some friends to make breakfast with. We decided on bacon from the Hampshire Farm and whole-wheat dutch pancakes with apples. It was absolutely delicious, but by the time we finished making it and eating it was 1pm and the entire time I had a nagging feeling that I should be in front of my computer doing homework.

Mim and I cook dinner for the mod on Sunday nights, and since we’re both pretty weighed down with a lot of homework we decided on something simple; some roasted roots, sauteed veggies with kale and chard, biscuits and steamed edamame. But in order to get it all done for dinner at 7pm  we had to start at 5pm and then we didn’t finish eating until 8.  So, my day devoted to school work ended up being one third work and two thirds food. And today I wasn’t even helping process any of the boxes of broccoli, edamame, or fennel that we got from the Hampshire CSA a couple days ago.

I don’t regret either meal that I made today. I got to spend time with people that I love, making and eating delicious food and that’s how it should be. However, the role that convenience food used to play in my life has left a void when it comes to feeding myself when I have lots of work to do. This experience certainly raises questions about lifestyle. What kind of life have I set up for myself when it’s hard for me to spend a few hours making food without worrying about other work that I feel is more important? Shouldn’t having enough time in my life to make and eat good food be the priority? Should it really be considered a luxury to sit down and enjoy a meal with my friends?

By eating so-called “convenience foods” when we feel that we don’t have the time to cook we’re sacrificing valuable time spent with others processing, making and eating food together. The privilege of being able to sit and enjoy food should not be sacrificed in the name of convenience and efficiency. I got all the work done that I needed to do today and despite my panic I even had time for a little walk. So, I’m learning to live without pre-made sandwiches and snack foods even though some days it can prove to be a bit tough, when all I want is to “grab n’ go”, literally.

The Cheese Dilemma

The most expensive thing that we consume is cheese and it should be. I worked on a sheep cheese farm for half of last summer and let me tell you, making high quality farmstead cheese is not easy. Milking our herd of 60 milking ewes took about 3 1/2 to 4 hours twice a day. We moved their pasture twice a day in order to provide to provide them with the best grazing. On a good cheesemaking day we were able to get a 16% yield of cheese from the milk of 4 consecutive milkings. After the cheese was made it had to be stored and cared for in the cheese caves for months. Each wheel has to be brined and flipped once a day for a week and then once a week for the next couple months. The bacteria growing on the rinds has to be carefully maintained and everything has to be kept extremely clean in order to prevent contamination.

Farmstead cheese should cost a lot. Industrially produced cheese pales in comparison to the quality of farmstead and artisan cheeses. The milk that they use is collected from all over the country from unknown farms, it is then pasteurized and then frozen or powdered. They make huge batches in giant factories that are completely standardized. Colors and flavors are added artificially and aging is simulated in mechanized cheese caves. In the industrial cheese world there is no value in feeding an animal on native pasture to create milk that tastes like the land of a region or cultivating the bacteria that is found natively to produce a unique cheese texture and flavor.

Cheese has become an intense topic of discussion within the house. How do we fit our desire to support farmstead cheesemakers in the area with our college student budgets? We love cheese. I love cheese more than most people (as you can probably tell), but buying small pieces of very expensive cheese communally is adding up. Quickly. Our debate swings around the issue of Cabot cheese. Cabot is a pretty large cheese company from Vermont that the produces mostly cheddar and jack style cheeses. It’s cheap and you can get a lot of it. Cabot is sold at the school store and at the student-run natural food co-op near our house and it’s even available in 5 pound blocks at the dairy farm on Hampshire property. Cabot Creamery is made up of a cooperative of dairy farmers all over Vermont. The cheese is decent and they are helping keep a lot of hard-working ailing dairy farms in business. Buying cheese from Cabot means that we are supporting a very large local and successful local business.

So what’s the problem? Well, we can hope that our money is mostly going back to dairy farmers who are providing the milk but it’s hard to know. And how do we justify buying Cabot over buying from Jeannette Fellows of Chase Hill Farm who sells cheese at the Amherst farmers market every week? Or over cheese from Upingill Farm who provided us with all of our wheat? It’s a tricky balance and we’ve come up with a compromise. Our communal cheese will be large blocks of cheddar from Cabot since we simply can’t afford to spend 20 or more dollars on cheese a week for the group, but anyone is welcome to purchase personal farmstead and artisan cheeses whether for themselves or to share. It may not be the ideal system, but we’ve got to work with what we’ve got. I plan on continuing to purchase farmstead cheeses from around the area when I can not only because I know how much work it is to produce them, but mostly because they just taste so freaking good.

down south

I went home to New Jersey this weekend. We had decided before hand that it’s not really feasible for us to eat locally at home. Most of us live in agricultural areas and our families buy local products, but lugging a sack of flour home and spending 5 hours cooking bread for myself wasn’t exactly my plan for the weekend.

New Jersey is about 250 miles from Hampshire College, which doesn’t seem very far but as a person who is depending on my region for food I noticed a stark contrast between the food that is available to me and the food that is still fresh off the vine just a few states south. I walked into the ice cream store that I work at during the summer where we use lots of seasonal and local ingredients for the ice cream expecting to find the usual fall and winter flavors; pumpkin, apple sea-salt caramel, chocolate bourbon pecan, cinnamon etc. But when I looked into the gelato case and saw nectarine sorbet, heirloom tomato, and pear rosemary I couldn’t believe it, the taste of summer is still there! When I walked into the barn at the vegetable farm I worked at last summer I saw flats and flats of heirloom tomatoes. There was a bounty of sweet peppers and summer squash. It was beautiful!

I had a strange feeling of envy creep over me. Do my friends here really appreciate the bounty that they still have? Okay, it’s not like we’ve been reduced to cabbage and potatoes up here in New England (yet) but the leaves are changing and autumn is most certainly on its way. I wanted to grab as much of the summer bounty I could and run with it. It’s a bizarre survival mentality that I have caught myself reverting to every once in a while. For instance, if there is bread on the kitchen table in our house, even if I’m not hungry I’ll take a slice simply because I know it will be gone by the time I get back from class. A fellow mod-mate and I have called it automatic eating. Even if I don’t want a tomato, I will eat it anyway, because I know in a few weeks there won’t be any fresh ones anymore.

I gazed at the flats of tomatoes in the barn with awe. I filled an entire plastic bag with summer squash to take back to school with me. I went back to the ice cream store for a second helping of nectarine sorbet. I soaked it up. It’s a bit odd to think of places in my life only in terms of food that I can get there, but these days I think that my brain may be turning into food.

Mo’ money, mo’ wheat berries

So, one of the huge questions on everyone’s mind is how much is this really going to cost. We know (although there is some debate about this that I plan to investigate more) that we are saving money in long term environmental and health care costs by eating locally, and our money is (theoretically) going straight back into our local economy. But really, we’re poor college students and we’d like to know if this crazy experiment is going to use up all of  our summer job and work study savings or not. So, we cautiously addressed the topic over dinner on Sunday. Our system is that when one person buys communal food or supplies, they write up how much they spent under their name on a spreadsheet on the fridge. When the paper is full we add up everything and then divide the total by 7 (the number of people in our house). Then those who spent under the average, pool the money that they owe and pay those who spent over the average, so that everyone is even. We’ve been here for a little over three weeks. We’ve bought furniture and a lot of food that we’ve been putting away for winter. We’ve shopped at the farmers market every week and a trip to Atkins (the farm market store across the street) almost every other day for cheese, milk, and eggs. We all waited for the numbers with baited breath. Will it be $30 per week? $40?

Tobin looked up from the calculator and triumphantly announced that our average was $25 per week per person. Whew. That was a relief. Now, that doesn’t count the $600 we paid for both of our CSA shares or the $100 we paid for  the 70 pounds of peppers, or the 500 pounds of wheat berries that we pre-ordered and paid for last semester. It doesn’t count the gallons of milk, the hundreds of tomatoes, and the corn meal, the herbs,  the dozens of eggs, or the dried and frozen veggies and fruits that we’ve gotten for free from our friends, our farms and from our gardens. But that’s the beauty of it. Eating locally means knowing the people who are producing your food and people who produce food are usually more than eager to generously share their products with others. I know I’ve said this before, but it’s all about creating relationships.

Eating locally costs money. But not that much. Certainly not as much as we thought, and our spending will continue to go down as we have to stop stockpiling and start to rely more on our stored foods.