On the daikon radish theme from a few posts back, I wanted to share a good recipe for a pickled daikon radish relish that my friend Pat Whetham of Whetham Organic Farm introduced me to, that I've learned to make from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook by Sally Fallon.
As of late I've been exploring the world of fermented after watching a video of Sandor Katz who wrote The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved and Wild Fermentation, and coincidentally attending a fermentation class at a United Plant Savers 2008 Planting The Future Conference in Oxford, Mi at a charming place called Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center last fall.
This basics on fermentation class was offered by Linda Conroy of Moonwise Herbs, and I took it completely by coincidence, having originally signed up to hear Joyce Wardwell, who couldn't make it at the last minute. When that kind of thing occurs I figure there must be a reason.
Linda was an inspiration and after class she gave us all samples of wonderful tasty things, including piima and sourdough to take home and use to begin our own fermentations.
What fun.
Well, somewhere in that same timeframe, Pat gave her CSA subscribers some little baggies of fermented daikon radish to sample in our shares, and then in one of our discussions of sauerkraut, she mentioned fermentation using whey.
Bingo.
I had whey, from my brand new piima, and was wondering what to do with it!
So herewith I'll share the basic recipe for Pickled Daikon Radish.
Peel and grate one or two daikon radish roots into a sturdy bowl. Add 1 T sea salt and about a quarter of a cup of whey.
Using a wood mallet or potato masher, pound the grated radish until it releases its juices. Pack it all into a wide mouth quart mason jar, pressing it down until the juice rises to cover the radish, and leaving a good inch of headspace.
Cover, and keep at room temperature at least three days to get started fermenting, and then refrigerate. WALLA! Pickled daikon, a good digestive garnish to any meal.
Next, sauerkraut.
Showing posts with label CSA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CSA. Show all posts
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Saturday, January 31, 2009
A little late or a little early
I'm cleaning out some old files, and today I ran across this link (here), that, amazingly is still live, to a little spot by our local ABC news about Pat Whetham's Organic CSA farm. Now it's late to be posting it for last year, but for the coming season it's spot on!
Time to be signing on for a share is coming up in your neighborhood, and here in Genesee County, Michigan last week Pat wrote to her mailing list about the series of organic gardening classes she's offering right there on her farm. She's an expert at organic farming and gardening, having done it for many years and being integrally involved in the Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance (MOFFA). She was even an organic inspector for certifying farms at one time, which looks like a fascinating kind of a job.
Time to be signing on for a share is coming up in your neighborhood, and here in Genesee County, Michigan last week Pat wrote to her mailing list about the series of organic gardening classes she's offering right there on her farm. She's an expert at organic farming and gardening, having done it for many years and being integrally involved in the Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance (MOFFA). She was even an organic inspector for certifying farms at one time, which looks like a fascinating kind of a job.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Planning the veggie garden in the depths of winter
CSA farmer Pat writes today that she is busily reading her seed catalogues and planning this year's vegetable planting. The eternal grounded optimism of people who are connected to the earth is ever so comforting and inspiring to born cynics like me.
"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." - Albert Camus
It is zero degrees Fahrenheit today, but I can feel the real world stirring, thanks to Pat.
The time is now to read the CSA contract, and to mail our downpayment for our half a working share, and although Herb retired this year and the economy, especially in Slow Motion Katrina'd Genesee County, Michigan is looking like the first hill on a roller coaster to many of us, we can't lose sight of the fact that "this too shall pass" and summer will come, and we need to do something to keep our world, from our backyard to the whole nation, on the right path toward sustainability, community, and good health.
Thanks, Pat, For doing what you do.
Here is a good interview with Ken Meter on local economies and sustainability that I hope you'll watch:
"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." - Albert Camus
It is zero degrees Fahrenheit today, but I can feel the real world stirring, thanks to Pat.
The time is now to read the CSA contract, and to mail our downpayment for our half a working share, and although Herb retired this year and the economy, especially in Slow Motion Katrina'd Genesee County, Michigan is looking like the first hill on a roller coaster to many of us, we can't lose sight of the fact that "this too shall pass" and summer will come, and we need to do something to keep our world, from our backyard to the whole nation, on the right path toward sustainability, community, and good health.
Thanks, Pat, For doing what you do.
Here is a good interview with Ken Meter on local economies and sustainability that I hope you'll watch:
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Food for thought
I wish my kids would read this:
Michael Pollan Interview
By Mark Eisen
November 2008 Issue of The Progressive
Michael Pollan has got people talking. His recent books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, have captured the public imagination, setting off countless coffee shop discussions, dinnertime arguments, and oh-so-many blog posts.
Even more impressively, his exploration of modern-day agriculture and the dysfunctional American diet has prompted his readers to look at their own eating habits with a new sense of understanding and often a desire for change.
Pollan has taken Wendell Berry’s memorable phrase “eating is an agricultural act” one step further. “It’s a political act as well,” Pollan advises.
A lot of people agree. The alternative food movement—organic farming, local food systems, sustainable agriculture, and more—is burgeoning today because, one family at a time, consumers are backing away from the global food network. Instead, they patronize farmers’ markets, buy food shares from CSA (community-supported agriculture) farms, and favor grocers who sell local meat and produce.
Pollan’s books are essential reading in this movement. He details the importance of grazing to a sustainable farm’s operation and the problems of corn as the cornerstone of U.S. agribusiness. But most of all he gracefully chronicles his own journey of discovery in a food world where, amidst $32 billion in advertising, baleful health consequences are carefully obscured.
Pollan’s topics include a thorough demolition of “nutritionism,” the reigning health ideology that offers dizzying and ever-changing advice on polyunsaturated this and low-fat that, often in the cause of selling highly processed food products.
A good diet is really pretty simple, Pollan declares: Avoid “edible foodlike substances.” Instead, eat real food. “Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”
I caught up with Pollan two days after he returned from a book tour in New Zealand and Australia. At fifty-three, he looked fit but tired from the travel. He lives on a leafy avenue in Berkeley with his wife, painter Judith Belzer, and their fifteen-year-old son. He teaches journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, after a ten-year stint as an editor at Harper’s Magazine. We talked over cups of Darjeeling tea in his kitchen. Here is the edited and condensed interview.
Q: You argue that consumer ignorance is essential for maintaining the industrial agriculture system.
Michael Pollan: If people could see how their food is produced, they would change how they eat. My interest in the topic traces to two moments, in 2000, when I learned how our food is produced.
One was driving down Route 5 in California and passing the Harris ranch, which is a huge feedlot right on the highway. It’s a stunning landscape. I had never seen anything quite like that.
Miles of manure-encrusted land teeming with thousands of animals and a giant mountain of corn and a giant mountain of manure. And a stench you can smell two miles before you get there.
Most feedlots are hidden away on the High Plains. This one happens to be very accessible. Then I visited an industrialized potato farm in Idaho and saw how freely pesticides were used. The farmers had little patches of potatoes by their houses that were organic. They couldn’t eat their field potatoes out of the ground because they had so many systemic pesticides. They had to be stored for six months to off-gas the toxins.
These two things changed the way I ate. I don’t buy industrial potatoes, and I don’t eat feedlot meat.
It’s only our ignorance of how our food is grown that permits this to go on. Most people, if they went to the feedlot or to the slaughterhouse and saw how the animals are raised and killed, would lose their appetite for that food.
The industry knows this. It works so hard not to label where the food comes from, how it’s made, and whether or not there are GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in it, because they know very well from their own research that people don’t want food grown that way.
Q: The national organic rules, which took effect in 2002, are credited with creating the boom in organic food sales. Yet you seem skeptical.
Pollan: Something was gained and something was lost when the federal government defined what “organic” meant. The rules were drawn in a way to make organic friendly to large corporations looking to do organic as cheaply as possible and on as large a scale as possible.
For example, the fight over whether you should really require pasturing for dairy so the cows can eat grass: They drew those rules so broadly that companies like Aurora and Horizon could slip through with very large industrial feedlots.
An “organic feedlot” should be a contradiction in terms, but it’s not under the rules. They really wanted to make it possible to have a mirrored food supply. So you could take everything in the supermarket and make its organic doppelganger. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? It’s a mixed thing.
The Chinese organic is a real question. First, how organic is it? You hear stories that make you wonder. The other issue is what you can do within the organic rules and still be sending contaminated product. Because the soil is so badly contaminated in China, even if they don’t put chemicals on their fields for three years [as U.S. organic rules require for certification], the heavy metals are still there.
So what the consumer thinks they’re buying—organic food—may not be what they’re really getting from China.
Q: The case is made that Wal-Mart’s entry into organic sales won’t hurt organic farmers, but will help the movement by creating more customers for co-ops and natural food stores.
Pollan: I hope that’s true. But Wal-Mart is one of the reasons we grow beef the way we do in this country, which is to say with brutal efficiency and lots of pharmaceuticals. Wal-Mart’s focus on low price tended to mean squeezing their suppliers very, very hard.
Wal-Mart isn’t doing that yet with organic. But long term, that’s what I would worry about: that they would force organic prices down not by being more efficient in distribution but through pressuring suppliers.
Q: The organic folks I talk with say that Wal-Mart sells only the most popular organic items and doesn’t offer the wide selection that serious organic shoppers want.
Pollan: Wal-Mart feeds the bottom third of the population. So they’re not competing with Whole Foods or the corner co-op. It is bringing more people into organic.
The other virtue of Wal-Mart getting into organic is the education factor. There are lots of people in this country who don’t know what organic is, and they will learn about it from Wal-Mart.
When I first started talking about the industrialization of organics, there really was a sense that “big organic” would crush “little organic.” But I don’t think that’s what is happening.
They are very separate worlds. There is overlap, but “little organic” is like these smart independent bookstores. They figured out a way to be in a different business. They do events and hand-sell books and have a whole conversation about books that Barnes & Noble and Amazon can’t do.
In the same way, you see the really entrepreneurial farmers figuring out they don’t have to compete with Whole Foods and certainly not Wal-Mart. They can offer a higher level of quality and more personal attention through the whole CSA relationship and by selling at farmers’ markets now.
Q: Newsweek ran a story arguing that the organic market was leveling off because it’s just too expensive in an era of higher food prices. Do you agree?
Pollan: No, I think it’s still growing quickly. The demand is still there.
What’s slowing the growth is that there is less incentive for farmers to convert to organic because conventional prices are so high. If you’re a wheat or corn grower you’re getting a real good price. Why would you endure the economic hardship of converting to organic farming?
It takes three years. You have to follow organic practices without getting the benefit of the organic label for your effort. It’s a big investment to make the switch.
That’s what’s slowing down organic growth.
Q: In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you detail the rise of U.S. corn production and the use of high fructose corn syrup as the ubiquitous sweetener in so much processed food. But your discussion of cheap corn gave no sense that corn prices would soon go through the roof.
Pollan: As a journalist, I was describing what was. I don’t think I made any predictions. But the story has changed a lot. How it’s going to play out is very hard to predict.
A good deal of The Omnivore’s Dilemma dealt with how we took making food out of the solar basis and put it on a fossil-fuel basis. This is what the industrialization of food is essentially. It’s introducing cheap fossil fuel in what had been a strictly solar process of using photosynthesis to grow food.
When you do that, suddenly your food economy is dependent on your energy. And that’s why prices have gone up. When oil went up, that was the shock. That, and using corn to produce ethanol.
At this very moment, there are executives sitting around the table at Coca-Cola, saying the price of high fructose corn syrup is spiking and will probably stay there for a while. “Do we shrink the portion size, or do we raise the price? Do we to go back to the days before supersizing and sell eight-ounce Coca-Colas instead of twenty-ounce Coca-Colas?”
I hope they shrink the portion size. That would be good for public health.
Q: Does the world have a food shortage now, or is it more a problem of distribution and changing diets?
Pollan: The spot shortages around the world are really not so much about supply as the price. There are really high prices, and that’s driven by ethanol, high oil prices, and the growing demand for grain in Asia.
The whole free trade regime around grains is trembling right now. Countries are recognizing that you don’t want to lose control of your ability to feed your population. You don’t want the price of food in your country to be dependent on decisions made in Wall Street or the White House.
Trade globalization has forced cheap American and Brazilian grains into all of these countries. As a consequence, they’ve lost the ability to grow their own grain.
Now they wish those farmers were there.
Q: You seemed to struggle with the concept of vegetarianism and arguments against meat eating.
Pollan: I’m a pretty harsh critic of 99 percent of America’s meat system, but there is that 1 percent I think is important to defend, because first there are good environmental reasons to eat meat in a limited way.
If you believe strongly in building up local food economies, there are places where meat is the best way to get protein off of the land. It’s too hilly, too dry. Having animals is very important for sustainable agriculture. If you’re going to have animals on the farm, they’re going to die eventually, and you’re going to eat them.
But I have enormous respect for vegetarians. They’re further ahead than most of us. They’ve gone through the thought process in making their eating choices. They’ve just come out in a different place than I have.
I think we’re going to focus on meat-eaters the way we have on SUV drivers. There will be a lot of pressure and education to show that a heavy meat diet is a big contributor to climate change, and that there are many good reasons to eat less meat.
Q: How is meat consumption tied to climate change?
Pollan: In several ways. First, it’s fossil-fuel intensive. If you are feeding animals grain on feedlots you are growing that grain with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides. You are moving that grain around the country to feedlots. You’re moving the meat around the country.
It’s a very inefficient way to feed ourselves. It takes ten pounds of grain to get one pound of beef, seven pounds of grain to get one pound of pork, and two pounds of grain to get one pound of chicken.
There is an equity issue, too. If we really have a limited amount of grain to feed the world, and we’re feeding 60 percent of it to animals, and another 10 percent to our cars, that’s going to be hard to defend in the future.
Q: To a striking degree, you argue that individuals in their daily lives can make a difference.
Pollan: I really have a lot of faith — and I know that it’s considered naive by some people on the left — that consumers can change things. I have seen too many cases of what happens when consumers decide to inflect their buying decisions with their moral and political values. It brings about change.
The food industry is remarkably skittish. They’re terrified of food scares and food fads, both of which can cost them billions overnight. So they’re actually more responsive than you would think.
It’s just a matter of consumers voting with their forks for things like grass-fed meat and producers hearing that market signal. But I don’t think you can completely reform the food system by just voting with your fork.
There are policy issues, too. The Farm Bill matters greatly. So I’m not naive in thinking all of our answers lie in changes in personal behavior. The same is true of global warming. Individuals have a lot to do, but we also need public solutions. You can’t have one without the other.
Q: How is climate change a crisis of lifestyle and character?
Pollan: Look, 70 percent of economic activity in this country is consumer — it’s our purchasing decisions. That is the economy. We are implicated in these problems, and we have to recognize that. It’s our lifestyles; it’s how we’ve organized our cities and the countryside. It’s the size of our houses and how we heat our houses. It’s all these things. This is global warming.
We can look at supranational institutions to create a new set of rules for this economy. But I don’t think that will happen in the absence of people discovering that they can change their lives.
I really believe in what Wendell Berry said in the ’70s—that the environmental crisis is a crisis of character. It’s really about how we live.
Q: Are people getting it?
Pollan: On food I have a lot of optimism. I see evidence that people are changing the way they consume. I don’t foresee the industrial food system going away. I see it shrinking.
One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you’re going to put in your body—and what you refuse to put in your body. That’s politics at its most basic.
Mark Eisen writes about food, political, and business topics from Madison, Wisconsin.
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Michael Pollan Interview
By Mark Eisen
November 2008 Issue of The Progressive
Michael Pollan has got people talking. His recent books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, have captured the public imagination, setting off countless coffee shop discussions, dinnertime arguments, and oh-so-many blog posts.
Even more impressively, his exploration of modern-day agriculture and the dysfunctional American diet has prompted his readers to look at their own eating habits with a new sense of understanding and often a desire for change.
Pollan has taken Wendell Berry’s memorable phrase “eating is an agricultural act” one step further. “It’s a political act as well,” Pollan advises.
A lot of people agree. The alternative food movement—organic farming, local food systems, sustainable agriculture, and more—is burgeoning today because, one family at a time, consumers are backing away from the global food network. Instead, they patronize farmers’ markets, buy food shares from CSA (community-supported agriculture) farms, and favor grocers who sell local meat and produce.
Pollan’s books are essential reading in this movement. He details the importance of grazing to a sustainable farm’s operation and the problems of corn as the cornerstone of U.S. agribusiness. But most of all he gracefully chronicles his own journey of discovery in a food world where, amidst $32 billion in advertising, baleful health consequences are carefully obscured.
Pollan’s topics include a thorough demolition of “nutritionism,” the reigning health ideology that offers dizzying and ever-changing advice on polyunsaturated this and low-fat that, often in the cause of selling highly processed food products.
A good diet is really pretty simple, Pollan declares: Avoid “edible foodlike substances.” Instead, eat real food. “Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”
I caught up with Pollan two days after he returned from a book tour in New Zealand and Australia. At fifty-three, he looked fit but tired from the travel. He lives on a leafy avenue in Berkeley with his wife, painter Judith Belzer, and their fifteen-year-old son. He teaches journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, after a ten-year stint as an editor at Harper’s Magazine. We talked over cups of Darjeeling tea in his kitchen. Here is the edited and condensed interview.
Q: You argue that consumer ignorance is essential for maintaining the industrial agriculture system.
Michael Pollan: If people could see how their food is produced, they would change how they eat. My interest in the topic traces to two moments, in 2000, when I learned how our food is produced.
One was driving down Route 5 in California and passing the Harris ranch, which is a huge feedlot right on the highway. It’s a stunning landscape. I had never seen anything quite like that.
Miles of manure-encrusted land teeming with thousands of animals and a giant mountain of corn and a giant mountain of manure. And a stench you can smell two miles before you get there.
Most feedlots are hidden away on the High Plains. This one happens to be very accessible. Then I visited an industrialized potato farm in Idaho and saw how freely pesticides were used. The farmers had little patches of potatoes by their houses that were organic. They couldn’t eat their field potatoes out of the ground because they had so many systemic pesticides. They had to be stored for six months to off-gas the toxins.
These two things changed the way I ate. I don’t buy industrial potatoes, and I don’t eat feedlot meat.
It’s only our ignorance of how our food is grown that permits this to go on. Most people, if they went to the feedlot or to the slaughterhouse and saw how the animals are raised and killed, would lose their appetite for that food.
The industry knows this. It works so hard not to label where the food comes from, how it’s made, and whether or not there are GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in it, because they know very well from their own research that people don’t want food grown that way.
Q: The national organic rules, which took effect in 2002, are credited with creating the boom in organic food sales. Yet you seem skeptical.
Pollan: Something was gained and something was lost when the federal government defined what “organic” meant. The rules were drawn in a way to make organic friendly to large corporations looking to do organic as cheaply as possible and on as large a scale as possible.
For example, the fight over whether you should really require pasturing for dairy so the cows can eat grass: They drew those rules so broadly that companies like Aurora and Horizon could slip through with very large industrial feedlots.
An “organic feedlot” should be a contradiction in terms, but it’s not under the rules. They really wanted to make it possible to have a mirrored food supply. So you could take everything in the supermarket and make its organic doppelganger. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? It’s a mixed thing.
The Chinese organic is a real question. First, how organic is it? You hear stories that make you wonder. The other issue is what you can do within the organic rules and still be sending contaminated product. Because the soil is so badly contaminated in China, even if they don’t put chemicals on their fields for three years [as U.S. organic rules require for certification], the heavy metals are still there.
So what the consumer thinks they’re buying—organic food—may not be what they’re really getting from China.
Q: The case is made that Wal-Mart’s entry into organic sales won’t hurt organic farmers, but will help the movement by creating more customers for co-ops and natural food stores.
Pollan: I hope that’s true. But Wal-Mart is one of the reasons we grow beef the way we do in this country, which is to say with brutal efficiency and lots of pharmaceuticals. Wal-Mart’s focus on low price tended to mean squeezing their suppliers very, very hard.
Wal-Mart isn’t doing that yet with organic. But long term, that’s what I would worry about: that they would force organic prices down not by being more efficient in distribution but through pressuring suppliers.
Q: The organic folks I talk with say that Wal-Mart sells only the most popular organic items and doesn’t offer the wide selection that serious organic shoppers want.
Pollan: Wal-Mart feeds the bottom third of the population. So they’re not competing with Whole Foods or the corner co-op. It is bringing more people into organic.
The other virtue of Wal-Mart getting into organic is the education factor. There are lots of people in this country who don’t know what organic is, and they will learn about it from Wal-Mart.
When I first started talking about the industrialization of organics, there really was a sense that “big organic” would crush “little organic.” But I don’t think that’s what is happening.
They are very separate worlds. There is overlap, but “little organic” is like these smart independent bookstores. They figured out a way to be in a different business. They do events and hand-sell books and have a whole conversation about books that Barnes & Noble and Amazon can’t do.
In the same way, you see the really entrepreneurial farmers figuring out they don’t have to compete with Whole Foods and certainly not Wal-Mart. They can offer a higher level of quality and more personal attention through the whole CSA relationship and by selling at farmers’ markets now.
Q: Newsweek ran a story arguing that the organic market was leveling off because it’s just too expensive in an era of higher food prices. Do you agree?
Pollan: No, I think it’s still growing quickly. The demand is still there.
What’s slowing the growth is that there is less incentive for farmers to convert to organic because conventional prices are so high. If you’re a wheat or corn grower you’re getting a real good price. Why would you endure the economic hardship of converting to organic farming?
It takes three years. You have to follow organic practices without getting the benefit of the organic label for your effort. It’s a big investment to make the switch.
That’s what’s slowing down organic growth.
Q: In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you detail the rise of U.S. corn production and the use of high fructose corn syrup as the ubiquitous sweetener in so much processed food. But your discussion of cheap corn gave no sense that corn prices would soon go through the roof.
Pollan: As a journalist, I was describing what was. I don’t think I made any predictions. But the story has changed a lot. How it’s going to play out is very hard to predict.
A good deal of The Omnivore’s Dilemma dealt with how we took making food out of the solar basis and put it on a fossil-fuel basis. This is what the industrialization of food is essentially. It’s introducing cheap fossil fuel in what had been a strictly solar process of using photosynthesis to grow food.
When you do that, suddenly your food economy is dependent on your energy. And that’s why prices have gone up. When oil went up, that was the shock. That, and using corn to produce ethanol.
At this very moment, there are executives sitting around the table at Coca-Cola, saying the price of high fructose corn syrup is spiking and will probably stay there for a while. “Do we shrink the portion size, or do we raise the price? Do we to go back to the days before supersizing and sell eight-ounce Coca-Colas instead of twenty-ounce Coca-Colas?”
I hope they shrink the portion size. That would be good for public health.
Q: Does the world have a food shortage now, or is it more a problem of distribution and changing diets?
Pollan: The spot shortages around the world are really not so much about supply as the price. There are really high prices, and that’s driven by ethanol, high oil prices, and the growing demand for grain in Asia.
The whole free trade regime around grains is trembling right now. Countries are recognizing that you don’t want to lose control of your ability to feed your population. You don’t want the price of food in your country to be dependent on decisions made in Wall Street or the White House.
Trade globalization has forced cheap American and Brazilian grains into all of these countries. As a consequence, they’ve lost the ability to grow their own grain.
Now they wish those farmers were there.
Q: You seemed to struggle with the concept of vegetarianism and arguments against meat eating.
Pollan: I’m a pretty harsh critic of 99 percent of America’s meat system, but there is that 1 percent I think is important to defend, because first there are good environmental reasons to eat meat in a limited way.
If you believe strongly in building up local food economies, there are places where meat is the best way to get protein off of the land. It’s too hilly, too dry. Having animals is very important for sustainable agriculture. If you’re going to have animals on the farm, they’re going to die eventually, and you’re going to eat them.
But I have enormous respect for vegetarians. They’re further ahead than most of us. They’ve gone through the thought process in making their eating choices. They’ve just come out in a different place than I have.
I think we’re going to focus on meat-eaters the way we have on SUV drivers. There will be a lot of pressure and education to show that a heavy meat diet is a big contributor to climate change, and that there are many good reasons to eat less meat.
Q: How is meat consumption tied to climate change?
Pollan: In several ways. First, it’s fossil-fuel intensive. If you are feeding animals grain on feedlots you are growing that grain with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides. You are moving that grain around the country to feedlots. You’re moving the meat around the country.
It’s a very inefficient way to feed ourselves. It takes ten pounds of grain to get one pound of beef, seven pounds of grain to get one pound of pork, and two pounds of grain to get one pound of chicken.
There is an equity issue, too. If we really have a limited amount of grain to feed the world, and we’re feeding 60 percent of it to animals, and another 10 percent to our cars, that’s going to be hard to defend in the future.
Q: To a striking degree, you argue that individuals in their daily lives can make a difference.
Pollan: I really have a lot of faith — and I know that it’s considered naive by some people on the left — that consumers can change things. I have seen too many cases of what happens when consumers decide to inflect their buying decisions with their moral and political values. It brings about change.
The food industry is remarkably skittish. They’re terrified of food scares and food fads, both of which can cost them billions overnight. So they’re actually more responsive than you would think.
It’s just a matter of consumers voting with their forks for things like grass-fed meat and producers hearing that market signal. But I don’t think you can completely reform the food system by just voting with your fork.
There are policy issues, too. The Farm Bill matters greatly. So I’m not naive in thinking all of our answers lie in changes in personal behavior. The same is true of global warming. Individuals have a lot to do, but we also need public solutions. You can’t have one without the other.
Q: How is climate change a crisis of lifestyle and character?
Pollan: Look, 70 percent of economic activity in this country is consumer — it’s our purchasing decisions. That is the economy. We are implicated in these problems, and we have to recognize that. It’s our lifestyles; it’s how we’ve organized our cities and the countryside. It’s the size of our houses and how we heat our houses. It’s all these things. This is global warming.
We can look at supranational institutions to create a new set of rules for this economy. But I don’t think that will happen in the absence of people discovering that they can change their lives.
I really believe in what Wendell Berry said in the ’70s—that the environmental crisis is a crisis of character. It’s really about how we live.
Q: Are people getting it?
Pollan: On food I have a lot of optimism. I see evidence that people are changing the way they consume. I don’t foresee the industrial food system going away. I see it shrinking.
One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you’re going to put in your body—and what you refuse to put in your body. That’s politics at its most basic.
Mark Eisen writes about food, political, and business topics from Madison, Wisconsin.
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Tuesday, July 08, 2008
a morning at the CSA farm, part 2
Some closeup shots below of the CSA farm veggies, via Bonnie. The deep red lettuce is a stunningly beautiful variety called 'Merlot' - I'm sure we can Google a seed source because I can't recall where Pat said she got her seeds. She is careful to buy her seeds from organic sources.
We're only on week 2 of our 20-week season. Hard to believe, when the solstice is already past we are only just beginning to enjoy the harvest, but that's how it is in Michigan.
We just ate the last of our Michigan strawberries - full flavored, sweet and red all the way through, as only a fully ripe strawberry can be. Ripe berries don't travel well, and folks who buy strawberries in the grocery store probably think strawberries really taste like juicy cardboard.
The tart cherries are beginning to come in, and my tree didn't produce this year, so I'll have to find a local orchard in the newspaper and make a visit.
We're only on week 2 of our 20-week season. Hard to believe, when the solstice is already past we are only just beginning to enjoy the harvest, but that's how it is in Michigan.
We just ate the last of our Michigan strawberries - full flavored, sweet and red all the way through, as only a fully ripe strawberry can be. Ripe berries don't travel well, and folks who buy strawberries in the grocery store probably think strawberries really taste like juicy cardboard.
The tart cherries are beginning to come in, and my tree didn't produce this year, so I'll have to find a local orchard in the newspaper and make a visit.
A morning at the CSA farm
I brought my camera to the Whetham Organic CSA Farm to get some colorful shots for the blog, but my friend Bonnie had hers too, and she promised to send me some photos to share with y'all. Thanks, Bonnie!
You know you're on a farm when you see the implements along the road out back.
Salad, mmmm!
These are some of the cole crops, the potatoes and pea plots from a distance.
The peas and potatoes up closer:
A farm hand, mulching the potatoes...
Pat herself, queen of the peas ... Actually, she's instructing the organic gardening class right out in the field.
A look back to the house... it's so quiet and peaceful back in Pat's garden, makes you want to stay for a while.
You know you're on a farm when you see the implements along the road out back.
Salad, mmmm!
These are some of the cole crops, the potatoes and pea plots from a distance.
The peas and potatoes up closer:
A farm hand, mulching the potatoes...
Pat herself, queen of the peas ... Actually, she's instructing the organic gardening class right out in the field.
A look back to the house... it's so quiet and peaceful back in Pat's garden, makes you want to stay for a while.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Meet My Guest Blogger, Pat
Last year my family joined Pat Whetham's organic vegetable CSA* farm, here in Genesee County, Michigan. Just to give it a try see how we liked it. The food was fresh and healthy, organically and locally grown. It was a good year. And luckily, our half share was plentiful: we had more than we could use.
And, just maybe because of all of the green leafy veggies, my cholesterol level this year was better than last year's reading. All good, all good.
(*Consumer Supported Agriculture)
Farming is a real life gamble, when you think of it. We get a taste of that when we buy a share in a CSA farm and then wait to see what happens with the weather and insects and whatever else Mother Nature has in mind for us. Like with stock, 'the market doesn't always go up'. This uncertainty is what the farm family has to deal with every year for their livelihood.
It gives us a clearer idea about the precariousness of the climate change that we are beginning to experience as well.
Anyhow, this year I like to think we were first in line to re-subscribe.
We shareholders receive occasional e-mails concerning relevant topics from our CSA farmer, Pat, and upon reading the latest one, I had 'the light bulb' turn on over my head:
Ask Pat to be a guest blogger!
In other words, ask her permission to post her emails and help spread her words of wisdom and experience! So I turn this space over today to Pat.
From Whetham Organic Farm - "The Way We Live Now"
In the interests of further educating everyone I know:
[Linked] to this is a very interesting article by Michael Pollan, author of The Ominivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. ... I really want you to read it and think.
Pollan is good at making us think (at least in my opinion) and his work has helped fuel the 'eat local' movement across America by describing the production of industrial food in great detail. In this article he is very definitely equating our food choices with our environmental or carbon footprints. And it's about time. I've been trying to do that for 20 years, but no one would pay attention - including the environmentalists.
By the end of the [linked] article Pollan finally is saying Grow your own food. It's the best choice for the whole entire world and everybody in it. I agree and say also that garden needs to be organic, not chemical (because chemical gardening -and farming- uses more resources as well as being unhealthy for you and the planet).
Can you believe that many 'gardeners' never grow anything edible? Those people need to be encouraged to put some fruits and vegetables among those ornamentals!
Pollan talks about viral social change - that phenomenon where ideas spread like a computer virus. Let's help this particular virus along. Start praising all the gardeners you know for growing their own food.
Encourage others to try it. That's one of the reasons I started an organic gardening class this year - to encourage others, to show them how it's done if they don't know, to spread the word as Pollan is trying to do.
For those of you who can't grow your own, CSA is a good choice, particularly a really local CSA where you can see your food being grown, maybe help out a little, and gain some understanding of the whole process of gardening and farming and the ways it can help or hurt the world.
I have a few more "viral" ideas coming along in my mind. Expect to hear about them soon.
Pat
And, just maybe because of all of the green leafy veggies, my cholesterol level this year was better than last year's reading. All good, all good.
(*Consumer Supported Agriculture)
Farming is a real life gamble, when you think of it. We get a taste of that when we buy a share in a CSA farm and then wait to see what happens with the weather and insects and whatever else Mother Nature has in mind for us. Like with stock, 'the market doesn't always go up'. This uncertainty is what the farm family has to deal with every year for their livelihood.
It gives us a clearer idea about the precariousness of the climate change that we are beginning to experience as well.
Anyhow, this year I like to think we were first in line to re-subscribe.
We shareholders receive occasional e-mails concerning relevant topics from our CSA farmer, Pat, and upon reading the latest one, I had 'the light bulb' turn on over my head:
Ask Pat to be a guest blogger!
In other words, ask her permission to post her emails and help spread her words of wisdom and experience! So I turn this space over today to Pat.
From Whetham Organic Farm - "The Way We Live Now"
In the interests of further educating everyone I know:
[Linked] to this is a very interesting article by Michael Pollan, author of The Ominivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. ... I really want you to read it and think.
Pollan is good at making us think (at least in my opinion) and his work has helped fuel the 'eat local' movement across America by describing the production of industrial food in great detail. In this article he is very definitely equating our food choices with our environmental or carbon footprints. And it's about time. I've been trying to do that for 20 years, but no one would pay attention - including the environmentalists.
By the end of the [linked] article Pollan finally is saying Grow your own food. It's the best choice for the whole entire world and everybody in it. I agree and say also that garden needs to be organic, not chemical (because chemical gardening -and farming- uses more resources as well as being unhealthy for you and the planet).
Can you believe that many 'gardeners' never grow anything edible? Those people need to be encouraged to put some fruits and vegetables among those ornamentals!
Pollan talks about viral social change - that phenomenon where ideas spread like a computer virus. Let's help this particular virus along. Start praising all the gardeners you know for growing their own food.
Encourage others to try it. That's one of the reasons I started an organic gardening class this year - to encourage others, to show them how it's done if they don't know, to spread the word as Pollan is trying to do.
For those of you who can't grow your own, CSA is a good choice, particularly a really local CSA where you can see your food being grown, maybe help out a little, and gain some understanding of the whole process of gardening and farming and the ways it can help or hurt the world.
I have a few more "viral" ideas coming along in my mind. Expect to hear about them soon.
Pat
Thursday, February 21, 2008
A Message from Pat
Pat, our CSA farmer and organic gardening teacher, sent this message to her list and told me I could post it. In case you aren't a reader of my cranky enviro-green pacifist blog, I should probably tell you here that (over there) I posted a few awfully cranky posts about the big meat recall that is even making a few of my fast food eating friends nervous. The meat, that is, not my cranky blog which they don't read.
Anyway, Pat is on the same wavelength about the disgusting state of animal protein being foisted off on the consumer in this nation, and here is a bit of her message:
Greetings all,
It's been busy around here - or at least, I've been busy.
[Note: I snipped some personal info here - Betsy]
But I have had time to see and read some news about the food supply in this country that just makes me shake my head in disgust and shame. Largest recall of beef ever! The news videos have been frightenening, and have reminded me to talk to you all again about the source of your food.
[Note: Pat attached a copy of the same article I linked to in my cranky green blog - Betsy]
Since you have come so far as to join a CSA in search of better food, I hope you are a receptive audience for further suggestions regarding what you buy and eat. I'm not going to suggest that all of you become vegetarians, although I know several of you are. I am going to let you know - as I have in the past couple of years - that there are better choices for animal products also. We are taking a first step for the CSA by making better eggs available for order this year.
[Note: Yipee! - Betsy]
While I can't provide meats for you, I can lead you in the right direction - local, or at least Michigan, small farms that sell poultry, pork and beef, milk and cheese.
As I organize some sources for you, I hope you will do some research on your own. Where to start? A favorite website of mine is the Sustainable Table (www.sustainabletable.org). From it you can read lots of interesting stuff, plus access the websites eatwellguide.org and the meatrix. The Meatrix is a series of animated videos (3 at last count) that illustrate the problems with confined production of meat. It's easiest to view these with a high speed connection, of course, but most dial-up connections can manage if you are patient with the start and stop process (once you've watched it through once, a replay should come in with out the delays).
If you are still buying meat, milk and eggs from the grocery store, please do some investigating into just how those products are grown and processed. Small local farmers, especially organic ones, don't mistreat their livestock nor do business with the slaughter houses that do.
If you want to connect more with the small organic producers in Michigan, I suggest attending the Organic Conference held each year in March. Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance sponsors this event, which now features something for everyone, not just for farmers. MOFFA welcomes your support as a non-farmer attendee of this year's conference. Maybe you'll even want to join! find the information at www.moffa.org. [In the interest of "full disclosure" I've been on the Board of MOFFA for 16 years and I help plan and organize this conference.]
Wishing for spring to come soon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Pat
Anyway, Pat is on the same wavelength about the disgusting state of animal protein being foisted off on the consumer in this nation, and here is a bit of her message:
Greetings all,
It's been busy around here - or at least, I've been busy.
[Note: I snipped some personal info here - Betsy]
But I have had time to see and read some news about the food supply in this country that just makes me shake my head in disgust and shame. Largest recall of beef ever! The news videos have been frightenening, and have reminded me to talk to you all again about the source of your food.
[Note: Pat attached a copy of the same article I linked to in my cranky green blog - Betsy]
Since you have come so far as to join a CSA in search of better food, I hope you are a receptive audience for further suggestions regarding what you buy and eat. I'm not going to suggest that all of you become vegetarians, although I know several of you are. I am going to let you know - as I have in the past couple of years - that there are better choices for animal products also. We are taking a first step for the CSA by making better eggs available for order this year.
[Note: Yipee! - Betsy]
While I can't provide meats for you, I can lead you in the right direction - local, or at least Michigan, small farms that sell poultry, pork and beef, milk and cheese.
As I organize some sources for you, I hope you will do some research on your own. Where to start? A favorite website of mine is the Sustainable Table (www.sustainabletable.org). From it you can read lots of interesting stuff, plus access the websites eatwellguide.org and the meatrix. The Meatrix is a series of animated videos (3 at last count) that illustrate the problems with confined production of meat. It's easiest to view these with a high speed connection, of course, but most dial-up connections can manage if you are patient with the start and stop process (once you've watched it through once, a replay should come in with out the delays).
If you are still buying meat, milk and eggs from the grocery store, please do some investigating into just how those products are grown and processed. Small local farmers, especially organic ones, don't mistreat their livestock nor do business with the slaughter houses that do.
If you want to connect more with the small organic producers in Michigan, I suggest attending the Organic Conference held each year in March. Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance sponsors this event, which now features something for everyone, not just for farmers. MOFFA welcomes your support as a non-farmer attendee of this year's conference. Maybe you'll even want to join! find the information at www.moffa.org. [In the interest of "full disclosure" I've been on the Board of MOFFA for 16 years and I help plan and organize this conference.]
Wishing for spring to come soon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Pat
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
The CSA meet up
Last night Herb and I went to a church downtown to hear about the upcoming offerings of CSA farmers in our area. It was a meeting of potential customers and hopeful growers, all intent on connecting to buy locally grown, hopefully certified organic, fresh and wholesome food by the farm supporting "subscription" method.
The manager of the Flint Farmer's Market, Dick Ramsdell, should be thanked for arranging the meeting. A few of the growers are actual vendors at the market, but he offers us all the market as a central meeting place to drop off and pick up our shares. It is wholly a thing that he thinks should be done, to introduce urban consumers who have lost contact with their food source to the actual people who make their living by producing our food, and he arranged this meeting on that principle, with or without the profit motive for the market.
He did mention that the fresh local idea is growing so well he is hearing about more vendors building hoop houses so that we can have fresh local greens in the winter soon.
I took plenty of notes, but didn't really need to, as I planned to re-subscribe to Whetham Farms' CSA considering our good experience last year. Three of my gardening friends, Mel and Bonnie and her husband Chuck, are joining, too.
There is a lot of information out there if you still need to be convinced. Some of the handouts were straight from the web:
Local Harvest has a lot of information on CSAs.
What is a CSA? is from this site in Lebanon!
Five Reasons to Buy Local is from Community Alliance With Family Farmers a good site with lots of links...
And Mr. Ramsdell recommended one of my favorite sites for loads of reading (that this city girl only discovered last year): ATTRA - National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service
Here is a list of the goods that growers were offering, just to show a bit of what we can buy fresh, and local, and (hopefully) organically grown or at least grown with as sustainable practices as possible:
vegetables, greens, pumpkins and squash, potatoes, heritage tomatoes and cucumbers
fruit, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, apples (heritage), pears, peaches, plums, grapes soon, sweet and tart cherries
flowers, gourds
honey
maple syrup
chickens, range and tractored
eggs
turkeys, heritage varieties
grassfed beef
milk soon
lambs
pork
One grower said they raise 90 varieties of vegetables.
One grower said she raises 30 to 40 varieties of heritage tomatoes.
One farmer's antique apple trees are coming into production.
One grower is offering a monthly workshop.
One grower said they have two festivals during the season.
We heard terms like sustainable, heritage, hormone free, pastured.
We heard plans and dreams and goals, some of them realized.
One farmer's land has been in the family for 5 generations!
One farmer's daughter is taking the organic farming program at Michigan State University!
There was a lot of hope for the future in that room last night.
The manager of the Flint Farmer's Market, Dick Ramsdell, should be thanked for arranging the meeting. A few of the growers are actual vendors at the market, but he offers us all the market as a central meeting place to drop off and pick up our shares. It is wholly a thing that he thinks should be done, to introduce urban consumers who have lost contact with their food source to the actual people who make their living by producing our food, and he arranged this meeting on that principle, with or without the profit motive for the market.
He did mention that the fresh local idea is growing so well he is hearing about more vendors building hoop houses so that we can have fresh local greens in the winter soon.
I took plenty of notes, but didn't really need to, as I planned to re-subscribe to Whetham Farms' CSA considering our good experience last year. Three of my gardening friends, Mel and Bonnie and her husband Chuck, are joining, too.
There is a lot of information out there if you still need to be convinced. Some of the handouts were straight from the web:
Local Harvest has a lot of information on CSAs.
What is a CSA? is from this site in Lebanon!
Five Reasons to Buy Local is from Community Alliance With Family Farmers a good site with lots of links...
And Mr. Ramsdell recommended one of my favorite sites for loads of reading (that this city girl only discovered last year): ATTRA - National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service
Here is a list of the goods that growers were offering, just to show a bit of what we can buy fresh, and local, and (hopefully) organically grown or at least grown with as sustainable practices as possible:
vegetables, greens, pumpkins and squash, potatoes, heritage tomatoes and cucumbers
fruit, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, apples (heritage), pears, peaches, plums, grapes soon, sweet and tart cherries
flowers, gourds
honey
maple syrup
chickens, range and tractored
eggs
turkeys, heritage varieties
grassfed beef
milk soon
lambs
pork
One grower said they raise 90 varieties of vegetables.
One grower said she raises 30 to 40 varieties of heritage tomatoes.
One farmer's antique apple trees are coming into production.
One grower is offering a monthly workshop.
One grower said they have two festivals during the season.
We heard terms like sustainable, heritage, hormone free, pastured.
We heard plans and dreams and goals, some of them realized.
One farmer's land has been in the family for 5 generations!
One farmer's daughter is taking the organic farming program at Michigan State University!
There was a lot of hope for the future in that room last night.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Genesee County: put the CSA introductory meeting on your calendar
The manager of the Flint Farmer's Market, Dick Ramsdell has been a key supporter and promoter of Community Supported Agriculture here in Genesee County. There is a great article on the front page of Monday's (Jan. 28) Flint Journal by Elizabeth Shaw entitled "Green Thumbs - Urban Agriculture in Full Bloom Here" (link) that discusses some of what is going on here in our area.
Want to learn about Community Supported Agriculture or how to join a CSA group with local farms? There's a free public meeting coming up:
When: 7 p.m. Feb. 5
Where: First Presbyterian Church, 746 S. Saginaw St., Flint.
Details: (810) 938-4246 or chsramsdell@hotmail.com
A few interesting local food factoids from the article
(Source: Food Bank Council of Michigan):
If every Michigan family bought just $10 per week of Michigan produce, it would keep $37 million a week or $1.9 billion a year from leaving the state.
Food now travels an average of 1,500 miles to get onto Michigan tables. (Think of the fuel burned!) 50 percent of trucks on interstate highways carry food.
A Michigan Land Use Institute study reports local buying could generate almost 2,000 new jobs and increase farm income as much as 16 percent.
Want to learn about Community Supported Agriculture or how to join a CSA group with local farms? There's a free public meeting coming up:
When: 7 p.m. Feb. 5
Where: First Presbyterian Church, 746 S. Saginaw St., Flint.
Details: (810) 938-4246 or chsramsdell@hotmail.com
A few interesting local food factoids from the article
(Source: Food Bank Council of Michigan):
If every Michigan family bought just $10 per week of Michigan produce, it would keep $37 million a week or $1.9 billion a year from leaving the state.
Food now travels an average of 1,500 miles to get onto Michigan tables. (Think of the fuel burned!) 50 percent of trucks on interstate highways carry food.
A Michigan Land Use Institute study reports local buying could generate almost 2,000 new jobs and increase farm income as much as 16 percent.
Two updates
First, the organic CSA farmer I have written of who is offering the monthly hands on workshops on organic vegetable growing, Pat Wetham, has got a new phone number:
# 810-867-4435.
I hope you'll sign up for her workshops! With the trend toward fresh, organic and local food, what could be more valuable than knowing how to grow your own veggies in your own yard? Nothing is more local, and there is nothing like knowing how your food was really grown, because you've done it!
Also, this morning the League of Conservation Voters sent out their online voter guide to the 2008 presidential candidates(link). It's pretty interesting reading. The LCV sent a questionnaire to each of the candidates and then researched what they said (their public statements), what they promised (their platforms), and most importantly their track record, what they did (how they have voted.)
It won't surprise you on the Republican side.
That joke Giuliani did not extend the courtesy to respond and has no federal voting record. But his opinions are simply not environmentally responsible.
The flip-flopping Michigan Mitt did not have the manners to reply either and has no federal voting record. He says he loves coal and drilling.
'Mac' McCain must not have grandchildren he cares about, he has a 26 voting record.
The Democratic candidates did surprise me a bit.
Billary has a 90 percent voting record. If I liked her I'd say Yay.
Obama voted a 96! Yay!
But I must comment Hill and Obama have not been Senators long enough to test their true mettle...
Edwards voted a 59, which is hard to understand considering his spearheading of the defense of the Clean Air Act. Maybe he is cleaning up his act? I need to do some further reading.
Of course my man Dennis K. with a 92 beat Hillary but didn't come in as well as Obama. But he left to work on retaining his congressional seat again.
You can spend a lot of time reading up on the issues, and the LCV has done most of the footwork for us! We know where they stand (non-partisan) and what they stand for (the future of the planet!)
They have a richly informational website that really educates. For instance, if you can stomach it you can study what the present despoilers are doing and what they have accomplished here.
Isn't it about time we voters let the powerful know we won't support them if they don't take care of our planet?
Clean air, beautiful public spaces where nature can live, and safe water are the commons that belong to us all. Why should the profit of a few take those things we share away from us!
# 810-867-4435.
I hope you'll sign up for her workshops! With the trend toward fresh, organic and local food, what could be more valuable than knowing how to grow your own veggies in your own yard? Nothing is more local, and there is nothing like knowing how your food was really grown, because you've done it!
Also, this morning the League of Conservation Voters sent out their online voter guide to the 2008 presidential candidates(link). It's pretty interesting reading. The LCV sent a questionnaire to each of the candidates and then researched what they said (their public statements), what they promised (their platforms), and most importantly their track record, what they did (how they have voted.)
It won't surprise you on the Republican side.
That joke Giuliani did not extend the courtesy to respond and has no federal voting record. But his opinions are simply not environmentally responsible.
The flip-flopping Michigan Mitt did not have the manners to reply either and has no federal voting record. He says he loves coal and drilling.
'Mac' McCain must not have grandchildren he cares about, he has a 26 voting record.
The Democratic candidates did surprise me a bit.
Billary has a 90 percent voting record. If I liked her I'd say Yay.
Obama voted a 96! Yay!
But I must comment Hill and Obama have not been Senators long enough to test their true mettle...
Edwards voted a 59, which is hard to understand considering his spearheading of the defense of the Clean Air Act. Maybe he is cleaning up his act? I need to do some further reading.
Of course my man Dennis K. with a 92 beat Hillary but didn't come in as well as Obama. But he left to work on retaining his congressional seat again.
You can spend a lot of time reading up on the issues, and the LCV has done most of the footwork for us! We know where they stand (non-partisan) and what they stand for (the future of the planet!)
They have a richly informational website that really educates. For instance, if you can stomach it you can study what the present despoilers are doing and what they have accomplished here.
Isn't it about time we voters let the powerful know we won't support them if they don't take care of our planet?
Clean air, beautiful public spaces where nature can live, and safe water are the commons that belong to us all. Why should the profit of a few take those things we share away from us!
Monday, January 28, 2008
Join a CSA in Genesee County!
This is how we got into a CSA last year! Believe me, it's a good thing.
“Genesee County - do you want to know who is growing your food?”
Flint, MI - The Flint Farmers’ Market will sponsor a second annual Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) informational meeting designed to connect local farmers with urban residents who are concerned about the types of MEAT, POULTRY, EGGS, FRUITS and VEGETABLES they consume. The CSA INFORMATIONAL MEETING will be held Tuesday, February 5, at 7:00 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church on Saginaw Street, downtown Flint. (Parking is in the rear of the church. Enter from 4th Street.) This is the only CSA meeting the Market will sponsor before next summer, so those interested are strongly encouraged to attend. For more information please contact Dick Ramsdell, Market Manager, 810.938.4246 or chs_ramsdell@hotmail.com .
The meeting will introduce the community to the concept of a CSA, and offer those interested, the opportunity to contract directly with a local farmer this summer. More than one dozen local produce farmers and meat producers, both traditional and organic will be at the meeting to answer questions. The Flint Farmers’ Market will serve as the delivery point for farmers and the pick up point for customers, either on a Tuesday or a Thursday market day during this summer’s growing season.
A CSA links urban customers directly with the farmers who grow their food. Once established, consumers contract with a local farmer or meat producer for a specified amount of product over the growing season. This way the consumers know the person who grows their food and where it is grown. Consumers pay for the product at the beginning of the season (money which the farmer can count on, thereby planning production accordingly). The farmer provides the contracted amount and variety of produce or meat during the summer season. Last year, over 100 citizens met with local farmers at the winter meeting, with many following through on contracts during the summer of 2007. The Flint Farmers’ Market is pleased to provide this service to the community; it encourages urban residents to eat healthy local food during the Michigan growing season, and it supports local farmers with income and a predetermined customer base.
For more information please contact Dick Ramsdell, Market Manager, 810.938.4246 or chs_ramsdell@hotmail.com .
Contact: Karianne Martus, Creative Communications Company (810) 487-1626
“Genesee County - do you want to know who is growing your food?”
Flint, MI - The Flint Farmers’ Market will sponsor a second annual Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) informational meeting designed to connect local farmers with urban residents who are concerned about the types of MEAT, POULTRY, EGGS, FRUITS and VEGETABLES they consume. The CSA INFORMATIONAL MEETING will be held Tuesday, February 5, at 7:00 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church on Saginaw Street, downtown Flint. (Parking is in the rear of the church. Enter from 4th Street.) This is the only CSA meeting the Market will sponsor before next summer, so those interested are strongly encouraged to attend. For more information please contact Dick Ramsdell, Market Manager, 810.938.4246 or chs_ramsdell@hotmail.com .
The meeting will introduce the community to the concept of a CSA, and offer those interested, the opportunity to contract directly with a local farmer this summer. More than one dozen local produce farmers and meat producers, both traditional and organic will be at the meeting to answer questions. The Flint Farmers’ Market will serve as the delivery point for farmers and the pick up point for customers, either on a Tuesday or a Thursday market day during this summer’s growing season.
A CSA links urban customers directly with the farmers who grow their food. Once established, consumers contract with a local farmer or meat producer for a specified amount of product over the growing season. This way the consumers know the person who grows their food and where it is grown. Consumers pay for the product at the beginning of the season (money which the farmer can count on, thereby planning production accordingly). The farmer provides the contracted amount and variety of produce or meat during the summer season. Last year, over 100 citizens met with local farmers at the winter meeting, with many following through on contracts during the summer of 2007. The Flint Farmers’ Market is pleased to provide this service to the community; it encourages urban residents to eat healthy local food during the Michigan growing season, and it supports local farmers with income and a predetermined customer base.
For more information please contact Dick Ramsdell, Market Manager, 810.938.4246 or chs_ramsdell@hotmail.com .
Contact: Karianne Martus, Creative Communications Company (810) 487-1626
Friday, January 25, 2008
Winter is the time for gardeners to grow
No, I don't mean our waistlines from all the sitting around reading and writing and planning. Or growing plants indoors though many of us do. I'm talking about learning more about our preoccupation. We read books, magazines, newsletters and the internet, we attend workshops and conferences, and we take time to organize, digest and internalize what we learn.
Today I sent in my five dollars to reserve a place in a beekeeping workshop at the Genesee Conservation District. It sounds fun! I'd like to keep bees, although Herb is to say the least circumspect. He keeps saying things like, bees sting people.
Well, I probably won't get a hive this year, what with the economy and being on a budget and all. But it will be fun to learn. And speaking of budgeting, the CSA organic gardening workshops I posted about a few days ago are a great deal - if I plan to help out, as a CSA subscriber I can attend for free! HOW COOL IS THAT! I though Pat's organic vegetables and greens were first rate last year, and we had more than we could use (so I froze some and gave away some). Now I get to combine the pleasure of being around like minded people, learning good skills, and I can bring my veggies home the same day! Yipee!
Today I sent in my five dollars to reserve a place in a beekeeping workshop at the Genesee Conservation District. It sounds fun! I'd like to keep bees, although Herb is to say the least circumspect. He keeps saying things like, bees sting people.
Well, I probably won't get a hive this year, what with the economy and being on a budget and all. But it will be fun to learn. And speaking of budgeting, the CSA organic gardening workshops I posted about a few days ago are a great deal - if I plan to help out, as a CSA subscriber I can attend for free! HOW COOL IS THAT! I though Pat's organic vegetables and greens were first rate last year, and we had more than we could use (so I froze some and gave away some). Now I get to combine the pleasure of being around like minded people, learning good skills, and I can bring my veggies home the same day! Yipee!
Thursday, March 01, 2007
The student CSA organic farm at Michigan State University
This brings back memories of summer! I took the tour two years ago during the Michigan State Master Gardener Association Summer Conference.
Local, sustainable, organic produce... the wave of the future! Those young people give me hope.
I love my coldframe, but if I could only build a greenhouse. I've got Dr. Biernbaum's plans that he handed out that day, but I lack a willing partner.
Wouldn't you agree, fresh homegrown veggies 48 weeks of the year would be wonderful?
Local, sustainable, organic produce... the wave of the future! Those young people give me hope.
I love my coldframe, but if I could only build a greenhouse. I've got Dr. Biernbaum's plans that he handed out that day, but I lack a willing partner.
Wouldn't you agree, fresh homegrown veggies 48 weeks of the year would be wonderful?
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