The Old Man and Phil

For a while there, it looked like Punxsutawney Phil was right on target: the cherry trees are turning pink around the edges, and a few hardy daffodils are showing their cheery yellow trumpets. And then this afternoon, we got caught in a hailstorm while driving to the co-op. When it was over, we looked around, and the foothills looked like someone had taken a sifter of powdered sugar to the evergreens atop Tiger Mountain.

Once inside, the produce section reminded me that it’s still winter. There’s still a mountain of kale and chard (purple dragon kale and rainbow chard went into the cart). The heads of lettuce were a bit bigger, but still brown along the stems (two heads of curly red, one Bibb), and the oranges were the brightest thing among the fruits (two navel oranges, four blood oranges, four Braeburn apples).

I pass by the tiny bin of token asparagus and the clamshells of strawberries piled next to it (they probably took the same truck from California). I do splurge on a few tomatoes (four on the vine, four Roma) and then load up on potatoes: a farm twenty miles away provides us with some fist-sized Yukon Golds and a some lovely looking russets. I pile in four big bakers, and make sure I pick up some (non-dairy) sour cream for tonight.

My funky German seasonal cookbook professes to tell me the best for each month, but February looks frighteningly similar to January: red cabbage is reprised, joined by green cabbage, and we add in mussels (this book is from a Hamburg publisher) and chives. I can’t say this is particularly helpful. I have a big pot of chives just outside my kitchen, and even with our mild weather, they’re still dormant. And mussels may be in season in Northern Germany, but the freshest thing at the fishmongers these days are scallops and Dungeness crab. They both tempt me, but it still seems early; I expect to eat them with little new potatoes and asparagus. I’ll wait a bit.

Ah, but one last ingredient made it into the chapter: pearl barley. I learn that it is the washed and polished barley kernel, the oldest grain known to man. The Chinese consider it one of the five holy foods (along with soy, rice, wheat and millet). I consider it heavenly in soup.

As we lug our bags out to the car, the sun is shining again, and the mountain is a normal deep green. Psychic groundhogs notwithstanding, I don’t think Old Man Winter is quite done with us yet. I’ll open a can of three-bean chili to make the spuds into a meal, and send the kids off to bed in fuzzy jammies and with full tummies.

Planting seeds

The first seed racks are starting to sprout in stores, and my co-op is no exception. There is still snow in the foothills: it’s far too early to be planting tomatoes and beans! But we had a few mild days last month, and I got out for a few hours and turned over the garden, plowing some lovely composted steer manure under.

It’s hard to believe, but in the same season when we’re curling up with seed catalogues and graph paper, the real farmers are long past the planning stage. They’ve already placed their orders, and are already planting early starts in their greenhouses for transplanting.

Now when I say “farmer,” I’m talking about the people who still plant real seeds, tend plants, and harvest the food on land they own. There are very few of these folks around anymore, but they still exist. One of the best places to find them are CSA farms, or Community Supported Agriculture.

One of our local CSA’s (for we are blessed with several) is just over the other side of the valley towards the east, Jubilee Farm. We stumbled upon them quite by accident several years ago, visiting a work colleague whose father, like my visiting father-in-law, was a beekeeper. The farm down the road apiece had a big white barn, and oodles of pumpkins—u-pick! We had quite an adventure when Number One son managed to leave his boot behind in a mud puddle, but we truly enjoyed the positive energy that seemed to run through the place. We discovered why, when several years later, we met up with the man who owns the place, Farmer Erick, on a class field trip. A man of contagious energy, Erick put the kids to work, harvesting carrots and corn, and even gave them a sheaf of amaranth to take home. They dried its seed and planted it the next spring in the school garden. (I should mention that Erick also writes an entertaining and informative newsletter, to which I am addicted.)

Jubilee is a CSA, and I have seriously considered joining many times. Here it is subscription season again, and still I hesitate. It’s about as local as you can get, the produce is top-quality, organic—and headed to biodynamic this year. What more could I want? What’s holding me back? It’s the way we eat.

We tried a CSA-type delivery service for several months a few years back, and it was a disappointment for us. Because of our rotation diet and snacking habits, I need two meals’ worth of potatoes, 6 heads of lettuce, and around 6 pounds of apples/bananas/oranges a week. And I need that every week—no exceptions. While our share gave us plenty of vegetables for a family of four, I was still having to shop for the staples in our diet nearly every week. My grocery bills skyrocketed, and it was dismaying to see the same produce in the co-op as in my box.

What’s more, just as my own garden started to produce things like lettuce and potatoes, the box started giving me the same things I was growing. This meant I had far more than I could use, and I ended up giving things away and composting perfectly good food. There was simply no advantage other than the feel-good factor of supporting my local farmer.

So our plan for this year is the same as the last few years: potatoes, snow peas and kale will go in the ground in the coming weeks, and we’ll keep looking for the most local sources for what we don’t grow (last year I didn’t buy any lettuce for 4 months!). And you can bet we’ll be back at Jubilee in the fall for pumpkins and whatever else they’re selling at their farm stand. And we’ll be sure to bring dry socks!

Trust funds

As I read books and watch videos about where our food comes from, it becomes evident to me that the driving force behind it is just plain greed. Huge, wealthy companies are squeezing everyone, from farmers to consumers in order to stuff their pockets fuller. It is easy to become discouraged, to feel that one person can't make a difference, that we are powerless to change things.

When Number One Son was but a wee babe, we joined a group of mothers and toddlers. It was wonderful to feel part of something. As years passed, we brought many a meal to welcome a new baby or support an ailing family member--we even cleaned house for one mom on three months' bed rest. One of our members suggested a babysitting co-op as a natural extension of this good will. We all agreed it would be ideal to have a trusted friend to watch our kid, not just in dire straits, but for such luxuries as a teeth cleaning or an evening out with our husbands.

The first step involved distributing coupons representing 1/2 hour of sitting, ten per person, a kind of currency for sitting. When you sat, you earned, when you dropped your kid off, you paid. Sounds simple, but as it turned out, the formalization spelled doom. Too many moms 'spent' their coupons, and then dropped out, leaving the rest with handfuls of useless scrip. The co-op fizzled, and mistrust poisoned the group.

Fast forward to the present day: we are part of a small school community, where no such formal system exists. Yet our kids--for we see ourselves as the villagers who must raise them--are constantly in motion between families, passed hand to hand with small-town casualness and trust. After one particularly harrowing experience that landed me in the hospital for five days, it took a series of calls, from friend to friend to locate my little boy, well-fed and playing happily at a friend's home.

My heart is warmed by this community, a rarity in this world. We all trust that it will even out in the end, and certainly no one is keeping score. If one of us drives more than the other, we are still content, for we're making it one less car on the road. We all win.

I am encouraged when I see small signs of this kind of trust and calculated abandonment of greed. The paper tells me about a café in Kirkland, Terra Bite Lounge, where the menu bears no prices. You pay what you feel the meal was worth, and as you are able. The owner isn't worried about getting stiffed--his vision is based on trust, not greed. It all evens out in the end.

The CEO of Whole Foods announced that beginning this year, his salary will be $1/year. He states simply, "The tremendous success of Whole Foods Market has provided me with far more money than I ever dreamed of and far more than is necessary for either my financial security or personal happiness." And he's working to spread his gospel of conscious capitalism.

The unfortunate reality is that we live in a world driven by money, especially big money. But that doesn't mean we can't do the right thing. Many voices remind us that we can vote with our dollars, and not enough of us do. But I think we can do even more by not opening our wallets to begin with, but by opening our hearts and homes.

The IRS doesn't care much for this kind of attitude, as it leaves less for the taxman. But if you look at the grand scheme of things, we wouldn't need as much government funding--at least for peaceful pursuits--if we were watching out for each other instead of watching the bottom line.

It all evens out in the end.

Balsamsuppe

Number One Son woke with a fever this morning, just in time to miss his best friend's birthday party (ice skating!). Adding insult to injury, not only is his head splitting, but it's the beginning of midwinter break. It seems this always happens to him: when he had chicken pox, he broke out Friday after school, scratched for a week, and the last pox healed up the following Sunday, just in time for him to return to school. Poor kid.

I reach into the larder for the making s for yet another batch of magic chicken soup. Magic for the sparkles (the oil droplets glistening on the surface), magic for the word noodles (colorful alphabet pasta), and magic for the love.


Next to my jar of magic noodles is a packet of instant soup I picked up from the health store in Germany (they call it a Reformhaus, which I think makes it sound like a place for recovering addicts). The mix is for Kerbelcremesuppe, chervil cream soup, a delicate, elegant, summer garden-party kind of soup, and one of my favorites. The label reads, in part:

Die Suppe gehört nicht nur zu den beliebtesten Lebensmitteln; eine gute Suppe kann auch Balsam für die Seele sein. (Soup is not just one of the most popular foods; it can also be balm for the soul.)

I couldn't agree more, and Number One is clearly more chipper for it.

The lost art of leftovers

My Dear Husband is feverish with germs inherited from Little One, who is so tired he fell asleep on the sofa, and Number One Son has a school play tonight. I'm barely hanging on, too frazzled from quasi-single parenting to create anything resembling a culinary masterpiece tonight.

The 'normal' thing to do on a day like this is to send out for pizza or grab something from a supermarket deli, but the last thing I want to do is get in the car again. My mother, a child of the Depression, whispers in my ear (all the way from her home in California--how does she do that?), "waste not, want not!"

All right, then, leftovers it is. The fridge yields two-ish servings of salmon and rice, some spaghetti and red sauce, a container of Rotkohl (passes the smell test), a handful of raw curly kale, and one boiled red potato. The kale and potato are chopped and tossed into the frying pan, the rest line up for their turn in the microwave.

I reflect on how amazing it is that in one short generation we have gone from our parents' forced frugality: my parents lived--and starved--through the Depression, my husband's through World War II in Britain and Germany, to this time of so much food being wasted that municipalities are beginning to recognize it as a problem. Sampling resources online, anywhere from 10% to nearly 30% of the residential waste stream in this country is food. Our city has contracted with the garbage company to provide little food waste buckets for our kitchen counters. The contents are composted along with our yard waste.

It is especially appalling when I consider how much easier it is to reheat leftovers now than the few (short?) years ago, before microwaves. I recall one evening when my parents were going out, leaving me and my brother to fend for ourselves (this was considered normal, responsible parenting back then). Mom provided what she thought were simple instructions for reheating our dinner, leftover shrimp Newburg. The rice and shrimp went in a double-boiler: all we had to do was bring the water to a boil, set the timer for 20 minutes, and eat it. Sounds simple, but we were very literal, not understanding that we needed to turn the burner down once the water started boiling. Predictably, we got distracted, and didn't notice the the lower part of the pot had boiled dry until it had actually melted down, resulting in a Leaning Tower of double boiler and a horrid acrid smell. My brother bravely took the whole thing outside at arm's length and hosed it down. After the burner had cooled (approximately the time it took to make and eat peanut butter and jam sandwiches for supper), we peeled the aluminum pot bottom off like so much foil.

We had a good, if funky, menu last night. I know the food was good, for I made it myself, just not last night. There is still one portion of spaghetti leftover, which will make a very nice lunch for a little boy who is still young enough to love noodles more than girls.

Resourcefulness

One of the things a restaurateur must do is something they call sourcing. It corresponds roughly with what you and I would call deciding where to go shopping. When a new restaurant opens, they need to find sources for the ingredients needed for their menu, along with other sundries used in their kitchens and restaurants. It’s not unlike moving to a new town, and trying to find a new school, mechanic, doctor, etc. And it involves, predictably, making a myriad of choices.

Much has been written about the psychology of choice. Even though we’re told that choice is good, it can be absolutely paralyzing and does not necessarily lead to happiness. People tend to either overanalyze and be unhappy with their choice, or just make any choice and decide to be happy about it. Interestingly, we can choose behaviors that will lead us to feel better.

The average supermarket contains about 45,000 SKU’s (Stock Keeping Units, part of the data management system supermarket management uses to track inventory and billables). That huge number translates into a lot of choices for a hungry person pushing a cart, or the archetypal harried mother and her melting-down toddler.

Clearly, we can’t consider every item on every trip. Psychologists would call that maximizing: identifying and analyzing every possible to choice to insure the best possible outcome. It’s paralyzing—a person would starve to death in the amount of time it takes to consider and compare 45,000 items.

Our primary coping habit is to develop shopping habits. Food marketers call this brand loyalty, and spend a great deal of money and effort designing catchy slogans and attractive logos to make sure you identify their brand as the one you can trust.

I used to shop at a regionally owned chain carrying national brands (which has since been swallowed by a national conglomerate), but over the years, my shopping habits have changed: I grew tired of wading through countless new labels and resets (that’s when the store rearranges things to get you to notice new products with wider margins). I now do almost all of my shopping at the local, member-owned co-op, where the vast majority of the objectionable ingredients and corporate injustices have already been weeded out.

We’ll call it sourcing for the sustainable home kitchen.

Do you believe?

The latest headline in the food world is an outbreak of salmonella, apparently traceable to peanut butter. Having had salmonellosis before (from a delicious flan in a Mexican restaurant), I can vouch that it’s terribly unpleasant. But I’m scratching my head. Salmonella is usually associated with eggs, which commonly harbor the bacteria, that haven’t been exposed to heat high enough to kill off the pathogen. That’s the reason you can’t get a soft-boiled egg in a greasy spoon anymore and fresh mayonnaise is off the menu in fine restaurants. It seems odd that a product that essentially contains one ingredient—peanuts—could be tainted.

A glance at Peter’s ingredients list tells me it contains roasted peanuts, sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (cottonseed and rapeseed) and salt. Hydrogenated oils are probably the most highly processed item on the list, made by adding hydrogen to liquid oils to make them solid. (At least that’s the common description; I can grasp making oil, but have no idea how you add a molecule of anything to a food.) Sugar is also highly processed, but neither of these ingredients are terribly prone to salmonella, which tends to prefer animal products. So, maybe it’s not the ingredients at all.

The product in question bears the label Peter Pan (of do you believe in peanut butter? fame), also sold under the name Great Value, and is manufactured by food giant ConAgra Foods—they apparently make all Peter Pan, but not all Great Value peanut butter. The affected jars all came from a single facility in Sylvester, Georgia (in “The Peanut Capital of the World”), The problem is national, affecting 228 people in 39 states, including states as far away as Alaska and Maine. It’s a fine example of how tangled the food supply web becomes at the food-as-a-commodity level.

My guess is that the FDA, now on site in Sylvester, will find bacteria at the plant: not associated with a type of food, but with the process as a whole. It’s unlikely that human hands touched any of the foodstuffs along the way, since harvesting and process are so completely automated. It may be something as simple as bird droppings contaminating part of a rapeseed field, entering the processing plant, which in turns distributes the bacteria among several thousands of jars destined for widespread distribution. The bacteria then propagate in jars of unrefrigerated peanut butter on stores’ and consumers’ shelves.

It is equally likely that results will be announced as inconclusive: between the time delays (the outbreak began in August of last year), and the political clout of large conglomerates, so vital to local economies in the South and elsewhere, the FDA will not be in a position to make any irrefutable statements, and the status quo will remain.