It has been a few years since I’ve done a really close examination of how much of our food we’re producing/getting locally/getting from elsewhere.  In that time, some things have changed at our place – some of our fruit trees have begun producing, we’ve gotten more and different livestock, we’ve built relationships with some new sources.  On the other hand, foster children have meant we are required to provide some purchased milk and other items we didn’t buy previously, and we also have been the beneficiaries of a lot of things given to us by our dumpster-diving buddy.

I think it is time for me to sit down and figure out what we’re eating and where it is coming from in a consistent way, and I’d like to invite others to do so too.   Many years ago, Aaron Newton and I imagined “The Bullseye Diet” as a revision of the then-popular “100 Mile Diet” to help people think about how to bring the local into their diets – you start with the 50 yard diet (from your back steps or your kitchen garden) and move out from there.  The goal is to get most of your food from the inner rings – and to rely on the outer as much as possible for luxury items, rather than things you really depend on.

Different people in different places will have very different abilities to do this – and that’s fine, this isn’t a competition.  What it is is a chance for us all to compare notes on how much food we can produce on our own properties and how much we can forage and buy from nearby – and where exactly it is coming from.  By pulling together regional information and how big our personal land bases are, we can get a sense of what, say, urbanites in Pheonix or suburban dwellers outside Sheboygan can grow, and what an emergent local food culture really looks like.

I’d like to invite you to join me, starting April 1, in keeping track of how much you are producing, and where the food you aren’t producing is coming from.  Over the course of a year, with monthly self-analysis, we’ll take a look at what we local eaters are actually eating, where we’re getting it, what we can change and what needs work.  We know that the local food movement has made enormous progress over the last few years, but how much in any given region is hard to quantify, and few regions have full local food evaluations.  This isn’t that – but it is a start at collecting experiences.

It shouldn’t be too onerous to track – most of us can quickly note where our meals are coming from – and again, this is not about competing. Instead, we need to think about what would happen if we couldn’t buy everything we wanted – and  tbe first steps in that are taking a good hard look at what we are really eating.  But not just a hard look – this is a chance to look with pride and joy at all we’ve accomplished both personally and as communities.  It is a chance to show off what we’re eating, and the delicious, local meals we’re producing.  To ask ourselves about substitutes for things we buy from far away and to share our collective wisdom at finding new resources and new ways to include more vibrant local food in our diets.

Anyone in?

Sharon

In some ways, the last month has been further disappointing – nearly non-stop rain has meant that even farms that didn’t lose crops to the tropical storms have lost some of their usual produce – for example, my usual source for fall raspberries in quantity lost everything.  Another source has had so much mold and mildew due to the rain that they aren’t picking either, so it looks like no raspberry jam this year.  Fortunately, we had a great year for blackberries and peaches, but raspberry was everyone’s favorite.

In other ways, there have been some heartening developments.  Several local farms have done the work of sourcing fairly local produce from farms in the region.  While the prices are up (they have to buy it), I can get bulk peppers, sweet potatoes and onions.  Some of the farms did have some crops in for the year before Irene and Lee, so while they lost all their field crops, they do have carrots, potatoes and garlic in some quantity – so one answer is more of what they do have.  Another is that in a minor crisis (and this is not minor here, but it isn’t a region-wide food failure without the capacity to transport food around either), I can rely on my local farms to source food for the customers from other farms in the larger region.  So I can add to my pantry most fall staples.

There will be some major gaps in my pantry this year – very few tomato products, and no salsa at all (Next year I’ll remember to mix it up more – I had decided I’d do all the whole tomatoes and sauce first and then the salsa when the hot peppers were riper, but that wasn’t such a terrific plan,  Definitely one of those live and learn things.

Despite being under 3 feet of water, the one really flood proof warm weather crop I did have were the tomatillos – astonishingly (given that they are more adapted to heat and drought), they’ve continued to grow unabated, where pretty much everything else but the greens drowned, rotted, succumbed to fungal disease, burned down or fell into the swamp (there is something Monty Pythonish about the ways that plants succumbed).  So along with some greens, we’ll have a lot of salsa verde and carmelized tomatillo jam.  This will definitely take up a larger role in our diets this year.

Turnips mostly survived, so we’ll eat more of those as well.  We had a good quince year, our best ever, and many local farms do have apples, so apple-quince sauce and quince jam and paste will also take center stage instead of standing towards the back.

We’ve fortunately got hay put aside, but no corn for our livestock or for us. I have some pop and grinding corn left over, and the corn stalks have fed goats and rabbits so it isn’t a total loss, but still, we’ll be buying more feed this winter than I like.

There are two implicit questions here – what will I eat this winter, and what would I eat in a disaster that meant we couldn’t bring in what we had.  The answer to both is “more of what there is” – but it would be vastly harder to adapt to in the case of an inability to bring in crops from further away.  We keep enough stored food to be able to eat all winter, but we’d grieve the lack of many of our usual root cellared staples that make that diet more appealing, and to the preserved foods that give brightness, spice and pleasure.  Still, we would eat.

To me, this emphasizes the central importance of both food production and food storage – any of us may see crop or even whole garden/farm failures in any given year, and none of us can be 100% sure that we will be able to replace what we have lost.  Food storage gives us leeway, and the option of keeping everyone fed.  Food preservation allows us to take what is abundant (and something is always abundant in even the worst years) and use it to supplement and rebuild food stores, in case not everything is abundant.\

The other thing I have learned to this is to assume less – I did not rush when the cucumber became available because ordinarily, I have another month of pickling.  I could have canned more tomatoes, put up more of the rhubarb, harvested some of the corn before the storm and dried it indoors.  Hindsight, of course, is always clear – but it will remind me next year, and as I fill my root cellar not to take for granted the idea that next month’s gleanings will be there.

I think my family has never had such an acute lesson on the importance of food storage, of keeping up with the preservation and making good use of all we have, and of appreciation of what is ordinarily available.  We are lucky – we can replace some of what is lost.  People in my region benefit both from the networks of farms that allow us to reach out a bit further from our local circle and also from the fact that we don’t, as yet, HAVE to rely on local food.  It gives us time to strengthen and build for a day when we may.

Sharon

The cold weather experienced across much of the US in early February made its way deep into Mexico and early reports estimate 80-100 percent crop losses which are having an immediate impact on prices at US grocery stores with more volatility to come.

And it isn’t just Mexico – the freeze damage in Florida is also having an impact on produce prices – and will for some time to come.

This is just one more reason not to rely on far away places to feed you – and that means adapting a diet suitable to your own climate.  Do you miss cucumbers in February in upstate NY?  Sure.  Do you need them?  Not when you’ve got:

Apples, carrots, parsnips, onions, garlic, squash, sweet potatoes, sprouts, scallions, arugula, celery root, beets, potatoes as well as other fruits and vegetables preserved in various ways.   The world is full of reminders that while it is a good thing to be able to go outside your region when you need to, need and want aren’t the same.

Sharon

.

This blog will be quiet for a bit, while we enjoy the rebirth of the cycle of light and darkness, and relax in the quiet time of the winter. For those of you celebrating Christmas and Yule and the Solstice and other celebrations of rebirth, I wish you a good holiday. And as we go into this time of feasting, I hope each of us will think hard about what our role in averting hunger can be in the new year.

Some of us will plant gardens, or expand the ones we have. Some of us might start selling a little our extras, or a little more food. Some of us may volunteer with local food security programs or poverty abatement groups. Perhaps we’ll give talks at our local church, synagogue, mosque, temple, community center or farmer’s market about local food and food security. Perhaps we’ll bring food to a neighbor and let them taste the lush glory of local eating.

Maybe we’ll start a farmer’s market or a coop. Maybe we’ll talk to a neighbor or three about the importance of local food systems. Maybe we’ll run for zoning board and change that rule about backyard chickens. Maybe we’ll get some chickens this year, or rabbits or worms or bees. Maybe we’ll work on preserving open space for the animals already here on the planet.

Maybe we’ll join Seed Savers, pick out a single variety, and commit to maintaining it in perpetuity so that it doesn’t disappear from the earth. Maybe we’ll grow a new crop, or more of it, and donate to our food pantry or a local low income family. Maybe we’ll make a donation to the Heifer fund or another charity that supports local food systems. Maybe we’ll give a little more, and live with a little less and be happy.

Maybe we’ll buy more local food, and less from the supermarket. Maybe we’ll encourage our local schools or restaurants to buy from local farmers. Maybe someone will start a seed company, microbrewery or a CSA. Maybe we’ll get our town to plant fruit and nut trees instead of regular street trees, or start a permaculture forest garden. Maybe we’ll start a Victory Garden campaign in our town, city, state… Maybe we’ll start thinking of “Victory” as not something you get from war, but from a world where no one goes hungry.

Maybe we’ll learn to cook something new from scratch, or teach someone else how to cook staple foods. Maybe we’ll do something to promulgate the joys of a really local diet, or explain the problems of CAFO meat and industrial agriculture to someone who doesn’t understand. Maybe someone will run for office, and change agricultural policy in your region. Maybe we’ll feast gloriously, and eat a little lower on the food chain the rest of the time.

Maybe we’ll can or dehydrate something this year, ferment or preserve something we’ve never tried. Maybe we’ll teach a neighbor, a friend, a school class how to put up food, or how to forage. Maybe we’ll get our kids to eat the kale this year, even if we have to disguise it somehow. Maybe we’ll get our spouse to eat it too.

Maybe we’ll build soil, add organic matter, and sequester some carbon this year. Maybe this year will be the one we give up the chemicals, or the gas powered tools. Maybe this year we’ll stop treating the earth like dirt.

Maybe we’ll do what we’ve been doing all along, only more and harder, because we understand what is at stake. Maybe we’ll take on a new project, marshall our time and energy a little better. Maybe we’ll start tentatively and gain confidence, or take courage and go further with this than we ever have. Maybe one of us will make a difference, or all of us will.

Remember, there are moments that are dark – it isn’t just seeming. But the light comes back every year, and it can come back in the face of any darkness.  And like the light, we come back renewed as well.

Sharon

But that does leave the question open – what the heck are the other 200 million Americans going to do (actually, more like 210)?  Don’t they have a role in our food system too?  Aren’t we mean to have left all of them out?  Well, you’ve got to give us a little bit of a break – some are infants and toddlers or too ill to really get involved, but there’s still a lot of people left out.  Our suggestion was that we also needed 200 million home cooks – because, after all, who is going to cook all this fresh produce?  In a society where most foods people eat are processed, who does the cooking?

But we’ve got an additional plan for anyone out there who feels that simply by calling on you to cook from scratch and grow food, we didn’t give you enough jobs, or for those who don’t want to be farmers, but who still feel they have a role to play.  This is very clearly articulated in an article by Jeff Nield who points out that most of us are still eating some pre-made, processed foods,  rather than making everything from scratch and thus, there’s a big gap in our market for food processors using local ingredients.  Nield is speaking about larger scale processors, and he argues that it doesn’t make sense for those companies to focus solely on local markets:

If diversity is a key to success for small- and medium-scale farmers, it would make sense that the same principal is equally important to a processing industry that relies on those farms for raw materials.

“It brings a great opportunity, of course, when you talk about being able to source unique and different foodstuffs within different regions within the province, but the problem of course then is scale, right, because those companies have a difficult time moving up and exporting and serving larger markets,” Eto points out.

Which begs the question, is it possible, or even desirable, to bring a local, processed product to market solely to supply the local market? Probably not. This approach may work for perishable staples like dairy, meat and eggs, but the average person can only eat so much jam, salad dressing and potato chips. With shelf staples like these, the obvious business case is to capture the largest market share, beyond any defined local boundary.

But with the current consumer shift towards local food, any product with a locally sourced ingredient list would presumably have an automatic market that would at least try the product once, says Walker. The hard part is getting these products out there in the first place.

This may not be true for factory-scale production, but it is true for the kind of small producer that many of us could be – and this is a useful reminder that if other people are willing to pay for someone to transform food from its natural state to a more complex one, here are jobs for many of us.  We need a lot more small scale producers, particularly producers that build on local agriculture, making good use of the things that grow well in your climate.

It is unlikely that we will entirely shift away from a people who like to be able to pick something up on the way home to a people who cook everything straight from the rutabaga, as it were.  That’s ok – most places in the world have a bustling local economy made up of small scale food producers, snack stands,  street food, etc…  most of it delicious.  This can be a viable way to make a living – and a viable way to serve a clear and identified need in your community. 

This hampered by the lack of commercial kitchens. In most states, home kitchens are insufficient for the production of most food products.   Moderate scale production things like jam, bread, casseroles, sandwiches, healthy snack foods, etc… is marred by the fact that most of us can’t get a place to make them.  So one of the things we desperately need is a larger amount of public infrastructure for small producers.  And many of us could enable this process – your church, school, community center may already have a commercial kitchen, and leasing it out might be a fairly simple process.  Otherwise, you might get it certified.

 In most states, there are also quite a lot of people violating these laws regularly – and it may be both remunerative and effective for you to consider violating these laws.  Right now, there are restaurants being run out of people’s living rooms, immigrants producing their traditional foods in uncertified kitchens, and Amish women selling pie out of their kitchens.  The lack of inspection does raise risks of food borne illness – of course, so does the lack of inspection in your office kitchen, the lack of inspection in your mother’s kitchen…   Such covert enterprises may be worthwhile, or not.

Some states, like mine, allow home kitchens to be inspected and certified for small-scale food production, below a certain amount of sales – if this is not the case in your state, you might lobby for such a change.  Or we might all lobby for the right of small scale producers to produce low-risk foods at home – it is awfully hard to poison someone with most baked goods, for example – you have to work at it.

There are also oppportunities to be had in distribution – being the person who drives your neighbor’s eggs and produce into the place you work to sell is one possibility.  A less commercial oen, but with considerable benefits is what the couple we stayed with in Charlottesvillle, VA are doing – their home is the site for their cow-share pickup and has in the past been the site of their CSA pickup.  They derive strong community benefits from being the site of food distribution, and they often get extra produce or dairy products if a member doesn’t come to pick up their share.

I know that you were worried that you wouldn’t have enough to do in the post-peak world, particularly if you decided not to be a farmer.  Now, I can reassure you – there are plenty of jobs to be done, and many of them allow you to get your hands into the food system as small scale processers and distributors.  Cool, eh?

Sharon

They are as much part of the Middle Eastern diet as hummus and olive oil, but the rocketing price of tomatoes has led many families to treat them as an expensive delicacy.

The cost of a kilogram of the usually ubiquitous red fruit has risen seven- or eightfold in Israel and Palestine in the past month as a result of the scorching summer, with some retailers charging up to 14 or 15 shekels (around £2.50).

“People are still buying tomatoes but they are buying fewer of them,” said one Jerusalem retailer. “I am hoping the price will drop soon.”

The Israeli government has waived taxes on imported tomatoes for the rest of the year to help counter shortages resulting from the unusual heat.

The exemption applies to 4,000 tonnes of the fruit, mainly from the Netherlands.

The crisis is easing as a new crop of tomatoes, grown after the intense heat of the summer, are coming on to the market, said an Israeli ministry of agriculture spokeswoman. “One of the problems has been that tomatoes don’t last long once ripe,” she said.

According to Gidon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Middle East, “We’re seeing the impact of global warming. We can see real changes having to take place on how we grow food for our basic dietary needs.”

One of the things that I think is important to remember is that foods are not automatically interchangeable – consider how you’d feel if your bread or potatoes or rice were replaced with Cassava tomorrow and someone said “well, they are all nice, filling starches…”  People are passionate about their major foods, and it is worth noting the way that those disruptions undermine a sense of stability, even if there is enough overall food.

Sharon

In a year, despite food stamps and other resources, the USDA reports that 17 million Americans went hungry.  One out of every *FIVE* children went hungry last year – a jump from one in six last year.  Child hunger is increasing dramatically, much faster than adult hunger.  In some states in the midwest, including Ohio and Illinois, the numbers were one out of three.  Think about that – about the fact that in the middle of the densest stands of calories in the world, one out of every three kids in a classroom goes hungry.  Half a million children are frequently hungry.

For those who think that the food crisis is over, or somehow conveniently far away, this should be a reminder that it is present, and it is now.  The hunger numbers have been going up steadily since 2007 – and we mostly pay attention at the holidays.  But annual attention isn’t enough anymore – we have to pay attention all the time.

We have spent trillions bailing out the banks, and stimulating the stock market – while we have failed miserably to provide for the most basic needs of our citizenry – food, shelter, health care, protection of the elderly and disabled, a defensive military.  This is what government is for – not to micromanage the banks, not to remove risk from those best able to bear it.  But we’ve abdicated our real responsibilities.

I’m fortunate in that I write to people who, if they can’t make their government act, know how to act themselves.  We’re going to need more gardens, more cooking teachers, more food preservers, more neighbors looking in on one another, more friends lending a helping hand – because someone has to pick up the slack when the government falls down.

Sharon

“That means in the working life of my children, more grain than ever produced since the Egyptians, more fish than eaten to date, more milk than from all the cows that have ever been milked on every frosty morning humankind has ever known.”

This is a brilliant quote, and stunningly evocative way of making clear how acute the problem is.  I hope that it does effectively bring home how large the question of our food security is – because I think most people in the developed world see food as largely trivial.  Even movements towards better food tend to work under the assumption that someone (farmers) will take care of providing better, safer food for us, if we simply “create demand.”  Thus we set ourselves up as baby birds, mouths wide open, waiting for someone to provide our needs. 

I would put the problem a little differently than Clark does, however.  Because while the quantities of food needed to sustain our population, even in the best case scenario, where we gradually bring that population down, are astounding, in some ways, that’s a secondary project – the primary one will be the pursuit of justice.

Aaron and I wrote _A Nation of Farmers_ to try and help end the baby-bird view of agriculture.  We argued that the days of agriculture as something we are not participants in, except perhaps as “consumers” are now over.  And one of the central questions we asked was whether we could in fact, feed a world of nine billion people.  The answer was a tentative yes -accepting that such a choice further degrades our ecology and can only exist in the context of a stabilizing population – that is, sooner or later we all starve to death if we don’t do something to continue and enable our demographic transition.

We presently grow enough food to feed 9 billion people.  That’s an astonishing realization for most people – that the world produces about double the number of calories we need.  That means that even if yields were stabilize, we could feed the coming population and gradually stabilize it (this is a large project obviously, and not my primary topic today, but we discuss it in ANOF), on just what we grow now.  The difficulty, of course, is that during the next 50 years, we are expecting radical reductions in our ability to grow food due toc climate change.  We can expect to see, for example, more than half of the 17% of the world’s irrigated land that provides 30% of the world’s grain harvest, taken out of production due the loss of water supplies.  For every 1 degree of temperature rise, rice yields fall by almost 15%.  Facing four degrees represents a disaster.  But it was more than just climate change that made us tentative about our ability to feed the world – it was the problem of justice. 

Our tentativeness wasn’t due to dependence on technological breakthroughs, or even fear of declining ability to do the work or make fertilizers in a depleted world.  Believe it or not, we don’t actually need any major technological breakthroughs to feed the world with minimal use of fossil fuels.  A lot of people assume that nitrogen fertilizers won’t have a substitute – but all those nitrogen fertilizers we’ve been using over the years are being recycled over and over, persistantly in human urine – we have all the high nitrogen fertilizer we will need, if we can tap it.  The same is true of rising prices for Potash and Phosphorus depletion – these problems have a solution – the fact that our bodies contain these minerals. Humanure, properly and safely composted at high temperatures, is a reasonably complete fertilizer.  Human and animal bones can continue to make up the difference.  We will have to return to a model of ashes to ashes and dust to dust, and do so with careful attention to the prevention of disease, but it is viable.

Nor do we doubt that human labor can replace fossil fuels – or rather, it can replace them in the appropriate model.  What has been found in the former Soviet Union and Cuba and in other places where fossil fuels suddenly become scarce is that small scale, diversified agriculture can match or exceed outputs – that is, the total amount of food, fiber and fertility produced by a small, diversified farm is generally more per acre, even if the yield of a single crop is lower – ie, a small farm might produce less total corn, but more total calories.  It won’t be easy to break up our largest industrial farms, or to shift our diets towards a wider range of crops, to develop truly local food systems, and to teach millions of developed world residents that they no longer have the option of acting like baby birds, that they have to take a role in their food system, but it can be done. 

We are not organic purists (that is, we both practice organic agriculture, but aren’t dogmatic about saying all farms need to be perfectly organic), but we recognize that the future of agriculture is much lower input than at present – and thus it is important to recognize that organic agriculture has kept pace in both yield and output with Green Revolution agriculture – that is, if we were dependent on fossil fuels for agriculture, we should see that organic yields haven’t risen along with chemical yields, but we haven’t seen that at all.   More importantly, there are two values to low input agriculture – where organic food is more expensive in the rich world, because of the high cost of human labor in relationship to cheap fossil fuels, in the poor world, the case is the opposite – one study found that even if yields were lowered overall, organic agriculture would result in less hunger, simply because people could afford more food that way.  If we imagine a world where fossil fuel prices eventually rise out of range of many people, we can expect to see this transition occur in the rich world.

Perhaps more importantly for the larger question of whether we can feed the world, organic agriculture, with its close attention to soil, has shown to be more resilient in times of stress – with fewer and fewer “normal” years for growing, and with farmers all over the world facing wild gyrations in weather patterns, it is of the utmost importance to emphasize good soil management and crop resilience – and soil conscious, small scale, low input agriculture generally exceeds the results of conventional agriculture in years of drought or flooding or other weather event.  These weather events will be the norm, not the exception as time goes on.

Along with organic agriculture, we have a number of tools that can at least soften the blow of climate change on our agriculture – there’s work to be done on the world’s soils, it is possible to shift crops in drying areas towards more drought tolerant ones, and perennial and woody agriculture offer crop possibilities we haven’t fully explored.  Climate change will be an enormous wild-card challenge to our ability to feed ourselves, no doubt – but it isn’t necessarily climate change that creates the deepest doubts.

But if we can manage yields in face of depletion, and if we can adapt our agriculture to climate change, we still face the deep root question of equity – and it is here where our hopes for a world without profound and chronic hunger across the board falter – because last year, when we crossed the 1 billion mark in the world, hungry and added 100 million people to the list of the starving, we had record harvests.

Think about that.  Last year, we did, at least for one year, grow more food than we ever have in human history.  And hunger still rose and overflowed, and millions died – most of them children. 

Why did they die and starve?  They died because we didn’t care enough about justice.  The UN FAO attributed 40-60% of the rise in hunger to biofuel growth – when cars and people compete for food, the cars win.  The rich world found a way to use their food to keep their oil addiction going, and we as a people said “screw the hungry.”  There’s simply no other way to read this – we knew that biofuels drove food prices up for the poor, and we burned them anyway.

Why else?  High meat consumption of livestock fed on grains – the average poor person eats virtually no meat, the average rich one eats eight times as much grain, mostly in the form of meat.  We care about the hungry, at least in principle, but not enough to stop eating factory farmed, grain fed meat and other animal products.

Other reasons include the rich world’s failure to make good on its pledges to help out the world’s poor in the food crisis – we promised money and then we backed out, because we were busy giving money to Goldman Sachs, who obviously needed it more than starving children.   There’s also the globalization-induced movement of large portions of the world’s rural population to cities, where they are dependent on grain markets.

There are plenty of other factors – poor management in the countries themselves, political issues, bad agricultural practice, lack of investment in the kind of crop research that would help – a whole host of them. But the majority of the factors simply come down to this – we don’t care enough about justice to actually feed the people we’ve got now, so why do we think we’re going to care later, as it gets harder?

There’s a really good reason to take up the banner of justice here – and that is this – we’ve already proved that most of the richest and most important people in the world don’t mind seeing people go hungry as long as it doesn’t interfere with their accumulation of wealth.  Having established that, why on earth would any of us think that they’ll mind seeing *us* go hungry? 

Unless we grasp that equity is the central issue here, we will see a world where more and more of “us” and more and more of “them” are hungry, and where the lines between us and them are badly blurred.  The good news is that we could decide that we care more about “them” than we do about other things, and focus *now* on justice, and on equity – on making sure that the world’s food goes ’round.

The truth is that in some ways, we’ve got the tools to handle the basic crisis of production – they aren’t easy tools to enact.  It isn’t easy to shift from a society where all you have to do is be a consumer to one where you have to be a producer.  It isn’t easy to accept that your diet and way of life have no future, and you have to change them.  It isn’t easy to learn to eat new foods, or grow them yourself.  It isn’t easy to change whole practices and economies around.  But in some ways, these projects pale against the giant project of creating a greater degree of human justice.

In the coming 50 years, in my life and my children’s  a great number of unfair, unjust things are going to happen to both the world’s poor and world’s “on their way to becoming poor” – we will be forced to flee the coastlines and the dryest parts of the world.  We will struggle to live with much less energy and fewer resources.  We will face crises we’ve never seen before.  We will struggle to keep up food yields, and to feed our world.  And nearly all of us, wherever we live in the world, will feel unfairly used – because, after all, none of us meant this to happen, it isn’t fair.

And it isn’t.  None of us individually made our situation.  But the only hope of having a decent and humane future is this – that we ally with our fellows – next to us and around the world, that we the future poor and the present poor tie our sense of injustice to the project of creating greater equity – of ensuring that food goes first to the hungry, of sheltering those who are most vulnerable, and of mitigating suffering as our central project.  Justice, justice shall you pursue.  And all the days of your life.

Sharon

“We harvested 37 pounds of onions, but despite my best efforts, some of them cured with soft spots where mold had gotten underneath the outer layers and would work its sway through the whole onion if we didn’t stop it.  So we had to cut up many onions and freeze teh good parts – or cook them.  All of which accounts for the fact that a year and a half after we arrived in Piermont, I found myself one morning cutting up a half-rotten onion to salvage, and realized that a year earlier ?I would have thrown the whole thing away.” Gussow, 103

And

“The lesson I take away from the realization that our crops will sometimes be drowned is not that those of us who live in the colder states can’t be relatively self-reliant; we can.  And although Alan and I would have been wise to choose higher ground, I’ve seen no sensible agricultural scenario that suggests that anything can be done to insulate food production from the vagaries of nature.  If we wish to feed ourselves from our own regions, and allow others to do the same, we will need to try and adjust our choices and our appetites to what Nature will provide in a given year.  We need accept the fact that in some years we won’t have al the potatoes and onions we want.  On the other hand, we will sometimes have more raspberries than we can eat, and the crops that succeed will be both safe and tasty.” Gussow, 107-108

Yesterday, I was reminded of this passage as I set myself to salvaging food from my garden.  In my case, it was my sunflowers and dry corn.  I’d noticed that blue jays after my sunflowers, but hadn’t seen that they’d gotten to the corn, too.  The sunflower damage seemed minimal when I checked a few days, so I optimistically elected to leave the sunflowers up a few more days, until our expected first hard frost down in the insulated lower garden.  This was a mistake, big time – yesterday, after our frost, I went out to gather the heads, only to find that most of them were very nearly empty.

Now this was non-trivial because those sunflowers are one of the ways I’m trying to minimize my dependence on the feed store and purchased grains – my chickens and turkeys will happily empty a head in a few minutes flat, and each seed reduces my grain costs.  The corn is an even bigger issue – this was food for us, a sweet grinding corn I love – there is no comparison with the bland cornmeal corns available most places.  Fortunately, the jays didn’t get the majority of the corn – but I was still out there, pulling any ear that had even a short row of kernels around it.

Ours was a tough garden year – we had over 20 inches of rain alone in June – you can tell the history of the year by my garden – I have two long areas that were planted in the lower garden after the beginning of July – these areas are flourishing. Everything else…well… there was a lot of salvage this year.  It doesn’t matter – we still cut the bird pecks out of the tomatoes, break off the slug damaged bush beans, eat the stunted vegetables, dehydrate potatoes or sweet potatoes too wet to store well.  It is food, and you don’t just waste it.

And this, I think, is a mindset that is worth getting into early on.  It would be easy to say “oh, it was a terrible crop, why bother.”  Or perhaps to say that the birds can have the last of the sunflower heads – after all, they are, we are told in the Torah, entitled to a share of the grain as well.  Fair enough, but now they’ve had their share, and I’m taking mine.  Even if it is imperfect.  Even if it wasn’t what I dreamed of.

The ability to make something of vegetables caught by frost, flooded, stunted by drought, partially eaten by some creature is one of our gifts – food preservation methods can mean that something that would otherwise have been lost can be saved – onions that won’t store well can be dehydrated or frozen, as Gussow points out.  Or new recipes arise for green tomato pickles, the outer leaves of cabbage and green pumpkin pie.  It is food, and you don’t waste it.

Today, in front of the woodstove, my children and I will draw back the husks of our corn, and hang it up to dry further in the house.  Most of the ears are full, some are not, but we will save what we can – because it is our food.  When we committed to growing it, we committed to this – that we will regard our food as primary.  I’ve no sorrow in buying to replace a lost crop, or to expand upon our gardens – that is normal and natural.  But if I grow it, and I possibly can, I will eat what I grow before I rely on other sources. 

It is hard to believe how differently people who live through food scarcity regard food – in some cultures, to tread on a piece of dropped bread is a sin, and a deep one.  In Elizabeth Erlich’s superb memoir of Jewish food, and of learning from her Holocaust survivor mother in law, she observes her mother using her thumb to ensure that every drop of egg white was removed from a shell, and when she enquires, her mother in law observes that her own father died of starvation – how could she ever waste food.

We are told that the only good and safe and healthy food is perfect – we are lied to and told that perfect looking is better for us, even if it has been doused with chemicals.  Up to 20% of all produce in the US is discarded and wasted simply because of cosmetic imperfections.  We thus lose the old habits of thrift and care, and the value that says “this is food, we do not let it go to waste.”

I don’t want to lose that. Asher came out with me to pick the corn, in a cold drizzle.  We picked the little ears and put them in bushel baskets.  We picked the big ones. He helped me spot the last few, and when he said “are we all done?” we didn’t stop until we were sure.  Not because I don’t want to feed the jays – but because it is food, and if I choose to feed the birds, it will be consciously, with intention, not because I let food, good food, go to waste.

Sharon

Now apples aren’t a small thing for us – Eli is addicted to apples, they are his favorite food, and we buy about 12 bushels of apples every year (our own trees are just coming into bearing, so this is on top of what we produce), as well as making some cider when we can borrow a press, out of the wild apples on our property.  We dry apples, sauce them, make apple butter, but mostly eat them out of hand.  When anyone says they are hungry in our house, the one thing you can always have is an apple.

We enjoy everything from the earliest Summer Transparents and Oldenbergs that start off the new season to the September gravensteins and cortlands, but for me, real apples begin in mid-October, when the Northern Spies and Roxbury Russets are ripe.  They are tart and crisp, and something about each bite says “more, more.”    Apples grow in other places, of course – New York is only the second largest producer in the US…but to me, apples are inextricably linked with the cold, rocky soil that I was born into in the Northeast.

Today we drove into an Amish neighborhood to find an orchard that mentioned that they have Esopus Spitzenberg apples – Bellinger orchards in Glen/Fultonville for them that are out my way, although I fear that this year, they no longer have Spitzenberg apples.  You see they had a bad year for that variety, and only a few trees, and I pretty much harvested the lot (it wasn’t that much, in defense of my greed ).  They have a winey taste to them, sweetness, crispness, and an underlying spice – there’s nothing not to love about them. 

My kids can gorge on Pound Sweets (the old fashioned sweets are much better than most sweet apples, more complex) and Baldwins to their hearts content, but I’m hiding my Spitzenbergs, and doling them as a reward to myself and my husband, to be eaten with homemade herbed goat cheese or had as a snack on a particularly productive day, when they are well earned.  My own Spitzenberg trees are still small, but I smile at them a lot, and pat them, give them a nice dose of goat manure and a lot of kind words in anticipation of the days to come. 

It is no accident that we still revere Johnny Appleseed, or that wherever european settlers went, the brought apples.  The apples were a long lasting touch of sweetness, that for some varieties, kept well into winter.  They were food for children who ate few sweets, and not enough fresh things all winter long.  Their juice was sweet and delicious when fresh, and a source of warming alchohol in winter.  The drops fattened pigs or sheep.   They were roasted over the fire at night, and sliced and hung in rings behind the stove to dry.  They were packed into the root cellar and made into pies for breakfast (I have enough old New England WASP in my blood to believe in the merits of pie for breakfast…or really any time ).  With a mug of beer or cider, a piece of cheese and a chunk of bread the made the perfect, portable, delicious lunch.

Apples are part of my project too – first of all, we eat so many we’d be crazy not to have them.  I read the names on our list, listing places, origins, stories of the past: Roxbury Russet, which came from a neighborhood in Boston near where I grew up; Yellow Transparent, the first apple of summer; Freedom, a new introduction that seems to be resistant to some apple diseases; Baldwin, the old classic apple before Mac, which I vastly prefer; Arkansas Black, which wears its name on its sleeve; Chestnut, a delicious crab cross, tiny and superb; Chenango Strawberry, fruity and tied to my own region; Wolf River, a huge apple from Wisconsin, English Pearmain – perhaps the oldest known apple still in cultivation; Sheepnose, which carries a description in its name…Greening, Winesap, Grimes Golden, Liberty, Lady, Ananas Reinett.

Moreover, our rabbits and goats eat the tree prunings, and the drops.  Sweet cider is our favorite drink, and apples the only fruit that I can get locally all winter long.  We grow other tree fruits and nuts, of course, but while apricots and peaches, quinces and plums please us, there is no other fruit that makes us sigh in delight this way, or whose complexities get discussed, whose favorites get praised and defended as apples do. 

The bags of Spies, Mutsus, Spitzenbergs, Sweets and Macouns came home, but they are only the beginning of our appling – from now until the end of the month, we will be apple foragers, buying from several of our neighbors who grow them, filling our root cellar with boxes of apples in anticipation of the days when the trees are bare and we long for the tang and sweet crunch of autumn.

Sharon