Trying something new...

Hello to all after some winter hibernation. Our Winter CSA started up recently, and I am thrilled to be back in the green(s). Oh, and in the tubers. Root veggies, that is. A few weeks ago, my share included some delicious spinach, a lettuce mix, some coveted cilantro, and a green known as mache (a dark green lettuce with a kind of sweet, nutty flavor). We’ve had some awesome salads at my house.

And, 3 lb of Jerusalem artichokes, a.k.a. sunchokes. I’ve never eaten this knobby little tuber before. I half-considered passing it up and just grabbing my greens and heading home. But, my curiosity won out and I decided I’d give them a try. I had to pull out my vegetable bible, The Victory Garden Cookbook. I decided I’d try the Jerusalem Artichoke Soup, since the author Marion Morash claims it is her husband Russ’ favorite choke recipe.

A golden opportunity presented itself when all three of my children were elsewhere for a Saturday evening. They are fine eaters, mind you, but Jerusalem artichoke soup is pushing it even for them. I spent no small amount of time peeling those sunchokes, so I was really hoping I could trust Russ on this one and the soup would be a hit with my husband and me.

And, oh my. It was wonderful. Really tasty. The beauty of belonging to a CSA is that often those gardeners spring something new on you – I have to admit I probably wouldn’t have picked up those sunchokes on my own! Now I’m a fan. And if you’re wondering why they call them Jerusalem artichokes, well, according to Marian, they never came from Jerusalem and they aren’t related to the globe artichoke, though they do taste a bit like them.

Coincidentally, I was reading an article called “The Best Antiaging Foods You’re Not Eating Enough of” in the April issue of More Magazine. Guess what was #10? Yep, sunchokes. Apparently, they’re packed with vitamins A and B, potassium, iron, calcium, and magnesium. A win:win. If you’re looking for the next anti-aging big thing (okay, I’m pushing it), here’s the recipe for the soup. Enjoy!

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup (The Victory Garden Cookbook, Marian Morash)

1 lb. Jerusalem artichokes
Lemon juice
1 medium onion
2 stalks celery
1 leek
2 tbsp butter

1 ½ tbsp flour

3 cups chicken broth

1 cup cream

salt and pepper

½ cup sour cream

Wash, peel, and coarsely dice chokes, dropping them into water acidulated with 2 tbsp lemon juice as you prepare them (this keeps the chokes from turning brown). Chop onion, celery, and leek and cook in butter over low to medium heat for 10 minutes, or until softened. Sprinkle on flour and cook, stirring, for 3 – 5 minutes. Add chokes (remove from lemon water right before adding) and broth and bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for 15 – 20 minutes or until the vegetables are tender. Puree mixture in a blender or processor, and return to saucepan. Add cream and reheat. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice to taste, and serve with a spoonful of sour cream on top.

Forget the food miles argument

Can we just lay the whole food miles argument to rest? Food miles is not a primary reason to eat locally.

A new study, Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States, published this past Wednesday by the journal Environmental Science & Technology reports that the type of food you eat and the manner in which it is produced are more important components of its contribution to your carbon footprint than the distance that food travelled to get to you:

The [greenhouse gas] emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s footprint for food consumption.

Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.

Buy local because it's fresher and tastes better. Buy local to support farmers in your area. Buy local because you want to know how your food was produced. But to lower your food's impact on the environment, shift to sustainably-produced foods and to a diet focussed more heavily on plants than animal products.

NYT on the coming food crisis: Bad policy & bad luck

There's a great Op-Ed in today's New York Times on the reasons behind the coming food crisis.  Paul Krugman talks about bad policy (the focus on using grains to produce biofuels, the war in Iraq), bad luck (a combination of weather-related factors that have conspired to cut the grain supply worldwide), and a complacency about long-term trends (the increasing tendency of third-world countries to prefer a western, meat-based diet) as the causes of restricted global food supplies.

His conclusion? Cheap food may be a thing of the past.

Food miles is not the issue

Or at least not the only issue, or the most crucial issue. It's one small part of the greater picture of eating locally and an even smaller part of the question of global climate change. As Michael Specter points out in this month's New Yorker, in an article on carbon footprinting entitled Big Foot:

"Food carries enormous symbolic power, so the concept of “food miles”—the distance a product travels from the farm to your home—is often used as a kind of shorthand to talk about climate change in general."

But that symbolic power doesn't automatically translate into importance in the big picture.

“People should stop talking about food miles,” Adrian Williams told [Specter]. “It’s a foolish concept: provincial, damaging, and simplistic.” Williams is an agricultural researcher in the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England. He has been commissioned by the British government to analyze the relative environmental impacts of a number of foods. “The idea that a product travels a certain distance and is therefore worse than one you raised nearby—well, it’s just idiotic,” he said. “It doesn’t take into consideration the land use, the type of transportation, the weather, or even the season. Potatoes you buy in winter, of course, have a far higher environmental ticket than if you were to buy them in August.”

I agree. Food miles is not the issue. Other things being equal, it's better for food to travel less. But things are seldom truly equal. We can grow tomatoes here in Ohio in the dead of winter, but it takes energy to keep them warm and well-lit enough. So in February is a local hothouse tomato necessarily less impactful than one shipped in from California?

Of course, who wants to eat hothouse OR shippable tomatoes? I'll wait for August, thanks!