For those items that you can't find locally, it's great to find a source for organically-grown options that goes even a step beyond Fair-Trade. Benevolent Blends, run by Cistercian monks in Wisconsin as a way to support themselves, donates a portion of its profits to various charitable organizations.
Another excellent article from Food Democracy. Must reading for any consumer who wants to eat locally.
From the article:
Have we failed? No. We’ve provided income to hundreds of people and their families, produced the finest organic fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers available anywhere and fed thousands. We’ve shared bounty with the needy and pumped large sums of money back into our local economy. Even though farming has not been financially rewarding, we’ve lived a life of indulgence that few can embrace·the life on a farm. No price can be placed on living the miracle of the soil, walking fields each week and witnessing the effect of warm rains and steaming sun brining life and growth of luscious, healthy produce grown naturally in concert with nature.
From the excellent blog Food Democracy, Joel Salatin's article Sound Science is Killing Us is a bit on the long-and-dense side but worth plowing through.
From the article:
A diesel tractor can either pull an anhydrous-ammonia-fertilizer injector, or it can pull a manure spreader full of compost. It is the heart, the soul, the belief system that determines how technology will be used. Electricity can be used to power feed augers and ventilation fans, medication timers and artificial lights in a confinement poultry house, or it can power an energizer hooked to high-tech, information-dense, polyethylene-stainless-steel-threaded poultry netting in a pasture setting. The belief system defines the use.
Pattie over at Foodshed Planet has a great idea which I am shamelessly stealing: setting aside several days between Thanksgiving and Christmas to do nothing special at all. Accept no invitations, host no gatherings, attend no shows, plan no shopping trips or outings. Just a day to take a deep breath and enjoy being together during the holiday season. This is especially a great idea for me because my favorite winter meals require ongoing light supervision which keeps me at (or very near) home but not really busy.
Pattie calls them 'yellow days' because that's how she marks them out on her calendar, but I think I'm going to call them Home Days. I'm marking my calendar right now.
My indolence is fast becoming net-famous, with my rationale for choosing 'locavore' over 'localvore' ("reasons of simple laziness: it's easier for me to pronounce") being quoted by Language Log and Daylife. It seems locavore is still winning even though some folks fret about its unfortunate resemblance to 'locovore.' Which critics might use to imply we were crazy.
Really, is it any less likely critics will turn localvore into locovore? If people want to make fun of us I doubt they're going to stop and say, "Oh, but I can't turn 'localvore' into 'locovore.' There's an extra letter in there! Damn. So close."
The coiner of the term, Jessica Prentice, explains her reasons for choosing locavore over localvore here, noting that "if journalists wanted to question me on (the association with 'loco' as in crazy), it would be an opportunity to explain that what is really crazy is the amount of unnecessary importation and exportation of food that currently happens in our globalized food system."
William Moseley on SFGate.com condemns the locavore movement for hurting organic and fair-trade farmers in developing countries. It seems that supporting our neighbors is unfair to farmers in Chile and Africa who are depending on us.
Me, I'm prone to feeling liberal guilt. But it seems like some people are just plain greedy for that extra helping of it.
Thursday's turkeys are picked over and the carcasses in the freezer for stock. I have a lovely bunch of leeks from Boulder Belt Eco-Farm, picked up at the November Winter Market in Oxford the weekend before Thanksgiving along with carrots, celery, and garlic, so I decided to make Turk-a-leekie soup. Like Cockaleekie, only with turkey.
First I started the stock. Into my largest stockpot I put one of the turkey carcasses plus several bags of vegetable trimmings I've been saving for the past week or so -- some carrot tops, onion ends, a celery end, some garlic ends, and potato peelings. I save these trimmings as I prepare veggies from week to week and stick them into the freezer for stockmaking. Seems a shame to put a perfectly good carrot into my stockpot when I can just save the trimmings which would otherwise go to waste. I also added a couple of bay leaves, a few peppercorns, a piece of ginger, and some allspice berries. Bring to a boil, lower to simmer, and leave for a couple of hours.
In the meantime I started the veggies for the Turkaleekie. I heated some good homemade butter in my 6-quart soup pot, pressed a couple of garlic cloves, and sauteed them for a few minutes. I ground a lot of pepper in, diced my carrots and added those, then the celery and leeks and turned the heat to low. All the trimmed ends went into the stockpot to help out.
While the veggies sweated, I cut up turkey into medium dice and set it aside. When the veggies were tender, I added the turkey, covered the pot loosely, and set it into the fridge. Then I waited for my stock. I let it simmer for a couple of hours, then strained it into a bowl and added enough to the veggies and turkey just to cover and returned the pot to the simmer. For a bit of added interest I stirred in some hot sauce and a couple of spoonfuls of leftover mashed potatoes. I didn't need to add any salt, probably because the turkey had been brined prior to roasting. The resulting soup was rich and flavorful.
We served it with rye rolls that were purchased from a local baker, but I doubt the grain was local. But with local turkey, local butter, local garlic, carrots, celery, leeks, and potatoes, we're still calling this a 90% local meal.
TURK-A-LEEKIE
3 T butter
3 cloves garlic, pressed
2 C diced carrots
2 C diced celery
3 C leeks, halved lengthwise, cleaned well under running water, then sliced thin
3 C diced cooked turkey
4 - 8 C turkey stock
Dash of hot sauce (optional)
1 C leftover mashed potatoes (optional)
salt and pepper to taste
In a large pot, melt butter and saute garlic. Add carrots and saute briefly, then add celery and leeks and turn heat down to sweat vegetable until barely tender. Add turkey and stock and bring to a simmer. Add hot sauce and potatoes if desired and correct seasonings. If you aren't starting with good homemade stock, you may want to add a bouquet garni when you add the carrots. A good addition to this soup would be barley, potatoes, or wide noodles.
I had lots of stock still left, so I packaged that up for the freezer. I still have another turkey carcass, too, but as I used up all my veggie trimmings I'll probably wait a week or so before I make the second batch of stock.
Last night we had taco meat over baked potatoes and steamed broccoli. The ground beef, potatoes, garlic, onions, beef stock and broccoli were all local, so although the corn flour and most of the spices aren't, we think this qualifies as a 90% local meal. I wish I'd taken a photo, but we ate late and everyone was starving.
TACO TOPPING FOR BAKED POTATOES
This cool little mapping tool from the 100-Mile Diet site will let you enter your zip code and click to see a map centered on your zip with a 100-mile radius drawn on it.
There's an interesting post by Gary Paul Nabhan, one of the earliest proponents of local eating, in the must-read blog EatLocalChallenge. He offers suggestions on how to define local and regional foods:
1. Local means from a farm, ranch or fishing boat that is locally-owned and operated, using the management skills and the labor of local community members. A farm that is owned all or in part by an extra-local corporation, and which uses migrant workers who live outside the community does not benefit its community economically or culturally as much as it should.
2. A regional food is one that has been tied to the traditions of a particular landscape or seascape and its cultures for decades if not for centuries. If the same mix of mesclun greens is grown in greenhouses across the country and sold in every farmers market from Maine to New Mexico, it is more like a franchised product (from a seed company) than it is a local or regional food. Yes it may be produced five miles from your home and thereby reduce food miles, but its seeds are not saved and adapted to local or regional conditions, they are bought from afar every year.
3. The miles a food travels (“food miles”) must be placed in the size and volume of the mode of transport, its source of fuel, and its frequency of travel. Using biodiesel in a larger truck may be more efficient, and leave less of a carbon footprint than using leaded gas in an old clunker. One in every five kilocalories in the American food production and delivery system now underwrites transportation, as well as packaging and cooling while in transit, so this will be an increasingly important issue to solve by using alternative fuels, cost-efficient volumes, and ensuring that vehicles holding their full capacity in both directions, perhaps by carrying compost back to farms where the vegetables originated.
4. On farm energy and water use matter. If a farm near Tucson Arizona is irrigated from a canal that transports Colorado River water hundreds of miles (and at high ecological cost to wild riverine species), or if it uses fossil groundwater set down during the Pleistocene pumped by fossil fuel set down in Iran during the Pennsylvanian era, what is to be gained by promoting its food?
5. Other on-farm inputs matter just as much. Where are the sources of hay for livestock, compost for garden crops or nitrogen for field crops? They should be locally if not regionally-sourced. Why call lamb locally-produced in Idaho when its flock has wintered part of the year in California and its hay comes in from southern Colorado?
6. Fair-trade with other cultures, localities and regions is fair game. Circumvent they globalized economy for the items you truly need from other regions by establishing fair-trade exchanges. It is not that we don’t care about farmers and ranchers elsewhere, we simply don’t wish to see middlemen gaining more of each consumer dollar than the producers do. Producers inevitably plow money back into their communities and lands, intermediaries seldom do.
7. Invest in the foods unique to your region that cannot or should not be grown anywhere else. The attached RAFT map (pdf) reminds us of ancient food traditions based on climate, soil and culture, involving both native and immigrant foods that have adapted and been integrated into particular places. Because the U.S. currently lacks the geographic indicators such as denominations of origin that reinforce the links between place, culture and genetics of a particular food, these place-based foods are truly threatened by globalization. Invest in them and their original stewards.
