The Emergent Agriculture--a review

There is not a lot that is new in Gary Kleppel's book The Emergent Agriculture: Farming, Sustainability, and the Return of the Local Economy. A cogent, well-reasoned take-down of industrial ag--but then, there's a herd of those, ranging from succinct to verbose (for the record, Kleppel is more towards the succinct end of the spectrum). A call for a more appropriate agriculture? Read that. An overview of New Ag farms? Nice, but seen that. 
Where Kleppel's book shines is in the discussion of  the new/old structures of how food moves from producer to consumer. And it should; Kleppel is himself both an academic and a farmer.
Antonio Gramsci described a group of people who, though members of the working class or the bourgeoisie, are an organically developed "thinking class" that "articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves." He called them "public intellectuals." There should be a name for those who, although they hold membership in the traditional academic intelligentsia, chose to immerse themselves in traditional forms of work. We need more of these two groups, and Gary Kleppel, professor of biology at SUNY Albany, is definitely in the latter group.
When trying to see the shape of a new way of living, a new societal paradigm, it helps to have the kind of training given to those who pursue an academic career. Such training helps one to see both the large view and the details. When your talking about agriculture, it really helps to have gotten your hands dirty.
When Kleppel talks about the new/old methods of marketing food, it helps that he's worked a farmer's market and participated in a CSA (community supported agriculture). When we grew food, it was quite clear that the place most farmers fell down was in the marketing of their products.
When farmers get $0.02 out of the sale price of a loaf of bread, the correct response is not to grow more wheat. The better response is to find ways to capture more of the profit from your production.
I kept saying that our customers didn't come for the vegetables as much as they came for the connection. They wanted the story. An example: We had a number of zucchini that were not straight, but curved around small scars in their skins. People hesitated to buy them until I pointed out that these scars came from our pesticide; chickens. The occasional peck at a bug would scar the zucchini skin, leaving it to heal slightly bent. The damage was quickly seen as a mark, not of failure, but of superiority. These were not perfect because of the type of farming we did.
These are the connections celebrated in Gary Kleppel's book; unmediated links between producer and consumer. But not every farmer is ready to be a farmer, an ecologist, and a marketer. This is an area that he misses--the role of the co-operative movement. Co-ops can fill the gap of missing abilities. Small cheesemakers. Farmer's supplying a group-owned store. While the future may play out the way The Emergent Agriculture suggest, it will also be more complex, more intricate, than it suggests. Good book, though.

“The rose speaks of love silently, in a language known only to the heart.”

I get depressed, sometimes. Reading about the industrial diet, the more I understand the fragility and corruption of the international food system digging into the structural problems of food production, all of these things can become overwhelming. I write with the desire to change things, but sometimes it feels like all my posts look the same:

The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.The system's broken. We're all gonna die.

I know that urban farms are springing up across North America, that Joel Salatin's leading the charge to more sustainable farming out east, Milkwood Permaculture is doing the same sort of thing down south, and hundreds of people are making moves towards a better tomorrow. There is hope. Really.
So a couple of days back I was thinking about what it says at the top of the page: Discussion of farm policy, food security, and food. With recipes. And as I walked the dog out in the park near where I'm currently living, I noticed that the feral rose bushes were covered in hips. My head was ping-ponging between the Depression of  the 1930s and the current state of affairs, and I had been considering differences in how people ate, then and now. So I came back a couple of hours later with both the dog and a jug and picked the rose hips at the top of the page.
They were in great shape:

As you can see, the hips had ripened and maximized their flesh (that little 0.3 mm thick layer between the skin and the seed package). I pulled the flower ends off each hip, tossed the hips in a pot, added a bit of water, and boiled them until they popped. After the hips had cooked down to mush, I strained the seeds and skins out of the pot, and began to boil the remainder down.
Once everything had begun to evaporate, I added a couple of cups of sugar, on my way to jam. the, wondering if I had any pectin in the house, I looked out the kitchen window, and spotted these:

There's the remains of a quince tree slowly being killed by a holly in the front yard. There was a fairly big (well, relatively big, for this tree, under these conditions) fruit visible from the window. When I went out, I found a small handful of the fruit.
Quince has an extensive history of use, but the one I was interested in comes from the fruit's high pectin content. I took the largest fruit, diced it up small, and tossed it into the jelly.
As the quince cooked in, I continued to intensify the jam. I had a few of those little tiny jam jars you get in hotels, so I cleaned them out, made sure the lids fit. And used them, and a larger two cup container, to hold the jam. I used the small ones because I know that I'm going to be asked for a sample of the rose hip jam, and these make perfect testers.
The jam is strongly scented, hasn't properly set (which is pretty normal, as far as I can tell. I've never seen/tasted rose hip jam that had fully set), and tastes somewhere between really great and inedible. It also has a slightly mealy texture.
I've made this before--the last time was more than twenty years back. This time, of the three ingredients, two were grown within 100 metres of here. If I had a beehive, this could have been the most local jam I've ever made. Probably still is.
This sort of thing helps. I love cooking, and making something like this jam reminds me that the earth would actually rather have us here. We serve an ecological purpose. We just have to remember that, and try to fit ourselves into the world, rather than demanding the world adapt to what we want. Now I just need to make some sourdough bread with local wheat flour.

Taste Of Edmonton

I'm in Edmonton this week, visiting family this week. And today was the opening of Taste of Edmonton, an annual event where local restaurants try and convince you that you should never eat anywhere else. So, on two sides of Churchill Square in downtown Edmonton, a double row of food stalls line the streets offering samples of two of their foods--a taste of either one should convince you that this is the restaurant in which you should spend your life.

Each food stall has a poster with their two features and a picture of the head chef. At Normand's Bistro (above) they were offering beef short ribs and mash or smoked bison carpaccio. As I seldom eat beef anymore and can seldom resist a piece of bison, I convinced my brother-in-law that we should try the smoked bison.

Very small plate. Bit of salad with a spiced oil/vinegar dressing. And three pieces of smoked bison.  The dressing was nice, but the bison was great. Excellent flavour and good texture; I just wanted a big chunk to rip and tear at with my teeth and wash it down with a strong red wine.

Kyoto was an easy choice--Canada maki. A salmon roe added colour and Bob snagged my wasabi after my sushi (below) disappeared in a single bite.

I loved the massive cauldron of Chicken Bhoona bubbling away. I'm a sucker for drama--especially when it involves food--but I didn't try the bhoona, just loved looking at the cauldron bubbling away. With my volunteering at the soup kitchen, this is a scale of cooking I can appreciate.

Bob tried the beef and wasabi slider, which was tasty, but the wasabi mayo was a little under-spiced.

 The Hat resto Bar looked interesting. I thought I'd look at the Mahi Mahi sliders.

 It was decided that I wasn't going to be allowed to leave with only one slider. I was supposed to eat two.

The sliders were really just filet o'fish reinterpreted by a chef. Excellent fish, battered, with a tartar mayo on a slider bun.  Two of these with a beer? Yeah, I'm down with that....

 Select was a last minute addition. I was getting pretty full in the day's heat, and was more interested in my nephews lemonade (lots of lemon, not too much sugar) than in eating something else. But Smoked Mac and Cheese with Boar Bacon?

 This is about the correct amount. Both the cheddar and the boar bacon were apple-wood smoked. Select offers the mac and cheese as a table serving--enough for everyone to get a small amount. That's a great idea. This was all I could reasonably eat before feeling my heart slow down. The boar bacon was terrific!

 Post exploration, my niece had to have her Chocolate-dipped Strawberries for dessert. I completely understood.

 There was a tonne of great flavours available for the tasting. And the day was perfect for it. There was a general agreement to use local products where available, but not to be restricted to local foods. Boar bacon, bison, beef, all these were local products. Bacon-wrapped scallops? Not so much. Nor was the mahi mahi. But the food I sampled was prepared with care and attention (of course, the sample was a bit self-selecting). All in all, a great time, and an interesting contrast to the local food fair at Peppers (just up the block from my home) the day before I left for the week.

Regulatory Kickstarter

Image via Wikipedia

The Christian Science Monitor has a report that California has joined thirty other states in encouraging micro-businesses.

Late last month, the California State Assembly passed new legislation that would assure legal status for small-scale cottage industries that sell baked goods and other "non-potentially hazardous" food items produced in home kitchens.

We're talking homemade cookies and brownies, jams, jellies, fruit pies, mixed nuts, flavored vinegars, dried teas, roasted coffee, and other yummy stuff that's already legal in more than 30 other states including Oregon, Washington, Texas, and Michigan, which have similar legislation in place.
Freshly signed by the governor last Friday, the California Homemade Food Act (AB1616) clears the way for home cooks in the world's eighth-largest economy to make and sell a wide range of products without the need to invest in commercial kitchen space or comply with the zoning and regulatory measures that govern larger producers and producers of meat and dairy products, specifically omitted from this law.

Gotta say, this makes me very happy. Locally we have an enormous number of fruits and berries growing on public property. Being able to buy jams and jellies and vinegars and such made within a couple of blocks of both where I live and where the fruit grew would be lovely. We bought honey last year that had been gathered within a mile of our house (the bees probably used the flowers in our yard). This is an excellent way to both make the food system more resilient and to give people a sense of community.

Samantha's Chocopops

From Samanthaschocopops

Had a chance on Saturday morning to try a small--entirely too small--sample of Samantha's Chocopops while having my morning cuppa. Nice chocolate, it went well with my chai, and wasn't over-flavoured or given too many weird inclusions. Samantha has a lovely selection, starts with good ingredients, and has a delightfully presented final product. And 10% of profits go to a local charity--until Valentine's Day, that's Cystic Fibrosis Vancouver.  So, if you've someone in your life who needs chocolate--even if it's you--this is a great way to fulfill that need!

500,000 Scoville Units--That's Not Too Many, Is It?

I'm making lunch today (a big lunch that will take the place of dinner), and I thought it was a good time to try a few new things. You know, now that my significant other is out of the house and can't try and change my mind. Like poaching tongue the other day. That was a decision she suggested might have been in error....
That's really unfair. Paula is very supportive when I cook, but there are some things she just has no interest in (like tongue, or offal of any sort). And also, our spice palette differs. I like to pull out the spice weasel occasionally and "kick it up a notch." And that notch is sometimes over her limit. So the time to try a ground chili powder that comes in a test tube and is rated at 500,00 scoville units is probably when she is out of the house.
I picked about five pounds of veg yesterday from the community garden plot we have, and thought I should do something with it. So, lunch. And what am I having? Well, baked potato (allegedly from BC, but how do you really know?). A pork chop--again, supposed to have been grown on the Island and certified cruelty-free. This one I trust a bit more because the store is small and local, the meat comes in once a week and is cut on premise, and I know the owner. So I pay a bit more, more secure in trusting that I'm getting what I pay for.
And I went out in the backyard yesterday and picked small purple plums. Sun-warmed, beautifully ripe, I ate most of what I picked. Even though I was disturbing one of the residents--a hummingbird flew up, tick tick tick-ed angrily at me about being in front of his favourite flower, and then perched a little more than arm's length away to watch what the crazy ape was doing.

Local Food Fair!

Not huge, but really a lot of fun. Peppers, the food store on the left of the photo, held a local food producers fair yesterday, to advertise many of the brands they carry. With the two large exhibition tents set up on the right, people started showing up even before the producers had set up.
In addition to Level Ground (about whom I've written before), there were3 numerous other producers, several of whom I was unaware. Portofino is not one of them.

Portofino Bakery

Portofino makes a large variety of breads and supplies a number of outlets, from Peppers to Hotel Grand Pacific. They've become a significant voice among local food producers.
Daksha's Gourmet Spices is producing a line of curry mixes: Butter Chicken, Chicken Curry, Korma, Tikka Masala, Tandoori,Vindaloo, Spicy Fish,Chana Masala, Aloo Gobi and Daal.

Hungry For Change

I have to say, I love this sort of thing--this is a student-produced, neighbourhood-generated video on a social issue (of course its food security--do I ever talk about anything else these days?)
Here, students look at the concept of a "food desert", a place where there are no grocery stores. All the while that they were interviewing people, I kept thinking "Hey! There's a vacant lot. Use that." Sure enough, they are also involved with an urban farm with a farmer's market component.
This is also a particularly American video. It takes place in an African-American neighbourhood, and there is a deep undercurrent of issues of race. But at the same time, the solutions are practical and applicable to pretty much any urban area.


Umoja Students from North Lawndale College Prep, Manley, and Ace Technical 
High Schools teamed with Free Spirit Media to discover the facts about the food 
desert in North Lawndale, Chicago.

In the end, you have to question how this situation could have become so dire. Food deserts? How the hell do you not feed people? Why should we have to educate people in what constitutes good food? And a big reason for many of the problems we face, I think, is because we are nations of immigrants that destroyed the indigenous cultures, leaving us with no food culture of our own (and not much other place particular culture either, but that's for a different venue). We don't recognize terrior, we have no real place-specific foods (no equivalent to Parmesan cheese which is made in Parma, from Parman cows, the whey of which is fed to hogs which then become prosciutto). We have no generational attachment to the land in North America, and while many immigrants had an attachment to owning land, a house in the suburbs has fulfilled that desire. There is no equivalent to, say, the attachment to land reform and land ownership you find among the peasants of  South America, or the Northern European peasants from whom I am descended. Land hunger has been diverted into house hunger.
But this video points out another truism; that, given tools, people are ready, willing, and able to make changes in their local environments that contribute to self-determination. In many ways, it boils down to an old punk slogan: DIY or Die. Because culture is made, not consumed.

Chili Tank

Well, not actually a tank, but a Czech Army Field Kitchen. This short video by Kyle Farquharson and Jennifer Giesbrecht of the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism interviews local Steven Forster and his unique food cart.


Notice, at about 1'10", the display of the different types of carrots being prepped for use. Steven is careful to use local and organic wherever he can when making chili. He operates under the name Opa's Suppenküche. and you can check out another video--showing how the tank is heated using green fire logs made primarily of used coffee grounds. He also serves into biodegradable and compostable bowls.And the chili looks pretty darned good too!

Corporate Food Sells Local

It's a funny ol' world. This ad comes from Hellman's--a company owned by Unilever, one of the larger corporate behemoths straddling our globe. The ad is practically a PSA for Canadian farmers and Canadian food with the seeming contradiction of being put out with one of the global food giants it decries.  Yet, owning local as well as international producers, it's clear that Unilever won't suffer no matter what we as consumers do. Unless wegrow our own food and purchase from local farmers at a local market or through a CSA, the multinationals are still going to make out like bandits. But all that being said, still a good commercial.

Community Garden

About six months back, Paula finally got a spot in the University of Victoria's Community Garden. By the end of August, they were ready to move the garden to its new location. And since then, gardeners have been busy preparing things for the next growing season.

  

The garden is located in what was nothing more than a grassy field for years. Pipes have been laid for water, and after the plots themselves were laid out, the sod was lifted in each of them. The best thing about the garden is the two metre high deer fence around it--there are a lot of deer on campus.

Paula and Ben, our son, originally laid out the beds in the new plot. Formal raised beds are new to me--on the farm, we used a rotary tiller to break up the earth and then used a hilling blade to hump it into a rounded long mound. As you can see, here we have a much more formal series of boxes--each lined on the bottom with landscape cloth to discourage anything from working its way up from underneath.
The boxes are spaced so that they are slightly further apart than my feet are long--enabling me to stand between the beds.Each had a layer of leaves laid in, and then covered with a mixture of compost and topsoil.The recent rains seem to have compressed the soil a bit.
The old strawberry garden was moved a week or so back, so Paula planted some of the extras in the one bed. This still needs to be mulched.

I salvaged what was left of a soaker hose that had been run over by a lawnmower (not by me!), and cut it into shorter pieces to fit in the beds. I found some L and T fittings at Rona and laid the hose out until I ran out. So far, this bed and the strawberries have hose in them, and the third bed and the empty space are still waiting. But I got a clockwork timer today (spring driven) that will enable us to turn the water on and leave.
The polytunnel hoops are 25mm electrical conduit held in the D holders for the next size up. The conduit came in three metre lengths--longer than I wanted-- but once I bent them into their holders, it didn't seem necessary to shorten them. Poly clearly still has to be installed....
The fourth space in the plot isn't being ignored; it is slated to have a cold frame built for it. Among other things, we're hoping this gives us a place to overwinter herbs.
Its strange to imagine overwintering anything. Out on the prairies, most everything is planted in May and out of the ground by mid-October at the latest. Here, things are different. Up the peninsula, someone is successfully growing citrus trees. Kiwi fruit are farmed nearby. Here at the bottom of Vancouver Island, the temperate rainforest is modified by a local micro-climate that gives us even milder weather. A lot of rain in the winter, sure, but seldom snow, and even less seldom, -20C. I've never gardened out here, so this year looks to be very experimental.

Jammin'

Spent much of the afternoon making jam yesterday. Put me in mind of a couple of things, not the least of which was Michell Shocked's excellent tune “Strawberry Jam” from her Arkansas Traveller cd/tape/album/download. The song is a tribute to making jam—but jam becomes a metaphor for all DIY culture, and how culture is something made, not consumed. And how making things, particularly jam, is a liberating experience.

But standing there in the kitchen, mushing berries down and adding sugar (not too much, because I've been using Pomona's Universal Pectin instead of Certo for a while now), put me in mind of my mother and growing up in Edmonton. Mom put up a lot of preserves.

My mother was not a great cook, but she was pretty darned good at putting up jars of fruit in syrup, jams, and the like. Growing up in the suburban sixties, our family kept contact with the land by picking local berries, and keeping a garden. Living in Alberta, we had access to wild Saskatoon berries. Mom and Dad would keep track of where the berries were heaviest and how ripe they were—in rural areas, Saskatoons grew along fence lines, so you had to park, cross the ditch at the side of the road, and then push your way through wild roses to get to the berries.

I have great memories of having a pail hung off my belt, a hot summer day with that high background sound of heat, mosquitoes,grasshoppers, and sun, stuffing handfuls of plump, sweet, purple berries into my mouth (and occasionally into the pail). It would take forever to fill the pail (I wonder why?) and when I came out of the bushes, Mom and Dad would have emptied several of the smaller buckets into the large pail.

I never thought about it, but when we got home, Mom would have to sit for hours, sorting the berries, tossing out all the crap I'd cheerfully picked (because it helped fill the bucket, you see), and prep the berries for preserving. She made mountains of jam, and also preserved Saskatoons in a sugar syrup. This was a long-time favourite of mine; there was always an air of festival when there were Saskatoons for dessert.

There were other berries in our lives; one of the first things the folk did when setting up the garden was to plant raspberries along the fence-line. As kids, we picked handfuls of them as they ripened, but the larger volumes were reserved for Mom. We also, like pretty much every house on our block, had rhubarb plants. In July, we would crack off the largest stalks and grab a drinking glass with a couple of centimetres of sugar into which we'd dip our rhubarb. At first you'd eat the sugared rhubarb, but by the end you'd just be sucking vaguely rhubarb-flavoured sugar off the stalk without biting it at all.

It was unusual to see a yard without a kitchen garden in it. In late summer, as the evenings lengthened, we'd gather in groups and roam the back alleys, hopping over fences to steal fresh vegetables and fruit from carefully tended plots. We'd eat fresh peas, and then chew on the shells for the blast of flavour, spitting huge mouthfuls of pulp as we went along. We'd search out massive carrots that were on the verge of changing from sweet to woody, rub the dirt off on our pants, and walk along talking, feeling that satisfying crunch as your teeth finally made it though the bright orange flesh.

Wed could simply have stayed home and eaten our fill of veg out of our family gardens, but “garden raiding” (as we called it) made the vegetables taste so much sweeter. The same with fruits; many families had apple trees (mostly the smaller crab apples), and you quickly became aware which apples were good raw, and which weren't. Crab apples were also pickled—I still remember taking the entire apple into my mouth and pressing it with my tongue. The softened flesh and skin of the apple would mush into an explosion of flavours, and I would pull the stem with the core still attached out of my mouth through pursed lips, sucking the last of the goodness off of it.

A Quick Round Up

Over in China, flooding has innundated over 1 million acres (just over 404 thousand hectares) of farmland, raising local food prices by a minimum 20%. Flooding has been bad this year pretty much everywhere--like southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Warm air holds more water than cold, and the steady upward drift of average global temperature means we're going to face more of this. There's a short article on the China flood in The Guardian.

In an op-ed piece in the NYTimes, Patricia McArdle writes about how the US is destroying one of the last locavore cultures with foreign aid. No surprise there. This has been the role of foreign aid since the mid-sixties and the birth of the "Green Revolution." That the US is still pursuing a policy decades after it was shown to be misguided and wrong isn't much of a surprise either; the US is a ship that may no longer be able to turn. Oh, and the locavore culture being destroyed? Afghanistan.

Verlyn Klinkenborg writes a very short piece (A Welcome Silence) on the joys of leaving the hearing protection on when working. It echoes one I read in Harrowsmith a decade or two back that suggested that rather than using hearing protection, one could just give up the chainsaw....

Local Sourcing 1

The summertime lobster sandwich from McDonald's is back! Yes, Micky D's serving a lobster which is only available in New England and the Atlantic provinces. Apparently the lobster is being sourced from lobster-men in Escuminac, New Brunswick in a move to try sourcing and selling a local sandwich.
Now, this feels really strange, but I have to compliment McDonald's on this move. Locally sourced for local consumption,these are the actions we need to see in the food world. If we could add “sustainably harvested” to the list, we'd have the whole trifecta.
Honestly, do we really need to eat the same things everywhere in the world? I know that this is the concept behind food outlets like McDonalds. You serve the same thing everywhere, standardizing production, preparation, and service across your chain in order to present the same experience to every consumer on every visit. But we've done that, and it's killing us.
Regardless of what we've been teaching ourselves for the last century, people are not all the same everywhere. Motivations may be, general needs may be, but that doesn't make us identical. Just as an example, cow's milk isn't great for everyone (often, goat's milk is a better fit). So force feeding everyone a burger and shake combination may not be the best idea.
We, as humans, have spent thousands of years developing local and regional cuisines. This food is one of the ways we define ourselves. I know most Canadians don't get it (other than poutine, we really have no national cuisine), but most places aren't Canada. Provence, Tuscany, Ethiopia, all of these places have things they eat or ways they eat that are particular to themselves. Parmesan cheese is not the white grainy food-like substance we consume in North America; rather it is particular to the Parma region of Italy. And when you feed pigs on the waste whey from making Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, you get a specifically-flavoured pig that, when you've butchered and salt-cured it, makes prosciutto. Salt-curing a ham doesn't make prosciutto, terroir makes prosciutto. And that terrior is place-specific. Techniques are transferable (thus you can cure a prosciutto-style ham), but place isn't transferable. If I cure a ham from a Berkshire hog on a farm north of Sudbury which I raised on whey from milk from Jersey cows made into a Cheddar style cheese, what I get is not prosciutto, but a salt-cured ham that represents the place in which it was produced. And no one can copy that terroir—which is why I shouldn't be trying to represent that ham as being something its not. Call it Tondalayo Ham produced using adapted Parman techniques, which would explain what it was better than simply calling it prosciutto.
Eating local isn't about sourcing the same items everywhere, it's about letting farmers do what they've done for fifteen thousand years—figure out what grows well and grow it. And just because something exists doesn't mean everyone should be able to get it. Total gratification of every whim is not just killing us, its killing the planet.

BTW, there's actually an ad for the McLobster....