Photo by Steve Bailey, under a Creative Commons license

I love this quote from Susan Rubin, co-producer of the film Two Angry Moms and founder of the advocacy group Better School Food, from an article excerpted by CalorieLab:

You get angry when your boundary has been violated, and the food industry has violated our boundaries with what they are offering out kids. I’m just trying to protect my cubs.

I think every penny is worth it. To me, food is health care. You can pay the farmer or the doctor.

(Emphasis is mine.)

I can really attest to that—since I started cutting back on processed junk for mostly local, organic food two years ago, I haven’t been sick once. (Well, other than my regular migraines, for which no earthly balm can abate.) My friend Felicia trumps me with THREE.

This post is part of One Local Summer: Week 7

I’m madly trying to keep up with my CSA’s vegetable bounty. This scrumptious carrot, ginger, and beet soup, adapted from a recipe in Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons, can be savored hot or chilled—and is perfect for helping pare down beet and carrot inventories in fridges everywhere.

Local: Organic beets, organic onions, organic carrots, organic garlic, organic parsley
Non-local: salt, vegetable bouillon cube, canola oil
Unknown: Organic ginger

Carrot, Ginger, and Beet Soup
Serves 4

• 4 medium-size beets, cut into chunks
• 1 tbs canola oil
• 1 medium-size onion, chopped
• 1 pound carrots, coarsely chopped
• 1 tbs minced fresh ginger
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 6 cups water or basic vegetable stock

1. Heat oil, saute onions.
2. Add carrots, ginger, and garlic—cook for 5 mins.
3. Add beets, then water or stock.
4. Simmer covered for 50 mins.
5. Puree soup in batches in food processor or blender.
6. Salt and pepper to taste.

This post is part of One Local Summer: Week 6

Potato-and-pesto croquettes with yogurt-cucumber sauce; a side of roasted wax beans and caramelized onions

Local: organic potatoes, organic basil, organic yogurt, organic cucumber, organic wax beans, organic onions, organic garlic
Non-local: breadcrumbs, organic olive oil, organic cumin, salt, pepper

The recipes were adapted from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, a massive tome I borrowed from the library but am considering purchasing. I can’t recommend this cookbook enough, even though it skimps on accompanying photographs. The best part is the section on commonly used vegetables, which Madison lists alphabetically, along with information about differentiating among varieties, storage, and preparation—terribly useful when you find yourself faced with bag of greens from your CSA (kohlrabi, anyone?), with no clue what to do with them.

The yogurt-cucumber sauce, which you keep refrigerated, is wonderfully cooling and the perfect companion for fritters and croquettes. Here’s my modified recipe:

Yogurt Sauce with Cucumber and Cumin
Makes about 1 1/2 cups

• 2 cups yogurt
• 1 small cucumber, peeled if waxed, and cubed
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tbs extra virgin olive oil
• salt to taste
• freshly milled white pepper to taste

Stir all ingredients in a bowl and let stand at least 15 mins for the flavors to develop.

This post is part of One Local Summer: Week 4

A dutch baby filled with an apple-and-peach compote. Is there a joy greater than having the juices of a perfectly ripened peach run down the sides of your mouth as you scrape the pit clean?

Local ingredients: apples, peaches, spelt flour, organic free-range eggs
Non-local ingredients: organic butter, organic soy milk, organic/fair-trade sugar, organic cinnamon powder

Photo by MaryJanesFarm

You might as well have handed me a bag of writhing snakes—so alien and fraught with nervous concern was my first encounter with garlic scapes during a CSA¹ pickup last year.

But once this lifelong city girl got over the foreignness … and, well, springiness … of it all—boy, were they tasty!

Scapes are the flower stalks you’ll find on members of the Allium family, which includes onions, leeks, chives, and, hardneck garlic. Garlic scapes twist and curl upwards, making supple arcs as they grow, but will straighten and stiffen with time, before growing little seed-like bulbs. Young and tender garlic tops still in full curl can be snapped off easily with your fingers, providing a mild garlic flavor and crunchiness, whether in salads, soups, or stir-fries. You can even puree scapes with some olive oil (adding lemon juice and Parmesan cheese for taste) for fresh homemade pesto.

More about garlic scapes (plus some recipes) at MaryJanesFarm.

¹Community-Supported Agriculture. Locate a CSA in your area by entering your zip code at LocalHarvest.org

The fabulous Felicia Sullivan reviews The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Screenshot from Cavemen’sCrib.com

Have you scoped out the Geico cavemen’s pad at Cavemen’sCrib.com? I’m not one to shill for corporate America but the site is very thoughtfully and impressively put together—especially from my vantage point as an interactive-marketing refugee—and far more entertaining than I’d care to admit. I took a screenshot of a cookbook I stumbled open during an exploration of their kitchen; it specifies locally grown and organic ingredients (antibiotic-free seems redundant, however.)

Cavemen, they’re just like us!

(Although, considering that the Geico cavemen are portrayed as testy, bourgeois poseurs, maybe it shouldn’t be construed as a compliment.)

Illo by Leo Jung/New York Times

What should humans eat in order to glean the maximal health benefits? According to Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, the formula is simple:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Read the rest of the magazine feature here. (Warning: long, so you might want to clear your calender first.)

Related articles:
1. Michael Pollan vs. Whole Foods
2. Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children
3. World’s Healthiest Foods

Illo by Stuart Bradford/Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports has just released the findings of its analysis of 525 fresh, whole broiler chickens purchased in 23 states last spring—83 percent harbored campylobacter or salmonella, which colonize the birds’ intestines and are the leading bacterial causes of foodborne disease that sickens 1.1 million or more Americans each year. (Interestingly, this was a “stunning increase” from its 2003 findings, where 49 percent tested positive for one or both pathogens.)

The spiral-shape campylobacter has seemingly wriggled onto more chickens than ever, because although the U.S. Department of Agriculture tests chickens for salmonella against a federal standard, no such standard exists for campylobacter. (CR insists that there now should be.)

The biggest surprise: Overall, chickens labeled organic or raised without antibiotics (and costing $3 to $5 per pound) were more likely to harbor salmonella than were conventionally produced broilers that cost around $1 per pound¹. (Tested were 10 organic and 12 nonorganic no-antibiotics brands, including three that are “air chilled” in a newer slaughterhouse process supposedly designed to reduce contamination.)

Most of the bacteria CR tested from contaminated chicken (both conventional and no-antibiotics) showed resistance to one or more antibiotics, including some fed to cluckers to speed their growth, as well as those we’re prescribed to treat infections. This wasn’t unexpected even in the no-antibiotics birds, says CR, because “those germs are widespread and can persist in the environment.”

Without knowing more about the magazine’s methodology, there’s not much I can say about its results, which seem to run counter to what we’d expect from organic animal husbandry. (Should we blame big-box organics for the dilution of stricter standards; who knows?) I mean, it’s no skin off my nose personally since I’m vegetarian, a position that’s proving increasingly merited in light of news that cows, pigs, sheep, and poultry are the world’s greatest environmental threats.

But even CR concedes that you should purchase any meat directly from small farmers, via farmers’ markets and Community Supported Agriculture programs, so you can engage in a dialogue with the farmer about how the animals are raised, what they eat, and so forth. And of course, CR’s analysis doesn’t take into account the fact that organically raised livestock isn’t force-fed pesticide-soaked, genetically modified corn feed mixed in with ground animal parts, or kept so tightly confined that they are unable to shuffle more than a few feet for their entire lives. (More reasons for eating organic meat here.)

Alright, I’m going to rip out the ol’ bleeding heart here: Organic animals are raised more humanely—with a species-appropriate environment to roam—and are fed well-rounded and nutritious diets that boost their health (and by that same token, yours) significantly. Smaller farms also means less manure, which is a human-health risk because any overspill can contaminate our water sources with E. coli and other pathogens. In just one region of North Carolina, for instance, hog farms produce 10 million metric tons of waste annually. That’s A LOT of poop to scoop.

And organic meat? Well, as far as I can tell, it’s not just a load of crap—which is more than I can say for some of the health and environmental policies in this country.

¹One exception was Ranger, a no-antibiotics premium brand sold only in the Northwest, which CR found to be “extremely clean.” Of the 10 samples it analyzed, none had salmonella, and only two had campylobacter.

Photo by Romulo Yanes/Gourmet

Are you, like me, drowning in precariously stacked mounds of squash from your CSA farmer? Luckily for us, Epicurious.com has a whopping 252 different squash recipes archived from the pages of Gourmet, including Butternut Squash with Ginger Relish (pictured above), Acorn Squash with Wild Mushroom Cranberry Stuffing, and Grilled Smoked-Mozzarella and Yellow Squash Pizzettes. My sweetie loves polenta, so I might be giving the Butternut Squash Polenta a whirl soon, perhaps with some fresh cheese from the farmers’ market if they’re still around after I’m through sketching naked ladies this Saturday.

A toothy aside: The New York Times rhapsodizes about the perfect pie crust. (Apparently it doesn’t come from a giant freezer in the middle of a supermarket aisle.)

Photo by Art Wolfe/Getty Images

Perhaps I’m courting a divine smiting, albeit the positively perfect kind, from the sainted Martha herself, by ignoring her edict to order my Thanksgiving turkey on Nov. 13.

Describing a “Butterball house of horrors,” the November 2006 issue of Satya reaffirmed just some of the reasons why I went vegetarian (after a college trip to a chicken farm, coincidentally). From an interview with Matt Prescott, PETA’s Manager
of Factory Farming Campaigns:

This Thanksgiving, 45 million turkeys will be slaughtered and eaten. That’s one sixth of all turkeys sold in the U.S. each year—675 million pounds of animal flesh in one day! While most people think of turkeys as their Thanksgiving dinner centerpiece, turkeys are extremely social and good-natured. Their personalities are as strong and varied as cats and dogs, perhaps even a bit smarter. People may also not be aware that turkeys raised for food are confined to grow-out sheds where they are forced to stand on mounds of fecal waste and breathe in toxic ammonia fumes. When only a few hours old hours old, a portion of their beaks and toes are severed without the aid of anesthesia. Although birds constitute more than 98 percent of land animals eaten in the U.S., the USDA refuses to list them in the only federal law designed to protect animals at slaughter, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. …

PETA’s [undercover] investigators witnessed Butterball workers punching and kicking live birds, slamming them against metal transport crates and trailers, and throwing them into concrete walls and floors. In one instance, a bird was slammed so hard against a handrail that her spine popped out. Another time, a worker stomped on a live turkey’s head until her skull exploded under his foot. One worker even sexually abused a bird, inserting a finger into her cloaca (her vagina). Aside from the sadistic acts of cruelty the workers would commit for “fun,” they routinely hung birds improperly—by broken legs, one leg or by the head.

PETA’s investigators also discovered that management at this plant had a flippant attitude about animal welfare. Unlike the procedures, forms and handbooks for everything else, the content of the animal welfare form was not covered in new employee training. Furthermore, employees who could not read or who could not read well, were provided no assistance in understanding the form. Management made comments about how “animal rights activists don’t like it when you kick a turkey” and that “animals have more rights than people now a days.” They also told workers not to worry if they hear a “popping” sound while working, that’s “just” a bird exploding under the tire of a truck.

If you’d still prefer a real turkey over Tofurkey, here are some of the things you can do. (Full disclosure: I have never actually tasted Tofurkey but am convinced it tastes like rubber cement after it’s been rolled in the gunk under the fridge a few times. I don’t understand “fake meat” in general.)

1. Go humane: According to The Green Guide, labels like “free range” and “free roaming” are minimally verified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and “assure little besides some access to some air.” Look, instead for the American Humane Association’s “Free Farmed” label on certified turkeys in the supermarket. The certification ensures that the animals are “free from unnecessary fear, distress, pain, injury, and disease,” as well as given ready access to water, a healthful diet, and a comfortable, species-appropriate environment.

2. Order locally: Search through listings on Local Harvest to find an organic turkey farm near you. Besides supporting small-scale organic agriculture that encourages biodiversity over standardization, you’re also cutting down on fossil fuels that would have been used hauling your turkey from across the country, not to mention the pollution transport engenders. You can also choose to go with Slow Food USA’s Heritage Turkey program, which supports breeds of turkey near extinction because of the homogenization of large-scale factory farming. Raised on organic feed, the turkeys are given more exercise and a more varied diet than their industrial brethren. And, get this, they can actually fly, unlike factory-farm turkeys which have been anatomically manipulated to be so large-breasted and heavy that they have trouble standing upright, frequently develop leg and hip infections, and require human intervention in order to reproduce.

3. Don’t waste anything: Liz from Pocket Farm, who rears her own meat in the most humane way possible, encourages you to make the best use of as much of the animal as you can, as a part of “honoring the animals that are giving up their lives for us.” Simmer the leftover turkey bones in water with some vegetables, herbs, and spices, for a stock you can use to create soups or stews.

If all this turkey talk has driven you to decide to feast without the beast, mouthwatering vegan and vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes abound. And if the spirit of Thanksgiving really moves you, you can even adopt a turkey that can either go home with you or live out its natural life at Farm Sanctuary’s¹ shelter for farm animals. Start a new family tradition by leaving a place card at your dining table for Hildy, Blossom, Laila, Tinkerbell², or whichever feathered fowl you are not eating. Then, get your kids in the act by reading them one of the many turkey-friendly Thanksgiving books available.

¹A Charity Navigator four-star charity. It has rescued 1,000 turkeys over the past 20 years.

²Actual turkey names!

A couple of shots I took at the farmers’ market at Union Square today.

Photo by David Royal/New York Times Magazine

Michael Pollan writes in today’s New York Times Magazine about “bad spinach the government will only make worse.”

If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That’s exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat—sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it’s easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism—to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.

He goes on to say that industrial farming and processing methods, both of which have been “industrialized and centralized over the last few decades” are putting our health at peril. The lethal 0157:H7 strain of E. coli, responsible for the latest outbreak of food poisoning, was believed to have evolved in the guts of cattle fed a diet of grain that “happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.)”

Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn’t be, rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.

Pollan makes a case for eating local, not just because we want to support farmers in our communities and eat seasonal fresh food at their most flavorful—or even because we want our children to recognize real food in its natural, unpackaged glory—but also for “hardheaded or pragmatic” reasons. Want to fight off a possible terrorist attack? Shop at your local farmers’ market or community-assisted-agriculture (CSA) program.

Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental—and deliberate—contamination. This is something the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. “The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry” make them “vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy—and at the moment they are thriving—is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

(Emphasis is mine)

The Food Network’s Alton Brown also fingers our not eating local for the whole spinach fiasco. [via Slowly She Turned] “21 states affected by spinach grown not only in one state but in one region of one state. Had the spinach stayed near home odds are good this would have been caught sooner,” he blasts in his blog. He continues:

Had the big chain grocers and restaurant suppliers purchased locally grown produce, this wouldn’t have happened. But don’t blame them. Nope. Blame us. By demanding fresh spinach year round (or anything else for that matter) we create the monster. It’s like Dan Akroyd thinking of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghost Busters. Our own unnatural desires and our refusal to consume locally grown foods have brought us to this sorry state.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Brown ends his post with a ominous warning. “Until we diversify and decentralize our food growing system and learn to eat locally and seasonally,” he says, “we only open up ourselves for more of the same. And let that be a lesson to us all.”

DUM DUM DUUUUUMMM …

Cover by BusinessWeek

From the cover story of the latest issue of BusinessWeek: “Pastoral ideals are getting trampled as organic food goes mass market.”

Next time you’re in the supermarket, stop and take a look at Stonyfield Farm yogurt. With its contented cow and green fields, the yellow container evokes a bucolic existence, telegraphing what we’ve come to expect from organic food: pure, pesticide-free, locally produced ingredients grown on a small family farm.

So it may come as a surprise that Stonyfield’s organic farm is long gone. Its main facility is a state-of-the-art industrial plant just off the airport strip in Londonderry, N.H., where it handles milk from other farms. And consider this: Sometime soon a portion of the milk used to make that organic yogurt may be taken from a chemical-free cow in New Zealand, powdered, and then shipped to the U.S. True, Stonyfield still cleaves to its organic heritage. For Chairman and CEO Gary Hirshberg, though, shipping milk powder 9,000 miles across the planet is the price you pay to conquer the supermarket dairy aisle. “It would be great to get all of our food within a 10-mile radius of our house,” he says. “But once you’re in organic, you have to source globally.”

Hirshberg’s dilemma is that of the entire organic food business. Just as mainstream consumers are growing hungry for untainted food that also nourishes their social conscience, it is getting harder and harder to find organic ingredients. There simply aren’t enough organic cows in the U.S., never mind the organic grain to feed them, to go around. Nor are there sufficient organic strawberries, sugar, or apple pulp—some of the other ingredients that go into the world’s best-selling organic yogurt.

Now companies from Wal-Mart (WMT) to General Mills (GIS) to Kellogg (K) are wading into the organic game, attracted by fat margins that old-fashioned food purveyors can only dream of. What was once a cottage industry of family farms has become Big Business, with all that that implies, including pressure from Wall Street to scale up and boost profits. …

As food companies scramble to find enough organically grown ingredients, they are inevitably forsaking the pastoral ethos that has defined the organic lifestyle. For some companies, it means keeping thousands of organic cows on industrial-scale feedlots. For others, the scarcity of organic ingredients means looking as far afield as China, Sierra Leone, and Brazil—places where standards may be hard to enforce, workers’ wages and living conditions are a worry, and, say critics, increased farmland sometimes comes at a cost to the environment.

The story goes on to say that, by becoming successful “beyond [its] wildest dreams,” the organic industry has shot itself in the proverbial foot. The big, looming question, it seems, is if organic food production can be replicated on a mass scale—and if it can feed the world. (The short answer: Yes, yes, yes, and yes.)

Even BusinessWeek agrees that most adherents of the organic movement don’t want any part in the conventional big-box system of production.

When consumers shell out premiums of 50 percent or more to buy organic, they are voting for the Butterworks ethic. They believe humans should be prudent custodians not only of their own health but also of the land and animals that share it. They prefer food produced through fair wages and family farms, not poor workers and agribusiness. They are responding to tales of caged chickens and confined cows that never touch a blade of grass; talk of men losing fertility and girls becoming women at age nine because of extra hormones in food. They read about pesticides seeping into the food supply and genetically modified crops creeping across the landscape.

Yet neither the article nor organic food production’s staunchest critics lay any blame on conventional farming’s chemical-intensive, monoculture approach, the insidious federal farm subsidies that sponsor them, or our cheap oil policy. Nor do they address our nation’s two-tiered food production’s contribution to the growing divisiveness between the rich who can afford nutritious, pesticide-free food, and the poor who can’t. The entry of big-box-companies such as Wal-mart into the fray may, as Slate’s Field Maloney says, help “democratize the nation’s food supply,” but it still sounds like it’s conventional, industrial agriculture that needs to be turned on its head—and completely overhauled—for impeding the evolution of an alternative, truly sustainable model of food production (not to mention making us fat and sick).

Until that happens, I’ll continue to do the localmotion, supporting my neighborhood small farms, and, where possible, making the choice for both local and organic. My food doesn’t need to travel more (and thus pollute more) than I do, organic or not.

Also on BusinessWeek Online:
1. Video View: Talking with Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg
2. Slide Show: Look Who’s Vying for the Organic Dollar
3. Why the Stink Over China’s Organic Food?
4. Table: Tale of Two Cows
5. Graphic: Healthy Profits

Related articles:
1. Organic/Eco Classifications
2. Unfair Organics
3. Organic’s Edge Questioned
4. Eat Shoots and Leaves
5. Not All Organics Created Equal
6. Chekhov’s Eco Tip: Local or Organic?
6. Blog Love: Pocket Farm
7. The Oy in Soy

Photo by Carin Krasner/Getty Images

The number of ingredients in a crinkly bag of commercial potato chips is staggering. Take Lay’s Original Baked Chips, for instance: It contains dehydrated potatoes, modified food starch, sugar, corn oil, salt, soy lecithin, leavening (monosodium phosphate and sodium bicarbonate), and dextrose. (Don’t ask me why they had to use two forms of sugar.)

So last night, the hub and I made our own oven-baked (not fried!) potato chips using a recipe I found online. Just grab a bag of organic taters from your local farmer, slice each potato into thin chips, then bake them on a pan with some salt and butter for 15 to 20 minutes at 500°F, or until golden brown. Some of our chips came out a little burned because of our uneven slicing—the Food Network won’t be coming a-calling anytime soon—but most of them tasted just like they came straight out of a bag from the snacks aisle—no preservatives, no packaging, no excessive greasiness, and seriously delicious. Did we mention CHEAP, too? The hub started bellyaching when I began (loudly) craving potato chips at 10pm, but once we were through with a stack of some homemade golden goodness, he immediately asked if we could make some more tonight. (Remember kids, junk food, whether organic or not, is still junk food, so go easy on it. Your mom just called me to tell you that. You should listen to her more often.)

If you’ve been following our eco tips thus far, you’ve probably honed reducing your contributions to the waste stream to an art form. So we can’t imagine you’d have very much trash at the end of the day, after you’ve separated your recyclables and the organic material you’ll be tossing on top of the ol’ compost heap. Still, most of us are doomed with the detritus of everyday living, and so, if you work in a cubicle with your own regulation trash can, consider tossing your litter in the communal trash can in the office break room, instead. You’ll save your cleaning attendant the trouble of changing out another plastic liner—plus, those petroleum-derived, nonbiodegradable bags can really add up.

From my CSA farmer: Parsley, 1 heirloom tomato, 4 baby eggplant, 1 pound green beans, garlic

From my organic market: 1 onion (origin unknown—bad witch, no biscuit)

(To roast—and caramelize—vegetables, place all of them, except for the parsley, in a lightly oiled roasting pan, sprinkle salt, pepper, and drizzle with some olive oil. Place in a preheated oven set to 375 and cook for 1 hr.)

From a free-roaming chicken farm in Freehold, N.J.: 3 eggs

Non-local ingredients: olive oil (although it’s from California, rather than Italy), salt, pepper

Dessert: farmers’ market yellow peaches, organic raisins, organic plain whole-milk yogurt, Smucker’s caramel sauce (from before I starting caring about what I ate)

Instead of moping around for want of a husband—he’s been away for three weeks and counting—I went to the farmers’ market in Union Square to partake of some of fall’s bounty. From left: organic banana bread, homemade apple butter (I blame Amy), and organic spelt flour. Not shown: six luscious yellow peaches for my lonesome belly.

Here’s Chekhov’s takeout—really homegrown organic wheatgrass, but I get a kick every time he nibbles from it.

Today is the Eighth Annual Knit-Out & Crotchet, Too! Last year, I rocked out my Lorna’s Laces socks on the Union Square tarmac and spotted The Chin chain-smoking with abandon. Mothers, don’t let your daughters grow up to be short, egomaniacal, “champion” crocheters who filk about yarn.

In the news today:
1. California takes on global warming.

2. “Yes Virginia, there is a way for students to live green.”

3. 58 percent of consumers surveyed said they were “not green interested” and did not care about environmentally friendly practices, including recycling, corporate social responsibility, or natural and/or organic ingredients.

4. 40 percent of the U.S. is facing moderate-to-extreme drought, says NOAA.

5. Bottled water vs. tap water: “Paying hundreds of times more for something you’re already paying for is probably the silliest of all spending habits.” I think the word they’re looking for is “sucker”.

6. On PBS this October: Building Green features green building techniques and materials.

7. For some brevity, Lambert the Sheepish Lion! [via Hugg.com]

This installment of the Carnival of the Green, organized by City Hippy and Triple Pundit, is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The sublime LA Green Living hosted last week and I will be passing on the flaming torch in slow motion, to the resonant drumming of “Chariots of Fire,” to Karavans on September 18.

ROLL UP, ROLL UP, ladies and gentlemen, boy and girls, for the stupendous, the magnificent, the peerless, the ONE and ONLY Carnival of the Green. What’s that, sir? How much does it cost? HOW MUCH DOES IT COST? Why, it will cost you, dear sir, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! That’s right, you heard it right here, ladies and gentlemen, keep your shirts on because you will spend exactly ZERO clams … nada buckaroos … zilch … ZIP … Schrodinger opened the box and the BOX WAS EMPTY! What’s the catch? There’s no catch! You wound me with your cynicism, suh! Right down to the belly of my soul. ‘CEPT I DON’T HAVE ONE! Nearly had you there, didn’t I? What did you say, madam? Yes, you in the very fetching blue silk hat. How long will we be here? Just one night, my friends. You will never see the likes of this carnival, this luminous line-up, this GALAXY OF STARS in its current incarnation ever again in this town! This is a ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY, ladies and gentlemen, so WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? Step up, step up, hey no pushing, son, there’s plenty of room for everyone inside the tent, gather in, folks, gather on in …

Click here for more »

With the bounty of vegetables that summer has afforded us, I’m always brainstorming new and inventive ways of cooking the many beans, turnips, squash, tomatoes, potatoes et. al. we’ve been getting weekly from our CSA. Then I discovered The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Farmer, published in 1918 but reproduced in its entirety online. The chapter on summer vegetables is helpfully organized by name, from artichokes to turnips. How did I live before, unschooled as I was in the nine different ways you could cook a tomato?

How about kicking it back older school with recipes from the White House in 1887? The White House Cook Book is a “comprehensive cyclopedia of information for the home.” You can also expend little effort but manage to bowl over your dining companions just the same with The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking (1903) by Helen Campbell.

Also, in these unsettled times, please see Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918), by C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss, because “serv[ing] the cause of freedom” never goes out of style.

You’ll also do well to be reminded of the following advice on vegetables by Mrs. Brian Luck, who wrote The Belgian Cook-Book in 1915:

Nearly all these are at their best (like brunettes) just before they are fully matured. So says a great authority, and no doubt he is thinking of young peas and beans, lettuces and asparagus. Try to dress such things as potatoes, parsnips, cabbages, carrots, in other ways than simply boiled in water, for the water often removes the flavor and leaves the fiber. Do not let your vegetable-dishes remind your guests of Froissart’s account of Scotchmen’s food, which was “rubbed in a little water.”

I’m not sure what that crack about brunettes was all about (should I take umbrage 91 years after the fact?), but rest assured, Mrs. Luck, I will strive not to evoke your idea of gastronomic Scotland in my culinary endeavors.

Tonight’s dinner: Pasta with lemon-basil pesto and sautéed tomatoes.

Organic whole-wheat spaghetti from DeBoles, manufactured in Melville, NY, which is about 35 miles of NYC, where I picked it up. On sale, too (20 percent off, baby!)

From my CSA organic farmer: A Cherokee purple heirloom tomato, a hybrid tomato I forgot the name of, garlic, sweet onions, and lemon basil. The only non-local ingredients were the olive oil, salt, pepper, and dashes of dried herbs (rosemary, thyme, and oregano) from my spice rack.

Tasty! I do love me some lemon basil.

You are what you eat, and to help us along is World’s Healthiest Foods by the nonprofit George Mateljan Foundation with its detailed listings of, well, the world’s healthiest foods, complete with nutritional information broken down into specific minerals and vitamins necessary for our long-term wellbeing. Thanks to my CSA, it appears that my packed lunch is the cancer-fighting special: cabbage, red beets, green peas, garlic scapes, and turnip greens. Coincidentally, so was the chocolate chip-oatmeal-yogurt whole wheat muffin I had for breakfast (freshly baked yesterday with honey instead of processed sugar).

You’ll also find loads of recipes, and suggested meal plans to combat specific ailments or for general health.

I also recently discovered that adding a pinch or two of oregano or thyme into your teaball when you make a cuppa packs a mighty punch of antioxidants, along with a very slight minty flavor that’s extra flavorful. (We like antioxidants—which are potent combos of minerals and vitamins—because they help battle cancer, reduce cellular damage from free radicals, boost immunity, and possibly slow down the aging process¹.)

¹I’ll get back to you in about 30 years on that one.

Call me a citified ignoramus, but I only recently discovered a couple of things I didn’t realize were produced and manufactured in the U.S.—both of which happen to come from the state of Maine: sea salt and seaweed. (Then again, my sister went to college in Waterville, ME, and she was none the wiser, either, though she’ll freely dish about the stuffed shirts down in Portland.)

Now there’s no reason, for me, at least, to procure sea salt hand-harvested from “pristine Atlantic seawater” off the froggy coast of Brittany or to stare wistfully at the dried seaweed imported all the way from Japan because of qualms against contributing to climate change.

Something else I wish Maine bottled up: its pine-scented fresh air. I was practically rolling around in it when I visited.

Additional resources:
If you live in the U.K., Angelsey Sea Salt from Wales is U.K. Soil Association certified.