It’s not only important that your cooking oils are organic and free of agricultural adulterants and chemicals, but that they are the right oils for the type of cooking you’re doing. A lack of understanding can be detrimental to your health. If your oil smokes when frying or sautéing, it not only emits an acrid smell, but healthy fats in the oil can be transformed into unhealthy trans fats. In addition, free radicals are formed that can oxidize cholesterol in your bloodstream to create artery-clogging plaque. Discard any oil that has reached its smoke point. Use this table to determine which oil is the best to use for your purposes.
High Heat Oils: These are oils to use for high heat applications like frying.
Avocado - smoke point 510 F.
Almond - smoke point 495 F.
Apricot Kernel - smoke point 495 F.
Sesame - smoke point 445 F.
Medium High Heat Oils: Good for sauteeing and baking.
Canola - smoke point 425 F.
Grapeseed - smoke point 425 F.
Walnut - smoke point 400 F.
Coconut - smoke point 365 F.
Soy - smoke point 360 F.
Peanut - smoke point 355 F.
Medium Heat Oils: Full flavored, unrefined oils good for sauces and salad dressings, and for medium heat sauteing, where the oil's flavor is integral to the dish.
Sesame, unrefined - smoke point 350 F.
Toasted Sesame - smoke point 350 F.
Olive, extra virgin - smoke point 325 F.
Corn, unrefined - smoke point 320 F.
Coconut, unrefined - smoke point 280 F.
No Heat Oils: These unrefined oils have a robust flavor and such a fragile structure that they're best used on a finished dish or blended into a dressing or sauce without heating.
Borage - smoke point 225 F.
Flaxseed - smoke point 225 F.
Wheat Germ - smoke point 225 F.
Evening Primrose - smoke point 225 F.
Of all these oils, the one with the most health benefits is olive oil. Unfortunately, most of the olive oil sold in the United States is rancid or inferior, especially those oils imported from Europe or the Middle East. Just in the last five years, California organic olive oils have achieved quality levels that make them as good as any in the world. You can see the names and contact information of suppliers by visiting:
http://www.cooc.com/producers_certified.html
Oysters are now farmed in the cold waters of northern California north to Canada. The native oyster of these waters was Ostrea lurida, the tiny but impeccable Olympia oysters that were gobbled to extinction by the people who came for the Gold Rush. A sparse few are still harvested in Washington.
Oysters called Crassostrea gigas were imported from Japan and formed the basis of the early West Coast oyster farms, such as Hog Island in Tomales Bay north of San Francisco, where they are called Sweetwaters. Tomales Bay, on the border of Marin and Sonoma counties, is also the breeding ground - or water - for the Great White Shark. Sweetwater is just one of the names for C. gigas. Others include Golden Mantle, Kumamoto, Portuguese, Preston Point, Quilcene, Fanny Bay, Rock Point, Skokomish, Wescott Bay, Willapa Bay, and Yaquina Bay, depending on where they're grown - but they are all the same species. These are meaty fellows that can be quite good and sweet during the cold winter months. During the warm spring and summer months, they develop a reproductive sac with an unpleasant muddy look and taste.
The East Coast native oyster is Crassostrea viginica, called a variety of names depending on where they're grown. On Prince Edward Island they're called Malpeques. On Cape Cod they are Wellfleets. At Long Island they are known as Blue Points. Farther south yet they are Apalachicolas. These spawn at any time during the year, and so never develop the muddy sac.
The European oyster, Ostrea edulis, is known by a variety of names. In France it is Belon. Grown on the East Coast, it's known as the Euro Flat. Grown on the West Coast, it's called either Belon or Euro Flat. Impoverished is the man or woman who doesn't love a fresh raw oyster drenched in nothing but lemom juice with perhaps a grind of fresh black pepper.
Cindy Pawlcyn is one of the chef/luminaries of the restaurant scene in San Francisco and the Napa Valley. At Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen in St. Helena, Chef Pablo Jacinto came up with these incredible appetizers. They're easy enough to make and impossibly delicious. Get the best oysters you can (which means Malpeques, in my book).
24 oysters
2 cups mayonnaise
2 Tbl. minced shallots
3 cloves garlic, minced
Juice of 1/2 lemon
4 Tbl. tequila
1/2 cup grated asiago cheese
1/2 Tbl. fresh ground black pepper
Combine all ingredients and refrigerate until needed.
2 Tbl. olive oil
2 shallots, minced
2 chipotle chilis, minced
3 clove garlic, minced
1 1/2 lb. spinch, destemmed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Heat oil and soften shallots, chilies, and garlic, but don't brown. Add spinach, salt, and pepper, and cook until just wilted. Mix all together. Spread out on sheet pans to cool.
Serves 4
People often ask me why they should spend the extra money on organic food. One good reason is to make meals from scratch from wholesome ingredients instead of heating up ready-to-serve meals from the freezer aisle at the local supermarket. Reading the ingredients on some of these heat-and-eat meals may give you pause, as it did me. I checked the ingredients on several typical ones at my local supermarket and found the following. "Marie Callender's Complete Dinner of Herb Roasted Chicken and Mashed Potatoes with Broccoli and Carrots" advertises, "Now! Tastier Mashed Potatoes", and I can see why - they're loaded with cream, butter and salt. This meal contains 35 grams of fat and 1240 mg. of salt. Marie's picture is on the box and she does seem to be developing a double chin.
"Stouffer's Lean Cuisine, Cafe Classics, Beef Pot Roast with Whipped Potatoes", fell farther down the slippery slope of modern food science. You Don't get beef, according to the box, you get "beef product". It consists of beef, water, dextrose, soybean oil, modified cornstarch, potassium chloride, salt, potassium and sodium phosphates, caramel color, and natural flavors. The gravy includes "rendered beef fat". I know why this is called lean cuisine - one bite and you've had enough.
"Kid Cuisine Corn Dog with Apples and Blue Watermelon Flavored Sauce, Corn, French Fries and a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup" is a kid's meal from the folks at agribusiness conglomerate ConAgra. Note to parents: read the ingredients before serving, unless you hope the sodium nitrite, calcium stearate, sodium erythorbate, disodium dihydrogen pyrophosphate, polyglycerol polyricinoleate and such will calm junior's jitters.
"Michelina's Signature Chicken Marsala with Garlic Mashed Potatoes" ostensibly contains three ingredients (chicken, potatoes and gravy), but the box list 139 ingredients. Yes, 139. And among the chemicals you'll actually find some food. The point is that big food processing companies have every reason in the world to create food products that are convenient, are at least tolerable to the tastebuds, and are cheap. If they have to use chemical flavorings, colorings, preservatives, texturizers, and such to do it, well okay. If they load their products with sugar, fat, and salt, well, those substances taste good - in fact, they're almost irresistible. No wonder that a burger and fries with a soda are the mainstays of the fast food industry: fatty meat, salty and fatty fries, and sugary soda pop. But as even a casual look around America will tell you, something's wrong with either our food or the way we eat, or both.
Have you heard about cold-brewed coffee? It has less acid, caffeine, and bitterness than coffee brewed with boiling hot water.
It's not hard to make. Set your coffee grinder on regular and grind a quarter pound of organic, Fair Trade beans. Organic means the environment where the coffee is grown is protected. Most coffee plantations are planted where rain forest has been cut down, destroying bird habitats and unleashing a host of ecological problems. Fair Trade means the coffee growers are being paid a premium that helps lift them out of poverty.
Place the ground coffee in a quart jar and fill the jar to the top with cold, clean water. Screw on the top, give it a shake and set it on the kitchen counter for 24 hours. At the end of that time, pour the contents of the quart jar into a French coffee press (also known as a press pot), push down the filter mechanism, and pour off the coffee into a pitcher. Discard the coffee grounds. It may take two pours to press it all.
You can do one of two things at this point. Either pour the cold-brewed coffee into ice cube trays and freeze, then store the frozen cubes in a plastic freezer bag. You can use them later to make iced coffee. Or, pour some into a saucepan to be gently heated for a hot cup of coffee. Store the rest in the cleaned quart jar in the fridge.
Adjust this recipe to your personal taste. If you want stronger cold-brewed coffee, use more ground coffee per quart of water. If it's too strong for you, add water to the brewed coffee until it's just right. In the end, you'll get all the flavor of real coffee with less of the acid and caffeine.
So you should care. When chickens are slaughtered, they are quickly eviscerated, dipped in hot water to loosen feathers, and then quickly de-feathered. This leaves a warm carcass - and the right conditions for the growth of harmful bacteria like salmonella.
And so most chicken processors give the carcasses a dunking in an ice-water bath to cool them down. But think - if one chicken carcass is contaminated with harmful bacteria, that bacteria enters the cooling water and can spread to all the other carcasses dipped in that water. It's not the ideal sanitary situation.
The answer has been the development of air-cooling machinery over the past few years. Instead of a plunge into ice water, the chicken carcasses are dried and chilled with a blast of super-cooled air. If there is a contamination of any carcass, it's not spread to all the others in the processing line. The lack of moisture on the chickens also helps control the spread of any pathogens.
Not all organic chickens are air-chilled, but many are. Look for it on the labels, or ask your butcher. It simply makes sense.
No berry is more delicious than the strawberry, nor more loaded with agricultural chemicals when it’s grown conventionally. Pickers who have to enter the poison-drenched fields call strawberries “the devil’s fruit,” not just because of the backbreaking labor it takes to harvest them, but also because of the toxic environment of the fields. Over 7,800,000 pounds of agricultural chemicals were used on strawberries in 2001 in California alone. That’s 39,000 tons. In a study by the Environmental Working Group of 42 fruits and vegetables, strawberries had the highest concentration of chemical contaminants. And yet no berry is more beloved by children, who are most susceptible to bodily harm due to these chemicals. That’s perhaps the chief reason to seek out organic strawberries—but there are others. Strawberries are delicate things—quick to lose their evanescent esters and other fragrance and flavor compounds, soft and easily crushed in transit, and prone to rapid molding. And so the big, conventional, commercial growers use varieties like Tioga in California, Surecrop through much of the country, and Blomidon in the northern states and Canada. What these types lack in quality they make up in firmness and shipping ability. But how unfortunate are those folks who’ve only tasted these tough, flavor-challenged commercial types. Here are some commercial berries to look for. If you live where the wild strawberries that grow east of the Rockies are found, they are by far the best berries in the world, but they’re seldom found in commerce.
Alpine Type
Alpine Yellow—Long, conical berries are highly aromatic, great flavor.
Baron Solemacher Improved—Berries are an inch long, “wild” flavor.
Ruegen—Small fruits with the intense flavor of wild strawberries.
Everbearing Type
Chandler—Bright red berries of very good flavor from UC Davis.
Mara des Bois—Wild woodland type ripens late summer, early fall.
Selva—Produces good-flavored fruit summer through fall.
Tristar—Deep red flesh, skin with excellent flavor for an everbearer.
June-Bearing Type
Cavendish—A Nova Scotia introduction with an excellent, sweet flavor.
Delmarvel—A sandard of quality in the Mid-Atlantic states; large fruits.
Fairfax—Early season bearer; dark red when ripe; aromatic, flavorful.
Royal Sovereign—An old English variety with a distinct, delicious flavor.
Sequoia—Frequently planted in U-Pick farms; excellent quality.
Sparkle—Wins my personal taste test as best-flavored hybrid strawberry.
Suwannee—Large berries that are also frequent taste-test winners
Is it possible to make organic junk food, and is it being sold?
You bet. One way to define junk food is anything that’s heavy on the fat, salt, and carbohydrates like starches or sugar.
All these ingredients can be organic, but if they’re turned into candy, sweet drinks, burgers and fries, pizza, and such, they are still junk food. They may lack the load of chemicals used in agriculture, or the artificial compounds placed in the foods by food scientists to extend shelf life, texturize the product, and enhance flavor, so in that way they are better than their conventional versions—but they’re still junk food.
I do a lot of shopping at Whole Foods, because I know I can get fresh, organic meats, fish, and vegetables there. But even Whole Foods has two long frozen food cases just stuffed top to bottom with pre-made meals, ice creams, frozen pizzas, and other highly processed foods.
The best way to shop any supermarket—and the most economical and healthy for you—is to shop the outer edges of the store. If you’ll notice, that’s where you find the meat, fish, dairy, bulk bins, and vegetables. It’s the middle aisles where you find the most processed and manipulated foodstuffs.
It’s important to eat organic, but junk food is junk food, whether it’s organic or conventional. As organic foods have entered the mainstream, food manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon by offering organic knock-offs of common, highly processed, junk foods. Don’t fall for it.
Whenever possible, eat organic, fresh, in season, local fruits and vegetables, meats, milk, and other whole, unprocessed foods.
Probably no change in our culture sums up the emergence of the organic ideal more than the change in our bread.It wasn't that long ago that bread in America meant the tasteless, gummy, white slices used to hold sandwich ingredients together. It was a utilitarian product, not a palate pleaser. It's hard to believe we ever got along without the wonderful discoveries we've imported from Europe: pain levian, made with a natural starter; good baguettes that must be eaten fresh from the oven to be at their best; ciabatta, the Italian word for slipper, which is a flat bread with an airy, soft interior and a light, thin crust; quintessentially German dreikornbrot (packed with grains and seeds and bursting with natural goodness), and many other types of fine bread.
My thoughts ran along those lines when I recently brought home a loaf of sourdough from the Acme Bakery of Berkeley, California and tore - literally - into its dark brown crust. I tore off a chunk of crust with my side teeth and crunched in. It had yielding parts, tough and chewy parts, and crisp and crunchy parts with a browned and roasted, nutty wheat flavor. Inside, the bread was moist, stretchy, and chewy. Its aroma combined a dominant sourness with a satisfying, warm, and yeasty graininess. The smell of this bread brought back memories of afternoons when I was about 10, climbing into beams of the neighbor's dairy barn, jumping off into the dry hay, and smelling dusty alfalfa and timothy, oats and chaff, fermenting corn silage, milk and cows, all mingled together. But the Acme loaf is not the bread of my childhood - not by a long shot.
"There's a big change going on with bread", says Joseph Rodriguez of Uprising Bread Bakery in Brooklyn. "The top bakers in Paris are going organic. True artisans all over the world are sticking to pure, organic ingredients." Uprising is an organic bakery started three years ago by Rodriguez and Nicole Lane, his wife. The bakery, with two retail outlets plus sales to markets and restaurants in New York City, makes 12 or 13 kinds of naturally-leavened breads daily, including Italian country bread, special breads like potato and rosemary and carmelized onion, ciabatta, and French-style baguettes. "We don't use commercial yeast," Rodiriguez says. "We've created a natural starter culture and refresh it often - it gives a slightly sour flavor to the bread, but not as sour as San Francisco sourdough."
If you remember, it wasn't that long ago that organic, whole grain bread was hard to find. And now it's here in abundance.
I once asked Joan Gussow, a well-known nutirtionist, what vegetable is best for us to eat. Without hesitating, she said "Kale. But the problem is that nobody eats enough kale for it to make much difference." That's not true when you have a juicer, because you can put as much kale through it as you wish.
A few rules about juicing are in order. Always use fresh, organic produce to avoid the agricultural chemicals used on conventional produce. Don't store juice - drink it within five minutes after you make it. The reason is that juicing vegetables releases enzymes that immediately start to break down the health-giving factors in the food. And start with refrigerator cold, raw vegetables. Warm vegetable juice isn't nearly as palatable as cold.
About two-thirds of the juice should be carrot juice. This makes the juice sweet, creamy, and delicious. For the other third, I use pasley, kales chard, peeled cucumber, celery, and one beet.
Here are five reasons why making vegetable juice and drinking it regularly is a good idea.
1. You get the benefits of an armload of vegetables - more than you'd ever eat at one sitting - in each glass.
2. Raw vegetable juice stimulates a healthy mix of intenstinal flora, and given that nine out of ten cells in our bodies are intenstinal flora, when they're healthy, we're healthy.
3. Vegetable juice is full of soluble fiber that aids regularity.
4. Juice is packed with a wide array of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and other nutritional factors.
5. It tastes great!
Apologists for the conventional food industry have claimed for decades that organic food and conventional food are the same when it comes to nutritional value and flavor. Well, now you can simply refer them to “Organic Foods: Are They a Safer, Healthier Alternative?” in the Fall, 2008, issue of Nutrition in Complementary Care (NCC), a journal of the American Dietetic Association.
Dieticians are professionals in the study of food and nutrition as it impacts health, so it’s interesting to learn what they have to say about organic food. This article is peer-reviewed and loaded with two pages of references to studies published in scientific journals. The authors of the NCC article put together a table that summarizes the nutritional value of organic versus conventional foods.
It analyzed 41 different scientific studies and found these results: Regarding beneficial fatty acids in milk, “organic milk has higher polyunsaturated fatty acids, total omega-3 fatty acid, a more beneficial omega-6:omega-3 ratio, higher alpha-linolenic acid, and higher levels of conjugated linoleic (CLA) fatty acids.” Human breast milk was also studied for its content of essential fatty acids and mothers who ate organic produced more of the health-promoting fatty acids in their milk than mothers who ate conventional. Comparing organic and conventional lettuce, spinach, kale, endive, chard, cabbage, celeriac, turnip, beets, corn salad, potato, radish, and corn, organic produce contained more vitamin C than conventional. When the same produce was tested for iron, magnesium, and phosphorus, again organic food contained more of these essential minerals than conventional.
Several studies looked at antioxidants like phenolic acid and salicylic acid, and again organic foods contained more of these beneficial compounds than conventional.
Flavonoids are immune-system boosters with a wide range of health benefits. Studies looked at the amount of quercetin and kaempferol, and once again, organic food contained more of these flavonoids than conventional.
Not every study showed the benefits of getting more nutrient punch in your organic food. Some showed the benefits of what you don’t get by choosing to eat organic. Nitrates in foods can cause a wide range of illness, including cancers, birth defects, type 1 diabetes, and more. “Overall, the data indicated significantly lower nitrate content in the organic crops versus conventional crops,” the article says. A second study found nitrate levels 83 percent higher in conventional crops than organic crops.
Conventional produce had more crude protein than organic. This was explained by the heavy use of soluble nitrogen fertilizers on conventional farms and the consequent increase in nitrates in the crops. “Organic crops take up nitrogen more slowly, and do not have spikes in growth,” the researchers reported. “This allows attention to other metabolic plant functions like vitamin C production.” Other scientists found that “although organic foods may contain less total crude protein, their essential amino acid profiles are perhaps actually higher. Given the increase in nitrates from synthetic fertilizers used in conventional farming, the lower total crude protein in organic crops may be an indirect benefit.”
The article goes on to summarize the high levels of pesticide ingestion when conventional food is eaten. The conclusion: “An average six to 11 year old child is exposed to chlorpyrifos at doses four times the dose the EPA considers acceptable for long-term exposure…the results suggest that diet is the primary culprit for pesticide exposure in children.”
Overall, the article draws this final conclusion: “The evidence suggests that organic foods are more nutrient dense with regard to the specific nutrients cited above, and may in fact be safer in terms of pesticides and related risks.” It’s nice when scientists back up what we’ve known all along. A study done in England recently said eating organic food gives one the equivalent of an extra meal each day, without any extra calories. The organic food is simply more nutritious.
Why would that be? What makes organic food more nutritious? The answer lies, I think, in the concept of health. Organic crops and farm animals are healthier than their conventional counterparts. They get the nutrition they need from organically-treated soil in the form they like it, when they need it, and in the right amounts. All their systems for building tissue, making fruit, and warding off pests are operating at optimum levels. Health is transferable. As the old organic adage says: healthy soil makes healthy plants makes healthy people.
From its beginnings well over half a century ago, organic farming and gardening has focused on three things: environmentally sound agriculture and horticulture, eating food grown as close to home as possible, and eating food when it’s in season.
In the past 10 years, a huge number of people have grasped those ideals because they make sense. Who foesn’t want clean food that represents the local community—its farmers who grow the food that grows best locally?
But those huge numbers of people have created a drain on the small-scale, local system of organic farming the supplies food for farmers markets and supermarkets with an organic bent, such as Whole Foods.
Demand consistently outstrips supply. This has two effects. First, it can raise prices for organic foodstuffs. And second, it can create large corporations that develop new strategies for supplying the demand. This second effect is on full display in the case of Horizon and Aurora organic milk products. Instead of milk being produced locally, it is produced in giant conglomerations of cows spread around the country. Agribiz has taken notice and begun exploiting the organic market. And now come the first inklings that big corporations may be violating the spirit, and quite possibly the letter, of the USDA’s organic rules.
“While USDA bureaucrats drag their feet on closing key loopholes in national organic standards, retailers, wholesalers and major ‘organic’ brands are continuing to sell milk and dairy products labeled as USDA Organic, even though most or all of their milk is coming from factory farm feedlots where the animals have been brought in from conventional farms and are kept in intensive confinement, with little or no access to pasture,” according to the Organic Consumer’s Association.
The OCA is expanding its boycott of Horizon and Aurora organic dairy products to include five national private label organic milk brands supplied by Aurora, as well as two leading organic soy products, Silk and White Wave, owned by Horizon's parent company, Dean Foods. It’s time to turn up the heat on the Shameless Seven, as OCA calls them.
“While thousands of organic consumers and a number of natural food stores and cooperatives have joined the boycott, major national large grocery retailers have ignored it. Aurora Organic supplies milk for several private label organic milk brands, including Costco's ‘Kirkland Signature,’ Safeway's ‘O’ organics brand, Publix's , High Meadows, Giant's ‘Natures Promise,’ and Wild Oats organic milk. Aurora Organic received a failing grade from the Cornucopia Institute’s survey of organic dairies for its practice of intensive confinement of dairy cows,” the OCA reports.
For action to keep organic rules strong, check in with OCA’s website at:
http://www.organicconsumers.org and http://www.cornucopia.org.
Now that it’s late March, snow and ice have melted in all but the cold tier of states along our northern border with Canada. In the old days, when almost every family lived on a family farm, winter fare consisted of what you put up—without refrigeration. Peaches and cherries were brandied. Apples were cut into slices and strung on strings to dry, then stored in jars in the cupboard. Onions hung in sacks in the attic. Winter squash survived through the winter just fine in a cold bedroom. Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and other root crops lived in barrels in the root cellar. Cabbage could be stored fresh by pulling it up roots and all and hanging it upside down from the attic rafters. Or it could be made into sauerkraut. Bacon was smoked and kept in a cold room, wrapped in paper to keep vermin away. The hens still laid a few fresh eggs every day, though winter production was down. A pig was slaughtered in late November and sausage was potted and covered with lard. Parts of the pig were made into scrapple and head cheese. Hams and hamhocks were salt-cured and smoked. But there was precious little in the way of fresh greens to eat. That’s why when the snow melted away, those early farm families went out to gather ingredients for a spring tonic—a celebration of nature’s first greens.
In the basket went wild onions, green tops and all. A few violet leaves. The first, tender dandelion leaves—lots of them. If you lived in California, there was miner’s lettuce. Where spring water flows, the first leaves of watercress appear. And those farmers knew to start spinach, chicories, and other hardy greens in the fall, cover them with a deep layer of hay, and uncover them in early spring to add their emerging leaves to the spring tonic.
These, and other edible plants that show the first green of the year, were a welcome relief after a winter of heavy, preserved foods from the pantries and rootcellars of the farms of the 18th and early 19th centuries in America. Soon after that bracing, bitter spring tonic, the oak trees began sprouting their leaves, and when they were backlit by the sun, they appeared golden yellow. Poet Robert Frost saw this and wrote:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
New scientific work shows that the amount of nutrients in organic food is higher than in the same amount of the same kind of conventionally grown food.
More “nutrient dense” is the phrase the scientists use.
A “State of Science Review” just issued by the Organic Center in Enterprise, Oregon, went through 97 scientific studies and found that average content of 11 nutrients were 25 percent higher in organic than in chemically grown food plants. A University of California study in 2007 additionally found that the longer a field was managed organically, the larger the difference in nutrient levels between organic and conventional tomatoes.
And the same thing holds true for beef cattle raised organically compared to conventionally. Organic beef—especially from free range, grass fed cattle that do not finish their lives eating grains like corn—contains much more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), one of the essential fatty acids that promotes our health. And milk from organic cows also contains more CLA.
The digestive tracts of grass fed organic cattle also do not harbor virulent strains of E. coli bacteria that can cause illness and death in human beings. Those virulent strains develop in the digestive tracts of cattle fed grains to fatten them before slaughter. Cattle are not natural grain eaters; their stomachs are not set up that way. Nature intends them to eat grass.
Organic beef is also not fed routine antibiotics. When cattle are forced to live in large herds in filthy feed lots where they are fattened for slaughter, they are prone to infections and diseases, so antibiotics are routinely given to them. These antibiotics promote the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria (they kill off most bacteria except those that are resistant and these then reproduce).
Organic milk cows are not given hormones to force greater milk production—hormones that cause illness in humans. Conventional cows do get hormones that force 20 percent more milk from the animals. But the quality of the milk is so bad that Europe won’t import it.
The bottom line: when cattle or milk cows are raised organically and graze pastures handled organically, that meat is more nutrient dense, cleaner, and healthier for us.
As I watched Michelle Obama on the news fecklessly poking at the grass on the south lawn with the point of a shovel, I realized that she doesn’t have a clue about organic vegetable gardening. She’s simply going to get her groundskeepers together and order up a 55-variety vegetable garden and then go back into the White House and pursue her work.
Her heart’s in the right place, though. Putting an organic vegetable garden on the White House grounds is a fine idea. But actually making a performing garden presupposes more knowledge than most people realize. And making the garden authentically organic presupposes even more knowledge on top of that.
First of all, 55 different vegetables is an enormous number of vegetables. I can’t even imagine what all of them will be. Will there be crosnes? Jicama? Ground cherries? Each veggie has its special requirements—some like an acid soil with a low pH and others like an alkaline soil with a high pH. Celery likes to be planted in a boggy soil, while herbs like thyme and rosemary like a dry soil. Corn likes a soil rich in the major nutrients of potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen while tomatoes want a soil that’s moderate to low in nitrogen. Some onions and strawberries will stop growing after the summer solstice, while other onions and strawberries keep producing all summer. Okra likes it midsummer hot while peas and spinach like cool weather.
You don’t just remove the sod from a big square and start planting all these vegetables in whatever soil is under the sod. Proper soil improvement takes a good three years unless you bring in truckloads of ready-made compost. And if you only plant in the spring, then you’ll have a single harvest sometime around the end of July and nothing from the garden after that. To make the garden productive throughout the growing season means you have to plant and replant time after time.
Some vegetables are prone to wilts and diseases while others aren’t. Cabbage moths and cabbage loopers will attack your cabbage family crops (kale, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, etc.). Not might attack. Will attack. You have to know how to prevent these attacks without using pesticides (if you are going to have a real organic garden). Squash bugs and stem borers will attack your squash family plants. Striped and spotted cucumber beetles will attack your cucumbers. Cutworms will topple your seedlings. Mexican bean beetles will find your beans. Potato bugs will find your spuds. And army worms will advance on your whole patch. You need to know how to prevent these pests from getting your veggies before you do, and how to ward them off when they appear.
All of this is doable, of course. But watching Michelle poke at the soil brought me back to my first gardens, which were disasters. Becoming a good gardener is a lot like becoming a good doctor. There’s a world of knowledge behind each and every person and each and every crop.
If there are any rules for how to eat properly, they would be, in this order:
1) eat organic, 2) eat local, and 3) eat what’s in season. Now the demand for organic food has increased so dramatically that America’s organic farms can’t keep up with it. And no wonder—there’s not very much money in the new farm bill for small farmers, let alone organic farmers.
So, China steps in to fill the market with food grown there, frozen, and shipped over here. In 2005, about $136 million worth of organic products were shipped here from China and sold through Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s markets. There are no current figures, but they are sure to be much higher now. The problem is that in the wake of recent health scares in pet food and poison toys from China, many consumers would shy away from organic food from China. Not only is the food questionable, but its carbon footprint is huge, having been shipped all the way from Asia.
Citizens’ concerns over food safety are being used to promote passage of a truly noxious piece of legislation in Congress, H.R. 875. It’s a bill put up by Monsanto and other agribusiness corporations trying to seize control over all agriculture. It was introduced by Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), whose husband runs a polling and political consulting firm, among whose clients is Monsanto.
While purporting to be about food safety, the bill is really about defining as safe only Monsanto’s Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). The bill has teeth, including prison time for those who transgress its rules, but it is also vague about exactly what would trigger the penalties. It calls for a bureaucratic administrator with draconian lawmaking power to create definitions so that Monsanto’s competitors could be run out of business or thrown in jail.
Progressive activists are calling this bill “The Food Fascism Act,” and from the sounds of it, that might be the proper name. Small farmers have a tough enough time of it, trying to compete with food from China and big American agriculture without this toxic legislation.
You can find out more about the bill and find a link to the text of the bill at: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum959.php
That sounds like a prescription for losing some weight - getting more nutrition from less food.
But that’s what new studies are showing about organic food versus conventional.
For years, agribusiness has claimed that there are no studies proving that organic food is any more nutritious than any other kind of food. But that’s just a lie. Many studies conducted over the past few decades have shown that organic food is more nutritious and the studies are coming in faster and more complete now that organics has reached the mainstream.
The new buzzword is “nutrient density.” And organic food has more of it. Scientific studies show that as yields of crop plants rose under chemical cultivation, nutrient content fell. The chemical fertilizers boosted yields, but resulted in declines of five to 40 percent of some minerals in vegetables. Thomas Powell, writing in The Avant Gardener for April, 2009, quotes a famous study from 1981 showing that as phosphorus fertilization increased on raspberries, the phosphorus in the plants increased but other nutrients dropped by 20 to 55 percent. Recent studies show that in 43 garden crops, protein content has declined by six percent and that of three vitamins has decreased 15 to 38 percent since 1950.
In other words, chemical fertilizers flush out big yields of poor quality foods because the soils aren’t replenished any anything other than the three macronutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. And those are in soluble form that quickly leaches out of the soil, fouling the ground water.
Nutrient density increases under organic cultivation, however. The Organic Center of Enterprise, Oregon, has recently released a “State of Science Review.” It shows that in 97 published studies, average content of 11 nutrients was 25 percent higher in organically grown than conventional produce.
As organic gardeners and farmers know, the secret to greater nutrient density lies in the rich soil produced by this method. A University of California study published in 2007 found that “the longer a field was managed organically, the larger the difference in flavonoid levels in organic versus conventional (tomatoes).” Well, of course. Organic soils are fertilized with compost, and compost is the rotted residue of plant tissues. It’s nutrient recycling, so the soil has everything that the new generation of living plants need to build themselves strong, healthy bodies. And build ours the same way.
No berry is more delicious than the strawberry, nor more loaded with agricultural chemicals when it's grown conventionally.
Pickers who have to enter the poison-drenched fields call strawberries “the devil’s fruit,” not just because of the backbreaking labor it takes to harvest them, but also because of the toxic environment of the fields. Over 7,800,000 pounds of agricultural chemicals were used on strawberries in 2001 in California alone. That’s 39,000 tons. In a study by the Environmental Working Group of 42 fruits and vegetables, strawberries had the highest concentration of chemical contaminants.
And yet no berry is more beloved by children, who are most susceptible to bodily harm due to these chemicals. That’s perhaps the chief reason to seek out organic strawberries—but there are others. Strawberries are delicate things—quick to lose their evanescent esters and other fragrance and flavor compounds, soft and easily crushed in transit, and prone to rapid molding. And so the big, conventional, commercial growers use varieties like Tioga in California, Surecrop through much of the country, and Blomidon in the northern states and Canada. What these types lack in quality they make up in firmness and shipping ability. But how unfortunate are those folks who’ve only tasted these tough, flavor-challenged commercial types.
The best strawberries, in my opinion, are the tiny, native wild strawberries of North America that grow east of the Rockies (Fragaria virginiana). In the Pocono Mountains, they ripened in the second week of June. The fields around my boyhood home were carpeted with them—they grew prolifically in the poor shale and clay soils of our hilltop. When the hot June sun baked these fields, great clouds of strawberry fragrance would rise to meet me and I spent many happy, sweaty hours down among the grasses and weeds, eating them straight from the plants. The berries are only the size of your little fingernail, but each packs all the intense strawberry flavor of a full-size hybrid berry—and then some. I was lucky to be back in that vicinity a few Junes ago and drove to that hilltop to see if I could find some wild strawberries. I hadn’t tasted them in probably 30 years or more. As I entered an open field near my former home, I was greeted by the familiar smell of strawberries, and looking down, saw them dangling red and ripe from their little plants by the hundreds. I got a small paper cup from the car and quickly filled it, then drove down to the village diner where I had my first job (washing dishes) and ordered a scoop of vanilla ice cream. When it was set in front of me, I poured the wild strawberries over it and dug in. Though time has, I’m sure, dulled my senses somewhat, they were still as rich and luxurious a flavor as I remembered.
Something of the wild strawberry’s flavor persists in our cultivated varieties, because it’s one of the parents of our modern hybrids. Wild strawberry plants were taken to France about 1600, and a century later, another wilding (Fragaria chiloensis), from the Chilean coast, was also transported to France. The two species crossed by accident about 1750 and the first modern hybrid (F. x ananassa) appeared. Much work was subsequently done in England to bring about a wide range of cultivars. Eventually the hybrids returned to the Americas to become the basis of the strawberry industry here.
I’ve begun to see the little European wild strawberries called fraise des bois—woods’ or Alpine strawberries (Fragaria vesca)—in farmers markets, but only occasionally. Like the native American wildings, they have a rich, intense fragrance and flavor that’s irresistible. If you’re lucky enough to have a good source of these or of F. virginiana, consider making strawberry wine. A friend of mine went on a picking spree and made several gallons from virginianas, and it was a rare, heady, syrupy wine, best taken in small Port glasses or poured over vanilla ice cream.
Some varieties of hybrid berries produce a big crop in June and then are finished for the season. These June-bearers are usually better flavored than everbearing types that produce a sprinkling of berries throughout the summer. Something about the intensity of the June sun brings up the sugars and flavors of strawberries, and also their nutritional quality. These berries contain up to 77 mg. vitamin C per 100 gm. fruit, as well as folates, potassium, and dietary fiber.
Commercial berries for shipping—even organic ones—must be picked before they’re fully ripe or they get too soft. This means that the best berries are going to be locally grown—the nearer your house the better—so that they can ripen fully on the plant. And they will be from June bearing types. Then they’ll be soft, juicy, and dripping sugar, with a hint of pineapple in their flavor. These are the ones to buy by the flat for freezing. Although strawberries don’t freeze very well texturally—if they’re soft going into the freezer, they’ll be mushy coming out—they will make wonderful frozen smoothies paired with bananas and other fruits when put through a blender. If you slice them and freeze the slices individually on wax paper laid on a cookie sheet, then put them in freezer bags when frozen hard, they can be added to winter fruit compotes.
But the glory of strawberries is to get really flavorful June-bearing varieties grown organically and picked at their peak of ripeness and eat them fresh, maybe with a little cream or red wine and sugar, but at their very best just by themselves. Should you choose to use them in cooking or with other foods, they make some heavenly flavor marriages: classy with Champagne, perfect with crème fraiche or mascarpone, delicious with oranges and tangerines (whose acidic zestiness enhances strawberry’s flavor), harmonic with pineapple, and classic with rhubarb—among other flavor pairings. And I haven’t even mentioned chocolate.
I don't know if you saw Stephen Colbert's ironic send-up of the chemical agriculture industry recently, but it was priceless comedy. And richly deserved. It turns out that the Mid-America Croplife Association (MACA), which represents chemical companies that produce pesticides and other toxic substances, is in a dither about one of these three things: guess which.
1) The high price of chemical raw materials
2) Rising costs for transporting chemicals
3) Michelle Obama’s organic garden
If you guessed number three, you are correct. In an email they sent to their supporters and clients, a MACA spokesperson wrote, “While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made us shudder.” Maca then sent Mrs. Obama a letter asking her to please consider using chemicals—what they call “crop protection products”—in her garden.
MACA’s letter is part of a decades-long propaganda and disinformation effort to convince people that crops cannot be grown without chemicals. The old agribusiness mantra was, “If agriculture went organic, half the world would starve.” It’s utter nonsense, of course. Under organic culture, soil is improved as its used, crop yields are equal to or better than conventional agriculture, the produce is free from toxic chemicals, soil erosion is curbed, droughts are less destructive because spongy organic soil holds water better, organic food is often more nutritious than its conventional counterparts, and ecosystems on and around organic farms are not disrupted by chemicals and are strengthened by the purity of the agriculture practiced there.
I can just see the MACA flacks sitting in their conference room, shuddering away as pictures of Michelle’s organic garden are shown on TV. That little garden is a fearsome thing and a danger, all right. It’s a danger to their profits.
As long as you have a spot that gets three or four hours of sun a day, you can grow your own organic lettuce for salads all season long.
Here are some things you need to know about lettuce to get started.
1) Morning sun is best, but if all you have is afternoon sun, that will do as long as the plants get no more than four hours of sun each day.
2) Lettuce likes it best in cool weather. In very hot weather, make sure the soil stays moist but not sopping wet, and even move your plants to a shady area.
3) You can certainly grow lettuce in a garden, but you can also grow it in almost any container that has drain holes in the bottom. Cardboard boxes lined with plastic lawn and leaf bags, with drainage holes poked in the bottom, and filled with organic compost from the garden center work just fine and cost very little.
4) Figure 15 plants of looseleaf lettuce per person. A cardboard box planter as described above will hold three rows of five plants each. So create a box for each member of the family.
5) Plant looseleaf varieties like Oak Leaf, Black-Seeded Simpson, Deer Tongue, Salad Bowl, Ruby, Prizehead, and others. These take about seven weeks to reach harvestable size.
6) When harvesting, take only a few outer, larger leaves from each plant, leaving the inner leaves and roots in place. This “cut-and-come-again” technique allows you to keep harvesting from the same plants for many weeks.
7) Start a second set of boxes about half way through your growing season (early July in the mid-Atlantic states). The spring-planted lettuces will bolt by the hot weather of mid-summer. Bolting means they are sending up a flower stalk to make seed, which turns the plants bitter and unusable. The second set of boxes will take over for the first set as they begin to bolt. Discard plants that begin to bolt.
8) You don’t need to use fertilizer if you use well-made compost. It has plenty of grow power.
9) Make sure the soil is constantly moist, but not sopping wet.
If you use these simple steps, you’ll be able to grow your own salad lettuces all season long.
Strangely enough, although bananas are grown far away in tropical and often exotic regions of the world, they are one of the most ubiquitous organic fruits available to us. The reason is that while many of our other fruits are locally-grown, and therefore of spotty organic availability, bananas come to us through a huge network of large corporate plantations and international delivery systems. We may believe our organic bananas come from dedicated, small-scale, organic family farmers, but that’s a romantic notion that’s almost never the case.
The Dole corporation is the largest supplier of organic bananas to the U.S., Western Europe, and Canada, but there are also Quinta Organica, Organics Unlimited, Sabrosa, and Eco Organic. Denny Gibson of Puget Consumers Co-op (PCC), the largest consumer-owned food co-op in America with 40,000 members and seven stores in the Puget Sound area, says that when the superior organic bananas provided by Quinta Organica aren’t available, the co-op turns to Dole. Because of Dole’s historical record as a chemically-oriented, agribusiness giant, some members challenged PCC about selling Dole bananas. Gibson and his wife Monica toured some of the big suppliers in South America, including the Dole organic banana plantation in Manabi, Ecuador, and here’s what he reports:
“Overall, we felt the plantation was well organized, the employees had a clean and safe working environment, and the administrators expressed a commitment to organic farming methods, fair treatment of their employees, and protection of the natural environment. Granted, it was a one day visit, we aren’t soil scientists, and we didn’t have a chance to interview the employees. Industry insiders claim Dole executives have said publicly they really ‘don’t believe’ in the organic ‘fad,’ and that Dole imports every [farming] input possible instead of making it locally, which doesn’t support sustainable agriculture. But what we saw was quite positive compared to what most people might imagine from a multinational corporation.”
One of the smaller organic producers is Quinta Organica, located in southern Ecuador. PCC’s customers have commented on the superior flavor, creamy texture, and consistent appearance of Quinta’s bananas. Quinta’s founder and CEO, Werner Forster, says the difference is due to rich, fertile soil and organic fertilizers, proper care of the plants, and harvesting the bananas at a slightly more advanced stage of development.
Whether Quinta or Dole, organic banana culture is light years more eco-friendly than conventional. Here’s why. First of all, farm workers and banana wranglers are exposed to harmful chemicals. On the plantations, conventional growers fertilize the soil with 1.5 tons per acre of 8:10:8. The numbers refer to chemical nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in the fertilizer. Unless organic matter is returned to tropical soils, they soon lose the life in the soil that depends on actively decaying organic matter. Without a rich diversity of soil life, diseases and pests can proliferate.
“Black sigatoka fungus in banana plantations has reached global epidemic proportions,” according to Dr. Emile Frison, a Belgian scientist who heads the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain, as reported in New Scientist magazine. He says the Cavendish banana variety is being attacked around the world by Panama disease, a soil-borne wilt that destroyed the superior Gros Michel strain of bananas in the 1950s. Fungicides are proving increasingly ineffective, but Dr. Frison is looking to biotechnology and genetic modification to save the world’s bananas and plantains, on which half a billion people depend for a staple food. He’s looking in the wrong place.
It’s been shown that soils teeming with soil life prevent outbreaks of diseases and funguses that wreak wholesale destruction on crops, especially the kind of fusarium wilts of which Panama disease is a type. The problem is that lifeless chemical soils fertilized with nothing but mineral macronutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium have no autoimmunity to diseases, whereas rich, organic soils do. Conventional banana growers also use a host of toxic chemicals against pests. Nematodes (destructive soil worms) are controlled with carbofuran, Dasanit, Ethoprop, and phenamiphos. Yet nematodes can be controlled organically by proper tillage, sun exposure, and crop rotations with nematode-destroying Pangola grass. Black weevil is controlled with dieldrin and heptachlor; banana rust thrips with dieldrin, diazinon, and dursban, and banana scab moth with injections of pesticides into the growing stems. Yet all of these are controlled with non-toxic techniques on organic banana plantations.
As for fertilizers, bananas and plantains are heavy feeders. Harvesting five tons of fruit from an acre depletes the soil of 22 pounds of nitrogen, four pounds of phosphorus, and 55 pounds of potassium. Instead of applying chemical fertilizers, if the old plant stems and leaves from one plantation acre are chopped and incorporated into the soil, 404 pounds of nitrogen, 101 pounds of phosphorus, and 1,513 pounds of potassium are returned to the soil. If this material is composted with other organic matter, even more is returned. The result? Under organic cultivation, the soil improves in health, amount of soil life, availability of nutrients, resistance to soil pests and diseases, and its ability to produce extra high quality bananas and plantains.
Organic bananas are well worth seeking out because their production avoids a host of toxic chemicals that affect everything from the health of the plantation soils and surrounding ecosystems, to the health of the workers who grow and handle them, to the health of those of us who eat them.
In the late 1970's, a man named Brant Secunda was studying shamanism under the tutelage of Don Jose Matsuwa, a Huichol Indian from Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains. He subsequently had a visionary dream of people eating chocolate, which filled their bodies with love.
Cut to the present day, where Secunda has now established Shaman Chocolates, part of the proceeds of which goes to support the Huichols in their efforts to retain their pre-Columbian culture—possibly the last North American tribe to have kept their indigenous culture fully alive. Secunda also started the Dance of the Deer Foundation, based in Santa Cruz, California, that conducts seminars and tours for people interested in the Huichol culture and artwork. Their artistry includes astoundingly beautiful “paintings” made from colored string and beeswax. Chocolate has figured in the Huichol culture for thousands of years, much as it did with the Aztecs and other indigenous Mexican tribes. The Huichols used it in ceremonies and as offerings to Mother Earth in appreciation of her many blessings.
I’ve sampled Shaman Chocolates—they’re completely organic and carry the USDA Organic seal as well as the CCOF seal—and they are delicious. Seven types of bars are available: extra dark, dark, dark with raspberries, dark with coconut, milk chocolate, milk chocolate with macadamia nuts and Hawaiian pink salt, and milk chocolate with hazelnuts.
It’s a good feeling when buying these chocolates to know they are helping to protect the Huichol culture. One result has been the building of a high school so Huichol students don’t have to leave their villages, and support for the first Huichol to go to college—a young woman who is studying law in order to help her tribe protect itself from pressures to give up the traditional ways in favor of joining with mainstream and modern Mexican culture.
To find a store near you that carries Shaman chocolates, visit www.shamanchocolates.com/StatesForStores.html. This site not only will take you to local stores, but has a button that takes you to an online shopping page.
Here are four websites you should know about if you’re interested in the fresh, local, and organic food.
The first is Local Harvest (www.localharvest.org/).
This excellent site lists farms, community support agriculture organizations, farmers’ markets, restaurants, groceries, co-ops, and other sources of organic food near you. It also lists food and farm events nationally, and supports blogs where online communities form around good, fresh, local, seasonal organic food.
The second is the Eat Well Guide (http://www.eatwellguide.org/i.php?pd=Home).
The site will point you to organic farmers within a selected number of miles of your house. You can also search by foodstuff. I searched for organic lettuce and was given two farms within 20 miles of my house that sell organic salad greens.
At the third website, the Food and Water Watch (http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/global-grocer),
you can find out where your food is coming from. I put garlic in the site’s search feature and discovered that there was a 318 percent increase in garlic imports from 1993 to 2007. It also told me that less than half the garlic sold in the U.S. is now grown domestically, and that 93 percent of imported garlic comes from China. Yikes!
The fourth website, the Sustainable Table (http://www.sustainabletable.org/home.php),
is chock full of good information about sustainable and organic food, including which foods contain harmful chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, and the like. It also links to The Eat Well Guide.
Honeybees not only supply us with honey, but they pollinate our crops - everything from apples to winter squashes. They are an extremely important part of the food chain that leads to human beings, and they have been dying around the world by the billions due to a mysterious killer called, for want of a better name, colony collapse disorder. Up to 70 percent of all beehives in the world have been affected. In France alone, approximately 90 billion bees died over the past 10 years, reducing honey production by 60 percent.
Now a group of German environmentalists and farmers calling themselves the Coalition Against Bayer Dangers has sued Bayer CropScience, a subsidiary of giant Bayer AG (yes, the same company that makes the aspirin) chemical conglomerate. The suit alleges that is Bayer’s pesticides, imidacloprid and clothianidin, that are killing off bees wholesale. The lawsuit notes that colony collapse disorder started occurring about the same time as the Bayer pesticides began to be marketed.
Both pesticides are systemic chemicals used to coat crop seeds. The chemicals work their way from the seed through the whole plant—including its pollen and nectar. They impact the central nervous systems of the insects, which then die. The pesticides not only contaminate the plants grown from treated seed, but enter the environment through rain washing them off the seeds. They persist in the soil and find their way into whatever is growing there, posing widespread danger to honeybees and other insects.
The two insecticides earn Bayer about 800 million Euros a year, and the company is fighting any attempts to prohibit their use. The French, however, have recently banned them, as has Germany. Bayer produced many studies claiming to show that the pesticides are safe and environmentally friendly, but the boards of environmental protection in France and Germany declared them to be flawed. When Bayer applied for a permit to sell the pesticides in Canada, the Canadian Pest
Management Regulatory Agency said, “All of the field and semi-field studies were found to be deficient in design and conduct.”
In the United States, the Natural Resources Defense Council recently filed a lawsuit in federal court to force the federal government to disclose studies it ordered on the effect of Bayer’s pesticides on honeybees. The EPA ordered the studies as part of the process for approving Bayer’s registration for the pesticides during the Bush administration. The approval was then granted. The NRDC believes that EPA has evidence of connections between the pesticides and colony collapse disorder, but has not made the studies public. More than a third of all honeybee colonies in the United States have died off since the disorder was identified in 2006.
"Organic will be integrated across all agencies at USDA" Deputy U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan told those attending the Third Annual Organic Summit in Stevenson, Washington, two weeks ago.
“Here’s where I’d like to fulfill a promise I made to many of you…and that is, organic should be integrated across all agencies, not just the National Organic Program, but each and every agency at USDA should have some engagement with the organic sector. Organic can no longer be stove-piped at USDA,” she said.
Starting this week (June 14-21), the first-ever wide-scale survey of organic farming in the United States will be launched as the Organic Production Survey. Information from the survey will be used to shape USDA policy and priorities with an eye toward helping small organic producers grow their operations into mid-sized farms and ranches.
Merrigan said that the main thrust now of the National Organic Program will be to rigorously enforce the standards that were drawn up to define organic. “We spent a lot of time developing standards, and now let’s make sure they have the teeth and that they are followed and adhered to,” she said.
How things have changed in 35 years. In the mid-1970s, organic activists at Organic Gardening magazine and Congress developed the National Soil Fertility Program, which aimed to survey all the organic waste in this country that’s dumped into landfills, and how much soil building compost it could make to be returned to the land as fertilizer. A pamphlet about it was given to the state secretaries of agriculture at their yearly meeting in Washington, D.C. Brushing it brusquely aside and refusing to accept the pamphlet was the Texas Secretary of Agriculture who said, “Don’t bother me with that #$&@.”
And one day when I was an editor on the magazine, I stopped to speak with someone at USDA Headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland. The man, an agricultural scientist, showed me into his office, closed the door, and locked it. “Why are you locking the door?” I asked.
“If anyone saw me talking with someone from Organic Gardening magazine,” he said, “I’d get fired.”
How times have changed.
One of the best things about summer is when the organic apricots appear in the markets. When you find really good looking ones with a blush on their cheeks and a sweet ripeness yet firmness of texture, make this preserve. Apricots have an affinity for lemons that will surprise you. Use them on English muffins oron really good toast. They also make a wonderful sweet-sour glaze for boneless, skinless chicken breasts, for pork chops, and on pastries. Note the recipe calls for several stages over a day or two. It’s worth the time and effort to make a batch—and you can only do it when the best apricots are in season. And that seasonal peak arrives in early July.
5 lbs. unpeeled ripe organic apricots
6 cups sugar
1/3 cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice
6 ½-pint canning jars with lids
Canning pot with rack
1. Pull the apricots apart at their seam line and discard the pits. Place the fruit halves in a bowl with the sugar and stir until well mixed and the sugar has dissolved. Cover the bowl and set it aside for four hours (or place it covered in the fridge overnight).
2. When you’re ready to cook, place a stack of saucers in the freezer, then turn the fruit into a heavy pot and stir in the lemon juice. Set the heat to medium-high, stirring frequently to prevent scorching. Cook until the fruit reaches the jelling point. (Drop some of the preserves on a freezing cold saucer. After the drop chills, swipe a finger through it. The finger mark should remain and the surface of the preserves should wrinkle a little. Do this several times as the mixture boils, because if the fruit is overcooked and scorches, it will be too thick and acquire an acrid taste.) As soon as the jelling point is reached, immediately remove the pot from the heat. Turn the contents of the pot into large baking dish, let cool, cover with foil, and refrigerate.
3. The next day, sterilize the jars and lids in boiling water. Return the apricot mixture to the pot and bring the pot to a boil. Remove from the heat and ladle the preserves into the jars, leaving ½ inch head space. Put on the lids and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, making sure the jars don’t touch each other or the bottom of the pot and that there are at least 2 inches of rapidly boiling water above the lids. Makes 6 half-pints.
Folks who eat healthy, clean, and environmentally friendly organic food already know why their food is so good, but other folks may need some convincing. They need to see Food Inc., a new documentary movie about the American food industry by filmmaker Robert Kenner. It will convince them that there’s a good reason why so many people are choosing organic food for the health of their families, for the families of farmers and farm workers, and for the health of the earth itself.
In a recent review of the movie in the June 29, 2009 New Yorker, David Denby called the film, “…an angry blast of disgust aimed at the American food industry…The seemingly vast array of foods in a typical supermarket is not so varied as we might think,” because so much of it is based on cheap, often genetically-engineered corn in its many disguises, like high fructose corn syrup, and because “much of it is produced and controlled by a few enormous food companies that have operated without serious government regulation in recent years.”
It’s about time that a good documentary chronicles the cynical abuses of the food industry, and the terrible effects it has on the health of Americans and the natural ecosystems that operate on planet earth. We’re just now learning that, just as pesticides have had the effect of breeding superbugs that are resistant to ordinary insecticides, and antibiotics are breeding antibiotic-resistant supergerms, so herbicides are breeding herbicide-resistant superweeds out of the common field weeds of North America.
We can see the effects in the obesity that’s around us everywhere, in soaring rates of type 2 diabetes, and in a populace that ranks lowest among first world countries in measures such as infant mortality and rates of some diseases. Some say that America has the best health care in the world. That’s true if you look at medicine practiced on people who are already sick and who can afford such care, but the best health care in the world starts with good, wholesome, healthy, organic food on the plate at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Sick animals—of which you’ll see plenty as Food Inc. explores the horrific way in which farm animals are raised at factory farms—transfer sickness to the people who eat them. Healthy animals, such as those raised organically, transfer that health to the people who eat them or their products like milk and eggs. That’s true health care.
Yes, organic food costs more to produce. Things on the organic farm tend to be small-scale compared to the farm-by-numbers practices of Big Ag. More passes through the fields on tractors are required for many organic crops. Open-pollinated and non-GMO seeds cost more. Farm animals are raised in humane conditions instead of being herded into small confinements and doused with chemicals. Organic foods aren’t filled with cheap extenders and chemical flavorings that obscure the tasteless creations of industrial food companies. Resources on the organic farm are allotted to the environment as well as to the production of food and fiber. There’s composting to be done—an expense conventional farms don’t have. There are many other reasons why it costs more to produce organic food.
But that’s just looking at the small picture. Is organic food really more expensive when we look at the big picture?
Fifty years ago, people spent about 13 percent of their income on food and about five percent on health care. Today the average American spends about five percent of his or her income on food, but more than 20 percent on health care. Obesity has reached epidemic proportions. It’s estimated that one of three children born today will develop Type 2 diabetes. Why all the obesity and sickness? Blame the lousy food that flows from the industrial food factories. It’s loaded with salt, sugar, and fat. Corn and soybeans dominate as ingredients—and they are genetically altered. Meats are contaminated with antibiotics that have bred MRSA—antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Pesticides and herbicides add to the toxic burden that creates sickness in consumers, in farm workers, and in the land itself.
A diet of organic food, on the other hand, guarantees that the food is raised free from chemical toxins, with no genetic modifications, and that meats are raised humanely without antibiotics and hormones. Organic food tends to be locally produced, which supports local farm communities. It’s cheapest when it’s in season. Healthy farms produce healthy foods which produce healthy people. In addition, there are no costs for rescuing streams and ground waters from toxic contaminants. Soil erosion is reduced because soils are enriched with water-holding, spongy humus that is the product of decayed organic matter.
As more organic food is produced, the price disparity with conventional food narrows. Every dollar spent on organic food is a vote for wise, clean, wholesome farming and for our own health and the health of our families. We may pay a little more at the checkout counter, but we won’t be paying the horrendous social and environmental costs of Big Ag later.
Horizon bills its milk as organic. It might or might not meet the letter of the law - the USDA’s National Organic Program—but it certainly doesn’t meet the spirit of the organic law.
Horizon, owned by Dean Foods, has always raised large dairy herds under less than adequate conditions for positive health of the animals. And now Dean Foods is setting up a lower-priced product category they’re calling “natural dairy,” which simply means conventional milk and milk products. It will be sold under the corporation’s Horizon label. Dean is doing the same thing with its line of soy milk products called Silk—switching from organic to conventional soybeans.
The result, of course, is that the new “natural” dairy category will compete with its own organic brand, and with other, more legitimate organic brands around the country. Many organic dairy farmers are complaining that they could be ruined by the size and strength of Dean Foods’ marketing clout.
In a related story, it turns out that under the presidency of George W. Bush, the USDA’s National Organic Program, which is the rules for determining whether a food is organic or not, was ignored and sometimes overruled.
The Washington Post recently wrote a scathing indictment of the NOP and its director, Barbara Robinson. She overruled the professional staff at the NOP by allowing synthetic additives to be included in organic baby food after a phone call from a powerful Washington lobbyist. Robinson overruled her staff, which determined that DHA and ARA oils should not be approved, especially for baby food. Hexane, a neurotoxic solvent specifically banned in organic food production, is used to extract the oils from seaweed and soil fungus. That’s just one example.
What can we do as concerned organic-minded individuals to make sure USDA’s National Organic Program keeps the organic laws strictly enforced? One thing is to know what’s happening. The Washington Post story is at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070203365.html.
The next thing is to write to USDA Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1400 Independence Avenue SW, Washington DC 20250 and demand that the National Organic Program be fully implemented so that food and fiber labeled organic are truly organic, and enforced so that those who violate the law are prosecuted.
Two things you should know when buying food at a farmers’ market. One, are you dealing with an actual farmer who grew the crop or with a purveyor who buys his or her food somewhere else and resells it at the farmers’ market? And two, is the food you’re buying really organic—and how can you know?
The actual farmer will know the variety name of the food—Red Haven peaches, Detroit Dark Red beets, and so on. After all, he or she bought the seed, planted the trees, and chose the varieties. Purveyors may or may not know the variety, usually not. Also, real farmers will have produce that’s not uniform. Some peaches or beets may be runty, or of an odd shape. Big supermarkets don’t want these, but they are just as tasty as the uniform ones, if not moreso.
Purveyors, on the other hand, tend to have fruits and vegetables that have been sorted by the wholesaler and look neatly identical. You won’t find odd-ball varieties, but rather the standard varieties that wholesalers sell to supermarkets. The purveyor will act like a grocer, not a farmer. They usually won’t have any business name displayed, or a business card to offer. If they do have a card, it will say something like, “John Smith, Farm Fresh Produce.” A farmer’s card will usually feature the name of the farm: “Justa Farm, Organic Produce in Season, Paul Harps, Proprietor.” A purveyor can say a crop is organically grown, but that doesn’t prove it’s so. If it is truly organic, the purveyor will have documentation from a certifying agency. He’ll be able to name the certifier and show you the agency’s symbol. He may have the USDA’s green and white organic seal. Beware of purveyors who say, “The crop isn’t certified, but it’s organic.” They may sometimes know the variety of foodstuff they are selling, but they most likely won’t know the cultural details—where and how the crop was grown. The farmers market may be a one-day event for a purveyor who’s ready to move on to greener pastures tomorrow. I’m not saying you have to be paranoid about food fraud, but it pays to be suspicious if food sold as organic by a purveyor who has no documentation. Caveat emptor is always a good policy.
The value of separating the farmers from the purveyors is manifold. First, the farmers can pick their fruits and vegetables when they are at their peak. Vine-ripened berries don’t last long in the supermarket pipeline. They soften when ripe, and tend to disintegrate before they reach the store’s shelves. But a farmer can pick his berries in the evening and have them at the farmers market the next morning. So many fruits develop amazingly delicious qualities only when they are picked ripe, and that goes for everything from avocados to watermelons. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and so Bartlett pears should be purchased when they are still hard and preferably green. If left on the tree, they turn to brown mush from the inside out.
Purveyors, even purveyors of organic produce, must buy the same wholesale fruits and vegetables that go to the organic sections of supermarkets. So their produce is bedeviled by the same problem as the big markets—it has to be picked early to ship well and to get the premium price that the first guy in with the crop can demand. And that means watery avocados, sour kiwifruit, and insipid melons. This problem doesn’t much affect vegetables—they tend to be more delicate and choice when picked on the young side. But it certainly does apply to fruit.
Some of the finest fruits are actually found only at farmers markets, and picked from the wild. Growing up in Pennsylvania’s countryside, I could tell the time of year by the wild fruits that were available. The tiny wild strawberries—each of which had twice the flavor of any large commercial berry—were ready in mid-June. The black raspberries, or black caps as some called them, were invariably ripe on the Fourth of July. Wild huckleberries came into season in mid-July, and about the same time as the wineberries. Wild grapes, Vitis labrusca, get ripe in August, and as boys, we were able to smell them from 100 feet away and climb the trees where they hung in festoons. The only time I’ve ever seen any of these astoundingly delicious fruits for sale has been at roadside stands, farmers markets, or sometimes at farms where the kids have set a few boxes out on a bench by the parking space. Once picked, most won’t keep for more than a day. Picked ripe, they are all incomparable. I’ve grown any number of commercial black raspberries offered in the fruit catalogs, and none of them even come close to the evanescent aroma and flavor of real black raspberries from wild bushes with their dusty violet, prickly stems. And when I was a kid, I could get a pint of black raspberry ice cream that contained—I could tell by the taste—the real thing. But nowadays, you either have to pick them yourself or find them at farmers markets or roadside stands.
How do you tell whether food is organic or not? If it is, the farmer or purveyor will display a sign naming the certifying agency that guarantees it’s organic, such as CCOF in California, Tilth in the Northwest, or NOFA in the Northeast. Beware the purveyor who says it’s organic but has no proof.
You can determine whether the farmer is organic by asking him or her how they handle insect infestations. All farmers have to deal with pests and diseases, but organic farmers have a distinct set of methods to control them without poisons and will generally be happy to discuss the techniques with you. One such method is the use of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), a disease that affects only caterpillars. All organic farmers will be aware of it. If your farmer doesn’t know what Bt is, chances are he’s not organic. So ask questions. The answers will tell you straightaway whether the farmer is truly organic.
When I joined Rodale Press, as it was called in 1970, as an associate editor of Organic Gardening, J.I. Rodale was still alive. I had gotten to know him years before due to family interconnections with the Rodales. One of his daughters married a good friend of my wife’s sister: that sort of thing—and I admired his clean-looking, well-ordered organic farm (the first one in the whole nation then) near Allentown, Pennsylvania.
I didn’t know at the time that J.I.—for Jerome Irving—was destined to become an iconic figure in the organic movement.
He began “Organic Farming and Gardening” magazine in 1943, when the new agricultural wonder drug was DDT and was being spread with abandon on victory gardens and farms across America. He had figured out, through a voracious reading habit, that synthetic chemicals would lead to sickness and disease in the ecology of life. This was 20 years before Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring and long before ecology even became a subject of study in universities. He saw clearly way back then that the way to farm and garden was to work with nature, not defeat her chemically.
And yet he was an unlikely guy to be such a pioneer. He was brought up in the milieu of New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th Century. He kept his New York-Jewish accent his whole life, and his love of Yiddish theater, too. It was Rodale who suggested to the Manhattan city council that street lights should be timed on the city’s avenues so that someone driving the speed limit would find lights turning green as he or she approached them—a trick used almost everywhere today.
He moved to eastern Pennsylvania to work with his brother developing light switches. But his interest lay in publishing. As his business—Rodale Press—flourished, he handed the light switch business to his brother and built the headquarters for his publishing business a few blocks away. The light switch business turned into Lucent Technologies, a pioneer in mercury switches and a big player in electronics today.
In 1950, he began Prevention magazine, built upon the same premise as Organic Gardening: that the way to health was through proper nourishment, that proper nourishment prevents illness. The motto around Rodale Press was that healthy soil builds healthy plants and animals and that when people eat healthy plants and animals, they stay healthy. Prevention spawned the natural vitamin and nutritional supplement business that is a multi-billion dollar business today. That’s right, before Prevention, it didn’t really exist.
The theme of health continues at Rodale today. It publishes the very popular magazines, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Bicycling, Runner’s World, and so on. You can see the connection.
I worked with J.I. on various projects in my first two years at Rodale Press. By that time, he devoted a lot of his time to writing plays that harkened back to the old Yiddish theater that gave him so much pleasure as a youngster. He even bought his own theater in Greenwich Village and put on his plays there. Critics panned the plays unmercifully, but J.I. kept on writing plays until he died in 1971.
It’s not his plays that he is remembered for. He had a quick, and quixotic, brilliant mind, and he achieved what few people achieve: a transcendent illumination of a truth that the world is still coming to grips with: farming and gardening can be practiced entirely naturally, without synthetic chemicals, if we augment and encourage natural principles—and the results will be improved soils, healthy crops, higher yields of better tasting and more nutritious crops, robust ecologies, and a better, healthier world, including the people in it.
Although he was thought of as a crackpot in his time, he never wavered from his belief. He had been to the mountaintop and been given a glimpse of radiant truth, which he dutifully spread. He has been fully vindicated. He should get a statue on the National Mall.
Now that the best tomatoes of the year are in the stores and farmers' markets, I have to share this recipe with you, because it has brought much joy to my dinner table and the folks who eat there. It could hardly be simpler—and that is its virtue. I like it with capellini, but it goes equally well over any kind of hot-from-the-pot pasta.
The secret here is that everything should be organic. Before I give you the recipe, here’s an email I received today from a young New Jersey man who understands the value of organic food. He kindly praised my book, “The Organic Cook’s Bible,” but I kindly praise him for turning his family organic. Despite all the disinformation being spread about organics by agribusiness and their flacks, this man has seen through it:
“I am writing this because I want to express my gratitude to you for writing the book, ‘The Organic Cook's Bible’. I feel you have done a great service to me, my wife, and many other cooks throughout the world.
“What I can say about this book is that it's a true eye opener. After considering the Organic Factor in every kind of food, I've been inspired to live my life as organically as possible. For the past few months now, I've been shopping only at organic and natural health food stores, sticking to about 90 percent organic foods. Organic fruits and vegetables certainly have a hundred times more flavor, and grass-fed beef burgers don't make me feel guilty at all.”
Raw and Delicious Organic Tomato Sauce for Pasta
5 medium tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped into lumpy pulp
3 tablespoons minced shallots
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
1/4 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
3 tablespoons finely chopped basil
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 pound cappellini (angel hair) pasta, cooked according to package
instructions
Place the tomatoes, shallots, vinegar, salt, and pepper in a bowl and mix well. Set aside for 10 minutes, then put through a large sieve and let drain. Add the drained solids back to the bowl. Add the basil and oil and stir to mix. Serve at room temperature over steaming hot pasta.
Organic food is no more nutritious than conventional. No scientific proof of organic foods’ superiority. Two billion people will starve if the world’s agriculture goes organic. Organic food is dangerous because it fertilizes the soil with manure. And all of it is lies. Outright, bald-faced lies, told by flacks for the agricultural chemical companies.
In researching my book, The Organic Cook’s Bible, I filled a filing cabinet full of scientific papers that showed organic food to be more nutritious. And since the book was published in 2007, there have been many more studies showing the same thing. The United Nations is teaching organic agriculture in Third World countries and saying that organic farming holds promise of avoiding starvation for millions of people. Many studies show that organic farm yields are about the same, if not better, than conventional yields.
So along comes a report by Dr. Alan Dangour, a Registered Public Health Nutritionist, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, that reviewed scientific studies for the past 50 years showing no significant nutritional differences between conventional and organic produce, meat, and milk.
Dr. Dangour, however, only allowed 55 studies to be considered. There were 162 studies in all. When all the studies were taken into account, according to a news story in The Independent, organic produce was frequently higher in nutrients than conventional. For instance, beta carotenes were 53 percent higher and flavonoids 38 percent higher in organic produce.
Peter Melchett of The Soil Association, the UK’s organic group, wrote, “The review rejected almost all of the existing studies of comparisons between organic and conventional produce.”
Carlo Leifert is professor of ecology at Newcastle University and has been conducting a $17 million EU-funded study into nutritional differences between organic and conventional foods. He attacked the Dangour study. His initial research found that organic milk contained about 60 percent more antioxidants and beneficial fatty acids than conventional milk. Provisional results from the same study suggest that organic wheat, tomatoes, cabbage, onions, and lettuce also had between 10 and 20 percent more vitamins. None of Professor Leifert’s work was included in the Dangour review.
Dr. Dangour looked at studies going back 50 years. Back then there was little research into organic food. Most studies were done at land grant colleges and paid for by agricultural chemical companies. Modern research is showing that organic food is indeed more nutritious than conventional, and yet, the headlines keep appearing. I’ve quoted one as the headline on this report.
Sweet, tender, creamy corn is so luscious simply boiled on the cob that it’s hard to believe it could be better. But when someone takes the time to dig a pit in the seashore sand and burn a driftwood fire in it until there’s a bed of red-hot coals, then load in wet seaweed, a few bushels of corn, lobsters, and soft-shelled clams, and top it with more seaweed and wet burlap until the corn and seafood are all roasted and steamed, right there could be your first dinner in paradise.
This staple food has come a long way since a Mexican annual grass called teosinte crossed with another wild grain (scientists don’t know which, and they don’t know precisely when, but it was probably sometime well before 6,000 BCE) and the resulting species began to sport small, ¾-inch heads studded with seeds. The first evidence of cultivation of this plant by Native Americans was discovered in the Tehuacan Valley of Puebla, Mexico, and dates to 5,500 BCE.
By the time Columbus arrived 6,992 years later, the plant had changed into its modern form—dependent for its survival on human hands to pull the seeds off the cobs and plant them individually a foot or so apart. Over that time, the Native Americans learned to boil their corn in water into which they threw wood ashes. Although they were stone age people living without modern science, they knew what was good for them. Today we know that niacin—a necessary vitamin in the human diet—is locked up and unavailable in corn, and societies that depend on corn for the bulk of their protein are liable to develop pellagra, a particularly nasty disease caused by niacin deficiency. Adding ash to cooking water, however, makes the water alkaline and converts the niacin into a form that can be assimilated by humans—a process scientists call nixtamalization. Perhaps Native Americans discovered the secret of unlocking niacin using divination, or a sixth sense, or maybe the way I discovered baby corn—by pure dumb luck.
When I was learning to grow vegetables organically, I planted my first corn crop in soil so poor I had to open up a four-inch- deep channel in the brick-hard earth with a pick. I planted the seeds a foot apart in five rows three feet apart, like the seed packet said, and pretty much forgot about the corn. Later that summer I found spindly little stalks about a foot and a half tall growing among the weeds. They had small, two-inch ears, which I dutifully harvested. I thought they looked like the baby corn that was showing up in Szechuan dishes in New York, so I tasted one—hmm, sweet and tender. So I harvested the bunch of them—got maybe two handfuls from the whole darn patch—and wokked them into a stir fry. That’s how I discovered that Chinese baby corn is just that—immature corn picked very young, and not a separate kind of corn. Later I learned that because corn grows so large so fast, it needs enormously rich soil and plenty of water to produce big, fat ears. Once I provided those conditions, I was swamped with corn.
I also learned that sweet corn is a mutation of Indian or field corn—the starchy corn that’s used mainly for cattle fodder in the United States. A mutant gene slows the conversion of sugar to starch—but only until the ear is picked. As soon as it is picked, the corn begins turning its sugar into starch. For maximum sweetness, then, you have to get the corn to the pot of boiling water immediately. (Don’t add salt to the water, it toughens the kernels’ seed coats and makes them chewy.) Corn breeders worked on this phenomenon and came up with corn that contains the so-called “sugary enhanced” gene, which produces added sugar in the kernel. We’re not talking genetic engineering here, but just regular, old-fashioned sexual reproduction and the careful selection of superior resulting strains. Genetic engineering involves opening up the DNA inside of genes and adding genetic sequences from other organisms that perform certain functions, or fail to perform them, or prevent their performance. Eventually—and I remember the day in the late 1970s when the delivery man brought a trial box of ‘How Sweet It Is’ into the office of Organic Gardening—breeders found corn with the so-called shrunken gene (sh2), which slowed the conversion of sugar to starch so completely that this Xtra Sweet corn, as it’s known, will stay sweet for two weeks after it’s picked.
I’ll say this for Xtra Sweet corn—it’s really sweet. So sweet that some people find it cloying. I’m on the edge: if it’s fresh-picked, fine. Then it’s poppy and juicy and sweet. But don’t let it sit for two weeks. It’ll still be sweet, but it will also have lost many of the goodies and enzymes that make fresh corn taste so good. Treat it like any other corn, which means eat it as soon as possible.
Corn laid out for sale should be iced down in summer heat. I remember the sweet corn vendors coming to Pennsylvania from southern New Jersey, the back of their trucks loaded with sweet corn in their husks over which ice was poured. Cold water ran in rivulets from the bottoms of their flatbeds. The corn—usually ‘Luther Hill’ or ‘Silver Queen’—was picked that morning and perfect. You could tell because the cut ends were still green or whitish green, and juicy-crisp when nicked with the thumbnail. When corn gets old, the cut ends are white and fibrous looking, and feel dry when nicked. When really old, they’re brown. Nobody ever thought of stripping the husks open to inspect each ear of corn the way people do here in California. It astounded me when I moved to this state to see shoppers standing by a mound of sweet corn in its husks, pulling down the husks from ear after ear, tossing ones they didn’t like back on the pile for later poor suckers to buy, I suppose. If I were the store manager, I’d toss these people out of the store on their ears. You can feel through the husks when an ear is full and fat and when it’s not. You can pull open just the top of maybe an ear or two and give it the fingernail test: if the kernel expresses clear juice when it’s pressed open with a thumbnail, it’s too young. If it expresses a milky fluid, it’s just right. If the kernel is dry and doughy, it’s too old. But maybe, just maybe, these people are looking for corn earworms!
Corn earworms are those fat gray grubs that chew into the kernels at the tips of the ears. If the earworms have been there for a while, they can chew their way down toward the mid-length of the ears, but that’s rare. Despite their rather grubby appearance, and the trail of frass (earworm poop) they leave in their wake, earworms are natural. If the choice is between pesticides and earworms, I’ll take earworms any day. Usually they are just in the tips of the ears and the tips can be broken or cut off easily and discarded, earworm and all (though I admit a pang of sorrow for the comfy earworm, lodged in her delicious home, having to go live in a dark garbage bag which will eventually be twist-tied up and sent to the dump).
However, the presence of earworms does not necessarily mean that the corn is organic. You can spray the heck out of corn with pesticides, but the poisons won’t reach down into the ears under the tight husks to kill the earworms. Earworms are really a sign of poor field management. If corn is grown in the same field year after year, the earworm populations will build up and up. A good organic farmer will never grow corn in the same field year after year. His or her corn will be relatively earworm free because of good management. And more nutritious, too. Tests by the University of California showed that organic corn contained 54 percent more bioflavonids, a cancer-preventing antioxidant) than the same crop grown with chemicals. The presence of earworms is a minor inconvenience, says nothing about organic versus conventional farming practices, and simply means that the farmers aren’t rotating their crops. No big deal.
If finding an earworm bums you out, think of all the things that corn gives us. Bourbon! My folks are from Kentucky, “where the corn is full of kernels and the colonels are full of corn.” But also tortillas, tamales, scrapple (a Pennsylvania Dutch pudding made of corn meal and ground waste parts of pigs that is sliced and fried in lard; if you’ve never had scrapple, count yourself lucky), corn syrup, popcorn, hominy grits, polenta, hush puppies, corn pone, corn bread, hoe cakes, johnny cakes, bannocks, spoon bread, and--hallelujah!--corn smut, a fungus that invades corn and looks like the growth of a gray and blackish-purple alien creature on the corn ear, but which is a delicacy called huitlacoche in Mexico, where it’s steamed or fried.
Corn has many culinary affinities, among them bacon, butter, cayenne, cheese, lemon, lime, onions, black pepper, and salt. In fact, it is, along with beans, a vegetable shmoo. For those too young to remember, the shmoo was an animal invented by the cartoonist Al Capp, who drew L’il Abner for many years. The shmoo gave eggs, tasted like ham, and loved to be kicked. I don’t know about kicking corn, but in every other way, it’s as versatile and delicious a vegetable and grain as we have.
Here’s a recipe for a fabulous corn dish called humita. I first ran into humita at a restaurant called Grandma’s House near Mendoza, Argentina, and was delighted at its richness and delicate flavors. In subsequent days eating at a variety of restaurants, I saw that humita—a mild and tender preparation made with freshly grated corn kernels--is a national dish in Argentina, often accompanying great portions of grilled beef.
Under different names, humita is known throughout the Americas, especially Spanish America. A sweetened version is preferred in the northwestern parts of Argentina and is made with cheese, onions, lard, and sugar, and is spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, or anise. But the following is my favorite.
SWEET HUMITA (Recipe One)
4 cups freshly grated corn kernels (about a dozen ears)
¼ cup olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 sweet pepper, chopped
1 tomato, peeled, seeded, chopped
1 Tbl. paprika
1 cup milk
1 Tbl. cornstarch
2 Tbl. sugar
14 oz. jack cheese, cubed or in strips
½ tsp. ground cinnamon
¼ tsp. ground nutmeg
1 tsp. brown sugar
Salt to taste
Cut kernels off cobs. Squeeze remaining corn milk out of cobs with the back of a knife. Or slice down through the rows of kernels of a few of the ears with a sharp knife and then scrape out the milk and flesh with the back of a knife. Place this in a blender and whiz to a grainy consistency, not a fine puree. Heat oil to medium and make a sauce with the onion, sweet pepper, tomato, and paprika. When the vegetables are tender, add grated corn and the cup of milk in which the cornstarch has been dissolved. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook for about five minutes until mixture has slightly thickened. Season with salt to taste. Add the cinnamon, nutmeg, and brown sugar. Oil a casserole dish, pour in the humita, cover with cubed cheese, and sprinkle a little brown sugar and a shake of cinnamon over the cheese. Bake in a 325 F. oven for about one hour, or until cheese on top begins to brown and humita is tender and fluffed up. Serve hot.
HUMITA CASSEROLE WITH CORN HUSKS (Recipe Two)
4 cups grated organic corn kernels (reserve corn husks)
¼ cup olive oil
1 large onion chopped
1 tsp. or less ground cumin
1 tsp. anise seeds
1 cup milk
1 Tbl. cornstarch
2 Tbl. brown sugar
Salt and pepper to taste
Reserve inner, soft husks. Remove all silks from ears and husks. Place husks in a deep pot with 1 tsp. salt, and cover with boiling water. Parboil for three minutes. Take the pot off the heat drain the husks. Grate corn kernels as in recipe one. Heat oil and fry onion for about two minutes, or until clear and softened. Add cumin, anise seeds, grated corn, and milk with dissolved cornstarch in it. Bring to a boil and simmer gently until mixture thickens, stirring constantly to prevent sticking. Remove from the fire, stir in brown sugar, salt, and pepper. Butter or oil a casserole with a cover and carefully line it all the way around inside with parboiled husks, first the sides and then the bottom. Use scissors to trim husks for the bottom to the casserole’s dimension. Husks on the sides must be placed with pointed ends upwards, so they can later be folded over the top of the casserole. Pour half-cooked humita into the husk-lined casserole, fold over the pointed husk ends and cover with additional husks. Place a heavy cover on the casserole and bake in a 300 F. oven for about 1½ hours, until humita is tender and fluffed up. For maximum drama and fun, serve covered hot from the oven to the table. With diners watching, remove the cover and husks that were placed on top, opening up the folded-in husks lining the casserole sides, using a large spoon. The corn husks (chalas in Argentina) enhance the fresh corn aroma of the humita. Even though they are not edible, they are the main seasoning for this very special dish. Serves 4.
Sometimes a writer fashions a thought that has escaped everyone else for years and years, putting a problem so succinctly and trenchantly that it’s awe-inspiring.
New York Times’ columnist Nicolas Kristof did that on the paper’s op-ed page on August 23, 2009. Here’s his lead paragraph: “Yamhill, Ore.—On a summer visit back to the farm here where I grew up, I think I figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture. It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste, and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all. More fundamentally, it has no soul.”
Kristof recounts the kind of soulful farming that went on at his family’s farm in the Willamette Valley and contrasts it with conventional “modern” farming methods. He finishes by admitting that he’s “wistful for a healthy rural America composed of diverse family farms that offer decent and varied lives for the farm animals themselves…In contrast, a modern industrialized operation is a different world: more than 100,000 hens in cages, their beaks removed, without a rooster, without geese or other animals, spewing out pollution and ending up as so-called food—a calorie factory, without any soul.”
Essayist and farmer Wendell Berry has touched on these themes, as has writer and farmer Gene Logsdon, both of whom I count as friends. I’m sure we would all agree with Kristof that farming without soul produces food without soul, and that food impoverishes us in ways we can scarcely imagine. Just think—every dollar spent on factory chicken, such as purveyed by Colonel Sanders or in the meat cases of supermarket America, is a vote for inhumane conditions where chickens spend a hellish existence for a few short weeks until they are slaughtered and put out of their misery.
Now consider organic farming. If any form of food production can be said to have soul, it’s organic farming. Animals are cared for. Insects aren’t considered “the enemy.” The whole farm is thought of as a living system, and the farmer’s job is to protect its health and increase its welfare. It enriches the soil as the soil is farmed, rather than depleting it. It protects all the life on the farm, from the tiniest microorganism in the soil to the biggest bull in the pasture. Someone once said that the best crop of an organic farm is the people who grow up there. Yes. They have soul, as Nicolas Kristof has so insightfully put it.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I had a biology class taught by Mr. Weaver. He had one of the students go to a nearby field and cut a swath of weeds and hay and bring it back to class. We put this bunch of field hay into a large jar and filled the jar with water. It sat on the windowsill in the classroom for a while, and after a number of days, we put drops of this water on slides and put them under the powerful microscopes our lab was equipped with.
A wonderful world appeared in the eyepieces. There were all sorts of fascinating minuscule critters in that drop of water. I remember rotifers, little creatures with wheel-like mouthparts that moved in waves, bringing detritus into their maws. There were parameciums (paramecii?), one-celled creatures that were basically a mouth and a gut and an anus. And amoebas, too, little blobs of protoplasm that squinched and squelched their way through the liquid. The “hay infusion,” as Mr. Weaver called it, was crawling with life, some of which, he said, would make us very sick if we ingested it.
Which brings us to sun tea. To make sun tea, you take the herbs or teas you wish to make tea from, put them in a jar of water, and set the jar in the sun for—some say a few hours, some say a few days. Since the water and the herbal “hay” aren’t sterilized, I say that the paramecii, amoebas, and rotifers, along with a host of other microorganisms and one-celled critters designed to give you the runs, start growing as soon as conditions are right. And the right conditions would be the herbs in water in the sun.
So I’d recommend that if you want to make sun tea, make it strong by using a lot of herbs, leave it in the sun for no more than two hours, strain it and put it into glass containers with closed lids, and put it in the fridge right away. Use it up within a few days. From what I saw through the eyepiece of that microscope all those years ago, you do not want to send those critters down your gullet and into the nice, healthy ecosystem of beneficial bacteria in your gut.
So even if you eat organic food exclusively, chances are you are getting a hefty dose of herbicides in your drinking water. In the August 23, 2009, issue of The New York Times, Charles Duhigg wrote an article entitled, “Debating How Much Weed Killer is Safe in Your Water Glass.” Here are his first few paragraphs:
“For decades, farmers, lawn care workers, and professional green thumbs have relied on the popular weed killer atrazine to protect their crops, golf courses, and manicured lawns. (Atrazine is manufactured by Novartis, a subsidiary of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz drug companies.)
“But atrazine often washes into water supplies and has become among the most common contaminants in American reservoirs and other sources of drinking water.
Now, new research suggests that atrazine may be dangerous at lower concentrations than previously thought. Recent studies suggest that, even at concentrations meeting current federal standards, the chemical may be associated with birth defects, low birth weights, and menstrual problems.”
The article shows that in some areas of the United States, up to 70 percent of the population is exposed to high levels of the weed killer in its drinking water, and that at certain times of the year when herbicides are being applied to cropland, concentrations in drinking water spike 300 times higher than levels that Purdue University researchers think produces low birth weights among newborn babies.
But the problem may not be limited to atrazine. Roundup, made by Monsanto, contains the weed killer glyphosate, which is said to be less toxic than atrazine. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Far from it. Roundup is 41 percent glyphosate herbicide and 15 percent “inert ingredient,” identified as polyoxyethylene amine (POEA) that acts like a detergent to allow the glyphosate to penetrate the waxy surfaces of leaves more easily. Japanese physicians investigating 56 cases of Roundup poisoning found that POEA is three times more lethal than glyphosate, according to the British medical journal Lancet (2/6/88).
What’s an organic-minded person to do?
I can only tell you what I’ve done. I purchased a water filtration system called Aquasana. The double filter cartridges fit into a case that’s mounted under my kitchen sink. There’s a spigot that delivers the filtered water right next to the main spigot of the kitchen sink. I’ve signed up to have fresh cartridges delivered to my home every six months, so the water is always pure. It works like a charm. Set a glass of regular city water next to a glass of Aquasana and the difference is amazing. The Aquasana water tastes clean and pure. I keep a bottle of it in the fridge at all times, and enjoy drinking it throughout the day whenever I’m thirsty.
If this sounds like an endorsement, it certainly is. It turns out that Aquasana is the cheapest of all the in-home filtration systems on the market and, according to Consumer Reports, does the best job. I’m thrilled to have really good water that tastes like pure, fresh spring water, available in my kitchen at all times. If water is going to go down my throat, it will have come through the Aquasana system.
I have no interest in Aquasana other than pure water. I don’t own stock in the company—I don’t even know if it’s traded on the stock exchange. I don’t know anyone associated with the company. I was looking for a water filtration system just to make sure I wasn’t poisoning myself with atrazine, glyphosate, and other agricultural chemicals and industrial nasties, when I ran across the information in Consumer Reports.
According to the CU article and the company’s literature, Aquasana filters out chlorine, lead, VOCs (volatile organic chemicals, including herbicides and pesticides), THMs (trihalomethanes), cryptosporidium, giardia, and MTBEs, among other harmful microbes, parasites, and chemical substances. Its patented process leaves in natural minerals for the healthiest, best tasting water possible.
If you want to augment your commitment to organic foods with a source of really good-tasting, clean water at far less cost than buying bottled water, visit www.aquasana.com. See for yourself.
In the spring of 1838, Mrs. Richard Cox, the wife of an English minister, walked out her back door and encountered her apple tree in full and glorious bloom. She watched a honeybee working one of the apple blossoms, and was struck by the beauty of God’s and nature’s ways. On a whim, she tied a piece of yarn to the spur where the blossom was.
Months later, she found that the blossom had been pollinated and there hung an apple where her yarn was tied. When it was ripe, she opened the apple and extracted five seeds that were inside.
Anyone who knows much about apple culture knows that apples don’t come true to seed. That is, if you plant an apple seed, you don’t get the kind of tree that the seed came from, but rather a chance group of apple genes that mostly produce little, sour, worthless apples.
Mrs. Cox grew out her seeds. Four of them grew into trees that bore little, sour, worthless apples. But the fifth was a revelation! It was the most delicious apple she’d ever tasted. It was the first Cox’s Orange Pippin, and within 20 years was the most popular, sought after, and cherished apple in England, and remains, to this day, one of the world’s most superior apples.
Which goes to show that by remaining open to nature, by following our feelings, and by being close to nature, amazing things can happen. This is one of the secrets of organic gardening and farming. Conventional, industrial agriculture has no time for such nonsense. The land and its creatures, plant and animal, are treated ruthlessly, with one eye on the bottom line and the other eye on the bottom line, too. There is certainly no room for the kind of apotheosis that Mrs. Cox experienced all those years ago.
But farmers and gardeners who grow organically cultivate connections with the soil and its plants, with nature and its animals, that can allow insights to break through. Although he pre-dated the development of organic agriculture, Luther Burbank (1849-1926) was that kind of farmer. There are stories of Burbank on his knees, promising his blackberries and prickly pear cactuses that he would let no harm come to them if they’d drop their thorns and spines. And Burbank did indeed introduce the first thornless blackberries and spineless cacti, which are still sold to this day. In fact, the country’s most popular plum, the Santa Rosa plum, is named for the California town where Burbank lived and worked. He developed this fabulously delicious fruit by crossing Japanese plums with other types, and, it’s reported, asking the plants to produce a fruit they’d be proud of.
Think of that the next time you are tempted to buy some product of soulless conventional agriculture. All plants and animals are fellow creatures on this planet. When they are treated properly—raised organically—they may respond with flavors, fragrances, and nutrition beyond our expectations.