Have you noticed that more and more products at the organic markets are simply the same kind of processed foods you can buy at the conventional supermarkets, only made from organic ingredients? Mmm—organic pizzas, frozen dinners, snack crackers and chips; heavy on the organic fats, organic sugars, and organic sea salt. How long before we find organic Hot Pockets, donuts, and Twinkies? Granted that processed foods made with organic ingredients don’t carry the typical load of agricultural chemicals, or any of the hundreds of chemicals used to flavorize, texturize, emulsify, preserve, and color the conventional products. But they are still processed foods, drained of their life force, less than whole, mere mouth fun instead of delicious-and-nutritious, and usually with a lot of fat, sugar, and salt.
Now, I’m all for occasional mouth fun. One of my local organic supermarkets offers a scoop of ice cream in any flavor of your choice, served in an eat-all cone, for $1. Maybe once every month or so, I’ll indulge. Everything in moderation, right? Including moderation. But that kind of thing doesn’t replace good whole foods like fruits, vegetables, and even a decent sandwich. When was the last time you had an apple and a carrot, with maybe a bit of good cheese, for lunch? They’re whole, they’re filling, and they are good for you.
One of the reasons we eat organic is to enhance our health. Heavily processed foods, even if they are organic, don’t help in that department.
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The environmental press reports that in addition to continued reports of Colony Collapse Disorder — a still mysterious phenomenon in which entire bee colonies disappear, leaving not even their dead bodies behind — bee populations are suffering poor health in general, and experiencing shorter life spans and diminished vitality. And while parasites, pathogens, and habitat loss can deal blows to bee health, research increasingly points to pesticides as the primary culprit.
Of particular concern is a group of pesticides, chemically similar to nicotine, called neonicotinoids (neonics for short), and one in particular called clothianidin. Instead of being sprayed, neonics are used to treat seeds, so that they’re absorbed by the plant’s vascular system, and then end up attacking the central nervous systems of bees that come to collect pollen. Virtually all of today’s genetically engineered Bt corn is treated with neonics. The chemical industry alleges that bees don’t like to collect corn pollen, but new research shows that not only do bees indeed forage in corn, but they also have multiple other routes of exposure to neonics.
A Purdue University study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, found high levels of clothianidin in planter exhaust spewed during the spring sowing of treated corn seed. It also found neonics in the soil of unplanted fields near those planted with Bt corn, on dandelions growing near those fields, in dead bees found near hive entrances, and in pollen stored in the hives.
Bees, of course, pollinate many of our most important food crops, such as apples and other fruit trees, squashes, as well as annuals that support beneficial insects in the rural ecosystem. Without them we are in trouble.
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Speaking of Bt corn—corn into which a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which produces a caterpillar toxin, has been spliced using genetic modification techniques—people around the world are beginning to catch on to Monsanto’s plan to corner the world market on seeds.
According to an article published this month in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Monsanto is facing biopiracy charges in India. In an unprecedented decision, India's National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), a government agency, declared legal action against Monsanto (and its collaborators) for using local eggplant varieties to develop a genetically engineered version of eggplant that carries the Bt gene--but without prior approval of the competent authorities, which is considered an act of biopiracy in that country. Let’s see how far the government of India can get against Monsanto.
In the United States, Monsanto has been challenged by many environmental and family farm organizations for introducing Bt corn and other GMO seeds into the environment, contaminating nearby organic crops. According to the Public Patent Foundation, Monsanto has one of the most aggressive patent assertion agendas in history. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto admits to filing 144 lawsuits against America’s family farmers, while settling another 700 out of court for undisclosed amounts. The farmers’ violation? They let their crops be contaminated with Monsanto’s GMO frankengenes, and that’s a patent violation. It’s like a guy walking up to you on your own property, punching you in the nose, then suing you for getting your blood on his suit.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s response has been to approve genetically modified alfalfa and soybeans as well as corn, and to name a Monsanto executive to head up our nation’s food safety program.
Good luck, India.
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As long as we’re talking about Monsanto and its frankenseeds, Anthony Gucciardi reports in L'Osservatore Romano that on January 5, 2012, a prominent member of the Vatican spoke out against genetically modified crops. Cardinal Peter Turkson said that genetically modified crops are a “new form of slavery,” and went on to discuss the impact that they have on both the environment and the economy. Farmers have risen up against Monsanto and genetically modified seeds, with Monsanto’s control of seed sales forcing thousands of farmers into debt worldwide. In India, Monsanto has ruined the lives of so many farmers that the prevalence of their suicides has led a large farming area to be called the “suicide belt of India,” the article states.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., our Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration still won’t require big corporate food producers to disclose on their labels whether their any of their ingredients are genetically modified. Such disclosures are required in Canada, Europe, and Australia—but not in “the greatest country in the world.”
From midsummer to late fall, it’s easy to eat local. The summer fields and orchards are full of locally grown vegetables, seeds, nuts, and fruits. But what about the other seven months of the year, from December to June? How can one eat locally when nothing is growing?
Remember that when a food is in season in your area, it is at its best quality and its lowest price. If it’s a wild food, like wild berries, it is not only at its peak quality, it’s free. So when foods are in season locally, that’s the time to stock up for the off months. If you grow a garden, think about planting enough to see you through the off months. Here are 10 tips for extending summer’s bounty through the whole year. Many involve a freezer. If you don’t have a freezer, consider buying one. It will pay you back many times over. Buy one that self-defrosts. Defrosting a freezer yourself is a time-consuming, messy business. Take it from someone who knows.
1) When spring garden peas are in season, don’t open their pods, but blanch them for one minute in boiling water, then freeze the pods in plastic freezer bags—enough for a meal in each bag. When you want to use them, place the bag in a bowl of hot tap water on your kitchen counter about an hour before dinner. By dinnertime, they will have thawed. The pods will have turned to mush. Discard them. The peas inside will be perfect. Heat them gently on the stove top and serve.
2) In August, buy lots of summer-ripe, delicious tomatoes. Make tomato sauce from them. Set a large pot of water to boil on the stove, then put batches of tomatoes into the boiling water for about two minutes. The skins will then be easy to slip off. Put the skinned tomatoes into another large pot and cook down into sauce. Can the sauce. Make enough for one quart a week for seven months—about 30 quarts. Or, even easier, Freeze whole tomatoes in freezer bags and thaw them for sauce or ingredients as needed in the off months.
3) Grow or buy thick-skinned winter squash, such as Butternut, Acorn, or Hubbard, in the fall when they are plentiful and cheap. Lay newspapers on the floor of a cold room like a garage or outbuilding and place the squash on them so the squash don’t touch each other. Most of the squash will keep through the winter, getting sweeter as they get older. Discard any that soften.
4) Grow or buy onions and garlic with the tops still on. Braid these and hang them in a cool, dark place. Sweet onions like Maui, Vidalia, and Walla Walla won’t store well, but yellow onions with tight necks, and garlic, will last through the winter.
5) Summer stone fruits like peaches, nectarines, cherries, apricots, pluots, and others have remarkably short seasons. In the late spring or summer when they are at the farmers’ markets, buy plenty. Preserve their summer-fresh flavor this way: make a syrup of spring water, lemon juice, and honey. To one gallon of water add a cup of lemon juice and a cup of honey and stir until dissolved. Cut stone fruits in half and remove pits. Peaches and nectarines can be cut into slices, but other stone fruits are best frozen as halves. Place a serving’s worth of fruit in a pint or quart freezer bag and add enough of the freezing syrup to just cover. Close the bag, excluding air, and twist-tie shut. Freeze. To thaw, place a bag in a bowl of hot tap water for an hour. Don’t reheat or add more hot water. The fruit will be almost as good as in the summer.
6) When either wild or farmed berries are in season, buy plenty for the winter months. These include red and black raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, huckleberries, or, if you live in the far north, salmonberries, cloudberries, and watermelonberries. Place them in a single layer on cookie sheets and freeze. When they’re frozen, put them into freezer bags, twist-tie shut, and place them back in the freezer. This keeps them from making a large frozen clump. Add berries to your frozen stone fruits for fabulous winter desserts.
7) Make peach nectar for the holidays. Make an inch-thick layer of sugar in the bottom of a crock. Put in a single layer of whole peaches—no stacking. Cover these peaches with another layer of sugar, then add another single layer of peaches, until you almost reach the top. Finish with a layer of sugar. Cover the crock with a cloth and secure it tightly so no fruit flies can enter. Place the crock in the back of a closet. Around the end of December, bring out the crock and ladle the liquid you’ll find into a funnel set on a gallon plastic jug, preferably one that held water. When the jug is nearly full, leave an inch or two of headspace for expansion and freeze the jug. When it’s frozen, put it in a large bowl, cut away the plastic, and, using an ice pick, break the frozen parts away, catching the remaining liquid in the bowl. It’s this liquid that’s the peach nectar and it is delicious.
8) Grow or buy a large supply of hard root vegetables like potatoes, beets, turnips, rutabagas, and carrots when they’re cheap and in season. Place these in mixed single layers in a clean plastic garbage can, layered with dry peat moss, and store the can in a cold basement, garage, or storage shed. They’ll keep fine all winter.
9) Grow or buy lots of culinary herbs when they are in season. Chervil, for instance, has a lovely anise flavor but is hard to find except for its short season in late spring. Tie up bunches of these herbs with string, making a loop at the string’s end. Place each bunch of herbs in a large paper bag and tie off the bags with the stem ends of the herbs and the string with the loop protruding. Hang these bags in a warm, dry, dark place such as an attic. When the stems break with a snap, the herbs will be dry. Crumble them by crunching the bags with your fingers. The crumbled dried herbs will fall into the bags and you can gather them and store them in marked jars for off season use.
10) Fill jars with de-pitted summer stone fruits and fill the jars with vodka. After a few months, you’ll have fruit flavored vodkas for making mixed drinks to tide you through the rest of the year.
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According to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks corporate lobbying practices, Monsanto spent more than $5.1 million in 2011 lobbying the federal government. In 2010, Monsanto spent over $8 million, and in 2009, over $8.6 million. Monsanto's largest lobbying year was in 2008, when it spent nearly $9 million lobbying the federal government and your elected lawmakers.
And what did all these millions buy? Well, its patents on its genetically modified organisms are safe. GMO alfalfa and sugar beets just got the go-ahead. A Monsanto exec is in charge of U.S. food safety. And there doesn’t appear to be any serious regulation of GMOs in sight. And, oh yes, you still can’t find out from food labels whether there are GMOs in your food. Monsanto won’t hear of it.
You see the word “sustainable” a lot in regard to agriculture these days. But it’s rarely explained. Some people use it as a broad term to indicate that farms are using environmentally-friendly methods. Others use it merely as a marketing gimmick. Mostly it’s a mushy word without a precise meaning. But forget about “sustainable” as jargon, and let’s go back to what the word meant before it became trendy. It meant something that could continue in perpetuity, using whatever renewable resources were available.Now let’s apply that definition to agriculture. Conventional agriculture has never been, is not, and never will be sustainable. It is so resource intensive that it will eventually exhaust its energy resources, or will create such super-insects that farming in the open air will become impossible, or it will destroy the soil so completely that erosion will render farmland useless.
The only sustainable form of agriculture is organic, with a small “o.” So that includes regular organic farming, French intensive agriculture, Biodynamic farming, traditional Chinese peasant farming methods (read “Farmers of Forty Centuries,” written a century ago about how Chinese peasants replenish their soil and keep fertility strong in perpetuity), and other wrinkles in what is organic farming.
That’s because organic agriculture recycles organic matter such as crop wastes, animal manures, and—when we become more enlightened—household garbage through a composting system and back to the land. When renewable sources of energy come on line, organic farming will be completely sustainable in every way. Right now farmers are still using fossil fuels in their tractors and to heat their buildings, but that will change as hydrogen fuel cells and other renewable energies become available. Organic farming as currently practiced isn’t completely sustainable yet.
One reason it isn’t is that, as it has become successful and even mainstream, many techniques used to move organic food to market are based on the conventional system and are not sustainable. Blueberries in January from Chile, garlic from China, jet-fresh pineapples from Hawaii, winter crops from Florida and southern California and Mexico—nothing sustainable about that.
True sustainability in the food supply will approach optimum only when the farms are organic and use only renewable energy, when the food is locally produced so it’s not trucked halfway around the world, and when it’s seasonal, which is a consequence of its being locally grown. Obviously, all local produce is seasonal by nature or farmers wouldn’t be able to grow it. You just don’t grow melons in January in Minnesota unless you do it in a heated greenhouse, and that’s not sustainable.
What it comes down to is that Organic, Local, and Seasonal are the definitions of sustainability in farming. We can do our part in making sure our food is sustainably grown by making sure it’s as OLS as possible.
If you’ve never grown your own onions, you have a treat coming. How many kinds of onions do you find at your market? Two or three, maybe four? Well, if you look at a seed catalogue, you’ll find many more. Some will be sweet onions with a short shelf life. Others will be skinny-necked onions that will keep through next winter. Some will be big slicers, like the red onions you put on hamburgers. Choices run into the hundreds.Onions are easy to grow. Bugs seldom bother them. But there are a few things you should know. First, order your seeds now. Pick a variety that sounds good to you. In early February, sow seeds according to the packet directions in a flat of potting soil somewhere away from freezing temperatures but where they get plenty of sunlight. If you live in USDA Zones 7 or warmer, you can put the flats outside. Keep the soil moist but not sopping wet, making sure there’s good drainage in the bottom of the flat.
After a couple of weeks, the onions will send up a single spear-like leaf. When this leaf is about four inches long, using a fork, prick out each little plant and transplant it to its own small paper cup with a hole for drainage punctured in the bottom and filled with potting soil. Water it in well and let it continue to grow.
Onions don’t mind the cold weather of early spring. About mid-April, dig up an area of soil about four by six feet. Amend the soil with plenty of compost—four bags would be ideal—but don’t dig the compost into the base soil. Spread it out evenly on top. If it’s put on thick enough, it will smother the weeds seeds below.
Plant your onions by turning the paper cups upside down and keeping the spear-like leaf between open fingers. Take this plant, turn it right side up, and plant it in the compost, firming it in. Space the plants six inches apart in rows eight to 12 inches apart. There’ll be room for about 50-60 onions.
Onions hate weed competition. Keep weeds down by covering the soil between the onions with an inch deep sprinkling of grass clippings (make sure the grass hasn’t been treated with herbicides). If any weeds poke through, pull them out as soon as you can. Weed free is the motto of your onion patch.
Onions will grow and enlarge until the summer solstice, at which time, most varieties will stop growing and start maturing. As they mature, they develop a tough papery outer skin and their tall, hollow spear-like leaves begin to turn brown. When the tall leaves are about half brown, push them over so they lay flat on the ground. In about two weeks, they will have dried and withered. Using a spading fork, gently lift the onions and place them in warm, bright shade—not full sun—such as under a tree. This cures them for storage. At this point make onion braids. If you have grown yellow onions with skinny necks rather than sweet onions, you can hang the braids in an outbuilding where they’ll keep just fine until freezing weather arrives. Then hang them in a dry basement or cold attic so they don’t freeze. Sweet onions will last into fall but no longer.
All winter, as you need an onion, you’ll have your own, self-selected variety, organically grown, right at hand. And remember, every good meal starts by chopping an onion.
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The following is a report from Dave Murphy at Food Democracy Now. If you want to know more about this group or make a much-needed donation, visit www.fooddemocracynow.org.
“In retrospect, 2011 will be remembered as the year that our federal government let Monsanto go wild.
“Right now there’s a battle being waged for the future of our food and our democracy and you and your family and everyone who eats is on the front line.
Over the past 20 years Monsanto has led the way in corrupting our democratic institutions, rotating their lobbyists in and out of our federal agencies (Michael Taylor, former Monsanto super lobbyist is now the current FDA food safety Czar), and writing the rules that govern their genetically engineered products while high-jacking science and our democracy.
“Currently, with Monsanto’s help, the USDA has intentionally weakened the agency’s own oversight, handing over the power to complete the required environmental impact statements (EIS) on Monsanto’s own products back to the company. Once again, our government is happy to let the fox guard the henhouse.
“This is at a time when the dangers of Monsanto’s flagship products, such as Roundup Ready crops, are being increasingly linked to crops diseases and livestock infertility, and their genetically engineered Bt insecticide gene is failing in fields all over the Midwest.
“In 2011, Food Democracy Now! helped expose these major flaws in Monsanto’s GMO products and stood up to our government’s continued collusion with the world’s leading seed and biotech giant.
“If you need any evidence that the Monsanto train is not slowing down, consider this: in the past twelve months Monsanto has had five new GMO crops greenlighted by the USDA, including Roundup Ready alfalfa, GMO sugar beets and a new “triple-stack” GMO sweet corn that will put both Monsanto’s Roundup Ready and BT insecticide genes directly on your plate.
“In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the Obama administration quietly approved 2 brand new Monsanto GMO seeds, including Monsanto’s drought tolerant corn and Monsanto’s GMO Soybean Vistive Gold, which is engineered to lower its fat content.
“If you don’t think that Monsanto won’t stop at anything to push their untested GMOs on the world, think again.
“Right now Monsanto’s CEO is working to raise money with the United Nation’s World Food Program to peddle their toxic seeds in troubled countries around the world under the guise of alleviating hunger. If there’s one thing we now know about Monsanto, it’s that they never let a crisis go to waste, but this is appalling.”
What’s up with all these “probiotic” products on the shelves these days? Are they organic—not only certified, but do they figure into a truly healthy organic lifestyle?
The answer is yes, probiotics are a part of a healthy lifestyle even if you never buy a probiotic product. That’s because probiotics refers to beneficial bacteria that inhabit our intestines. Did you know that nine out of every 10 cells in your body—and 99 percent of the DNA in your body—are your intestinal flora. These are bacteria that have important functions within each of us.First, they help decompose the food we eat into nutrients that our intestinal walls can absorb and pass along to our bloodstream, where they are used to build tissue and bone. Sound familiar? Sure—like the bacteria in a compost pile or good organic soil that decompose dead vegetable and animal material, reducing it to soluble nutrients that plant roots can absorb into their internal sap and use to build leaf and root and seed and fruit. Not only do bacteria share these functions in our intestines and in the soil, but in some cases are the same kinds of bacteria.
Second, the bacteria within us and in the compost or soil produce vitamins that we might otherwise not have access to. They are intimately bound up with the health of the plants that grow in the soil and with the health of our bodies. Third, these bacteria within us form colonies that protect our intestinal walls from pathogens that we may have ingested in our food. They prevent disease even as they promote better health. In the soil, microorganisms colonize plant roots and help deliver scarce nutrients to the roots that the plants might otherwise not get from the soil solution, the nutrient-laden natural moisture in the soil.
Probiotic products, whether bought from the store or made at home, deliver trillions of beneficial microorganisms to our intestines. Some set up shop there. Some stay for a while and do some good. Some pass through our digestive systems quickly, but do a lot of good on their quick tour. The mix of bacteria within us is always shifting, depending on what we eat. Probiotic products help maintain a great diversity of these one-celled organisms. A healthy ecology is defined by its great diversity. So while the kinds of naturally-occurring bacteria in our intestines are shifting this way and that, probiotics help keep a constant flow of diverse organisms in the mix, and that spells health.
And yes, you don’t have to spend a lot of money on kombucha or kefir at the store. Both of those probiotic beverages can be easily made at home. In fact, I’m making both right now. Here are a couple of links to introduce you to kombucha and kefir. They are far from the only fermented, probiotic products on the market or that can be made at home, but they are powerful probiotic sources.
For kefir, visit www.yemoos.com/milkkefirguide.html and www.yemoos.com/waterkefirguide.html.
For kombucha, visit www.GetKombucha.com and snoop around the site.
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Did you know that most brand-name mattresses are soaked in chemicals? Flame retardants, preservatives, adhesives, and more are used in fiber-based beds, and they have dozens of toxic chemicals in them. Synthetic memory foam mattresses of polyurethane, like Tempurpedic, are loaded with chemicals like toluene, dimethylformamide, vinilideine chloride, and others.
But you can buy organic mattresses, made from natural materials grown organically, using natural rubber in the latex form, and made without toxic chemicals. The only trouble is the organic mattresses are usually prohibitively expensive, but they don’t have to be if you buy the organic mattress direct from the manufacturer.
A store that makes organic mattresses to order—eliminating the wholesaler, the whole brand name infrastructure, the costs of advertising, the bloated CEO payouts, and all of it—is The Natural Mattress Store in San Rafael, California. My wife and I just bought a brand new mattress there, to be made to our specifications for size, firmness, and materials, for half the price of brand name organic mattresses sold at nearby sleepware stores.
If you’re interested, visit www.thenaturalmattressstore.com.
Composting is great, but it’s a lot of work. I’ve found a way to hire thousands of little employees who do the work of composting for me. They are red wiggler worms, and they live in three “Can-O-Worms” worm bins in the space under my front steps. I have a pretty enameled pot on my kitchen counter. All vegetable and fruit scraps go in there, but no meat or animal products, no members of the onion family, no spicy-hot peppers, and no citrus rinds—the little worms don’t like those things.When the enameled pot is full, every three or four days, I go down to the bins. To remember which bin got the previous pot full of vegetable and fruit scraps, I keep a stick on top of the last bin filled. The next bin gets the next pot of scraps, which I smooth out over the surface of one of the round plastic trays with thousands of perforations in the bottom.
Each bin has three trays that stack on the base. When the bottom tray is full of scraps, I put on the second tray and start dumping the scraps there. As the worms finish digesting the scraps in the bottom tray, they move up to the fresh food in the tray above through the perforations and start munching away.
There’s never an odor from this process. And the worms reproduce, seeding the scraps with thousands of tiny, white threads that are baby worms, soon to mature into the red, segmented worms called red wigglers. They really do the job and they do it right. When the trays become finished compost, I dump them onto a tarp. The worms don’t like light, so they burrow down into the compost, and I take handfuls of wormless compost off the surface and put them into a big plastic pot to use on my roses, in the vegetable garden, on my strawberries, and on the Meyer lemon and Bearss lime trees that keep me in citrus. This compost is seven times richer in nutrients for having gone through the digestive system of my worms than soil made in a regular compost pile. The worm soil is dark, rich, crumbly, sweet-smelling earth just bursting with all the elements plants need for health and bounty.
The only downside with the worms is trying to remember all their names. Petunia is the one with the odd segment, and Uncle Wiggly is…
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The Organic Center (www.organic-center.org) offers the following reasons to go organic. You may already know many if not all of them, but it might be a good idea to save this file in case someone asks you why you choose to buy organic food.
1. Organic Is the Only Alternative Delivering Meaningful Health Results.
It is hard to miss the problems arising in the wake of the conventional food system–toxic exposures, birth defects, learning disabilities, obesity, water pollution, unacceptable suffering by farm animals, to name a few. While dozens of labels promise often undefined and unverified benefits, the certified organic label stands apart in consistently delivering what people care most deeply about–more nutritious food, grown using methods that minimize the use of toxins, while building soil quality and protecting water quality. A growing, dynamic organic food sector will stimulate valuable changes benefiting all of agriculture, as well as everyone dependent on the American farmer for three square meals a day.
2. Reduce Your Exposure to Harmful Synthetic Pesticides.
Conventional farmers apply 2-12+ synthetic pesticides to their crops. The average serving of conventionally grown leafy greens, peppers, tree fruits, berries, and grapes contains three to four pesticide residues. Residues of some widely used pesticides can trigger subtle changes in a child’s development, and may lead to a wide range of health problems including ADHD, autism, obesity, and certain forms of cancer.
3. Boost the Nutritional Quality of Your Food.
Organic crops are grown in healthier, biologically active soils. While crops on organic farms tend to yield somewhat less per acre and often take longer to grow than crops on conventional farms, plants nurtured by soil on organic farms produce crops that contain higher levels of important antioxidants, minerals, and vitamins. In fact, you can increase your intake of beneficial antioxidants by 30 percent just by switching to organic food.
4. Steer Clear of Unknown Genetically Engineered Food Risks.
Most of today’s genetically engineered (GMO) foods were approved over 15 years ago during a period when the government was aggressively promoting biotechnology. The prevailing “wisdom” was that GMO foods were “substantially equivalent” to conventional foods. We have since learned that even small differences in the genetic makeup of food can lead to unexpected human health risks. Because organic farmers cannot plant GMO seeds, nor use GMO crop inputs, choosing organic is the only sure way to avoid GMO food risks.
5. Decrease your Intake of Unnecessary Hormones and Antibiotics.
Most conventional livestock farmers use a combination of growth hormones, drugs, feed supplements, and high-grain diets to push their animals to grow faster, get bigger, and produce more milk and eggs per day. In fact, animals on conventional farms are often pushed so hard that they experience serious reproductive and/or other health problems leading to heavy antibiotic use. The National Organic Program rule prohibits the use of virtually all synthetic animal drugs. At the end of the day, healthy animals produce healthier meat, milk and dairy products, and eggs.
6. Give Farm Animals a Healthy Measure of Respect.
A significant share of the livestock raised on conventional farms live in crowded, stressful conditions that erode animal health, increase drug dependency, and take away any chance of carrying out natural behaviors. However, the National Organic Program (NOP) rule states that organically raised animals must have access to the outdoors, including pasture, and ample space to carry out natural behaviors.
7. Preserve Local Crop Varieties for Future Generations.
Today 50 percent of all food eaten worldwide comes from four plant species and three animal species. A handful of multi-national corporations own and control over 50 percent of the world’s seed market. Small organic farms often preserve heirloom and rare seed varieties for future generations to experience and enjoy.
8. Improve Water Quality and the Safety of Drinking Water.
Rainfall landing on a field of crops will carry a certain amount of soil, nutrients, and chemicals downstream or into underground aquifers. The more chemicals applied per acre, the greater the challenge in preserving water quality. The Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the most graphic example of the enormous harm caused when farm chemicals flowing off of millions of acres congregate in the mighty Mississippi.
9. Promote Biodiversity and Beauty in Rural Landscapes.
Organic farmers not only encourage biodiversity, they depend on it – both above and below the ground. Experienced organic farmers have learned over many decades that combining multiple crops with livestock and other animals is the best way to promote soil health and fully utilize the rainfall and sunlight that falls on an acre in any given year.
10. Maintain Healthy Soil.
Healthy soil is the bedrock of all successful organic farms. Hundreds of studies conducted on multiple continents over the last 50 years have compared soil quality on organic versus nearby conventional farms and virtually every one has concluded that organic management substantially enhances soil quality.
11. Organic Food Delivers More Intense Flavors.
Organic fruits and vegetables more often than not have higher levels of flavor-enhancing nutrients, coupled with lower concentrations of water and sugars. The end result is typically more intense and complex flavors. Plus, no artificial food colors or preservatives are added to any organic foods.
12. Create Healthier Working Environments for Farmworkers and Rural Neighbors.
Farming is second only to mining on the list of the most hazardous occupations. Unless great care is exercised, exposures to toxic pesticides, caustic fertilizers, and other chemicals will pose risks for many people working on or living near farms. Organic farmers simply do not use high-risk chemical materials and so workers, and rural neighbors, have one less health risk to worry about.
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News Flash: the U.S. Department of Agriculture is training Monsanto to police itself!
The government is making an effort to allow giant biotech firms like Monsanto to conduct their own environmental assessments. The stated goal is to speed up the approval process for genetically engineered crops - such as a non-browning apple and drought-tolerant corn.
Truthout, the political and environmental action organization, reports that “over the past seven months, our reporter sought out documents, chased leads, and followed the trail of the biotech industry's mounting push to influence government regulators. He sifted through the letters that lobbyists sent to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, discouraging ‘any suggestion by USDA that biotechnology plants ... are likely to cause significant adverse effects.’ And he discovered the submissive responses from Vilsack.” This not only lets the fox guard the henhouse, it gives the fox a truck, helps it load up the hens, and gives the fox gas money.
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Although it took three years, a complaint against the huge Shamrock Dairy in Arizona by The Cornucopia Institute, which called out the dairy for factory farm practices it has been calling organic, has finally been settled. The Institute is one of the nation’s fiercest watchdogs of Big Ag’s underhanded practices. Read its press release on the subject at http://www.cornucopia.org/2011/12/enforcement-hammer-falls-on-giant-arizona-organic-factory-farm-dairy/
The food processing industry is the single largest source of chemicals that humans ingest—and as a species, we ingest many hundreds of chemicals through food, water, and absorption through the skin. If we could do one thing to severely restrict the amount of chemicals in our bodies, it would be to replace all processed foods with whole, organic foods.
Sometimes, we don’t even recognize processed foods for what they are. I know I didn’t realize that orange juice—even the kind labeled “Not from Concentrate”—is processed.But a recent article on Huffington Post, quoting a source on www.civileats.com, had this to report:
“Once the juice is squeezed and stored in gigantic vats, they start removing the oxygen. Why? Because removing oxygen from the juice allows the liquid to keep for up to a year without spoiling. But removing that oxygen also removes the natural flavors of oranges. Yeah, it’s all backwards. So to have OJ actually taste like oranges, drink companies hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that make perfumes for Dior, to create these ‘flavor packs’ to make juice taste like, well, juice.
“Any taste difference in, say, Minute Maid versus Tropicana is therefore due to the specific flavor pack the company uses. Since these flavor packs are made from orange byproducts, they don’t have to be considered an ingredient, and therefore are not required to appear on food labels. This is despite the fact that they are chemically altered.”
Hmmm—it’s true—Tropicana tastes the same in New York as it does in San Francisco and so does Minute Maid, sort of like Coke and Pepsi. And these juices each have a specific flavor that never varies. And it’s due to flavor packs. Okay, that did it for me. I went to Sur le Table and bought a hand juice squeezer, then stopped at Whole Foods for a couple of dozen organic Valencia oranges and popped them into the vegetable crisper at the bottom of my refrigerator. Now here’s my morning routine:
Feed the cats and dog. Build a fire in the woodstove. Hand squeeze fresh, organic Valencia juice. Oh my—like any real product, it tastes like what it actually is and the taste varies naturally with the source of the ingredient. This is real, live juice, cold and delicious, with all its esters and enzymes intact and functioning to give it an honest aroma and flavor. It hardly takes any more time to make than it does to pour a glass of flavor-pack processed juice from a plastic coated cardboard half gallon carton.
I recycle milk and juice cartons but many folks don’t, so the cartons become waste for the landfill. No waste with fresh-squeezed juice, however. My garbage-eating red wiggler worms don’t like citrus rinds, so I turn up a shovelful of soil in one of my raised beds, dump in the rinds, and cover them up with soil. By the time spring rolls around, the rinds will have decayed and enriched my soil for whatever crop I put in there—maybe peas.
Now I’m on a kick to stop eating any processed foods. That includes stuff like ice cream and hot dogs. Oh, and Triscuits, which I love. And does cheese qualify as processed? While I may not be perfect in my quest to avoid processed foods, it’s important to think about what I’m eating. There is organic ice cream—no chemicals. There are no-nitrate, organic, all-beef hot dogs. And there are organic “woven wheats,” identical to Triscuits. Good, raw milk cheese is not processed, but cheap, colored “cheese food product,” and even many cheap brands of cheese, are. So I stick with good cheese that’s made with organic milk whenever possible.
Unfortunately, there are some processed products that are irreplaceable. Thomas’s English Muffins is one. The organic English muffins at the store just aren’t nearly as good. So to dissuade myself from buying them, I look at the ingredients on Thomas’s and discover High Fructose Corn Syrup among them. “Yuck,” I say to myself. “I don’t want to put that crap in my body.” So I walk on by. Works every time.
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The Global Citizens’ Report on the State of GMOs, coordinated by Navdanya International of India, notes that genetically engineered crops have failed to deliver higher food yields, while creating dangerous superweeds. In fact, in China, where cotton that’s been engineered to contain the gene from Bacillus thuringiensis that kills insect larvae (Bt cotton), is widely planted, populations of pests have increased 12-fold since 1997, while in India, pesticide use has increased 13-fold since Bt cotton was introduced. The reason is that with the wholesale planting of Bt cotton, cotton pests have evolved immunity to the Bt toxin. Since Bt cotton is not sprayed with pesticides (because the pesticide is now built into the plant tissue), the mutant insects have free reign to do their damage. I saw this day coming from the first time I heard that Monsanto was developing Bt crops like soy, cotton, and corn. Bacillus thuringiensis was a valuable organic insect control when used in spot applications only as needed. But by flooding cotton, soy, and cornfields with billions of plants, each of which contains the toxin, the evolution of resistant insects was speeded up a thousandfold. In fact, if used as a control by spraying the bacillus in small amounts, resistance would probably not have happened at all. There would have been no selective pressure for it to develop.
“Choice is being undermined as food systems are increasingly controlled by giant corporations and as chemical and genetic pollution spread,” according to Vandana Shiva, director of Naydanya International, adding, “GMO companies have put a noose round the necks of farmers. They are destroying alternatives in the pursuit of profit.”
Yes they are. And our Food and Drug Administration still refuses to mandate labeling of GMO foods in the United States.
To hear some people explain it, organic agriculture is some kind of weird, hippie, tree-hugging, groat-eating scheme to deny the technological marvels of conventional agriculture and plunge the world into wholesale starvation. As former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz said, “If we return to organic agriculture, who will decide which 50 percent of the world’s people will have to starve?” I hope you realize how bogus this idea is. According to the researchers at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, organic agriculture is just as productive, if not moreso, as conventional, chemical-dependent agriculture. This is backed up by long-term studies of crop systems at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, which turned a worn-out chemical farm into a showplace of good organic practices where yields of corn and bean crops more than equal local chemical farms. Plus, given that organic foods can sell for more than conventional foods, growing organic crops yields higher economic returns for farmers. Even more importantly, the benefits of organic agriculture for the environment far exceed any benefits of conventional agriculture. And, truth be told, conventional agriculture racks up detriments, not benefits. It depletes the organic matter in the soil, leading to soil erosion, drought-prone soils, the inability of soil to hold nutrients, and many other problems from its chemical and toxic-based practices.
Here’s the real story: nature herself is organic. All organic gardeners and farmers do is copy her. In that way lies confident success, not trouble and failure. Look around you at wild nature: climax forests and fields are healthy. Trees grow. Grasses wave in the breeze. Frogs jump and birds chirp. Life goes on its merry way without toxic chemicals, factory-made fertilizers, and modifications of the genetic codes by meddlesome scientists. Here’s the bottom line: when you follow nature, you get a confluence of unexpected benefits. When you practice conventional agriculture, you get a confluence of unexpected detriments. Just ask a conventional dairyman who shoots up his cows with bovine growth hormone to get their bodies to pump out huge amounts of watery milk until the cows can barely walk whether he’s happy with his herds’ health. Now ask an organic dairyman whose cows pasture on grass and live the life nature intends for them whether he’s happy with the health of his herds.
Nature is organic. Just as the soil in a healthy wild forest increases in organic matter as the years deposit layers of decayed leaves, weeds, and other plant detritus, so organic agriculture, that recycles organic matter back into ever-replenishing soil, improves soil and plant health as it grows crops. To those who have wondered which half of humanity will have to starve, I say it’s the half who depends on agribusiness for their unwholesome foodstuffs.
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A recent study published in the November 23rd Journal of the American Medical Association found that people who ate canned soup for five days straight saw their urinary levels of the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) spike 1,200 percent compared to those who ate fresh soup. About a year ago, the FDA admitted that BPA is dangerous but conceded that the government agency is powerless to regulate its use. BPA is an endocrine-disrupting chemical pervasive in our food supply thanks to its use in lining canned goods. Over the years, studies have linked it to breast and prostate cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, reproductive failures and behavioral problems. Although these ill effects have been widely circulated (enough so that baby bottle manufacturers are quick to point out their new BPA-free plastic), it is not until this study that we learned just how easily BPA levels rise in the body when exposed to canned foods.
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When I found out that Monsanto had taken the gene for the production of the caterpillar toxin produced naturally by Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and inserted it into corn using GMO techniques, my feeling was, “Oh no! This will only hasten nature’s response to overcome the toxin, taking away a tried and true organic pest control.”
How right I was—unfortunately. A range of insects that are caterpillars in their larval stages are developing resistance. The western rootworm beetle – one of the most serious threats to corn – has developed resistance to Monsanto’s Bt corn, and entire crops are being lost.
Farmers in several Midwest states began reporting root damage to corn that was genetically engineered with the Bt toxin to kill the rootworm. Iowa State University entomologist Aaron Gassmann recently confirmed that the beetle, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera, has developed resistance to the caterpillar-killing Bt protein. Two-thirds of all U.S. corn is genetically modified and the bulk of that is Monsanto’s Bt corn.
In response, Monsanto launched a “triple-stack” sweet corn which it envisions being sold at farmers markets. This corn will be genetically modified in three different ways, hoping that it will defeat nature’s ability to overcome the genetic toxicity Monsanto is building into the corn. It won’t work. But you won’t know about it, because the FDA refuses to allow food labeling of GMO products. You are not allowed to know about it, courtesy of your eco-friendly Federal government. Oh, did I mention that President Obama named a Monsanto executive to oversee food safety in the U.S. this year?
There are vegans and vegetarians who tell me that it’s immoral to eat meat. They have been telling me that for years, but it hasn’t swayed me. Quite the contrary. When someone gets judgmental about my behavior, it tends to focus my attention on their rigidity. I listen to their arguments. They will call the killing of animals murder. They will quote the passage in Genesis that enumerates the edible plants that should be our food. They will point to scientific studies that show that a diet heavy on meat, especially well-done or charred meat, can cause cancer and other health problems. Still, I am not swayed.For millions of years, mankind hunted wild animals and ate them. Our bodies developed in such a way that we are omnivorous—able to eat both plants and animals. We share this trait with dogs and pigs. Cats go a step further and are carnivorous, subsisting solely on meat. We, too, can subsist almost solely on meat, as proved by the diet of the Inuit people of the far north.
It’s hard to think of the slaughter of domestic animals for meat as murder, since without human beings, our domestic animals wouldn’t even exist in the forms we know them, and they depend on us for their very lives. Slaughter, however, should be done as humanely as possible. Our meat animals are innocents. They deserve a humane death. Everything lives by eating other living things. There’s no need to feel guilty about it.
Yes, the healthiest diet is one that’s primarily plant foods, especially raw fruits, some raw vegetables like salads, and cooked vegetables. Meat should be eaten in moderation, and then it should be low in saturated fat and high in unsaturated fat. Fowl and fish lead the list, but there’s also a place for lesser amounts of red meat. One of the healthiest meats of all comes from wild-hunted ungulates like deer, antelope, and reindeer. If you’ve had these meats, you’ll know what I mean. Wild-hunted ungulates have been food for humans and proto-humans for millions of years. Their meat tastes so good because we evolved eating it. The pleasure we get from a food tastewise is a good indication of how good for us it is. But all things in moderation and that especially goes for red meat.
Finally, yes, there are many studies that show a link between diets rich in heavily cooked red meats and disease, and we’ve agreed that such foods should be eaten in moderation, if at all. But there are thousands of studies about the beneficial effects of the omega-3 essential fatty acids in ocean fish, in the proteins in all meats, in the crucial vitamin B-12 that is found primarily in meat and is central to the proper development of our bodies and general health. The proteins in meat are reduced to their constituent amino acids in our digestive systems, and the aminos are used by our bodies to build new muscle and replace old tissue. Plants may supply the clay and water, but the aminos are the bricks that are made from them. We can get most of the aminos we need from plants, but not all. Some nutrients are formed in meat alone.
Besides, as the saying goes, “All flesh is grass.”
Organic meat, milk, eggs, butter, and other animal products are raised humanely and slaughtered humanely. They are free from antibiotics and artificial hormones. They are not genetically modified. At least for me, they are part of the healthiest diet. If you are vegan or vegetarian, that’s fine by me. Just don’t call me a murderer just because I like bacon with my eggs.
Making your own homemade, organic sauerkraut is easy and fun, and you’ll get a better crunch and flavor than store-bought. The lactobacilli that actual do the work of making the kraut are already in the air. You just set things up so they can go to work.
Use a ceramic crock with a fired, non-porous surface, a glass jar or jug, or a food-grade plastic container. Make sure it’s food grade plastic or it will leach toxic chemicals into your kraut. Use a mandoline or vegetable grater to make cabbage shreds. This recipe calls for three tablespoons of salt. If you are on a salt restricted diet, you have two options. Reduce the salt by half (this will result in a limp sauerkraut rather than the crunchy kraut we’re really after) or pass on making your own sauerkraut. The reason is that salt creates an inhospitable environment for pathogenic organisms, keeping your kraut safe to eat. Lactobacilli are salt tolerant, and not only that, they are a main component of your intestinal flora, and by eating homemade kraut, you’ll be recharging your intestines with natural, wholesome, and health-promoting bacteria.
The weight that’s called for can be a simple plate laid on top of the cabbage and weighed down with two or even three closed quart canning jars full of tap water. Eat a test sample of the sauerkraut after two weeks to see if it’s to your liking. It should be ready, and it should increase in sourness for another two weeks. It can be—and maybe should be—refrigerated after three weeks from inception, and eaten within six weeks from the day you made it.
If it turns brown and has any off-taste at all, discard it. But in all likelihood, you’ll find that your own sauerkraut puts almost all store-bought krauts, especially those that have been pasteurized (canned), to shame. And it will be 100 percent organic.
You can add other vegetables, such as spicy, fresh-split chilies, peeled and crushed garlic cloves, even a few juniper berries. But for your first batch, stick with cabbage alone.
2 heads of organic cabbage (about 5 pounds)
3 tablespoons non-iodized (kosher or sea) salt
1. Grate one cabbage and place in a vitreous crock, large glass jar or jug, or food-grade plastic bucket, not in a metal container.
2. Sprinkle half the salt over the cabbage. Grate the second cabbage and add it to the crock. Sprinkle on the rest of the salt.
3. Crush the mixture with your hands until liquid comes out of the cabbage freely. Place a plate on top of the cabbage, then weigh down the top of the plate. Cover the container with a loose lid or cloth.
4. After two days, scoop the scum off the top of the liquid. Place the plate back on, add the weight, and check every three days, removing scum as necessary.
5. After two weeks, sample the sauerkraut to see if it tastes ready to eat. The flavor will continue to mature for the next several weeks. Canning or refrigerating the sauerkraut will extend its shelf life. Yields about two quarts.
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Remember that I reported to you a few months ago that the current Federal Secretary of Agriculture, like his predecessors before him in the Bush administration, brought in agribusiness flacks to help define what’s organic and what’s not? Well, they’ve done their work well, and the organic purity law is under attack by Big Ag again. Read all about it and see how you can protest at this link:
http://www.cornucopia.org/2011/11/future-of-organic-food-and-agriculture-at-risk
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The Organic Center in Colorado has an excellent website devoted to disseminating evidence and science-based information about the health and environmental values of organic agriculture and foodstuffs. I really encourage you to check them out at:www.organic-center.org
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Ajinomoto, the company that makes aspartame, has changed its name to AminoSweet. It has the same toxicity as before, but a new, nice-sounding name. Aspartame was invented as a drug, but upon discovery of its sweet taste was transformed into a food additive. This latest aspartame marketing scheme is an attempt to fool the public into accepting the chemical sweetener as natural and safe, despite much evidence to the contrary.
The short answer is no. Oysters are grown in ocean bays, inlets, and estuaries where the water’s quality cannot be controlled, only monitored.
If there’s a water quality problem—such as after a rain where dairy animal waste may make its way into the water or there’s a red tide—the Federal Government has inspectors in place that quickly shut down oystering in affected beds.
But that doesn’t mean that raw oysters on the half shell can’t be a part of a healthy, organic diet. These little morsels of soft, yielding flesh are chock full of minerals, as you’d expect from filter feeders in salt and brackish waters. They are especially rich in zinc, a mineral that’s essential for proper sexual functioning, particularly in men. There are some caveats about buying oysters, however.
1) The fresher, the better. Always, and without fail, find out from your fishmonger or supplier when fresh shipments come in and buy them then.
2) The more northerly they grow, the safer they will be. In southern oyster beds, such as in Florida and Louisiana, there’s a chance of oysters being infected with Vibrio vulnificus—a nasty disease that can cause death—and/or Vibrio parahaemolyticus, less life-threatening but a food poisoning so violently sickening you’ll want to die. Both are related to the Vibrio that causes cholera.
On the West Coast, select oysters grown from San Francisco north into British Columbia. These will most likely be Crassostrea gigas, although more and more oyster farmers are growing the prized eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica, and even the European flat oyster called Belon in France, Ostrea edulis. If you can find them, little Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida) are the indigenous oyster of the West Coast.
On the East Coast, select oysters grown from Chesapeake Bay north to the Canadian Maritimes. Almost all the oysters in commerce will be the native Crassostrea virginica. They are given different names—and even show different flavors—depending on where they are harvested. Malpeques from Prince Edward Island, Wellfleets from Cape Cod, and Blue Points from Long Island Sound are all Crassostrea virginica.
Qlympia oysters, called Olys (OH-lees) by their aficionados, are both farmed and wild harvested on the West Coast. Before the Gold Rush, they thickly encrusted the shores of San Francisco Bay. The dish called Hangtown Fry was the meal asked for by condemned miners in the Sierra foothills because it contained eggs, oysters, and bacon—all three ingredients hard to come by in those times, which might have prolonged the condemned’s lives for a bit until the noose was draped around their necks.
Placer mining—firing heavy streams of water at banks of soil, rocks, and perhaps a little gold—sent untold tons of slurry down to San Francisco Bay, which covered up the oyster beds and killed the Olys wholesale. Paper mills farther north up turned raw wood pulp into paper and incidentally soaked the surrounding shorelines with the toxic chemical wastes produced by the paper mills, which killed off the native oysters until, by the 1950s, Olympia oysters were an endangered species.
But then environmental laws went into effect, the paper mills shut down, and friends of the Olys have emerged to repopulate the inlets of Puget Sound with these choice little oysters. They differ by the inlet in which they grow. In Little Skookum inlet, for instance, they develop grooved shells that resemble a raccoon’s footprint in shape, and locals call them “coonfoot oysters.” But in most places from Olympia to Bellingham, and even down into California, they are known as Olympias, or simply Olys.
They are a small oyster, about the size of a half dollar coin—although younger readers may wonder at that description, having never seen a half dollar coin. Let’s just say they are about half the size of Crassostrea gigas, the Pacific oyster brought here in the 20th Century to replace the Olys, because C. gigas tolerates pollution better than Olympias. Most of our West Coast oysters today are local variations of C. gigas.
There’s not a lot of meat in an Oly, but what there is is sweet, tender, and briny. You would be well advised to keep your eyes peeled for them. Almost all farmed Olys are grown in natural inlets of Puget Sound and hardly qualify as farmed. Most oystermen (and oysterwomen) simply pick up Olys that have grown naturally on the gravelly and shell-strewn bottoms of the inlets. Several groups have been re-introducing Olys into their natural habitats in inlets where pollution or overharvesting originally wiped them out.
But there are still some natural, original beds of wild oysters growing in Puget Sound. There’s essentially no difference between naturally-occurring oyster beds and those reintroduced into wild places by environmentalists. All grow in the fertile waters of the Sound. All feed on the nutrients in the algae blooms caused by the nutrients released by salmon after they spawn and die upstream. And all are superior oysters in texture and flavor. Look for them, and buy them when you can.
Wild food may not be organic in the strict letter of the law, but they are organic in the spirit. Mother Nature, after all, does not use factory-made poisons as she gardens the world.
Wild foraged food might not be organic, in the strict sense of that word, but it grows without the use of agricultural chemicals and feeds on the decaying residue of previous year’s plants. So, in the spirit if not the letter of the National Organic Program, it’s organic with a small “o.” Even in winter, one could drink tea made from the hips of the multiflora roses that grew everywhere and supported much wildlife. Those hickory nuts gathered in the fall cure themselves and dry out just in time for the winter holidays. Pennsylvania is a land of hunters, and small game like rabbits, pheasants, grouse, and wild turkeys was always plentiful. In December deer season began, and most folks I knew had a freezer for when the deer came home, cut into pieces and wrapped in butcher paper.
And winter was the lean time. In spring, our hillsides were covered with wild strawberries growing down among the field grasses, and when the sun shone and the humid air rose from the fields, it carried the scent of those strawberries to our noses. Soon we were on hands and knees, gobbling them by the handfuls. Wineberries, originally brought from China in the late 19th Century, escaped into the wild and their canes hung heavy with lovely sweet, garnet-colored fruit. The black raspberries had the most delicious flavor and there was even a native red raspberry. Blueberries and huckleberries were indigenous to those hills and never hard to find. Dewberries, a form of low-growing trailing blackberry, dangled their shiny black fruits along the roadsides.
There were fish in the streams—trout stocked by the State Fish & Game Department and native brown trout, too—along with pickerel, bass, and catfish that we kids would catch and cook ourselves.
Where I lived, the back country streams were spring fed, and so clear and cold you could drink right from them. In late summer, walking a fencerow or dirt road, you could smell the wild grapes and look up into the trees for them. They smelled and tasted like Concord grapes because Concord is a selected sport of the wild grape of the east.
The towering American chestnut forests were gone—wiped out by a fungus—but their roots lived on, sending up young trunks that could survive for about five to 10 years before succumbing to the fungus, and sometimes that was enough time for them to set a crop of chestnuts, and we kids loved finding and cooking those.
And the mushrooms: in the spring, there were the incomparably delicious morels, in the fall chanterelles, plus oyster mushrooms and black trumpet mushrooms, and if we were really lucky, the boletes that Italians call “porcini”—little pigs. Watercress grew along the rivulets of spring water that issued from the ground. And when we kids couldn’t find anything to eat, there was always plenty of nourishing sunlight to warm us up on lazy summer days. Such food was pure and delicious, and it nourished our young souls as well as our bodies, because its abundance assured us that the world was benign, and that nature was on our side. Today I’m no longer tramping about the eastern woodlands, but I eat organic whenever possible. I find that organic food, because of the benign way it’s produced, gives me something of the same soulful nourishment that the wild foods of my childhood did.
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My mom made the best has browns ever, but the recipe passed on when she did many decades ago. Since then, I have been trying to recreate her hash browns. After many, many years, much trial and error, and lots of failure, I’ve finally been able to produce Hazel Cox’s hash browns from my very own kitchen, and they are as delicious as I remember them from my childhood.
Here’s how to make them.
Start by filling a large saucepan with water and add a scant teaspoon of salt to the water. Turn the heat to high and let it reach a full boil.
Use Yukon Gold potatoes. She probably used Russets, a floury type, simply because they were the only potato variety available back then, except for red starchy potatoes. Yukon Golds are choice because they are sweet enough to brown up nicely. Start with about three pounds. Cut them into small, 1/3-inch cubes. I set a potato on its side and cut 1/3-inch rounds to the middle of the spud. I set these rounds, largest cut side down, on the cutting board. There will be three or four rounds, depending on the size of the original potato. Then, very carefully, I cut down through the stack of rounds at 1/3-inch intervals, turn the stack 90 degrees, and cut again at 1/3-inch intervals across the stack. I repeat this with the second half of the potato. It yields a nice pile of small, raw potatoes. I repeat the process with all the potatoes.
Now scoop up all the potato cubes and place them in the boiling, salted water. Stir every minute or so to prevent the potatoes sticking to the hot bottom of the saucepan. In about five minutes, each little cube will be al dente—done “to the tooth” as the Italians say, meaning that they are cooked but still retain some firmness. Remove the saucepan to the sink, pour off most of the water, and fill the pan with cold water to stop the cooking. Set the pan with the potatoes and water aside.
In a large iron skillet over medium heat, lay four slices of thick, applewood smoked bacon. Turn the slices frequently to encourage the bacon fat to run. While the bacon is cooking, dice a small onion. I cut off the root end and the top end, then make a score on the skin from one end to the other and remove the outer layer of onion skin. Then, using a sharp knife, I make slices about ¼-inch wide down from the top end toward the root end, side by side, but not all the way through the onion. I turn it 90 degrees and again make ¼-inch slices from the top end down toward the bottom end, but not all the way through. Now I set the onion on its side and make ¼-inch slices from the top end toward the bottom end, resulting in a cascade of ¼-inch dice. When I reach the part of the onion that hasn’t been cut, I turn the onion interior side down, cut ¼-inch slices across this butt end, turn the end 90 degrees and make a second row of ¼-inch slices. Now the whole onion is diced.
The bacon should be sizzling and yielding up its fat to the skillet by this time. When the bacon has started to become brittle and rendered out most of its fat, remove the slices to paper towels. Use this meat for salad dressing, BLTs, or what have you, but it’s the fat in the pan that you want. Now drain the potatoes and add them to the skillet set over medium high heat. Turn the potatoes every couple of minutes with a spatula, lifting then and turning them over so a new side will start to brown. After 15 minutes, add the diced onions, and continue turning every two or three minutes. Right about now, add salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste. This is a personal preference, so I’m not going to suggest amounts of salt and pepper. Personally, I like lots of pepper and less salt. But add the amounts you like.
Turn and cook the potatoes until they achieve a speckled brownness, but don’t let them burn black, even a little, for that means they are becoming bitter. This may be another 20 minutes of so. Serve immediately. I guarantee the potato lovers in your family will bless your name.
Whether your garden is just a small plot of flowers by the front door or a full-on truck patch, you’ll want to put it to bed for the winter. The purpose is to prepare the garden beds for next spring, when you’ll be planting again. Start by pulling out any weeds that you’ve let grow as summer turned to fall and garden work became less appealing. Especially pull out any weeds that have gone to seed. Then turn any finished crops or frost-bitten annual flowers into the soil with a spade. They’ll rot overwinter and help fertilize your soil. Cut perennials off about two inches above ground level and remove the tops to the compost pile, or let them lay on the ground to rot overwinter.
Now fertilize the beds with at least two inches—or more if you’ve got it—of well-made compost. A cubic foot of compost will cover about six square feet of soil, or shovel compost onto the beds and rake it out evenly so it’s about two or three inches deep. Leaves are your friends. Cover your garden beds with leaves you’ve raked up. Scavenge the neighborhood for your neighbors’ bags of leaves. Cover your beds with a good six inches of leaves and wet them down with a hose. If you have the time and inclination, run your lawnmower over the leaves to reduce them to chopped mulch. If the mower is blowing the chopped leaves too far afield, chop the leaves with the mower near a wall, where the leaf mulch will collect. Then transfer it to the garden. Leaves are super-nutritious for the soil.
If you have tender plants that will need protection overwinter, such as hybrid tea roses, Make chicken wire cylinders about three feet in diameter and three feet tall. Trim your dormant roses back as you normally would—to two or three canes each about a foot long. Now cover each plant with its own wire cage. Fill the wire cages with leaves and fix a piece of bird netting over the top so rain can enter but winter winds can’t whirl the leaves away. If you live in a very cold region—USDA Zones 5 or colder—you should additionally wrap the rose canes with old cloths, old cloth rugs, or anything that will cover them against the cold, before putting the wire cages over them and filling them with leaves. Your seed catalogs will start arriving around the first of the year. Order early to make sure you get what you want. When things start warming up in the spring, turn the overwintered leaves and compost into the garden soil and add another two or three inches of compost to the soil surface. Your garden will be ready to grow, and will start growing cold-season crops when the soil temperature reaches a steady 50 degrees F.
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The term “organic” has its own watchdog agency separate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Cornucopia Institute is a non-profit organization located in Cornucopia, Wisconsin, that seeks justice for family organic farmers. Part of that task is to guard the term “organic” so it is not misused or applied to foods that are not organic. The Institute recently released an important report on breakfast cereals and granolas. It’s important enough to give you the full executive summary. You’ll note that the full report includes a scorecard of 50 cereals showing which are truly organic and which aren’t. The results may surprise you. Here’s their executive summary of the report, followed by a link to the scorecard.
Federal law requires that organic food products be produced in ways that promote ecological sustainability, without the toxic inputs and genetically engineered ingredients that are common in the conventional food system. Increasingly, these organic products are forced to compete with products that claim to be “natural.”
No legal requirements or restrictions exist for foods labeled “natural.” The term, in many instances, constitutes meaningless marketing hype promoted by corporate interests seeking to cash in on the consumer’s desire for food produced in a genuinely healthy and sustainable manner.
Unlike the organic label, no government agency, certification group or other independent entity defines the term “natural” on food packages or ensures that the claim has merit (other than meat, where the USDA has created some extremely modest requirements). Each corporation determines its own definition of the “natural” label.
“Natural” generally is thought to mean “no artificial ingredients,” including preservatives, but the farms and processing plants that produce ingredients for “natural” foods are not prohibited by law from using dangerous pesticides, genetically engineered crops, fumigants, solvents and toxic processing aids. These agricultural and manufacturing inputs are not required by law to be listed on ingredient labels.
This report explores the growing trend toward labeling conventional foods as “natural,” focusing on breakfast cereal and granola, which are considered staples in many American households. Since breakfast cereals are popular with children, it is especially important for parents to be aware of the differences between “natural” products, with conventional ingredients, and certified organic ones. Children are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of synthetic pesticides and other inputs that are commonly used in “natural” products but prohibited in organics.
This report stresses that the terms “natural” and “organic” are not interchangeable, and an analysis of the differences shows why health-conscious and ecoconscious consumers should check carefully for the word “organic” before putting a box of cereal or bag of granola in their shopping cart.
Section I of the report covers the legal requirements that distinguish organic claims from “natural” claims on food packages. Federal law requires that foods with the “organic” label be produced in ways that are substantially different from conventional food production. Independent USDA-accredited certifying agents ensure that organic producers follow these strict federal standards. No such legal requirement exists for “natural” labels on foods. Since no federal law exists to define and standardize “natural” claims, each company comes up with its own self-serving definition.
Section II explores several company definitions of “natural,” underscoring how vastly different they can be. For example, some companies go to the expense of procuring non-genetically engineered corn in “natural” products, while many “natural” breakfast cereals contain high levels of genetically engineered ingredients. Yet despite the substantial legal difference between organic and “natural” labels on foods, polls show many consumers are unaware of these differences.
In Section III, results from various polls show that many consumers erroneously believe that the “natural” label has merit, such as signifying that the food is free of pesticides and genetically engineered ingredients. Companies that market “natural” foods to ecoconscious and health-conscious consumers benefit from this widespread confusion between organic and “natural.”
Section IV details various tactics that have been used by companies in their attempt to appear to be equivalent to organics, intentionally blurring the distinction to mislead shoppers. To empower consumers who wish to support companies that are committed to organics, food safety and environmentally sustainable agriculture, Section V includes company profiles of organic and “natural” cereal and granola brands. This section lifts the veil on corporate owners of popular brands that sometimes actively hide their identity from their customers, perhaps knowing that consumers drawn to “natural” labels would not be interested in enriching multibillion-dollar corporations. Bear Naked®, owned by Kellogg Company, is an example: the name Kellogg appears nowhere on Bear Naked® packaging or its website. This section sheds light on corporate identities of popular organic and “natural” brands, ranging from small family businesses to multinational corporations.
Section VI explores price differences between organic and “natural” breakfast cereal and granola products. Although “natural” products are conventional (both in crop production and processing methods), they often are priced at a premium, closer to organic prices. In some cases, conventional, “natural” products are priced higher than their organic counterparts. It appears that companies are engaged in clever “natural” marketing, profiting tremendously from consumer confusion about the difference between “natural” and organic and their willingness to pay a premium for pure, wholesome foods.“Natural” marketing hurts certified organic farmers, organic competitors, and consumers who believe they are buying a truly natural product.
Section VII discusses the effects of “natural” claims on the organic manufacturers whose certified organic products are forced to compete with empty “natural” claims. Companies marketing “natural” products merely pay lip service to sustainability and eco-friendliness, while undercutting the truly committed companies that walk the walk by buying from farms that are managed organically, without synthetics, genetically engineered crops or toxic pesticides. Many times “natural” companies invest in solar or wind energy to prove how “green” they are, rather than investing in organic, the safest and most environmentally friendly form of agriculture.
Section VIII discusses the effects of “natural” marketing on organic farmers. When food manufacturers shift their product ingredients from organic to “natural,” it means they buy conventional ingredients from chemical-intensive farms instead of buying from organic farms. Organic farmers have received lower prices for their grains in recent years as cereal companies drop their demand for organic ingredients when they switch to “natural” labeling and conventional ingredients.
Section IX covers differences in environmental impacts of certified organic farming and conventional farming that produces ingredients for “natural” products. As shown by poll data, many consumers believe that “natural” means the food is free of “unnatural” inputs, such as genetically engineered seed and pesticides.
Section X explores various impacts on consumers of misleading “natural” labeling and consuming conventional ingredients. Section X also provides test results showing that many “natural” cereal products, including Kashi, Mother’s and Barbara’s Bakery, are produced with genetically engineered organisms. Section X also uses pesticide residue data from the United States Department of Agriculture to show that many conventional ingredients in “natural” breakfast cereal and granola products often contain pesticide residues. Aside from chemical residues emanating from crop production on the farm, “natural” ingredients are also not protected from toxic fumigants used on crops in storage, and toxic solvents used during processing. These inputs are strictly prohibited in organic production and processing.
Consumers should be aware that “natural” products contain conventional ingredients that were produced no differently from the ingredients in other typical processed foods. Only certified organic ingredients were verified as grown and processed without the use of genetically engineered organisms, toxic pesticides, fumigants and solvents.
This report is accompanied by an online scorecard listing 50 cereal and granola brands, available on the Cornucopia website (www.cornucopia.org/cereal-scorecard).
Killing things is not the way to control them.
Organic gardening and farming teaches us that. Let’s say you have a nice crop of Asian greens in your garden, but European Cabbageworms are eating their leaves. And so you use an insecticide to kill the worms. Used often enough, there will eventually be some cabbageworms that are resistant to the insecticide. The idea of “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” comes into play.Those resistant cabbageworms breed new generations of resistant cabbageworms. The old insecticide doesn’t work any more. New and more toxic insecticides are brought in, and the cycle starts all over.
Now we find out that the routine use of antibiotics in farm animals has bred superbugs—microbes resistant to antibiotics. It’s a big problem, and hospitals are frantically trying to find new antibiotics to subdue these super-strong disease-causing germs. Even more recently, word has leaked out that Monsanto’s Round-Up herbicide has been used so frequently and so widely that resistant super weeds have started showing up. “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Nature, too, uses genetic modification—we call it mutation—to circumvent the killing power of our scientists. The stronger the killing power applied, the stronger the weeds have to be to survive, and the stronger they become.
The organic way is just the opposite. Organic farmers and gardeners invite in a greater diversity of creatures. If there are pests, then there are beneficial insects that will show up to devour them. If we use antibiotics only occasionally to cure disease, rather than routinely, then we reduce the pressure on microbes to mutate into antibiotic-resistant forms. If we reduce weeds in our garden and fields with cover crops and mulches, then we not only suppress weeds, we improve the soil as we do so.
Conventional agriculture deals death in the form of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and antibiotics, which only treat symptoms. Organic agriculture enhances life and by increasing bio-diversity, cures problems at their root. Attempts to control problems by killing things also infects the medical profession, with the same results as in agriculture. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), medical care—and we’re talking about proper medical care that administers FDA-approved drugs--is one of the leading causes of death in this country, claiming more than 280,000 lives per year, says Dr. Brad Case.
The result? According to the World Health Organization, the United States has the worst overall health of any industrialized country on earth (we rank 37th out of 37), and yet we spend as much on healthcare per capita as the two top ranked countries combined. We’ve seen the links between the life in the soil that produces healthy, organic food and the life in our intestinal tracts that produces good health in our bodies. It’s time for the medical profession to work with nature to prevent disease rather than working to control nature with toxic compounds after disease manifests itself.
As it stands right now, it’s pretty obvious that our politics is all about money. Those with the most money win elections, research reveals. Once in office, the politicians have to keep amassing money to get re-elected. Uh-oh, here come the lobbyists with fistfuls of dollars to give to the Congressperson or state assembly member or mayor or county commissioner or whoever will vote their way. The money taken, the politician then gets to vote on legislation and lo and behold, we have a politics that supports the lobbyists’ money sources. Can you spell Corporate America, Goldman Sachs, and the Koch brothers?
Recent Republican bills in the House have tried to stop funding for any women’s health organization that supports abortion, eliminate Planned Parenthood, de-fund NPR, take the environmental shackles off of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge so drilling can begin, open up more areas of the Gulf of Mexico and both coasts to more drilling, allow clear cutting of our national forests, and—if Herman Cain has his way—tax the poor more and tax the rich less, because that’s what his nonsensical 9-9-9 plan would do. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch agrees. His plan for cutting the deficit? “Tax the poor,” he said.
So the current political system is broken badly. The answer is to pay Congresspeople a salary, just like us working stiffs, and make it illegal for lobbyists to give politicians moneyor for politicians to take money. Elections would be funded by the public, and legitimately elected officials would each get the same amount of air time on radio and TV to make their case (the airwaves are public, you know). In fact, ban lobbyists altogether. If a corporation wants to get its message across to a Congressperson, let them provide information to that Congressperson in written form that’s available for the public to see. No secret back room deals allowed. Get the money out of politics. And amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s unconscionable decision that defines corporations as persons and allows them to give unlimited amounts of money to lobby our politicians under protection of their First Amendment rights as persons.
Then we would have a Congress peopled with politicians who would have a chance to re-think the way our country conducts its business. They could then develop an organic politics.
What would an organic politics be like? It would essentially change the lawmakers’ priorities from money to what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote, “We the People, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Promoting the general welfare is a key provision here. It means, among other things and in modern parlance, environmental protections, regulation of banks (or re-regulation, since it was the casting off of regulations instituted in the Great Depression that allowed for the crimes of the current banking system), good and strong health care laws, and a strong social safety net for the elderly, the unemployed, the sick, children, and others who have fallen on hard times. Organic politics would look for ways to increase the health and welfare of the earth and all those who live on it and from it. The use of poisons in agriculture would be strictly controlled. Municipalities would divert all organic garbage and clean waste to composting and/or energy-creating facilities (garbage can first be fermented to create fuel and then composted to be used as fertilizer). Recycling would be supported. Wildlife would be protected, especially endangered species.
There’s so much good we could do if our government wasn’t corrupted by money. It is the root of all evil, you know. So why is it the engine that drives our politics? It’s time to get the money out of politics. If the Occupy Wall Street movement wants to cause real change, it must eventually settle on developing an organic politics along the lines defined here.
My wife Susanna and I both want to keep some chickens. We have the room. The birds could scratch around the property and eat bugs—meaning really, really good eggs, the kind with thick whites and deep orange yolks that stand up proudly. Right now we feed kitchen scraps to our red wiggler worms, but we could easily divert some to the hen pen, where the chickens can scratch them to shreds and poop all over them, and we can then rake up the mess and fertilize our garden crops and fruit trees with it. No rooster, though. Who wants to be woken up at dawn by a noisy rooster? Or be attacked every time you walk too close to him or his hens? The hens will just have to forego getting their eggs fertilized.
We have plans to build a henhouse and two excellent books on raising backyard chickens from Storey Publishing: “Chick Days,” and “Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens.” If you’re thinking about chickens at your place, these two books are invaluable. Just Google Storey’s online catalog.
When we finally build our chicken house, security will be the first concern. On our hill here in Sonoma County, we see fox almost daily. While our dog keeps away the raccoons, possums, and skunks, all of whom like chicken dinners as much as we do, the fox is a sly fellow and a first class chicken murderer and once he knows there are chickens in the hen house, he will try to raid the place.
And so the pen will require sturdy wire mesh. Now a fox will burrow under the strongest wire fencing, so the fencing will have to extend down into a trench at least 18 inches deep, and then be bent to lie flat in the trench about another 18 inches, extending away from the interior of the pen and the vertical part of the fence. Then the soil goes back into the trench, and heavy rocks are set every couple of feet right up against the wire on the outside of the pen.
We have a dog and we live far enough into the country that the dog can run free. So the hens will be able to have the run of the place during the daytime. But as the sun goes down, the hens will go into their pen and during the night will roost in their hen house, where, it is hoped, they will deposit eggs for our breakfast and for our cooking and baking needs.
All this is hunky dory, completely organic, and do-able.
Now here’s the sticking point. “What happens,” I ask Susanna, “when the hens get old and stop laying?”
She: “We keep them as pets.”
Me: “It’s the stewpot for them, in my book.”
She: “Well, your book has to go back on the shelf. You can’t kill Henrietta, or Pecky, or Buffy.”
Me: “That’s why I won’t name them or consider them pets.”
She: “But you will. I know you. You’re a sucker for animals. Look at the way you hug our dog.”
Me: “You kiss the cats.”
And so the argument goes, back and forth. So far, the question of what to do with non-laying old hens has defeated our intention to get chickens. My vision is that if Susanna wins this argument, our place will turn into a kind of convalescent home for hens. We’ll have three or four young ‘uns laying, and dozens of old hens being crotchety and eating us out of house and home, scratching up our flower beds, and generally being a nuisance.
Of course we could build a second pen and hen house for the older non-laying hens and just leave the door open for the fox at night. That’d solve the problem. It would be a win-win for the fox and me. But Susanna won’t hear of it.
Believe it or not, now is the time to start planning for next season’s organic tomato patch. Why now? Because you are going to have the earliest tomatoes of anyone in your county and you need to know which seeds to order to get the right varieties and plant them at the right time.
Many home gardeners pride themselves on bringing in the first ripe tomatoes of the season, but very few know exactly how to do it.Here’s what you need to know to bring in the earliest possible tomatoes in your region, in a way that requires the least work. In fact, in less than an afternoon, you can create a tomato patch that will swamp you with fruit all season long without weeding, or even very much watering. My advice is to print out and save these directions.
Overview: Tomatoes are among the highest yielding of all our garden crops. But the earliest tomatoes—those that grow and produce well when the spring weather is still cool—are not the most high yielding types. So we need a strategy. Let’s start with the soil. A very rich soil—that is, one with an abundance of nitrogen from manures—tends to flush tomato plants into lots of stem and leaf growth, but not so much into producing tomatoes. In trials at the Rodale Institute in Maxatawny, Pennsylvania, we grew tomatoes in pure compost, in soil under turf that was removed, and in unimproved field soil that had been in continuous corn crops where agricultural chemicals had been used for many years. The tomatoes produced the heaviest crops in the soil that had been under the turf. Circles of turf grass were removed and tomato plants put into the exposed soil underneath. This seemed to suit the tomato plants best, prompting them into good, compact growth with lots of fruits. If you have an area of your garden that’s 12 feet by 8 feet (96 square feet) and covered in turf grass, you can lift six three-foot circles of turf and shake the soil from the turves into the exposed soil, with two rows of three circles each. If the soil is bare or weedy, turn it up and improve its nutrition with about a cubic foot of good compost per circle. This is where your tomato garden will go.
Varieties: You are initially after the earliest possible tomatoes in your area. And so, you need seed of early varieties—those that will mature fruit when other varieties are hanging out, waiting for warm weather. But you will also want a variety that will produce pounds upon pounds of tomatoes for sauce during the warm summer months.
First, you need to understand the difference between determinate and indeterminate tomatoes. Determinate plants set a large crop of tomatoes and then stop growing. Indeterminate plants keep producing new stems throughout the growing season, right up to frost, with trusses of flowers followed by fruit emerging from the leaf axils of those stems. For our earliest tomatoes, we will choose one determinate variety. The other variety in our six-plant tomato patch will be indeterminate. We will also grow an extra indeterminate plant in a large pot to replace our earliest tomato after it sets its crop of fruit. Here are the varieties you need.
Purchase a packet of Oregon Spring V and a packet of a large paste tomato like Rocky. (Oregon Spring is available at Territorial Seed Co. at www.territorialseed.com/prod_detail_list/s?keyword=Oregon+Spring and Rocky is available from Tomato Grower’s Supply Company at www.tomatogrowers.com/processing.htm and scroll down to Rocky.)
Oregon Spring is a cold tolerant tomato developed at Oregon State University for home gardeners along Oregon’s cool coast. The catalogs rate it at 58 days from setting plants in the garden to maturity of its first tomato crop, but we can hasten that. Large paste tomatoes like Rocky—or old favorites like San Marzano or Roma—are indeterminate and will produce bushels of fruit all summer. Rocky is good because each tomato is large and can be used fresh as a slicing and salad tomato or it can be used for sauce. As you prepare for the growing season, start saving all your newspapers. There’ll be a good use for them later. And save all one-gallon plastic milk or water jugs.
Setting Up the Tomato Patch:
Identify your last frost date. In much of the country, that’s about May 15, with more northerly areas up to several weeks later and southerly areas up to a month earlier. Most tomato-growing instructions tell you to wait until two weeks after the last frost date to plant your tomatoes, but I’m going to tell you to plant them two weeks before the last frost date. After all, we want the earliest possible tomatoes and I have a strategy for getting the plants to produce fruit while the neighbors are still selecting their seedlings at the garden center.
Determine where your tomato patch will go. It will be two rows of three plants each for a total of six plants, which translates to a width of eight feet and row length of 12 feet, or 96 square feet. At the hardware store, buy a piece of clear plastic sheeting that will entirely cover the area with one piece. About six weeks before your last frost date, lay the clear plastic over your future patch site and shovel a little soil along the edges so heat is trapped under the plastic and breezes can’t blow it away. This will help warm the soil long before the surrounding soil is warm. If there are grasses and weeds, mow them down almost to ground level before putting on the plastic.
Starting Your Plants:
About the same time you are laying down the plastic, start your tomato plants. If you have a cold frame, warm porch, sunny bay window, or any area that gets six hours of sun a day, you’ll place your new seedlings there. If not, consider investing in fluorescent grow lights hung just a few inches above your seedlings. Tomatoes like heat and light.
Rather than use pots, you’ll need a series of paper cups—small, medium, and large. With a pencil, punch three drainage holes in the bottom of the smallest cups. Fill the small cups to within a half inch of the top with potting soil or any good garden soil. Plant two seeds of each variety of tomato in each cup. Plant two or three cups with Oregon Spring and about 12-18 cups with your high volume paste tomato, such as Rocky, marking the cups so you know which variety is in them. Place the cups in a containing tray that won’t leak and water them well.
New seedlings will show two leaves—the cotyledons—at first, and then will follow with true leaves with scalloped margins. When the seedlings show four true leaves, take the next larger size cups and punch drainage holes, then fill them with potting soil. Select the largest and strongest seedling from each of the smallest cups and transplant it to the next larger size, burying the stem to just below the true leaves. Handle the seedlings very gently, pricking them free with the tines of a fork. If you must touch the seedlings, handle them by the leaves, not the stem. The baby tomato can produce new leaves if you accidently damage one, but not a new stem. You can nick off the cotyledons with a fingernail or use scissors. Discard the runts and mark the new pots with the variety in them.
Let the tomatoes grow until they now produce a tuft of new leaves at the top of the plants. Take the next larger size of paper cup and repeat the procedure, again nicking off lower leaves and burying the stem right up to the tuft of new leaves at the top.
Tomatoes produce roots all along their buried stems, and so what you’ve been doing is creating a tomato plant with a small but strong tuft of growing leaves and a great big ball of roots. If you’ve ever purchased started tomato seedlings at a nursery, you’ll notice that they most likely have long stems and lots of leaves but very small root balls. This is because the nursery has been feeding the plants with high-powered liquid fertilizer, so the plant has no need to grow lots of roots. It’s swamped with fertilizer. When such a plant is put into the garden, suddenly it no longer gets copious quantities of fertilizer, yet it has all those stems and leaves to support without enough root system to support them. And so it sulks and hardly grows at all for a few weeks to a month, until its root system catches up with its green tops. But you have created exactly the opposite: a huge root ball and very little top. When this baby gets planted, it takes off like a rocket, with plenty of roots to supply immediate growth of strong stems, greenery, and of course, big tomatoes.
Planting the Tomatoes:
For your six plants, you’ll have one Oregon Spring and five plants of your main, indeterminate variety. The sixth indeterminate plant should go in a five-gallon pot, staked to grow there until Oregon Spring is finished, after which you’ll pull the Oregon Spring and transplant the sixth main crop plant into its space.
You can leave the clear plastic on the ground and punch planting holes through it, but I don’t recommend that. Over the summer, it will tend to break apart due to foot traffic and create a mess. So I advise pulling up the plastic at this point and storing it for later use, as you will see. Dig six circular holes a foot or more deep and a foot across. Add a handful of compost to each hole before putting in the tomatoes and mix it with the native soil. Plant them deeply enough that all of the root ball and most of the stem is buried. Run a hose on each plant on a slow trickle for at least a half hour, so they are thoroughly watered in.
Mulching the Plot and Caging the Tomatoes:
Each tomato plant will need a vertical cylindrical wire cage to which you can tie the elongating shoots. Tomatoes left to lie on the ground will rot. The wire mesh should be generous enough for you to reach your hand through the squares in order to harvest the tomatoes inside. Concrete swimming pool reinforcing wire is ideal. It will never rust out and your hand will easily slip inside the squares formed by the wire mesh. Each cage will be made from nine feet of four-foot wide wire mesh formed into a cylinder slightly smaller than three feet in diameter. And you’ll need six cages. So you will need 54 feet of wire mesh four feet in width cut into six nine-foot lengths. Form each into a circle and crimp the exposed wire ends onto the closest wire square to make each cage. This reinforcing wire is tough stuff, so you’ll need a good pair of vise grips and tough gloves for this work.
Once the cages—six cylinders four feet tall and a little less than three feet in diameter—are constructed, it’s time to go for all those newspapers you’ve been saving. Lay thick pads of newspaper on the ground over the whole tomato patch, exposing only the holes with the tomatoes in them. Use stones to hold the edges of the paper down so they don’t blow in the wind. If this newspaper mulch is good and thick, it will positively prevent weeds from growing in your tomato patch, and it will hold moisture in the ground so watering will be kept to a minimum. Newsprint will decay over the summer and you can turn it into the soil at fall clean-up, where the wood fibers in the paper will decay into a crumbly brown mass that will loosen the soil and hold water like a sponge.
Once the patch is covered with thick pads of newsprint, set one of the cages over each tomato plant. Weigh down the bottom edge of the wire with several heavy stones or bricks in at least three evenly-spaced places so the cages won’t topple over in a wind, especially after the tomatoes grow up to fill the cages and they become top heavy. I’ve also used tent pegs driven around the bottom wire of the cages to hold it firmly to the soil.
Finish the patch by covering the newsprint with good-looking mulch like sphagnum moss, spoiled hay, cocoa bean hulls, fir bark, or any other organic material. This top dressing looks good, makes it easier for you to walk on the spaces between the plants, covers the papers so they don’t blow around in the wind, and will decay so it can be turned into the soil with the newspapers to add organic matter at fall clean-up time.
Getting Early Tomatoes:
Remember that we just planted our tomatoes in pre-warmed ground before the last frost date. Now here’s how to keep the plants warm so your tomato production begins as soon as possible and you can harvest ripe tomatoes even in June!
You will need three plastic, gallon-sized water or milk jugs for each plant. Fill them with water and set three of them around each seedling inside the cage. There should be just enough room for the three jugs and the seedling growing up between them. This water acts like a thermal flywheel, absorbing heat during the day and giving it off to keep the plants warm through the night. Additionally, retrieve the clear plastic you used to warm the soil. You will need to cut six pieces, each four feet by 10 feet. These will wrap around the outside of the wire cages. Hold them in place with duct tape, especially along the top edge, so the plastic doesn’t slip down. Also cut six pieces in rough, four-foot circles, which you’ll lay across each of the top of the cages, holding them in place by lengths of scrap wood.
You’ve now created mini-greenhouses for your plants. Be aware that as days grow longer and the sun hotter, it could get too hot inside these cages. Place a thermometer in one to check the temperature of all. About 90 degrees F. should be a maximum inside the cages. On bright sunshiny days, you can remove the top plastic, putting it back on as the sun lowers in the west.
Once you reach your last frost date, consider removing the tops permanently and by two weeks after the last frost date, remove the plastic from around the cages. Empty the jugs and store them under a tarp, strung on a wire in the rafters of a shed, or under some other cover, as direct sunlight will degrade them, and so you can re-use them each year.
Where the last frost date is May 15, your tomatoes will be well on their way to maturity, especially Oregon Spring. It should deliver home-grown, ripe tomatoes of good quality to you by the third week in June or thereabouts.
Summer Maintenance:
It doesn’t take a lot of time to set up this patch and from now on, it takes almost no time to maintain. Make sure the tomatoes have adequate water, usually a deep watering once every two or three weeks in the summer with little rain, or less where rainstorms are frequent. The plants have all the nutrition they need. Weeds won’t be a problem as you’ve covered the ground with a thick mulch of newspaper sections. You’re good to go.
Your tomatoes can be gently and loosely tied using strips of cloth to the wire cages as they grow, and some varieties will grow past the top. Rather than letting them tumble over the edge, weighed down with fruit, which can damage the stems, you can drive three 8-foot stakes into the ground spaced evenly around the outside edge of each cage, then continue tying the elongating stems vertically to the stakes.
Using this method, Susanna and I have put up 48 quarts of tomato sauce plus had plenty of fresh tomatoes for salads and sandwiches and eating out of hand all season long. Oh, and there were plenty to give away, too.
Once upon a time, I planted three filbert bushes arranged in a triangle around a large rock on my property. Over about five or six years, they grew to 12 to 15 feet tall, and sent up many trunks from their roots, so that the bushes turned into a filbert—or hazelnut as some call them—grove. And they started to bear.
The first couple of years of their bearing, I waited patiently for them to ripen their tasty nuts, secured into their green herbaceous husks with the flared and filigreed openings. But when they should have been ripe, in October, I couldn’t find them at all. They’d disappeared from the tall shrubby bushes. And then I spotted the squirrel that had beaten me to my own filberts.
So I went in the house and got my .22 rifle and went to the filbert bushes. I didn’t see the squirrel, but figured he would be listening somewhere in the woods. In a loud voice, I announced, “Hey squirrel! See this rifle? If I catch you stealing all the filberts next year, I’m going to shoot you! You can take some, but not all. I mean it!”
The next October, my daughter, who was about seven years old at the time, and I went to the filberts, pushed our way into the thicket, and sat on the rock. We brought a basket to fill with nuts, but my daughter said there weren’t any. “They don’t show themselves right away,” I said. “You have to sit quietly and pretty soon, they’ll start showing themselves. It’s like the birds. They all fly away until you are quiet, then they return.”
So we sat quietly on the rock for about five minutes. Then she said, “I see one.” And then another, and another, until she saw that the filbert bushes were loaded with nuts, their husks the color of the senescing leaves, which had made them hard to see. We filled a big basket full with the nuts and took them back to the house, where we shucked the hard nuts from their husks and put them in the attic to cure. By Christmastime, we had nuts aplenty, nicely cured in their shells. They’d never needed sulfuring, spraying, fertilizing, or pruning. That’s the way it is with nut crops.
We also had a large black walnut tree near the house. These nuts are covered with a green husk that turns black and stains your hands for weeks if you get its juice on you. The question becomes, how do you get the husks off the nuts without staining yourself and you clothing? Our driveway wasn’t paved, and there were two shallow ruts. We gathered the walnuts and tossed them into the ruts. Every time we drove our car over them, we squished more husks off the hard nuts inside. After rains and dry spells, we could lift the nuts without staining our hands. They also required curing until the holidays.
Finally, we had a large hickory tree that rained its nuts in late September. The hard nuts were encased in segmented husks. These were easy to open to get the hard nuts inside. They too needed to cure until the holiday season. While the husks were easy to open, the nuts were hard to crack and the nutmeats hard to get out of the chambers and convolutions of the shell.
All three of these nut crops grew without help from us of any kind. Year after year they did their job of supplying us with delicious nuts. You can buy varieties of filberts, black walnuts, and hickory trees that produce nuts selected for easier picking and cracking, and easier to get the nutmeats from, than the wild types.
Learn more and see nut trees for sale at the Northern Nut Growers Association (www.nutgrowing.org), at Gurney’s Seed & Nursery (www.gurneys.com), and Miller’s Nurseries (www.millernurseries.com) and click the “Figs and Nuts” tab. Hickories don’t grow west of the Rockies, but black walnuts and filberts do fine.
Did you know that Australia, Japan, and the European Union ban the import of U.S. milk and milk products because so much of it contains rBST (also known as rBGH), a genetically engineered hormone that forces a cow to produce excessive amounts of milk?
Are you aware that the European Union also bans the importation of many American farm products other than milk because they have been genetically altered?
What do the European nations know that we don’t know?Strike that. It’s more accurate to say, “What do European nations know that we can’t know?” We can’t know what they know because the U.S. Department of Agriculture fails to require the labeling of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in American food products.
That seems strange, doesn’t it? Monsanto claims that their GMO seeds and the foods produced from them, and the milk from rBST-treated cows, are all perfectly safe. You’d think they’d be proud to display a statement on food that reads, “Contains GMOs.” Why not? They’re safe, right?
Well, common sense tells you why they don’t want you to know that food contains GMOs. Because if it’s so labeled, you won’t buy it.
Of course, you can avoid the problems with GMOs by buying and eating organic food. Frankenfoods, as genetically modified foods are often called, aren’t allowed in organic culture. Big Ag companies like Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Cargill, Archer-Daniels-Midland and others have been fighting organic farming for many years. It stands to reason why. These companies have lots of agricultural products to sell, and many schemes for selling them. Organic farmers don’t buy their products, by and large. They don’t buy pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, chemical fertilizer, antibiotics, growth hormones, GMO seeds, and so on.
As an organic-minded consumer of quality food, you can keep yourself up to date about GMO products through several sources. First, take a look at this YouTube clip about rBST: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SXVpvgXo9Q.
You’ll find some other interesting clips at that site, too, including one about how Fox News covers up problems with Monsanto’s cow hormone.
A non-profit organization called the Non-GMO Project tests and verifies foods that contain no GMOs and provides manufacturers with a label that says, “Non GMO Project VERIFIED.” Visit them at www.nongmoproject.org and look for their label.
The Institute for Responsible Technology publishes a very useful Non-GMO Shopping Guide, listing companies and products guaranteed to contain no GMOs, as well as a full page of products in which GMOs occur but are not labeled. You can access the guide through www.ResponsibleTechnology.org.
Since the 1990s, the American people have been asking the FDA, USDA, legislators, and the courts to label foods containing GMOs. So far, they haven’t. So in California, people are taking this demand into their own hands via a 2012 Ballot Initiative Campaign to put the measure on the California ballot next year. They need volunteers to gather signatures. You can do your part and get involved by visiting www.labelgmos.org/pledge.
If you are an organic farmer or retailer and want to be completely up-to-date on all aspects of the GMO situation, visit http://www.non-gmoreport.com/, where you can subscribe to “The Organic and Non-GMO Report,” which provides comprehensive information to insure a safe, healthy, and sustainable food supply. They also publish “The 2011 Non-GMO Sourcebook,” containing hundreds of companies, products, services, and organizations from around the world that are fighting the creeping (and creepy) entry of GMOs into the world’s food supply. It’s a 108-page book listing just about everyone involved in fighting for non-GMO foods.
On a personal note, a few years back I received a phone call from an editor of Popular Science magazine. He asked me what I thought would be the big science story in 100 years. I said, “The enormous effort needed to root out genetic modifications in living organisms that will have caused huge problems by then.” In sum, Monsanto’s bottom line is not the most important thing in the world. A safe, clean, organic food supply is.
Is it just me, or does everyone think peach melba is heaven in a bowl? I don’t exactly remember where I first had this luscious dessert, but I think it might have been a small French restaurant called Le Cheval Blanc in midtown Manhattan in 1958. Peach melba, of course, was invented by Escoffier himself to honor Dame Nellie Melba, a popular Australian opera singer of the late 19th Century. If Escoffier had invented nothing else, he would rank among the great chefs of all time, because, done right, this dessert is incomparably delicious.
You will want only organic ingredients, because otherwise, the dessert will be fouled by additives, hormones, antibiotics, and god knows what else. Get the best organic peaches you can find. Have on hand a pint of organic vanilla ice cream. Find a pint and a half of organic red raspberries. The recipe calls for red currant jelly. If you can find it in its organic glory, all the better. Here’s the recipe. If you have never had peach melba, prepare yourself for a treat you will never forget.
First, make the melba sauce:
1 ½ pints organic ripe red raspberries
½ cup red currant jelly
½ cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon salt
1. Puree the raspberries in a blender, then put the puree into a fine-mesh sieve above a bowl. Scrape back forth until the mashed pulp and juice is all collected in the bowl and the seeds remain in the sieve.
2. Place the pulp in a heavy saucepan with the jelly and bring to a simmer, then add the sugar, cornstarch, and salt.
3. Simmer about 10 minutes until the surface is glassy and the foam has died down. Set aside and allow to cool, then chill in the fridge before using on the dessert.
Now, process the peaches:
2 ripe, organic peaches
½ cup sugar
Vanilla ice cream
1. Plunge the peaches into boiling water for a minute, then run under cold water to cool. Peel and cut into halves, removing the stones.
2. Poach the peach halves in a saucepan with the sugar and enough water to cover, just a few minutes. Remove peaches to a bowl and allow them to cool, then chill them in the fridge.
3. When you’re ready to serve the dessert, place two scoops of vanilla ice cream in two chilled bowls, then cover each scoop with a peach half, hollow side down. Drizzle half the melba sauce over the peaches and ice cream in each bowl. Serve immediately. Serves 2.
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Yes, that’s right, President Obama has appointed Monsanto executive Michael Taylor—the man who brought the bovine growth hormone into our food supply—to be in charge of America’s food safety. The results have been immediate. The Senate Appropriations Committee has urged the FDA to finalize rules on the use of antibiotics in factory farming that poses a serious health threat. According to Food Democracy Now, “You’ll never guess on whose desk those urgent rules are gathering dust. That’s right, Michael Taylor.” Food Democracy Now is sponsoring a campaign to have the Obama administration give this Monsanto flack the heave-ho, and over 43,000 people have already done so. If you want to add your voice, visit: http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/419?akid=373.101853.jZg...DW&t=9
Most people think of beans as a benign part of the diet—and that they are, but not when they’re raw. Even when they’re organic.
A word of warning right up front: don’t nibble raw shell beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) while you’re shelling them out of their pods or otherwise preparing them for cooking. They contain glycosides that can produce hydrocyanic acid in the human digestive system, and there are cases of children dying from eating raw beans.
Just 10 minutes of cooking detoxifies them. Raw soybeans and favas don’t contain the glycosides, but have their share of other toxins. One more word of warning: it’s rare, but some people, mostly of Mediterranean descent, lack an enzyme to break down fava beans, and can have a serious reaction to them. If that’s your heritage, nibble a little fava before you launch into a plateful or have your doctor give you the test for favism.
To be on the safe side, boil shell beans for 10 minutes, then pour out the water and add fresh water. Return to a boil to finish cooking. And while sprouting makes beans’ starch and protein more digestible, raw sprouted beans—except mung beans--contain a substance that inhibits trypsin, a digestive enzyme. So sprouted seeds of green beans should be cooked, such as in a stir fry. A good general rule is to cook beans and avoid them raw.
The toxic compound, phytohaemagglutinin, is present in many varieties of common shell beans but is especially concentrated in red kidney beans. As its name suggests, it encourages the clumping of red blood cells together—otherwise known as blood clots. Clots can cause heart attacks and strokes, among other vessel-blocking problems. Phytohaemagglutinin can be deactivated by boiling beans for 10 minutes. However, for dry beans, the FDA recommends an initial soak of at least five hours in water; the soaking water should be discarded. The 10 minutes required to degrade the toxin is much shorter than the hours required to fully cook the beans themselves. However, lower cooking temperatures may have the paradoxical effect of potentiating the toxic effect of haemagglutinin. Beans cooked at 80 °C (176 °F) are reported to be up five times as toxic as raw beans. Outbreaks of poisoning have been associated with the use of slow cookers, whose low cooking temperatures may be unable to degrade the toxin. The primary symptoms of phytohaemagglutinin poisoning are nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Onset is from 1 to 3 hours after consumption of improperly prepared beans, and symptoms typically resolve within a few hours. Consumption of as few as four or five raw kidney beans may be sufficient to trigger symptoms. Beans are also high in purines, which are metabolized to uric acid. Uric acid is not itself considered a toxin, but it may promote the development of gout. For this reason, persons with gout are often advised to limit their consumption of beans.
The bottom line: don’t eat raw beans, period.
America is more polarized now than at any time in my lifetime, at least—probably since the reform movement between 1890 and 1910 and possibly since the Civil War. The culture clash comes down to this: On one hand stand the oligarchs, those richest 400 people you keep hearing about who own more than the next 150 million of us combined. Arrayed on the side of the oligarchs are big corporations, lobbyists, the Republican Party and many blue dog Democrats, conservatives of many stripes including the Tea Party, and all the henchmen and henchwomen paid to protect the ever-increasing wealth of the richest few, their power, their influence, and their perks.
On the other hand stand the humanists: those who believe that the job of government is to improve the health and welfare of all citizens under its jurisdiction, protect the environment, regulate business, increase equality, and promote beneficial and sustainable methods of production, such as organic farming.
Make no mistake—choosing to buy organic food is not only healthy and smart, it’s a political act. The culture wars here in America are real. Let’s look at a few aspects.
According to Jeffrey Smith, a consumer advocate and anti-GMO campaigner, Monsanto’s vice president and chief lobbyist has just been appointed by President Obama to become the senior advisor to the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. “He (Michael Taylor) is now America’s food safety czar,” Smith writes. “What have we done?” He points out that when Taylor was at the FDA in the early 1990s, he oversaw the policy that allowed Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rBGH/rBST) onto the market. Injected cows do produce more milk, but the milk, among other problems, contains more IGF-1, or insulin-like growth factor. “IGF-1 is a huge risk factor for many cancers,” he writes, “and a former Monsanto scientist told me that when three of his Monsanto colleagues evaluated rBGH safety and discovered the elevated levels of IGF-1, even they refused to drink any more milk unless it was organic and therefore untreated.”
Monsanto not only foisted rBGH on the public, but has tried to keep milk producers from stating that their milk contains no rBGH. Monsanto was pleased when Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff declared that labeling milk as rBGH-free was illegal and that all such labels should be removed from the state’s shelves. Outraged consumers stepped in to force Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell to reverse Wolff’s decision.
And where is Dennis Wolff now? The word is that President Obama is considering him for the top food safety post at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
And what was the bottom line for Monsanto in all this? Through Michael Taylor, the company got milk producers who state that their milk is rBGH free on the cartons to also state the disclaimer that according to the FDA, there is no difference between milk from rBGH free cows and injected cows. That fact that this is a lie and nonsensical (there are a lot of studies pointing to health problems from rBGH milk, which, incidentally, is banned in most of the developed world) doesn’t seem to matter. The fox is in charge of the hen house now. And we dumb clucks better watch out. How? By insisting on buying organic food, which is firmly planted on this side of the front line in the culture war. Why do you think that Big Agriculture has been fighting organics so hard and for so long? Why should Monsanto, Cargill, Dow Chemical, Archer-Daniels-Midland, and other giant ag conglomerates care whether some farmers and gardeners want to grow crops the natural, earth-friendly way?
It’s because we represent the enemy.
And the fight isn’t just in the United States. In India, the government made plans to set up the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) that would give approval for GMO foodstuffs to enter Indian agriculture. Under proposed legislation, the new BRAI would be based within the Ministry of Science and Technology—the body that has a mandate to promote GMO crops. Not only that, but the BRAI bill gives the new authority sweeping powers to override the Right to Information Act of 2005—a law akin to our Freedom of Information Act, which guarantees open, transparent government activity. Thus the questions of safety of GMO crops would all be decided out of public view. More foxes guarding more hen houses.
But the Indian government didn’t reckon with the people of India. Crowds of protestors unfurled a banner in front of Parliament reading, “Don’t Corrupt Our Food. Stop BRAI Bill.” Neha Saigal is a female Greenpeace activist who was dragged away from Parliament by police when she helped unfurl the banner. In a statement, she said that “BRAI is a plot by the government to circumvent the massive opposition seen against GMO crops in the country. Our government wants to give backdoor entry to potentially dangerous GMO crops…and the sad part is that the proposed system even fails to do independent safety assessments before approving GM crops.”
This time, the war isn’t being fought with guns, but with butter.
America has many regional specialty dinners—fried chicken down south, Kansas City barbecue, San Francisco cioppino—but perhaps none is as scrumptious as a true Down East clambake from the coast of Maine.
With overnight shipping, the Maine experience can be yours. Some of it will be wild caught, some organic, but all will be a very special treat for whomever you invite.
It won’t be cheap but it will be worth it.If you live where you can gather seaweed, you’ll need several wheelbarrow loads. You’ll also need burlap bags that have been soaked in water overnight. You’ll have to dig a fire pit. In Maine they dig it on the sandy beach. If you have hard, rocky soil, just dig a shallow pit. The pit should be 4x5 feet and a couple of feet deep, if you can manage that depth. And you’ll need a wheelbarrow full of stones about the size of baseballs or softballs, preferably flat.
If you live in Maine, your ingredients are at hand, but if you live elsewhere, several ingredients will have to be shipped in.
Beer is a good accompaniment for a clambake, but Chardonnay is also appropriate.
You’ll start dinner with a New England clam chowder. For this you will need some New England steamer clams, also known as soft-shell clams, long-necked clams, or piss clams—the latter name because when you dig them from the sandy mud banks of the tidal flats where they grow, your clamming tool compresses the mud and the clam responds by sending out a stream of water through its siphon. You can find dozens of recipes for New England clam chowder online, but I use the one in The Joy of Cooking and it’s excellent.
Dinner will also have big bowls of steamed clams—steamers of course. I’d recommend taking delivery of your steamers the day before your clambake, using some of them for chowder, reserving the clam broth, and refrigerating the rest. Discard any clams that are open or whose shells have broken, even if that’s a significant number. After making the chowder, refrigerate that, too, and warm it up gently before serving the next day.
Have some cheesecloth on hand, and butcher’s string, because you will be tying up bags of steamers for the bake. The main attraction will be lobsters. Have them arrive the day of the clambake, but make sure that UPS or Fedex guarantees delivery by a time that makes sense for you to serve them at dinnertime. You will kill the lobsters before the bake by bringing a large pot of water to a full boil and, holding the lobster head down by its body, plunging its head four inches or so into the boiling water until it relaxes (dies). This keeps the lobsters from clanking around under the burlap during the first stage of the bake. Both lobsters and clams can be ordered from www.simplylobsters.com, or one of the many other reputable lobster shippers on the coast of Maine.
You will have some kind of salad available, preferably American-style potato salad, and of course corn on the cob, cooked along with the clams and lobsters. Some people like their corn, clams, and lobsters dipped in butter, but things can get pretty buttery that way. Many aficionados keep some hot clam broth to swish the clams in to remove any sand. I use a little organic olive oil for the corn and the lobsters. Too much butter fills me up too fast.
Dessert should be the little, super-flavored, wild Maine blueberries, made into a pie according to your favorite blueberry pie recipe. My only recommendation is to pile the blueberries high in the pie shell. They are available from www.gmallenwildbluerries.com, and from several other sources. Make the pie a day in advance as you’ll have your hands full on clambake day, and top it with organic whipped cream.
To cook the corn, clams, and lobsters, build a three foot high rick out of very dry wood, with crumpled paper on the floor of the pit, slender sticks laid on the paper, and larger pieces on top. Set fire to the paper, and when the rick collapses, throw on larger pieces of wood so a hot fire that fills the pit is achieved. When the fire is most intense, toss in dry stones to cover the coals so the stones get red hot. When the stones are hot, about an hour exposed to the burning billets of wood underneath, toss on the seaweed, preferably rockweed. If you don’t have access to seaweed, lay two layers of wet burlap over the stones. Place the husked corn, bags of steamers, and fresh-killed lobsters on the seaweed or burlap, with the clams together in an area where you can retrieve them first. Cover the pit with another two or three layers of wet burlap and let it all cook for about 45 minutes to an hour.
Start the clambake with a cup of the good chowder, have salad available, then pull back the burlap and take out the bags of steamers and serve with hot clam broth. Replace the burlap. The clams should be open. Tell your guests to discard any that haven’t opened.
After the clams, serve the corn on the cob and the lobsters together. Read up on tomalley if you aren’t certain about what to do with the green goo inside the lobster’s carapace.
Finish the dinner with Maine blueberry pie.
Is there such a thing as organic junk food, or is all organic food good for you?
The answers are yes and no.
Yes, there is organic junk food. Once the idea of organic food caught on with the general public, food processors realized that there was a market for highly processed foods made from organic ingredients. The main food groups in junk food are sugar, fat, and salt. So they make sure the sugar is organic, the fat is organic, and the salt takes care of itself. Voila! Organic pizza.
Now that people are catching on to high fructose corn syrup, a substance that is the cheaper way to sweeten things and may contribute to a range of health issues, some companies are making soft drinks with real cane sugar. But a soft drink is still dyed, flavored sugar water, and an organic pizza is still a load of fat and salt. So, no, not all organic food is good for you if the food is junk food.
There are some good things to be said for organic junk food. The ingredients are grown or produced without the use of agricultural chemicals and that benefits the environment. And the junk foods aren’t loaded with chemicals that texturize, preserve, emulsify, color, or artificially flavor the food. That doesn’t mean a daily diet of organic pizza, organic soft drink, and organic cookies is good for you. It just means that it is not as bad for you as chemical-laden processed foods.
The real culprit here is the food processing industry. Go down the frozen food aisle of your supermarket and start looking at the ingredients of frozen, processed foods, especially those designed for kids. I once found a frozen dinner for kids that contained over 70 ingredients and only five of them were food.
Here’s what’s good for you: whole foods, just like the name of the supermarket: an apple, a head of broccoli, a pork chop, blueberries, asparagus; whole, fresh fruits and vegetables of all sorts, and some meat, milk, eggs, and cheese, but in moderation. Take a simple test. For one day, eat as you normally would. Make a list of everything you eat. At the end of the day, total up how many items were whole foods, like a salad, vegetables, fruits, eggs, and meat; how many minimally processed, like potato salad or a ham sandwich, and how many processed foods like ice cream, cookies, Triscuits, Count Chocula, and so on. If two-thirds of your daily intake is whole or minimally processed food, you are doing very well. Try to minimize the processed components. For instance, that Miracle Whip on your sandwich is processed food, the bread is minimally processed if whole grain, while the meat, tomato, and lettuce are whole foods. The sandwich thus gives you one mark for processed, a mark for minimally processed, and three marks for whole foods. You only have to do this for one day, and it’s important that you eat as you normally would. Don’t try to “win” by selecting more whole foods that day. The object is to see just how much of your diet is processed, minimally processed, or not processed at all. It’s in the processing that manufacturers pack their chemicals and it’s important to know what you are eating.
It goes without saying—but I’ll say it again anyway—that the best way to eat is 1) organic, 2) local, and 3) seasonal, and that the more of your diet that is unprocessed, the better. This goes double if you’re feeding children, for their growing, small bodies do not need the kind of biologically disruptive chemicals that food processers put into their wares.
Here are some tips for getting the most bang for your buck when buying organic chicken.
Buy skin-on, bone-in thighs and drumsticks. Even though you’ll discard the skin and bones (unless you add them to a pot of water with an onion, a carrot, a stalk of celery, and some peppercorns and boil this down to make chicken broth), you’ll still be ahead of paying the butcher to remove the skin and bones. Since chicken breasts are the most expensive cut, avoid them. If you think you like white meat better than dark meat, make a side by side taste comparison. You may find that dark meat has a richer flavor and a better texture.
When you get the chicken parts home, it’s very easy to slip the skin off the thighs and, using a boning knife, remove the large thigh bone. The legs are a little trickier, but nothing that you can’t do. Loosen the skin at the top of the drumstick, where it attached to the bird’s body, and pull it down as though you were undressing the drumstick, toward the foot end. The skin will be mighty slippery and the foot end of the drumstick won’t want to let it go easily. What I do is to wrap the loosened skin around my index finger, and holding the fat part of the drumstick with the other hand, pull the skin off the foot end. It usually comes without too much of a tussle.
Some people debone the leg meat, but I see no reason to do that. The leg bone makes a fine handle when eating the thing. I put the de-boned and skinless thighs and skinless legs in a bowl and pour on a good barbecue sauce. Then I take a length of aluminum foil and line a baking sheet with it, making sure the edges are turned up all around the foil. Then I lightly spray the foil with an organic, non-stick cooking spray like the canola oil spray from Trader Joe’s.
I pre-heat the oven to 300 or 350 F., depending on how much time I have until dinner. It will take about an hour and a half at 300 and 50 minutes to an hour at 350. Coat the pieces with the barbecue sauce and lay them out on the aluminum foil, open side (the side where you removed the bone) down for the thighs. It doesn’t make any difference which side of the drumsticks you put down. When they’re all laid out, take a tablespoon and ladle a tablespoonful of leftover barbecue sauce over the surface of each piece.
This makes a simple and very tasty meat portion of an evening meal. Leftovers go in the fridge for lunches and snacks. Clean up is a snap. Of course, there are many other ways to prepare legs and thighs, but this method is cost effective, and you are getting organic chicken.
I’ll run over the advantages of organic chicken: no hormones, no antibiotics, no chemicals that pacify them, no need to cruelly de-beak them because they are not crammed together in cages but have some room to grow on a floor or outside in a pen, where they are not prone to trying to kill each other. Some organic chicken producers use a moveable pen that they move to fresh grass each day, giving the birds a chance to really be birds and eat worms and grubs. This method results in the best-tasting eggs and meat. Look for label information that says they are raised on pasture. And look for air-chilled chicken. That means the carcasses of newly slaughtered birds aren’t cooled by dumping them into a communal bath of ice water, where birds infected with pathogens can spread their germs to other birds in the bath, but the carcasses are cooled instead by streams of cold air. Much healthier.
Maybe—or maybe not.
Several U.S. lawsuits are now challenging popular beauty and personal care products labeled as organic, because there’s a lack of stringent across-the-board certification in one of the fastest-growing segments of the cosmetics industry, a more than $10 billion business. According to The New York Times, “All One God Faith, the Californian company that does business as Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, filed suit in April in the San Francisco Superior Court, with the U.S. Organic Consumers Association as a party, against various competitors for making what it said were misleading organic labeling claims.
The suit alleged that products labeled as organic were actually made with ingredients derived from conventional agriculture or petrochemicals. The defendants included, among others, Nature's Gate, Kiss My Face, Avalon Organics and Care by Stella McCartney.” A lawsuit filed in late May by the California Attorney General's Office against five companies, including Whole Foods Market, alleged they were selling natural body care and household cleaning products that contained high levels of 1,4-dioxane - a chemical known to cause cancer in animals - while failing to warn consumers.
“We believe the USDA Organic Standards, which is a government regulated standard for organics, should be applied to cosmetics,” Craig Minowa, an environmental scientist at the Organic Consumers Association, told The Times. “Organic is organic, no matter whether you are talking about food, cosmetics, or cleaners. There should not be separate standards for different types of products. Either it's organic or it's not.”
Well said. Either it’s organic or its not. There are some cosmetic and body care companies that may not tout themselves as organic, but are makers of very pure and healthy products. Many of these are German, a country with exceptionally strong purity laws. Two of the finest are Weleda and Dr. Hauschka.
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Speaking of The New York Times, it published on July 2 an article by William Neuman on nitrites in processed meats under the headline, “In the Matter of Nitrites, The Label Can’t Always Be Trusted.” The article pointed out that while makers of organically-labeled processed meats, such as hot dogs and salami, do not add sodium nitrate or sodium nitrite to their products, they can add celery juice, which is naturally high in nitrites. Nitrites can bind with amino acids in meat to form nitrosamines, which are carcinogenic. Manufacturers of processed organic meats can then say “No Nitrites Added” on their labels. That doesn’t mean the meats contain no nitrite at all. “Nitrite is nitrite,” Marji McCullough of the American Cancer Society told The Times. But despite McCullough’s assertion, not all nitrite is created equal. Molecules have handedness, and nitrites from organic sources are built by the plants that make them in what chemists call left-handed structure. Sodium nitrite molecules made in a factory are about 50-50 left- and right-handed in the way they are structured. Our bodies, because they are natural living flesh, are built to deal with left-handed molecules. Celery juice and celery powder may provide some nitrites, but they are natural and may even be beneficial. Scientists studying the role of nitrites in human health have discovered that they benefit the healthy functioning of the cardiovascular and immune systems—at least when the nitrites are left-handed.
Some processed meat companies say the link between nitrites and cancer is an outdated concept, that processed meats are much safer than they were 40 years ago because the USDA has now limited the amount of nitrates and nitrites that can be used in making processed meats.
“What’s very clear,” Dr. Walter C. Willet of the Harvard School of Public Health told The Times’ reporter, “is that consuming processed meats is related to higher risk of diabetes, heart attacks, and colon cancer.” And those diseases are related to the high fat and salt content of processed meats, not the presence of nitrites, especially when the nitrites are in the form created by the celery plant.
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Here’s another big surprise from Big Ag. Last fall the Environmental Protection Agency approved DuPont’s new herbicide, Imprelis. DuPont claimed it was more environmentally friendly than other herbicides and sold lots of it to landscapers across the country who used it to keep broad-leaved weeds from growing in turf on lawns and golf courses.
The big surprise?
Norway spruce, white pines, willows, poplars, and other trees are dying where the herbicide has been applied. “This is going to be a large-scale problem, affecting hundreds of thousands of trees, if not more,” Dr. Bert Cregg, an extension specialist at Michigan State University, told The New York Times. Amy Frankmann of the Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association, said, “I’m very concerned. One member is looking at having to replace a thousand trees.”
That kind of cost could drive landscapers out of business. Will DuPont absorb some of the cost?
The company continues to sell the product, and in a June 17 letter to its landscaper customers, DuPont product official Michael McDermott seemed to blame the landscapers. They may not have mixed the herbicide properly or combined it with other herbicides, he suggested. He also suggested they leave the dying trees in the ground. They might come back.
A nationwide class action lawsuit has been filed against DuPont by the law firm of Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann, and Bernstein on behalf of landscapers and property owners who have suffered damage from the herbicide. “Imprelis has been widely adopted by landscapers and lawn-care specialists who believed DuPont’s claims that it is safe and an environmentally-friendly herbicide,” stated plaintiff’s counsel Jonathan Selbin. “Instead, the evidence is quickly piling up that Imprelis is attacking trees as if they are weeds.” Imprelis is not approved for use in New York or California. People in other states who feel they have been harmed should visit www.lieffcabraser.com/case/484 for instructions on how to join the suit and how to take and preserve photos, soil samples, and other evidence.
We Americans don’t realize what suckers we’re being played for. A huge amount of what we believe is propaganda shoveled to us by corporate America hiding behind pretty false fronts. If that sounds Orwellian, it is Orwellian. For instance, take the American Dietetic Association’s recent press release, distributed through its eatright.org mouthpiece, entitled, “Advising Consumers about Organic Foods and Healthful Eating.” Notice that people are not people, patients, clients, individuals, or anything else. They (we) are “consumers.” You would think that the American Dietetic Association would have the interests of Americans and their health at heart, wouldn’t you? After all, they are the people who certify dietitians, who are the people who plan meals for hospital patients, among others. Have you ever tasted hospital food? Exactly.
Let’s take a close look at that press release. It notes that while “organic” food (organic in quotes, as if implying something fishy is going on) is produced under the rules of the USDA’s National Organic Program, “NOP certification does not claim nutritional or food safety benefits for organic products.” It adds that “many conventional farms use environmentally and agriculturally sustainable practices commonly associated with organic practices.” This not-so-subtly implies that there may be no difference between conventional farms and organic farms.
A few sentences later, they tell us that “organic…foods are not necessarily healthy or sustainable, yet healthy food should be synonymous with both nutritious and sustainable.” Thanks, ADA, for pointing that out. We almost might have fallen for the organic industry’s tricks and deceits.
Further on, the release tells us that “reports of contamination by E. coli show higher levels in organic produce. Other studies have documented that using animal manure fertilizer in organic production…increases the risk of contamination of fresh produce with E. coli, Salmonella, and other enteric pathogens.” No mention of the fact that the National Organic Program expressly prohibits the use of fresh animal manure on cropland. And that all animal manures must be composted to kill all pathogenic organisms. And that study after study shows no statistically significant contamination on organic produce when the rules are followed.
To drive the point home that organic food is dangerous as hell, the release goes on: “It is important to note that many ingredients and methods (such as antimicrobial agents, preservatives, and irradiation) with demonstrated food safety benefit are not allowed in organic food production.” It adds, “both conventional and organic foods have been targets of food-borne illness outbreaks and recalls.”
But organic food IS more nutritious, right? This site has reported lots of studies showing organic superiority in the nutrition department. The dietitians will certainly recognize that, right? Here’s the press release: “Systematic reviews recently completed in the U.K. and France show few differences in nutrient content between organic and conventional produce. The small differences reported were not across all products and result from variations in mineral uptake from soils and fertilizers applied to soils.” Ah, and conventional farmers apply mineral fertilizers. Now I get it.
Well, how about milk—the most popular of all organic products? The release: “A study of milk quality among conventional and organic varieties showed no biologically significant differences in quality, nutrients, and hormones, although conventional milk had significantly lower bacterial counts.” Whoa, Nelly. Must change back to ordinary milk with its doses of recombinant Bovine Somatotropin (that’s also known as rBGH, a GMO hormone to stimulate cows into producing huge amounts of milk), which damages the cows, but what the heck—it’s not affecting humans, right? As it turns out, breast development at age 7 or 8 in girls isn’t so unusual these days. A new study, recently published in the journal Pediatrics, shows that American girls are maturing earlier and earlier. One possible reason is the presence of rBGH residues in milk. Its metabolites are dangerous, too, such as insulin-like growth factor #1 (IGF-1) implicated in breast cancer development.
Any other reasons to avoid organic milk? The release: “Organic milk production relies on greater farm acreage and less pesticide use than conventional production and inherently increases methane emission.” Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, like carbon dioxide on steroids. So global warming is increased by organic farming. I never would have guessed that, since organic farming sequesters tons and tons of carbon dioxide in the soil, rather than releasing it to the atmosphere. And why would methane emissions be greater from organic cows than conventional cows? Organic cows don’t eat no beans.
The bottom line, according to the press release? “The best method to differentiate (conventional and organic) products is the food label.”
How’s that for propaganda? People actually believe this stuff, but most of it is lies and half-truths. What got me interested in this press release is that I thought the American Dietetic Association was a legitimate organization, but then I followed a link to one of the ADA’s front organizations, where the financial backers of the ADA were listed. Who was there?
Coca Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Campbell’s Soup, Hershey’s Chocolates, ConAgra (the huge multinational Big Ag company), and so on down the list. Then I checked the ADA’s board of directors, and there was someone from Dannon Yogurt, and someone from ConAgra. So just today I went back to that link of financial backers to check my facts, and this is what I found: “Page no longer found.” They’d taken down the page. I’d be ashamed of my revenue sources, too, if my job was to promote healthy food and my backers were the junk food makers.
Just remember: you are being propagandized, not just by the ADA, but by smooth-talking, smiling, seemingly friendly and helpful front organizations across the corporate spectrum. As Bob Dylan wrote, “Look out, kids, they keep it all hid.”
The short answer is no. There are rules for what makes a product organic—a lot of rules. Wild food, although great fun to forage for, is not grown to organic standards. In fact, it grows itself in whatever ways it chooses at whatever sites it likes. That could be on top of a toxic waste dump.
Foraging wild food is having a revival right now. It’s been 35 or so years since Euell Gibbons wrote his entertaining and enthusiastic series of books about stalking the wild asparagus and other wild comestibles, so I guess it’s about time for a revival. Euell himself killed the last vogue when he made a TV ad showing him eating Grape Nuts and claiming that they “taste like wild hickory nuts.” Anyone who’s ever tasted a hickory nut knew right away that was nonsense and Euell lost his legitimacy then and there.
We, being organic-minded folks, may indulge in the wild food fad. I know I do, and have brought home everything from black trumpet mushrooms to rose hips for making tea. As concerned environmentalists, however, there are a few things to keep in mind when foraging.
First, think about our own health and the health of those who may eat our foraged foods. Only harvest food that you know is wholesome and safe to eat. My personal rule is, I’d feed it to my kids.
Don’t harvest in fields that may have been sprayed with toxic agricultural chemicals. Old abandoned fields, hedge rows, woods’ edges, and the like are probably going to be okay.
Don’t harvest plants that are endangered or close to being wiped out by overharvesting in your area.
If you find a stand of a wild food you’d like to harvest, just take what you need for that day’s use and use all you take. In other words, don’t harvest wholesale and destroy a viable stand of wild food.
For all the millions of years leading up to the dawn of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, our hominid ancestors foraged for wild food. A liking for it and a knack for finding it are undoubtedly hard-wired into our genetic code, for foraging ability was a key to survival. Enjoy it as a pastime because it combines diet and exercise in a particularly healthy way.
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Regular readers of this blog will know that the lid has been blown off Monsanto’s Round-Up herbicide. Turns out that Monsanto has known for 30 years that glyphosate, the herbicidal ingredient in Round-Up, causes birth defects, according to a group of scientists who have studied it. Trouble is, the information was never made public. Monsanto, over that time, has used genetic engineering techniques to produce “Round-Up Ready” crops—meaning they are resistant to the herbicidal effects of glyphosate, so farmers can use all the Round-Up they want. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has to approve GMOs (genetically modified organisms) before they can be used, and recently approved Round-Up Ready GMO alfalfa and sugar beets.
Now Monsanto has come up with Round-Up Ready GMO Kentucky Bluegrass. Bluegrass is not only a forage crop for horses. It’s also a common lawn turf grass, used around homes, homes that may have children, homes that may have young families with pregnant mothers. Surely the USDA wouldn’t allow this glyphosate-resistant GMO grass to be used around homes, would it? Aren’t Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture, and his boss, Barack Obama, supposed to be environmentalists? Doesn’t Michelle Obama have an organic garden on the White House lawn?
Well, oopsie! On July 1, the USDA “added Kentucky Bluegrass, a grass that is genetically engineered to tolerate applications of glyphosate, to the list (of allowed GMO plants),” according to the Organic Trade Association. So if glyphosate causes birth defects and Monsanto and the USDA are doing what they can to encourage its use in residential areas where people are conceiving and raising children, what would you call that?
Let’s start by listing some reasons why you would want to buy conventionally grown foods. One, you trust that conventional farmers wouldn’t sell produce that’s contaminated with poisons. But the bulk of commodity foods sold in this country are grown or raised using a slew of toxic chemicals. Huge corporate farms operate hand-in-hand with huge agricultural chemical companies that supply the toxics. The headlines recently have been full of the revelation that Monsanto has known for over 30 years that Round-Up herbicide causes birth defects and failed to tell the public. So it makes no sense to trust these corporate behemoths with your health. In fact, you already know what they care about the most: healthy profits for their shareholders and their own bottom lines.
Two, conventional food is cheaper. That idea is penny wise and pound foolish. You may pay less at the check-out counter, but you pay more personally in damage to your own health and socially in the depletion of natural resources (soil erosion) and damage to the environment (toxic chemicals in the ground water, disruption of ecosystems, development of antibiotic resistant bacteria due to routine use of antibiotics in meat and milk animals, disruptive hormones in those same animals, GMO crops that insert rogue genes into the environment, plus lots more).
Three, it’s convenient. Conventional food is found in abundance at your local supermarket. But for the sake of that convenience, are the costs to you and the environment really worth it?
Fourth, you just don’t care. That attitude is not only short-sighted, it’s stupid. Not caring will not only have no effect solving the problems of conventional agriculture, it will have negative effects on you and those you care about.
Now let’s look at some reasons why you would choose to buy organic food.
One, you are supporting farmers who are farming in a sustainable way; that is, organic farming improves the soil as it grows crops, so the land can be farmed in perpetuity without damage.
Two, you are supporting—in many instances—local farmers who are improving the environment for everyone living in the area by not spreading toxic chemicals. Toxin-free farms allow for protection of wild species and a stronger and more diverse natural ecosystem.
Three, you are protecting your health and the health of those you are responsible for feeding, as well as the health of farmers and farm workers.
Four, you are not spending your food dollars on produce from farmers who are fighting nature, but on produce from those who are working with nature, taking advantage of nature’s processes, lessening energy use from fossil fuels, recycling waste, and helping to green your community.
Five, you like the simple and natural approach to food production that organic farming represents.
Six, you are not supporting destructive, corporate Big Agriculture and all the depredations it causes.
Seven, the food tastes better and is often more nutritious.
Eating organic food is just common sense.
Isn’t this just the best time of the year? For so long, market fruits have been limited to apples from controlled atmosphere warehouses in Washington, bananas from Central and South America, and citrus from Florida, Texas, or California. Anything else had to cross the equator—too long a haul, too expensive, and unreliably organic. But now: Locally grown blueberries, apricots, peaches, nectarines, raspberries, blackberries, pluots, cherries, plums, and of course, strawberries.
As Sir Isaac Walton observed about strawberries, “Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless He never did.”
This bounty of summer fruits is only with us for a short time, so eat up. And if you have a freezer, freeze some for when the winter winds blow and the rain turns to snow. Don’t forget to make the best jam in the world, now that apricots are in the stores. Here’s the recipe:
APRICOT PRESERVES
Wait until the height of the apricot season, around the end of July, and when you find the most delicious apricots, make these preserves. It’s an out-of-this-world confection that’s perfect to spread on muffins, to glaze a ham, to use in a fruit tart, or to add a sweet tang to pork tenderloin.
4 lbs. fresh apricots
5 cups sugar
Juice of two lemons, strained
8 8-ounce canning jars with tops and bands
Pit the apricots and slice them into coarse pieces. Mix them with sugar in a bowl and let the mixture stand for an hour or overnight on the counter. This allows the juice to run and dissolve the sugar. Place a dinner plate in the fridge. Transfer the mixture to a large saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Stir it frequently to prevent sticking. Be careful not to let it foam up and over the sides. Skim the light foamy material that will rise. Reduce heat to medium and cook until it looks like preserves. Boil the jars, lids, and bands in water to cover them. Take the plate from the fridge and spoon a bit onto the plate to test consistency. When the consistency seems right, remove from heat, stir in the strained lemon juice, spoon the preserves into the jars, leaving ½-inch headroom, put on lids and bands and process according to the jar manufacturer’s instructions. This makes eight jars.
Okay—that’s the fun part of this blog. Now comes the REALLY fun part. It concerns strawberries. Nine scientists led by J.P. Reganold at Washington State University, recently published an open source article on PLoS ONE, an open access journal, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. So let me do that now. I’ve already credited Prof. Reganold. Here’s the citation:
Reganold, J.P., et al (2010) Fruit and Soil Quality of Organic and Conventional Strawberry Agrosystems. PLoS ONE 5(9): e12346. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012346.
Just paste that citation into your search engine and the study will come up. Lest anyone accuse these scientists of bias, their study was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, The National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, among others. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. To contact the scientists, email reganold@wsu.edu.
Strawberries are high on the list of “dirty dozen” foods most contaminated by toxic chemicals when they are grown conventionally. So this study is well worth reading. Here’s a verbatim synopsis from the study:
People often buy organic food because they believe organic farms produce more nutritious and better tasting food from healthier soils. Here we tested if there are significant differences in fruit and soil quality from 13 pairs of commercial and conventional strawberry agrosystems (farms) in California.
At multiple sampling times for two years, we evaluated three varieties of strawberries for mineral elements, shelf life, phytochemical (naturally occurring chemicals produced by plants) composition, and organoleptic (taste) properties. We also analyzed traditional soil properties and soil DNA using microarray technology.
We found that the organic farms had strawberries with longer shelf life, greater dry matter (meaning they had more substance), and higher antioxidant activity and concentrations of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and phenolic compounds (antioxidants that protect the body against cancer), but lower concentrations of phosphorus and potassium.
In one variety, sensory panels judged organic strawberries to be sweeter and have better flavor, overall acceptance, and appearance than their conventional counterparts. We also found the organically farmed soils to have more total carbon and nitrogen, greater microbial biomass and activity, and higher concentrations of micronutrients. Organically farmed soils also exhibited greater numbers of endemic genes and greater functional gene abundance and diversity for several biogeochemical processes, such as nitrogen fixation and pesticide degradation.
Our findings show that the organic strawberry farms produced higher quality fruit and that their higher quality soils might have greater microbial functional capability and resilience to stress.
Despite the propaganda from corporate agriculture, organic food really is more nutritious, tastes better, is far less likely to be contaminated with agricultural poisons, and builds the health of the earth where it’s farmed. These strawberry studies are one sweet example of that.
The short answer is: it depends. It depends on what you mean by “kill.” If you mean all life—plants and animals—then yes, we must kill to live. If you mean must we kill animals to live, then the answer is no, there are the vegan and ovo-lacto vegetarian options.
However, let’s get real. Like it or not, we are omnivorous. Most people aren’t going to stop eating meat. But in the future, they may stop eating so much meat. Meat production consumes an extraordinary amount of agricultural resources per pound of food consumed. Not only that, but the way we mass produce meat today is creating serious health problems. The routine use of antibiotics to prevent illness in cattle confined to filthy feed lots has created superbugs—bacteria resistant to antibiotics used for humans. The feeding of grain to cattle to fatten them up for slaughter has created deadly strains of E. coli, which we witnessed killing people recently in Germany when sprouts were contaminated by water that in turn was contaminated by runoff from cattle feeding pens. The digestive systems of cattle are made for grass, not grain. Grain may produce fat in the animals, but it also breeds bad bacteria in the last of the four chambers of their digestive systems.
But those are problems associated with conventional farming. Animals are a valuable part of an organic farm. Just as in nature’s wild ecosystems, where there is a mix of plants and animals, so there should be a mix of plants and animals in the organic agricultural ecosystem, whether on a farm, or even in a home garden. Fish in the ponds, lakes, and streams; chickens in the hen house; rabbits in their hutches; domesticated hogs, sheep, cattle, and goats—they all have a part to play on the organic farm. Their manure is recycled through the compost piles that provide the fertilizer for the fields. Unlike our pets, which we allow to live out their lives until they die and we bury them, we harvest the farm animals while they are most useful. When the egg production drops off, the hen becomes a fine chicken stew.
It’s important on an organic farm or in an organic garden that our animals are treated well when they are alive. That means they have a chance to live as nature intended, doing their jobs, fulfilling their ecological roles, and increasing the health of the whole system. Chickens can scratch up wireworms and Japanese beetle grubs from the soil, hogs can root out the nutsedge that’s invading the cornfield, cows can graze sweet grass and give sweet milk, goats can browse on the poison ivy and keep down the greenbriar. And when it comes time to harvest the domesticated animals, it must be done as humanely as possible.
The amount of edible meat produced on an organic farm will be less than a factory farm but may be an indication of how much meat should be in our diet. Less meat, but organically raised, clean and wholesome, and slaughtered by people trained to do it properly, is part of a very healthy diet.
People often ask me, “What foods should I make sure are organic?” What they are really saying is that they don’t want to eat only organic food because of the expense, but realize there are some foods that are more heavily sprayed with toxic agricultural chemicals and that they’d like to avoid them.
Well, okay. There are many lists calling themselves “The Dirty Dozen” most-sprayed crops, but here are 15 foods most of these lists agree on. It’s not just insecticides that dump conventional foods onto a list like this, but also the heavy use of fungicides, herbicides, antibiotics, hormones, and other disruptive chemicals. Some of these foods carry a load of many chemicals. Strawberries, for instance, can be treated with more than 50 agricultural chemicals. So here are the dirty 15. Read it and weep, because many of the most pleasurable foods we have are here:
• Peaches
• Apples
• Strawberries
• Grapes
• Cherries
• Nectarines
• Pears
• Red Raspberries
• Bell Peppers
• Celery
• Spinach and Leafy Greens
• Potatoes
• Tomatoes
• Milk
• Meat
My advice, though, is to eat organic food only, because even if a food is not on this list, that doesn’t mean it’s been grown without agricultural poisons. It may not be as loaded with toxics as these foods, but conventional agriculture means that chemicals are used to farm, even if it’s just the chemical fertilizers used to fertilize the fields. Any way you look at it, conventional agriculture is destructive of the natural ecosystems it affects; harmful to the animals it raises; dangerous for the farm workers, their families, and the farmers; uses up precious resources like topsoil, and is controlled by huge corporations that are interested chiefly in making money no matter what damage they do.
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In a recent blog, I told you about the dangers of the herbicide called Round-Up, and the frightening discoveries of Don Huber, a retired professor at Purdue. Since then, some new revelations have come to light concerning Round-Up. It turns out that chemical industry regulators have known for years that Round-Up causes birth defects, but have hidden that information from the public, according to a new report recently released by Earth Open Source.
The report was written by a group of scientists and academicians listed, along with the full report, at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/57277946/RoundupandBirthDefectsv5.
The report, “Round-Up and Birth Defects: Is the public being kept in the dark?” found that regulators knew as long ago as 1980 that glyphosate, the chemical on which Round-Up is based, can cause birth defects in laboratory animals.
But despite such warnings, and although the European Commission has known that glyphosate causes malformations since at least 2002, the information was not made public. Instead, regulators misled the public about glyphosate's safety. Although glyphosate was originally due to be reviewed in 2012, the Commission decided late last year to delay it until 2015. The chemical will not be reviewed under more stringent, up-to-date standards until 2030.
“Our examination of the evidence leads us to the conclusion that the current approval of glyphosate and Round-Up is deeply flawed and unreliable,” wrote the report’s authors. “What is more, we have learned from experts familiar with pesticide assessments and approvals that the case of glyphosate is not unusual.
“They say that the approvals of numerous pesticides rest on data and risk assessments that are just as scientifically flawed, if not more so,” the authors added. “This is all the more reason why the Commission must urgently review glyphosate and other pesticides according to the most rigorous and up-to-date standards.” The report recommends the removal of Round-Up from the market.
Researchers have also found that genetically-modified crops created to withstand Round-Up are being colonized by a pathogen that may cause animal miscarriages. Don Huber, professor emeritus at Purdue, wrote an open letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack requesting a moratorium on deregulating crops genetically altered to be immune to Round-Up.
Huber wrote, “It is well-documented that glyphosate promotes soil pathogens and is already implicated with the increase of more than 40 plant diseases; it dismantles plant defenses by chelating vital nutrients; and it reduces the bioavailability of nutrients in feed, which in turn can cause animal disorders.”
Scientists have a term for the bacteria that colonize your skin—commensals. A great majority of these aren’t disease-causing germs; they are health-promoting bacteria that perform needed tasks. They coat the body as part of the human biome—a term that means all the organisms that live on us or within us. You may wash yourself with soap and water, but there will still be about a million bacteria on every square centimeter of your body.
Dr. Julia A. Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute and her colleagues recently reported in the magazine called Genome Research that that they’ve discovered six different tribes of bacteria that inhabit each niche of the human ecosystem. Each tribe has a specific function to perform. For instance, one tribe inhabits the skin in the crook of the elbow, moisturizing the skin there by processing fats exuded by the skin.
Dr. Segre’s team is part of the Human Biome Project, an effort to catalog and describe the functions of the microorganisms that colonize at least 20 sites on the human body, and maybe many more. Interestingly, the composition of the bacterial colonies changes from site to site on the body and from person to person at the same site. That means that the colonies in the crook of your elbow differ from the colonies on your forearm, and while the same may be true for your friend across town, the tribal composition of your elbow crook will differ from the tribal composition of her elbow crook.
By far the majority of bacteria in the human biome live in the human intestine where they work to break food down into nutrients to be absorbed to feed the body, among many other functions. We’ve known for years that our physical bodies—our eyes, ears, muscles, and other tissues—are constructed from about 10 trillion cells, but that there are 100 trillion cells in the human intestines. So that means that nine out of every 10 cells in our bodies are gut bacteria. We’ve also known that the bacteria in the human biome have 100 times more genes than the 20,000 genes in the human genome.
Now researchers have discovered that gut bacteria fall into categories, too—three categories to be precise. These categories are called enterotypes, which means types of gut bacteria. They are differentiated by what they do and the enzymes that they produce. The enzymes are particularly important, because these catalytic substances aid in the dismantling of our foodstuffs and the creation of vitamins and other nutritionally important substances for us. Without them, we might become deficient in one or more of these important vitamins. So, the relationship between our body and its intestinal flora is symbiotic. We give them a place to live and food to work on, and they produce valuable nutritional substances that keep us healthy. The enterotypes share many functions, but are categorized into three types by how much of certain enzymes they produce:
Enterotype 1 produces more enzymes for making vitamin B7 (biotin), and includes high levels of bacteria called Bacteroides.
Enterotype 2 produces more enzymes for making vitamin B1 (thiamine), and includes high levels of bacteria called Prevotella.
Enterotype 3 produces more enzymes for making vitamin B12 (cobalamin), vitamin K, and includes high levels of bacteria called Lactobacillus acidophilus.
So what’s all this have to do with organic food? Well, we learn from the practice of organic gardening and farming that to feed our plants, we need to feed the soil microorganisms in the soil. And to feed ourselves properly, we need to feed the intestinal bacteria that perform the same function in our intestine that soil microorganisms do in a good organic soil. In fact, many of these microorganisms in intestine and soil are the same critters, doing the same work to enhance health. And what do these microorganisms like? The answer is fresh and raw organic matter uncontaminated by agricultural chemicals.
We also know that if a field—the skin of the earth—is plowed up and doused with herbicides and pesticides, the first creatures back are not beneficial plants and insects. The first creatures back are the opportunists that cause disease—rough weeds like green briar and plant-eating insects. It’s only when there are enough plants and bugs to eat them that the beneficial, insect-eating bugs can return.
Washing yourself with antibacterial or antiseptic soap destroys the colonies of beneficial bacteria on your skin. The surest way to smell bad is to use deodorants that wreak havoc on your skin bacteria, because the first organisms back are going to be those that feast on sweat and dead skin cells, creating body odor. When you take a course of antibiotics by mouth, you are dropping bombs on your intestinal flora. There may be reasons to disinfect your hands—if you’re a surgeon, for instance—and take antibiotics, such as when you have a nasty infection. But do it only when necessary, and then re-establish healthy skin and gut colonies by using gentle soap and eating organic food.
The bottom line: wash your body daily with plain soap, such as Dove. And if you must take antibiotics, eat plenty of fresh raw fruits and vegetables and take a probiotic that resupplies your intestine with gut bacteria, such as organic yogurt or acidophilus milk. Natural pharmacies also carry probiotics.
Think of your body as an organic farm for bacteria and other microorganisms and treat it that way.
Humus is what’s left over after soil organisms finish digesting the remains of plants. Its presence in the soil is an indication of the soil’s health. It is black, crumbly, and spongy. If you garden and add mulch and compost to your soil, you are increasing its eventual supply of humus, and building the health of the soil and the plants that grow in it. And humus is magical stuff.
Humus particles are very small—the size of small cracker crumbs. But if you had a piece of humus the size of a Volkswagen beetle, you’d see that its surface was not smooth, but the opposite of smooth. It would be entirely ridged, folded, with deep channels running into the interior. If fact, if you laid the surface of the particle out flat, it would cover an area the size of a football field.
This humus surface carries a negative electric charge, which gives humus one of its most beneficial properties for the gardener. It is the prime mover in what soil scientists call the Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) of a soil. Here’s how it works. You’ll remember from high school chemistry that when a soluble salt is dissolved in water, it becomes ionized. It comes apart, into positive ions (cations) and negative ions (anions). For an example, table salt (NaCl) becomes Na+ and Cl-. The cations are often metals like potassium, zinc, and magnesium. Or they are gases like hydrogen and nitrogen, or substances like phosphorus and carbon. All these cations and many others are needed by plants to build their tissues.
The Cation Exchange Capacity of a soil is a naturally-occurring system whereby these fertilizing elements reach a certain saturation in the moisture in the soil, and are held at that level. When a plant takes up a cation of potassium, for instance, the CEC takes another cation of potassium from storage and floats it into the soil moisture, keeping the saturation steady. And where are the cations stored? On the negatively charged surface of humus particles. Remember that humus particles have an enormous surface area for their size, and can store trillions of cations in a bucket of good, organic soil. Thus the CEC keeps the soil solution, as soil moisture is called, well stocked with all the elements plants need for healthy growth. And these elements are recycled in an organically-fertilized soil by the actively decaying organic matter of composted plant remains, stored on the surface of the humus produced from those plant remains, and held in just the right amounts in the soil solution by the CEC. The only thing an organic gardener or farmer has to do is to add compost to the soil on a regular basis. Nature has strong systems in place to do the rest.
Now consider what happens under conventional agriculture. Chemical fertilizers are composed of just three elements: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. These are in soluble form. There is no organic matter in a bag of chemical fertilizer, and thus no humus forms. The natural CEC is non-functional. Rains wash the soluble fertilizers into the ground water and the local aquifers. The nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilize ponds and lakes, causing eutrophication, the process by which a body of water becomes polluted with nutrients from chemical fertilizers, thereby encouraging the growth and decomposition of oxygen-depleting plant life like algae, and resulting in harm to other organisms—like the whole watery ecosystem from fish to fowl. Much of the expensive and fossil-fuel-based chemical fertilizers runs off without reaching the crops it’s intended for, causing great environmental damage.
But that’s not all. Humus is spongy and holds water—a great deal of water. Studies have shown that organically-managed soils can sail through periods of drought by relying on the water held by the spongy humus and decaying plant matter. Conventional crops have no such advantage.
Further, the application of chemical nitrogen turns off one of nature’s most beneficial soil systems—the ability of certain bacteria to take nitrogen from the air and convert it into organic fertilizer. These nitrogen-fixing bacteria do the job for free. But they are sensitive to the amount of nitrogen in the soil, and only make as much fertilizer as needed by the plants. When soluble chemical nitrogen fertilizers like ammonium nitrate are used, they flood the soil with nitrogen. The nitrogen-fixing bacteria say, in effect, “This soil doesn’t need any more nitrogen,” and they stop working. And once such bacteria turn themselves off, it’s off for good. And so a perfectly good, natural, free system of supplying plants with nitrogen is replaced in conventional agriculture by one that disengages the CEC, turns off the nitrogen-fixing bacteria, forces plants into quick, weak, unhealthy growth, and runs off to pollute the environment.
So why does Big Ag continue to do this? Because you can sell a bag of chemical fertilizer, while many of nature’s systems are free.
When most people think of farms and farmers, they think of a bucolic landscape with bright, sunny skies, fields of corn, and pastures of plenty. It’s a healthy place, full of life, hard work, and down-to-earth people.
That’s so 19th Century. Sure, there are still farms like that—in the Amish and Mennonite communities, and scattered here and there around the country. But for the most part, farms aren’t like that anymore. Small family farms were pretty much driven out of business by Big Ag in the 1970s. If you’re old enough, you may remember the suicides, heartbreak, and tractor assaults on state capitols by family farmers in those days as Big Ag drove them to ruin and then bought up their farms at fire sale prices.
Today’s factory farms are cut from the same bolt of cloth as Big Oil. We run our cars on fossil fuels, with all the rapaciousness that follows: “Drill, baby, drill,” Saudi funding of Islamist extremism, wars for oil, oil spills like the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico—one can go on and on.
Factory farms are based on fossil fuels and are just as rapacious in their own way. The toxic chemicals used to kill insects, weeds, and funguses; the petroleum used to make chemical fertilizers; the hazardous working conditions for farm workers, and the bottom-line demands of corporate agriculture all conspire against the environment. Soil erosion is rapidly depleting America’s fertile heartland. Toxic chemicals flow into the Mississippi River and create havoc with wildlife as contaminated water drains into the Gulf of Mexico. Factory farmed food is depleted of nutrients and full of toxic chemicals, antibiotics, and hormones, causing health problems for human beings.
Meanwhile, the world’s population is exploding and is estimated to reach 10 billion people within a few decades, if not sooner. They have to eat, and they will have to be fed.
But factory farming is not sustainable. The harder we farm the arable land in the world with factory techniques, the more we exacerbate the problems these techniques cause. We need to think about farming in a more sustainable way.
Enter organic farming. Rather than depleting the soil, organic farming actually improves the soil as it grows crops. That’s because crop wastes and cover crops grown in place as green manure are recycled, through the composting process and by disking cover crops into the soil, back to the land. This actively decaying organic matter causes an explosion of benign microorganisms in the soil, resulting in many tons of soil life in every organic acre. A soil rich in organic matter is far less prone to erosion than a depleted soil with hardly any spongy organic matter in it. Such a rich soil also holds water, making organic fields less vulnerable to drought. And the foods grown on organic farms are free of toxics, contain more nutrients, and tend to taste better. As for the bottom line, once soil has made the transition to organic, yields of major crops like corn, soybeans, and hay tend to be equal to or higher than the yields of factory farms.
Factory farming is just not going to be able to provide for the future needs of mankind without causing irreparable damage to the earth. Organic farming will provide, and will improve the earth as it does so.
Gardening season is here, and if you want an organic garden, you won’t need to buy a lot of expensive, toxic chemicals. But there are some items you’ll need to make your organic garden thrive, such as weed barrier cloth instead of herbicides; ways to deal with garden pests like gophers, deer, and rabbits, and perhaps beneficial insects to release.
There’s always Google or Bing, but a better way might be to visit www.OrganicControl.com. This long-time business, operating now for 35 years, covers the field, from beneficial insects to safe and organic insect controls, to products that repel garden-damaging animals, to mason bees that help pollinate your crops, to organic soil amendments, and much more. In addition, there’s a lot you can learn about organic gardening at their site.
Organic Control also has a Facebook page, where you can interact with the folks at the company, ask questions, and get answers. Check them out at www.Facebook.com/OrganicControl.
This company also sells products relating to organic hydroponic growing, a fast-growing field that supplies retailers like Whole Foods with organically-grown vegetables year around.
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On April 26th of this year, The New York Times carried an editorial entitled, “Hiding the Truth About Factory Farms.” It’s such an important topic that I’d like you to read what the Times had to say:
“A supermarket shopper buying hamburger, eggs, or milk has every reason, and every right, to wonder how they were produced. The answer, in industrial agriculture, is ‘behind closed doors,’ and that’s how the industry wants to keep it. In at least three states—Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota—legislation is moving ahead that would make undercover investigations of factory farms, especially filming and photography, a crime. The legislation has only one purpose: to hide factory farming conditions from a public that is beginning to think seriously about animal rights and the way food is produced.
“These bills share common features. Their definition of agriculture is overly broad; they include puppy mills, for instance. They treat undercover investigators and whistle-blowers as if they were ‘agro-terrorists,’ determined to harm livestock or damage facilities. They would criminalize reporting on crop production as well. And they are supported by the big guns of industrial agriculture: Monsanto, the Farm Bureau, the associations that represent pork producers, dairy farmers, and cattlemen, as well as poultry, soybean, and corn growers.
“Exposing the workings of the livestock industry has been an undercover activity since Upton Sinclair’s day. Nearly every major improvement in the welfare of agricultural animals, as well as some notable improvements in food safety, has come about because someone exposed the conditions in which they live and die. Factory farming confines animals in highly crowded, unnatural and often unsanitary conditions. We need to know more about what goes on behind those closed doors, not less.”
Great editorial. Good for The New York Times. And the editorial writer didn’t even mention that the Constitution expressly prohibits laws limiting freedom of the press. Laws criminalizing investigative journalism, whether words or pictures, are simply unconstitutional. Times food writer Mark Bittman, for whom I have a great deal of respect, addressed the same topic the day after the editorial appeared and wrote, “Minnesota’s ‘ag-gag’ law would seek to punish not only photographers and videographers, but those who distribute their work, which means organizations like the Humane Society of the United States and Mercy for Animals.” The law is so sweeping, says Nathan Runkle, executive director of Mercy for Animals, “that if you took a picture of a dog at a pet shop and texted it to someone, that could be a crime.”
Thirty years ago, when I was Director of Electronic Publishing at Rodale (I must have been one of the first directors of electronic publishing at any publishing house in the world), I wandered into the offices of The New Farm magazine, a Rodale publication about real-life organic farming. It had occurred to me that the cruel factory farming techniques used in the production of our meat, eggs, and milk animals was totally antithetical to the spirit of organic agriculture, and that one of the tenets of organic farming should be the humane treatment of farm animals. I suggested this to the editors—and they laughed at me. “You don’t understand farmers,” they said. “Farmers don’t care about babying their animals. They care about their bottom line.”
Well, now it’s 30 years later and the humane treatment of animals has been added to the tenets of organic farming--not because of me, but because of you, the consumers of organic meat, eggs, and milk who have demanded it. While unspeakable cruelties go on at conventional factory farms, organic farmers have become far less cynical in the past few decades and have made humane treatment of animals part of what it means to be organic. Because organic farmers take better care of their animals, we all become more human. Now do you see who’s behind the push to make it a crime to take pictures of factory farms?
There’s an old saying that you can tell the quality of a gardener by the quality of his or her melons. I make no claims for my quality as a gardener, but I have grown sweet melons successfully. Here’s what I’ve learned about how to do it.
Melons don’t like to be transplanted. They sulk and become garden laggards if you try. Wait until the soil is nice and warm—around the last week of May in most of the country—and plant them into hills spaced six feet apart in full sun. These hills are mounds, 18 inches in diameter, of native soil heavily enriched with compost, rotted manure, or other actively decaying organic matter. Plant three seeds in each hill and thin to the strongest two at about three weeks of growth. Melons like to wake up where they want to grow--in rich, well-drained soil kept constantly moist (but not sopping wet) in full sun. They tolerate no setbacks if they’re to make sweet melons. Continual good, strong growth is what you want.
Touch them as little as possible so you don’t spread wilts or fungus. Spray them after their first true leaves appear with a mixture of one tablespoon of baking soda dissolved in a gallon of warm water, and re-spray the leaves and stems after every rain. Wilts and fungus and white mildew on the leaves clog the plants’ plumbing system, and the leaves are the plants’ sugar factories. Clogged plumbing from the sugar factories means your melons will never get sweet.
Consider planting radishes six inches apart in every direction where the melons will grow. This will deter striped and spotted cucumber beetles.
If you still see greenish striped or spotted cucumber beetles on the flowers, suck them up with a cordless vacuum and dispose of them. Or cover the melons with floating row covers after you chase out the beetles—which works but may slow down ripening as the covers reduce sunlight. If you see squash bugs—grey, shield-shaped bugs—soak one pound of cheap tobacco (Bugler) in a gallon of water, and spray the tobacco tea where you see the bugs. Check the underside of the leaves where you see squash bugs for areas of tiny, amber-colored eggs and remove them. They are eggs of the squash bugs. Or make a mulch of heavy-duty aluminum foil and lay it down where the melons will grow just before you plant the hills. Place it so the reflective side is up. This repels many insects and bounces more light up into the leaves which can hasten ripening.
Spray the melon leaves every two weeks with fish emulsion and liquid seaweed, or compost tea. And pour some compost tea on the roots as well. This will encourage strong, steady growth.
Melons often look like they’re wilting in the hot mid-summer sun, but check them at dusk. They should have straightened up again by then. If they stay wilted, you may have stem borers. Check the stems near the hills and look for little holes about a quarter of an inch in diameter. Take a sharp knife and slice open the stem for a few inches outward away from the roots and toward the shoot’s tip and look for a small worm. Dispose of the worm, close the slice up and wrap the stem with a Band-Aid or piece of masking tape.
The melons want lots of nutrition, lots of sun, and lots of water—until the growing fruits are about three to four inches in diameter. Then reduce watering but don’t let the roots dry out. The reduced watering helps the melons sweeten up.
If all this seems like a lot of work, remember that you will be able to harvest your melons when they are truly ripe. Melons in the store are picked early, before they develop full sugar, in order to ship well. You, on the other hand, will pick your melons when they slip easily from the vine and are packed with sweet flavor. This means that if you give them a slight tug, they come off their parent vine easily. There are some melons that don’t slip. In that case, look at the leaves nearest to the fruits. If they are yellowing, the melon is most likely ripe.
Which melons to grow? There are hundreds of kinds. I prefer the little French ‘Charentais’. Look for heirloom varieties in the heirloom catalogs, such as Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Just google around. You’ll find them. In the southeast, or wherever summer humidity is high and mildews and wilts are a problem, consider planting some resistant varieties like ‘Sugar Queen’, ‘Sweetie”, and ‘Savor’.
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In other news:
For 50 years, Dr. Don Huber has been a scientist studying plant diseases in the U.S. and around the world. He spent 35 years at Purdue University as Professor of Plant Pathology. He also has a 41-year military career (he’s now a retired colonel) evaluating natural and manmade biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks. He coordinates the “Emergent Diseases and Pathogens Committee” as part of the USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System under Homeland Security.
Food Democracy Now, a progressive group formed to warn people of dangers to our food supply by corporate agriculture, recently interviewed Dr. Huber about a newly emergent threat caused by Monsanto’s “Round-Up Ready®” genetically altered seeds. You can view video of the interview and learn more here:
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/371?akid=314.101853.Hahbxu&t=7
Here’s what Food Democracy Now has to say about this threat:
“Round-Up Ready® seeds are genetically engineered to be resistant to Monsanto’s top selling weed killer Round-Up, which is made up of Glyphosate and a trademarked formula of component chemicals. In 2007, more than 185 million pounds of Glyphosate were sprayed on America's soils and crops and that amount has only continued to rise as more weeds develop resistance to Glyphosate.
“A growing body of scientific evidence has shown that the overuse of Round-Up and Glyphosate has created severe micronutrient deficiencies in the soil and plants causing an epidemic of diseases, such as Goss's Wilt on Round-Up Ready® corn and Sudden Death Syndrome in Round-Up Ready® soybeans.
“Recently a team of top U.S. scientists discovered an organism associated with this rise in plant diseases in Round-Up Ready® corn and soybeans which form the foundation for animal livestock feed in the U.S. The organism is observable only by an electron microscope, and was previously unknown to science.
“This new organism, along with nutritional deficiencies in the Round-Up Ready ® GMO corn and soybean feed, has been associated with a sharp rise in animal infertility including a 20 percent failure to conceive rate among cattle and hogs and up to a 45 percent rate of spontaneous abortions within cattle and dairy operations.
“In response to the published and emerging science, Dr. Huber wrote a letter to Secretary Vilsack asking him to delay his decision to approve Round-Up Ready® alfalfa expressing his grave concerns about the long-term implications of more Round-Up Ready® crops on the market.”
Vilsack and the Obama administration’s response was to give Monsanto the go-ahead to distribute and plant Round-Up Ready ® corn, soybean, and alfalfa seeds. This decision is a disaster for organic farmers, for once the rogue genes in the GMO seeds are grown out and their pollen is blown by the wind, non-GMO corn, soybeans, and alfalfa can become contaminated with the GMO genes, after which they will no longer be able to be labeled organic. Monsanto has shown a willingness to then sue farmers who inadvertently grew GMO contaminated crops for patent infringement.
In the video, Dr. Huber explains that Round-Up reduces a plant’s ability to withstand disease. The new organism, evidently as-yet-unnamed, is exceedingly small, ubiquitous in the environment, and finds easy pickings on plants genetically altered to withstand Monsanto’s weed killer. According to Dr. Huber, these damaged plants make poor fodder for farm animals. I’ll keep you posted as I learn more.
Although the word “natural” has no legal meaning the way “organic” does, it is often thought of as a synonym for “organic.” After all, when something is organically grown or raised, it’s as natural as it can be. But natural also has a wider meaning. Something that’s natural is of, by, or from nature itself, or herself as we say colloquially. And so, as folks who want to live as organically, sustainably, and cleanly as we can, we should ask ourselves the profound question, “What is nature?”
As we look around us, we might say nature is the way things are, the way things work, in places untrammeled by mankind. Or, to include mankind in the definition, we might say that nature is the inherent spirit of this world—and maybe of all worlds. But nature acts very differently from the world we experience when we look at very small things, on atomic scales and smaller.
In the past century, theoretical physicists have shown us that in the very miniscule world of atomic particles, there is a whole set of physical rules that seem strangely counter-intuitive on the large scale where we live and work. Or, at least, our large scale physical rules emerge from this quantum world, as it is called, by a process of averaging an almost infinite number of probabilities into near certainty.
For instance, flip a coin once and you’ll have a 50-50 chance of it turning up heads or tails. But because the sides don’t weigh exactly the same, or there’s a deformity in one side or another, or there’s an unconscious bias in the way you flip it, by flipping the coin 50 million times, it’s a near certainty that one side or the other will come up much more frequently.
But there’s another, more intriguing aspect to the quantum world: the uncertainty principle. This rule holds that we can know the speed or the position of a quantum object like an electron, but there’s no way to know both at once. The act of observation collapses a nebulous wave of mere probabilities into a definite actuality, but only for speed or position, never both at once. On our large-scale level—where we live--we can measure where an automobile is at any moment and how fast it’s traveling. Why not an electron or a photon?
Because on the quantum level, things don’t act the way we think they should. The very act of looking at a photon or electron makes it act like a particle. If we don’t look, it acts like a wave. Well, is it a particle or a wave, which are two very different things? The answer is, it depends whether you’re looking at it or not.
Physicists have grappled with this concept, creating scientific experiments to see whether this duality is indeed a physical reality, not just a mental concept. And yes, it is true. Quantum phenomena are really just wave-like collections of probabilities until we observe their positions, when they then become particles.
This means that when you turn off the lights in the living room and go to bed, the living room ceases to be a definite place of floor, rugs, chairs, lamps, walls, windows, and flat screen TV, and becomes a soup of probabilities whose future cannot be predicted with absolute certainty. Come downstairs, flip on the light, and there’s your certainty—the room takes shape as you remember it because you are observing it.
In other words, our consciousness creates certainty out of probability. In a sense, we create the world we inhabit as we move through it.
This is not as outlandish as it may first seem. It was Albert Einstein who first described space and time as a continuum—that is, as a space-time matrix of these two qualities of experience forever interlinked, as two facets of the same reality.
The future is all probability, isn’t it? You may think you know how the future will turn out with more or less certainty, but it really is all probability. It’s extremely probable that the sun will come up tomorrow morning but far less probable which horse will finish first in the eighth race at Belmont, and nearly impossible to predict what the last three numbers of the U.S. Treasury balance will be on a given Wednesday afternoon.
If the future is all just a soup of probabilities, then the past is a fixed history of certainty. We can say for certain that the sun came up this morning, that Bide-A-Wee won the eighth race at Belmont, and that 623 were the last three numbers of the Treasury balance at accounting’s closing last Wednesday.
What’s the difference? What has changed? How has guesswork changed into certainty? The answer, of course, is that time flowed over the critical point of the present and has been observed by our consciousness. Unless someone looked to see who won the race or what the Treasury’s final numbers were, they would remain uncertain—just probabilities.
Thus our consciousness plays a critical role in turning probabilities into certainties. The world of the future is all potential. The world of the past is all actual. Consciousness in the present moment is the agent that turns one into the other. This is what the theoretical physicists who deal in quantum mechanics have been saying mathematically for close to a century. But it’s a commonsense notion.
In truth, probabilities and uncertainties are only potentials and you can’t pin them down with absolute certainty. The past, on the other hand, is just our way of historically reporting actualities that have already come into being.
There is only the present, has always been only the present, and always will be only the present. Thus the present moment—the only place where we live and dwell—is a very sacred place, involved in turning the potential of the universe into actuality.
So the question becomes: what are we creating with this godlike gift we have of bringing possibility to certainty? If we create the world with our every glance and action, what world are we creating?
Women have a special role to play, because they bring life to the world. But men and women, by their choices in the present moment, literally bring the world to life. With every choice of organic food and green living, we are bringing a better, stronger, more natural world into being.
For further reading and viewing in this area:
See Prof. Richard Feynman deliver a series of filmed lectures on “The Character of Physical Law” by visiting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk&feature=related
Books:
Biocentrism, by Robert Lanza, MD; Benbella Books Inc., 2009.
Quantum Man--Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, by Lawrence M. Krauss; W.W. Norton & Co., 2011.
Many of us no longer eat bacon the way we once did—that is, as often as possible. Yes, it’s yummy, but it also contains a lot of salt and lard and we’re trying to cut down on salty, fatty foods.
But that doesn’t mean we must never eat bacon. Life is for living, after all, and a couple of strips on special days—holiday mornings or your birthday, for instance, or a BLT for lunch once every few months--won’t kill you. It was a wise person who first said, “Moderation in all things, including moderation.”
Which brings us to the once-a-year organic feast. At our house, we have this feast on the first day of spring. For us, it’s the perfect time for a celebration. The bitter winter is dead (if not entirely gone), the sun is waxing warm, you can smell the earth again, the crocuses and snowdrops are up and blooming, the does are fat with their developing fawns, the sap is running sweet in the sugar maple trees, the wild onions are sending up the first green spears of the new year, and life is returning to the world.
And so, we indulge. But we do it with organic ingredients because our indulgences are enough without having them carry a load of man-made toxins into our bodies. We plan a dinner that we would never ordinarily eat, and that yet was a staple Sunday dinner for many families half a century ago. It remains primarily a treat for the taste buds rather than a source of healthful nutrition for the body. It revels in fat. For this one dinner each year, we eschew the good and go for the gusto.
It starts with roast beef—a three-rib, loin-end “prime rib,” from an organically raised, grass-fed animal. I put “prime rib” in quotes because today the term generally means a certain cut of meat rather than USDA Prime beef. USDA Prime grade means it’s fattened on grains at the end of its life, which renders the meat well marbled with fat and therefore very tender. While tenderness is a plus, there’s a big downside to grain-finished beef. The digestive system of cattle is not designed for grains. It is designed for grass. The presence of masticated grains can allow the growth of illness-causing bacteria, including harmful strains of E. coli, in the cattle’s gut. It’s best to seek out a three-rib, grass-fed, organically-grown roast, which will naturally be USDA Grade Choice. Ask the butcher to remove the chine bone, and to tie it back in place when he ties up the roast. If the chine were still attached to the ribs, you couldn’t separate them with a knife after the cooking is done. But you want it tied back as it protects the heart of the meaty center of the roast from becoming well done during cooking. Then when you go to carve, you can simply remove it.
When buying a three-rib roast, ask for the smaller, loin end of the full seven-rib standing rib roast. This three-ribber will weigh about seven pounds. It’s the tenderer cut. Figure a roasting time for medium-rare of 18 minutes per pound, approximately two hours for a seven-pound roast. You’ll calculate the exact roasting time depending on the exact weight. Or, if you’re using a thermometer, plunge the tip into the thickest part of the meat and take it from the oven when the interior reaches 135 to 140 F. for medium-rare.
Take the meat out of the fridge about two hours or so before you plan to put it in the oven. Since roasting will take two hours or so and you’ll also let the roast rest after you take it out of the oven, that means you’ll take the roast from the fridge about five hours before you want dinner to hit the table.
Before dealing with the roast, think about whatever salads or vegetables you’ll want with this feast. Plan ahead so they are ready when dinner is served. My go-to feasting vegetable is creamed spinach. Have good bread, butter and/or olive oil ready for dinnertime, too. But back to the roast:
There will be a concave surface of bone and a convex surface of meat covered with fat. Trim the fat, if necessary, to no more than a quarter inch thick, and retain the trimmed fat. Mash a few cloves of garlic through a garlic press and rub the roast with the mashed garlic all over its surface. Then sprinkle on some kosher salt on the fat side and grind a little fresh black pepper on, too, then pat them in with your hand. Place the roast fat side up on a roasting pan. A two-piece pan with a slotted top is ideal. You’ll want to catch all the clear fat as well as the dark pan drippings.
Pre-heat the oven to 550 F. and place the roast on a rack set in the oven’s middle position. Close the oven door and immediately turn the heat down to 350 F.
Take any trimmed fat that you set aside and render it in a small frying pan over medium heat until the fat melts and runs clear. Remove any solids, squeezing out the liquid fat into the pan. Set the pan aside. Rub the inside of a 9x12 Pyrex baking dish with a thin coating of butter over its bottom and sides. Pour a cup of all-purpose flour into the baking dish and swirl it around until all the butter is dusted with flour, then pour out the excess flour. Set the baking dish aside, away from heat.
Prepare a batter, for you are going to make Yorkshire pudding! In a bowl, sift together ¾ cup plus two tablespoons of all-purpose organic flour and ½ teaspoon of kosher salt. Make a well in the center of the flour and pour in ½ cup whole, organic milk and stir it in thoroughly. In a separate bowl, beat two large organic eggs until they are well mixed, then beat the eggs into the batter. Add a half cup of spring water and beat it into the batter until large bubbles rise. Set the batter aside.
When the roast is done, take it out of the oven and transfer it to a serving platter. Cover it loosely with a sheet of aluminum foil and set the roast in a warm place. Immediately turn the oven up to 400 F. Pour the clear fat from the roasting pan into the baking dish and add the rendered clear fat from the frying pan, too. Place the baking dish back into the oven on the middle rack. Let the rack and fat heat up for about 5-7 minutes until they are as hot as the oven. Pull out the rack and pour the Yorkshire pudding batter into the baking dish, then immediately push in the rack and close the door. Bake for 20 minutes, then turn the heat down to 350 F. and bake for 10-15 minutes more.
While the pudding bakes, you can scrape up the browned bits from the roasting pan and, using beef stock or just water, make gravy. Make a roux of butter and flour and use it to thicken the gravy. Have the gravy ready for those who want it on their beef or, if you are making mashed potatoes, to fill the wells in the potatoes. Personally, I find that the pudding is enough starch—but that’s just me. I love beef gravy on my mashed potatoes, too, and as long as we’re feasting, what the heck.
When the pudding is done, it will be more like wet pudding on the bottom of the baking dish and more like crusty popovers where it’s risen up the sides. Cut it into four-inch-wide pieces that include some of each texture and serve immediately with the roast beef, which you’ll carve at the table. Look for an old-fashioned electric knife at yard sales—they make carving slices off a roast beef into a snap. Otherwise, sharpen your carving knife to razor sharpness and use a carving fork to steady the meat. When the meat is all sliced, the ribs can be carved into separate ribs and given to those who like to gnaw meat off the bones cave man style. I’m raising my hand right now.
As long as we’re having a full-fat feast, a dessert of fresh fruit with a scoop of vanilla ice cream topped with whipped cream is always welcome. Just make sure it’s all organic. The dinner may offer an overload of calories, but at least it’s all food.
Ever notice how the news channels on TV preface every story with a shout about “Breaking News” or “News Update?” Well, we here at Organic Central can do the same thing. Here’s a sampling of newsy tidbits that have accumulated on our desk.
BREAKING NEWS! Going Au Naturel, Maryanne Osberg’s food blog, lists her picks for the 30 top organic food blogs, and includes Organic Food Guy among them. That’s big news here at Organic Central, so we’ll lead off with that. You can visit her site at
http://rntomsnonline.com/going-au-naturel-the-top-30-organic-food-blogs.
NEWS UPDATE! As you are undoubtedly aware, Congress recently passed a 2011 budget that cut $38 billion from Federal programs. Some of those cuts affected organic agriculture. The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service (ATTRA) was eliminated in an earlier bill and was not restored in the final agreement. Congress dealt a significant blow to funding for conservation programs, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). Cuts to conservation programs totaled $500 million. Congress cut or eliminated other important programs that benefit organic farmers, and wouldn’t you know it: Programs that serve organic and sustainable farmers were disproportionately targeted in the cuts to agriculture. Why would that be? Because when people buy conventional food, Big Ag has more dollars to give to the hordes of lobbyists who wine and dine and patronize the legislators who make the budget cuts. Who you gonna cut—Cargill or the organic farmers who have little clout on Capitol Hill?
EXTRA! Organic farming can remove 7,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it in one acre of farmland, according to research at The Rodale Institute. Researchers estimate that if all 434 million acres of cropland in the U.S. were farmed organically, they would sequester enough carbon dioxide to be the equivalent of eliminating global warming gases from 217 million cars—more than a third of all the cars in the world.
WUXTRY! WUXTRY! READ ALL ABOUT IT! “Wuxtry?” Yes, in cartoons way back in the day, the cartoonists would always show street corner newsboys hollering wuxtry instead of extra. When newspaper competition was keenest, in the 1930s and 1940s, papers would put out an extra edition when some important story was breaking, and send boys out on street corners to sell the extras to passersby. So, pretend I’m a street corner newsboy. Here’s your Extra:
“Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears.” So says the headline in the April 7, 2011, The New York Times. The story, by Elisabeth Rosenthal, details how, in the second half of 2010, the price of corn rose 73 percent in the U.S. China is now using cassava, Europe is using rapeseed, sugar cane is being used in Brazil—all to create biofuels. Prices are being driven skyward and people in low income situations around the world are threatened with being priced out of the food market. To these problems I’d add the effect that farming for biofuels has on the land, with the destruction of organic matter in the soil, the use of chemicals for fertilizer and weed and pest controls, agricultural runoff that damages waterways, and soil erosion from all the plowing.
LATEST NEWS! The FDA has confirmed that 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States go to animal agriculture. Conventional meat, milk, and poultry operations use enormous amounts of antibiotics to prevent the animals from getting sick from the filthy conditions in which they are raised. The result is that the antibiotics kill off the susceptible pathogens—except for the few that are resistant. These multiply and become the drug-resistant superbugs we see everywhere today.
Every year, more than 90,000 Americans die from infections by bacteria that have developed a resistance to antibiotics. That number exceeds the death toll from AIDS, car accidents, and prostate cancer combined. The Natural Resources Defense Council reports that “the scientific consensus is that non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock animals is a serious threat to public health.”
Of course, the total amount of antibiotics used on organic animals is ZERO. If an organically-raised animal gets sick and needs antibiotics for treatment, that animal is removed from the organic program for such time as it takes for it to recover and all antibiotics are metabolized out of the animal’s system. When you eat organic meat or eggs, or drink organic milk, you are helping to end the routine use of antibiotics in the nation’s food supply.
About a decade ago, one of the members of the Garden Writer’s Association of America (GWA) came up with a good idea. We all know there’s hunger in America—something there shouldn’t be in this fruitful land. What food is given to food banks tends to be canned. So the garden writer suggested that the members of the Association encourage their readers or listeners or viewers, as the case may be, to plant a row for the hungry.
When setting out the vegetable garden, it doesn’t take much to plant an extra row of a vegetable. If you are going to plant six tomato plants for your own use, plant a seventh and deliver its bounty to the local food bank. Fresh tomatoes will be much appreciated.
Not every vegetable is suitable. Loose leaf lettuce, for instance, is so perishable that by the time it got to the needy, it would be limp, if not spoiled. But root crops like carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, radishes, and celery root will hold up just fine and be even more appreciated, because they are packed with good nutrition.
Asian greens of all types, chard, kale, broccoli, asparagus, European head cabbages, collards, and mature spinach plants with the roots intact will all last just fine in the trip to the food bank and from there to those in need.
Summer and winter squashes are perfect choices for that extra row. Just plant the bush types rather than the squashes that produce long runners and you’ll conserve a heap of space in your garden.
And what will be more appreciated by those in need than summer-ripe, sweet melons. Imagine bringing a basket full of orange- and green-fleshed melons to the food bank.
The point is that you don’t have to plant all these vegetables yourself. Pick one, and when you put in your garden, plant a row for the hungry. You’ll feel satisfied if you do.
There’s no denying that raw milk can be a source of deadly listeria bacteria and other diseases that can affect humans—if the cows that produce the milk and the conditions in the milking barn aren’t properly cared for. So for those of us who would like to drink raw, organic milk, it behooves us to know our dairy. The dairyman or dairywoman will be able to go over their procedures for maintaining the milk’s safety and the certifications they get from their health department.
In a grand case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the FDA some years ago planned to ban the importation of cheese made from raw milk, usually from Europe. Since cheese connoisseurs know that raw milk cheeses are the best and most flavorful, there was such an outcry against the FDA’s proposed rule that the agency relented and raw milk cheeses are still available in our markets today.
But what about raw, fresh milk? Why is it important that it be raw and organic? First, let me ask you—have you ever tasted fresh raw milk, still warm from the cow? If you have, you know how the flavor is miles ahead of milk that’s been pasteurized. There’s something fundamentally “milky” about it, in a way that pasteurization destroys. The heat of the pasteurizing process—especially milk and cream that is Ultra-Pasteurized--eliminates factors that give raw milk its true character.
If the milk is produced organically—that is, the cows are given fresh pasture or dried hay or silage that’s never been treated with chemicals, the cows themselves are never given routine antibiotics or milk-stimulating hormones or other chemicals, and the dairy is scrupulously clean, then, according to a study from the UK, organic milk, compared with regular commercial milk, shows higher levels of unsaturated fatty acids, including omega-3s and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) that is thought to have heart healthy benefits and anticancer properties. Researchers at Newcastle University in northern England report these results in a recent issue of the Journal of Dairy Science.
By switching to organic milk, consumers could increase their intake of beneficial CLA by 40 percent, depending on their intake of milk and milk products like cheese, the report says.
By refusing to administer milk-producing hormones to their dairy cows, organic farmers have far healthier and contented herds. Yes, contented. Modern commercial dairies often give cows hormones that result in weak animals that struggle to carry bloated and distended udders that produce up to twice as much milk per cow as untreated animals.
And now the USDA has agreed to allow Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa seed into American farmland with no restrictions, meaning that alfalfa pollen carrying the genetic modifications could blow onto organic fields, where organic alfalfa could become contaminated. Alfalfa hay is one of the chief foods fed to dairy cows during their confinement to barns in the winter months. How long before the USDA shuts down an organic farm because its alfalfa or corn contains genetic modifications, disqualifying it for organic certification? With this terrible decision by the Obama administration’s agriculture department, Monsanto kills two birds with one stone. It spreads its patented GMO seeds at will, forcing farmers to buy it or be hit with lawsuits for patent violations (this is already happening), and may just drive some organic farmers out of business.
The answer to these depredations is to find raw, organic milk from certified safe dairies.
Sometimes the word organic doesn’t just mean the USDA rules for growing crops and raising animals. It can have a broader sense of being close to nature and the ways human beings have been dealing with meat animals since the dawn of agriculture. When I was 14, I was privileged to see an example of this.
The little village where I grew up was just a few houses and businesses in Pennsylvania farm country. Our neighbor was a dairy farmer with 125 acres and 35 milking cows. Next to his farm, on a hilltop about a mile from my home, was the Neihardt farm, a mixed farm operation.
One cold November day, I was visiting my school chum Joe Bailey at his house in the village. Joe’s older brother Carl was there, and said he’d be working a hog butchering at the Neihardt farm the next day, and I could come if I wanted. I said sure, and the next morning early, Carl drove by my house to pick me up.
The cold morning sky was dull gray. The air had that scent of coming snow. When we pulled into Neihardt’s lane that ran back to the farm, we could already hear the pigs squealing and screaming as the farmer shot three of them, one by one, with bullets to the brain. Then the Neihardt sons, two young men in their late teens or early twenties, carried the fresh-killed pigs to the flatbed trailer attached to the tractor. They drove the carcasses to a large shed and backed the trailer into it. Carl said he was going to help with the butchering, and I should ask Mrs. Neihardt how I could help. I said okay, but first watched the men stick the pigs’ back legs with meat hooks attached to chains and use the tractor’s winch to haul the pigs upwards until the carcasses hung head down. They scrubbed the carcasses with big brushes and a hose, then placed large metal pans under the heads and cut the pigs’ throats. Blood drained from the pigs into the pans. “The women use the blood to make blood sausage,” Carl said, and sent me off to find Mrs. Neihardt, who’d find something for me to do.
“You can render the lard and make the cracklin’s,” she said, and showed me to a spot between the house and barns where a wood fire had been built on the ground and a large cast iron pot hung from a crossbar above the fire. She set up a metal table and on it set a long wooden stick, a long-handled sieve, and a circular press about 10 inches in diameter with a spout at the bottom.
“One of the men will strip the fat off the hogs,” she said, “and bring it to you. Toss it into the pot.” She pointed to a wooden stick. “Stir the fat with the stick and don’t let the stick touch the ground. Keep it clean. Keep the fire going with wood from that pile over there. After a bit, you’ll see liquid fat—that’s lard—run free in the pot. When you get about eight inches or so of free-run fat in the bottom of the pot, come get me and I’ll show you how to make the cracklin’s. And don’t let the fire die down too much. Keep the fire hot but not hot enough to make the lard bubble or smoke. It’s an important job, so mind it well.”
The warmth of the fire felt good. It was going to snow for sure. After a while, one of the men who were butchering the hogs brought over a wooden box filled with scraps of fat. “Here ya go,” he said, and dumped the fat into the iron pot. I stirred it around with the stick, and soon the pieces were sizzling and liquid lard was running in the bottom of the pot. It smelled clean and meaty.
After three boxes had been emptied into the pot and I had stoked the fire, I went to get Mrs. Neihardt and found her in the farmhouse kitchen along with three other women who were preparing something. “I think there’s enough fat in the pot now,” I said. She wiped her hands on her apron, picked up a fabric potholder and some paper plates, and came with me to the pot.
“Now set the press so the spout is over the pot,” she said and showed me where to place it. She took up the long-handled sieve and scooped the fried fat rinds from the pot and placed them in the press, almost to the top. Then she put in the follower, held the press down with the potholder in her right hand, and with her left, pressed down on the lever attached to the follower. Liquid fat poured from the spout and landed in the pot. “Press it good and hard,” she said. “Get as much fat out as you can.”
After pressing, she put the table back away from the fire, lifted the lever so the follower came free, turned the press over and slammed it on the top paper plate. Out came a cake of cracklin’s, a little shy of 10 inches in diameter and about two and half inches thick. She broke off a piece of the cake and handed it to me. “Try that,” she said, and popped another piece in her mouth. It tasted like the pot smelled, clean and sweet, like very fine bacon, with a hint of woodsmoke about it from the fire. “That’s wonderful,” I said. She looked pleased. “Now render more fat and make the cracklin’s. When you make a pressing, bring me the cracklin’s on one of those paper plates, like I showed ya.” And she bustled off, back to the kitchen.
I could see the men bringing metal buckets and meat wrapped in butcher paper into the kitchen. I was curious about the butchering and walked up to the shed where the men were working. One of the pigs was lying sideways on a big bench, being disassembled by two men working with long, bloody knives. I went back to the pot and continued to render lard. As I made my first press of cracklin’s, snowflakes started to drift down from the sky. As they landed in the pot, they hissed as the hot fat turned them into steam. I knew it was going to snow, I said to myself, pleased that I had called it, and that the snowflakes were hissing in the pot. It was a pretty scene, even if the ground was muddy and there was lots of blood in the butchering shed.
By the time I made my second cake of cracklin’s, Mrs. Neihardt came over with a card table and something wrapped in white paper. She put the paper on my little metal stand and set up the card table. “I brought you some sausage,” she said, and went back to the house. I unwrapped the paper, and there was a lump of fresh-made sausage about the size of a lemon. It smelled wonderful and I could see spices, seeds, and black pepper in it. Two hours or so ago and this sausage was running around in that pig pen over there, I thought, pulling off a piece and putting in my mouth.
To this day, I have never tasted anything quite like it. It was made from scraps and bits of leftover pig, but it was incredibly fresh, juicy, meaty, spicy, and loaded with sweet pork flavor. It was and still is, my benchmark for sausage.
I saw Mrs. Neihardt coming back, carrying a stack of metal pans, a folded cloth, and a long-handled scoop. “Now we make the lard,” she said, setting up the pans on the card table. She showed me how to scoop up the liquid fat and how high to fill the pans. “When you get all the pans filled, cover them with the cloth,” she said, looking up at the sky. “It’s going to snow harder and I don’t want water on the lard.”
I did as I was showed how, nibbling at the sausage, eating the piece of cracklin’s I’d saved for myself, listening to the pork sizzle and the snowflakes hiss, smelling the wood smoke, and feeling happy, contented, and warm, even if my toes were freezing cold. I had the sense that a farm scene like this had been going on for a really long time. I knew that day I was lucky to be part of it and to eat fresh sausage and cracklin’s.
If that wasn’t organic, I don’t know what is.
A cartoon in a recent New Yorker hit the nail on the head. It showed a guy standing at a crossroads by a directional sign. One direction was labeled, “Fountain of Youth.” The other direction was labeled, “Fountain of Bacon.”
Yes, it’s true: we all love bacon, yet we seldom indulge if we are trying to eat a healthy diet. It’s the food we hate to love.
Oh yeah, there’s organic turkey bacon. Those strips—low-fat, high protein, good-for-you goodness—are baconesque at best. They are to real bacon what decaf is to espresso. They may be called turkey bacon, they may be organic, they may be okay for a faux BLT, but they are not bacon.
***
Bacon is inimitable. For years I tried to make hash brown potatoes as good as my sainted mother’s, but always failed. Until one day, remembering the empty frozen orange juice can my mom always kept in the fridge, and how it always had bacon grease in it, I tried frying two or three strips of bacon in the skillet, removing the meat after the grease was rendered into the pan, and frying the potatoes and onions in that grease to which I added a pat or two of butter. And then crumbling the bacon and adding the bacon bits back at the end. And there—voila!—were mom’s hash browns, the pinnacle of potato pleasure.
***
Bacon has power. When I lived in Pennsylvania, I had a dog named Ben—a big, brindle mutt with a sweet disposition. One day he didn’t come home, so I set out to look for him, and eventually found him near a neighbor’s farmhouse. I opened my truck door and yelled for him to get in. He hesitated but finally jumped in. The next day he took off and again I found him at the farmer’s house. The farmer came out and we had a talk. He said that he liked to ride his horse over his fields, but the groundhogs dug deep holes that could break a horse’s ankle if it stepped in one. Ben had been going to his fields and having fun by catching groundhogs and shaking them by the neck until dead—and in fact, had cleared two of his fields of groundhogs entirely. So the farmer admitted he wanted Ben to stay around and kill groundhogs. So he fed Ben bacon. And Ben stayed. Now, you know how loyal dogs are. I loved that dog. But I never fed him bacon.
It was humiliating to realize that my dog had dumped me—for bacon!
***
Is it worth buying organic bacon? I mean, we aren’t going to eat much bacon (if we’re wise), so why not buy the commercial stuff for those rare times when we convince ourselves that although we should do and consume all things in moderation, that includes moderation itself?
The answer is a definite yes—which you probably already figured out I’d say, me being the Organic Food Guy. But there are good reasons for buying organic bacon. First, the hogs that provide the raw material for bacon are raised in environmentally sound ways. If you’ve ever been to a commercial hog raising farm, you will know what I’m talking about. It’s not that pig manure is in and of itself terribly rank, but tons and tons of it decaying in slurry ponds and concrete tanks is indeed rank and foul. Not only that, but the hogs themselves are subject to that stench and cleanliness isn’t always a high priority on big commercial hog operations. Cleanliness is, however, a big deal to the pigs, which are clean animals, despite their reputation. Organic hogs are raised in humane ways, without drugs, antibiotics, hormones, or other “improvements” on Mother Nature.
***
The best bacon I ever had was purchased from a local Pennsylvania Dutch farm family. I’d walk up to their back door with a fist full of dollars and the lady of the house would walk with me to their smokehouse out back. It was round, about eight feet in diameter and eight feet tall, built of stone by itinerant Irish laborers in the last part of the 19th Century, and had a clapboard roof and a large iron door with cast iron hinges riveted onto it. Inside, a hickory wood fire smoldered—not enough heat to cook the bacon, but plenty of smoke to flavor it. Slabs of bacon hung from meathooks suspended on a cross bar above the smoky fire, which was built under a metal box on the concrete floor. The lady took down a slab and, back on the porch, pulled out a scale and weighed it. She took her money and wrapped the bacon in brown butcher paper.
Modern commercial bacon is weak stuff compared to that lady’s bacon. It was substantial in texture, with a flavor to match. She may not have been certified organic, but I saw where her hogs lived—in clean quarters, with access to a field for rooting when the weather cooperated. She was the spirit of organic farming incarnated, and if I had some of her bacon today, and could share it with you, I bet you’d agree.
The Obama administration really blew it when it approved unrestricted production and use of Monsanto’s “Round-Up Ready” alfalfa and soybean seeds. These seeds are genetically engineered to resist the fatal effects on plants of Monsanto’s Round-Up herbicide. The effects of the administration’s decision are insidious in several ways.
First, despite pleas from the organic community, the USDA made no requirement that Monsanto—or DuPont or Syngenta, the other big players in the field of genetically modified organisms (GMO)—label foods made from GMO plants so that consumers can avoid them if they wish. And no wonder--many polls show that if consumers knew that their foods contained GMOs, they would refuse to buy them. And yet, nearly half the seeds sold in the United States contain genetically modified material. And 87 percent of GMO foodstuffs is grown from Monsanto’s seeds. And some estimates are that 70 percent of our food supply contains GMOs.
Second, because Round-Up Ready crops don’t succumb to glyphosate, the herbicidal ingredient in Round-Up, farmers are encouraged to control weeds by spraying more acreage more often with the herbicide. And is Monsanto’s weed killer safe? Well, Round-Up is 41 percent glyphosate 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, plus other undisclosed ingredients. Japanese physicians investigating 56 cases of Round-Up poisoning found that POEA is three times more lethal than glyphosate, which in itself is a poisonous chemical, according to the British medical journal Lancet.
Third, any pollen that drifts from GMO corn, soybean, or alfalfa fields onto adjacent or nearby organic farms can pollinate the same organic crops. As you know, GMOs are not allowed in organic food, and so the contaminated organic acreage would lose its certification and put the organic farmers out of the business of selling organic food. GMO alfalfa, grown in fields liberally doused with Round-Up, is cattle food—meat and milk. Now organic farmers have no way to keep the contaminants away from their crops.
Fourth, Monsanto and the others carry patents on their GMO crops. Any farmer who saves patented seeds to plant next season infringes on the corporate patents. Monsanto alone pays a staff of 75 people to spend millions of dollars to investigate and prosecute farmers—close to 3,000 in 20 states—for patent infringement. From the beginning of agriculture 10,000 years ago, farmers have saved crop seeds and selected strains with sought-after qualities. That’s how progress in agriculture is made. Well, you can kiss all that goodbye if Monsanto owns the patent on your seeds.
Fifth, the concentration of control over our food supply is rapidly moving into the hands of some of the most rapacious and environmentally unfriendly corporate behemoths in the world. According to some recently misguided—or intentionally contrived—Supreme Court decisions (see Citizens United), corporations are now considered persons. Big biz loves to point out its personhood when it serves its ends. But if an actual person—a human being—grabbed oligarchic or monopoly control of the nation’s food supply, poisoned its fields and people, and tinkered with the control panel of life so it could sell more poison, that person would be prosecuted. So if Monsanto claims the rights of personhood, it should also be held accountable for the responsibilities of personhood. Hello Justice Department?
There are even more reasons why the Obama administration’s decision to allow Monsanto free rein in America’s farm fields was wrong. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and President Obama himself should be ashamed of this sell-out position. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama is trying to grow an organic garden on the White House property and working to improve the diets of America’s kids. Looks like the Obamas are working at cross purposes here.
The world’s standard of quality for chickens is for birds raised in Bresse, France. Bresse chickens—the name both of the town in the Alps-Rhone Department where they are grown and the name of the breed of chicken—have been given their own appellation--a particular place where they must come from. And they must be of the Bresse breed. They get to eat the best chicken feed and mash and they must have room enough to walk around the countryside. All this is regulated by French law.
Bresse chickens are highly valued for their deep flavor and tender meat. About 1.2 million are raised annually, but such is the demand inside France that few birds make it out of the country. Poulet de Bresse currently sells for 17 euros ($23.36) for each kilo of weight.
An American variety, the Blue Foot or Poulet Bleu, was developed from French stock in the 1980s in Canada and is raised along similar lines in California. It has become equally highly prized—and highly priced. It’s not the same breed as a Bresse, but some experts consider it just as good, or almost as good. These chickens, like their French counterparts, have red combs, white feathers, and blue feet, the colors of the French flag and the stars and stripes as well.
In addition, most growers raise blue foot chickens organically—all organic feed; access to free range, sunlight, and fresh water; no antibiotics, no growth hormones, no cages, no chemicals of any sort. Because the feed is organic and contains all the nutrients that feed is capable of containing, these chickens get optimum nutrition. This translates into optimum flavor in healthy birds.
Because the birds are not raised in cramped conditions, where they are often at the mercy of aggressive cage partners and fed with growth hormones inflating them to harvest size in six weeks, their meat doesn’t contain the stress metabolites that make for soft, boggy, badly-flavored meat. These are chickens allowed to operate as chickens, not factory outputs.
American Blue Foot chickens, like Bresse birds, are allowed to grow bigger than factory birds, usually slaughtered at 14 weeks, yielding birds between 3.5 and 4.0 pounds. At slaughter, they are not dipped into a communal ice water bath, a practice that can spread disease from one infected carcass to all dipped in the water. Rather, they are air-chilled with a blast of clean, cold air.
Most organic chickens sold in the U.S. are not blue foots—and that’s okay. They may be smaller with somewhat less flavor, but they are still a far cut above what’s available from factory chicken farms. If you are interested in the blue foot bird, google Blue Foot Chickens for Sale and you’ll find a list of online suppliers.
Our honeybees have had a tough time of it lately. First it was an outbreak of mites that attack and kill honeybees, causing immense damage to hives nationwide. Then Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) started showing up. Bees would fly off to work the flowering fields and never return.
It was hard to pinpoint the cause of CCD. Some thought that it was caused by a pesticide marketed by Bayer, the German chemical company. But just recently scientists have found that it is almost certainly caused by a combination of two non-lethal funguses that, when they get together, can be fatal to honeybees.
So, is the answer pesticides that kill the mites and fungicides that kill the funguses? No, says The Oregon Garden, an 80-acre botanical showcase and teaching facility in Silverton, Oregon, 45 miles south of Portland. The answer is to make life easier for the bees.
In the summer, certain worker bees are detailed to the hive entrances to beat their wings so that hot air build-up inside the hives is exhausted. But workers at The Oregon Garden attached little solar devices that operate fans that cool its four new hives when temperatures go above a pre-set limit. And this has made all the difference. The worker bees that used to stay at home to cool the hives are now free to go off and collect nectar and pollen. Hives only a year old are notoriously poor honey producers, but the four year-old solar-cooled hives at The Oregon Garden yielded 300 pounds of honey in their first year.
The cooler hives suppress hive mites and the fresh, circulating air keeps down any fungus that might contribute to CCD. The solution to several problems was a simple one: augment nature’s own system, rather than trying to defeat it. This is always the organic way. And when it works, it tends to solve a number of problems at once without creating new ones.
***
Have you seen those ads on TV featuring a woman shopping and complaining about “food taxes, even on bottled water”? The ad is placed by Americans Against Food Taxes, and claims that the government is trying to manipulate your food choices by using its power to tax. The group’s website says that it’s a “coalition of concerned citizens, responsible individuals, financially strapped families, and small and large businesses in communities across the country.”
Uh, have you ever heard anyone complain about food taxes, especially on soda, juice drinks, and flavored milks? No, neither have I. So I checked in with SourceWatch (www.sourcewatch.org), an organization that takes the lid off advocacy campaigns, to see who is behind Americans Against Food Taxes. It sure smelled like an Astroturf organization to me (a group claiming to represent a groundswell movement of citizens, but is really a front for big corporations trying to twist public opinion in its desired direction).
Here’s SourceWatch: “Its extensive membership consists mainly of lobbying groups for packaged food and soda companies, chain restaurant corporations, and the world’s large food and soft drink manufacturers and distributors, including the Coca-Cola Company, Dr. Pepper-Royal Crown Bottling Co., PepsiCo, Canada Dry Bottling Company of New York, the Can Manufacturers Institute, 7-Eleven Convenience Stores, and...” Well, you get the idea.
Goddard Claussen Public Relations in Washington, D.C., mounted the campaign for the beverage industry. Its website boasts that “Fortune magazine branded us as ‘the go-to guys in issue advocacy.’” So the next time you see that woman complaining about the government using taxes to help reduce the consumption of obesity-causing soft drinks, know that you’re watching a cleverly hidden campaign by the beverage corporations to protect themselves from paying taxes and insuring that Americans keep downing those sugary soft drinks.
The go-to guys call it issue advocacy, but it’s really propaganda for a destructive hidden agenda.
What do you think is the most popular garden plant in the world? Tomatoes? Hot peppers? Potatoes? No—it’s none of those. In fact, it isn’t even a food plant. It’s the rose.
But there’s been a long-standing problem with roses. Many of the most beautiful need lots of fertilizer, fungus sprays, pesticides, and other agricultural chemicals to thrive. Among the most chemically-drenched are roses sold as cut flowers in supermarkets and grocery stores around the country. Who wants to eat organic only to have the table set with toxic flowers?
So along came the horticultural scientists at Texas A&M and asked themselves a simple question: What if we planted hundreds of kinds of roses out in a field, with just a handful of compost for fertilizer and a little organic mulch to cover the soil, and abandoned them? No further fertilizer. No water. No pesticides. No fungicides. Nothing. Just let them fend for themselves. Which would die and which would struggle and which would thrive?
So they did this, and sure enough, after a few years, they found that there was a group of roses that didn’t need agricultural chemicals, irrigation in Texas’s blistering hot climate, or anything else. They just grew fine and dandy, thank you.
Some were new hybrids and some were actually old favorites that had been around for decades. They examined these champions and discovered that many shared some unusual characteristics, such as changes in the fatty acid content of the cuticle layer of their leaves and other adaptations that allowed them to flourish where other roses succumbed.
So they named these no-maintenance plants Earth-Kind ® roses. And they put up a website where gardeners who love roses but hate chemicals and hard work can identify them.
It’s at http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/earthkind/roses/cultivars/.
If you intend on growing roses, you might want to check this site before choosing varieties, thus avoiding the need for toxic chemicals. If the topic is of serious interest to you, consider buying a copy of “The Sustainable Rose Garden,” a book-sized collection of 32 articles by leading rose lovers and scientists about the new class of low-work landscape roses, edited by Pat Shanley, Peter Kukielski, and Gene Waering and published in 2010 by Newbury Books. It’s technical but accessible to amateur rose lovers, too, and it’s a fascinating read.
So—smell your roses without fear, use a few petals in your salads, make an organic potpourri using Earth-Kind ® roses and other no-work cultivars you’ll find in the Newbury book.
You can raise a pig with plenty of fresh air and sunshine, a pen for it to root in, nothing but wholesome food to eat, and make that pig as organic as a pig can be. And when it’s butchered, you can hang slabs of its fatty belly in a real smokehouse and cure it with salt and hickory smoke, not chemicals, until it’s a heady, smoky treasure of fragrant bacon.
The trouble with it is that it’s still bacon—about 80 percent lard—and still delivers a load of hard fat to your arteries, even though it’s organic. In other words, even though foods are organic, that doesn’t mean they are good for you.
I don’t deny myself much when it comes to food. I love organic gelato and there’s a pint of Coppa Mista in my freezer right now. When I indulge—every few days—I eat only a tablespoonful or two. That small amount isn’t going to hurt me, and because I eat so little of it, I savor every taste much more than if I’d spoon it into my mouth in quantity.
Bacon is another infrequent treat, and I use it like a flavoring agent or condiment, rather than in quantity. For instance, if I’m making hash brown potatoes, I start by frying two strips in the pan until the fat is rendered. Then I remove the strips and fry onions in the bacon fat. When the onions are cooked clear, I remove them to a bowl and add the diced, par-boiled potatoes to the pan. These are fried slowly at low heat over an hour or so. When they are done, I crumble one slice of bacon and add it and the onions, plus salt and fresh-ground black pepper, to the potatoes and continue cooking until everything is finished.
The other strip of bacon goes into the dog’s dinner bowl along with dry food. A dog will never roam far from home if it knows that from time to time, bacon may be coming in its dinner.
There are many dietary items that make life worth living but that can be injurious in quantity, even if organic: wine, butter, pepperoni pizza, and much more. Here’s a guideline for healthy eating that allows just about anything in your diet: make 50 percent of your diet fresh, raw vegetables. Twenty five percent cooked vegetables. Fifteen percent meat, fowl, or fish. Five percent wine or other beverage, and five percent anything else you like, including bacon.
The news isn’t good. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has authorized the unrestricted planting of genetically modified alfalfa, brushing aside a compromise with the organic farming and activist community that would have at least relegated GMO alfalfa to certain places where their rogue genes couldn’t contaminate organic alfalfa, which is fed to cattle that produce organic meat and milk.
The problem is that Monsanto’s “Round-Up Ready” alfalfa contains genes from outside the alfalfa genome that allow the crop to grow in the presence of the herbicide. Organic farmers, scientists, anjd environmental activists had worked long and hard to prevent this GMO alfalfa from being planted widely. If the genes for herbicide-resistance migrate to organic alfalfa fields, then those fields, their crops, and the animals that eat those crops can no longer be considered organic.
But Monsanto put on a huge and fierce—and costly—lobbying effort and the Obama administration caved. Of course, Republicans were in the forefront of the pressure on Vilsack. “Restrictions based on economic consequences of pollen drift politicize the regulatory process,” Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK) wrote to Vilsack in a letter also signed by Reps. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Pat Roberts (R-KS). Talk about politicizing the regulatory process!
In a monumental burst of hypocrisy, Vilsack told reporters after the decision to allow unrestricted planting of GMO alfalfa that “We want to expand and preserve choice for farmers. We think the decision reached today is a reflection of our commitment to choice and trust.”
Who does he think he’s kidding? The Secretary’s decision represents a total capitulation to Big Ag and nothing else, and sets a horrible precedent for future decisions regulating GMO crops.
I know it’s tempting. It’s around noon. You are on the run. You have little time for a sit-down lunch. You’re hungry. And there, rising all around you at the strip malls are the Golden Arches, BK Crowns, and smirking images of Colonel Sanders.
Forget it. Go buy an organic apple.
Case in point: consider the chicken McNugget. Besides the old joke about, “What part of the chicken is the nugget?” it turns out that a given McNugget is one half chicken meat and one half…what?
Here’s what a recent issue of Time magazine had to say:
“Do you put dimethylpolysiloxane, an anti-foaming agent made of one, in your chicken dishes? How about tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), a chemical preservative so deadly just five grams can kill you? These are just two of the ingredients in a McDonald's Chicken McNugget. Only 50 percent of a McNugget is actually chicken. The other half includes corn derivatives, sugars, leavening agents and completely synthetic ingredients. Federal Judge Robert Sweet wrote in a lawsuit against the restaurant chain in 2003: ‘Chicken McNuggets, rather than being merely chicken fried in a pan, are a McFrankenstein creation of various elements not utilized by the home cook.’ Judge Sweet ‘questioned whether customers understood the risks of eating McDonald's chicken over regular chicken.’”
Now a new study by University of Toronto researchers shows that perfluoroalkyls, which are used in fast food wrappers to keep grease from leaking through, are being ingested by people and showing up as contaminants in their blood.
According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, perfluoralkyls, including perfluooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluoroctanesulfonate (PFOS) are also found in drinking water, dust, air, carpet and fabric protectors, flame retardants, non-stick pots and pans, and stain-proof clothing. They show up in umbilical cord blood and breast milk, meaning they pass the placental barrier into fetuses.
Studies have linked perfluoroalkyls of over a dozen types to disruption of the endocrine system and sex hormones, damage to the pituitary gland, tumor development, infertility, thyroid disease, cancer, immune system problems, increased levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol in the blood.
The answer to fast food dangers is to eat a healthy diet of organic foods. Then you will get none of these chemicals and their toxic side effects.
You can buy high quality, organic canned pet food these days, but it’s expensive and not as high quality as pet food you can make yourself.
Look for sales on ingredients like stew meat and chicken livers, fish filets and shrimp. When you spot a good price, buy up enough to make several month’s supply for your pet.
Make a firm distinction between dog food and cat food. Dogs can tolerate and even thrive on some grains and vegetables. Cats need primarily meat and fish. Let’s look at their diets separately.
For dogs, think stews. Use organic ingredients, because animals have no more need of toxic agricultural chemicals and artificial processing agents than we do. Use whole foods whenever possible.
I make a stew of stew meat, dredged in whole wheat flour and browned in beef fat, plus vegetables like potatoes, kale, collards, carrots, winter squash, and a little onion, and grains like rice, barley, and oatmeal. Add water so the stew makes some gravy, but no wine or bouillon cubes. I cook the stew just as I would an Irish stew for our human dinner table. When the stew is finished, and cooled, I add brewer’s yeast, a little cod liver oil, bone meal, and chopped bone marrow from an organic beef shank. Make the proportions about half meat and half vegetables, grains, and supplements, and you’ll have fine, nutritious food for your dog. If you are a vegetarian and want to feed your dog that way, then the animal’s nutrition is up to you. I think dogs need meat. There are some foods that are absolutely toxic to your dog. They include chocolate, chicken and turkey skin, macadamia nuts, milk and milk-based products, grapes, raisins. It’s fine to treat your dog with a bone, but not one that splinters, like chicken bones or lamb shanks. Ask your butcher for a raw bone for a dog.
When the stew is finished, place a day’s worth of food in as many freezer bags as you need, and freeze them. The day’s amount will vary with the size of your dog, and will contain a morning and an evening serving. To determine how much, ask your vet what’s appropriate for your dog’s size and weight. Each evening before bed, take a bag from the freezer and place it in the fridge overnight. If it’s still partially frozen in the morning, run a little hot water over the closed bag. Don’t microwave. Make sure all your ingredients are organic.
Consider making a separate set of bags of raw food: chopped raw beef liver mixed with raw hamburger, some shredded raw carrots, chopped fresh parsley, and freeze them. Feed your dog this raw food, morning and evening, once a week.
Cats need mostly meat in their diets. For cats, I make three different freezer bags: one of cooked chicken and giblets, another of chopped, raw chicken liver and hamburger or ground lamb, and a third of poached fish such as catfish or tilapia filets mixed with raw, peeled, chopped shrimp. You can add vitamin supplements for cats, available at vets or good pet stores, as needed, according to the package directions. Make sure your ingredients are organic and keep the bags frozen until needed, as raw meat and fish go off quickly. Not only are these organic ingredients free from toxic chemicals, but their production is environmentally friendly. If you use ocean fish, it won’t be organic because there’s no way to guarantee their provenance. Besides, you may be exposing your cat to mercury contamination. Stick with farm-raised catfish and tilapia.
You’ll find that these home-made pet foods are comparable in price to store-bought or a little cheaper. But they give great peace of mind and healthy nutrition to your pets.
At the first sip of this indispensible broth, your face will light up, you’ll smile, and a feeling of warm goodness and nutritive power will sweep over you.
Make sure it’s all organic by using organic meat and bones exclusively. Use filtered water if you have it.
Once the broth is prepared, frozen into cubes in ice cube trays, and stored in freezer bags in the freezer, you’ll find a thousand uses for them.
First, you can use them instead of bouillon cubes. Commercial bouillon cubes are full of hydrolyzed vegetable protein and certain amino acids from meat that can cause the death of neurons in the brain and spinal cord, especially in children and the immune-compromised elderly. If you want to know more about this, Google “excitotoxins” and you’ll find many citations and loads of information.
So, thaw a few cubes and you’ll have what the Italians call “brodo,” or broth in English. It is such good stuff that I’ll bet you’ll never be without a bag full of frozen cubes again. Traditionally, Italians cook tortellini then add the hot cooked pasta to the broth, but you can also cook the pasta in the broth, although that will add some murkiness to what will otherwise be a clear, light amber broth of amazingly good flavor and delicacy. Besides tortellini, you can use ravioli, other types of pasta or noodles, a few slices of chicken, or chopped parsley in the soup.
If someone is down with a cold or the flu, have them drink a cup of this hot broth.
When making a stew, add a couple of cubes to the pot before cooking.
Use it to make risottos and for braising meats.
Poach eggs, chicken, or fish in this broth for extra flavor, but don’t throw away the poaching liquid. It’s so nutritious, you’ll want to drink it yourself.
Deglaze roasting or frying pans with this broth when making gravy or jus.
Use as you would chicken or beef broth.
And how do you make this magical substance? I turned to Marcella Hazan’s book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,” because I first encountered the broth in a small restaurant in Venice, Italy, and never forgot its sheer goodness. Hazan’s book should be in even the smallest library of home cookbooks because it delivers on its title. Her writing is simple, direct, and easily understandable, and her directions are clear. Absorb this book and you will be an Italian cook as good as any. Hazan says to avoid using poultry giblets, lamb, or pork, as their flavors are too strong for this ethereally light and lovely broth. She suggests that when you are preparing chicken, beef, or veal dishes, save bones, scraps, and small pieces of meat and freeze them until you have collected about three or four pounds of cuttings and bones. Of these collected pieces, she says no more than two pounds can be bones. Bones with marrow, such as beef shank or oxtails are best. When you’re ready to make the broth, enrich the mixture with a pound and a half to a two-pound piece of fresh brisket or chuck, bringing the total to about two pounds of bones and three of meat. Make sure all the ingredients are organic.
Salt to taste (not too much)
1 carrot, peeled
2 stalks celery
½ red bell pepper, deseeded and cored
1 small potato, peeled
1 fresh, ripe tomato or one canned Italian plum tomato, drained
5 pounds assorted beef, veal, and chicken meat and bones
1. Put all the ingredients in a large stock pot and add enough filtered water to cover by two inches. Set the cover askew, turn heat to medium, and bring to a boil. As soon as the mixture begins to boil, lower the heat to a gentle simmer.
2. Remove scum that floats to the surface, at first abundantly, then tapering off. Cook at a simmer for three hours.
3. Filter the broth through a large wire sieve or strainer lined with a single layer of paper toweling into a non-metal bowl. Allow it to completely cool, uncovered.
4. When cool, place it in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight, until the fat rises to the top and solidifies. Remove the fat.
5. Return the covered bowl to the fridge if you plan to use the broth within three days. If you want to keep it for longer than three days, freeze in ice cube trays, transferring the solid cubes to a freezer bag, and store in the freezer for up to six months.
Makes 1 ½ to 2 quarts.
Estimates are that the organic food industry in the United States hit $30 billion in sales by the end of 2010. Steady and significant growth occurred despite the premium cost of organic food and a slack economy. To see how the organic industry is doing both in the U.S. and around the world, check out the following metrics, as supplied by the Organic Trade Association. They reveal the tremendous growth of organics, but also show that we have far to go in converting our agriculture to a sustainasble, environmentally-friendly, organic form.
• U.S. sales of organic food and beverages have grown from $1 billion in 1990 to $24.8 billion in 2009. Sales in 2009 represented 5.1 percent growth over 2008 sales. Experiencing the highest growth in sales during 2009 were organic fruits and vegetables, up 11.4 percent over 2008 sales
Source: Organic Trade Association’s 2010 Organic Industry Survey
• Organic food and beverage sales represented approximately 3.7 percent of overall food and beverage sales in 2009. Leading were organic fruits and vegetables, now representing 11.4 percent of all U.S. fruit and vegetable sales.
Source: Organic Trade Association’s 2010 Organic Industry Survey
• Organic non-food sales grew 9.1 percent in 2009, to reach $1.8 billion.
Source: Organic Trade Association’s 2010 Organic Industry Survey
• Total U.S. organic sales, including food and non-food products, were $26.6 billion in 2009, up 5.3 percent from 2008.
Source: Organic Trade Association’s 2010 Organic Industry Survey
• Mass market retailers (mainstream supermarkets, club/warehouse stores, and mass merchandisers) in 2009 sold 54 percent of organic food. Natural retailers were next, selling 38 percent of total organic food sales. In 2008, mass market retailers represented 45 percent of sales, while natural food channels represented 43 percent of sales. Other sales occur via export, the Internet, farmers’ markets/ Community Supported Agriculture, mail order, and boutique and specialty stores.
Source: Organic Trade Association’s 2010 Organic Industry Survey.
• Certified organic acreage in the United States reached more than 4.8 million acres in 2008, according to updated data posted by USDA. U.S. total organic cropland reached 2,655,382 acres in 2008, while land devoted to organic pasture totaled 2,160,577 acres. California leads with the most certified organic cropland, with over 430,000 acres, largely used for fruit and vegetable production. Other states with the most certified organic cropland include Wisconsin, North Dakota, Minnesota and Montana. Forty-five states also had some certified organic rangeland and pasture in 2008; of those, 13 states had more than 100,000 acres each, reflecting the growth in the U.S. organic dairy sector between 2005 and 2008. Certified organic cropland acreage between 2002 and 2008 averaged 15 percent annual growth. However, it still only represented about 0.7 percent of all U.S. cropland, while certified organic pasture only represented 0.5 percent of all U.S. pasture in 2008. Overall, certified organic cropland and pasture accounted for about 0.6 percent of U.S. total farmland in 2008. Although a small percentage of major U.S. field crops are grown organically, organic carrots represented 25 percent of total U.S. carrot acreage, while organic lettuce represented 8 percent of all lettuce acreage. Fresh produce is still the top-selling organic category in retail sales. Meanwhile, the organic livestock sector has seen growth, with 2.7 percent of U.S. dairy cows and 1.5 percent of layer hens managed under certified organic systems.
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, www.ers.usda.gov/data/organic.
• Acreage managed organically in 2008 in the world totaled 35 million hectares farmed by almost 1.4 million producers in 154 countries, according to data from The World of Organic Agriculture 2010. Organic agricultural land area increased in all regions, and was up nearly three million hectares, or nine percent, compared to 2007 data. Of the total area managed organically, 22 million hectares were grassland. In addition, 8.2 million hectares were used for cropland. The regions with the largest area of organically managed land are Oceania (12.1 million hectares in Australia, New Zealand, and surrounding island states), Europe (8.2 million hectares), and Latin America (8.1 million hectares), according to statistics in a chapter by Dr. Helga Willer. The report also recorded 31 million hectares that are organic wild collection areas and land for bee keeping. The majority of this land is in developing countries.
Source: The World of Organic Agriculture: Statistics and Emerging Trends 2010.
• Meanwhile, according to Organic Monitor estimates, global organic sales reached $50.9 billion in 2008, double the $25 billion recorded in 2003.
Source: The World of Organic Agriculture: Statistics and Emerging Trends 2010
Rudyard Kipling once famously said in regard to China, “There lies a sleeping giant.” Well, the giant is awake and comes roaring economically into the 21st Century. It always has had a great influence on the rest of the world culturally, with its own brand of Buddhism, with the teachings of Lao Tzu that became Taoism, and with the down-to-earth instructions for living of Confucianism, to say nothing of its art, sculpture, music, and instructive history, or its inventions that need no listing here (fireworks—thus rockets—anyone?).
It has also had an impact on agriculture and especially horticulture. A well-known book, “Farmers of Forty Centuries,” tells how, by recycling every scrap of organic waste, including human “night soil,” back to the earth, and by farming small plots intensely, the Chinese developed a sustainable agriculture that has lasted thousands of years without depleting the soil.
“But China has been notorious for its famines,” you might think. Yes, but that has had more to do with fire, flood, drought, and political upheavals than in the quality of the small patches of arable land that have persisted in good health for millennia.
Were those small patches organic? No, because the organic method is more than just the absence of agricultural chemicals. But while Chinese small patch agriculture wasn’t organic in the strict sense governed by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) based in Bonn, Germany, of which the U.S. National Organic Program is a part, the Chinese small patch farmers were definitely in the spirit of the organic movement, long before it arose in Europe and America.
There is now in China true organic agriculture—or what purports to be organic agriculture, because as we’ve seen with contaminated sheet rock, baby food, toothpaste, medicines, and pet food, China’s products aren’t always reliably safe.
Fraud is universal and not confined to China, but proper certification agencies—especially those under the aegis of IFOAM and those that certify for the USDA Organic seal—keep things on the up and up. The problem in China is chaos in the organic marketplace. “Not only are there two rival clean-food standards,” writes Chi-Chu Tschang in Business Week, “Green Food and Organic Food, backed by different government ministries, there are also 21 separate agencies that claim the right to certify food as organic.
Chinese garlic and some other fresh vegetables have been displayed as organic in America, but more frequently, “organic” soybeans, rice, and other grains , along with frozen vegetables, and fruit concentrates from China have been making their way into frozen cases and into organic products sold in America. Wal-Mart had to drop one Chinese supplier a few years ago for fraudulently claiming organic status and Japan has simply stopped importing Chinese food until that country can get its act—organic or conventional—together.
The Business Week article also cites Ming Yi, founder of a supermarket chain in China that has agreed to supply Wal-Mart’s supercenters with reliably bona fide organic foods, who said he was once approached by a farm in northeastern China that exports vegetables to the U.S. under the Ministry of Agriculture-backed Green Food standard. The outfit wanted to buy 10 kilos of his organic produce so they could submit it to an IFOAM-affiliated certifying agency called the Organic Food Development Center (OFDC) in Nanjing so they could claim it as their own. “We don’t do business with these kinds of people,” says Mr. Ming.
But those kinds of people are out there. All this proves once more that the way to eat, if at all possible, is first, certified organic; second, local, and third, seasonal. If you know who grew your organic food and he or she lives in your foodshed, you can’t do better than that.
A recent article in The Huffington Post reported that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Department of Pesticide Regulation has approved methyl iodide for use by fruit and vegetable growers despite heavy opposition from environmental and farmworker groups that cited its links to cancer. The state Department of Pesticide Regulation will register the fungicide as a substitute for the pesticide methyl bromide, which is being phased out by international treaty because it depletes the Earth's protective ozone layer. California's $1.6 billion strawberry industry will undoubtedly provide one of the biggest markets for the chemical, as will the Central Valley’s nut orchards and the fresh flower nurseries dotting the coast in Ventura and San Diego counties. The pesticide is included on California's official list of cancer-causing chemicals, and the department’s own scientific advisory panel has raised concerns that it could poison the air and water. Assemblyman Bill Monning, D-Monterey, whose temperate coastal district produces strawberries year-round, said he was disturbed by the approval after several hearings on Sacramento about the pesticide's health impacts. “I think there is sufficient scientific evidence to say that this chemical is unsafe at any speed,” he said. “With a limited state budget, it is going to be very difficult to rely on agricultural commissioners to provide enough oversight and monitoring if this goes into use extensively.”
Californians for Pesticide Reform, Pesticide Action Network North America, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation and the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment have urged Gov. Jerry Brown to outlaw methyl iodide’s use. Teresa DeAnda, a resident of the Central Valley town of Earlimart, the site of a major pesticide drift incident in which more than 250 people fell sick in 1999, said she was worried about the fumigant's impact on rural communities. “There is just no way you can prevent these accidents from happening,” said DeAnda, who represents Californians for Pesticide Reform. “It hurts my heart to know that people will be exposed when this pesticide is applied.” The fungicide is registered for use in 47 states today, besides California. The only bright spot in this picture is that it is not allowed to be used on the United States’ 4.8 million organic acres or on California’s nearly half a million organic acres.
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Now that the holidays are behind us, ask yourself, “Were my cranberries organic and grown in the USA?”
Does it matter?
The answer is yes, it matters very much. Cranberries that have been imported pose the greatest pesticide risk per serving than any other fruit or vegetable, according to the Organic Center.
One of the most common pesticides sprayed on cranberries, chlorpyrifos, is a known endocrine disruptor, linked to serious developmental damages in children, even in low-dose amounts generally thought of as safe.
Many cranberry bogs have been grandfathered in and thus avoid federal and state clean water regulations that would prevent them from discharging chemical fertilizer and pesticide-laden water into nearby streams and lakes.
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You’ll remember from your high school chemistry class that hydrogen peroxide is simply water with an extra oxygen atom attached. That extra atom of oxygen makes the hydrogen peroxide molecule relatively unstable, and is easily dislodged. Pour some on a fresh cut in your skin and it bubbles as the extra oxygen is released and links with another free oxygen atom to form a molecule comprised of two oxygen atoms. The oxygen molecule and the water the atoms left behind are both stable, and the bubbles you see fizzing in your injury are the gaseous molecules of oxygen being generated. Besides sterilizing your cuts, hydrogen peroxide can also sterilize plant surfaces to prevent or eliminate disease, and it can be used as a bactericide on fruits and as an algicide in standing water. Hydrogen peroxide is approved for use in organic agriculture and horticulture, and products in the proper concentrations are being marketing by BioSafe Systems. If you’re interested, visit www.biosafesystems.com.
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The Organic Farming Research Foundation Board of Directors has called for strong federal policies to prevent genetically engineered (GE) crops from contaminating organic foods. The foundation said the widespread planting of GE crops increases contamination risks, which threatens the livelihood of organic and other farmers who choose not to use GE technologies. Organic regulations prohibit the use of GE material in crops and processed foods certified as organic. “It is a matter of fairness,” said OFRF Board President Deirdre Birmingham. “The uncontrolled spread of GE pollen and seed is unfairly threatening to put American organic farmers out of production. Organic family farmers demand the right to farm free from GE contamination and loss of their organic markets due to GE contamination.”
One of the aspects of a midwife’s work is to give her clients good information about nutrition during pregnancy and lactation. The idea is not to load up on high density foods in hopes of providing super-adequate nutrition for the developing baby. In that direction lays big babies and therefore difficult labors. The idea is to eat well but wisely so that the baby is thrifty—a word that in gardening means a plant that’s well-nourished and sturdy, but not forced into big growth. You want a tight, compact, and well-nourished infant who’ll traverse the birth canal with the minimum of difficulty.
One of the topics at a recent conference of midwives in North Carolina was the question of organic food, and the midwives were all for it. Not only does organic food—thrifty in and of itself--promote thrifty babies, but it does so without the chemicals and the harmful techniques used in conventional agriculture.
Of course, some midwives have long been advocates of organic food. Ina May Gaskin at The Farm in Tennessee has been a supporter since the 1960s. But let’s face it—the 1960s are now a half century ago, and there are at least two generations of midwives that have come along since, and maybe three.
People who aren’t familiar with the world of birth and babies may not understand just how important good midwifery is for young mothers. What organic farmers and gardeners are for the world of food, midwives are for the world of childbirth. The alternative to organic food is conventionally-produced food, grown in fields scoured clean of life by the use of poisons—pesticides, fungicides, herbicides. The alternative to drug-free childbirth at home is a hosp-ital birth, with epidural drugs injected into the mother’s spine so she can’t feel the strong—and yes, sometimes painful—natural process of her pelvis opening to allow a baby to be born. And yet Mother Nature provides benefits for women who experience natural childbirth. Certain hormones are released through the process that encourage bonding and promote euphoria once the baby is delivered. Natural home birth is safer than hospital birth—hospitals after all are where sick people go and really nasty germs reside. But there’s nothing pathological about childbirth. The caesarian rates in our hospitals are a national scandal. A caesarian section sounds great but is a major surgery, with all the complications that can entail. Among the countries in the world with the lowest rates of maternal and infant mortality are those with the highest rates of home birth—Holland among them. Where would you rather give birth—in a hospital or at home? If complications arise, as they sometimes do, 911 is a phone call away and a hospital is usually nearby.
A home birth, attended by a competent midwife and a doula (a labor coach), is the safest, most natural, most empowering, and organic way to give birth. I know. My wife is a midwife and I’ve attended births with her and marveled at her skill—and especially at the courage and determination of the women who were giving birth. Men show courage in different ways, but let no one denigrate the sheer courage of women as they perpetuate our race. Few men are ever called upon to show the steadfast courage of a woman in childbirth.
My wife Susanna is the author of “Water Birth—A Midwife’s Perspective,” and she’s available at www.northbaymidwifery.com if you have any questions. No matter where you live, she can help you find a midwife in your area.
The fact that midwives are accepting organic food as an important part of what they have to give to their pregnant clients is not surprising to me at all.
At the core of organic gardening and farming is the quality of health. Like beauty, goodness, kindness, or insightfulness, it’s not something you can hold in your hand, but it is a transcendental quality of the first importance. You’ll know it when it’s gone. In fact, growing plants organically—for food, ornament, as part of an environmentally sound ecology, or for a practical purpose like a windbreak or for firewood—is to foster the health of all the creatures and systems that bear on that growth.
The organic grower recycles all his or her organic matter—pulled weeds, leaves, hay, farm animal manure—through the composting process and back to the soil. This not only conserves valuable organic matter that might otherwise be relegated to a landfill, it feeds the soil.
Soil teems with microorganisms and larger organisms like earthworms, too. There are over two billion living cells in each tablespoonful of rich, compost-amended soil, tons of living creatures in the top foot of every acre of enriched, organic soil. Compost is what the soil microorganisms need to be healthy. A healthy soil prevents disease. For instance, potato scab is a fungus that makes ugly, black, scabby patches on potato tubers. But an organically-amended soil resists potato scab. That’s because possession is nine-tenths of the law in the soil system. A rich, organic soil is thoroughly colonized by beneficial bacteria and other microscopic creatures. Potato scab can’t gain a toehold in such a soil. It’s a healthy soil—health being defined as either the absence of disease or the ability to resist disease. And what is disease except an outbreak of destructive organisms that overwhelm the defenses of a creature, whether that’s an immune system or a scabby soil.
So health is built from the ground up in the organic system. Once you have a healthy soil, you can plant it. Plants and soil organisms have co-evolved over millions of years. Plants prefer their food delivered to them by microorganisms in the soil. The healthy soil gives plants what they want, when they want it, at the rate they need it. Let’s look at those three statements:
--What They Want: Microorganisms tear apart organic matter and flood the soil’s moisture with nutrients biologically formed for plants’ benefits. As they reproduce and die, the microorganisms’ slightly acid cell contents dissolve minerals from bits of rock in the soil. These minerals also feed the plants. Neither Monsanto nor a farmer knows the optimum way to feed plants. Soil microorganisms do.
--When They Want It: Plants have different nutritional needs at different stages of their growth. Soil creatures feed them exactly the right nutrients at the right time.
--At the Rate They Need It: In early spring, when the soil is cool and the seedlings are just emerging, the microorganisms are also just waking up and feed the new plants just small amounts of nutrients. Flooding seedlings with lots of nutrients would force them into tall, spindly, weak growth. The microorganisms know just how to feed plants at the proper rate for optimum health. As the soil warms and plants put on major growth in early to mid-summer, the soil life gets cooking, too, and feeds plants at greater rates. It’s a system, set up by nature, to optimize the health of the plants. Instead of weak growth, plants become thrifty—a term of art meaning they are stocky, compact, and strong.
Now animals--cows, ducks, chickens, goats, sheep, pigs, or humans--come to eat these healthy plants. Because the plants have grown with all the nutrients they needed to make all the compounds they were capable of making, they can supply us with the full panoply of molecules nature intended. No only do our bodies absorb these molecules, allowing us to build our health, too, but they feed the intestinal flora within our digestive systems. Nine out of every 10 cells in our bodies are intestinal bacteria, and when they are fed what they want, when they want it, at the rate they need it, they greatly augment our health.
Many of our intestinal bacteria are similar in function or even related to soil microorganisms. And so health makes a giant swing from the soil through the plants to the animals and back to the soil again, leaving a trail of good health and glowing good feeling behind. That’s why organic gardening and farming means good health. When people complain that organic food is too expensive, I realize that they are not aware of all the benefits of that food. In the big picture, it is far less expensive than the consequences for environment and personal health of eating conventionally grown food.
Believe me when I say that health is not a factor on the factory farm.
And now, a quick run-through of some topical news stories of interest to the organic community. Food-borne illnesses kill more than 5,000 people and sicken 76 million every year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And so both Democratic and Republican Senators sponsored the Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510), the most important piece of legislation to protect the public to be proposed in a generation.
But then the word came down from the Republican leadership in the Senate to kill the bill. Even its Republican sponsors backed away from it. Recently the Senate voted for the bill was 57 in favor and 27 against, and as you know, it takes 60 votes to get anything done in the Senate. Why would the Senate Republicans prevent the bill from going forward? As Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said, the GOP’s top priority is to make sure President Obama doesn’t get a second term, and passage of the food safety bill might win him some friends.
So I guess the bottom line is that another 5,000 people will have to die and millions be sickened so Republicans can do their political posturing.
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The FDA is getting ready to approve the sale of genetically-engineered salmon (aka frankenfish) in American markets. And the agency doesn’t want you to know whether the salmon you’re buying is genetically altered or not. It’s not requiring fish farmers to label their fish GMO. The Obama administration evidently thinks that American consumers have no right to know what they are buying and eating and should be kept in the dark. “Change has come to America” apparently meant coins jingling in the pockets of Monsanto executives.
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The 300-acre organic farm of the Rodale Institute in Maxatawny, Pennsylvania, has finally added cows to the diversity of life forms on its farm. The farm is not meant to be a working farm as much as a place to test organic farming ideas. Those ideas have always included the central place of animals in the organic farming system and it’s nice to see the farm managers bring in farm animals to augment the testing of field crops.
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Have you noticed that more and more beverages are being sold in hard plastic containers instead of glass? There may be a significant health danger in that. Food and beverages are by far the main source of human exposure to the estrogen-mimicking chemical bisphenol-A, or BPA, according to a panel of expert scientists at the World Health Organization and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Studies have linked the chemical to breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes, male infertility, and other health problems. One of the chief concerns of the scientists is that containers for baby food and baby bottles may contain the chemical, which can adversely affect the development of infant and toddler endocrine systems.
The bottom line: opt for glass instead of plastic containers or canned food whenever possible.
The Economist magazine chooses a topic for debate from time to time and invites readers to agree or disagree with the premise of the debate. The readers’ remarks are often cogent. Such was the case during a recent debate as to whether genetic modification of food crops and other techniques of bioengineering are compatible with sustainable agriculture, a term that I take to include organic agriculture.
Here’s the premise of the debate: “This house believes that biotechnology and sustainable agriculture are complementary, not contradictory.” You can read the full debate at www.economist.com/debate/debates/overview/187. But I thought several comments were of enough importance to share them with you.
Comment # 1
Dear Sir,
Some relevant facts for the discussion:
All current GMOs are [created] to resist pesticide applications or to spread pesticides indiscriminately; i.e., not targeted applications (Roundup Ready and BT). Both these methods are prohibited in organic agriculture systems.
Not a single GMO crop has higher yields.
Not a single GMO crop has achieved any improvements to drought resistance.
Organic does not attempt to “combat” nature- and altering genes and DNA of species in a laboratory is not a method that is compatible with the organic philosophy of mimicking nature, but is a violent overriding of nature’s method of protecting species purity. Fish can’t breed with cows, bacteria can’t breed with corn and sustaining this is for a good reason--but now some scientists are playing God and overriding this through laboratory interventions. This can never be a tool used to further organic or sustainable production as the method is a violation of nature's [way of separating] species. It's simply not compatible, and the risks are unknown.
If we think we can sustain humanity's existence while destroying the existence of the natural world and other species, we have gone too far down a road of arrogance and the ones that will pay are ourselves.
The motion is a bit of an oxymoron also, as sustainability is about sustaining something, in this case agriculture and the components of agriculture, one of which is plants. Biotechnology like genetic engineering is precisely NOT SUSTAINING current species or their natural evolution through cross breeding according to natural law, and [is an] attempt to replace plants and animals with forms not existing in nature. The motion is not logical or coherent; it is a confused and contradictory statement. Like saying that I want to have my cake and eat it too.
Comment # 2
Dear Sir,
The key to sustainability for farmers is being able to save their own seed. Even in a bad year, you will have some seed to save. If you are forced to buy all of your seed, then one bad year means economic devastation. For those who see consolidation of agriculture into the industrial monocrop model, this is not a problem. For farmers like us devoted to sustainability, we focus on maintaining genetic diversity, spreading (and thereby diluting) safety risk among many small farms instead of one huge contamination, and keeping small farm businesses viable.
Exporting GMO seed in the name of improving food production is disastrous; poor farmers in the Third World living at the margins of the monetary economy are precisely the wrong people to pay that kind of price.
We also still do not know the health effects of the protein modifications in engineered foods. No science yet clearly links them to the increases in food allergies, but that may just be because the real science has yet to be done. We just don't know. Meanwhile, GMO continues to contaminate all of our crops though cross pollination making it almost impossible to pull back this headlong experiment with our food and health.
Comment # 3
Dear Sir,
It is important to note and remember what sustainability means and this is being lost in the complexity of this debate.
Sustainability means honoring and balancing the three Ps: People, Prosperity, and the Planet. This is a very simple but powerful concept.
GMO food products certainly honor the prosperity of Monsanto and other companies that are trying to force the use of these products on an unwilling public. However, GMOs do not honor people, or why else would the [agribusiness companies] oppose labeling tooth and nail? Given the worries of [GMOs] spreading into the environment, they do not honor the planet.
They actively dishonor people when companies sue farmers for pollen drift, seek to destroy seed bank companies, and to [control] agriculture, which belongs to all people.
The words GMO and Sustainability are unfortunately mutually exclusive.
Comment # 4
Dear Sir,
The current approach to GMO is too focused on selling more herbicides like Roundup, as opposed to creating crops that are more resistant to the challenges of Mother Nature (temperature, water, etc). As we have seen with Roundup, [GMOs give us] Pyrrhic victories, and we [only] create a new class of superweeds, which need more aggressive herbicides, and so on. This is not sustainable and a battle we won't win from Mother Nature.
Furthermore, the ability to patent living organisms for the profit of a few is an outrageous abuse of the patent system. The onus should be on the seed companies to prevent pollution or make GMO plants easy to identify.
This is Jeff writing now:
I certainly don’t think bioengineering is compatible with sustainable—or especially organic—agriculture.
I would add that switching genes from various organisms into other organisms is akin to opening up Control Panel on your computer’s operating system and just clicking away to see what happens. Genetic structure in natural organisms is the end product of millions of years of evolution, and millions of years of nature trying random mutations to see what works and what doesn’t. If a strand of DNA includes code that will create a terrible disease in a person, then I can see the necessity of snipping off that bit of code and replacing it with the same bit of code carried by a person without that disease. But inserting caterpillar disease genes into crop plants so they kill any caterpillars that bite them (exactly what companies have done with the gene for the Bacillus thuringiensis toxin) or “improving” nature by putting mouse genes into corn, or other abominations, should be illegal. Do you really think humans have the wisdom to fool around with the control panel of life?
The fact that companies like Monsanto fight so hard to prevent the GMO labeling of food simply proves that Monsanto knows that people would avoid GMO food like the plague. Canada and the countries of the European Union require GMO food to be labeled as such. In the United States, our Congresspeople are in the pocket of Big Ag, literally bought by campaign contributions, and so we are not allowed to know whether our food has been genetically modified.
How do you like it here in the dark?
Dennis Cardoza is a Democrat, a Representative to Congress from California’s 18th Congressional District in the Central Valley from Stockton to Fresno, home to intense agriculture, most of it conventional, some organic. He is Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee’s Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Farming.
Or—at least he was chairman of the Subcommittee. It remains to be seen who will sit in the chairman’s seat now that the Republicans have gained control of the House of Representatives.
It could be Rep. Cardoza. He proudly calls himself a Blue Dog Democrat, which is another way of saying either a moderate Democrat or a centrist Republican. The League of Conservation Voters gave him a 65 percent rating on his votes for conservation legislation. That’s not a strong record. In fact, it was 14th from last among the 233 House Democrats in the last Congress. He may look better, however, compared with the corporatist Republicans who will now succeed him.
I contacted many folks in the organic farming community—farmers, activists, members of non-governmental organizations concerned with organic farming—asking if anyone had had contact with Rep. Cardoza, seeking to find out just what he’d done for the organic community, if anything. Only one correspondent had had contact with him—or rather, with his staff. That was a meeting to determine how much money Congress would appropriate for organic farming research and development in the 2010 Omnibus Farm Bill. The staff listened, commented favorably, and had a few ideas to chip into the discussion.
Other than that, Rep. Cardoza doesn’t seem to have been engaged in helping the organic farming community during his term as chairman of the Organic Farming subcommittee. I wrote to him two years ago asking him to recount for me any help he’d given organic farmers. Neither he nor anyone on his staff bothered to respond.
In fairness to Rep. Cardoza, his district is the heart of Big Ag, and conventional farmers make up the bulk of his constituency. They, too, need a Congressperson to represent them.
But it seems that once again, organic farmers are given short shrift. And that’s too bad, since organic farming is the only way to reclaim the Central Valley’s chemically-drenched landscape and clean it up for a sustainable future. The Central Valley is among the most polluted places on the planet because of the overuse of agricultural chemicals of all kinds there. Rep. Cardoza could have chosen to be a brave leader and carry the banner of organic farming—but it probably would have been political suicide. But maybe not. Times they are a-changin’. Organic food production is closing in on the $30 billion a year mark. Maybe some of those conventional farmers would have liked to have had an alternative to the use of poisons to grow their crops. Maybe the farm workers deserve better than to work in hazmat suits in the fields—or, worse, work without hazmat suits. Maybe an organic environment would have been safer for the kids growing up in the 18th District. Maybe the alternatives can both be offered and given real support—both conventional and organic.
I will report back in this space about the next chairman of the Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Agriculture. Maybe he or she will actually do something to support organic farming. I don’t want to be cynical, but I doubt it.
I could at this point overwhelm you with studies and scientific figures showing how contaminated our world is with industrial and agricultural chemicals. And I could scare you with the gory details of what these chemicals do to developing fetuses, and how vulnerable our babies are to developmental damage while in the womb, when their vital organs, glandular systems, bone structures, muscles, and brain tissue are forming.
But I’m not going to do that. I will assume you know that there are thousands upon thousands of chemicals, many of them untested for safety, in our environment and in us. And that yes, there are a host of developmental disorders with toxic chemicals as their cause.
Instead, I’m going to talk about how you can avoid almost all of these toxic insults to both mother and child.
If you are planning to become pregnant or are pregnant, it’s vitally important for you to decide to eat only organic food. My wife is a midwife and I’ve learned from her just how crucial this is. The single most important source of chemical contamination of our bodies is our food. Many of these toxins cross the placental barrier and can harm your baby. By eating only organic food—and especially unprocessed organic foods—you greatly reduce this toxic load almost to the vanishing point, or as close to the vanishing as we can get.
What a great feeling to know that your body is a safe and pure environment for your developing child. You wouldn’t smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol during your pregnancy, so why eat conventional food that’s contaminated with toxic agricultural and food industry chemicals? Why eat conventional “convenience” food that has more chemicals added during processing to color it and enhance its taste and texture and to act as a preservative? Why, when you know that organic food is more nutritious and has more of the elements you need to produce nutrient-rich blood that feeds the baby across the placenta. You want to give your developing child every advantage. And you do that by right diet. And right diet means a clean, wholesome, and nutritious diet of organically-grown food.
Once baby is born and you are breast feeding, it’s again vitally important to eat only organic food, because many of the most toxic chemicals in our environment and in our food are fat soluble, and breast milk contains its share of fat. Many of these chemicals can end up in breast milk.
If you are feeding commercial formula, make sure it’s an organic brand, such as Earth’s Best, Natures One, Bright Beginnings, or Vermont Organics. There are several others as well. Google these companies to decide which you prefer. Be aware that besides toxic chemicals, organic infant formulas also contain no hormones, genetically modified substances, antibiotics, or other potentially harmful substances.
Make sure that any beverages you drink are pure and organic, such as organic fruit juices, and especially be mindful of the water you drink. Tap water in most localities comes from local groundwater and can contain a wide range of chemicals--over 2,100 cancer-causing substances alone--including drugs flushed down toilets, antibiotics, and soluble bodily system disruptors. City water may be treated to kill pathogens, but it isn’t treated to remove toxics.
The following advice is based on my personal experience: and that’s to invest in an Aquasana drinking water filter, rated the best water filter and a best buy by Consumer Reports. A cartridge system that sits on your counter is about $100 and a deluxe under-sink system (which I have) with an in-sink spigot is about $200. The water from this system removes pathogens, toxic chemicals, synthetic organic compounds, chlorine disinfectant added by the city, and other junk you don’t want to be putting in your system. I couldn’t be happier with this filtration system. Our water now tastes wonderful. And it’s pure. I have no interest in this company except that I believe in its product and it always treats me fairly. I’m automatically sent two new filters every six months, and once I’ve paid for the initial installation, that’s my only expense. It’s far cheaper than buying water in gallon jugs at the supermarket, which may simply be some city water in plastic bottles that leach toxic Bisphenol-A into the water—plastic that will remain in landfills for many decades. Check out Aquasana at www.aquasana.com. Pregnant moms, newborns, toddlers, the whole family should have the benefits of clean water to go along with clean, organic food.
I repeat: you want to give your baby every advantage and protection against disease. Clean food and water is a large part of what you can do to guarantee that. Take it from a midwife’s husband.
How does the conventional grower think of his garden or farm? And how does that differ from an organic grower’s view? Very differently, it turns out. It’s a crucial distinction and at its core involves morality, ethics, and spirituality.
Let’s take the conventional grower first. He has a goal that he desires to achieve. If he’s growing corn, it may be 120 bushels per acre. It may be a certain amount of gross income per acre that he knows will allow him to keep farming. It may even be to grow the best artisanal varieties of corn for the upscale restaurant market. Whatever the goal is, he desires to achieve it.
What might hinder the achievement of that goal? Not enough nutrition in the soil might curb yields, and so he spreads chemical fertilizer with rich amounts of the three macronutrients: nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, in soluble form. He’s focused on the goal, but not on the effect the chemical fertilizers may have on the soil or the ground water where runoff of the soluble chemicals may end up, because he doesn’t really care about the effect on the life forms in the soil or streams. He wants corn! If the phosphorus causes eutrophication of the surrounding lakes, that’s not his problem. If the nitrogen causes algae bloom in the ground water, that’s not his problem. Unfortunately, the chemicals contain none of the micronutrients so important for plants to build their optimum, strong, healthy tissues. But it will boost yields and help the bottom line, so he spreads it on the land. His corn may not be the best or most nutritious corn for the people or animals that will eat it, but he doesn’t care. Keeping his eye on the prize, the goal is corn. No wonder apologists for conventional agriculture only focus on the bottom line. That’s all they really care about.
Rank weed growth can reduce yields, and so he spreads pre-emergence herbicides in early spring, before new growth of weeds or corn begins. He doesn’t care about the effect of herbicides on the life in his fields, such as the weeds that support the life cycles of beneficial insects. He plants “Round-Up Ready” genetically modified corn seeds that aren’t stunted by the herbicides that he applies later when summer weeds start to grow. Do you think he cares whether genetic modifications to natural plants may create ecologically devastating effects, such as the way GMO corn with the gene to kill caterpillars decimated populations of monarch butterflies? His focus in simply on corn—and lots of it.
Insects such as corn earworm, root borers, and others can ruin a crop, and so he sprays insecticides to kill off the insects that could reduce yields. Broad-spectrum insecticides don’t only kill the target insects, though. They burn through the entire spectrum of insects. Beneficials that prey on plant eating insects suddenly have no food. The entire system of natural checks and balances among the insects collapses. But in his single-minded focus on yields, the conventional farmer doesn’t care. “A good bug is a dead bug.” Sound familiar?
Corn smut fungus could also derail his plans, and so fungicides take care of that threat. But there are many beneficial fungi in a lively acre of organic or sustainably farmed soil. These include mycorrhizal fungi that live in a symbiotic relationship with plant roots and scavenge the surrounding soil for scarce phosphorus compounds—essential plant nutrients that these fungi haul back to their host plants and feed to them. They also include nematode-trapping fungi—strands of fungus with loops along their length that trap and kill nematodes, harmful little soil worms that infest plant roots. All are killed by fungicides.
When the corn ripens, he brings in his 120 bushels per acre, gets his price, banks his money, and he’s ready, after a season,, to start the process again.
His vision of the farm is that of a factory set up to achieve the ends he sets. It’s all about him, his goals and desires. Everything is bent to his will in order to achieve the results he wants. He commands. If it requires killing weeds and insects, then they are killed. Death figures in. It’s about ego and greed, which are even deeper at the root of evil than money.
Now let’s consider the organic grower. The organic grower has deferred to something larger than just himself. His vision is to replicate what grand Nature does in order to produce a crop. He also wants 120 bushels of corn per acre and enough money to keep farming. But he realizes that the tough, self-centered methods of conventional farming create more harm than good. There’s a higher power, with more natural wisdom, that he can model his farm or garden upon. And that is the grand Nature herself. The organic grower takes a more humble position and steps down from the seat of power, allowing Nature to suggest the way to excellent yields of marketable crops. This requires the farmer to study Nature closely, to see how she wants things to be, to understand her directives, her laws, her tendencies, and the flow of her energies, and to follow them. The gardener or farmer becomes a part of the cycle of Nature, rather than its master.
It also brings to mind the deep wisdom of the world’s spiritual traditions. When Jesus was asked how people should pray, he came up with the Lord’s Prayer and the lines, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What is heaven if not the abode of power beyond ourselves? What is Nature if not a power beyond ourselves and a reflection of the will of heaven? So following the path of Nature is a way of getting our egos out of the way and allowing Nature’s supernal laws to operate in our gardens and farms. It’s a way of allowing the will of the creator of Nature to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Other spiritual traditions understand this. Buddhism says all suffering arises from desire. The Taoists of China insist that following the way of heaven is following the natural way. The Zen Buddhists describe a way to surmount the ego to let the natural path reveal itself. All around the world the truly spiritual seek to transcend the selfish mind so that the way of harmony with the whole can be followed. When you look at the way conventional agriculture damages and kills, wrecks and ruins the soil, pursues profit on the backs of family farmers and farm workers, you see ego and greed at work.
Organic gardening and farming represent a more spiritual way to approach the cultivation of crops. Someone once said that the greatest product of an organic farm is an enlightened farmer. And enlightenment is the transcendence of the selfish world of ego and greed and the connection to a power greater than us. It’s not just an Asian quest. It’s as American as Emerson and Thoreau. Go online and read Emerson’s essay called, “Circles.” Follow his reasoning right into the garden or the farm.
Not a gardener, you say? That's because you haven't grown garlic. Nothing could be simpler, even if you don’t have any land. As long as you have a sunny spot on a porch, patio, or walkway, you can grow garlic. And garlic isn’t a crop you seldom use. If you’re like most people, you use it often and in quantity.
All you need is a sunny spot that gets at least six hours of sun a day, a container with drain holes in the bottom filled with at least a foot or so of planting soil you can buy at the garden center, and a head or two of garlic.
Pull the heads apart into cloves and plant the cloves with the root end—the end that was attached to the hard cleat at the bottom of the head—down, so that the topmost tip of the clove is about two inches below the soil surface. Push a hole in the soil with your finger, drop in the clove, cover the hole with planting soil, and gently firm it down. Then water the soil in the container thoroughly, making sure excess water can drain out through holes in the bottom of the container. Make sure the soil stays moist, but not sopping wet.
Plant them now, in the fall. When spring arrives, or within a few weeks if you live in the warm zones of the country, the cloves will send up spears. These spears will grow next season, and along about the end of July, pull the soil back and examine the bulbs. Each clove will have made a new head of garlic. For a real treat, harvest some garlic early, when it’s delicate and before the papery husks have formed. Fresh young garlic is great in salads and as an accompaniment to braised meats. It’s just as simple as that.
When the garlic is mature, dig up the heads and lay them in a sunny spot so that the spear-like leaves turn brown and dry. You can then braid them into a string of garlic bulbs to hang in your kitchen and use through the fall and winter.
By then you’ll have planted another crop of cloves that will yield the next season’s garlic. It’s easy to do this, and if you have not grown any of your own vegetables before, you’ll have the thrill of cooking with garlic you grew yourself. The experience is fun and liberating, and you may find time to grow even more of your own food in the future.
The best thing about growing your own food is that you know that no toxic agricultural chemicals have been used on it. It’s clean, it’s good, it’s yours.
Most of us eat chicken all the time. We may be vaguely aware of problems with the production of chickens—rumors about horrible conditions of confinement with chickens squashed three to a cage and barely enough room to turn around, problems with disease that require chickens be given routine antibiotics, problems with recall of contaminated meat and lately eggs, problems with the cruel ways in which the birds are killed.
When it comes to conventional chicken, it’s all true.
These birds’ lives are not their own. They are bent, from egg to killed bird, to our needs. They are just little meat factories for us. But the question arises—what are chickens really for? What are their lives about? Do they play a role in nature’s ecology? What is it? In the wild, what is a chicken supposed to be?
Originally, a chicken was a jungle fowl native to Southeast Asia that spent much time on the ground, although it could fly—and still can except farmers clip its flight feathers—into the trees to roost at night. To fulfill its ecological role, it needs a clean environment, fresh air, sunlight, access to the ground’s soil and its insects, seeds, and bits of green weeds. In return, the chicken fertilizes the soil with its droppings and occupies a place somewhere in the middle of the food chain. So naturally, chickens need a natural space with green growing plants and the insects they harbor.
What they get under most conventional agricultural conditions is exactly the opposite. They must live in their own filth, with no access to anything they need except antibiotic-laced feed. Their conditions are really too horrible to describe. About 30 years ago, I was working for Rodale Press, publishers of Organic Gardening and The New Farm magazines, among others. I went to the editors of The New Farm and suggested that the next step forward in organic agriculture was for farmers to give their meat, egg, and milk animals conditions for life that reflected what they’d need if they lived in wild nature. I was laughed at. “You don’t understand farmers,” the editors said. “They don’t want to be kind to their animals. They want to make money off them.” Honestly—and these were the editors of The New Farm, ostensibly the farm magazine of the organic movement.
I’ll say it again. Most normal, empathetic, organic-minded people would prefer that their meat, egg, and milk animals be understood as sentient, feeling beings, and be given at least the minimal requirements of their natures so they can be relaxed and happy critters before they are taken for humane slaughter. Farmers who only look at the bottom line and refuse to figure the welfare of their animals into their farm equations are not fully human, and their food products are not nearly as good as they could be. There’s a lot of research that shows the deleterious effects of stress and poor living conditions on the quality of meat, milk, and eggs, and it’s not pretty. The meat, especially, from frightened and stressed animals is boggy, soft, and mushy, as well as laced with stress hormones.
No, if farmers have to make a living by forcing animals into misery, then they need to find another line of work.
The world is changing and changing fast. Nobody wants to eat cruelty anymore. It demeans us and poisons us. And worst of all, it ruins the great, god-given gift of life as experienced by the animals.
Just about one year ago, I put this recipe in this space. It is such an excellent recipe that I’m bringing it back in case you didn’t save it or try it last year. Another reason I’m bringing it back is because organic Honey Crisp apples are in the stores right now, and Honey Crisps make the best pies.
For maximum flavor and nutrition, use all organic ingredients. Note that the pie crust dough should best be made a day ahead and refrigerated until very cold.
For the Crust:
This recipe makes enough dough for two crusts—one top, one bottom—for your apple pie. The secret to a great crust is simple: everything must be ice cold so the butter never melts until you pop the pie into the oven.
2 cups all-purpose organic flour, taken from the freezer
½ teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons organic butter, chilled
4 tablespoons organic canola oil, chilled
½ cup ice water
1. Mix the flour and salt together in a bowl. Cut the butter into eight pieces and add them to the flour along with the canola oil. Using two knives, cut the butter into the flour until the pieces of butter are smaller than peas.
2. Add six tablespoons of ice water and toss the mixture lightly using two forks. Add more water if needed so that you can press the mixture together into a ball that retains its shape. Wrap the ball in wax paper and refrigerate for at least two hours, preferably overnight.
For the Pie:
6 medium organic Honey Crisp apples
½ cup brown sugar
1 Tbl. cornstarch
1/8 tsp. salt
¼ tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. nutmeg
1 ½ Tbl. butter
1 Tbl. lemon juice
1 Tbl. white sugar-cinnamon mix
1. Have the filling made before you roll out the pie crusts. Grease and chill the pie pan you intend to use for the pie.
2. Quarter, peel, and core the apples and cut the pieces into thin slices. Place the apples in a bowl. Combine the sugar, cornstarch, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg and add them to the bowl. Toss the apple slices gently with the dry ingredients until they are evenly coated.
3. Place an oven rack in the middle position and line it with a sheet of foil to catch any drips from the pie. Preheat the oven to 450 F.
4. Cut the ball of dough into halves. Rewrap one half of the dough and place it back in the fridge. Using a chilled, floured stone or a chilled, floured board, roll the first half into a round larger than the bottom of the pie pan. Take the pie pan from the fridge. Using a rolling pin, flip the far edge of the dough over the pin toward you and roll up the dough onto the pin. Carry this to the greased chilled pie pan and lay the dangling edge of the dough over the near edge of the pan. Unroll the dough into the pan. Trim excess (any dough that hangs more than an inch over the edge of the pan) with scissors.
5. Fill the bottom crust with the apple filling, sprinkle it with the lemon juice, then dot the top of the filling with bits of the butter.
6. Take the other half of the dough from the fridge and roll out the top crust so it’s large enough to generously cover the pie. Again trim off any excess with scissors. Press the edge of the top crust into the edge of the bottom crust to make a seal, and flute the edge with the back of a table fork.
7. Lightly sprinkle the top of the crust with a tablespoon full of cinnamon and white sugar mixed half and half. Make five two-inch slices in the top crust with a sharp knife. Bake at 450 F. for 10 minutes, then turn the heat down to 350 F. and bake for 45 to 60 minutes, until the crust is golden brown and the juices are running. Makes one pie. Cool before serving.
Note: Be prepared for compliments.
The conventional food companies still claim that there’s no difference between organic and conventional food regarding nutritional content. The way they put it is: organic food is no better for you than conventional and in fact, could make you sick. They claim that there are absolutely no scientific studies that show organic food to be nutritionally superior.
All of this is, of course, lies. (Yes, lies. It’s one thing to get your facts wrong by mistake, and it’s quite another to get them wrong on purpose. The latter is called lying, and Big Ag has been doing it for decades.) The evidence for organic superiority has been shown over and over again for many years. But now new studies are making it more and more obvious that the old canards against organic food are baseless. To wit:
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A multi-disciplinary research team from Washington State University conducted a two-year study that made side-by-side comparisons of 13 conventional and 13 organic strawberry farms in California. The study analyzed 31 chemical and biological soil properties and the taste, nutrition, and quality of berries from each farm. Researchers in the fields of agroecology, soil science, microbial ecology, genetics, pomology, food science, sensory science, and statistics comprised the study team. The findings included
• Organic strawberries had significantly higher antioxidant activity.
• Organic strawberries had significantly more vitamin C.
• Organic strawberries had significantly higher phenolic levels.
• Organic strawberries showed longer shelf life.
• Organic strawberries contained more dry matter.
• Organic soils excelled in carbon sequestration.
• Organic soils contained more nitrogen in their carbon cycles.
• Organic soils contained more microbial biomass.
• Organic soils showed more enzyme activity.
• Organic soils contained more micronutrients.
The results were published September 1, 2010, in the peer-reviewed online journal, PLoS One. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0012346
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Scientists from the USDA’s Beltsville, MD, facility and Rutgers University in New Jersey studied conventional and organic high-bush blueberries. They found that compared with conventional blueberries:
• Organic blueberries contained significantly higher sugar levels.
• Organic blueberries had significantly more malic acid.
• Organic blueberries contained more phenolic compounds.
• Organic blueberries had significantly more total anthocyanins.
• Organic blueberries had significantly more antioxidant activity.
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, vol. 56, pp. 5788-5794 (2008).
***
Scientists from the University of Florida Department of Horticulture and Washington State University compared 236 organically and conventionally grown foods. They concluded that “organic foods contain, on average, 25 percent higher concentrations of 11 nutrients than their conventional counterparts. Source: http://www.organic-center.org/reportfiles/5367_Nutrient_Content_SSR_FINAL_V2.pdf
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Scientists at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary and the University of Strathclyde in Scotland analyzed 11 brands of organic soup and compared their levels of salicylic acid—known to help prevent hardening of the arteries and bowel cancer—to brands of conventional soup. They found the average level of salicylic acid in organic vegetable soups was 117 nanograms per gram, compared with 20 nanograms per gram in 24 conventional soups. The highest level (1,040 nanograms per gram) was found in an organic carrot and coriander soup. Four of the conventional soups had no detectable levels of salicylic acid. Source: European Journal of Nutrition, Vol. 40, p. 289.
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A professor of chemistry and an undergraduate student team at Truman State University in Missouri found that organic oranges contained 30 percent more vitamin C than conventionally grown oranges, even though the conventional oranges were twice as large as the organic ones. They combined nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and chemical isolation to measure the vitamin C content. Source: Science Daily Magazine, June 2, 2002.
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It’s not only what you get in organic food that’s good for you, it’s also what you don’t get:
Researchers at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Washington, tested the urine of two groups of children for the presence of organophosphorus pesticide metabolites. One group ate primarily organic food, the other ate conventional food. The group who ate conventional food had six times the amount of pesticide metabolites as the children who ate primarily organic foods. In an earlier study, one child who ate only organic food had no measurable amount of pesticide metabolite in his urine at all. Source: Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 109, No. 3, pp. 299-303.
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To sum up a few other studies:
Reviewing 41 published studies comparing organic and conventional fruits, vegetables, and grains, certified nutrition specialist Virginia Worthington concluded that organic produce contained, on average, 27 percent more vitamin C, 21.1 percent more iron, 29.3 percent more magnesium, and 13.6 percent more phosphorus.
Swiss researchers found that organic apples are of higher quality than conventional apples in regards to taste scores, sugar-acidity-firmness index, nutritional fiber content, phenolic compounds content (antioxidants), and something they called vitality index than a glass of its conventional counterpart, according to a recent study at Washington State University.
Research at the University of California at Davis showed that beneficial flavonoid content of tomatoes increased over time as farm fields were kept under organic cultivation, compared to conventional fields where flavonoid concentrations stayed the same from year to year. And the amounts of two flavonoids were 79 percent and 97 percent greater in the organic tomatoes.
Another research team at UC Davis found that organic kiwifruit had much higher levels of total polyphenol content (antioxidants) and vitamin C than their conventional counterparts.
A researcher at Newcastle University in England reported higher levels of antioxidants and lower levels of fungal toxins in organic milk compared to conventional milk. A three-year study in the United Kingdom found that organic milk contained 68 percent more omega-3 essential fatty acid than conventional milk. A Swiss scientists found that lactating mothers who ate organic had 50 percent more beneficial conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in their breast milk than mothers who ate conventional food. An Italian study found that organic pears, peaches, and oranges contain more antioxidants.
The list of studies goes on and on.
A few years ago, I got a telephone call from Popular Science magazine. They were doing a story about science in the new millennium and asked me, “What do you think will be a major science story 100 years from now?” My answer was immediate: “A lot of science will be devoted to tracking down and eliminating rogue genes that are now being inserted into our food crops and other products.”
You see, once a company—let’s take Monsanto as a for-instance—inserts a foreign gene into the DNA of an organism, it has legally created a new organism that can be patented. For example, by inserting a gene for resistance to herbicides into corn and soybeans, Monsanto then patented these “Round-Up Ready” seeds. Farmers using the seeds as planting stock for the next crop of corn and beans run afoul of Monsanto’s legal forces. And they are out there watching. In one well-known case, pollen that carried the GMO (genetically modified organism) gene for herbicide resistance blew into a nearby farmer’s field and his non-GMO crops produced seeds that carried the patented gene. He was sued for millions by Monsanto.
What’s the effect of patenting seeds? According to the United Kingdom’s Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, “Because of the generally negative effects of patents in plant breeding, (we) advise developing countries to completely ban patents on plants and seeds.” A spokesperson for the Rockefeller Foundation in New York added, “Tomorrow’s supercrops may end up like many of today’s medicines: priced out of the reach of much of the developing world’s growing population.”
It’s already happening, and not just in the Third World. It’s happening right here at home. Monsanto tops the list of the 10 largest companies in the world’s seed business. Patented seeds have grown from a third to over one half of the total $50 billion seed market in the past decade. Over the past 20 years, the price of cotton seed has multiplied by 12 times, corn by six, and soy by a factor of five.
And here’s a scary statistic: in 1996, between one and two percent of U.S. corn and soy acreage was planted to Monsanto’s GMO seeds. By 2000 it was 45 percent. By 2005 it was 80 percent, and by 2007, it was 90 percent. It’s estimated that in 2010, 93 percent of the soybean acreage, 93 percent of cotton acres, 86 percent of corn acres, and 95 percent of sugar beet acreage in the United States is planted with GMO seeds.
And now a move is afoot by some of the biggest seed companies to patent not just the seeds of specific kinds of crop plants, but to patent wide ranges of plant functions with an eye to controlling the future biomass market. Biomass is another word for the remains of anything—plant or animal—that was once alive, such as wood waste, sawgrass cuttings, and weeds. Biomass can be converted into fuel. Fuel powers our mobility. We may be seeing a shift from reliance on fossil fuels to the beginning of reliance on renewable biomass fuels. Do we really want our energy future in the hands of Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer Crop Science, and the rest of the top 10? If Monsanto had our best interest at heart, would they market products like the bovine growth hormone that turns cows into sickly milk machines?
Philosopher, metaphysician, mystic, and scientist Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian, developed the biodynamic method of gardening and farming in the early 20th Century. It is fundamentally and practically organic gardening and farming, with its tenets put down by Steiner before what we think of today as organic gardening and farming was even developed. Modern organics came later via Englishman Sir Albert Howard in the 1930s and American J.I. Rodale in the 1940s. Steiner’s insistence that toxic chemicals have no place in the garden or on the farm predated even the development of many of the agricultural chemicals in use by conventional growers today.
But Steiner went far beyond just organic gardening and farming. His vision was much more inclusive. Here’s a capsulization of his thinking:
There is a spiritual world that exists beyond our everyday world, and human beings can make contact with, learn from, and be improved by contact with this spiritual world. We are endowed with the ability to reach this higher plane, but we must develop that ability through study and techniques for awakening ourselves. He claimed to be in contact with that transcendental world, and from it received the ideas that became biodynamic gardening and farming.
Foremost is the idea that a garden or farm is formed in part through the spiritual world’s influences. Also that the cosmos above us and the earth energies below us form a continuum of which the surface-based garden or farm is just a part. So seeds and rooted plants are planted in the ground during the proper phases of the moon. Celestial influences are taken into account.
The garden or farm is thought of as a unified whole that can be organized so that all its life forms are connected and balanced. The garden or farm thus becomes harmoniously balanced among its parts and as a whole, and the whole is balanced within the cosmic framework. A corollary of this axiom is that as few outside inputs to the farm or garden should be made as possible. Everything turns into compost and is recycled. Perhaps the practitioner will import iron and gasoline, but not too much more. The constant recycling of the garden or farm’s organic matter means that a mix of microorganisms and larger plants and animals can develop that are specific to that site, creating food with a taste of the place it’s grown. And as the garden or farm becomes more and more uniquely of the place where it’s sited, unforeseen benefits and unpredictable quirks will accrue. The garden or farm is meant to be one of a kind, just as each human being is one of a kind, and biodynamics is the way to get there.
To aid nature’s processes in the garden or on the farm, the biodynamic practitioner creates homeopathic doses of preparations that encourage the development of humus—a very beneficial substance—in the soil. Other preparations help plants resist fungus, mold, and insect attack. Many people who are new to biodynamics start to lose their grip on the method when it comes to these preparations, because they do seem to be some form of Germanic “magic.” A cow horn is filled with fresh manure and buried overwinter and a preparation made from the horn’s contents when it’s dug up in the spring. Certain herbs are stuffed into a stag’s bladder and buried for a year. Quartz is pounded to dust and stirred into a liquid, then sprayed on crops.
While these preparations seem to verge on mysticism and magic, it’s important to try to see them the way Steiner did: as ways to work with earth and cosmic energies, as he was shown by insights gained from a higher level of consciousness. A lot of research has been done that shows that biodynamics has a very beneficial effect on crops and the great wheel of life in the garden or farm. It’s organic gardening and farming with a transcendental twist. Emerson and Thoreau would have loved it.
Those who disparage organic food often claim it’s too expensive and imply that consumers are being scammed.
Well, it’s true that organic food is often more expensive than conventionally grown food. But let’s examine why a little more closely.
It’s more expensive to control weeds organically. The conventional farmer simply sprays herbicides. One pass through the rows with a pre-emergence herbicide and one more later on in the season is all that’s needed. The organic farmer, on the other hand, has to plow down the weeds several times during the growing season, which uses more fuel for the tractor.
Conventional farming is like a paint-by-numbers painting. Put down herbicides on this date. Spray fungicide on that date. Fertilize with soluble chemical fertilizers on another date. Spray for insects on yet another date. Organic farming is more like doing a real painting. You watch the season develop and respond as nature would rather than on a set schedule. You pay for farm animals that control weeds and eat insects, as well as yield meat, eggs, and milk.
Crop rotations may mean some of the land is allowed to lie fallow for a season, giving it a rest from growing crops, and from making money.
All of these factors and more make organic farming somewhat more expensive than conventional farming—until you factor in the hidden costs of conventional farming.
The government subsidizes many crops on the conventional farm, even paying some farmers for not growing certain crops. Who pays for this? You do, through your taxes.
When farm workers get sick from exposure to agricultural chemicals, who pays their doctor bills? You do, through your taxes that support health clinics and Medicaid. And who pays for the illness chemical-laden, GMO-riddled, antibiotic-infected food causes in your family? We all do.
When the routine use of antibiotics in cattle, milk cows, chickens, and other farm animals breeds antibiotic-resistant strains of dangerous bacteria, who pays for the sickness these bacteria cause and for the cost of developing new drugs? You do.
When runoff from feedlots and other confinement facilities for farm animals fouls ground waters and waterways, who pays for clean-up? You do, if there’s any clean-up at all.
When tainted food is discovered and recalled, who pays for the illness that’s caused and for the government bureaus that monitor and enforce the recalls? You do.
When conventional farming depletes the soil of organic matter and renders it vulnerable to erosion, who’s paying the cost? Our children and grandchildren, who will inherit lifeless land. And who pays for dredging the silt that clogs rivers and streams after erosion has carried the soil into them? We do, through our taxes and the Army Corps of Engineers.
There are many more areas in which the true cost of conventional food is hidden from consumers. These costs are real, and we all pay them through our taxes or by other means. But pay them we do.
By comparison, organic food is far cheaper than conventional food.
Seems like I've always had dogs and cats. And over the years, I have learned one thing about these animals. The cats always want to eat the dog food and the dogs always want to eat the cat food. And that’s even though the foods are formulated especially for dogs and cats. Although we think of these pets as dumb, they aren’t dumb at all. The cat is thinking, “Why does the dog get that food and I don’t? I’m going over there and eat that dog food.” And the dog is thinking, “How come I don’t get what the cat is getting? I’m going over there and eat that cat food.”
I finally solved the conundrum by giving cat food to the dog and dog food to the cat. Reverse psychology. It worked. When they went to eat the other species’ food, the animals then all got their proper nutrition.
It got me to thinking about the way Americans are fed. While folks in other countries, such as Canada and the nations of the European Union, require their food suppliers to state on the labels whether the foods contain any genetically modified organisms, the food lobbies in the United States have paid enough money to our elected representatives that they will not pass similar legislation here. In fact, food companies not only don’t state whether their products contain GMOs, they aren’t even allowed to state whether they contain GMOs on their labels.
The conventional dairy industry has tried to get legislators to pass laws preventing milk producers from stating on their labels that they don’t use bovine growth hormones on their cows—forcing the poor critters to exhaust themselves producing inferior, hormone-laced milk by the gallons. That’s right. They don’t want you to know that organic milk producers don’t use antibiotics and hormones on their cows. They won’t proudly own up to their own depredations and say, “We use bovine growth hormones on our cows, producing cheaper milk for you and giving your little girls and boys a head start on developing nice big breasts.” Oh, haven’t you heard? Girls, especially, are entering puberty at earlier and earlier ages these days. Not only that, they don’t want you to know that organic milk producers don’t use routine antibiotics on their cows, drugs that create strains of super bugs that the medical profession is terrified about. Because our strongest antibiotics no longer kill them.
Bob Dylan, always about 40 years ahead of his time, summed it up nicely in Subterranean Homesick Blues when he sang, “Look out, kids, they keep it all hid.”
So what does all this have to do with my dog who only wants cat food and my cats, that only want dog food? They can’t read the labels either. And yet, they’d be better off eating the foods formulated for them and forgetting about the politics. There’s a lesson there.
At least the dumb-ass choruses of “Drill baby drill!” have quieted down since the Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil fouls our shores, threatens to disrupt our pristine arctic ecosystem, and supports repressive regimes in the Middle East.
The Western United States is being fractured to extract oil from shale. Plans are afoot to build lots of nuclear power plants, when we can’t even dispose of the nuclear waste we’ve already generated—waste that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.
Appalachia has been laid waste and mountaintops shorn off and pushed into pure water streams in pursuit of coal.
Isn’t it time for organic energy?
Remember high school chemistry? You dissolved an electrolyte in water, inserted an anode in one side of the beaker and a cathode in the other, and turned on the electricity. Oxygen bubbled from the anode and hydrogen from the cathode. You captured some hydrogen in a test tube and held it up to a flame to hear the “hydrogen bark” as it burned, recombining with oxygen and leaving only a little water vapor behind as the end product.
Now think about the oceans—millions of square miles of electrolytic solution that covers two-thirds of the earth. An endless supply.
Now think that modern solar cells that we install on rooftops generate electricity that not only power the needs of the household within, but also many times produce enough electricity for some to be sold back to the power grid, literally making the electric meter run backwards.
Now think of all the sunlight that falls on the world’s oceans. All the energy stored in Earth's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas is matched by the energy from just 20 days of sunshine. Each square meter of the earth collects on average the approximate energy equivalent of almost a barrel of oil each year, or 4.2 kilowatt-hours of energy every day. This energy is inexhaustible, renewable daily, and causes no pollution.
Now picture solar electrical panels set into the ocean, especially in the tropics where the energy is most intense. The electricity generated can be sent to attached tanks filled with sea water, and the hydrogen and oxygen generated can be captured. Tanks of the gases can be brought back to land and used as fuel for automobiles, turbines that generate electricity, and all other power needs. When the oxygen and hydrogen are burned and their power utilized, the end product is water vapor that returns to the sky and falls as rain that makes its way back to the oceans.
It’s all renewable, a hundred percent clean, and inexhaustible. It’s organic. Why aren’t we doing this?
Hint: we live in a corporatist state these days, and corporations make lots and lots of money selling fossil fuels that pollute our earth and spread disease among its creatures.
Let’s define terms before looking into arugula. Arugula has so many common names, and so many different plants are called arugula, that it takes a botanist to pick them apart, and even then the botanists give this versatile green a couple of names—something they rarely do. While the correct scientific name is Eruca vesicaria subsp. sativa, most plant scientists just call it Eruca sativa.
The Latin name Eruca has given rise to a slew of common names. In Greece it’s roka, in France it’s roquette, and in Italy, over 2,000 years of cultivation have resulted in a bunch of monikers: ruchetta, rughetta, regula, and rucola. In England and America it’s known as rocket, while in America it has still another name, arugula. You can hear the sound of the Latin name rattling around in all the common names. And there are at least three other, very different plants that aren’t Eruca at all but are called arugula. This herb has gone in and out of fashion over the centuries since colonists brought it to North America from England. It was popular in Colonial days but was out of fashion in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. It’s wildly in fashion again now, however, and with good reason, for when the leaves are picked young, they’re lightly peppery and add zing and snap to a mesclun mix or lettuce-based salad. But that’s just the beginning of what arugula can do in the kitchen. Before deciding its use, though, the organic cook needs to know what sort of arugula he or she is dealing with.
The plants are members of the big crucifer family that includes cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, turnip, rutabaga, radish, mustard, watercress…I could go on. Many members of this family have a spicy pepperiness to them: mustard, radish, curly cress, and watercress among them. So, too, does arugula. In the spring, the young leaves have a mild peppery flavor and resemble the leaves of turnips and radishes (although they aren’t fuzzy or hairy like them). As hot weather arrives, raw arugula leaves become unpleasantly peppery and fuzzy little hairs do develop on the undersides of the leaves. They get tougher in texture. At that stage, arugula is better used as a potherb or as a cooked green. Cooking reduces pepperiness but increases a pleasant bitterness that works well against savory and sweet flavors like beans and onions, but still, easy does it with mature, summertime leaves.
Although the peppery flavor diminishes after the plant flowers, the leaves are usually too tough then to make pleasant eating. The flowers, on the other hand, are a delight. Creamy-white little mustard-like edible flowers have fine red veining and make a pretty garnish on salads, adding a light orange aroma that you can detect if you hold a handful of them to your nose. In ancient Rome, the seeds were used as a condiment, and in India and Pakistan today the seeds are pressed for jamba oil, as it’s called there. Besides true Eruca, two species of the genus Diplotaxis are sold as “wild arugula.” Diplotaxis erucoides is a herb that tastes very similar to true arugula and might be found in some farmers markets. It’s not hard to find in Italy, where it’s often cooked with pasta or dry beans. In The Cook’s Garden Seed catalog of organic seeds, it’s listed as “Selvatica Arugula.” Diplotaxis muralis might also be found at the odd farmers market or Italian market as “wild arugula.” It goes by the name of rucola selvatica, or sylvetta. (Where’s a taxonomist when you need one?) And if you have a Turkish market near you, check for “Turkish arugula,” which is really Bunias orientalis. The wild arugulas and Turkish arugula are even more peppery than true arugula, and have leaves that are more slender and finely toothed. They’re usually eaten as a potherb or cooked with beans in their native country and in eastern Europe, where they’re popular. Yet another plant is called rocket: Hesperis matronalis, also known as dame’s rocket. This is a pretty meadow and roadside weed that has naturalized in the eastern U.S., but it’s not a culinary item.
But most likely you’ll find true arugula at the markets. Mid- to late spring is a good time to find choice leaves for salads. The ideal is to find leaves about four inches long, which are at their peak of freshness. Much that’s grown commercially in the west is organic because it’s not a plant that attracts many insects. The pepper in the leaves is probably a defense mechanism against insect attack. But in the eastern states, the common flea beetle hones in on crucifers and bites tiny holes in the leaves. The presence of some round holes the size of a pinhead indicates that the plants weren’t sprayed. Careful organic market gardeners have many tools to foil the flea beetles, but if they’re around, a few usually find a way to leave their calling cards in the form of little round holes.
Because fresh arugula gives off a warm, tingly smell, it makes a fine bed under ingredients like sun-dried tomatoes, slices of pear, radicchio, sliced chicken breast, shrimp, blue cheeses, carpaccio, pine nuts, pecans, and slivers of avocado drenched in lemon juice. Slice a piece of focaccia open and line it with a few arugula leaves, some crumbly goat cheese, and a slice of Italian deli meat for a fine sandwich. A few chopped leaves in potato salad alleviates its mayonnaisey blandness.
Bernadette Burrell is the chef at Dempsey’s in nearby Petaluma, and she says arugula is one of her very favorite ingredients to use at the restaurant. She grows it at home in her organic garden. “I like to put it on hot pizza so it just wilts, then drizzle it with a little olive oil,” she says. As for me, I throw some leaves in the bean pot and have stuffed home-made ravioli with arugula mixed with provolone cheese and porcini mushrooms and served them in a light and lemony cream sauce. Another interesting use for arugula is as an ingredient in creamed spinach—a dish that has lately gone out of style but is always a crowd pleaser. Make your creamed spinach as usual, but add a cup of chopped, fresh arugula to the spinach before steaming it.
Another way to use arugula is to sow a flat of soil with seed and place out on a deck or sunny porch. When the peppery seedlings show four leaves, cut them off and use like any other sprout. It’s as a player in mesclun that arugula really shines, though, giving bite to what otherwise might be bland or bitter. Toss this mesclun with some chopped, pickled artichoke hearts and the pickling solution from the jar, sprinkle on a few oil-cured olives (pit them first), then top with shavings of Reggiano-Parmigiano cheese. So simple. So good.
The wonderful thing about this time of year is that the locally-produced, organic food is at its most abundant, highest quality, and lowest price. This is the time to buy as much of those foodstuffs that dry, can, or freeze well and put up as much as you can for the cold months, when the same foodstuffs will be at their scarcest, lowest quality, and most expensive. Here’s a list of what I generally put up:
--Tomatoes. You can put them up as whole peeled, canned tomatoes; as canned spaghetti sauce with onions, garlic, and fresh herbs like oregano and basil, or simply freeze whole tomatoes, skins on, in gallon freezer bags. When you want fresh sauce for pasta or pizza in January, thaw out a few and cook them. As they cook, the skins will lift right off. I put up about 48 quarts of spaghetti sauce and freeze a few dozen whole tomatoes. If you live in an area where winters will freeze out your basil and oregano, simply cut stems of these herbs, tie them together, and hang upside down in a dry, dark, warm closet until the stems snap when bent, then store them as dried herbs in the freezer. Oregano will freeze well as a fresh herb, or whiz these herbs in a blender with enough water so they form a thick puree, then pour into ice cube trays and freeze. Store the cubes in plastic freezer bags. When making winter sauce or soups, simply toss a cube or two into the pot. Here’s a trick that will bring your spaghetti sauce to life. Add one half teaspoon of ground cinnamon to each gallon of sauce and stir in well before canning.
--Peaches. In a large bowl, make syrup from two parts water, one half part lemon juice, and one half part honey. Buy fresh yellow freestone peaches by the flat. Boil them a batch at a time for about two minutes, then run under cold water and slip off the skins. With a paring knife, cut crescent-shaped slices from around the peach, dropping them into the lemon-honey liquid. Place a dessert’s-worth of peaches in pint freezer bags along with just enough liquid to cover and twist-tie or zip lock the bags closed, then freeze.
Here’s an old-fashioned recipe for peach liqueur: in a large stone crock, pour a thin layer of sugar in the bottom. Cover the sugar with a single layer of sound, fresh, ripe whole peaches, then cover these with sugar. Add another layer of peaches, then sugar, peaches, sugar, peaches, until you reach about six to eight inches from the rim. Cover the top of the crock with plastic film, wax paper, or several layers of cheesecloth, then with a large plate or other heavy cover, and finally cover with a towel or cloth. Store this in the back of a room-temperature closet until the Christmas-New Year’s holidays. Open the crock and ladle the liquid that has formed into a funnel set into the spout of plastic one-gallon water jugs, leaving three or four inches of head space at the top of the jugs. Screw on the caps and freeze for 24 hours. Working over a large basin, cut away the plastic and crack open the frozen ice. Discard the plastic and frozen ice. The liquid that runs into the basin can be poured into jars with tight lids and stored in the fridge. You will find it to be liquid gold.
--Berries. Blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries can be placed one layer deep on baking sheets and quickly frozen in the freezer. Then place the berries in freezer bags and store in the freezer. Add a bag to the peaches when you serve them during the winter.
--Strawberries. Whiz strawberries in a blender with a tablespoon of lemon juice until they form a thick puree. Place one cup of this puree in pint freezer bags and freeze, storing them in the freezer. Strawberries frozen whole or as slices tend to turn to mush when thawed, so freeze them as puree. You can then thaw and swirl through home-made ice cream during the winter, or combine with frozen blanched rhubarb stalks and cook gently to make a strawberry-rhubarb pie filling.
--Peas. Grow a fall crop of English or garden peas or buy fresh at the farmers’ market. At home, blanch the pods in boiling water for two minutes, then drain and store a meal’s worth of the unopened pods in quart freezer bags with as much air excluded as possible. In the winter, fill a bowl with hot water from the tap about 45 minutes before dinner is ready and place a freezer bag of peas, still in the bag and still in their pods, in the hot water. A few minutes before dinner, open the bag and shell out the peas into a saucepan, discarding the pods. Add a little water and gently heat just until the peas are hot and serve immediately. They will taste like summer.
This is just the beginning of what you can do with the end-of-summer organic bounty all around us now. If you don’t have a freezer, you might consider investing in one. When you think about what you pay for commercial frozen foods or imported fruits and vegetables in the wintertime—especially when you think about the agricultural chemicals used on those wintertime foods and the fact that the varieties are not chosen for taste but rather for their shipping qualities—it makes a ton of sense to put up your own food when the harvest season is upon us.
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