These may be the days of blistering summer heat, but in less than two months, the nights will be turning colder and the days will be in the heavenly seventies during the day. The humidity of August will blow away, revealing the clear, clean, blue sky of September—and in much of the upper portion of the country, the summer garden will only last until October’s frosts bring it down.
So right now is the time to plant your fall garden. Think about the crops that like the cool weather and start them now. Spinach, kale, broccoli, potatoes, rutabagas, chard, cauliflower, lettuce, peas, and even late crops of bush beans, beets, and carrots will produce before the first frosts. You can plant fast-growing crops like radishes and turnips even later, toward the end of August in much of the country.
Of course, in the blazing heat of late July and August, your new, tender seedlings will need some protection from the fierce sun. Cover them with floating row covers, or plant them where they will get mid-day shade from something you can later remove, like a wheelbarrow. Whatever works.
Even on the West Coast, with its 300-plus day growing season and Mediterranean climate, the fall garden can start going in now—but you folks can plant squashes and other heat loving crops because the cold weather doesn’t really set in until November, and then you may not get a frost until December.
Back East, a lot of gardeners get the gardening bug at the end of the long, cold winters. In April and May, food gardens are put in. They yield brilliantly through June and July. But then in the heat of mid-summer, the weeds really get going and the thought of weeding on a humid, 90-degree day doesn’t seem so good. And so the garden goes to ruin, and by September, it’s entirely over.
Don’t let that happen this year. Garden smart. Put in your fall garden now. Enjoy fresh, home-grown food from now until frost. It may take a little time and sweat now, but you’ll be happy you did it when the cool weather rolls around.
Despite the distressed state of the economy, U.S. sales of organic products grew a healthy 5.3 percent during 2009 to reach $26.6 billion, according to the Organic Trade Association. Of that figure, $24.8 billion represented organic food. And within the category of organic food, 2009 organic fruit and vegetable sales rose 11.4 percent over 2008 sales. Most dramatically, organic fruits and vegetables now represent 11.4 percent of all U.S. fruit and vegetable sales.
Here’s more encouraging news. Certified organic farm, orchard, vineyard, and pasture acreage reached more than 4.8 million acres in 2008. This means that 4.8 million acres in the U.S. are safe places for farmers, farm animals, wildlife, and all the creatures who might visit that land. Run-off is reduced under organic cultivation, meaning fewer streams, lakes, and rivers and fewer sources of ground water will be polluted with soluble chemical fertilizers. Soil erosion will be curtailed on those acres. Drought conditions won’t be so severe because organic soils hold water like a sponge and this will reduce the need for irrigation.
Once again, nature reveals that when you do things organically—in harmony with nature rather than working to defeat her—you can expect a host of unintended benefits to arise.
***
In another matter, I recently went over to the Robert Mondavi Winery where three acres of grapevines are being started using the Waterboxx, a simple device that captures moisture from the air to supply plants with just enough water to get them started through the first year, after which they will be dry farmed.
The Waterboxx was invented by Peter Hoff, a Dutch engineer who was there describing his invention. Trials of the Waterboxx are going on at Mondavi, but also Spain, France, Kenya, Morocco, Holland, and Ecuador. Ninety percent of plants started with a Waterboxx survived, while only 10 percent irrigated by overhead watering or flooding survived in trials on desert land in Morocco.
After the first year, the Waterboxx can be removed from the plant and used on another. The device allows the reforestation of land from deserts to denuded mountainsides. It might be especially valuable in a country like Haiti, where almost all woody plants have been stripped and used for firewood.
For more information, visit www.groasis.com.
First there was Jerome I. Rodale, called Jerry by his friends and J.I. by everyone else, who, in the late 1930s, when civilization was celebrating the invention of DDT to control crop-destroying insect pests, cried, “Stop!” He knew at that early date that agricultural chemicals were wrecking nature. So in 1943, he started a little magazine called Organic Farming & Gardening. He saw that human health was built from the ground up: healthy soil produces healthy plants produces healthy animals that eat them, and this health passes right into the humans who sit atop the food chain.
He also saw that human health doesn’t depend on effectively healing people after they get sick as much as it does on preventing sickness in the first place; so, in 1950, he started Prevention magazine.
After J.I. died in 1971, his son Bob took over the company, known then as Rodale Press. Bob saw that besides eating organic food and taking necessary vitamins and minerals as diet supplements, health also depended on vigorous physical activity. He developed a large book publishing division. And he began publishing fitness magazines like Bicycling and Runner’s World, and gave the green light to the fabulously successful Men’s Health.
When Bob died in 1990, his widow Ardath chaired the board and handed the reins to executives outside the Rodale family. Meanwhile Bob and Ardath’s daughter Maria was growing up and working in various parts of the company. In recent years, especially since the death of her mother in 2009, Maria has guided the company, publishing Women’s Health to join the line-up of health and fitness magazines. Maria has become CEO and Chairman of Rodale Inc., placing a family member back at the head of this family-owned company.
Doing some investigative reporting, she has now published a book called, “Organic Manifesto—How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe.” In it, she examines the unholy alliances formed between the chemical companies that produce fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, antibiotics, growth hormones, and genetically altered seeds, the agricultural educational system that is virtually subsidized by those same companies, and the government agencies in thrall to powerful lobbyists, all of which perpetuates dangerous farming practices and deliberate misconceptions about organic farming and foods. Interviews with government officials, doctors, scientists, and farmers from coast to coast bolster her position that chemical-free farming may be the single most effective tool we have to protect our environment and, even more important, our health.
There is a small industry devoted to telling lies about organic agriculture. Dennis Avery, for instance, directs the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues and regularly produces screeds telling people the nasty ways in which they and their children will die from eating dirty, filthy organic food. The Hudson Institute is a conservative think tank supported by agribusiness corporations who use people like Avery as mouthpieces for their propaganda. Could the Institute’s antipathy toward organic food also be due to the fact that Cuba has won international acclaim for converting its agriculture to organics? You know what right wingers think of Cuba.
The “Organic Manifesto” should help set the record straight. Ms. Rodale inherited a positive, health-oriented, environmentally-sound, and ecologically protective world view along with her genes from the founders of the organic movement in America. If you’re interested in the book, follow this link:
www.amazon.com/Organic-Manifesto-Farming-Planet-World
It’s summer. Cheap, good Spanish red wines are in the stores. All we need for the perfect outdoor dinner party is a steaming paella—organic of course. Here’s my favorite recipe for this traditional Spanish entire-meal-in-one-pan dish. To be truly authentic, you need a two-handled paella pan, available at good cookery stores. They come in several sizes, but buy one at least 18 inches in diameter or 24 inches or more if you’re going to feed a small crowd. The following recipe feeds 12. Halve it for six people. Note that you start a day before you make the paella by marinating the chicken overnight. This recipe is adapted from one produced by Kitchen On Fire (www.kitchenonfire.com) in Berkeley.
For the chicken:
3 Tbl. extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. ground coriander
1 tsp. smoked paprika
½ tsp. ground cayenne
1 ½ tsp. finely minced garlic
3 tsp. lemon juice
1 ½ tsp. kosher salt
12 small chicken drumsticks or 24 drumettes (the first wing joint)
1. Combine the seasonings and chicken in a large gallon zip-lock bag or a bowl.
2. Close the bag or cover the bowl and place in the refrigerator overnight.
3. Before you start the paella, place the chicken on a baking sheet and roast at 375 F. for about 30 minutes. They will finish cooking in the paella.
For the paella:
6 Tbl. extra virgin olive oil
12 oz. spicy sausage, such as andouille or merguez, cut into 4-inch pieces
6 cups short grain rice
½ cup tomato, chopped
½ cup onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. saffron threads
12 cups chicken stock
2 Tbl. kosher salt
24 cherrystone or manila clams, scrubbed
24 black mussels, debearded and scrubbed
12 large shrimp, shells on
2/3 cup fresh garden peas, blanched
2/3 cup piquillo peppers, cut into thin strips
2 lemons, cut into wedges
1. Place the paella pan on a grate above a charcoal fire or gas grill so it reaches a medium high heat. Too high a heat will cause burning. Add the olive oil and coat the bottom of the pan with it.
2. Add the sausage and fry it for one or two minutes, stirring it frequently.
3. Add the rice and stir it around constantly for 2 minutes.
4. Add the tomato, onion, garlic, and saffron, mixing it into the rice.
5. Add the chicken stock, chicken pieces, and salt.
6. Bring the stock to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. (On a charcoal grill, pull coals to one side and place paella pan on the other side. Leave grill uncovered.)
7. Add the clams, mussels, and shrimp.
8. When the stock is mostly reduced, add the peas and piquillo peppers.
9. Remove any unopened shellfish. Stir gently until the stock is absorbed.
10. Serve hot onto individual plates with a lemon wedge, or let diners serve themselves from the communal pan.
Organic gardeners and farmers like to say they work with nature, not against her, and that’s the secret to the health of their soil and the products—vegetable and animal—that derive from that soil.
That’s true, but it’s also a very human-centric way of understanding organics. The deeper truth is that wild nature herself is organic, and as practitioners of agriculture and horticulture, human beings simply have to avoid interfering too aggressively in order to be organic, too.
Consider the forest primeval, or any place on earth where green things grow. This year’s detritus—deciduous leaves, bits of twigs and bark, insect bodies, dead animals, and so on—falls to the ground where it decays through the action of funguses, microorganisms, worms, and other creatures and becomes the compost from which next year’s plants will take their nourishment. The organic gardener’s compost pile is just this same process confined in a small place.
Another saying of the organic community is that the greater the diversity of an ecosystem, the greater its health. Look at a farmer’s field of corn or soybeans. Not much diversity there, and so those fields are vulnerable to attack by pests, requiring the use of pesticides if the farmer is conventional, or less toxic controls if the farmer is organic. But look at wild nature. In a climax ecosystem, just about every trophic level is filled. There are canopy trees, understory trees, shrubs, perennial forbs, and annual plants. Diversity reigns. And in the wild places where humans haven’t damaged the ecosystem, health reigns, too. Yes, there are plant-eating insects, but there are also insect-eating insects, and rarely do the plant eaters destroy their own food supply completely, because to do so would be to destroy themselves in the process.
All the lessons one needs to learn in order to be a good organic gardener or farmer are laid out in wild nature. Nature isn’t the kind of teacher who will lecture you, but she is a teacher who will show you how to operate. From us, she requires that we use our intelligence to understand her ways and mimic them in our gardens and on our farms.
The beauty part is that her classroom is always open, her lessons are always profound, and the learning can last a lifetime.
Well, it's unfair to single out the food companies for making us sick. The makers of drugs, personal care products, plastics, mattresses, electronics, and many other manufactured items use hundreds of chemicals to make their products, and the chemicals they use either enter our bodies directly or find their way through circuitous routes into our air, food, and water and then into us.
In this instance, let “us” include not only individuals, but the as-yet-unborn. Developing fetuses swim in amniotic fluid that contains hundreds—yes, hundreds—of chemicals. It’s one thing for adult human beings to encounter chemicals, but for those of us still developing, especially those still in the womb, the development of our delicate endocrine and nervous systems, among others, can be compromised by this toxic overload.
In a full-page ad in The New York Times, physicians at the Center for Children’s Health and the Environment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York said in part, “We are deeply troubled that an estimated 12 million American kids suffer from developmental, learning, or behavioral disabilities. Attention deficit disorder affects three to six percent of our schoolchildren...certain pesticides cross the placenta and enter the brain of the developing fetus where they can cause learning and behavioral disabilities…Exposures to organophosphate pesticides during pregnancy can result in abnormally low brain weight and developmental impairment…A University of Arizona study found that children exposed to a combination of pesticides before birth and through breast milk exhibited less stamina, and poorer memory and coordination, than other kids.” For more information, see www.childenvironment.org.
The Environmental Working Group found an average of 232 chemicals in the cord blood of 10 babies born late last year, according to CNN’s recent series, “Toxic America.” “For 80 percent of the common chemicals in everyday use in this country, we know almost nothing about whether or not they can damage the brains of children, the immune system, the reproductive system, and the other developing organs,” said Dr. Phil Landrigan, a pediatrician and director of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. “It’s really a terrible mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
The mess is especially messy in the area of conventionally produced food, such as beef cattle and their use in fast food outlets. Remember the deaths caused by E. coli at Jack in the Box a few years ago? Turns out that there are now six more strains of E. coli that have pretty much been ignored but have recently caused a spate of kidney failures and other problems across the country. These strains are not tested for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture right now, but there is pressure for testing to begin. Why no testing? Dr. Richard Raymond, who was the head of USDA’s food safety division from 2005 to 2008 said he stopped short of banning the rarer strains of E. coli in ground beef “because he thought he would not be able to defend the decision against industry criticism,” according to an article, “In E. Coli Fight, Some Strains Are Largely Ignored” (N.Y. Times, May 26, 2010).
These bad E. coli strains develop in the guts of cattle fed grains to fatten them before slaughter. Grain is an unnatural food for cattle and their unbalanced digestive systems allow these bad bacteria to develop. The beef then finds its way into local markets, school lunch programs, and, especially, into fast food outlets.
Who owns these fast food companies? According to Harvard Medical School researchers,, 11 large companies that offer health, life, and disability insurance owned about $1.9 billion in stock in the five largest fast food companies as of June, 2009. The fast food companies included McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, and Taco Bell. The insurance companies include Massachusetts Mutual, Northwestern Mutual, and Prudential Financial. Ah yes, the health insurance companies—the ones that pick our pockets should we happen to fall ill.
“The insurance industry cares about making money, and it doesn’t really care how,” says the senior author of the Harvard study, J. Wesley Boyd, M.D.
So, it’s not just the big food companies that are making us sick and poisoning our babies, it’s corporate America straight across the board.
Our best defense, of course, is to be scrupulous about eating organic.
Cold-brewed coffee is all the rage among coffee aficionados these days, and it could hardly be simpler to make. The following recipe makes a coffee concentrate, but one with less acid and less caffeine than coffee brewed with hot water. When using, try it mixed 50/50 with cold nonfat milk, then heated in a microwave for 2 1/2 minutes. For black coffee, dilute the concentrate with an equal amount of water or even twice the water. Freeze some of the concentrate into ice cubes and use them with an equal number of regular water ice cubes to make iced coffee. Ah, iced coffee—it could be the most refreshingly cooling summer drink of all. Reduce this recipe by half if using a mason jar:
1 pound coffee beans, finely ground
9 cups water
1. In a large jar with a screw-on lid, place the coffee grounds and add the water. Screw on the lid. Let stand on the kitchen counter out of direct sunlight overnight.
2. Strain the coffee into a pitcher through a fine sieve, several layers of cheesecloth, or cloth tea-brewing bag, then through a paper coffee filter to catch any hazy sediment.
3. Store the concentrate as ice cubes or covered in the fridge for 4 to 5 days.
It doesn’t get any more mainstream than the President’s Cancer Panel, established in 1971, and currently comprised of three distinguished physicians appointed by President George W. Bush. They report directly to the President, and recently delivered a 200-page report urging Americans to reduce cancer risks by, among other things, eating organic food.
Somewhere in heaven, J.I. Rodale should take a bow, for he warned us about the links between environmental chemicals and cancer, and the benefits of eating unpolluted organic food, seventy years ago. The agricultural chemistry industry called him a “nut,” a “kook,” and a danger to the country.
But as the Cancer Panel points out, our regulatory agencies—the EPA and FDA in particular—don’t do a good job safeguarding citizens against cancer-causing chemicals, and the result can be disastrous to our health. Their report notes that the danger is greatest during pregnancy, when the fetus is most vulnerable, and that 300 contaminants have been detected in the cord blood of newborn babies, which means amniotic fluid is also a chemical soup. “To a disturbing extent,” the report says, “babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’”
“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says, “and many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”
The report gives a list of things people can do to reduce their cancer risk. One of those things is “to give preference to food grown without pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and growth hormones.”
***
In related news, Congress now has before it the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which it has yet to pass. This bill, if enacted into law, would prevent agribusiness from routinely using antibiotics on meat and milk animals, a common practice that encourages the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And that means when human beings develop infections, those antibiotics are rendered useless to fight them.
Donald Kennedy, a former FDA commissioner and now professor of environmental science at Stanford, recently wrote, “Agribusiness argues—as it has for 30 years—that livestock need to be given antibiotics to help them grow properly and keep them free of disease. But consider what has happened in Denmark since the late 1990s, when that country banned the use of antibiotics in farm animals except for therapeutic purposes. The reservoir of resistant bacteria in Danish livestock shrank considerably, a World Health Organization report found.” You might encourage your Congresspeople to vote for the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act.
***
In more related news, pesticides are now being linked to the development of ADHD in children. According to a report on Health.com, which quotes a study that appeared in the journal Pediatrics, “Children exposed to higher levels of a certain pesticide found in trace amounts on conventionally grown fruit and vegetables are more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than children with less exposure. Researchers measured the levels of pesticide byproducts in the urine of 1,139 children from across the United States. Children with above-average levels of one common byproduct had roughly twice the odds of being diagnosed with ADHD.”
What is the pesticide at fault here? Organophosphates, which disrupt the nervous systems of insects. “Organophosphates are designed to have toxic effects on the nervous system,” says the lead author of the Pediatrics study. “That’s how they kill pests.” These pesticides act on a set of brain chemicals closely related to those involved in ADHD, the author said, “so it seems plausible that exposure to organophosphates could be associated with ADHD-like symptoms.”
Organophosphate pesticides are among the most widely used pesticides in conventional farming. Recent tests showed residues on 28 percent of frozen blueberries, 20 percent of celery, 25 percent of strawberries, 27 percent of green beans, 17 percent of peaches…and on and on.
The bottom line once again is to eat organic food, where no agricultural chemicals are used in production and residues are vanishingly small where they exist at all—and then exist only because of spray drift from nearby chemical farms.
Cherries start coming in during June, but the best pie cherries arrive in July when the tart cherries are ripe. Sweet cherries just don’t have the acid snap to make a succulent pie. Cherry pie demands a scoop of vanilla, so who are we to argue? Kirsch is available at most markets or liquor stores. Make sure your ingredients are organic!
1 1/4 cups sugar
1/3 cup cornstarch
1/2 cup Kirsch
4 cups pitted fresh pie (tart) cherries (or frozen if fresh are unavailable)
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup butter
Cold water
1. Preheat the oven to 425ºF. Mix the sugar and cornstarch in a saucepan, then add the Kirsch and enough water to make a smooth batter, about ½ cup. Set the pan over medium heat and bring to a boil. Continue to boil until the mixture thickens, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add the cherries, cinnamon, allspice, and almond extract, and mix well.
2. In another bowl, mix together the flour and salt. Add the butter and, using 2 knives, cut it into the flour until the flour has a mealy texture. Add cold water a tablespopon at a time and toss it through the dough with two forks until the dough forms a ball.
3. Divide the dough in half, making one half slightly larger than the other. Lightly flour a board or smooth surface and roll out the larger half into a 12-inch circle.
4. Line a 9-inch pie pan with the crust. Fill the pie pan with the cherry mixture. Make a top crust from the second ball of dough, slitting it in several places. Bake for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 375ºF and bake for 50 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown. Remove from the oven to cool on a rack.
Flaky Pie Crust
I’ve heard many ideas about how to make a flaky pie crust but none are as simple and effective as this recipe.
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ tsp. kosher salt
½ cup (1 stick) cold butter
1 ½ Tbl. canola oil
1/3 cup ice water plus more as needed
1. All ingredients should be as cold as possible. Sift the flour and salt together into a mixing bowl. Add the butter and canola oil and cut it into the flour using 2 knives, until it resembles a coarse meal. Add the water, quickly tossing it through the dough.
2. Press the damp dough together. It’s a good idea to use a spatula between your hand and the dough, so you don’t transfer the heat of your hand to the dough. If the butter melts, it soaks into the flour and loses the ability to make a flaky crust. If it forms a ball that doesn’t fall apart, you’ve added enough water. If it’s still crumbly, add ice water one tablespoon at a time until it does form a ball. When the dough holds together, cut it in half, press each piece down into a six-inch round, and wrap in wax paper, then refrigerate.
3. Refrigerate for an hour before rolling the pieces out to make a bottom crust that’s 12 inches in diameter and a top crust that’s 10 inches in diameter. Makes 2 crusts.
The latest news from the genetically modified crop front is—unfortunately and predictably—the same old news: overuse of GMO crops is having unforeseen negative effects.
Unforeseen by conventional farmers who buy the genetically altered seeds, that is. Here’s what’s happening:
Before companies like Monsanto developed the ability to genetically modify crops, they produced old-fashioned herbicides and pesticides. These chemicals did a good job of killing off almost all the pests in the fields where they were sprayed. Almost all the pests, that is, except the few mutant pests who had a natural resistance to the chemicals. These few reproduced and soon the fields were hopping with pesticide-resistant insects.
And so farmers had to move to the harder stuff—chemicals with higher toxicity. And the death spiral was on until today, millions of tons of ever-more-toxic chemicals are used worldwide to control pests and weeds. At great cost to farmers, the environment, and we who consume the farm products.
Enter genetic engineering. This so-called panacea was supposed to reduce the amount of pesticides used in agriculture, and to some extent, it has. But it’s replaced the toxic chemicals with something that produces the same negative effects: resistant pests. As you know, genes form the control panel of life. Humankind learned over the past 30 years how to gain access to this control panel. Now, there is a gene in certain bacilli that programs each bacillus to produce a substance toxic to caterpillars. Organic farmers have been using it for many decades, under the name Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt. It works well and can be applied on an as-needed basis to control corn earworm and other pests whose larvae are caterpillars. Bt doesn’t harm other creatures—only caterpillars.
The genetic engineers thought it would be a good idea to take that disease-causing gene from Bacillus thuringiensis and stick it into the genetic make-up of corn. Today more than 80 percent of the corn grown in the United States contains the gene for the caterpillar toxin. Every cell of the GMO corn carries that gene, even its pollen and so every cell is toxic to caterpillars. GMO corn pollen can travel long distances in a stiff wind, and it has been landing on the host plants of other caterpillar-larvae insects, such as monarch butterflies, killing the butterflies and other insects without discrimination.
And you know what else is happening? Now that the Bt gene is in every cell of virtually every corn plant in the U.S., some mutant insects have developed resistance to it. It won’t be long before the toxic corn will selectively wipe out those caterpillars without resistance, leaving only those with resistance to breed. And so another natural, useful tool to control insects will have been needlessly destroyed.
The same thing is happening with weeds. “Roundup Ready” plants are genetically altered to resist damage by the weed killer glyphosate, trademarked as Roundup. So you can plant your Roundup Ready crops and then kill almost all the field’s weeds with Roundup. Almost all the weeds—except those with a mutation that allows them to resist damage from glyphosate. And so while ordinary weeds die off and don’t reproduce, the mutant weeds reproduce happily. Sound familiar? It’s the same process as with Bt, and with conventional pesticides before them.
But surely we here in the U.S. must be as proactive as the Europeans, who by and large disallow the sales of GMO foods and require food labels that state whether a food contains genetically engineered ingredients. Um, no. If the U.S. government has its way, a powerful intergovernmental group may soon prevent anyone anywhere from labeling GMO food.
This group is promulgating the Codex Alimentarius—guidelines regarding food safety and labeling standards used by the World Trade Organization to settle international disputes regarding food and agriculture export agreements.
The Credo Action group (www.credoaction.com) reports that according to draft language circulated by the FDA, the U.S. will oppose a proposal at an upcoming meeting of a Codex committee that would allow the labeling of GMO food. “Unfortunately,” Credo Action says, “the Obama administration has incorporated pre-existing Bush administration positions stating that Codex should not ‘suggest or imply that GMO foods are in any way different from other foods.’”
Not only would this position allow GMO crops into the organic food supply, where it is expressly prohibited (who can tell if it’s GMO if no one is allowed to tell if it’s GMO?), but the position paper declares that mandatory labeling laws such as they have in Europe are “false, misleading, or deceptive.”
I don’t know about you, but I detect the hand of Big Agriculture—Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Cargill, and the rest of the usual suspects--in these positions. Who else would want to deny the public the right to know what’s in their food? Who else is selling GMO seed (Monsanto recently had to reduce the price of its GMO seed for corn, cotton, and soybeans because farmers were balking at paying its oppressive prices)? Who else profits from false, misleading, and deceptive propaganda about its products except those who call labeling laws for GMO ingredients by those very names?
It’s the old political trick of pointing the finger at your opponent and calling him or her in public what you secretly are in private. Laws requiring food companies to state when they use GMO products give consumers the choice to buy or avoid those products. You can just about hear the discussions in the boardrooms of Big Ag: “We can’t let people know there are GMO ingredients in their food. They might refuse to buy it. Here’s an idea: let’s make rules that say you aren’t allowed to reveal whether or not a food contains GMO products!”
As Bob Dylan wrote, “Look out, kids. They keep it all hid.”
Despite an economy in recession and folks keeping a tight hold on their wallets, sales of organic products in the United States grew by 5.3 percent in 2009, to reach $26.6 billion in sales. Of that figure, $24.8 billion was for organic food, the remaining $1.8 billion in organically-grown products like cotton.
That represents millions upon millions of people voting with their food budgets for clean food produced in an environmentally sustainable way. According to the 2008 Organic Production Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were 14,540 organic farms and ranches in the country that year covering 4.1 million acres. That means more than 4 million acres free from toxic chemicals, safe for wildlife and domestic plants and animals, and safe for farmers, ranchers, and people who use and eat their products.
The top 10 states in number of organic farms were, in decreasing numbers of farms, California, Wisconsin, Washington, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Ohio, Iowa, and Vermont.
The average annual sales of organic farms was $217,675, compared to $134,807 for U.S. farms overall. That’s a difference of $82,868 in premium prices paid to organic farmers for their products. Farm expenditures were higher for organic farms, at $171,978, compared to all U.S. farms at $109, 359. And that’s a difference of $62,619 more expense for the organic farmers. That still gives organic farmers over $20,000 more income than the average U.S. farmer. Nice. Even without taking all the environmental benefits of organic farming into account, farmers who go organic can expect a better bottom line than if they farm conventionally.
A farmer has to wear many hats, and wear them well. He or she has to know and understand soil science, agronomy, agriculture, plant pathology, entomology, meteorology, hydrology, marketing, and economics, among other disciplines. If farmers take a good hard look at the economics of farming, maybe more of them will switch to organics.
This growth is heartening, but around the world, organic growth is even more dramatic. In 2008, nearly 1.4 million farmers, orchardists, and ranchers farmed 86.5 million acres organically, according to BioFach’s “The World of Organic Agriculture.” The acreage total was up nine percent over 2007. Meanwhile, according to IFOAM’s “Organic Monitor” estimates, global organic sales reached $50.9 billion in 2008, double the $25 billion recorded in 2003. IFOAM is the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements.
While we still have a long way to go before world agriculture is entirely safe and naturally productive under organic agriculture, we are definitely on our way to that world.
The short answer is "No."
China has a long record of exporting shoddy and harmful products, from poisonous toys for children, to deadly pet food, to chemical-laden drywall that exudes harmful gas, to foods like peanuts contaminated with cancer-causing aflatoxin molds. Why should their so-called “organic” foods be legitimate?
According to Whole Foods, China’s food products are held to the same standards that apply to organic farmers here in the U.S. If you look at who certifies Chinese foods as organic, you’ll see QAI, which stands for Quality Assurance International. But QAI doesn’t certify Chinese foodstuffs. It simply certifies that the food has been certified by another company.
I say the certification trail grows too long for complete assurance that Chinese organic food really is organic. There are too many hands and too many steps and too much temptation for corruption along the way to trust Chinese organic food.
It’s going to take more than glib assurances from a Whole Foods suit to ease my skepticism. I want to know who exactly is doing the certification, inspecting the farms, testing the soil, watching the production lines. We just found out that during the Bush years, the USDA was lax in enforcing the organic laws here at home, although that has tightened up now that Obama is President. If things were lax here, how much better will they be in China, where schools collapse in earthquakes because unscrupulous cement purveyors sell weak cement to school building contractors?
No—I’m sorry. I read packages. And I believe that the best and safest foods are locally grown, organically-produced, and available in season. If the package says China, I’m outa there.
Ever hear of nano-foods? No? Well, that's on purpose. Most of the larger companies developing nano-foods are keeping their activities quiet (when you search for the term 'nano' or nanotechnology' on the websites of Kraft, Nestle, Heinz and Altria you get exactly zero results).
According to the website Nanowerks, “In the forefront of nano-food development is Kraft Foods, which took the industry’s lead when it established the Nanotek Consortium, a collaboration of 15 universities and national research labs, in 2000. Kraft’s focus is on ‘interactive’ foods and beverages. These products will be customized to fit the tastes and needs of consumers at an individual level.
What does this mean? What is nanotechnology, and what is a nano-food?
Nano- is a prefix that means ultra-tiny. Ultra-tiny particles such as carbon nano-tubes are being used in hundreds of ways to jigger our food supply. Yet New Scientist magazine recently reported, “Injecting carbon nanotubes into mice shows they can trigger toxic responses similar to asbestos fibres, causing a strong immune response and possibly cancer in the abdominal cavity, researchers say.” In another study, when mice inhaled carbon nano-tubes, all of the test subjects died within 9 days.
So how is nanotechnology being used in our food?
One way is to encapsulate nutraceuticals (foods with pharmaceutical properties) in capsules so small you can’t see them, and put them in products like cooking oils. Another is to put flavor enhancing chemicals into nano-capsules and mix them into foods. (To see what flavor enhancers can do, Google “excitotoxins.”) Another is to put nano-tubes (like the ones that killed the mice) into foods to increase their viscosity and ability to gel. Another is to put plant-derived steroids into nano-capsules and use them to replace the natural cholesterols in meats. Another is to seed foods with microscopic nano-particles in order to increase availability of nutrients in foods.
And the list goes on. And that’s just a partial list of what’s being developed for foods. Nanotechnology is also being used in agriculture, food packaging, and in food supplements.
But surely the FDA or EPA is monitoring nanotechnology in foods, right? Wrong. There is no oversight. There are no regulations. Foods containing nano-particles don’t have to be labeled as such.
But nanotechnology is not allowed in organic food products. That’s yet another very good and important reason to eat organically.
One sure way to destroy the integrity of the organic food industry is to fail to enforce the organic food laws, which are very strict about what constitutes organic food.
That’s just what the Bush administration did.
And this is according to the USDA’s Office of Inspector General, which audited and investigated the USDA’s National Organic Program under the Bush years. The Inspector General’s final report was issued March 9 and confirmed the allegation of prominent organic industry watchdog groups that under the Bush administration, the USDA did an inadequate job of enforcing federal organic law.
“Some of the most troubling findings,” says The Cornucopia Institute, a farm policy research group, include the USDA’s failure to follow through on enforcement after violations of the organic law were confirmed by federal law enforcement investigators. “And when enforcement was pursued, the USDA delayed action for as long as 32 months. And the NOP could not document for the Office of Inspector General the status of 19 complaints it received since 2004 that alleged illegal activity,” the Cornucopia Institute reports.
According to Mark Kastel, senior policy analyst at the Institute, “The Bush administration allowed factory farm production to proliferate, gaining as much as 30 to 40 percent of the organic dairy market, in addition to industrial-scale production of eggs and beef.”
However, once the Obama administration took over and Tom Vilsack was appointed Secretary of Agriculture, things began to change. One of Vilsack’s first actions was to appoint Dr. Kathleen Merrigan as Deputy Secretary of the agency. Dr. Merrigan is well known in the organic community as a person knowledgeable about organics and farming and food regulations. She in turn appointed Miles McEvoy to replace Dr. Barbara Robinson, the Bush appointee who headed the National Organic Program, and McEvoy declared “the age of enforcement” was at hand for the NOP.
Not a moment too soon.
It’s not surprising that the Bush administration would ignore the law and let big agriculture have its way. What is surprising is that during all the Bush years since 2002, when the National Organic Program was made into law, very little investigative journalism was done to reveal the extent of the enforcement deficiencies at NOP.
Most Americans have not eaten an actual currant, because if you look for them in the supermarket, you find small, dried, raisin-like fruits that are, in fact, small, seedless, dried Zante grapes. They are called currants simply because they look something like dried black currants.
But it’s worth seeking out real currants because of the diversity of their flavors, their usefulness, and—if you have a yard in the northern half of the country—they make pretty deciduous shrubs that once a year shower you with sweet little fruits.
I have grown three types of true currants—red, black, and white—plus gooseberries, which I include here because they are of the same genus (Ribes) and are something like an oversized currant. Of these, my favorites are the black currants (Ribes nigrum), prized across the countries of northern Europe, especially Germany. They barely cling to productive life here in the hot, dry climate of California, but in Pennsylvania, they were supremely easy to grow. I could take cuttings in the spring and simply stick them into a bed of compost-enriched soil, and by fall, they’d have reliably grown roots and were ready for transplanting to the permanent currant patch. By the time I sold the property, I had 50 black currant bushes, each six feet tall, laden with jet-black, shiny berries the size of small peas each June.
Some people say they aren’t very good raw, but not me. Yes, they have a strong musky flavor, but it’s rich and luscious. I find that commercially processed black currant jams, jellies, fruit juices, and even cassis—the liqueur made from black currants—have lost the musky flavor that makes black currants unique. Yet, when I make black currant syrup at home by simply cooking the berries with some sugar, then straining it, some of that unique flavor is retained. Black currants are very disease resistant and so are almost always grown without the need for chemicals, which doesn’t exactly make them organic. Organic is not just the absence of chemicals, but rather a method of enriching the soil, promoting biodiversity, and working with nature to improve the garden or farm ecosystem as crops are grown and harvested. The bottom line is that fresh black currants at farmers markets and roadside stands will almost surely be free of toxic chemicals, even if the farm isn’t certified organic.
The same applies to white and red currants (Ribes rubrum), and to gooseberries. White currants, which are a sport of red currants that lack the red anthocyanin pigment, are rare to find at the markets, but if you see them, certainly buy them for out-of-hand eating. They are the sweetest and mildest of the currants. The red ones are very tart when they first turn a watery light red in July. If allowed to hang on the bush, they turn a darker, richer red, and that’s when they are really good—still tart, but less so, and sweeter, with a succulent flavor. They also make fine syrups and jellies, and the best melba sauces have a dollop of fresh red currant or red currant jelly mixed into their raspberry base. They’re also an ingredient in Cumberland sauce, a tangy red currant/mustard sauce that’s traditional with cold meats… except the first time I encountered Cumberland sauce, it was at Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, served in a warmed chafing dish with small, little, finger-sized hot dogs as hors d’ouvres, of all things.
Gooseberries (Ribes hirtellum) are about two or three times larger than currants, and somewhat milder-flavored, with a flavor likened to grapes, kiwis, and even apricots. One can use them to make gooseberry fool (stewed gooseberries topped or blended with whipped cream or custard), which is a name I love and which I’m tempted to use as a pejorative. They have a mild tartness to them and are made into jams and preserves. Having grown them, I can attest that they have wicked thorns that the gardener must negotiate when pruning. I could only do the job shirtless, as the proximity of my bare skin to the gooseberry bushes made me extremely conscious and careful of the job at hand. When a gooseberry thorn punctures the skin, it sends a deep intense pain right down to the bone, a pain that lasts for a very unpleasant couple of minutes. My revenge was to eat them by the mouthfuls.
Black currants have been crossed with gooseberries to create a hybrid called the Jostaberry. The fruits are black, closer to a gooseberry in size than to a black currant, and lack the musky, resinous flavor of the black currant. They are occasionally found at farmers markets and roadside stands.
Finally, there are a couple of American native currants that grow wild. Ribes americanum and Ribes odoratum (with its pleasant clove scent to the flowers) produce small, red-black currants on medium-sized bushes. Their fruits are seldom seen in commerce but their genes are found in many of the commercial varieties.
You’ll probably never find true currants of any stripe at the supermarket, but look for them in their June and July seasons at the farmers markets. Whether you make jelly or jam or simple sauce, currants will make the best sort of glaze, to be brushed over fruit toppings, cakes, and pastries. Alpine strawberries can be dipped in currant jelly syrup and then dotted over tapioca puddings or cakes. Ricotta-filled blintzes will come alive when currant jelly syrup is poured over them, accompanied by a dab of crème fraiche. Stir red currant syrup through a banana smoothie for an ambrosial drink. Strew fresh white currants over a summer salad. Their uses are myriad.
LEMON BAVARIAN WITH BLACK CURRANT SAUCE
If you can put this dessert together, you will wow whoever comes in contact with it. One of the best things I’ve ever eaten.
Black Currant Sauce
4 cups black currant berries
1 cup sugar
Squeeze of lemon juice
In a saucepan, over medium heat, heat the black currants and sugar until the berries soften, the juice runs, and the sugar dissolves. Cook until all the juice is expressed. Strain into a bowl, add the lemon juice, and stir. Chill and reserve.
Lemon Bavarian
Although this isn’t a particularly difficult dessert to make, it does take attention to detail. It’s made the night before it’s served. The Bavarian can be frozen after its made and trotted out days afterward, but it will have a slightly different—although still excellent—consistency. Limoncello is the lemon-based liqueur made on the Amalfi coast of Italy.
1 cup plus 3 Tbl. sugar
2 organic lemons
1 ½ Tbl. unflavored gelatin
7 egg yolks
2 tsp. cornstarch
1 ½ cups whole milk
2 Tbl. limoncello
5 egg whites
Pinch salt
½ cup chilled heavy cream
1. Place two tablespoons of the sugar into a mixing bowl and add the zest of two organic lemons.
2. Juice the zested lemons into a measuring cup through a strainer to catch the seeds. You should have about ½ cup of strained lemon juice. Sprinkle the gelatin into the lemon juice, stir, and set aside to soften.
3. Add the egg yolks to the lemon zest-sugar mixture in the mixing bowl and beat until smooth with a wooden spoon. Gradually beat in one cup of the sugar until the mixture is very smooth and pale yellow. Beat in the cornstarch. Heat the milk until almost boiling and dribble it into the egg yolk mixture, beating all the while.
4. Pour the mixture into a saucepan or double boiler and heat gently, stirring with a wooden spoon, until the mixture thickens just enough to coat the wooden spoon. Be careful not to cook too fast or hard, certainly not to boil, or the egg yolks will curdle. If they curdle, all is lost. As soon as the mixture coats the spoon, take it off the heat, add the limoncello and gelatin mixture, and beat for a few moments until the gelatin is completely dissolved and mixed.
5. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites and a pinch of salt until soft peaks form. Sprinkle on one tablespoon of sugar and beat until stiff peaks form. Fold these egg whites into the hot custard in the mixing bowl. Place it in the fridge, and fold the mixture several times while the mixture is cooling, which keeps it from separating, until it’s cold but not quite set.
6. Beat the whipping cream until doubled in volume, then fold it into the custard. Turn the custard into a mold that has been rinsed in cold water and the excess water shaken out. It can be an eight-cup ring mold, simple metal bowl, or whatever. Cover the filled mold with wax paper and place in the fridge overnight. Before serving, remove the wax paper, dip the mold in very hot water for one or two seconds, then cover the bowl with a chilled serving platter and invert so the Bavarian drops free onto the platter.
7. Slice this Bavarian into individual servings, place these on chilled serving plates, and drizzle plenty of black currant syrup over each slice. Serves 8.
Now that the peas have been planted and spring is here, the gardening bug is biting hard. Long-time gardeners will know this, but those just starting out with home vegetable, fruit, or ornamental gardens need to know this: your garden will only be as good as your soil.
So the question becomes, what do we mean by “good” soil?
Good soil is rich loam, and loam is a mixture of sand, silt, clay, and actively decaying organic matter such as compost. A rich loam will have about five percent organic matter, about 15 percent sand, and the rest equal parts silt and clay. Too much sand, and the soil will dry out too fast and you’ll need to be watering too frequently. Too much clay and your soil will be sticky when wet or hard and impenetrable when dry.
Good garden soil will feel crumbly in your hands. You’ll be able to shove your hand down into it easily. It will be dark and brown. The more closely it resembles coffee grounds, the better. Roots can really grow vigorously in this kind of soil, and roots are the plants’ feeding organs, sucking up water and nutrients from the soil.
If you are starting from scratch, be patient. It takes at least three years to turn hard, lifeless soil into rich crumbly loam.
Here’s how to do it. Make sure you have a source of actively decaying organic matter. You can make your own compost (that’s a story for another day, but you can find the basics of how to make compost online), or buy it by the bag, or seek out sources of nutrient-rich organic matter, such as stable or stall sweepings and make heaping piles of them that heat up and rot. Then use the rotted result when the heat cools down—using fresh manure or stable sweepings can burn young plants.
Start small. You can pack a lot of food crops into an area 25 by 10 feet—that’s 250 square feet. Double dig the soil. That is, turn over and loosen the soil about a foot deep, then, moving soil aside, dig down a second foot deep in the layer under the first layer. Rent a tiller for the initial layer, or dig two layers deep at once by having a local farmer come over and rip your soil with a ripper attachment on his or her tractor.
Remove large rocks and roots from the soil. Add a layer of compost six inches thick over the new garden area and then cover it a foot deep in spoiled hay or unspoiled hay if you don’t mind paying for it. Make sure the hay doesn’t contain mature plant seeds.
Plant by pulling back the hay until you see the compost, then plant into the compost. After the seeds have sprouted and the plants rise above the hay, snug the hay back up around the growing plants. In the fall, when the garden is finished, spread another foot of spoiled hay over the surface. Let it sit exposed to the winter weather.
The next spring, turn the rotted hay into the soil, then add another six inches of compost and another foot-deep layer of spoiled hay, repeat the same planting procedure as the year before, finishing with another layer of hay in the fall. In the third year, repeat the procedure once again.
I guarantee you that by the spring of the following (fourth) year, you will be amazed at the condition of your soil and the abundance of food or flowers it produces. You will have excellent soil and, as a consequence, an excellent garden.
New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco are considering passing “Green Food Resolutions,” but the small town of Signal Mountain, Tennessee (population 7,000), beat them to it. It was the first in the nation to pass a Green Food Resolution, which is, “an ordinance designed to counteract the massive health and environmental damage created by large-scale factory farms and the meat industry, by encouraging local farms, plant-based diets, ecological sustainability and nutritious eating habits.”
It said, in part, “RESOLVED that the Signal Mountain Council promotes expansions of the number of Farmers' Markets, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, Community Gardens, and other venues for providing healthful plant-based foods, and encourages food retailers to offer more plant-based options.”
It sounds like a mixture of organics and vegetarianism. I’m down with the idea of the resolution, but not with the idea that healthy eating means eschewing meat. Well-produced organic animal protein is a vital part of a healthy diet. If someone wants to be a vegetarian or vegan, that’s fine by me, but animals have been a part of the human diet since our modern species of humans appeared 100,000 years ago, and probably was a part of the diet of our progenitors long before that. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, eat vegetables and meat, too, and we share 95 percent of our genome with them.
We’re now entering a phase where we realize the value of animals raised humanely without the use of antibiotics, hormones, or other chemicals.
The Green Food Resolutions have been launched in many cities across America by Farm Sanctuary, a vegan organization that works to end not just cruelty to farm animals, but their slaughter and consumption as food as well. Ending cruelty is a worthwhile and noble goal. Ending the consumption of meat, milk, and eggs by humans is a radical notion. It’s a shame that the two goals have to be merged by Farm Sanctuary. While I respect their right to espouse whatever views they wish, that respect should be a two-way street. Let’s institute organic standards for the husbandry of farm animals—essentially cruelty free and humane treatment. That’s a goal all compassionate people can accept.
It's not surprising that the same forces of nature that create living soil, plants, and animals also create us. Life is a continuum, after all, from the simplest one-celled prokaryote—a cell without a nucleus--to the most complex collaboration of eukaryotes—cells with a nucleus and mitochondrion—such as human beings. All life is cells and all cells respond to the grand scheme of nature.
And so, the life in the soil, including bacteria, fungi, worms, actinomycetes, insects, and many other creatures, are all subject to the grand scheme. And so is the life in us.
Did you know that nine out of 10 cells in the human body are the bacteria that live in our intestines? And that these bacteria are related in form and function to the soil bacteria? Both in soil and in our bodies, these bacteria are responsible for dismantling the organic matter we feed them (in the case of plants, we call it compost; in the case of humans, we call it food) and releasing its nutrients so they can be absorbed by plants and animals.
Bacterial action releases nutrients from organic matter. Living plants absorb them through their roots. Humans absorb them through their intestines. Think of a root as a long tube covered with tiny root hairs that absorb nutrients from the soil in which the root grows. Now think of an intestine as a long tube lined inside with villi that are similar to root hairs in form and function—only with an intestine, the soil is inside and it is within the intestine that bacteria are dismantling organic matter to release its nutrients. It’s as if animals learned to pull their roots up and out of the soil, turning them inside out, so they could walk about the world instead of being rooted to one place.
And so our bodies and the soil have a lot in common. And as said before, all life is cells and all cells respond to the grand scheme of nature. So what is this grand scheme of nature?
Put simply, it is nature’s drive to reach a climax ecology. And that means to pack as many life forms into a habitat as possible so they set up a system of checks and balances that keeps the habitat healthy. The more biodiversity, the healthier the system becomes. The habitat might be a farmer’s abandoned cornfield that’s moving from a monocrop of corn, which is a precarious situation vis a vis health, and returning to a meadow of native annual and perennial plants—a much more stable and healthy arrangement. But nature doesn’t stop there. She wants that meadow returned to a climax ecology, and so the meadow over time will return to forest in naturally forested regions like the eastern United States. And certain trees will dominate the upper story of the forest while others occupy the substories, and the ground is covered with plants like skunk cabbage, ground pine, trout lilies, and many other plants. And through all this wonderland of plant life birds fly, squirrels climb, and deer move ghostlike in the shade. It may take many centuries, but left alone, the climax ecology will return, for that’s the most stable and healthy use of a habitat.
And what about us? Can we set up a stable climax ecology within our intestines so that our gut bacteria’s ability to wrest every last nutrient from our food and feed it to us is maximized? Yes—and it doesn’t have to take centuries. It can happen quickly if we eat plenty of raw fruits and vegetables—easy enough to do if we eat fruit and salads regularly. A nutritionist once told me that if half of our diet is raw fruits and vegetables, the other half can be Twinkies and we’ll still be healthy. That’s hyperbole of course, but his point was that it’s not that difficult to maximize our health by feeding our gut bacteria what they like. And what they like is the same thing that soil bacteria like—raw organic matter. It’s what the bacteria are fit to handle, and dismantling organic matter is the job they love to do. This doesn’t mean you have to be a vegan or even a vegetarian. Just making sure you are eating plenty of raw fruits and vegetables will insure that there is a great diversity of symbiotic bacteria developing in your intestines, doing their job of keeping you (their host) healthy.
In other words, when your intestinal flora is happy, you are happy.
Anyone concerned with the purity of the food supply and the need to eat organically should be aware of Monsanto Corporation and what it’s up to. Perhaps the best way to gauge Monsanto’s influence over America’s food supply is to give a pop quiz. See how many answers you get right:
1. Monsanto makes almost all the _____ that’s used to produce high fructose corn syrup.
A. Flint corn
B. Genetically modified corn
C. Corn waste
2. High fructose corn syrup is found in
A. Thomas’s English Muffins
B. Coca Cola
C. Yogurt
D. Cough Syrup
E. All of the above
3. Monsanto controls ________ percent of all genetically modified organisms.
A. 100 percent
B. 90 percent
C. 50 percent
D. 20 percent
4. Monsanto’s GMO products appear in _______ percent of processed American foods.
A. 100 percent
B. 70 percent
C. 40 percent
D. 15 percent
5. Corn genetically modified to withstand Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide caused what in lab rats?
A. Heart disease
B. Birth defects
C. Hair loss
D. Kidney, liver, heart, spleen, adrenal gland, and blood damage
E. All of the above
6. Monsanto cleared _______ in profit from its 2008 operations.
A. $3.5 billion
B. $2 billion
C. $700 million
D. $500 million
7. If you own a farm next to a farm where Monsanto seeds are used, and if pollen from Monsanto’s plants fertilizes your seeds, Monsanto has established the right to _______ you for violation of the copyright on its seeds, and to collect royalties.
A. Sue
B. Blacklist
C. Slander
And regarding that last question, consider the case of Tennessee farmer Kem Ralph who, in 2004, served eight months in jail and was fined $1.3 million for lying about Monsanto cotton seeds he was hiding in his barn, claiming they weren’t even his seeds and that he was saving them for a friend. By the way, Tennessee’s fine for possession of cocaine is $2,500.
The answers are B, E, B, B, D, B, A.
I attended a cooking class at Rob Sinskey's organic winery where his wife Maria made these manicotti for the class. They were by far and away the best manicotti I’ve ever had. If you want to impress someone or a bunch of someones, make these. Maria says this is her great grandmother’s recipe transcribed by her mother. “Manicotti has been served at every family gathering for as long as I can remember,” she says. “This dish freezes very well and can be popped in the oven frozen, covered with foil for reheating. I suggest making extra and freezing it for your next unexpected soiree.” If you can find it, use Bellwether Farm’s sheep’s milk ricotta.
Maria advises that the pancakes can be made a day ahead and stored at room temperature between sheets of wax paper overnight. The sauce can be made two or three days ahead and stored in the refrigerator. It’s not necessary to reheat the sauce before assembling the manicotti, as they will be thoroughly heated in the oven.
For the manicotti pancake batter
2 cups organic all-purpose flour
2 tsp. kosher salt
6 large organic eggs
2 Tbl. extra virgin olive oil
Mix the flour and salt together in a bowl. Make a well in the center of the flour. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs until smooth, then mix in two cups of water and the olive oil, lightly beating the eggs, oil, and water together. Stir as you pour the egg mixture into the flour. Stir in the liquids very slowly to avoid lumps. Beat until smooth. Let the batter rest 20 minutes covered. Brush or spray a seven-inch diameter non-stick crepe pan with olive oil. Pour just under two ounces of the batter into the pan and roll it around to thinly cover the bottom. You can measure this with a two-ounce ladle or a measuring cup slightly less than ¼ cup full. If the batter seems too thick, add a little water and stir so that the batter will easily spread as you roll the pan around to coat the bottom. Cook on one side until the batter is set and the edges begin to curl from the sides of the pan. Use enough heat to cook the crepes quickly. Flip the pancake over and cook for a few seconds on the other side. Stack the pancakes between layers of wax paper with the pale side of the pancake up. Let cool. The pancakes can be stored at room temperatures overnight. Wrap them tightly with cling wrap after they are completely cool. Makes about 40 pancakes.
For the tomato sauce
Maria says that it’s far better to use good canned tomatoes than inferior fresh ones, and she’s right. Both organic canned tomatoes and tomato paste are available. If possible, they should be just tomatoes—no salt or citric acid added. If they do contain salt, omit adding any more salt to the recipe. If the canned tomatoes have basil with them, that’s fine. In fresh tomato season, use eight pounds of fresh, organic, ripe Italian plum tomatoes like Roma or San Marzano.
7 lbs. canned peeled organic plum tomatoes (8 lbs. fresh)
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, finely diced
8 cloves garlic, peeled and finely sliced
1 cup organic red wine
2 Tbl. tomato paste
½ cup chopped fresh oregano
½ cup chopped Italian flat-leaf parsley
1 tsp. crushed red pepper
Kosher salt to taste
1 Tbl. sugar (optional)
1 Tbl. toasted whole fennel seed
1 bay leaf
If using fresh tomatoes, blanch them and remove the skins. If using canned, drain the tomatoes and reserve the juice. Now the procedure becomes the same. Working over a bowl, cut out the hard spot where the tomato attached to the plant. Gently open the tomato and let juice and seeds fall into the bowl. Tear the tomato into chunks and place in another bowl. Repeat until all tomatoes are done. Pour the juice and seeds through a strainer held over the tomato chunks. (If using canned tomatoes, pour the reserved juice from the cans through a strainer held over the tomato chunks.) Discard the seeds. Heat a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the olive oil and onions and cook until the onions are golden. Add the garlic and cook further until the onions are lightly browned. Don’t let the garlic burn. Add the red wine. Turn heat down to medium low and simmer for five minutes. Add the tomato chunks and juice, tomato paste, chopped herbs, crushed red pepper, and two cups of water. Season with salt if desired. Add the sugar if the tomatoes seem too acidic. Add the fennel seed and bay leaf. Simmer uncovered over low heat for 1 ½ hours if using canned tomatoes, or two to three hours if using fresh, until the sauce thickens and the flavors have married. When finished, remove the bay leaf.
For the ricotta filling
If you can’t find sheep’s milk ricotta, use the best cow’s milk ricotta you can find.
4 lbs. sheep’s milk ricotta
2 Tbl. chopped Italian flat-leaf parsley
¼ tsp. freshly ground nutmeg
Kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste
4 large eggs
In a large bowl, mix everything together but the eggs. Beat the eggs lightly and fold in until thoroughly mixed.
The Method
Place two heaping tablespoons of the filling along one edge of each pancake and roll it up. Ladle some of the sauce in the bottom of a glass or ceramic baking dish to coat, and place the manicotti, seam side down, in the dish. After the dish is full of manicotti, ladle more sauce over the top to cover. Cover the dish with aluminum foil and bake at 350°F. for 40 minutes. Uncover for the last 10 minutes of baking.
One of the wonderful things about living in the country is all the wild food you have close at hand. In another few weeks it will be early spring and time to put together a wild spring tonic salad—one that will lift your winter-drenched spirits and light you up from the inside out.
The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote about this time of year:
For winter’s rains and ruins are over
And all the seasons of snows and sins,
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins.
For time remembered is grief forgotten.
The frosts are slain, the flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
Make sure all the ingredients for your spring tonic salad are from clean, unsprayed places so that you’re not ingesting herbicides or pesticides along with your greens. Make the basis of your salad the tender leaves of dandelion just beginning to unfold. If you live in California or the Pacific Northwest, you’ll add miner’s lettuce to the dandelions.
Throughout the country, wild onions will be sending up their slender, chive-like spears. Gather a few and snip half-inch lengths into the salad. You can even dig up a few of the small bulbs and slice them as pungent additions to the mix. Can you find a few early violets opening their sweet-smelling flowers? In they go--but just a few for color. Live out west? Add yellow mustard flowers or the blossoms of wild radish instead of violets.
The salad will be fresh tasting and bitter. That’s what the old-timers were craving after a winter’s worth of boiled potatoes, sauerkraut, and salt pork.
If you live in the city, you can still put together a spring tonic salad. Just head down to your local organic supermarket. Now is when the watercress is at its finest. You may even find it with the roots attached so it’s living food. Cut off the roots and the long stems and the leaves will be the basis for your salad. Add mache, also called corn salad, if you can find their small heads of paddle-shaped leaves. Buy some water chestnuts, peel them, and slice them into the salad. Buy a chicon (spear-like head) or two of Belgian endive and slice them into the salad. A tight head of red raddichio will add its chewy bitterness to the salad. Slice a clove of garlic into thin slivers and add them.
Now there’s a bitter spring tonic salad right from the store. Either way, the bitter salad is just the thing to restore and balance your winter-weary taste buds to get ready for the monumental pleasures of summer to come.
And keep your eye out for “The Big Summer Cookbook,” by yours truly, coming from John Wiley & Sons this spring. It gives you hundreds of recipes for using that monumental summer bounty.
Finding and using a good source of organic oils for culinary use is essential for several reasons. First, many mass-produced cooking oils such as canola, soy, corn, and cottonseed—are from plants that have been genetically engineered to resist damage by herbicides or to incorporate the gene that expresses the caterpillar toxin produced by Bacillus thuringiensis.
Second, sewage sludge containing heavy metals may have been used on the fields where the conventional oils were grown and been taken up by the plants. Or, if the fields were fertilized with chemical fertilizers, they may be depleted of trace minerals and organic matter, which can affect the quality of the oils grown on them.
Third, agricultural chemicals like pesticides have a tendency to accumulate in plant fats—such as the oil in the seeds—and in fat tissues in our bodies, too.
Fourth, bulk oils are usually extracted by a process that utilizes hexane, a petroleum by-product and nervous system toxin. While the hexane evaporates at the end of the extraction process and is said to be completely gone from the oil it extracts, it poses a risk to workers. And while the FDA vouches for the safety of chemically-extracted oils, I for one don’t find their assurances reassuring.
All these worries are void if I buy organic oil.
While my personal recommendation is to use organic extra virgin olive oil for most kitchen uses, I understand that many folks will prefer to use other oils for various purposes. Olive, canola, peanut, sesame, almond, and avocado oils have more than 50 percent monounsaturated fat—the kind that helps lower bad cholesterol. Canola, corn, safflower, sunflower, walnut, sesame, hemp seed, and soy oils are rich in polyunsaturated fats that contain the important omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids, necessary for proper growth in children and the maintenance of cardiovascular health,brain and visual function, and cell replacement in adults. But there’s a catch.
Recent studies suggest that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 may be most important in obtaining their health benefits, such as lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease. If your intake of omega-6 fat is too high, it competes with the omega-3 fats and prevents them from doing their beneficial work, which may lead to an omega-3 deficiency. For a healthy balance, it is recommended that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in the diet should be 3 or 4 parts omega-6 to 1 part omega-3. The right balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids enables the body to reduce inflammation, lower blood pressure, prevent irregular heartbeats, and promote cardiovascular health. The typical western diet has a ratio estimated at 20:1.
The following table shows the ratios of omega-6 to omega-3 in various vegetable oils.
Remember, you want a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in your diet of 3 or 4 to 1.
Oil/Ratio (omega-6 to omega-3)
Canola 3:1
Corn 8:0
Flaxseed 2:7
Olive 1:0
Peanut 4:0
Safflower 8:0
Sesame 6:0
Soy 7:1
Sunflower 8:0
Wheat germ 7:1
Unfortunately, corn, safflower, sunflower, walnut, sesame, hemp seed, and soy oils, while they are rich sources of omega-6, don’t have much omega-3. The essential fatty acid in olive oil is primarily omega-9, which doesn’t upset whatever the balance of omega-6 and omega-3 is in your diet. Omega-9 fatty acids are important monounsaturated fats, and one of the chief reasons why the olive oil-rich Mediterranean diet contributes so splendidly to cardiovascular health. It’s been proven to lower bad cholesterol and raise good cholesterol, and has more antioxidants than any other oil.
Fish such as cod, sardines, anchovies, mackerel, and salmon are excellent sources of omega-3. That’s why mom made sure you got your cod liver oil. But I can’t think of any culinary use for it. In the old days, you got your daily dose from a spoon. Today fish oil supplements are sold in convenient gel capsules. The point is that if you choose to use a lot of omega-6-rich oils in your cooking or on your salads, you might want to consider omega-3 supplementation. Two vegetable oils that do have a proper ratio of these essential fatty acids are canola and flaxseed oil. Flaxseed oil is especially good because of its greater amounts of omega-3 than omega-6, which will balance some of the excess omega-6 we get in our western diet. It should not be heated, however, but rather used cold as you would use any unheated oil, on salads, as a dip, in home-made mayonnaise, in smoothies, and in shakes. Some folks are leery of canola oil because they may have heard it contains erucic acid, which studies show causes heart lesions in lab animals. It’s an old finding. Canadians began a series of hybridizations of the rape plant—the source of canola oil—after World War II that led to varieties with less than two percent erucic acid. Today’s canola (for Canadian oil) has acceptable levels of erucic acid.
When oil used for frying or sautéing gives off smoke, it not only emits an acrid smell, but healthy fats in the oil can be transformed into unhealthy trans fats. In addition, free radicals are formed that can oxidize cholesterol in the blood to create artery-clogging plaque. Discard any oil that has reached its smoke point. Use this table to determine which oil is the best to use for your purposes. The information was supplied by the folks at Spectrum Organic Products, Inc.
Uses/Oil Type/Smoke Point
High Heat Oils: These are oils to use for high heat applications like frying.
Avocado - smoke point 510 F.
Almond - smoke point 495 F.
Apricot Kernel - smoke point 495 F.
Sesame - smoke point 445 F.
Medium High Heat Oils: Good for sauteeing and baking.
Canola - smoke point 425 F.
Grapeseed - smoke point 425 F.
Walnut - smoke point 400 F.
Coconut - smoke point 365 F.
Soy - smoke point 360 F.
Peanut - smoke point 355 F.
Medium Heat Oils: Full flavored, unrefined oils good for sauces and salad dressings, and for medium heat sauteing, where the oil's flavor is integral to the dish.
Sesame, unrefined - smoke point 350 F.
Toasted Sesame - smoke point 350 F.
Olive, extra virgin - smoke point 325 F.
Corn, unrefined - smoke point 320 F.
Coconut, unrefined - smoke point 280 F.
No Heat Oils: These unrefined oils have a robust flavor and such a fragile structure that they're best used on a finished dish or blended into a dressing or sauce without heating.
Borage - smoke point 225 F.
Flaxseed - smoke point 225 F.
Wheat Germ - smoke point 225 F.
Evening Primrose - smoke point 225 F.
It's that time of year again. Even though the world may be locked up tight in winter's icy grip, now’s the time to pore over your seed catalogs and order the little packets that will grow into delicious, garden-fresh organic produce.
Don’t have a garden? You can always have a small one by gardening in large containers with drain holes in the bottom, filled with good rich compost from the local nursery. All you’ll need is a sunny spot, something to tie your tomatoes up to, and seeds.
But where to get the best varieties and seeds? Here’s a rundown of some seed catalogs you should be aware of. Rather than give you mailing addresses, I’m going to give you URLs where you can peruse the wares of these companies and even order seeds over the internet.
For all-around great seeds for time-tested plants, you can’t beat the W. Atlee Burpee Company of Warminster, Pennsylvania. Burpee’s been around for a century. I’ve grown their seeds for over 30 years and am always pleased. Check them out at www.burpee.com.
For tomatoes, head to www.tomatogrowers.com, where you’ll find hundreds of varieties of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and tons of useful information about how to grow tomatoes. Don’t miss this website.
In centuries past, almost everyone had a garden, and a tradition grew up within families and among friends that the very best varieties were passed down through the generations by swapping or inheriting precious seeds. The Seed Savers Exchange of Decorah, Iowa, has a catalog full of these heirloom varieties just waiting for you to try them. Visit www.seedsavers.org.
You will find all organic seeds—and wonderful varieties—at Seeds of Change, whose marketing arm is at Spicer, Minnesota. The catalog guarantees all seeds have been organically grown. See for yourself at www.seedsofchange.com.
Like the idea of growing your own onions? You’ll find all types at www.dixondalefarms.com. This Texas firm ships 400 million onion plants a year and has been doing so since 1913. When I grow onions, I get started plants from Dixondale.
More heirloom seeds are available at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Mansfield, Missouri. Visit them at www.rareseeds.com.
Folks on the West Coast have their own dedicated garden seed company in Territorial Seed Company of Cottage Grove, Oregon. Here you’ll find the best varieties suited to the special conditions of the Pacific Northwest, especially the coastal zones from Santa Cruz, California, north into British Columbia. You will find them At www.territorialseed.com.
Well—that’s a handful of really fine seed companies where you’ll find anything you can think of for your 2010 organic garden. See you around the tomato patch. But start now. Time’s a wasting.
Organic Gardening magazine has suddenly come back to life after having fallen asleep for the past 25 years.It never was just about gardening when J.I. Rodale founded it in 1943 as “Organic Farming and Gardening.” It was foremost about the awakening of environmental consciousness, first as it applied to how we grow our food. In those days, most farmers and gardeners were enthralled with the miracle of chemicals—chemical fertilizers, yes, but especially insecticides like DDT that would wipe out all the bugs on the farm and in the garden, and we’d all live happily ever after.
Rodale pointed out that these chemicals were destroying nature’s web of life, tearing it apart, threatening the health of everything and everyone. For Rodale, it was always about health—wholeness. He was so far ahead of his time that initially, not many people understood what he was talking about. He was dismissed as a kook. He was vilified. He was ridiculed. But he was also right.
And then Rachel Carson examined a small piece of the new, holistic thinking that Rodale had espoused and wrote “Silent Spring,” a book in which she showed that DDT and other agricultural chemicals were harming the birds. She had more bona fides than Rodale, and people listened to her. And through Carson, a lot of people discovered that J.I. Rodale and Organic Gardening magazine had been sounding the same trumpet all along.
I joined Rodale Press, as Rodale Inc. was then called, in 1970 as associate editor of Organic Gardening. Eventually I became the Managing Editor. In 1970, the magazine had about 230,000 subscribers. By 1980-, when I moved within the company to direct its fledgling Electronic Publishing division, it had 1,200,000 subscribers. They weren’t all coming to the magazine to learn how to compost their kitchen scraps. They were coming because the magazine provided a new world-view, a new context for thinking about thenatural ecosystems from which we draw our health.
Then in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, Rodale scored a major success with Men’s Health magazine. Organic Gardening went back to being primarily a gardening magazine. And it slowly wandered back outside of the rushing torrent of contemporary thought, which was then more devoted to style and the go-go-go of making it in business than it was about understanding the health consequences of mismanaging the nitrogen cycle on our farms.
However, the seeds had been sown. The organic food business grew by leaps and bounds. Whole Foods sprang up. Suddenly folks everywhere were demanding clean, organic food. While the magazine lost its relevancy to the mass culture’s demands for organic food, organics had become a runaway hit, growing by 20 percent a year in products sold, for year after year.
Now take a look at the most recent issue of Organic Gardening. It looks like it’s beginning to find its groove again. Maria Rodale, J.I.’s granddaughter, has just taken the helm of the company and her eye is back on the big picture. In fact, Maria believes that it is the organic insight—the holistic way of looking at the world—that will ultimately save the world. We see eye to eye on that. We either work with nature’s forces, tendencies, and laws or we will perish--or become so degraded we’ll wish we’d perish.
It’s a good feeling to know that this magazine, which represents everything that’s healthy and holy in this world, is returning to its roots.
The word sage means wise. A wise woman is a "sage femme" and a wise man is called a sage. And the garden sages, both culinary and ornamental, are members of the genus Salvia, which translates as salvation or saving. And so the herb sage has been considered one heavy duty plant through the ages.
Sage is as pretty in the garden as it is useful in the kitchen. Besides common green garden culinary sage (Salvia offiucinalis)with its nubbly texture, purple sage (Salvia officinalis ‘Purpurascens’) sports dark greenish purple leaves, three-colored sage (S.o. ‘Tricolor’) has leaves with green, white, and pink variegations, and golden sage (S.o. ‘Icterina’) has green and gold markings. Other species of salvia have culinary uses, too, such as the bright red flowers of pineapple sage (Salvia elegans) that add dots of pure color to salads. All told, there are dozens and dozens of salvias in commerce, most of them ornamental.
But for cooking and that appealing sage flavor, no cultivar beats the plain old green species. The fresh leaves have a friendly spiciness and a musky, even medicinal scent. Those qualities become intensified when the leaves are dried. Whether home-grown or purchased as fresh sprigs at a farmers market, sage is easy to dry. Just tie the stem ends of the sprigs together and hang the bundle from the ceiling in a warm, dry place out of direct sun. When the leaves are crisply dry, you can rub them vigorously between your palms or mash them in a mortar with a pestle and watch them turn into a fluffy mass that you can then store in an airtight jar in your spice cabinet.
The most common culinary use for the herb in America is for flavoring the Thanksgiving turkey’s stuffing—and I admit that one of my favorite foods in this world is sage stuffing hot and moist from spending long hours in the oven inside the bird. But that’s just the most obvious use. Make a thin-crust white pizza and decorate the center with a star of six sage leaves, one for each slice. Sage tea has been used as a sovereign remedy for colds, sore throat, and tonsillitis, and as a digestive aid. In ancient times, it was thought to promote wisdom.
Ordinary green sage is quite potent, especially when dried, so use it judiciously. It pairs well with other strongly flavored herbs like rosemary and oregano, as well as the lemon herbs like lemon balm and lemon verbena. Sage exalts fatty meats like pork, sausages, veal, and poultry. Stuff a rolled pork roast with a mixture of chopped sage and apples. It also makes a warm partnership with liver and onions. And speaking of onions, mix finely chopped sage and parsley and add it to the batter you use to make fried onion rings. Tie fresh sage in a bouquet with parsley and thyme and add it to soups and stews, removing it before serving.
Sage has an affinity for Italian dishes like pizzas, focaccia, pastas, and gnocchi. It adds a pleasant herbal note when used in small quantities with mild cheeses. Chop it finely and use it in your cornbreads and biscuits. Use it to flavor bean, lentil, and pea soups.
Add a fresh sage leaf to other herb teas when you brew them to augment and enhance their flavor. Add a pinch to tuna salad, to seared ahi, and to baked or poached ocean fish.
You don’t have to have a garden to grow sage at home. It takes to pot culture beautifully. Just buy a plant in spring, plant it in a generous pot that has a drainage hole in the bottom, with potting soil for a growing medium, and keep it moist but not sopping wet during the summer months. You’ll have plenty by Thanksgiving.
If you want to use it in other dishes besides turkey stuffing, here are some ideas:
Saltimbocca
Saltimbocca is a classic Italian dish that jumps into your mouth, if the name is accurate, for that’s what saltimbocca means. It can jump into mine anytime. If you have an aversion to veal, use chicken breasts pounded to ½-inch thickness. However, organic veal is humanely raised—by law.
4 veal cutlets, pounded to ½-inch thick or thinner
8 slices of prosciutto, thinly sliced
4 slices of Fontina cheese
2 Tbl. butter
¼ cup dry white wine
½ tsp. fresh minced sage
¼ tsp. Dijon mustard
1. Top each of the veal cutlets with two slices of prosciutto and a slice of Fontina. Roll them up, turning in the ends so the filling is completely enclosed. Secure them with toothpick skewers, but don’t let the ends of the toothpicks stick out too far, as it will make it impossible to brown the rolls all over.
2. Place a skillet on high heat and add the butter, then the rolls, turning them frequently for about five minutes of cooking, until well-browned all over.
3. Remove the skillet from the heat and place the rolls in a serving dish. Place the serving dish in a warm oven while you put the pan back on the heat, adding the wine and scraping up any browned bits. Add the sage and mustard and mix well. Pour this sauce over the rolls. Serves 4.
Your Own Organic Stuffing
Yes, store-bought stuffing mix is traditional, but you can make just as tasty a stuffing using all organic ingredients. Notice that the recipe starts well before the big day.
2 lbs. organic white bread
Giblets from 1 organic turkey, cooked and chopped
½ small onion
7 whole peppercorns
8 oz. loose ground pork sausage
3 Tbl. butter
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 tsp. dried sage
1 large egg, lightly beaten
¼ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. fresh ground black pepper
1. Buy two pounds of sliced organic country bread (made with white flour, not whole wheat, rye, or sourdough). Place the slices in a large bowl, exposed to air, turning once a day until stale. This will take about four or five days. Cut into ½-inch cubes.
2. On turkey day, simmer the giblets, half onion, and peppercorns in water to cover. When they’re done, about an hour and a half, strain off the cooking water and reserve. Chop the giblets, onions, and peppercorns finely.
3. Cook the sausage in a skillet over medium high heat until just done, about seven minutes, turning and separating into little pieces. Remove sausage from the skillet, reduce heat to medium low, add the butter to the skillet, and cook the onions in the butter until they’re golden.
4. In a large bowl combine the bread cubes, giblet mixture, celery, onions and butter, sausage, sage, egg, salt, and pepper and toss to mix thoroughly. Use the giblet cooking water to moisten the stuffing, but be careful. A little too much moisture renders the stuffing clumpy and dense. Keep the stuffing just lightly moist and fluffy.
5. Stuff the turkey loosely, both in the body cavity and under the neck skin. Don’t pack it tightly. The rest of the stuffing can be cooked in a lightly greased dutch oven on the stovetop on low heat. Stir from the bottom occasionally and add a little water by pulling the stuffing aside and dribbling a little water onto a bare spot on the bottom if the stuffing appears to be drying out. It’s done when it’s all hot and steamy and the celery is tender—about an hour and a half. Correct the seasoning and serve hot in a separate bowl from the prized stuffing that comes from the bird.
If one gardens organically long enough, the big picture emerges. And the big picture is this: the more kinds of creatures that inhabit a system—whether garden, farm, meadow, or forest—the healthier it is.
Each creature has an ecological role to play. Microorganisms eat fungus strands. Funguses disassemble fallen leaves. Ladybugs eat aphids. Birds eat ladybugs. Mice eat birds’ eggs. Foxes keep mice in check. And finally, microorganisms and many other creatures eat foxes.
Life in a healthy garden is a strong tapestry of many strands, woven together, interacting to keep any one organism from dominating and causing problems. Like the American Constitution, it’s a system of checks and balances. It’s a grand circle, this web of life.
Given this perspective, it becomes obvious why poisonous chemicals, whether fertilizers, fungicides, insecticides, or herbicides, wreak such havoc in a tightly-knit system. These chemicals tear apart nature’s carefully constructed and balanced web of life.
With the web torn asunder, suddenly certain creatures are released from predation. Their numbers begin to multiply unchecked. What was once merely a happy player in the garden becomes a problem.
The organic approach is to maximize the diversity of life in the garden. This starts with feeding the soil microorganisms lots of organic matter. Actively-decaying organic matter creates a healthy bloom of bacteria, fungi, actinomycetes, and many other microorganisms which make up a diverse and healthy soil ecology.
These microscopic lifeforms produce a mix of nutrients in the soil that feed plants exactly what they want, in the forms they like it, when they want it, in the quantities they want. And thus the plants grow healthy.
As a healthy human being is able to ward off disease, so healthy plants can ward off not only diseases, but even insect damage, as insects preferentially attack weak and unhealthy plants.
These healthy plants help to nourish animals and humans in such a way that we grow healthy, too. Good and proper nutrition, born from healthy plants growing in healthy soil, is one source of human health.
So organic gardening is not just about gardening without chemicals. It is an insight into the workings of nature that allows the gardener to interact with nature for the health and betterment of every member of the entire system, including the gardener herself.
If all farms and gardens and properties were handled organically, nature would have an open invitation to create her healthiest and most diverse systems everywhere, with a return of endangered species, the sewing up of the torn web of life, and a fullness of life we’ve not experienced since the days of unspoiled wilderness.
Have you ever been exhausted but at the same time feel overjoyed by the exhaustion? Working for hours at farming or gardening can do that to you. Although you may be so tired you can barely move, you are overcome by a feeling of accomplishment. And not just mental accomplishment, but rather physical accomplishment, in the real world, where you can see the results of your hard work.
The best part about farm and garden work is that you then get to replenish your drained body with the fruits of your labor: real, honest, organic food. Yes, organic food tastes better than conventional food, especially when you’ve had a hand in growing it yourself.
You don’t even need to have a garden or be a farmer to have the experience. There’s an organization called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (www.wwoof.org) that started in England in 1971 and has grown considerably over the years. Right now there are over 15,000 people at organic farms around the world trading a few hours of work a day for food and lodging, more than double the number who took part in the deal five years ago.
Over 2,200 organic farms are now hosting travelers who find they can do farm chores like milking goats and making compost for just a few hours a day in return for a place to stay and good food to eat.
Farms are located in Central America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific islands.
WWOOF hosts grow food organically, are in conversion, or use ecologically sound methods on their land. They provide hands-on experience of organic growing and other learning opportunities where possible, and they provide clean dry accommodation and adequate food for their volunteers.
WWOOF volunteers need a genuine interest in learning about organic growing, country living, or ecologically sound lifestyles. They help their hosts with daily tasks for an agreed number of hours. The transactions between volunteers and hosts are off the money economy. There may be a small charge by the hosting country or WWOOF, usually in the $30 range.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has made some small advances in funding organic research and development for American farming—but not much. The big agribusiness companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Dow Chemical, and others have the money and they call the tunes.
You can see the same problems when you look at the public health debacle and other evidence that Congress is dysfunctional these days. The reason why seems clear: Many Congresspeople, Democrat or Republican, Senator or Representative, are bought by corporate America through the kindly ministrations of the lobbyists.
However, the problem isn’t with Congress. Who doesn’t want money showered on them, especially money that can be used to do what legislators have set as their first priority—getting elected or re-elected? The problem isn’t the lobbyists—they are just doing what they are paid to do. And the problem isn’t even corporate America. As long as corporations can get their way by funneling money to legislators, why not?
The problem is the money.
And right now a majority of Americans, from tea partiers on the right to furious progressives on the left, are angry, really angry. So here’s an idea on how to channel that anger and solve the problem at its root:
We—and I mean a broad coalition from the left and right—propose a new law, the Congressional Compensation Act. The law states that Senators and Representatives shall be given a salary. Make it a good one so they can live comfortably. And they and their challengers will be given a set and equal amount of money to mount their election or re-election campaigns and free time on radio and television to advertise when re-election time comes around. Everyone gets the same amount of money and free ad time, but they can choose to use the money and buy their ads on media as they will.
And that’s it. It will be illegal to contribute money to any legislator’s office or campaign. No free plane rides. No free vacations. No gifts. No nothing. Period. If anyone is caught giving money to a member of Congress, they shall be prosecuted. If any member of Congress takes money, they shall be prosecuted. And penalties will be stiff.
Okay—that’s Part One of The Plan. And realistically, Congress would never pass such a plan, for it would gut their ability to become rich and powerful, and run with and play with the big boys and girls. And so we have Part Two of The Plan: The Pledge. We ask every candidate for Congressional office, whether incumbent or challenger, to pledge to vote for the Congressional Compensation Act. If they refuse to answer, we will take that to be a no. We tell the incumbents and their challengers that if they do not back the Act, we will make sure they will not win their primaries. And we do this by letting every voter know that together we are strong and can enforce this. This is not a partisan effort. Party affiliation is immaterial. The important thing is to clean up government; i.e., get money out of politics. There’s no reason why the American citizenry can’t force The Pledge from every Congressional legislator or legislator wannabe. If they say yes, we work for their election. If they say no or weasel around answering, we work against their election. And so Congress becomes packed with those who’ve pledged to pass the Congressional Compensation Act.
Now, experience teaches us that people campaigning for high office will say just about anything to get elected, but once elected, they sing a different tune. If a backer of the Act reneges on their pledge and refuses to vote for the act either by abstention or by voting no, they will be targeted for elimination from office at the next election. If we have the consolidated power to extract The Pledge from them, we have the power to remove them from office. But we must act in concert through an organization such as Showdown in America.
Think about the result of having legislators who earn a salary for doing their job as citizens, but can receive no other remuneration. They might actually start legislating in favor of the will of the people in this country instead of fat cats and huge corporations. Wouldn’t it be great to return to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people?
It doesn’t make any difference whether you eat your apple pie with cheese or a la mode. I would say the following recipe makes such good apple pie that it needs no gussying up. Ditto with the crust recipe.
But here’s a tip. When the Honey Crisp apples are in the store, use them for this pie. They are truly superior. When they’re not in the stores, use whatcha got. Granny Smiths are good. Fujis, Galas, or Braeburns might be good, too. But Honey Crisps are the bomb.
There is a store not far from my home called Mom’s Apple Pie with a real mom (Betty Carr) and real apple pie. It used to be surrounded by Gravenstein apple orchards that supplied the year’s first fresh apples to all of America, but the bottom fell out of the market due to controlled atmosphere storage in Washington State—but Mom’s Apple Pie remains and the pies are as good as ever. This pie is even better, believe it or not.
For the Pie:
6 medium 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. 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.
2. Line a nine-inch pie pan with one of the pie crusts. Place the apple mixture in the shell and sprinkle it with the lemon juice, then dot the top with the butter. Preheat the oven to 450 F.
3. Place the second pie crust on top and trim excess. Squish the top and bottom crusts together along the rim of the pie pan with the back of a fork. 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. Place a sheet of aluminum foil on the oven rack to catch any drips. 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.
For the Crust:
This recipe makes enough dough for two crusts—one top, one bottom—for your apple pie. The secret is simple: everything should be ice cold.
2 cups all-purpose flour, taken from the freezer
½ teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons butter, chilled
4 tablespoons 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.
3. Cut the ball into halves and using a chilled stone or a chilled, floured board, roll the first half into a round larger than the bottom of the pie pan. Using a rolling pin, flip the far edge of the round over the pin toward you and roll up the dough onto the pin. Carry this to the greased 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.
4. Fill the bottom crust with the apple filling. Now repeat step 3, rolling out the top crust so it generously covers 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. Cut five two-inch slices in the top crust. Bake as instructed above.
Note: Be prepared for compliments.
For the word “organic” to mean anything, it has to mean something, and what it means is spelled out in the 2002 regulations promulgated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, setting the organic rules.
Big agriculture tried from the beginning to dilute those regulations, working to have certain pesticides and even sewage sludge containing heavy metals included in the definition of organic. But a public outcry beat back those attempts.
Now it’s happening again, and it concerns milk, and it’s a really serious matter once again. Aurora Dairy of Colorado has been sued in a class action lawsuit by organic milk consumers in 40 states, claiming that Aurora, which supplies store brand milk to 20 of the largest retail chain supermarkets in America, has been factory farming milk and selling it as organic to big box stores like Wal-Mart and Target, which in turn have been selling it to consumers as organic at cut rate prices.
In an almost incomprehensible turn of events, Organic Valley, the nation’s second largest organic milk marketer and a cooperative of honest organic dairy farmers, has underwritten a brief supporting Aurora’s side in the lawsuit. Even more disappointing is that the co-op provided financial support allowing the Organic Trade Association to file an amicus brief opposing the class action lawsuit brought by the consumers in 40 states.
Organic Valley’s involvement came as a shock to some of its own co-op members, including Kevin Engelbert, a nationally known organic leader and dairy farmer in New York State. “Can this possibly be true?” he told Cornucopia, an organic information organization. “Has Organic Valley made a pact with the devil? I know the Organic Trade Association is controlled by the big money interests,” but not Organic Valley, whose members assiduously try to insure that their products meet both the letter and spirit of USDA’s organic law.
Aurora, for its part, claims it’s prohibitively expensive to continue developing organic products.
Analysis and research by Cornucopia and the USDA, which is charged with prosecuting violators of the organic law, suggests that as much as a third of the nation’s organic milk supply comes from giant factory farms. According to Cornucopia, Dean Foods, the country’s largest milk marketer, and an Organic Trade Association member, has been widely criticized in the organic community for procuring much of the milk for its Horizon organic brand from mega-dairies allegedly breaking the same rules as Aurora.
You’ll notice a link to the Organic Trade Association on the home page of this website. You might want to let them know how you feel about this. A strong organic law is like a dike against the ocean of conventional food out there. Even a little breach soon turns into a failure of the whole dike. And if that happens, the whole validity of organic food goes down the drain.
The single most important thing you can do to improve your home cooking is to have a garden of fresh herbs. Even if you’re doing nothing but opening a jar of spaghetti sauce and boiling up some pasta, tossing in a handful of fresh herbs like oregano and thyme will bring the dish to life.
Having a garden of fresh herbs can be easier than you think. You don’t even need a yard, as most culinary herbs thrive in pots.
Which herbs to grow? Think Simon and Garfunkel: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. But also oregano, chives, winter savory, spearmint, borage, and lemon balm.
That’s 10 herbs. Do you have a sunny porch, deck, or patio with room for 10 pots? Sure you do. Make sure the pots hold at least a gallon of soil, and even larger is even better. The pots absolutely need to have drainage holes in the bottom. You might want to set them on a piece of black plastic to prevent the run-off water from staining the deck, porch, or patio.
Buy a couple of bags of organic compost at the plant nursery. Mix the compost with an equal amount of a mixture of sand and vermiculite, also available at the plant nursery. So your finished mix is 50 percent compost, 25 percent sand, and 25 percent vermiculite. This is a nice loose potting soil that will hold lots of water. Soil in pots dries out much faster than soil in the ground, and your plants need the soil to be moist—but not sopping wet—at all times. So water frequently.
When you harvest, take whole stems from here and there on the plant, leaving plenty. Don’t shear off stems wholesale with shears or scissors or you’ll be taking away the plant’s ability to feed itself and grow strong.
In the kitchen, strip the leaves from the stems with your thumb and forefinger and discard the stem. All the herbs’ potency is in the leaves. This doesn’t apply to chives. When you harvest chives, select several long spears, leaving plenty. You can then snip the chives into bits with scissors.
Some notes on the herbs:
Rosemary is strongly scented. A little goes a long way. Use it with garlic to flavor lamb.
Thyme is so useful in so many dishes. You can never have enough thyme. Try some of the scented thymes, like lemon thyme and caraway thyme.
Add fresh oregano to pizzas, pastas, and all tomato dishes.
Chives, snipped into pieces, are great in egg dishes like omelets.
Winter savory is known as the “bean herb” in Germany. Cook a few sprigs with your beans and you’ll see why. It adds just the right flavor.
Borage flowers are a pretty blue and taste like cucumber. Decorate salads and tall drinks with them.
Lemon balm, also called Melissa, makes a light and lively lemony tea.
Spearmint, of course, is for your mojitos and mint juleps.
Plant up your herb pots in mid-spring and you’ll have fresh herbs right through the summer and well into fall. In warm climates, you’ll have them year ‘round, but you’ll need to re-pot them after two years or they’ll be too crowded in their pots.
So it’s pretty simple to have fresh herbs close at hand when you’re cooking—and it will make a world of difference.
It's nearing the height of the citrus season - December through March - and now is when Florida citrus really shines. California and Texas both grow good citrus fruit, but the fruit just doesn’t sweeten up in the same way it does in Florida.
My citrus epiphany came one winter day when I was visiting the home of the late Bern Laxer, owner of Bern’s Steak House in Tampa. Bern was a driven man, full of pep and energy. He decided all his salads would be grown organically, at home, by him, and so he composted his restaurant’s kitchen waste and grew the field greens in a large plot behind his house. I was working for Organic Gardening magazine at the time and went to visit him to get an article for the magazine. We talked. I took notes. Eventually I got what I needed for the story and was leaving when I noticed a grapefruit had fallen to the ground from an organically cultivated tree in his front yard. I asked him if I could have it. “Sure,” he said.
That grapefruit became my lunch and it was an unbelievably delicious, tree-ripened, incredibly sweet and flavorful citrus apotheosis. Although I can’t find tree-ripened Florida citrus here in California, I can—and do—order some Florida fruit each year by mail. There is just something in the hot days and warm nights that allows Florida fruit to reach heights of quality that are unattainable elsewhere.
But why organic citrus? Does it have to be organic?
Look at the benefits.
First, conventional fruit is sprayed with pesticides. Do you cook? Do you ever have a recipe that calls for citrus zest, the shredded little bits of the peel? Lots of recipes do, and you’d better make sure your citrus for zesting is organic or you’ll be adding toxic agricultural chemicals to your food.
Secondly, ever notice how wonderfully orange conventional oranges are? That’s because they’re dyed and often given a thin coat of wax to reduce transpiration so they don’t dry out on their long journeys to Everytown, America. Organic citrus, on the other hand, may have some green on the peel, maybe a blemish or two where a bug took a nibble. But there are no dyes, no preservatives, no pesticides.
Third, organic citrus tastes better because the soil is amended with compost, the decayed remains of plants, containing all the nutrients that plants need in order to maximize their potential for flavor. And organic growers are more likely to plant and harvest super delicious varieties, like the Marsh grapefruit and the Meyer lemon.
It’s easy to find organic citrus online. Just Google organic citrus fruit and you’ll be presented with scores of sources.
I loved it when Michelle Obama caused an organic garden to be planted on the White House lawn. The President didn’t get much involved in the project, but I supposed he backed it. Now I’m not so sure.
President Obama has nominated Islam Siddiqui as the U.S. Chief Negotiator for international agricultural trade. Siddiqui is a top official from CropLife, the pesticide industry’s trade group. He’s spent years fighting bans and restrictions on harmful agricultural chemicals. He has worked to increase pesticide use, to overturn health and safety bans, and to undermine the strict rules of the organic label when he was at the U.S. Department of Agriculture by proposing that under his office’s “organic” rules, sewage sludge and even some synthetic pesticides would have been able to be used in organic agriculture. There was such a public outcry against this that the USDA dropped the proposals.
His nomination makes a mockery of Obama’s proclamation that he would not have lobbyists in his government. CropLife is the pesticide industry’s lobbying arm. Siddiqui lobbied to minimize restrictions on pesticides in the North American Free Trade Agreement. He was successful in exempting American farmers from the worldwide ban on the soil fumigant, methyl bromide, a potent ozone depleter.
If he’s confirmed in this post, he will have the power to influence agricultural trade negotiations and corresponding environmental and health regulations with countries all around the world.
If you want to take action, call the White House at (202) 456-1111 and politely tell President Obama to drop the nomination of Islam Siddiqui as chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the United States Trade Representative.
No such thing as an apple? Then what is that red fruit I have packed in my lunch bag? It is a Braeburn, or a Jonagold, or a Honey Crisp, or a Fuji, or—heaven forbid—a Red Delicious. The word “apple” is a category of fruit, not the fruit itself, for apple is an abstract term, while all real apples are specific varieties.
The same is true of all fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, or whatever else we’re eating. And here’s the thing: not all varieties are created equal. Some apple varieties taste better than other varieties (Winesap tastes better than Red Delicious), some are more fragrant (Cox Orange Pippin is more fragrant than Rome Beauty), some have better texture (Honey Crisp has a better texture than just about any other apple you can name). Some are better baking apples than others: Wealthy is a better baker than Smokehouse, for instance.
And the same is true of any foodstuff you can name. When you pick up any fruit or vegetable at the store, you are picking up a cultivated, named variety. If you are interested in the quality of the food you eat, then it behooves you to get to know the varieties that give you what you’re looking for. But how do you do that?
Here I’m going to make an up-front sales pitch for a book I wrote entitled, “The Organic Cook’s Bible.” You’ll find it on Amazon or in bookstores everywhere. There’s a section in the back of the book, printed on green-edged paper so you can easily find it, where I identify the best varieties of fruits and vegetables by name and by their qualities. I’ll give you a sample. When you go to the store to buy carrots, for example, the supermarket will very seldom tell you what variety you’re buying. But if you buy carrots at the farmers’ market from the farmer who grew them, he or she will surely know what variety they grew because they will have ordered the seeds. And they may have chosen a certain variety for its great flavor, because that’s what small-scale truck gardens are all about. They are about quality, not quantity. So—here’s the variety entry for carrots from “The Organic Cook’s Bible.”
CARROT VARIETIES TO LOOK FOR
The most flavorful carrots are not necessarily the most nutritious, as the list below shows. Carrots, like many others of the umbelliferae group (dill, fennel, parsley, celery, celery root, parsnips, chervil—any plant that has an umbrella-like seedhead), are highly aromatic, a trait that is preserved through even intense cooking.
Baby or Gourmet Carrots
Parmex—A spherical carrot the size of a golf ball with excellent flavor.
Amsterdam Forcing—A purple carrot with a succulent flavor.
Kundulus—A standard for full-flavored baby carrots.
Elevated Vitamin A
Beta-Sweet—-A release from the Texas Vegetable Improvement Center
with 40 percent more beta-carotene than ordinary carrots, a
maroon color from cancer-preventing anthocyanins, high
sugar content to attract children, and an improved texture.
A-Plus—Two and a half times the beta-carotene of ordinary carrots.
Long Tapered (7-10 inches)
Gold Pak 28—An All-America Selections winner for taste and texture.
Imperator—Standard supermarket carrot; much better when very fresh.
Danvers—Full-flavored, rich orange color; best for roasting.
Medium Long (5-6 inches)
Nantes Half Long—One of the finest-flavored carrots available.
Touchon—A French type of Nantes; exquisite taste, texture.
Scarlet Nantes—A Nantes type with a reddish orange color.
Yellow Carrot
Yellowstone—Mild flavor; makes contrast with richer types.
Red Carrot
Rothild—High in beta-carotene, with good flavor and red color.
The book names specific, high-quality varieties for over 100 fruits and vegetables, with over 700 varieties in all.
So what I mean when I say that there is no such thing as an apple is that all foods are specific varieties, and you can get to know the best by using my book. By the way, it was nominated as Best Reference of the Year 2008 by the James Beard Foundation. Just sayin’.
In France, where the best cheeses come from - the ones that inspired Americans to make artisanal cheeses in the 1970s and on from there—the milk is usually raw, organic, and taken from animals that are treated with respect.
And now the same is happening in this country. Yes, there are those who say that raw milk is dangerous and should be pasteurized before being made into cheese. But those who know real cheese, great cheese, know that as long as the milk herd is tested regularly for brucellosis and other diseases, the milk for cheese will be wholesome and delicious.
There’s an organization called the American Cheese Society that holds a yearly contest and awards medals to the best cheeses in the country. Sally Jackson in Washington State usually wins something, as does the Hubbardstown goat milk fromagerie in Massachusetts, and many others too numerous to mention.
I know that right here in Sonoma County we have one of the best cheesemakers (remember Monty Python’s Life of Brian? “Blessed are the cheesemakers?”) in the country, if not the world. Her name is Soyoung Scanlon, and her brand is Andante. Her cheeses are choice, small, expensive, but ever so delicious. Her animals—sheep, cows, goats—take grass and leaves and pasture and turn it into the finest milk. And she turns that milk into the finest cheeses.
Out at the coast in Pt. Reyes Station, the Cowgirl Creamery makes fabulous cheeses from local organic milk producers. Pt. Reyes Blue Cheese is renowned the nation over.
It is so gratifying to see dairies raising their milk-producing animals organically, the right way, and producing milk the envy of cheesemakers all over the world. And then making cheeses that win medals at the American Cheese Society’s competitions year after year.
I recently spent a morning watching the milking of sheep and cheese being made from their still-hot milk at Bellwether Farms on the Marin-Sonoma County line not far from the Pacific Ocean. The sheep ran into their stalls to be milked as though they enjoyed it—and I’m sure they did. The milk was taken immediately to the cheesemaking room where it was inoculated with the enzyme that curdles it. Within an hour or so of being milked, the milk from those sheep was cheese, resting in storage rooms to age.
The whole process was organic. The cheeses are wonderful. This is the way to eat. Now think about when you were a kid. Remember Kraft singles in individual plastic packets? See how far we’ve come?
Although I've been an organic gardener for 40 years and therefore have made many, many compost piles over the years, there’s always been a problem.
And that is, I had to build a compost pile all at once. One day I’d get all my materials together—leaves, any garden waste, whatever vegetable kitchen scraps I had on hand, a bucket of chicken manure—and make a nice layered pile five feet square on the bottom and three feet square on top and about three feet high. I’d turn it every two weeks. It would heat up, rot furiously, and in 6-8 weeks, I’d have finished compost ready to feed my garden.
The problem was, I had a constant stream of vegetable kitchen waste coming from my kitchen every day. I couldn’t add it daily to the compost pile. That would be like cooking a half dozen eggs by adding one to the skillet every three minutes. By the time the last one was done, the first three or four would be overcooked. Or if I stopped cooking the eggs when the first ones were done, the last ones would be underdone. Same with the compost pile. If I added my daily kitchen peelings to the pile, by the time the bulk of the pile was finished working, the most recent additions would hardly have begun to break down.
Just tossing the kitchen scraps into a bin was no good. That’s not making compost. That’s making a stinking mess of rotting garbage that attracts vermin.
And then I found worms. Specifically the kind of worms called red wigglers. I bought two worm bins. These are three round plastic trays that fit snugly one atop the other and sit on a base with legs. They have perforations all over the bottom of the trays, plus a spigot in the base where liquid can drain out.
I found a guy who sells red wigglers not far from my house and bought enough for the two bins. I primed the bins with torn strips of wet newspaper, some leaves, and green matter and put my worms into the bottom trays.
Then, each day I add the day’s kitchen scraps to the bottom trays. After those trays (remember I have two bins) are full of vegetable scraps and the worms have reduced the scraps to a fine brown soil, I start adding to the tray above it. As the worms finish with the bottom tray, they move up into the tray above through the perforations. Eventually, every three months or so, the bottom trays are completely finished—turned into worm castings, richer than plain compost, and seven times richer in nutrients and humus than good garden soil. This stuff is black gold.
So I lay a plastic tarp on the ground and dump the contents of the bottom trays on it. There are still plenty of worms in it, but these worms don’t like light, so they wiggle down into the compost. I lift off the worm-free top layer of this ultra-rich soil with my hands and put it in a bucket. I repeat this on three or four subsequent days until all that’s left is a little soil and a mass of worms. I put the worms into what was the second tray but is now the bottom-most tray, clean off the trays I’ve just emptied with a hose, and they now become empty top trays on the worm bins. Then I simply repeat as necessary and reap the benefits.
There is no smell. The finished worm castings—all my kitchen scraps that have been digested and excreted by the worms—are a gardener’s dream. They are clean-smelling and you should see my roses react to them, to say nothing of vegetables.
The worms solved my problem. Now my daily kitchen scraps are turned into the best soil on earth. For my part, I have to follow just a few simple rules. First, don’t let the worms dry out. Every so often I’ll give the top trays a squirt of water with the hose just to keep things moist in the bins. Second, there are some edibles you don’t give the worms. No animal products like meat, egg scraps (shells are fine), or dairy, such as cheese. No citrus rinds. Nothing from the onion family, meaning no onions, garlic, scallions, or chives. And nothing hot and spicy like hot chilies. Other than that, they get all vegetable waste.
My worms do the composting work for me and do it better than I ever could.
Thanksgiving is coming up in a short while. This time, let's make it all organic food. From the turkey to the ice cream, it’s not only quite possible to eat entirely organic, but it’s also easy these days. That’s something to really be thankful for.
There was a time, not that long ago—30, 35 years ago--when if you wanted organic food, you had to raise it or grow it yourself or know someone who did. Now it’s all as close as our nearest supermarket.
Of course it was fun having a garden, raising rabbits for meat, having a goat for milk. It was a real learning experience. It still makes me thankful I can just buy organic food at the market. Because let me tell you, raising and growing your own food and putting up enough for wintertime is a lot of work. Whew! Been there, done that.
I’m thankful that I don’t have to give my money to food producers who are in bed with the likes of Monsanto, the company that comes on with a smiley, helpful face as it pumps you and your world full of toxic chemicals and genetically engineered food. No, when you buy organic, you are supporting farmers who love the land and the creation that lives on it and from it.
When I eat organic, I know that the animals who give us our meat, eggs, and dairy products are treated humanely. I’m tremendously thankful for that. When I was a boy, I knew a kid who was cruel to animals. It made my skin crawl. Nowadays, just look in the meat, milk, and egg cases full of conventional products and you are looking at the end result of a chain of events that treats animals as product. Product doesn’t have feelings. Or at least feelings that are respected.
I’m thankful that my Thanksgiving dinner will be made from whole foods like potatoes, leafy greens, beets. Nothing will be processed or chemicalized by flavoring agents, texturizers, emulsifiers, high fructose corn syrup, fillers, TVP, coloring agents, preservatives, or all the agricultural chemicals used on the farms that grew the ingredients. It will all be just plain food—but I know how to make it tasty: make it simple and let the natural flavors of the foods shine.
We will have wine with dinner. As Father Robert Capon wrote in his fine book, “The Supper of the Lamb,” “Only the purblind can fail to see that sugar in the grape and yeast on the skins is a divine idea.” And it was Benjamin Franklin who averred that wine is a sure sign that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
So at our Thanksgiving this year, my prayer of thanks will be to God for setting nature spinning on this planet and for the natural bounty she provides for us—without the help of agribusiness.
So. Where are we really going with environmentalism, with organic agriculture, with our green ideas? What’s the goal? What will the world look like, be like, and what will our lives be like if we get what we want and achieve the world we’re striving for?
First, we have to realize that green living, alternative energy, organic farming, and environmental protection are short-term goals. They are steps on the way, but they aren’t the ultimate goal.
Simply put, the ultimate goal is an earth in balance.
We have far too many people on the planet now, and we are wrecking the place. That doesn’t mean we need to immediately kill off excess human beings. Populations can be reduced over time through attrition and education, plus intelligent birth control. But we do need to ask ourselves, what is the optimum human population of the earth? That is, what number of people represents a population that can live from the natural bounty that the earth produces, without agriculture?
For the earth is fecund and produces a natural bounty of food if nature is allowed to reach an ecological climax state. When I was a young teenager, my friend Ditty and I wandered the hills and forests of eastern Pennsylvania and we were never hungry. We found food everywhere—in the streams, in the trees, buried in the earth, hanging ripe and sweet from wild brambles, dropping from shrubs, hanging in low clusters from little strawberry plants.
Among the trees in the forest are many that produce high quality protein: beech, hickory, pecan, pinyon pine, chestnut, hazelnut, and more. Yes, chestnut. The American chestnut, once the dominant tree in the eastern hardwood forests, is making a comeback since scientists have back-crossed it to resist the chestnut blight that killed these magnificent trees in the early 20th Century.
Are we talking about returning to a hunting-gathering society such as existed before the agricultural revolution? Is there something wrong with agriculture?
Yes, there is. Once people started farming, the land became “theirs.” And once the land was someone’s property, it had to be defended. Hunting and gathering societies tend to think of the land as the property of life as a whole— humans, animals, plants. That doesn’t mean there weren’t warlike societies among hunter-gatherers. But carnage was rare and certainly there were no high tech world wars.
This is pie in the sky, isn’t it? Maybe. But humans lived this way for more than a hundred thousand years before modern civilization occurred, with its wars, rat-races, diseases, and barren cityscapes. Examination of the fossil bones of our hunter-gatherer ancestors show a robust people, devoid of most of the diseases of civilization: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, even tooth decay.
When the pilgrims landed in what is now Massachusetts, they were a scurvy lot of disease-ridden, misshapen Europeans scourged by the Black Death and many other diseases. Their food was inferior. They wrote in their journals about the magnificent physiques of the natives—their inherent nobility—their fairness—their advanced politics—and their beautiful, strong bodies, both men and women.
As Joni Mitchell sang long ago, “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” And the garden is the Garden of Eden, man and woman in their natural state, before they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
If this sounds naïve—a return to Rousseau’s idea of the Noble Savage that he espoused in the 18th Century, I’d advise skeptics to check the anthropologists and what they have to say about indigenous hunting-gathering societies of the past 100 years. These people work about 17 hours a week. They lead low-stress lives with plenty of time for love and laughter and story-telling and communion with nature. They are happy. And they are healthy.
What are we?
Our impulse toward green living, carried to its logical conclusion, may just carry us back some day to the place we started from, only now we are wiser and can be more aware of the pitfalls that await those who wrest life from nature instead of taking what nature so gently and beneficently provides.
Yes, organic food generally tastes better than the same foods grown conventionally. You can find a ton of studies that show that organic food either doesn’t taste as good, or is no better tasting than conventional foods. But in well-designed studies, such as Washington State University’s recent test on strawberries, organic foods consistently win the test. Apples are the most frequently tested food for their taste qualities, and again, in the best designed studies, organic consistently is found to taste better. To see these studies yourself, simply Google the question that headlines this essay. I’m not going to bore you with summaries of the tests in this space.
What I am going to do is give you some of the reasons why organic food tastes better than conventionally grown food.
First and foremost, organic food is grown in soil enriched with compost, which itself is a mixture of decaying plant matter and animal manures that have thoroughly decomposed into sweet-smelling and harmless fertilizer. This organic fertilizer contains good stores of the major plant nutrients—potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen—plus all the trace elements contained in the materials it’s made from. These include zinc, magnesium, manganese, sulfur, molybdenum, selenium, and many others. In other words, organic fertilizer contains the full range of plant nutrients in the form plants like and in the proper amounts for optimum plant health. When the apple tree grows its apples, it has all the little trace elements on hand with which to build flavor compounds. And that holds true for all crops, including vegetables and the animals that eat those vegetables. And so our eggs, meat, and milk also are crafted from the full range of nutrients. In addition, compost returns organic matter to the soil, causing a bloom of healthful soil bacteria and other microorganisms that help feed the plants.
Conventional agriculture, on the other hand, fertilizes with just three nutrients—potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen—and these in soluble chemical form that pollutes ground water. There’s no organic matter to build a rich, spongy soil, and so conventional plowing exposes the soil to erosion. Pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides kill off many of the beneficial microorganisms in the soil. Crops, and the animals that eat those crops, are thus deprived of the full range of nutrients that plants need to produce really rich-tasting food.
Another reason why organic food tastes better is that organic farmers keep yields at a sustainable level rather than forcing every last pound of vegetable matter from the soil. This makes for more concentrated flavors in the organic food. Scientific studies have shown that organic food is higher in anti-oxidants, which are not only beneficial for our health, but protect the fragile molecules of taste and fragrance in the food.
Organic farmers are more likely to choose varieties of foods that are known to taste better, while conventional farmers tend to choose varieties of crops that yield the most. For these and many other reasons, organic foods do generally taste better.
I recently saw Penn and Teller’s program, Bullshit, on cable TV. For this episode, they “debunked” organic food and invited “scientific experts” to tell why organic food simply costs more, doesn’t taste any better, and in fact is dangerous for your health. Because of my long years of research into the subject, I recognized the so-called experts for who they really were: flacks for the agribusiness industry and chemical manufacturers.
In one segment shot at a farmers’ market, passersby were asked to sample two unlabeled food items and say which they thought tasted better. Everyone they used in the program chose the food that was revealed to be conventional. Could they simply have not used the footage of people who thought the organic food tasted better? Or could they have simply lied and said that the organic items were conventional?
Wait, what is the name of their program again?
The concept of “organic” started with the perception that modern agriculture is a destructive process. It’s a deadly one. Just look at what we call the chemicals that enable industrial agriculture: pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, where the suffix “~cides” has the same meaning as in the words homicide and suicide.
Industrial agriculture leads to soil erosion and eventually soil ruin. It produces unhealthy food. It has no respect for life (see beef feedlots, chicken factories, etc.). It fouls the earth, the air, and the waterways of the earth. It concentrates power and money in the hands of greedy industrialists. In essence it leads to sickness—sickness from the ground up, sickness of the plants and animals that feed off industrial agriculture, and that includes us.
The organic idea is to try to understand nature’s laws, rules, energies, and tendencies and try to work with them instead of against them to grow our crops and food animals. And sure enough, organic agriculture pays off in a cleaner environment, in rebuilding depleted soils and staving off soil erosion, in more humane treatment of animals, in more nutritious food, and in diverting money from the agribusiness industrialists.
But that’s just agriculture. The fundamental organic insight—that we get better results when we work with nature rather than against her—is applicable in many other kinds of human endeavor, environmentalism and ecological preservation among them. Enhancing nature’s laws, rules, energies, and tendencies produces a confluence of benefits—we get the desired result but also a lot of unforeseen benefits--whereas working against nature produces a confluence of detriments. We may get our one desired result, but also a lot of unforeseen bad things happen. For instance, using a pesticide may indeed kill off almost all of the pests that are ravaging our crop, but there always a few of the insects that are immune to its effects. These breed and suddenly a whole race of pesticide-resistant insects is back attacking our crop worse than before. Not only that, but we’ve killed off all the beneficial insects that might help control the pests, because beneficials—those insects that eat other insects--are much more susceptible to pesticides than plant-eating insects.
The organic idea was a paradigm shift. But a new paradigm shift looms on the horizon, one that springs from the local food movement that argues that we should eat food produced within our local foodshed. A local or regional foodshed is defined various ways -- a simple 100-mile radius, for example, is often used in “eat local” campaigns. One of the qualities of a local foodshed is that the agriculture is sustainable—that is, it can be farmed in perpetuity because the methods used don’t destroy as they farm, rather they restore nutrients to the land, protect the water, and fit the yields of foods grown on the land to what can be sustained. Organic farming is a good example of a sustainable agriculture.
The new paradigm shift that’s slowly arriving goes beyond organic agriculture and beyond agriculture altogether. The best description of the approaching paradigm shift that I’ve encountered is contained in a book called The Vegetarian Myth, written by Lierre Keith. The book is brilliant and extremely radical. And by radical I don’t mean angry, violent, or anarchistic. I mean it gets to the root of the problem with the way we human beings feed ourselves. The problem is, she says, agriculture itself. That is, the tearing open of the earth for the wholesale planting of seeds. This discovery, some nine or 10 thousand years ago, has led us to the sorry state we find ourselves in today: militarism, nuclear weapons, global warming, environmental degradation, mass starvation, and all the other ills of modern times.
Her answer is to let the earth have its way, as it did for the millions of years before agriculture arrived. Let climax ecologies rebuild themselves. Let us find our food from amid the fecund mix of plants and animals that form local ecologies, as our ancestors did from time immemorial until the dawn of agriculture.
Pie in the sky? Sure. Radical? Very. Is the genie of agriculture out of the bottle permanently? Probably. Could the earth sustain the current six billion people if we returned to hunting and gathering? No. Could we reduce the earth’s population of humans to a level consistent with sustainability? Yes—through attrition and birth control. Would it mean paradise regained? Of a sort, yes. Our hunting-gathering ancestors had their problems, but a fouled, dying earth wasn’t one of them. Many studies of the bones of early man show that he and she were generally very healthy people, as are modern indigenous peoples eating what they hunt and gather.
Should we start thinking about ways to heal the earth and live sustainably on what she can feed us? Sure. Why not? One way to start is by reading Keith’s brilliant book, The Vegetarian Myth.
“Singing glorious, glorious, one keg of beer for the four of us. Thanks be to God that there are no more of us, for one of could drink it all alone—damn beer!” That was the refrain at Collegiate Beerfest, also known as my college days, but now it seems that the drink of choice is coffee. And good for college kids, because the casual cup of coffee is no longer casual.
Coffee is the world’s most popular beverage (after water), with an estimated 400 billion cups consumed worldwide every year. Over $10 billion in coffee was traded worldwide in 2000—an amount of trade surpassed only by petroleum. I don’t know about you, but I start my day with a freshly-brewed cup—organic, of course.
The best thing about coffee is the smell of the roasted beans. It’s seductive, enticing, alluring—promising a paroxysm of fulfillment of the sense of taste. But the flavor seldom delivers on the rich promise of the aroma. I have had, on three occasions that I remember, a cup of coffee that has delivered, but I can count those cups on the fingers of one hand. I remember my first—like one always remembers a first love. I was just 17, and it was a cup of a brand called La Touraine, made of coffee with an admixture of roasted chicory root, New Orleans style, brewed in a large samovar-like contraption. I tried many blends of coffee and chicory after that, trying to replicate the experience, but it has eluded me to this day. My second coffee apotheosis was a particularly memorable cup of A&P Eight O’Clock that I had in the kitchen of a friend in New Jersey one egg-yolk-sunny morning when I was 28, sitting at a well-worn card table. I cupped the mug in my hands to accept its warmth and plunged into its mysterious, burnished, dark and chocolatey interior, amazed at the complexity and generosity of the flavor. Subsequent cups of Eight O’Clock at all other venues were disappointingly ordinary. The third—and last perfect cup that I remember—was delivered to my table at the end of a great dinner at Stevenswood Lodge along the cool, foggy coast of Mendocino County, California. I wasn’t expecting such perfection, but there it was. I said to my wife Susanna, “Damn—that’s a great cup of coffee!” Let’s see—if I’ve had a cup of coffee to start my day since I was about 15, that makes 17,500 cups of coffee. Three memorable cups out of 17,500 is a winning percentage of 0.00017. And yet I soldier on, knowing there’s a perfect cup awaiting somewhere. I suspect my experience is not that unusual. Or maybe I’m just fanatically picky.
The highest grade of coffee is Coffea arabica, usually called just arabica. Today the market is being flooded with lower quality Coffea canephora, also called robusta, mostly from Vietnam and Brazil. This is causing immense social disruption in coffee-growing countries.
Truly good coffee should meet certain requirements. It should be grown at high elevations (mountain grown) and be specialty grade arabica. However, as with wine, you can have an award winning coffee from a plantation one year and the next it will be unremarkable. The best bet is to find a company whose product you know, like, and trust is truly organic, shade-grown, and high-grade arabica, and stick with them until you find something even more to your taste.
Coffee should be stored away from light or in a light barrier bag in a cool dry place (not the refrigerator). It should be frozen only if you are going to store it for longer than a month. Freezing will change the cell structure of the coffee bean and also change the way it grinds.
The following is a letter I received from Randy Wirth, co-owner and head roaster of the Caffe Ibis Coffee Roasting Company of Logan, Utah:
Caffe Ibis is a 26-year-old custom roasting house with a focus on triple certified coffees from around the world. We have a selection of 25 coffees that meet all three of the following critieria:
If you want to find out more about specialty coffee and some of the important issues today, you can visit the following sites:
--www.scaa.org (Specialty Coffee Association of America)
--www.transfairusa.org or www.fairtradecoffee.org
--www.natzoo.si.edu/smbc (National Zoo and Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center)
--www.coffeekids.org
Randy’s intrguing letter sparked further research on my part. I discovered that when organically grown within the shade of a rain forest, coffee trees don’t need the agricultural chemical fertilizers and insecticides required by full-sun, monoculture coffee plantations. Mammals, insects, fungus, and other life forms in the rain forest create a healthy biodiversity that eliminates the need for pesticides and other lethal agricultural chemicals in coffee production. But there’s more. The great diversity of life in the rain forest includes migratory birds that summer in the United States and Canada, and winter in the American tropics. Populations of migratory birds that use the Central and South American rain forests as winter grounds are being seriously depleted by clear-cutting for, among other reasons, full-sun coffee plantations. The National Zoo and Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center encourage us to drink “bird-friendly coffee.”
A healthy, biodiverse ecosystem that includes coffee trees protects not only migratory birds, but the entire ecosystem of plants, animals, and even the fertility of the soil and integrity of water supplies. In the tropics, nutrients don’t build up in the soil the way they do in cold winter regions. If a leaf falls to the ground, it’s soon dismantled by creatures like microorganisms and worms and its nutrients sucked up by plant roots and used to build trees, vines, and other life forms. Everything is upstairs. When a rain forest is clear-cut, almost all the nutrients in the system are thus removed. If the land is replanted entirely to coffee trees, it becomes a monoculture of one plant species, unable to provide for the great diversity of life of which rain forests are capable. Nutrients must be supplied in the form of chemical fertilizers. Because the natural enemies of the coffee pests have been destroyed with the rain forest canopy, the pests are free to multiply in plantations consisting entirely of their favorite food, and so pesticides need to be applied and reapplied. Because the shading, sheltering canopy has been removed, groundwater supplies dry up. Nutritionless soil with hardly any organic matter becomes exposed to tropical sunlight and laterizes—a soil scientist’s term for “turns to stone.” When you choose triple certified shade grown coffee, you’re protecting a valuable ecosystem, including the human beings who live in it and from it.
The world coffee market is now being flooded with cheap, inferior coffee grown in such full-sun plantations around the world, especially Vietnam. Prices for this coffee are so low that many coffee farmers receive less than the cost of production for their beans, which drives them off the land. The land may then be bought by corporations that clear-cut in order to plant full sun coffee. Transfair attempts to pay enough to keep indigenous coffee farmers on the land so they can grow their coffee under the rain forest canopy. While this helps, too many coffee farmers are seeing their incomes shrink and life becoming more untenable. Even during the good years, when crops do well and prices are high, growing coffee provides barely enough income to sustain a family. In bad years, things grow desperate. That’s where Bill Fishbein, founder of Coffee Kids in 1988, stepped in to help. Coffee Kids, based in Santa Fe, is an international non-profit organization established to improve the quality of life for children and families who live in coffee-growing communities around the world. Coffee Kids helps these families liberate themselves from economic dependence on the coffee crop by providing income-generating alternatives. For more information about this worthwhile organization, visit www.coffeekids.org.
More and more organically-minded coffee businesses in the United States are trying to help desperately poor coffee farmers. Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers of Portland, OR, works directly with family-owned coffee farms in Central America to insure they can uphold stringent standards to produce premium-quality coffees for which they are paid premium prices. Allegro Coffee Company of Thornton, CO, outside of Denver, a subsidiary of Whole Foods Market, forges relationships with its growers, assuring them of a fair price, requiring that they use sustainable and traditional coffee growing techniques, and bringing members of coffee co-op farms and family farms to Denver from Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, even India, so they can see how their coffees are roasted and marketed. The JBR Coffee Company of San Leandro, CA, has developed a program called “Source Aid” to help organic coffee growers in Central America through the efforts of its green bean buyer, Pete Rogers. To find out more, visit http://www.naturefriendly.org. Another eco-friendly and farmer-supportive company that sells 100 percent shade-grown, organic arabica is Rapunzel. Visit http://rapunzel.com/products/coffee.html. I guarantee that a trip through these websites will be an eye-opener regarding our daily cup of coffee.
It’s often said that when we buy organic products, we are voting for a clean, environmentally-safe agriculture with our dollars. In the case of coffee, we are also voting to help the impoverished families who grow this beverage in some of the most economically-deprived places on earth.
The Specialty Coffee Association of America gives the following advice for brewing the perfect cup of coffee:
For every ½ gallon (64 fluid ounces), 3.25 to 4.25 ounces of coffee should be used, depending on your taste. If too little is used the coffee will be weak or watery. Too much and the coffee is too strong and may be bitter. For the best extraction results (how much actual coffee flavor material is in the cup), the brewing temperature--the temperature of the water as it passes through the coffee--should be between 92°C and 96°C. If the water is not hot enough, too little flavoring material is extracted. If it is too hot, the extra molecular activity of the water decreases the extraction process and the coffee is also too weak. This temperature range is achieved if the water is simmering, just short of a full rolling boil.
Brewing time: from the time the water first makes contact with the coffee to the end of the brewing period, the SCAA standards for drip grind are four to six minutes; for regular grind, six to eight minutes, and for fine grind, four minutes. The finer the grind, the more particle surface area is in contact with the water. The more area that’s in contact, the quicker the extraction process.
If coffee is held on a heat source, the proteins in it begin to break down and the beverage deteriorates and becomes bitter and harsh. Storing brewed coffee in a closed, insulated container like a Thermos at 80°C to 85°C is best for maintaining the freshness of the coffee.
What's the Right Vegetable Oil for Kitchen Use?
Proof That Organics are Better
Is Big Organic Simply Organic Agribiz?
Frozen Organic Produce from China and a Very Bad Bill
Pesticide Peddlers Diss Michelle's Organic Garden
Are Organic Bananas Really Safe?
Organic Chocolate That Supports Indigenous People
Websites About Organic Food: Eat Green to Eat Clean
What-or Who-is Killing our Honeybees?
Organic Food Producers Get a Big Boost from the USDA
How to Make Apricot-Lemon Preserves
Why Organic Food is Cheaper in the Long Run
We Didn’t Trust Horizon Milk Anyway
Tips for Identifying Organic Food at the Farmers’ Market
J.I. Rodale, an Unlikely Organic Guru
"Organic No Healthier Than Conventional"
Hooray for Nicolas Kristof of the New York Times