www.eatlocalchallenge.com

Local plum jam

(Editor note:  This September, the Eat Local Challenge blog will be hosting an international, month-long eat local challenge in association with the Locavores.  This particular challenge will have a special focus of preserving, canning, and putting food up for the winter.  Stay tuned to this site in the next few days for more information. Meanwhile, this first post from Marc discusses making plum jam at home.)

By Marc

The grounds around my apartment have two plum trees that become heavy with fruit in the mid-summer.  The first few years I lived here, I didn't do anything with them except perhaps eat a few, only to rediscover that they are almost all pit and skin.  But last year my upstairs neighbor taught me how to make plum jam, so this summer I was sure to spend part of each weekend on a ladder harvesting as many plums as I could, even creating a strange contraption called "the depluminator" to pick fruit growing on high boughs beyond my reach.

Jam or jelly can be a fantastic way to preserve the bounty of local summer fruit.  A significant non-local component, however, is often required in the form of large quantities of sugar.  Much of the sugar sold here comes from the tropics, often produced by ill-treated workers on ill-treated lands.  Sugar beets are another source of white sugar, with California produces only about 6 percent of the U.S. crop (most comes from Minnesota and North Dakota). (An episode of the Deconstructing Dinner radio program goes into great detail about sugar, stevia and honey). 

Food and Farm Bill Notes

By Marc

Two important Food and Farm Bill items related to local eating in this week's blogs and news:

First, at Chews Wise, Samuel Fromartz (author of Organic, Inc., a critical look at the growth of organic agriculture) explains how the Food and Farm Bill can help organic farming (or, in the case of crop insurance, stop penalizing organic farmers), and gives suggestions on how you can help.  One way is by signing the Environmental Working Group's petition to Congress asking for more support for organic farming.  EWG has been near the forefront of the organic food movement for years and their farm subsidy database is shining lots of light on who really receives farm subsidies.  They want to submit the petition on July 15.

Second, Michele Kayal, writing for the Associated Press (via The Intelligencer & Wheeling News-Record), summarized how the Food and Farm Bill could help strengthen local food networks.  A summary of her article after the jump.

It's Food and Farm Bill Time

By Marc

Almost a year ago I posted Legislating Local Foods, an introduction to the Food and Farm Bill (also called the "Farm Bill," a highly flawed nickname). The Food and Farm Bill can have a positive impact on local eating in many ways---through programs that encourage purchases of local foods by schools, support for fruit and vegetable growers, funds to publicize Farmers Markets, to name a few.

Congress is writing the 2007 Food and Farm Bill during the summer, with a goal of a final vote before October. Subcommittees of the House Agriculture Committee are almost finished with their respective parts of the bill. After subcommittees finish their work, the full Agriculture Committee will combine them into the complete package, make amendments and deletions, and send it to the full House for debate, amendment and a vote.  No one is quite sure what will happen when it reaches "the floor."  Will House Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) allow amendments from non-members of the Ag Committee?  Or will she call for a vote immediately?  Dan Owens, at the Blog for Rural America has some thoughts on that question.

The Senate is a few weeks away from their committee sessions on the Food and Farm bill.
 

Reducing Kitchen Waste by Eating Chard Stems

By Marc

Chard -- red, white, or yellow -- is one of my favorite leafy greens.  The flavor is mild, it is available all year at the Farmers' Markets in the Bay Area, and it is a perfect side dish for a wide variety of main courses.  I typically cook it with a bit of garlic, but it also works in a tortilla casserole, or a filling for pastry (the one in the May/June 1998 Saveur magazine is especially delicious). 

But I never eat the stems, and this waste of vegetable matter always bothered me.  So I recently started a project to sell myself on eating the chard stems, otherwise known as "stem sell research."   

Pickling in Winter

By Marc

Where citrus grows, winter can be a time to preserve the bounty by making pickles and preserves.  In each of the last few years, I have spent a day or two making Indian lemon pickles:  pieces of lemon (peel and all) bathed in a spicy, salty, oily sauce.   

So far I have made two different pickles using the lemons from my backyard tree.  These pickles are not completely local because the salt, spices and oil are produced in some location that is outside my 100-mile circle. To estimate their local percentage, I weighed each ingredient and found that about 75% of the weight was local (lemons) with the remaining 25% being non-local (salt, oil and spices) . 

Drink Locally - West Coast Sake

By Marc

Saké -- an alcoholic drink that originated in Japan -- has had a rather bad reputation in North America for many decades.  In recent years, however, the drink has become much more popular because of a new appreciation of Japanese food and the availability of higher quality imported saké.  Consumers are starting to realize how delicious a carefully crafted saké can be, or how it can serve as the base of tasty cocktails.   

Although most of the world's saké is produced in Japan (home to almost 2,000 breweries), the western U.S. has breweries in Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Forest Grove (Oregon).  The rice for the breweries is grown in the Sacramento Valley, an agricultural region to the north of Sacramento.  And thus, the phrase "local saké" is a relative one:  for most of North America, "local saké" means that it came across the continent instead of across the planet.  But since Japanese saké probably enters North America on the West Coast, Japanese saké will be transported roughly the same number of miles within the U.S. as a California or Oregon saké.  The avoided leg of the journey will be the dirtiest one:  a month in a huge container ship with an dirty, old engine that burns one of the most polluting fuels around ("bunker fuel," a thick substance with hundreds of times more sulfur than diesel fuel used in trucks), concentrating its pollution on a just a few (generally low income) communities around the port.

On Growing Vegetables as Ornamentals

By Marc

Although I have been growing herbs for years, the early Eat Local Challenge excitement of the Spring inspired me to plant numerous vegetables in my backyard and on my patio.  One of my purchases was a scarlet runner bean plant.   Its small size---a height of 4 inches and just a few leaves---and my inexperience with vegetable gardening led me to I put it into a container with a volume of roughly 4 gallons.  In the next few weeks, the plant tried to tell me I had made a mistake:  it grew at a shocking rate, with the runner vine seemingly climbing a foot per day.  But I didn't listen. 

Putting Local Eating into Federal Legislation

By Marc

The current food system, with its ubiquitous corn products, feedlots, and multi-thousand mile transportation networks, did not "just happen" through the wonders of the free market.  It has been shaped by government agriculture, transportation and trade programs, like the interstate highway system, crop subsidies, water projects, federally-funded export programs, health regulations, and so forth.  And since policy was important in creating the current system, policy can influence its evolution to something more sustainable.   

Congress and the Executive Branch are always tinkering with agricultural programs, as recently documented by the Washington Post in an ongoing series.  For example, if a House member needs to bring home some pork to help his bid for the Senate, some customs duties can be diverted to provide checks for ranchers in his district.  Or if a powerful Senator wants to help out the catfish industry in his state, a letter to the Agriculture Secretary can secure a rule change.

My Eat Local Month

By Marc

During the month of May, I challenged myself to cook only ingredients from within a 100-mile circle around Berkeley, California.  It was a learning---and sometimes yearning---experience for me to limit my ingredients so much (in one of the most agriculturally diverse areas in the nation, to be sure).  This post is my attempt at a summary of my experience.

I had many conflicting thoughts during the challenge (for example:  the sugar snap peas are so delicious; there's nothing to snack on;  sugar glazed local pecans are amazing; some tofu would be ideal in this stir fry, but it's way too far outsider the circle;  these local eggs make remarkable frittatas), so as I try to sum up my month of Eating Local, I keep thinking of the beginning of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.  You know how it goes: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,..." and so on. It seems ripe for adaptation into a description of my month of cooking and eating local, but I won't subject you to that potential literary disaster (feel free to give it a try in the comments...here is the full text of the novel).

An Hourglass of Pollution: The Uneven Burdens of Trade

By Marc

One of the goals of the Eat Local Challenge is to raise questions about what we eat. Who produced the food?  What methods did they use?  Where does it come from?  How did it get here?  And what sorts of envirionmental impacts are incurred along the way?  Answering these last two questions requires a closer look at the international goods distribution system, something that is so diffuse outside of the major port regions that it usually fades into the background. 

The international goods distribution system is a complex multi-modal network (roads, shipping lines, airports, railroads).  Most goods arrive in the U.S. on huge ships loaded with containers that can be mounted directly onto rail cars or truck beds for transport to warehouses or repacking centers.   The highest density of activity is around the major ports, and the impacts are concentrated on whoever lives and works nearby.  A good way to visualize this is as an hourglass.  Container ships bring goods from all over the world.  They converge on a narrow region (the port), where the goods are transferred to trucks and trains. The trucks and trains travel away from the port on a tightly-packed network of freeways and railroad tracks, and then spread out across the nation.