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Cuba Day Six: Back to Havana, by way of

the secret garden of PelegrinPosted onAugust 9, 2012

Settling in on our minibus for the trip back to Havana, I see on our itinerary that our next stop is Project of

Sustainable Agriculture and Food Production Pelegrn. I figure that we will see another organic farm like the

ones weve visited over the last few days. So wrong!

Heres our driver Nafal relaxing on one side of the front porch of the Pelegrn

house, and a shot of the even more exuberant

other side. More going on here than

agriculture! But before we explore the other

surprises of Pelegrn, lets take a look at the

gardens.

The raised beds of vegetables contained by

borders of roof tiles show us once more that

the production of beautiful food can itself be beautiful.

Close by, we find a coconut tree weighted with fruit.Would you like to try it? Oh, yes! Suddenly somebody

is up the tree, and the next thing we know, a machete

is out, a hard nut has been topped for each of us,

and we are sipping coconut

waterthe slightly cloudy

thin liquid from the center

of the fruit, with its fresh

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herbal fragranceright from the shell. Heres Alex enjoying his.

We return to the central cluster of walkways, two-story

thatched cabanas, patios, and workshops. The creator of

patio Pelegrn has helpfully provided signs to help us

explore the compound: dance, literature, debate, music,

theatera network ofworkshops, nested on this

small property, for local

residents to cultivate their

artistic and intellectual

interests.

Here is a group of elderly women (most of them

appear younger than I am) practicing the craft of constructing handbags; I wish

that I had gotten a picture of their product, and even more I wish that I had

bought one!They were extremely well-constructed and stylish.

The creator of these delights (he would insist that it was a local community

effort) is Mario Pelegrn Pozo, painter, ceramic artist, and cultural promoter,

shown here with one of his own works

(purchased by one of us, I should add!).

We lingered in the gallery with its paintings,

ceramics, and handmade furniture. See that

painting over Rajs shoulder?it will soon behanging over my desk! (Ill tell you more about

Raj in a future post, but for now, check out

Generation

Food Project, his current movie project with Steve James, director ofHoop

Dreams.) We relaxed over a cup of coffee in

the caf literario. We wandered around the

grounds taking in the maze of artworks and

thatched structures. I wish I could spend more

time with youexploring the

birdcages and

rabbit pens,

the grain mill, the visiting hawk who hangs out

on the front porch, the fountain, the well, the

rescued alligator in his hog-wire cage

(big!soon to be picked up for a return trip to

the wild). But it is time for lunch! FollowFollow


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And what a lunch. It will be a while, here at home, before I can really enjoy an

avocado, or a mango, or a banana; the exotic warm aroma and rich flesh of the

just-picked fruit still has me seduced!

As it happened, it was also Melanies twenty-third birthday, so her dad Peter staged a

little celebration for her. (The family is Greek; Melanie

is a vegan chef, and Peter is a contractor whospecializes in building diners. What a great pair to

travel with!The morning that I was sick, Peter

brought a nice breakfast to my room to tide me over while the group was off on

a tobacco farm; he waved off my thanks with Im a good mother.)

After our mornings dalliance in this magical place, we arent easy to organize,

but eventually Zoe and Jess get us back on the bus headed for Havana, where we meet with Juan Jos Len

from the Ministry of Agriculture.

Sr. Len is a crisp antidote to our mornings artistic meanderings; a small farmer turned revolutionary, he has a

long memory and a ready command of facts and figures. He sketched in for us, through the eyes of the farmers,

the tumultuous early days of the Revolution in 1959.

The agrarian reform laws of 1959 nationalized and redistributed large land holdingsthose owned by Cubans

(including the Castro family, by the way) as well as those owned by foreign individuals and companiesbut

allowed each owner to keep 400 hectares of land. (The seizure of property owned by American citizens led the

U.S. in 1960 to impose the embargo on Cuba that continues to this day.) Small farmers were allotted the land

they were working, up to 67 hectares. (Why 67?It turns out that theres a measurement larger than a hectare,

a caballeria, which consists of about 13.4 hectares. So, five caballerias equals 67 hectares.) Also, over100,000 other families received at least one hectare (2.5 acres) or more. About 60% of the nationalized land

remained in state hands and about 40% was redistributed to land-owners and small farmers.

But, he said, the large land-owners didnt take advantage of the 400 hectares they were allotted, and instead of

farming, conspired against the Revolution. So in 1963 the state nationalized those

400-hectare plots as well; 80% of this land was held by the government and 20% was

distributed directly to farmers. The state organized the lands it retained into the large

state farms that we have heard of before, worked by farmers as employees of the state.

(After the fall of the Soviet Union, these farms would be broken up into the UBPCs likeAlamar that we visited on the first day, which hold their lands in usufructbasically, a

long-term leasefrom the state.) Of the farmers who became land owners, some chose

to consolidate their lands with others to form a cooperative. (In this case, they gave up

individual ownership by selling the land to the cooperative and becoming a share-holder

in the coop.) Other farmers retained ownership of their land but formed cooperatives to work together on the

logistics of farming (like El Paraso that we visited on day five). The revolutionary process of land distribution

continues; new laws passed in 2008 created a means to redistribute unused or poorly administered land. A

farmer or coop can now get a 13-hectare grant of such land (more or less a caballeria), and can ask for evenFollowFollow


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more, up to 40 hectares.

But how do these people selltheir crops? Sr. Len explained that the state purchases 100% of trade crops

like tobacco, cacao beans, and coffee. In addition, farmers are required to sell 80% of certain categories of

produce to the state, but can sell the remaining 20% on the free market. The restricted categories cover 21

products: among tubers, for instance, malangas, sweet potatoes, yams, and potatoes; in vegetables, onions,

garlic, pepper, cucumber, and tomatoes; in fruits, mango, guava, citrus, papaya, and pineapple; in grains, rice,corn, and garbanzos; and in dairy, milk. Theres aloton this list! (The states 80% of these products covers what

Sr. Len calls social consumptionthe needs of hospitals, schools, day-care centers, old-folks homes, etc.)

For products not on the list, farmers can freely sell whatever they produce. Also, farmers can contract to sell

directly to tourist operations like hotels.

But it turns out that small-scale urban agriculture operates outside this system. (Lots of exceptions!It appears

that Cuba is trying any number of different models these days.) Growers who live within a 10-kilometer radius of

a city can freely sell 100% of their produce. Tomorrow we will visit a bursting handful of gardens like these.

We have had a long day!But we have one more stop before we head back to the hotel: the Food

Conservation Project Vilda and Pepe. For fifteen years now, the couple (Vilda trained as a chemist in animal

nutrition, Pepe as a mechanical engineer) has been working tirelessly to teach Cubans how to preserve food.

Remember that, when the Soviet Union disintegrated starting in 1989, within two years Cuba had lost its main

trading partner and 80% of its tradetrade that included much of the Cuban food supply.

Vilda gave us a vivid picture of the impact of this loss on the Cuban dinner table. The calorie

intake of the average Cuban adult fell from about 3,000 calories a day down to 1,800 a day.

Protein intake dropped from 90 grams a day to 45. During this harsh period, Vilda and Pepe

drew on their backgrounds in nutrition and engineering to learn how to preserve food forthemselves, and then decided to share what they had learned in their own kitchen.

They use natural techniques and methods that work in ordinary Cuban kitchenssolar drying

and dehydration, fermentation and pickling in vinegar, pasteurization.

They developed a simple sterile sealer for bottles and jars from found materials that can

by copied easily (easily, at least, by the endlessly resourceful Cuban people). They

developed tasty recipes and offered classes for housewives, kids, and food producers.

Over time, they attracted funding from national and international NGOs and other sources

to help them scale up their operation.

Their outreach combines face-to-face approaches with extensive media efforts. Volunteer

promotores take the participatory training and then fan out into the community to show

their neighbors the techniques; children come into their test kitchen for classes once a month, learning

hands-on how to prepare healthful meals and preserve produce from their family gardens. Vilda and Pepe also

have created something of a media empirethey have a weekly half-hour radio show and a publishing house

that distributes their books and multimedia products. They now reach 15,000 people face-to-face, and over

radio and TV, about 1.5 million people per year. Their services are free; the media sales help fund the FollowFollow


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organization.

Their efforts allow farmers to add value to their produce and enable people to enjoy seasonal foods like fruits

across the year. And remember that Cuba lies in the middle of hurricane alleyin 2008, for instance, they had

two hurricanes within two days that destroyed over 750,000 pounds of the food supply. Thanks to Vilda and

Pepe, many Cubans can now rely on a small pantry of preserved fruits and vegetables to help them through

such crises. To learn more about their work, visit Food Conservation Project Vilda and Pepe. (Its in Spanish;use translate this page in Google search).

Posted in Food fairness, Meet the foodies, Sustainability, Uncategorized | Tagged Cuban food

preservation, Cuban sustainable farming, Patio Pelegrin,Vilda and Pepe | Leave a reply

Cuba Day Five: Paradise, and the question

of owning landPosted onAugust 1, 2012

The fate of Day Four: If you have been following my trip to Cuba, you may be wondering what happened toDay Four. I spent it at hotel Rancho San Vicente in beautiful Viales, in bed nursing a terrible cold! But during

one of my few forays out of my room, I did manage to confirm a point made by

our excellent guide Jess as we drove west into the mountains of the province

of Pinar del Ro. Although the land-line telephone system extends throughout

the province, the electric grid does not; much of the province is powered by

solar panels. Heres the array that keeps the lights on at our hotel. (Now back to

bed.)

So!Day Five.

Today we visted El Paraso (paradise in English), a family farm terraced along a hillside overlooking a valley

checkered with pastures and more farms. Here

Wilfredo, the head of the family, welcomes us,

translated by our trusty Jess. (I didnt get

Wilfredos last name, unfortunately.) You may

remember that a few days ago we visited

Alamar UBPC (basic unit of cooperative FollowFollow


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production, a farm on state-owned land run by a cooperative of workers). El Paraso on the other hand is a

privately owned family farm, organized with others like it in a private credit and service cooperative (the

acronym in Spanish is CCS). CCS farms have grown to represent about 17% of all Cuban farms. El Paraso is

also a Finca Agroecologica education center and demonstration farm.

The terraces stepping down the hillside, bordered and contained by hand-stacked stones, are silent testimony

to the time and labor that it takes to draw these orderly ranks of crops out of the land.Here we see a row of habichuelas, a long flat green bean; the interplanting in this field

includes scallions, squash, and several other vegetables, as well as bright flowers (to

attract pests away from the crops). Drip irrigation keeps the crops healthy with as little

water as possible (no mean feat in this veryhot climate).

The son-in-law of the family, Tony, took a moment on our tour to show us some of the

older tools still in use on the farm. The sugar-cane shredder,

constructed from bits and pieces from a tractor and a couple

of other sources, reduces the knife-edged sugar-cane leaves to pulp and channels off

the juice. The coffee-bean husker (a ubiquitous tool in Cuba, it

turns out) breaks up the outer husk to release the coffee bean.

(At one point Jessa formidable dancershowed us a

dance move based on the action of pounding the coffee

beans with the pestle of the husker. Where was my camera!)

And Tony showed us how to

operate the hand-mill, used to grind

corn and other grains. These tools,

like the terrace rockeries and the

thatched roofs of the cabanas and outbuildings, show meonce again how the Cubans manage to create both grace and

utility out of just the materials they have on hand.

After a delicious lunch on the farm, we headed off to the

headquarters of the Moncada UBPC, where we talked to Rafael Barrios, the head of production for the farm. It

was pouring rain once again!Here we see some members of the cooperative,

using probably the most efficient modes of transportation for the weather.

Unlike the Alamar UBPC that we visited earlier, with its diverse crops ofvegetables and herbs, the main crops for external trade here at Moncada are

the traditional ones of tobacco and coffee. Of its 204 hectares, 42 are devoted

to coffee and 42 to tobacco; 64 hectares are devoted to self-consumption

essentially, gardens for the families of the 86 associates who make up the

coop membershipand the rest is left in uncultivated woodlands, where they raise animals. In addition to selling

under contract to the government, they can sell some of their products to people outside the coop, and

sometimes family members supplement the family income with jobs in the town.

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Sr. Barrios helped us understand better what it was like for the farm workers to go from employee to coop

member. Like Alamar, the Moncada UBPC began in 1993 with the breakup of a large state-owned farm, and the

workers on that farm became the associates of the UBPC. Moncada also holds its lands in usufruct (essentially,

a long lease) from the state. The biggest challenge in the transition, he said, was that before, the government

answered for everything, but afterwards the workers had to organize themselves and manage their own

operation. With the right to own, if not the land itself, the means of production as well as the fruits of their labors,

Sr. Barrios said, the workers now feel like true owners. As part of their annually negotiated contract with thegovernment, the coop buys a technological package that includes everything (down to machetes!) needed to

develop the crops, and crop insurance as well. Over the course of the year they keep track of costs and

production levels, and after the harvest, more productive members get a larger share of the sales proceeds.

The farm has done well and is always growing.

I admire the energy and intelligence of everybody weve met at the UBPCsbut the Texan in me balks. Am I

hearing whispers from one of my stubborn peasant forebears? Do I have a primal fear of being turfed out of my

hut by some inscrutable landlord?I would want to own my land. Thus I was glad to discover that the Cuban

system, among its several models, has a place for private family-owned farms like El Paraso.

On our way back to the hotel at the end of the day, we stopped briefly in Viales, where I caught this classic car

parked in s street-scape of lovely rain-washed colors!

Posted in Food fairness, Sustainability| Tagged CCS, cooperative farming, Cuban farm ownership,

Cuban solar energy, UBPC,Vinales | Leave a reply

Cuba Day Three: Biosphere and the lotus

eater of Las TerrazasPosted on July 30, 2012

Today we set out west of Havana to Las Terrazas to visit the Biosphere, a UNESCO biological reserve. What

beautiful countryside! We arrived at the eco-station just in time to be pelted by rain, FollowFollow


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but we were able to ignore it with the help of a drink, some Afro-Cuban music, and a

fact-filled introduction to the reserve.

The Biosphere consists of 25,000 hectares (a hectare

is about two and a half acres) in three nested

zonesa nucleus of natural reserve (no people!),

surrounded by an ecologically managed buffer zone,in turn surrounded by protected zone of managed

resources including family farms. In the nucleus, the reserve boasts 900

different species of plants, 131 species of birds (50% of them migratory), 32 species of reptiles, and thousands

and thousands of species of insects. Only large mammals and other fauna are considered under-populated by

the standards of bio-diversity; 75% of them are bats. (At sunset that evening, I passed up the opportunity, which

I gather comes up daily, to watch a swarm of bats sweep out of the caves near our hotel for their nightly feeding.

I was coming down with a cold; I faded, Im sorry to say.)

The scientists at the reserve are working to repair ecological damage done over centuries. In the colonial period,

coffee growers stripped the area of its forests to develop their vast fincas; now the scientists are replanting with

over 130 species of native trees and other vegetation. They also have fish farms that support 21 different

species, 13 of them native to the region and two found only in the reserve.

They also are working to build agro-biodiversity. The farmers in the reserve live in the village of Las Terrazas

(constructed for them when the reserve was created) and have farm plots in the

surrounding hills. They contribute seeds from their crops to a strictly controlled seed

bank and exchange seeds both among themselves and with farmers in other regions.

The scientists keep track of the farmers who are growing indigenous crops following

traditional techniques and make sure to collect seeds from them. The seed bankensures that these crops can be planted year after year, and provides resources to

help repair the crop damage done by hurricanes and other natural disasters that lash

Cuba.

Once again, we found that these agro-ecological practices had a human heart and social mission. The project

Mi plato y yo (My recipe and myself) collects recipes, often handed down from grandparents to

grandchildren, of indigenous foods prepared in traditional ways. The published collections tell the stories both of

the dishes and of the cooks who contributed thema great way to celebrate the traditions of Cuban food

preparation and tempt cooks to try the techniques of these elders in their own kitchens.

Time for lunch!We wound our way through the village to Eco-Restaurant El Romero,

gourmet of the Cuban ecological cuisine. This

improbable gem is the brainchild of Tito Nuez

Guds, vegetarian chef, forager, and food artist (seen

here against a backdrop of the wetlands and fields

where he forages many ingredients for his menu). We

started with pickled lotus root, fresh and delicate. FollowFollow


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Following that, we had soup (several different kinds

for each table; mine was a lovely brothy vegetable

soup, and others had cold pumpkin soup or black bean soup). Our

main-course plates were a buffet unto themselvesa

torta, herbed brown rice, a taco, several kinds of

vegetables, all artfully plated (my notes are a

collection of superlatives barely readable throughsplashes and smears of the meal itself). We ended on

a high note with a chocolate pudding served in a little leaf boat. We puzzled over what

gave it its depth and complexity but ended up having

to ask: some pumpkin, some peanuts. How did they

do that?It was the best chocolate ever!

All of this carefully prepared and beautifully presented food emerged from the

small kitchen in the corner with its fresh herbs and shelves of handmade

condiments, where the chef and servers

handily choreographed our meal. But where

did Tito find vegetarian chefs of this caliber?Locally, of course, trained under

his careful eye. Describing the first reaction of his pork-loving Cuban community

to meals made only of plants, he laughed as he pushed his hands away from

himself in the universal gesture of refusal. But now he works with the schools to

explain the fare and trains students as interns to learn the preparations.

Changing the diet of his community, one leaf at a time!

Note: There wont be a Cuba day four; the cold I felt coming on today arrived copiously by night-time, and I

spent the whole next dayour first in the beautiful mountain town of Vialesin bed in a Claritan-inducedsmog. What did I miss?Primarily a trip to a tobacco farm, which of everything we had on the agenda

interested me the least (my swampy ex-smoker lungs would not have been amused). So, on to day five!

Posted in Food fairness, Meet the foodies, Sustainability, Uncategorized | Tagged Biosphere, ElRomero Restaurant, Las Terrazas | Leave a reply

Cuba Day Two: From commodity crops to

local sustainable farmingFollowFollow


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Posted on July 22, 2012

Today we started off at theAntonio Nuez Jimenez Foundation for Nature and Humanity (the acronym for the

name in Spanish is FANJ), an NGO with a very broad agenda related to culture and the environment. Nuez

Jimenez, who created FANJ in 1994 at the age of 71, was both a revolutionary (here he

is with Che Guevara and Ches daughter) and a professor of geology, a scientist with an

international reputation. And, like Darwin, Shackleton, andothers before him, he was a scientist-adventurerIn

1987-88, he set off with a group to cross South America to

Cuba by canoe, following the Amazon River east and the

Orinoco north, then across

the treacherous open waters

of the Caribbean to landfall in

Cuba. Our guide Handy (I

didnt get his last name)

showed us the very canoe that he paddled, as well as

a map of his (arduous!) route. (He was then 64 years

old. I am now 64 years old. Would it be sullen of me to

point out that I most likely couldnt paddle a canoe across the street?)

At any rate, after Handys tour of the foundation museum and library, we met with Maria Caridad Cruz,

coordinator of the FANJ Program for Local Sustainable Development. Yesterday we had learned about Cubas

early commitment to commodity crops (sugar, coffee, tobacco), the collapse of those markets, and the

emergence of other models like farming cooperatives. Walking through the fields of the UBPC Alamar, we had

seen one example of smaller-scale, highly diversified farming. Now Maria sketched out for us the whole FANJ

vision of what food production in Cuba could become.

At the most local level, FANJ helps people learn how to grow family gardens. And with 75% of Cubas people

now living in urban areas, many without a plot of land for a garden, FANJ also shows people how to build

gardens on their rooftops. The gardeners aspire to follow the ideals of organic gardening and permaculture:

close the circle. They collect rainwater in cisterns, filter gray water from their sinks and showers, re-use

building materials, recycle and compost, use small animals (chickens, rabbits) and animal waste, and (in the

most thorough-going cases) use dry toilets and convert human waste to usable garden fertilizer. (Seriously. More

on this later.)

These family gardens produce vegetables, medicinal and culinary herbs, fruits, and flowers and produce them

prodigiously! FANJ also offers a program about how to sell their excess produce. And FANJ supports seed

exchanges, both for family gardeners and for larger-scale farmers.

FANJs programs are small but growing. They now have 25 functioning groups in seven (out of Cubas 15)

provinces, and they have 120 promoters (promodores) around the country, getting into the smaller

communities with their mission and programs.

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But a word about the mission. Yes, they want the Cuban people to grow food to enrich their diets and

supplement their incomes. But they have a broader social mission: to develop active citizens who are working

together to solve problems at the local level. They aim to involve whole families (farming has historically been a

male occupation), and to encourage people to have a lively Interchange about their practices, their problems

and solutions, and their dreams. I will return to this theme later; I came to realize by the end of my trip that it was

really the cornerstone of what I was learning in Cuba.

Next we visited the Cuban Association of Agricultural and Forestry Technicians (ACTAF) where we talked to

Fernando Funes, the Coordinator of Agro-ecological Projects. Fernando took us

on a personal journey through the landscape that we had been visiting. At first

his agricultural education had been very specialized, in the spirit of the Green

Revolution; he studied pastures and cattle exclusively. Then the blow fell: the

USSR collapsed. He likes statistics; he mentioned that during the early part of

the Special Period, 100,000 cattle died. He added that he himself lost 25

pounds. (This is not a large man.) People felt the raw fear of not being able to

feed their families.

At that point, people began to adopt early forms of agro-ecological techniques. They kept poultry, pigs, and

honeybees; they applied biological fertilizers and manures, used nematodes, minimized fuel usage, and more.

They incorporated small animals into their food system, using plant byproducts to feed the animals and animal

byproducts to feed the plants. He led the way in incorporating forestry systems and pasture systems into overall

food production, use of inter-crop planting, and so on. At the beginning of the process, he told us, it took eight

units of energy to produce one unit of food; by the third year, it took only three units of energy to produce four

units of food.

The process of revising the system continues; he told us that under the new guidelines developed under RaulCastro, people can now claim unused or fallow land to farm under the usufruct system (basically, long-term

leases from the state). But he pointed out that Cuba still imports at least 50% of its food. (Some of our

informants put the figure at 80%.)

We will revisit many of these themes, and see wonderful examples of these processes at work, over our

remaining days. But we also took some time in the afternoon to savor beautiful

Havana! We first walked through the Plaza de Armas, with its graceful spaces. Then,

on the way to the Plaza de la Catedral, we passed a

building that was unfinished, but its blank concrete facadehad been brought to life by a mural of the society of Old

Havana. And finally we visited the plaza of the cathedral,

with its beautiful facade speaking

of the centuries of Spanish life that

had unfolded here.

But we werent done for the

day!We had the evening free, so we decided to have FollowFollow


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dinner at apaladar, a privately-owned restaurant typically located in the owners family

home. We found one nearby (somehow; not my

doing, certainly) and just showed up (no reservations).

(Sidebar: my greatest regret is that I didnt get any good photos of the 50 s

American cars, startlingly well-preserved, that we saw everywherethough I

have to add, mixed in with Priuses, BMWs,

and other contemporary models. Well, therewill be a next trip.) But what a treat the

paladar turned out to be!! We ate extremely

well; turtle, shrimp, chicken, mango, black

beans and rice, and more. Once again, Cuban

cuisine proved to be very flavorful but not

spicy-hot, carefully prepared and served in

generous (very generous!) portions. Presiding over our meal is trip coordinator

Zoe Brent of Food First. (Thank you, Zoe, for helping us discover this wonderful

place to eat!)

Posted in Food fairness, Gardening, Sustainability, Tools & techniques | Tagged agro-ecology, Cuban

agriculture reform, paladares, permaculture | Leave a reply

Learning from Cuba: Agro-ecology, urban

farming, and making doPosted on July 20, 2012

Hemingway, Fidel, Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis, Venceremos, Marielitos, Elinthe threads of so many stories

of Cuba are woven through the fabric of my own life! I was just eleven years old, catching my first glimpse of a

world wider than Kingsville, Texas, when on New Years Day 1959 Batista fled the country and Castros

revolutionary forces took over. And now, more than a half-century later, I have finally visited beautiful Cuba. My

tour, a joint offering from Food First, Global Exchange/Reality Tours, andAmistur, focused on Cubas developing

agro-ecological food system. I learned so much!Over the next few posts Id like to take you with me to theFollowFollow


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foundations, farms, neighborhoods, and small enterprises that we visited, and introduce you to some of the

Cubans whose labors are building the system.

Day One: Sunday July 8th

Actually, Day One was supposed to be Saturday July 7th, but we spent it in the Cancun airport waiting for our

Cubana flight; we finally go to our Havana hotel at about 5:00 Sunday morning. So we dumped our earlySunday-morning plans and slept in.

But we re-grouped around 11:00 and set off for UBPC Alamar, in the suburbs of Havana. A UBPC is a basic

unit of cooperative production, one of several organizational structures of farms in Cuba. The story of the

origins of the UBPCs brings together a number of themes that will come up again and again as we learn about

Cuban agriculture. The story, like so many others here, is a story of cataclysm and recovery. Up until 1989,

Cuban farming was organized into large state-owned agro-industrial green revolution farms that relied on

expensive heavy machinery and large amounts of imported chemical fertilizers to produce mono-crops of

sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco. By far the largest trading partner?The Soviet Union. But in 1989 the Soviet

Union collapsed, and so did Cuban agriculture. Once again (as it had after the 1961 US blockade began), Cuba

lost 80% of its trade, including the market for its crops and the imports of food that had fed the populace. Thus

began the Special Period (still continuing today) in which agriculture (among other sectors) underwent radical

change. In one such change, beginning in 1993, a number of large state farms were broken up and turned over

to cooperatives made up of the farm-workers who had been wage-earners on the land beforethus the birth of

the UBPCs. The land itself was granted in usufruct (essentially, a long-term lease of the state-owned land).

Sustainable agriculture began to be understood as a matter of national security, and organic and agro-ecological

techniques began to be adopted.

At UBPC Alamar, Miguel Salcines, president of the cooperative, walked us through the good-sized farm with itslush vegetable and herb crops striping the rust-red soil. Here he is explaining

their use of irrigation and covered structures

(for shade, rather than for raising the

temperature, as we use them here in Seattle;

Im here to tell you that they do not need to

raise the temperature. At all. Whew.). By the

way, pretty much our entire group is in this

photo; there were just nine of us, plus our tour

coordinator Zoe and our guide/translator Jess.

Among the other sustainable practices in use at Alamar are interplanting (here of lettuces and green onions), drip

irrigation, integrated pest control, and vermiculture (using worms to turn cow manure into organic matter for

compost). And they arent trifling with that operation

either; they produce about one ton per day of organic

matter, and sell what they dont use.

The cooperative plans to grow; the farmers hold FollowFollow


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shares in the organization based on the length of time

they have been members, and profits are distributed

per share. The group votes on policies and practices, and Sr. Salcines told us that

their decisions cant be overruled by outsiders. They also have a community mission;

they do educational tours and workshops for the local schools.

We ended our tour with a delicious meal served alfresco on the farm: fresh plantains, mangos, squash soup,black beans, malanga (a potato-like tuber), fresh juice, and more. We also saw one of

our first instances of the Cuban make it do

mentalityold bus windows pressed into service in

an outbuilding on the farm.

Back in town in the afternoon, we took a little walking

tour of the Plaza de

San Francisco and

Plaza Vieja in Old

Havana. Remember

that the Spanish

were thriving in Cuba

as early as the first

years of the 16th

Century; Havanas streets and plazas are as elegant and

baroque and wasted as only five complex centuries can

make them. But throughout the

twists and turns of our walk, it

seemed to me that Cuban wit andcreativity winked at us from all

sides.

What

had we

learned

so far

about Cuba? Here at the end of our first day, I couldnt say; I

found myself distrustful of my own delight in what I was

seeing. Was our experience being managed? Certainly.Were the people we were meeting open and analytical and

willing to question their own practices? Yes. The one thing I was sure of was that I needed to learn more.

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Posted in Food fairness, Sustainability, Tools & techniques | Tagged agro-ecology, Cuba, Cuban

farming techniques, organic farming | Leave a reply

Spudnik! Growing 21st-century potatoesPosted on July 4, 2012

Lots of ways to grow potatoes! I grow potatoes in a barrel, and to harvest them I turn the barrel over and

scrabble around for them in the dirt-pile. Last year, a class from the Seattle Culinary Academy grew potatoes in

mounded rows at La Conner Flats, and harvested them with a hoe. Poor old

van Goghs peasants trudged along

behind an ox, planting potatoes one byone in a long furrow. and probably

harvested them with a hoe too.

Forget the ox. Forget the barrel and the

hoe. A few weeks back, I went on a farm

tour in Skagit Valley that included a stop at Knutzen Farms, where Kraig

Knutzen, a fifth-generation direct descendent of the original farm family,

showed us how to get serious about growing potatoes. (My phone was dead!so I didnt get a photo. But lets

see if I can conjure up a picture for you.)

On the edge of a large plowed field behind Kraigs barn, two huge machines idled. The smaller one began to

rumble as it lobbed an avalanche of seed potatoes (potatoes cut into pieces, each piece with an eye) into the

bed of the bigger machine. The bigger machine, bristling with tanks and barrels and arms around its bed,

loomed above the field on huge tires. Once it had a load of seed potatoes on board, a farmworker climbed into

its cab, fired it up, and then, as it lumbered into action, tilted its steering wheel up and sat back with a

laptop!His driving job was done; the real navigator was a satellite a mile or so overhead that was chatting with

an innocuous-looking yellow tripod farther down along the edge of the field.

This rig reads the minutest contours of the field; it can align the edge of each pass across the field within aninchof the previous pass. It not only plants the seed potatoes with precision, it also measures out the exact (and

exactly minimal) application of dry or liquid fertilizer needed for each inch of the field. And it stores all of this data

in a huge file so that the inputs can be compared to the harvest, and year can be compared to year. Kraig says

they just pull this big data set into Google Docs and monitor how its going over time.

But wait, is this industrial overkill? How does this kind of mechanized precision agriculture fit into a vision of a

sustainably managed family farm? Kraig had plenty to say on the subject. He pointed out that this technologyFollowFollow


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enables them to get the maximum use out of the land with minimum inputs of fertilizer or other treatments.

Combined with other strategies like integrated pest management, use of amendments that arent residual in the

soil season over season, elaborate crop rotation schemes, and so on, the technology is one more tool that

enables the Knutzens to fulfill their generation-to-generation mission to be wise stewards of their land. It also

helps the farm to be commercially viable, so that the family can look forward to farming their land for the very

long run.

The Skagit Valley farmers that I have met are a fascinating loton the one hand innovative entrepreneurs, on

the other thoughtful conservators of their farming landscape. Over the coming months, I hope to introduce you

to many more of them!Stay tuned!

Posted in Meet the foodies, Skagit stories, Sustainability, Uncategorized | Tagged growing potatoes,

Knutzen Farms, precision agriculture, Skagit Valley farming | Leave a reply

April 14th! Skagit farm-fresh dinner on a

field of tulips

Posted onApril 2, 2012

Every April, theTulip Festival draws pretty much the entire population of Seattle north to the Skagit Valley to

marvel at the giant ribbons and patches of red, pink, yellow, and orange that quilt the valleys fields as the

flowers come into bloom. The article about the festival in the paper yesterday

offered an If you go sampler of other attractions to take in while youre there,

but left out one of the bestthe Celebrate SkagitDinner on the Farm on

Saturday April 14th. Dont miss it!There are only a few seats left!

Have you heard of the Outstanding in the Field dinners, with their landmark

long tables stretching across a farmers field? The Celebrate Skagit dinner

draws on the same inspiration, but lets face it, nobody in the Northwest is

going to sign up to eat dinner in a sodden April field!This dinner will be held in the Sam Hill Barn near Mount

Vernon, a 1927 Washington State Heritage barn on property that was one of the first bulb-growing fields in the

valley. (Note!The barn pictured above isnotthe Sam Hill Barn! It is just one of the beautiful faded structures that

linger among the tulip fields.)

Whats on the menu? To start, Skagit Valley yields a prodigious crop of potatoes, and some of them may showFollowFollow


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up on your plate, but others will arrive in a glass!Skagit Yukon Golds, distilled into vodka, will anchor a

signature cocktail created by Skip Rock Distillers for this event. For the meal itself, chef Michael Miller is creating

appetizers and a four-course dinner from the diverse harvests of the valleyseafood, meat, cheese, grains,

produce, berries, and more. And Hellams Vineyard of La Conner will be selecting Washington wine pairings for

the dinner.

The dinner will be elegant, but dont show up in black tie! The event will take place rain or shine, and remember,youll be on a farmthe website recommends galoshes, jeans, and jackets.

The event sponsors, Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland (SPF), have gone all out on this event to showcase the

products of the lavishly fertile Skagit Valley, on the same latitude as Frances Loire Valley. The proceeds of the

dinner (which costs $100 per person) will support their critically important work of sustaining the viability of

Skagit Valley agriculture. I hope Ill see you there! (But if I dont, stay tunedIm going to write it up here to tempt

you into signing up for the July edition!)

Posted in Events, Skagit stories, Sustainability| Tagged farm to table dinners, Outstanding in the Field,

Skagit Valley, Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland, Tulip Festival | 1 Reply

Rex the Rabbit (Cacciatore)Posted on January 14, 2012

This week I once again found myself with that restless urge to cook up something new. Rummaging around in

my freezer, I pulled out a package from my Lefever Holbrook Ranch meat delivery: rabbit Rex 2.5 lbs. Poor

old Rex!I may have scratched his ears back in September when I visited

Paulette and her kids on the ranch. Rex wasnt his name, of courseit was his

breed, developed in France in the early 20th century. And now that I think about it, the rabbit I met in Goldendale

did have a Gallic air about him, holding me with his dark gaze as I stroked his plush velvet coat.

The whole rabbit family on Paulettes ranch is pretty cosmopolitan; heres

Madison with one of the babies (kits), whose mother was a New Zealand (in

spite of its name, first bred in Mexico, also around the early 20th century) and

whose father was our friend Rex. (Youd recognize a New Zealanda big fluffy

albino white rabbit with ears that blush pink.) Since rabbits raised for meat are

often harvested at two months old, and I got my order from the ranch at the

end of November, Im now thinking that my Rex was actually Rex fils, one of FollowFollow


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these September kits.

With Rex now defrosting on my kitchen counter, I feel an unexpected pang. I know the usual things about him

that I want to know about the food that I eat: where he came from, who raised him, how he was raised. But this

time I knowhim.

Why am I a carnivore? Like you, Ive read any number of articles about the need to eat lower on the foodchainmuch less meat and more fruits, grains, and vegetables. For one thing, its easier on the environment; it

takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat, and methane gas from farm animals accounts for

around 15% of the worlds greenhouse gases. Also, wed show some shred of solidarity with the other seven

billion of us on the planetwe cantalleat this way, so maybe none of us should. And then of course its easier

on the animals!

But eating meat runs deep. When I was growing up in South Texas, we had meat at almost every meal. Ham

and bacon. Plenty of beefpot roast, steaks, hamburger in all of its chameleon forms. Chicken, the noble yard

bird!I remember helping my grandmother slaughter and clean them for Sunday supper.

We got some of this meat by hunting. I went a few times, but my father and brothers went every year. My dad

had an old Scout (precursor to the now ubiquitous SUV!) welded and bolted into a hunting machinebraces for

standing up to scan across the mesquite brush for quarry, gun racks, a ball-mount tow-hitch to pull his beat-up

old jeep behind them. In early fall, before the break of day, they would load up the bird dogs and head out to

their lease to hunt quail and white-wing dove. In November, they went off for long weekends to the hunting

camp, getting up early every day to hike out to their stand and sit silently for hours watching for a deer to

emerge from the dawn shadows and mist.

If they got their shot, on the way back home they would stop at Gaffords grocery store to leave the dressedanimal in a rented freezer locker. It was a tradition in our family that my dad would share his deer with a Mexican

woman who worked with him, and then a few days before Christmas, she and her family would bring us venison

tamales!Dozens and dozens of them. To this day, when I am home for the holidays we have chili and tamales

for our Christmas Eve meal.

So eating meat, for many of us, is part of who we are, where we came from, how we savor the earths bounty

together. Do we need to become vegetarians or even vegans? I can imagine getting there (or at least getting

close) some day, but for now I just try to choose and prepare my food as thoughtfully as I can.

So, Im still a carnivore, though I hope a more minimal and mindful one. And today I braised poor Rex alla

Cacciatora (hunter style). He was delicious!

Rabbit Stew (recipe from the New York Times, January 4th, 2012)

1 whole rabbit (2 1/2 to 3 lbs.)

olive oil

salt and pepper FollowFollow


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flour, for dusting

2 cups onions, finely diced

2 cups leeks, finely diced

6 garlic cloves, minced

2 tablespoons fresh rosemary, roughly chopped

1 tablespoon crumbled dry porcini mushrooms, soaked in warm water to soften drained and finely

chopped (save the liquid to add to the sauce)8 oz. cremini or portobello mushrooms, thickly sliced (I used portobellos)

Pinch of red pepper flakes

1 cup chopped canned tomatoes

1/2 cup dry white wine

1 cup unsalted chicken broth

1. Cut up the rabbit; the directions were complicated, but basically you want more or less the same pieces

youd get with a chickena breast (you can split it into two pieces), two front legs, a back, and two back

legs (possibly split into two pieces eachthigh and drumstick, more or less).

1.

Heat 1/4 inch olive oil in a Dutch oven or deep, wide heavy skillet over medium heat. Season the rabbit

pieces with salt and pepper, then dust lightly with flour. Lightly brown the rabbit for about 3 minutes o both

sides, working in batches. Drain on kitchen towels, then transfer to a baking dish in one layer. Heat over to

375 degrees.

2.

Pour off the used oil, wipe out the pan and add 2 tablespoons fresh oil. Heat to medium-high, add the

onions and cook till soft, about 5 minutes. Add the leek, garlic, rosemary and mushrooms. Season

generously with salt and pepper; add red pepper flakes to taste. Cook for 2 minutes more, stirring.

3.

Add the chopped tomatoes and wine, and let the mixture reduce for 1 minute. Add the broth and

mushroom liquid, bring to a simmer, taste and adjust the seasoning (but remember that the red pepper

flakes will get hotter).

4.

Ladle the mixture evenly over the rabbit. Cover the dish, and bake for 1 hour. Let it rest 10 minutes before

serving.

5.

I ate my first serving on a bed of fettucini. Tomorrow I might serve it on rice. Or

potatoes? Or just a big slice of beautiful rustic bread.

Posted in Food fairness, Recipes, Sustainability| Tagged braised rabbit, Lefever Holbrook Ranch, New

Zealand rabbit, rabbit cacciatore, Rex rabbit | Leave a reply FollowFollow


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Cooking Anne Hiltons

Christmas chapbookPosted on December 15, 2011

My friend Anne made a chapbook of vegetarian recipes for her mothers Christmas present this year, and I was

lucky enough to get a copy too! Entirely handcrafted, from paper cutting and

ink mixing to typesetting and the actual printing, this little chapbook took me

back to my first glimpse, in some dimly remembered college course, of the

complicated construction of early letterpress books. Preparing the paper and

ink, assembling the type into forms for each

page and color, making each impression

every single stage calls for huge care and

precision.. And no trivial task, either, to get

from a flat sheet of paper to a folded booklet!

(Try it! Using these pictures as a guide, take a

sheet of printer paper, mark off one side into

eight sections, and fold yourself a copy of

Annes book.) Anne tells me that the whole project took more than 100 hours

of work.

The project also weaves together threads of the story

of Anne and her mother; Anne explains that while I was living in Korea, my mother

sent me a book of vegetarian recipes for Christmas one year that she had written byhand. I still have and use that book, so I wanted to return the favor. What could make

a better gift? The Korean character on the over of the chapbook means good

fortune, luck, or happiness; Through her craftsmanship, I think Anne has made a little

bit of all threecertainly luck for me!

Turning through the booklet, I noticed a recipe for seitan and green bean curry.

Seitan?Never heard of it. (At what point will I stop running into new ingredients?) Seitan, it turns out, is

seasoned wheat proteinessentially, a very dense reduction of wheat gluten.

(Not for everybody, obviously.) Look for it in the same case as tofu. Some

people consider it meat-like; I bought a version called chicken-style. (I used

to scoff at vegetarians who ate pretend meatthink

veggie-burgersbut the more I learn about the costs

of diets like my own Texas-size carnivore fare, the

more inclined I am to explore alternatives. If a plant

food can satisfy a meat craving, so much the better!)

This recipe came from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, one of numerousFollowFollow


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excellent cookbooks put out by the famous Moosewood Collective in Ithaca, NY. I

went ahead and bought the book, but you can also find the

recipe online (for instance in Google Books).

Heres your list of ingredients:

3 tablespoons vegetable oil2 medium onions, finely chopped (~2 cups)

3 garlic cloves, minced or pressed

2 teaspoons minced fresh chile, or 1/4 teaspoon cayenne)

4 teaspoons garam masala

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 pound green beans, cut into 1-inch pieces (~3 to 3 1/2 cups)

1 pound seitan, finely chopped

2 1/2 cups chopped fresh tomatoes

2/3 cup coconut milk

3/4 cup water

salt and ground black pepper to taste

toasted unsalted cashew nuts

This dish is essentially a stir-fry; you want to have all these ingredients ready to go, so that you can work rapidly.

Heat the oil in a large skillet or wok and add

the onions and garlic. Saut for 2 to 3 minutes

before adding the chile or cayenne, garam

masala, and cumin. Stirring, saut for another

2 or 3 minutes. Add the green beans, then theseitan, and mix well. Stir in the tomatoes,

coconut milk, and water. Cover and bring to a

simmer. Cook,

covered, for about 10 minutes, until the beans are

firm-tender. Add salt and pepper to taste, and serve

topped with toasted cashews for a nice contrast in

texture. It came out very nicely! Instead of rice, I

cooked farro to go with the curry. Farro (also called

emmer) is also a new foodfor me, although I gather

that it is an ancient grain,

even collected in the wild by pre-agrarian people as long as 17,000 years ago. My

farro, though, was grown by Lentz Spelt Farms from Foundation Seed in arid eastern

Washington, in Marlin over by Moses Lake.

This is not a demanding dish to prepare! But as I cooked, I

thought about Annes mother writing down recipes for her to FollowFollow


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cook in Korea, and about eighteen hippies in Ithaca, NY forming a collective back in

1973 in to celebrate vegetarian fare, and about Washington farmers carrying forward

the life of an ancient grain, and about Anne spending 100 hours crafting her

chapbook. And as I serve dinner, I break into a grin: we made this!

(By the way, Anne also has a food blog!be sure to visit her!)

Posted in Good local products, Recipes, Sustainability| Tagged emmer, farro, Foundation Seed, Lentz

Spelt Farms, Moosewood Restaurant, seitan, vegetarian recipe | Leave a reply

Tilths demo garden: Life in the

sustainable gardenPosted on July 31, 2011

Standing in a garden on a warm sunny day, watching cream-colored butterflies flutter among the tidy plots of

vegetables, listening to the buzz and whir of hover-flies and bees, I wasnt really thinking of Tennysons nature

red in tooth and claw. But I was touring Seattle Tilths demonstration garden, and tour leader Amy Ockerlanderwas just then telling us about watching a centipede cut up a cabbage worm and eat it. How can you raise the

odds that youll have a hungry centipede patrolling your garden patch? We were there to see how Tilth

harnesses natural processes to grow healthy vegetables in sustainable ways.

Big message number one was start with mulch. (Thats Amy by the huge pile of it.) Especially in a climate like

ours, where it rains all winter long and then in summer (usually!) rains hardly at

all, mulch soaks up moisture, keeps nutrients from being washed away, and

suppresses weeds that fight your veg for nutrients. Plus it provides a happy

home for critters like centipedes, spiders, and other helpful killers. You can also

protect your soil by putting down a layer of feed bags (especially effective over

the winter here to keep soil dry-ish). This is Seattle, so

of course we go for coffee-bean bags!

Mulch was only one layer strategy we talked about. Those cream-colored

butterflies?As they flutter prettily from plant to plant they

are laying hundreds of dot-sized eggs on your cabbage-

family plants that hatch into voracious bright green cabbage FollowFollow


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worms. One way to mess them up is to put in a physical

barriercover the plants with row cover, a light cloth sheet

that keeps the butterflies from sticking their eggs to the leaves.

In following the layer strategy, you dont always have to put the layer on top. In

hugelkultur, the raised garden bed starts with a layer of rotting wood (chips, twigs,

sticks, branches . . .) at the bottom. Then you mound the soil on top. Think ofthe wood as a nurse log for your plant, sponging up water and nutrients that

otherwise would leach away.

To thrive, your garden also needs pollinator insects like mason bees. The Tilth

gardeners have constructed mason bee

blocks, little bee condominiums, under the

eaves of the building, so that the bees can

over-winter and re-populate year after year. And to attract pollinators, the

garden has flowering ornamentals planted among the vegetables.

Some plants naturally thrive when planted together, like the three sisters in

Mexican farming: corn, squash, and beans. (Normally,

the corn would be close to eight feet tall!but here in Seattle, its lucky to hit five feet.)

The corn provides a trellis for the beans to climb up, and the squash shades the roots

of the other sisters.

Big message number two waskeep your resources where you use them. They use a

rain garden to manage the rainfall runoff from the buildingabout 20,000 gallons of it in

a typical year! (This is water thatisnt going into thesewer system, to be processed and then bought

back from the city to water the garden. Thats a long round trip to water that

veg patch over there!) Pipes capture the water and feed it to a narrow trickle of

rock-lined stream bed that delivers it to a bowl-shaped depression about five

feet across. The thick plantings hold it there until it soaks out to the surrounding

area. They also use compost digesters to break

down plant trimmings into nutrients that leak out of

the bottom into the surrounding soil to be taken up by the next-door-neighbor plants.

Amy described the whole sustainable gardening endeavor as bringing life into the

garden. I loved to hear how cleverly these master gardeners wove together and

managed the thrust of life in soil, plants, insects, light, and water to make a healthy,

bountiful harvest. But for me, it is also a sustaining pleasure

to see the order and grace of their well-tended gardento sit

on a lovely trellis bench and gaze at the garden, to

admire a fragrant stand of basil corralled by an artful

soldiering of bamboo stakes, to imagine beans FollowFollow


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scrambling up the string

trellis behind the lettuces in

their hoop pergolas. I love

these minutely tended plots

that speak so eloquently about the diligence and hopes of

the people who built them!

Posted in Events, Gardening, Sustainability| Tagged caterpillar worms, demonstration garden,

hugelkultur, mason bee blocks, mulch, Seattle Tilth, string trellis, sustainable gardening, trellis bench

| Leave a reply

Down on the (campus!) farmPosted on June 21, 2011

On-campus at the University of Washington, on a meandering quarter-acre around the Botany Greenhouse, UW

students have labored for over seven years to build out a working farm, complete with beds in buckets,

cold-frames, irrigation system, two bee hives, and four plump chickens with their own custom chicken-tractor.

And last but not least, a functioning clay-and-straw pizza oven! (More on that later.)

Last week, Beth Wheat, newly minted UW PhD in Biology (now a postdoc in

the Program on the Environment) and the Educational Coordinator for UW

Farm, capped off the Seattle Arts & Lectures series Following Wendell: the

culture and politics of sustenance by giving us a talk and a tour of the

operation.

Beth set the stage by pointing out that less than 2% of our population now

farms, and the average age of the American farmer is 57. Even here in

Washington (an agricultural state, actually, if you leave out Seattle and Boeing), students were showing up in

ecology classes with no idea what a growing vegetable looked likethey couldnt match a carrot with a carrot

top. Hence the motivating idea for UW Farm: actively educate citizens for a more sustainable future by teaching

students how to grow food.

So they started digging away, preparing all the beds and buckets by hand,FollowFollow


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adding structures like the cold frames shown here, trying out new ideas about

growing food. They now layer crimson clover under chard, to fix nitrogen. They

consider the salad-making possibilities of their weeds.

They also really ran with the concept of the

parking-strip garden! Here, between a sidewalk and a

bike path, they have a series of beds, borders,buckets, and teepees growing everything from herbs

to beans.

Helping out with our

tour were student

farmers Michelle

Venetucci Harvey and Julia Reed (Michelle shown here). Both are also active

volunteers with the farmtwo of the 150 students typically involved at a given

time! The farm has a Compost Crew, it has a Chicken Crew, it has the Dirty

Dozen (now 40 students) who meet on Monday mornings at 7:30 (when I was

in college, I didnt know there was a Monday morning at 7:30) to plan the entire

operation of the farm for the week. And, for recruiting, rewarding themselves, and educating the public, they

have Pizza Bakes once a month!

No way were we going to miss out on fresh-baked pizza. So everybody got a

ball of dough and rolled out an individual pie, which we dressed up with herbs

and veggies from the farm. Heres mine, fresh

out of the oven!

Did I mention the salad ? As you can see,

there was plenty!

And the Prosecco

went very well with

both!

After years of operating slightly off the administrations

radar, UW Farm is now writing a business plan andworking to become as sustainable organizationally as

it is agriculturally. Theyve scored an additional (and larger) farm site at the off-campus UW Center for Urban

Horticulture, and our remodeled student union building (now about half-finished) will incorporate a demonstration

garden of several four-foot-by-ten-foot raised beds. Next up, they need funding to hire some actual paid staff;

its hard to keep going when your workforce turns over practically every quarter!

Read more about this fantastic operation here (oh, and dont overlook the donation button!):

http://students.washington.edu/uwfarm/ FollowFollow


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Posted in Events, Sustainability| Tagged farming, food organizations, sustainable farming, UW Farm |

Leave a reply

Going bananasPosted on February 19, 2011

This morning I had to face up to the fact that I had ignored my small bunch of bananas about three days too

long. Yellow well on the way to brown! So I decided that today was the day to launch my Mindful Munching

Campaign. Rule Number One: Do not throw out usable food.

As it happens, just last week I got the Grand Central Baking Book (check it out in What Im reading). Page 32:

Banana Nut Bread. Miraculously, I had all the ingredients on hand. (Even buttermilk!which is going to happen

maybe twice a year.)

What I didnt have was any idea what I was doing. The recipe calls for banana puree. So, Ive got four bad

bananas in front of mehow do I convert them to puree? Easily, it turns out, once I remembered that I had an

appliance with a puree setting. So into the blender with them.

Then, the recipe asks me to use a standard mixer to combine ingredients. Got one right here?Actually, yes. I

dragged out the KitchenAid mixer that I have used oh three times since I bought it. Great!It appears to have

done the job. At this point, every surface in my kitchen is dusted with flour and spackled with globs of errant

batter, but I successfully manage to get two pans of banana nut bread dough into the oven. I was so sure that I

would fail that I didnt take any process photos, but the end result was beautiful! And GAAAA it tastes so

good!

But will my next batch have to be plantain nut bread? Last January 10th, Mike Peed

wrote a New Yorker piece (We Have No Bananas) with the discouraging subtitle

Can scientists defeat a devastating blight? The species of banana that most of us

eat is the Cavendish, a cheap, sturdy, nutritious variety that Americans consume at the

rate of almost 8 billion pounds per year. Growers embraced the Cavendish, and over

the years created a global monocultureall Cavendishes, all the time.

Enter Tropical Race Four, a nasty fungus that lives in the soil and entirely rots out

Cavendish banana plants. According to Peed, since the late 80s It has spread across

Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, the Philippines, and most recently, Australia. We live in a flat world;

inevitably, Latin America will be next. FollowFollow


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The problem is being attacked by traditional breeding as well as genetic engineering

(with all of its attendant health and environmental concerns). But nobody appears to

be seriously proposing to challenge the underlying problem: if you plant just one

species everywhere, you are asking for it. As James Dale, a professor at Queensland

University of Technology, says in Peeds article, when you see the narrowing of

genetic culture, thats when you know things are going to die.

Can we change the complex business model underlying the production and marketing

of our foods, so that we can diversify the monocultures that threaten the continuing health of our food sources? I

have no idea. What do you think?

Posted in Sustainability| Tagged baking, cooking bananas, eating bananas, global food systems |

Leave a reply

Can that be right?Posted on February 5, 2011

Tonight I made one of my favorite cheap-and-easy dinnersfettucini with an uncooked sauce made of chunky

peanut butter, soy sauce, rice vinegar, garlic, red pepper flakes, and chives. Mix it up, dump the hot pasta on

top and toss. Add a salad of lettuce leaves with vinaigrette. Eat!

Earlier today in a New York Times op-ed piece, I had stumbled

upon a startling comparison of the amount of money people in

various countries spend on food consumed at home. Americans

invest a total of 6.8% of their household spending on this kind of

food. Compare this to the figure for Algeria, where they spend

43.8%! Or Morocco, 40.3%; Egypt, 38.3%; Tunisia, 35.8%.

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So I went off to the Web to see what I could find out about

spending on food in countries that look more like the US.

According to Eurostat, in the European Union as a whole, people

spend about about 12.7% of their household income on food and

non-alcoholic beverages. But it varied widely from country to

country; in Romania the figure was 44.2 %, compared to 9.3% for

Luxembourg. So, the richer you are, the smaller the share of yourincome that you spend on food. But even among the worlds

richest countries, nobody spends as little as Americans do.

A few days ago, also in the New York Times, Mark Bittman described our American diet as unhealthful and

unsafe. You get what you pay for? Well, yes, but thats not close to all of it.

When I was growing up in a small town in Texas, my family ate well, but plainly, and the atmospherics were that

paying too much attention to what was on your plate was . . . unseemly. Effete. More or less in the same

category as not knowing how to change a tire. My mother was quick to adopt innovations like canned ham and

Potato Buds. We were sturdy people, by God, and we would eat sturdy food, without fuss.

Lately, like many others, I have been discovering the pleasures of the garden, the kitchen, and the table. As I

think more about food, I want to prepare it with fresher ingredients, fewer additives, and more humanely

produced animal products. I want to buy my food from local producers down the road or across the way.

Inevitably, these choices are driving up my food bill. But never, ever will the percentage of money I spend on

food reach the stratospheric levels of around 40% of all my expenditures.

Food is the great irreducible. You can put off expenditures on clothes; you can do without a car; you can move

in with family or friends. But if you dont eat, you wont live. And the picture is fast coming into focus that moreand more people around the world are struggling to put food on their tables.

I dont know how to resolve these conflicts. I can eat lower on the food chain, and be healthier for it. I can seek

out organizations devoted to building global food security when I decide how to allocate my giving. But it looks

like we are going to have to attack this problem on a much larger, more coordinated scale, and soon. Look for

future updates as I dig into what is being done, close to home as well as globally.

(The 2/5/11 New York Times article I began with, The Kindling of Change by Charles Blow, pulled together a

number of statistics suggesting the roots of the protests spreading across North Africa and the Middle East.Mark Bittmans article, A Food Manifesto for the Future, appeared Wednesday 2/2 as a kickoff piece for his

new column. You can find him at nytimes.com/opinionator.)

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Posted in Food fairness, Sustainability| Tagged food justice | Leave a reply

EggsPosted on January 29, 2011

The other morning for breakfast I had a poached egg

on a toasted, buttered English muffin. Simplejust

kosher salt and fresh-ground pepper on top. I love

the way the yolk slowly flows into the muffins buttery

honeycomb of air-bubbles. Perfect.

It was a lazy morning, and as I assembled my

ingredients, I found myself reading the labeling on my

new carton of eggs: Naturally Preferred, cage free,

grain fed. And from inside the carton: Naturally Preferred eggs are the product of our cage-free operation and

vegetarian feed based on grains and soy beans. The hens live in open community houses where they have

feed, water, nests, roosting poles and plenty of area to exercise. Hens diet consists of grain-protein seed and

vegetable derivatives, with no animal or fish/shellfish by-products. There are no antibiotics or hormones added.

So far so good, Im thinking.

These eggs, it said, are distributed by Inter-American Products, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202. Theres also a reference

to a Texas license number. Ohio? Texas? Im in Washington State! So, I decided to try to map out the trip that

my egg took from the hen to the muffin.

The website of the distributor of Naturally Preferred eggs is also listed on the carton

(www.interamericanproducts.com) so I clicked around on the site. The company is a division of the Kroger

Company (which makes sense, because a few years ago Kroger acquired QFC, where I bought my eggs). It a

nation-wide corporation that specializes in producing house brand grocery products for food retailers and

wholesalersquality corporate brands, start to finish, coast to coast.

There is a surprising amount of information about the sources of the products the company sells (classified into

bakery, dairy, and grocery), including an interactive map showing the locations and names of their 36 plants.

There are two in the Northwest: Swan Island Dairy in Portland, OR and Clackamas Bakery in Clackamas, OR.

But no mention of eggs.

The site also offers an email link for customer comments, so I emailed them asking where their hens live and

where the eggs are sorted and shipped. I got an auto-reply from Kroger.com saying that I could expect a replyFollowFollow


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within two business days. It has been a week now and no reply, so Ill email them a link to this posting to remind

them to get back to me.

I also asked the manager of the QFC store where I bought the eggs. He said he didnt know where the eggs

came from exactly, but gave me a reasonable explanation of the overall operation. For the house brands of eggs

(there are several, targeting different marketslike organics consumers, which would be me), he believes that

Kroger constantly looks for the best sources (for price, quality, market-defined characteristics) and at any timemight be sourcing eggs from a shifting subset of providers. He took my name and phone number and said hed

see if he could find out more, but so far he hasnt called me back.

So at this point, Im asking myself a couple of questions. Where are these eggs actually from? And why didnt I

buy eggs from cage-free hens that live right here in Washington? I still dont know where these eggs came

from, but I do know (already knew) that the same grocery store where I bought them also carries similar locally-

produced eggs. This time, without any thought, I just picked up a different brand in a carton carrying the same

keywords that I select for.

But now that I have gotten pretty deeply into this question of eggs, Im asking myself why I select for those

keywords. What is it about cage-free, grain-fed hens that I think will produce a better egg? And what difference

does it make where the hen is laying that egg?

The first question is easier to answer. Ive read reports over the last few years about conditions on chicken

farms, and I dont need to pause too long to conclude that birds that have had their beaks cut off or that cant

stand up or turn around in their cages are not happy birds. Chickens arent philosophy majors, but no creature

needs to be tortured so that I can eat an egg (or a chicken leg, for that matter). But even if you take a

completely eater-centric view, surely there is enough evidence that stress makes organisms produce

toxinsand toxins dont sound particularly healthy or appetizing. Along the same lines, given the press aroundmad-cow disease over the last decade or so, Im not really interested in eating a product from a chicken that

was fed ground up animal parts.

So now I have an egg from a happy, well-fed hen. Why do I care where it came from? Yes, I buy locally grown

food and artisanal food productsbut I also eat bananas. I drink tea. Why not eat Cincinnati eggs? Really, the

reason probably has as much to do with people as it does with products. Yes, I believe that organically, locally

grown foods taste better. But I also admire the people who produce them. I want them to thrive! I want to go

see their operation, watch them work, and learn from them. Their knowledge and passion and skill teach me to

delight in what I eat.

Theres another issue lurking in all this, and it is price. On the day I talked to the QFC manager about his eggs, I

also checked prices. A carton of the local Washington organic eggs costs $5.29; the house (non-organic) QFC

brand was $2.99on sale for $.099! For a person on a budget feeding a family, surely that is a no-brainer.

Around the same time, I ran into an article in my local paper that mentioned that there are seven egg producers

in Washington (larger commercial operations, Im assuming, outside of small farms that sell at farmers markets

and so on), and together they have about 6.5 million hens. But only about 5% of them are considered cage-free.

Surely this is true in part because cage-free hen operations are much more expensive to run. I have no answersFollowFollow


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on the question of price; its an issue that I suspect I will return to often. Cant we find ways for everybody to eat

well at an affordable cost?

If I ever hear from Inter-American Products or the QFC manager, Ill update this article. On the other issues, I

welcome your thoughts!

Posted in Food fairness, Sustainability| Tagged cooking eggs, industrial egg production | 2 Replies


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