Where I buy it when I don't grow it

Imwalle Gardens
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10538928-181/santa-rosas-imwalle-gardens-a?fbclid=IwAR2M_Tiaf2vCr4Fk3LBcqJuzGaLRnXoRy6KEZMqxANr5GEYQ0D5wx4HWGUk&artslide=4&sba=AAS

And in season, Chiatri de Laguna Farm
https://www.farmtrails.org/business/chiatri-de-laguna-farm/

Both are less than two miles from where I live.

June is national Dairy Month

So a few thoughts on dairy, particularly in my corner of the world.
The dairy business is in trouble - or at least stressed - here. Milk is still the second biggest crop ($-wise) after wine grapes. It's close to 90% organic in Sonoma County, too, partly because the price of organic milk is not controlled the way conventional milk is. But there are sustainability advantages beyond income ones. So what's the problem?
1)The growth rate of organic milk sales has slowed. One wonders if the appeal has reached most of those who can afford the higher prices.
2) According to Albert Strauss, at a recent Food System Alliance meeting, organic dairies behave the same way as conventional ones, upping production when prices slide, compounding the problem.
3) Some processors have moved away from our area, in search of a lower cost of doing business, leaving producers scrambling. ( I stopped buying Wallaby yogurt when I realized it was no longer sourcing milk here, and was now effectively Dannon. I buy local milk and make my own using mesophilic cultures., that is, at room temperature on the kitchen counter.)

We hear we need to reduce our consumption of animal products in our diets to make an impact on greenhouse gas generation, but we also need to think about the positive effect of organic and resilient dairies, and buy the products of our local ones. (That is, organic milk and other dairy products that carry the name of a local dairy or creamery, not a general brand.) The best of them improve the pastures they use, pay attention to water quality, etc. And did you know that organic cows live longer lives? Information in sources varies, but it seems CAFO milk cows live a maximum of six years, averaging four or so. Organic dairy cows can be productive members of a herd into the double digits, and have a maximum life span well into their teens.

You can read about Strauss dairy and creamery here:
https://www.strausfamilycreamery.com/mission-practices/
And learn more about a family dairy near me, Beretta, here:
https://sonomarcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SRCD_Beretta_Profile-in-Stewardship_2016_FINAL.pdf

Meanwhile, make sure the milk you consume is doing not just your body, but the environment and your local economy, good.

I Love Olive

Here's a story from yesterday's Sac Bee about the growing trend of growing olives in California.
http://www.sacbee.com/2014/06/22/6500375/olive-cultivation-is-on-the-rise.html

I was fascinated that California farmers are planting olives, a drought resistant crop, in intensive ways (for machine harvest) that seem to negate some of the value of drought resistance. Thus more affordable California olive oil is not necessarily the best thing from a sustainability perspective. But who can afford the boutique oil prices?

Perhaps we should grow our own.  Should community gardens be putting in a few olive trees?  Should we bring back the idea of a communal press, where folks can take their back yard olives?

A few interesting statistics:
97% of the olive oil consumed in the USA is imported - and not all of it is what it seems.
98% of olives grown in the USA are grown in California - though other states are growing more.
4% of California olives were destined for oil in the '90s, but in 2012 it was 46%.

Occupy the hen yard

As I was driving over to the Joe Matos' cheese factory this morning, I saw a hand lettered sign, clearly the advertising of a diversified cottage industry.
Among the items listed were "chicken coups."

I knew the backyard hen movement had gone too far.   Now they are organized and taking over suburbia.   Shades of my second favorite barnyard movie, Chicken Run.  


With all the farm bill tussles and news or lack of it from Rio 20 years later I needed this (presumably) unintentional humor.   It didn't hurt to see a brand new Holstein calf as I drove by Beretta's dairy (Wallaby Organic Yogurt), too.

Updating the list of web sites

which sorely needed it.

I've added the site for the California Biosafety Alliance.  They are hosting an international conference on "Justice Begins with Seeds" on May 19 and 20, and promoting Food Sovereignty Week May 14-20.

I deleted the broken links, and pulled the links that include searches for local food - Local Harvest and the Meatrix - up to the top.   I learned about two more at the friends of agriculture happy hour on Friday and will be adding them.

In cruising through the links I realized a number of them are keeping up with Farm Bill 2012 developments.   I plan to pull these out and create a separate box for Farm Bill links soon.

And I pulled the site for the Oakland Institute up toward the top of the list since it remains the best source of info on the land grabs in Africa.   OI called my attention to this recent BBC broadcast on the land grab issue:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00p5qrb

No More MacDonald's!

in Iceland, that is.

The franchisee there simply can't afford the imported ingredients since the big financial meltdown.

Apparently Mac requires they use certain suppliers, and the freight, literally, is too high.

Instead there will be local hamburger joints, sourcing meat and buns and all locally and selling cheaper. And of course, being a good deal more environmentally friendly. Financial crises and the straightened circumstances they cause are, apparently, not always anti-green.

The prime minister who helped set up Iceland for its financial crash was publicized eating the first Big Mac when the joints opened. Will he be the last one Mac-ing it up?

Heard on "The World" this afternoon on public radio.

New resource for churches

I just hate when I can't find the right person to talk to so that I have an Episcopal hook on an ecumenical story. It happened again this week when I found nobody home so that I could write up the efforts of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon at their October 3 conference, Food Sovereignty for All.

But I can at least post a link to their handbook here:

http://emoregon.org/pdfs/IFFP/Food_Sovereignty_for_All_handbook.pdf

Download a copy and have a look. It's great stuff - practical advice for congregations wanting to do a food system related project, with real life examples. If you've got extra land or a big underused kitchen at your church, of if you just want to strengthen connections with and support for local agriculture, there is help with getting started in these pages. Even if a congregation has never done a community ministry project before, there should be no excuses after reading this handbook. There are also several pages of resources if a congregation wants to begin with study of the food and faith connections.

a sad mosey

Last Friday at noon I headed out for Rio Vista - where we were having a Celebrating Creation event on Saturday - the long way, heading down through Marin, Vallejo and Benicia, then east on 4. My goal was to find some local produce to serve at lunchtime on Saturday.

I think I must have been having fantasies about Brentwood. Probably it was the Buy Fresh, Buy Local signs the community features. I was ready!

But what a disappointment. Many farm stands simply were not open yet - though promotional materials say they are. One I found specializes in dry fruit and nuts, and sits right in the middle of a new subdivision. I asked the owner where some of the nuts - kinds I know don't grow around here - came from. She was a little vague, and I asked if nuts in the shell weren't subject to COOL? She didn't know what that was.

Onward I drove, taking in the sights. Strip malls, box store arrays, subdivisions with 2 story 2000 sq ft houses cheek by jowl, and apartment (or condo?) complexes that looked like public housing. A particularly sad sight was a van advertising "foreclosure tours". Looking around, I wondered how many of the folks who live in Antioch and Brentwood were in flight from the urban East Bay, taking advantage of no down payment, adjustable rate financing - and now are wondering just what they've done.

Then, continuing east, there was a sudden end of the subdivisions - well, maybe there was a small one here and there, old enough to have trees as tall as the two story buildings. But even here in the open space, many of the orchards seemed to be on the way out, vegetable crops, too, and horses and grapes on the way in.

I did find one cherry orchard that was open and selling - and the cherries were good - because they were all ripe. And finally somewhere between Knightsen and Oakley I found a farm stand selling strawberries, asparagus, eggs and lemons.

One hope I have is that the real estate bust will slow the rising land prices, and the encroaching housing, and leave more of the fertile land bordering the Delta for agriculture. The Brentwood Land Trust is apparently committed to preserving ag land, so the Bay Area can eat when we run out of oil - even though this wasn't apparent just driving around.

http://www.brentwoodaglandtrust.org/

I also hope the farmers in the Brentwood area will wise up - that if you are going to advertise as an area to Buy Fresh, Buy Local, you need to have more crop variety year round. If I can do it in my little community garden plot, they can, too...

Local produce and honesty

I haven't been going to my local farm stand much. I've been in and out of town a lot, picking up produce specials at Oliver's and even Raley's once in a while, and eating greens from my garden. But when I went there Sunday for seasonal roots I saw a new feature. EVERYHING is labeled as to origin. In the past I have always found out where things are from by asking - and if the folks don't know they will find out. Everything grown there has been labeled "Imwalle's". But now there's no need to ask where the other stuff is from. Why can't every market do this?

The Evolution of Healthful Diets

Last week I finished reading Why Some Like It Hot by Gary Paul Nabhan. Published in 2004, the book is a sound treatment of the adaptation of peoples to their local diets. I must say - it got off to a really slow start. But the latter chapters on the indigenous peoples of the American Southwest and Native Hawaiians were really interesting. Communities where obesity and diabetes were epidemic recovered health by returning to a diet of traditional crops and foraged wild foods. This book is not a platform for some wiggy blood type diet, or a pseudo-anthropological call for people to return to being hunter-gatherers. Rather, it's a reasoned treatment of science and culture, and their impact on human and environmental health.

Nabhan reasons that the increase in diabetes these days can be attributed to four things:
1) a loss of wild foods
2) a loss of diversity in crops and livestock
3) the unnecessary refining of so many foods, resulting in the loss of fiber
4) the development of so many additives to industrial foods, additives to which our bodies have no long term adaptation.

One of the things Nabhan points out is that human adaptation to local food stuffs does not seem to take hundreds of thousands of years, but more like just hundreds - fewer generations than many scholars have thought. (Let's hear it for evolution!)

In the chapter on the Waianae community on Oahu he quotes Dr. Terry Shintani:
"In traditional medicine it is recognized that there is really only one disease that all of us must learn to resist: arrogance. It is simply arrogant to think that we can violate the laws of nature and get away with it."

The implication is that we need to eat our native foods, the ones to which our people's bodies
have adapted over generations.

But this left me pondering - what about those of us who are dispersed and dislocated from the places where our ancestors lived? Surely that's a lot of the human community these days?
If you are Pima living in southern Arizona, or Hawaiian or hapa living in Hawaii - well fine. But what if you are from Africa via Jamaica living in Toronto? from Japan living in Sao Paolo? from Croatia living in Auckland? from Oaxaca in Chicago?

What if you are from assorted northern European tribes living in the Mediterranean climate of California? Some of the things that might be traditional foods for my sort of person would be grains that grow in crummy climates, like rye and oats - rhubarb and berries, particularly berries in the heath family - fish from the North Atlantic and Baltic - root vegetables native to Europe, turnips maybe? But that'd be racking up some food miles to eat that diet. While a few might be grown here, most aren't. And even when someone tries, they just aren't right somehow. You can keep California blueberries and Oregon cranberries as far as I'm concerned.

So to be healthy are we all supposed to go back where we came from?

CSA's on the rise

A NY Times article this past week reminded me that I had never posted the link to the Local Harvest locator. It does seem like CSAs are everywhere. Niece Pam in Massachusetts is pleased that she has a share in one, as her backyard produce consists of tomatoes, herbs and chickens not quite laying yet.

I'm happy that I don't need to subscribe, but then I realize being smug about it probably is not nice! How many people have the advantages I do, with a nearby farm stand and supermarket with lots of 100 mile produce - and people I know. How many people have a chance to participate in a community garden that's nearby, and have or can make the time to do so. And how many people have work that allows them to visit other farms and vineyards?

Today on the way home from Lakeport I visited a homely farm stand near Kelseyville. I came away with a cantaloupe that actually smelled, a couple of pounds of onions, and twenty pounds of Bartlett pears for $12.50 How many people are that lucky or have that much fun on the way home from church?

(Lake County is known for pears, walnuts, and, increasingly, wine. A fine combination.)

Local, Local, Local and Local

The New York Times has assembled links to many resources on local eating - from the Times and other sources - here:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/l/local_food/index.html

And in my own little local sphere, I've got squash.

What North American food nation do you live in?

I keep forgetting to post this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/29/dining/20080430_LIST_GRAPHIC.html#

A wonderful map accompanying a review of a book, “Renewing America's Food Traditions” by Gary Paul Nabhan, about disappearing foods.

I feel a little squirrely knowing I live in acorn nation, but I feel as though I live where acorn nation meets salmon nation. I also get a sense of reality about our diocese when I note that we also include part of pine nut nation.

Why garden?

Michael Pollan's essay, "Why Bother?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?ex=1366516800&en=4c931d0a068a2a1a&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

underscores the importance, real and symbolic, or personal change, of - he dares say it so I will, too - character, as we face the specter of accelerating climate change.

He concludes, of course, by suggesting everybody plant a garden. It's about using solar power directly, cutting the food miles close to zero, recycling kitchen waste, amusing yourself rather than being dependent on electronic diversions, cutting down on time at the gym - and better tasting food.

I got my first salad from my garden this year a few evenings ago - lettuce and radishes from the community garden, with some edible flowers - nasturtiums and chive blossoms - from my back yard. Dressed with olive oil from Oroville and the juice of half a Meyer lemon - from someone else's backyard - it was perfection. I had forgotten how good really fresh baby lettuce - as opposed to the gassed stuff at the supermarket - tastes. I planted my edible podded peas late, but they are blooming, and every grey morning means means another day they'll like before the consistent heat hits.

rising prices on tap

Add to the depressing stories I cited yesterday today's item on public radio's The World:

http://www.theworld.org/?q=node/16554

The price of beer is going up, too.

There is a short supply of hops and malted barley worldwide. The same increases in standard of living that stimulate the purchase of more bread and meat apparently cause a greater desire for beer. Accelerating oil prices affect the cost of shipping those two principle ingredients and the finished product. And changes in weather patterns - that's right, climate change - are affecting yields in hops and barley. Hops is apparently a finicky crop - so farmers may choose instead to plant corn or rapeseed, with more predictable harvests at the high prices paid for biofuel crops.

(According to the story, hops has to be grown in northerly latitudes, 49 N being ideal. This made me wonder why all the old hop kilns around here?)

There's a supplement to the story on The World's site, an interview with Tom Standage, author of "A History of the World in Six Glasses." Standage suggests that the accidental discovery of beer may have driven the beginnings of agriculture. We humans may have settled down and cultivated grain to slake our thirst. I suppose this makes sense, given Johnny Appleseed's true purpose. Why did we need Michael Pollan to tell us what we learned in elementary school was romantic twaddle? Why couldn't they have told us the truth? John Chapman was after a dependable source of applejack in every community.

So the desire for a little liquid merriment has driven a lot of farming.

Which brings me to a question. Didn't most cultures ferment what was handy - from cactus to grapes to rice to elderberries to molasses to potatoes to apples? Will it be part of relocalization to go back to local brews and spirits?

And there's a second question that runs through all these recent stories - our greed for energy from fossil fuels is now having multiple impacts on our food system, in many places, at many levels. Do we need to fast from our energy gluttony, so that once in a while all will be able to feast at the table?

What's next, butter tastings?

The lead article in the food stories feed from Wednesday's NY Times was on small dairies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/dining/20dairy.html?ex=1361250000&en=8f587a2194cabc6e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

I've just gotten around to reading it now. On Wednesday, among other things, I was doing my weekly older person's discount shopping. Looking for some cream to make a quiche with, I discovered some that actually came in a GLASS bottle, from Marin's Strauss Creamery. I thought I'd fallen into a time warp.

None of this will solve the problems around wholesome local food for folks who aren't rich, but for those of us who can re-order our priorities, who can choose to buy less of the good stuff, it's a blessing.

Struggles of affordable local restaurants

I've been wondering for some time why we don't have a medium or inexpensive restaurant around here which features local food. Is it the price of ingredients, or some snob/class consideration. While thinking about this and cleaning up piles of unread magazines, etc., I came across this article, which sheds some light on the struggles.

http://www.yankeemagazine.com/issues/2007-09/features/murphyslaw

Why is it that when I want to participate in the consumer culture...

I fail so miserably.

These days I am looking for a couple of ingredients for holiday baking, and looking, and looking, and looking...

Over the years I developed a recipe for what I call a California fruitcake - because it has lots of dried fruit soaked in plenty of alcohol rather than the nasty bits of candied tropical fruit, faux cherries, etc., and plenty of California nuts. Just think - a pretty much local seasonal treat. The backbone of this cake is dried pears. But I can't find any anywhere around here. I now have checked five markets - a national chain, a regional chain, a local market, a health food co-op and whatever Trader Joe's is - a transnational specialty food emporium? I used to always get these at Trader Joe's when it was a California chain, but the choices in dried fruit have been greatly reduced, and many of them are imported. You can get dried pears in mixed dried fruit - but both the national brand, Sunmaid, and a small organic label I found are not California fruit, but from China or Argentina, if I recall correctly.

Some of the best pears in California come from the region north of here where I am working with the congregations. Today I drove by the Safeway in Lakeport, where they had a rather tattered banner flapping "We have Lake County Pears" - but the only dried ones were the imported jobs in the Sunmaid mixture, and the weekend produce manager said there were no dried pears on her order sheets.

I'm now wondering if the fruit and nut emporia between here and Sacramento might be the places to check - but I've just had a trip over that way, and don't expect another until next year.

So, I tried the internet, where the best prices on California dried pears are kosher markets in New York and New Jersey.

The other item I've been looking for is rolled rye, which I use in some yeast baking items. Heck, you can even get rolled quinoa in the bulk bins - but only rye flour (no pumpernickel) and rolled rye as one of the four in a rolled cereal flakes melange. This is now a several year quest. I may have to order a case of it from Bob's Red Mill in Oregon if I want to ever make those great rye rolls again.

Early Rains and eating locally

Winter is arriving early here this year. Not winter as in cold, but winter as in rain. We have had 10% or our annual rainfall already, and it's only the middle of October. Not that we didn't need it, having had such a dry spring, but it does put an end to the summer garden in a way that is equal to but different from those areas where frost does the work.

Between the weather and the busyness of church schedules in fall, I've done most of the fall chores at the community garden with good help from others. Over the next week, I will mulch and sew some cover crops.

There are lots of tomatoes in several forms put by, but tonight I will be approaching the last fresh one, and using the last of the fresh zucchini and string beans, in a vegetable stew with polenta. Only the pumpkins will be left as fresh garden produce, until I harvest the first of the winter chard from my backyard in a week or two.

This has got me thinking about the challenges to eating locally, and fresh when possible, in the winter. Even in this benign climate, even with some garden space and year round farm markets, even with my own preservation efforts, it isn't easy to eat local in the winter. As I mentioned below, I do give in to frozen vegetables once in a while. And I will be buying fresh cranberries that are from Massachusetts (best flavor, flavors of home) if I can get them. Our food system and food habits have moved so far from do-it-yourself local food that even those of us with commitment and resources find it hard to change our habits.

The shift from encouraging home and community gardens to addressing food insecurity with subsidized commodities toward the end of the Great Depression is just one movement whose impact is still with us. We have organized around Big Food, the pal of Big Oil, and undoing the work is daunting.

The article in Wednesday's NY Times, "Local Carrots With a Side of Red Tape" seemed depressingly typical of the challenges we face. If individuals find it hard to undo our ways with food, how much harder on a larger scale, like getting carrots farmed in NY state to NYC school children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/dining/17carr.html?ex=1350360000&en=27ef27fc0052e905&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss

Churchshed

I've been thinking a lot about local - the whole peak oil, locavore thing - and how that relates to faith and spirituality.

Part of this is stimulated by periodic news bulletins about religious leaders who cannot resist flying around the country (and world) to speak about global warming. What do they think they are doing? I mean, we know what celebrities are doing when they use a private jet to get to an eco-benefit - but religious leaders ought to know better.

But mostly it's a positive impulse to consider local spirituality.

It takes work in a culture that is so mobile, lots of work to put down roots and pay attention to the weather and the landscape and the living things around us, as well as the history of human habitation and the folks who represent generations of life in the places where we live.

And it takes a conscious effort to bring the awareness of our surroundings in dialogue with the traditions of our faith.

Historically, Christianity took root in Britain - it went local, or became indigenous. And so we end up with mock English gothic church buildings around the world, and vestments suited to cool damp climes. Nevermind a fascination with things English.

Contrast that with efforts, not just in the tropics, not just in the southern hemisphere, but in urban north temperate dioceses, to find a sense of place. I recall when someone told me the Diocese of Massachusetts had become conscious of its congregations in relationship to its watersheds. The nine generations of Anglo-Americans who preceded me gave me a grounding in that place, so I will always understand what it means to have a sense of place, and of that place in particular. But what a boon it must be for the many who move to greater Boston, to be able to locate themselves, not just economically and politically, but geographically, ecologically.

Identifying one's watershed is one way to take root; another is gardening, with the attention it requires to weather, terrain, soil, wildlife, invasives. The concept of terroir applied to wine might also be applied to prayer - how are our prayers shaped by the totality of factors in the places where we are growing?

I am wondering what others do to live their faith in place, to become indigenous Christians.