UN Report on Food Waste in North America

Anyone who followed this blog in its early days knows that I showed a great fondness for lengthy reports. Here is one that appeared earlier this year. How I missed it, especially with my continuing work with our local Food Recovery Coalition, I don't know. I've only had time to skim it so far, but want it linked here. Diverting food waste is both a local and a global challenge.
https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/27688/WasteNot.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
There's a good chart on page 13 which shows the proportion of waste generated at the consumer phase of food's life cycle. This is highest in North America and lowest in the developing world where waste is most often generated between harvest and retail, in storage and shipping.

Ode to Baked Beans

I've just joined the Rancho Gordo Bean Club, and with that subscription comes the right to participate in the related Facebook group. Every day recipes are shared, cooking methods and vessels debated, and the glories of beans depicted.
A few days ago a woman posted a snapshot of a bean pot she'd found at a yard sale. "Is this okay to cook in,"she asked. It seems that a previous owner had messed with it, gluing felt on the underside of the lid, but otherwise it looked just fine, a large (four pound capacity) pot for baking beans in the oven.
One commenter mentioned that New England baked beans are always made with the lid off, with the cook adding a little water periodically over the hours of baking.
"What?!?," I thought. Whoever heard of that? You use the cover, but as they fit loosely you do need to check and add to the liquid from time to time. My reply to her was more polite than that, of course.
She then cited a cookbook that for her is canonical. I looked up the book and found the author was a journalist, not a cook, which left me with only one reply. "I'm chuckling as I read this. My New England Cookbook was my grandmother, born in 1890 and baking a pot of beans every Saturday for most of her adult life."

Our family bean pot now resides with my nephew Kevin, who from time to time cooks up a pot of beans in the true New England manner. Beans, salt pork (not bacon), onion, Colman's mustard, molasses, and white sugar. Gram usually baked pea (also called navy) beans, but later my Aunt Margaret produced the best results ever - hulking, meaty and sweet - with Maine yellow-eye beans.

I remember women bringing huge pots and cookers of beans to the summer fair at First Parish Church in Duxbury. I always helped my mother at the food table, of course. We would sell the beans by the pint, ladling them into the cardboard containers used for hand-packed ice cream. Margaret's recipe always sold out first. One year the new minister's wife brought her beans, but there was much whispering about the fact that they contained TOMATO. How, growing up on the back side of Beacon Hill, did she not know better!

Since abandoning meat as a dietary essential, I have tried to bake beans that taste good without the salt pork. For a while I was adding a nice big dollop of mango chutney to the pot. This helped some, but also redoubled the sweetness. Now that I am paying attention to the added sugar in my diet, the idea of the many forms of sucrose in the recipe is cloying. So I'm going to set out on an experimental journey, with less molasses and no other sugars, but adding something to boost the umami without obviously making a diversion from the New England route of bean cookery. Three contenders are Worcestershire sauce (I do eat little oily fish), smoked paprika, and tamari. Stay tuned for the reviews.

Preserving the harvest

I still love cooking, with a special fondness for baking and preserving. But I have to say that my stamina and attention span for long involved processes has diminished.
So my favorite tools of the season are the Instant Pot, immersion blender, and food mill.
I've made two batches of marinara by simply throwing everything in the pot. Well, not exactly throwing - there is some rough chopping involved, and the onion and carrot and garlic get a bit of saute in the olive oil first. Then when it's all done and cooled some, I blitz it in the pot.
I've been portioning this out, mostly as one cupfuls for one person's pasta, and freezing it.
But I've had an idea which I hope will turn out to be a bright one. I'm going to make the recipe one more time, subbing peppers, sweet and hot, for the carrot and some of the onion, and using vinegar (sherry?) as the liquid instead of the wine called for in the original recipe guideline. When it's whizzed "to the desired consistency," as the recipes say, I'll have salsa. With my handy pH strips I can see if it's then okay to can, and do that to save a little freezer room.
Oh - and meanwhile I have some roasted small tomatoes, given the immersion blender treatment to use in tomato-herb bread.
Here's the guideline I've been using for the marinara:
https://www.simplyhappyfoodie.com/instant-pot-marinara-fresh-tomato-sauce/
Except with paste tomatoes - I have San Marzanos - using just one 6 ounce can of organic tomato paste to give it a little more backbone.
And https://www.daringgourmet.com/fresh-roasted-tomato-and-herb-bread/
This impossibly long blog entry has a good recipe for the bread, which has never met a cheese it didn't like.

From the most recent Hazon e-blast

“Environmental teshuva” is shorthand for a further and renewed commitment to doing better for the planet. It’s a process for each one of us to think about what we are doing, or could or should be doing, going forwards. Environmental teshuva as a minimum – we believe – involves three elements:

1. Making a commitment to further change in our own behavior. (We’re especially encouraging people to reduce or eliminate their consumption of industrial meat and dairy, which is one of the single largest drivers of anthropogenic climate change);
2. Amplifying that by encouraging any institution you are part of to build or strengthen its Green Team, and enter into a multi-year process to drive systemic change...;
3. Being a wider ambassador for change – by volunteering time and/or giving money.

Carbon Farming

We need monetary incentives for farmers transitioning to no-till and other carbon sequestration practices. We've made progress in California. More could be done, and lots more in federal programs.
https://thefern.org/2019/06/one-man-is-trying-to-save-the-world-from-climate-change-by-mobilizing-an-unlikely-team-iowas-farmers/
By the way - this is also an interesting article about the intersection of faith groups, agriculture, and climate change.

The information we have been seeking

I'm still annoyed that CNN did not allow free streaming of the climate town hall, but I probably wouldn't have learned much about the candidates' positions on climate change in relationship to agriculture and the food system. It's not an interest of urban media, even though everybody eats.

Here's a gift from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
https://sustainableagriculture.net/blog/climate-change-agriculture-presidential-debates/
I've not had time to study this and follow the links, and but until I do and can comment, here's the dope.

August garden report

Better late than never.
Well, only a day late.
Tomatoes began appearing in August, and now are in full flush.
Rattlesnake pole string beans have passed into oblivion, but dry beans are going crazy in the same plot. I already have 3/4 pound of Good Mother Stallard. My forecast is 1 1/4 of them, less of Rio Zape and Christmas limas.
Plenty of summer squash and chard.
The winter squash plants (two in a hill) I thought might never do something erupted over night. They now have 6 or 8 butternuts in various stages of growth. They have lot of time to finish their growth and ripening.  The nearby green beans I got in late (Romano bush) have set some fruit; another week.
Winter squashes that went in earlier in other beds did not do so well, though it looks like five or six small fruit and soon.
Some may wonder why I plant things like beans for drying and winter squash in small community garden plots. It's simple; I like to grow real food, not just salad and greens.  Here, from a week or so ago.