Harvest

I've just been looking back over what I have written about gleaning, because I am preparing my midpoint grant report (thank you again, Episcopal Community Services - but what a month for someone involved with ministries of gardening, gleaning and preserving to have to write a report!) and am gearing up to mentor my first senior project (SVUSD) in gleaning.

It seems like an annual occurrence and a perennial problem - getting down to writing about food at the most food intense time of the year!

Two gleaning days this week, and the challenge of placing apples in a year when things are early and plentiful.  I've been feeling I must make something every evening with produce - what I call my squirrel complex - and I lost every weekend evening to one event or another - or just tiredness from two many different schmooze opportunities in one week, beginning with the Heirloom Festival.   Oh well - I've seen lots of friends and colleagues in the last week - and do have my supply of applesauce in the pantry, and 30 jars of  jam and chutney in the hall closet for the holiday fair at Trinity.

Tonight I made pesto for the freezer.  I read a recipe that subbed pecans for the worth-their-weight pine nuts, so tried that. Not quite sure what I think.  But I wasn't quite sure about sunflower seeds or cashews either.  Nothing has quite the combo of sweet and resinous that pignolis do.

At the garden, so far the thieving vandals are ahead of the gophers in reducing the numbers of my winter squash crop. Tomatoes are at their peak now.  Every time I do something with three or four pounds, I bring home as many two days later.  Mountain Magic, with it's ping pong to golf ball sized fruit, is most productive and has been a hit with everyone I gave a plant to on Rogation Sunday.   The romano pole beans have waned, but the late crop of french horticultural beans are racing the waning days to produce - and looking good.

I keep telling myself it's good to be tired because you are surrounded by produce.   And that's about as profound a reflection as I can manage...

Get thee to a farmers' market

because this is National Farmers' Market week.

Frankly I'm never quite sure what these designated days and weeks mean, and have thought from time to time about making a list of the ones I find most absurd.  But surely farmers' markets are anything but absurd, unless it is absurdly bountiful in this month of gardens and farms over run with good things.

Yesterday Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that 8,144 farmers markets are now listed in USDA's National Farmers Market Directory, up from about 5,000 in 2008.  Actually, they are up about 10% just in the last year.  Search for a market near you here:  
http://search.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/default.aspx

Rethinking "charity" and "philanthropy"

At the weekend I was pleased to see this provocative op ed piece by Peter Buffett, "The Charitable Industrial Complex."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html?_r=2&
It's been rattling around my brain, and colliding with the Gospel for this coming Sunday, Jesus' parable about the guy who couldn't resist building bigger barns.
There are so many stories that come to mind that I don't know where to begin.
What is the gap between the person who has no charitable impulse at all, who has probably ripped others off to amass his wealth and can only think about preserving it, and the one who has charitable impulses, but can only frame them in terms that a person of his social and economic class understands, and who ignores the power differential between the one with wealth, and the one(s) they decide to help?
I suppose the difference is that it is possible to challenge the one with some impulse to share - though I offer this as an hypothesis, not having found it to be true.  Colonialism among philanthropists is rampant, and so few foundations are generous toward those who seek genuine, systemic change.

I wish I thought guilt was a motivator for "giving back".  I think the two great motivators are a) to keep a revolt from happening or b) to help "them" be more like "us" (rather then helping them be more the people God is calling them to be in their context).

Both "charity" and "philanthropy" have at their root words meaning love.  And it seems to me that both carry a denotation of the very humanism that Buffett calls for.  Can we redeem these words? And can we have a conversation about the Christian understanding of love - that love does not use power, coerce, or lord it over others.  Oh dear, I could wax Pauline...

I love the two skills Buffett highlights:  listening and imagination. If we can truly listen to one another, and listen beneath the listening, perhaps we can imagine ways to rebuild systems so there's less need to meet needs, more room to build relationships that enhance the quality of all our lives.

I sure wish I were preaching on Sunday...

National Indigestion

I had to check out this map when a link to it appeared on Facebook.  What a disappointment.  Wouldn't this be a more interesting picture if something harvested in the state were shown?  How could dessert at the French Laundry in the Napa Valley actually represent all of California, when so many wonderful fruits and nuts are grown here, never mind the salad and the rice.  And bottled sauce for New Mexico? What about Hatch green chiles?  Maple syrup and salmon I accept, but Washington does a lot more than salmon - berries, cherries, apples.

If you'd like a larger scale and links to more background
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-food-in-america-2013-7

Nice graphics

Here are some of the best representations of what's in season I have seen.

http://chasingdelicious.com/produce-calendars/

They need a little tweaking for climate and weather but the circular design seems a lot easier to read than the usual bar chart - and there is more variety on these.  If I had a kitchen or cooking school to decorate I would definitely choose the prints from "Chasing Delicious". The nutrition by color pie chart is fun, too.

As for the tweaking - most plums have passed their prime here, but we have been gleaning figs for several weeks.   Pears are just beginning, and gravenstein apples are rolling in.  Most everything is a few weeks early this year, due to our warm dry spring.   Unfortunately I did not push to get things into my garden early, so I still have no ripe tomatoes here in the night-and-morning-fog part of the county.  Lots of grey mornings and cool evenings since the protracted heat of late June and early July.  But the hedgerow blackberries are plumper than I expected, thanks to the midsummer (John the Baptist) rain storm.

A small grant from Episcopal Community Services in our diocese is funding some more equipment for Sonoma Valley Gleaning, good to meet our increasing opportunities to glean.  Word of mouth in the community is a wonderful thing.   When my car is not filled with fruit, it is filled with boxes collected from Trader Joe's (wine boxes for firm pomes), Imwalle's, Raley's, even dumpster diving (shallow boxes for the fragile fruit like figs).  And a good detective could always tell the last thing I gleaned from the lingering smells in my little red wagon (Subaru).

Spring Reading

though you might want to add them to your list for summer.

The Upcycle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart was an inspiring read, taking up where their Cradle to Cradle left off.   It's not explicitly about the food system, but frankly I found its messages about  resilience and abundance applicable to many systems.   The two big take home ideas for me were

• Values are much more important than metrics.  We must begin any initiative by articulating what we value, not setting numerical goals.   For example, accessibility to fresh, healthful food for all, rather than 50% fewer outlets for sugary snacks and beverages in the neighborhood.   Then we can track progress toward that which we value.   Seems like there are ways this would be applicable in congregations, too.   
• Regulation indicates the need for redesign.   One of the things I think about a lot is that new regulations often cause new problems. With concern for health, NYC led the way in banning trans fats. But now the hunger for fats that are solid at room temperature has multiplied the number of palm oil plantations with the resultant destruction of tropical habitat and biodiversity.   In churches, the emphasis on "clergy boundaries" has caused a further distancing of ministry professionals from their communities, increasing the potential for abuses of power that the rules were meant to counter.   When we are tempted to create a new rule or regulation, we need to first step back and consider redesigning or reforming the system that calls for it.   

There are lots of inspiring examples in the book of values based planning and creative redesign.

An older book which I finally read is Patricia Klindienst's The Earth Knows My Name:  Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans. The title pretty much says it.  Here are a collection of stories about farms, urban farms, backyards and community gardens where traditions are carried forward, as cultures are remembered and evolve by peoples indigenous and immigrant.  It's a charming book that reminds us of some of the reasons why we garden.   I found myself thinking about the horticultural beans I am going to plant when I harvest my garlic in a week or two - the beans were one of my grandfather's favorites, something he grew every year.   Then there are my frustration with a rhubarb failure, and all the little lessons in frugality I learned from my dad, particularly about selecting plant starts to set out. I'm guessing that anyone reading this book will find themselves reconnected to their own food and gardening traditions.  

Radio Daze

It seems like there has been lots on the radio these past few weeks about food - and much of it worth listening to.

Michael Pollan has a new book on cooking, and appears to be on tour with it.  His interview on Science Friday was pretty interesting.   I did have some concerns, though, about who might be listening to or reading about his experiments with fermentation, and what they might come up with.   If you know me, you know I could never be one of the sanitation police, but people who do experiments with bacteria without understanding the science could be in for some trouble.  
http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/05/03/2013/michael-pollan-you-are-what-you-cook.html

And, Mark Bittman has a new book, too, and is making the rounds. This sounds like the third in a series on the same theme. Bittman's Food Matters laid out the program of part-time veganism, then the cookbook of more revised recipes followed, and now the program in detail, perhaps, with an elaborated description of being vegan before 6 p.m.   I'm a Mark Bittman fan, but I began to lose interest when someone keeps rewriting the same material.  I also have a question about vegan breakfasts and meaty dinners.  Perhaps this is the easiest rule to follow for those who have a social life.  But if I could eat fish and cheese and eggs and butter at only one meal, I'd want to be Swedish and have them for breakfast.
Bittman was interviewed on the San Francisco radio call-in show, Forum.  
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201305090900
I'm not going to buy the book - just for the tofu jerky recipe?  no -  but I still enjoy Bittman's reasonableness.

On the local scene, Andrea Davis of Quarter Acre Farm has a new radio show, Sustainable Growing, on SunFM Radio in Sonoma. Andrea is a hard-working, creative and articulate small scale organic farmer.   If you don't live in Sonoma, or aren't free to listen on Fridays at 2 p.m., you can listen via podcasts posted on the web site.
http://quarteracrefarmsonoma.com/sustainable-growing-radio-show/past-shows/