Green Options

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Flipping through recipes looking for a Mother’s Day dinner dessert, I lingered on “Cherry Berry on a Cloud,” one of my mom’s classic recipes. Mom’s the matriarch of meringues, amassing a collection of dessert recipes that blend crisp yet fluffy meringues with flavorful fillings and toppings.

But today I wasn’t drawn to this recipe for my menu plan. With all things maternal on all our radars this week, I realized if my mom and I had a theme dish showcasing the heart of our relationship, it would have to be the meringue.

Let me first confess that my mom is still a dash dazed and confused over the fact that my livelihood today roots in food. I farm and grow organic food, write about food and sustainable agriculture, cook our B&B breakfasts, lust over cookbooks like romance novels. She’s perplexed not because of my love for food, but over the fact that I never showed one iota of interest in cooking growing up.

“Cows aren’t Legos,” explains Jerri Cook, an organic dairy farmer and writer from the Wisconsin northwoods. “You can’t just rearrange genetic parts and expect it to be a cow anymore.”

Cook, along with her husband, Wayne, currently milk a herd of 25 cows, selling their milk to Organic Valley Family of Farms, the largest farmer-owned organic cooperative in the country. She represents the rural renaissance of farming women today: smart, sassy, steadfastly committed to educating about the importance of sustainable agriculture — and still the kind of gal who would warmly welcome you into her farmhouse kitchen for coffee, cheesecake and conversation.

Farming organically for over twenty-five years, the Cooks represent a small but dedicated group of farmers who have operated under these principles for their entire agriculture career. “Wayne’s family always farmed organically, thanks to his independent grandparents who didn’t want any part in what they saw as the government pushing chemicals,” says Cook with a smile. “I grew up an army brat in Germany and never experienced conventional American agriculture. When you’re never exposed to chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the concept logically doesn’t make sense. We ourselves didn’t want to eat food laced with that stuff; why would we ever sell it to anyone else?”

We northern Midwesterners tend to be humble cooks. Too often we don’t view our everyday fare as anything special. As a born and bred Midwestern gal, I sometimes fall in line with my peers and lust over hip California cuisine, Big Apple restaurant trends or Food Network designer chefs. The greens may seem greener over the border, which unfortunately results in us under-appreciating how good we have it in the land of cheese, wild rice and rhubarb.

But I’m forever reformed and now proudly flaunt my Midwest roots after bonding with The Minnesota Homegrown Cookbook: Local Food, Local Restaurants, Local Recipes. A new release from Renewing the Countryside, a Minnesota-based non-profit organization that champions the positive stories of rural revitalization, this photography rich book is a love song for local food. Through narrating the stories of 31 of Minnesota’s chefs and restaurants, the Minnesota Homegrown Cookbook offers 100 recipes that celebrate locally grown, organic and sustainable cookery.

And you think you’re busy? Zoë Bradbury has three thousand strawberry transplants to plant, two acres of row crops to sow including a diversified mix of everything from carrots to beets to lettuce, thirteen and a half tons of lime to work into the soil for organic fertilizer and a team of draft horses galloping in any day now. And don’t forget the experimental celeriac patch. Add in the role of accountant, office manager and marketing chief and you cook up the range of farmer responsibilities resulting in their annual crazy spring schedule.

The farmers’ market season may not yet be in full swing so we don’t see — nor appreciate — the flurry of farm activity going on across the country as growers get ready to keep us freshly stocked all summer. But Bradbury, a fledgling Oregon farmer starting her growing venture this season, along with thousands of small-scale, family farmers across the country, have been putting in long work days for weeks.

Chew on this statistic: the average American household spends about $2,434 on “food away from home.” Given that these National Restaurant Association’s numbers are from 2004, these dollar totals are probably even higher today.

However you slice it, we Americans love the convenience and ease of someone else cooking for us — and cleaning up afterwards. But just think about the potential economic and social impact if part of those dining dollars went to restaurants whose mission went beyond bottom line profit, offering a sustainability message along with daily specials?

Welcome to Kavarna, a coffeehouse my family and I discovered last weekend in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Kavarna (the Czech word for cafe) subtly yet poignantly exudes what conscious dining is all about, from securing used furniture to serving up locally grown sprouts year-round on the menu. Over the last decade, owners Alex and Linda Galt have cultivated a thriving business by creatively blending running a restaurant with leaving this world a better place. “It’s all about relationships, connections with both the environment and community,” explains the Galts. “Our customers and staff feel like stakeholders in this place, which shows in the loyalty that has grown over the years.”

Here’s some ways Kavarna serves up sustainable value-laden fare, providing a tip sheet for any restaurant looking to go greener and attract the conscious eater: (list after the jump)

Think you have spring fever? Sandy Dietz walks into a tsunami of vernal anticipation every time she enters her Minnesota greenhouse, bonding with the thousands of seedlings that will eventually find a home outside in the fields. Raising over a hundred varieties of vegetables, Dietz and her family run Whitewater Gardens in northeast Minnesota, growing for area farmers’ markets and a sixty member CSA (community supported agriculture).

“Our first farmers’ market of the season is like an anticipated family reunion for me,” Dietz says with a smile. “To reconnect with the folks who regularly buy our produce every week and watch them act like kids in a candy store when they see our fresh kale for the first time this year confirms that farming is where my heart and passion lie. To contribute to the local food system by taking things from seed to community, that’s priceless to me.”

Dietz’s path to farming represents current trends in small-scale agriculture. While she grew up in a small town setting, she and her husband, Lonny, had no growing experience. After years in traditional office settings, the Dietz duo started their five-acre market garden in 1996. Like many new farmers in training, they met seasoned Obi Wan Kenobi mentors to help them get established. “The strong network of organic farmers helped us get started and keeps us connected today,” Dietz adds. Dietz also represents the changing face of women in agriculture, as increasing numbers of women (particularly those under 55) are purchasing new farms and operating organic and sustainably-managed farms.

Pretend you hold the magic fairy wand of political change: What would you want the next president to do on the first day of his or her administration to tangibly address the planet’s most pressing challenges?

For me, I’m voting with my friend Roger Doiron and his campaign to get the next president to turn a chunk of the White House lawn into a kitchen garden. Roger contributed this idea (and currently leads the vote tally) to the On Day One project, a web platform of the Better World Fund to collect and share ideas about a to-do list for the President’s first day on the job.

Such a Presidential act would take the burgeoning local food movement to new levels of awareness and interest, and make an important global statement that America is taking self-reliant responsibility for our planet’s future. With a pack of zucchini seeds, the White House can send a message that the individual act of growing some of our own food can, collectively, combat and wrestle the looming weight of peak oil and global warming much more positively than further fertilizing the obese defense budget.

Interestingly, Roger’s crusade for the kitchen garden at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue roots in historic precedent. A local food advocate and founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, a global non-profit network of 4,900 gardeners in 90 countries working together to take a hands-on approach to championing the local food system, Roger admits this “is not so much a new idea as a good old one worth recycling.” As the first White House resident in 1800, President John Adams broke ground on a vegetable garden. And talk about eco-lawn care: During WWII, President Woodrow Wilson “hired” a herd of sheep to cut back the cost of maintaining the 18 acres of White House lawn, additionally resulting in thousands of dollars raised for the Red Cross through auctioning the wool. Eleanor Roosevelt inspired others with her Victory Garden on the White House lawn. Most recently, Alice Waters essayed to get the Clintons to plant a garden, but the idea never bloomed under that administration. Instead, the Clinton administration championed the North American Free Trade Agreement, steadfastly convinced its the economy, not ecology, that matters most.

Just because I’m a vegetarian, don’t assume I want a dessert made out of tofu. While I’m constantly trolling vegetarian cookbooks for new recipes for our bed & breakfast, I chuckle — and quickly close the book — when I hit the final dessert chapter where the writers often seem obligated, given the vegetarian nature of the cookbook, to present a collection of “healthy” desserts involving flax seeds, whole-wheat flour and tofu.

On the other front, cruise any supermarket aisle and you’ll be deluged with fat-free, chemical-laden attempts at guilt-free desserts. Neither option appealed to my dessert palette or what a dessert represents in my book: a sweet indulgence, a finale to a relished meal, something real.

Despite the fact that our Wisconsin farmstead, Inn Serendipity, remains covered with that nameless white stuff, my heart sits outside in the garden, ready for spring. Since curing my spring fever won’t come from planting pea pods anytime soon, I’ve learned to channel this vernal quest for change by revisiting old ideas with fresh perspectives.

March begs for a dash of newness and, in the spirit of greening our lives and recycling, there’s no better food for fodder (literally) than revisiting the things we see everyday, probing for a nugget of inspiration. From dusting off old cookbooks (I’m amazed at how I can always rekindle an old favorite I haven’t made in a while from our B&B cookbook, Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity) to foraging to the back of the pantry and finding that jar of grape leaves in brine (foodie impulse buy?), there’s a good shot of ideas nearby.

A Tufts senior e-mailed me the other day, attaching her resume and asking for career advice. While that play of events seems typical, her ambitions probably didn’t fit the cookie-cutter mold of most of her class peers. She wanted to run her own eco-retreat center one day, felt passion for the green movement and embraced her ecopreneurial passions.

In short, she blew away the goals and mindset I had back in my twenty-something days, when the only “green” in my world came out of an ATM machine. And frankly, as I’ve been off the mainstream career path for nearly two decades now, I don’t typically have seniors knocking on my e-mail door for advice. So I felt compelled to launch a dash of the unconventional her way — a dose of out-of-the-box career advice for someone heading down ecopreneurial career paths at a young age. Here’s what I sent to her: