Following my goji berry coup in Chinatown last week, I found myself with an embarrassment of riches. What to do with all of these berries? Where before I meted out a small handful to enjoy at the bottom of a tea cup, I was now free to make recipes that included whole cups of goji.
I was inspired by this combination of chocolate and goji, but decided to make an ice cream. When I found out that a vegan friend was coming over, I surveyed my non-dairy ingredients and came up with this frozen dessert, which was surprisingly creamy and quite delicious. The combination of chocolate and goji is reminiscent of black forest (chocolate-cherry), but more herbal and less saccharine.
Vegan Chocolate Ice Cream:
Most mainstream business reporting on the agricultural sector has recently focused on the socio-economic impact of rice shortages in southeast Asia or the global price spikes throughout the food chain. But despite the misfortune wrought by desertification, drastic weather changes and other contributing factors, those who trade on the commodities market have seen food shortages as a boon.
Companies that have already benefited from buying up wheat, corn or soy futures are beginning to invest in farm land (from the corn fields of Indiana to cattle ranches in Argentina), storage facilities (such as grain elevators) and fertilizer companies. An article in the New York Times proposes that this financial interest will stimulate food production, thus stabilizing the supply.
But what does it mean for the future of food, beyond the immediate crisis? According to a financial adviser
Despite a mild insecurity with shopping in grocery stores where the latin alphabet graces few labels, I was overcome with a desire to shop in Chinatown today upon seeing the perfect, sunny weather. More than picking up a few veggies, I was hoping to gather some inspiration. I have gotten into a bit of a cooking rut lately, which seems to be a consequence of farmer’s market shopping: always the same vendors, little variation from week to week. But much like a farmer’s market excursion, the Chinese groceries along Spadina Avenue offer a pleasurably ambling shopping experience without the neon lights, air conditioning and tasteless, overpackaged food that can be found at my local supermarket.
After fortifying myself on BBQ Pork steam buns, I walked into the first grocer
Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.
With an ever shrinking topographical footprint and a population in perpetual flux, the modern city has some feeding issues. A recent article in The Globe and Mail described the frustration of farmer’s market organizers over the shortage of independent farmers who are able to open stalls. The demand, it seems, is far outpacing the supply on a small scale, but also on a large one: the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 80% of the earth’s agriculturally-viable land is already farmed, but the earth’s population is expected to grow by 3 billion by 2050 (NASA via verticalfarm.com). With the impending expansion of an already existent disparity, what can we do to feed all people?
Who Feeds Us? is my attempt to investigate the lives of our farm workers. Who picks our crops and packages our meals and how are they treated in our name? What do we implicitly sanction as we swipe our debit cards through the checkout line?
The accompanying picture is of a migrant farm worker, much like Olivia Tamayo, who made history last week when she became the first female migrant worker to successfully bring a sexual harrassment suit against her employer to a federal jury. Ms. Tamayo was awarded over one million dollars in 2005 when a district court found Harris Farms guilty of sexual harrassment and descrimination. Last week, a federal court upheld that decision, finding that Harris Farms inappropriately responding after Ms. Tamayo was raped three times by her direct supervisor. Harris’ only action was to move Ms. Tamayo to an empty field that was closer to her rapist’s house.
Following the verdict, an alarming op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times described Ms. Tamayo’s plight as unique only in the attention it garnered. Sexual harrassment and assault of female farm workers is so prevalent, that a study conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that 90% of surveyed female farm workers considered it a “serious problem.”
In junior high school, I had a quirky music teacher (is there any other kind?) who would occasionally launch into monologues on a myriad of topics including, but not limited to: what a loser her ex-boyfriend was; amusing malapropisms from her overbearing opera coach, Hilde; and life “on the stage.” I remember these well because it was the first inkling I had that teachers carried on real lives outside of the confines of school, but also because there were a few key phrases that have managed to remain in my addled brain since. One of these was “rhubarb and spinach.” During rehearsals for our production of Guys and Dolls, the music teacher instructed us to repeat this phrase in low voices whenever we were supposed to evoke a low din during a street or party scene. Our music teacher assured us that extras in movies are instructed to repeat the phrase and that it was a standard acting method. To this day, I can’t look at rhubarb without thinking, “and spinach.”
The raw food movement began with a fringe group of eaters in the mid 1970s and has since gained mainstream status along with other alternative diets such as veganism and macrobiotic eating. Most major cities and many smaller ones now boast raw food restaurants. Raw cookbooks abound and celebrities like Carol Alt, Woodie Harrelson and Natalie Portman have gone public with their raw food habits.
A cornerstone of raw foodism dictates that uncooked food is more nutritionally intact and bioavailable to humans. Raw foodists point out that all natural foods have the enzymes necessary to break down their matter, but that these enzymes are destroyed by cooking temperatures. Such followers believe that by eating only foods that contain their own decompositional enzymes, the body does not have to produce its own digestive enzymes (from the pancreas) and can redirect the energy elsewhere. Raw foodists also believe that an uncooked meal is more nutritious than cooked counterparts because of some evidence that cooking leaches nutrients.
But new evidence published in the upcoming issue of the British Journal of Nutrition suggests that vegetables do not always provide optimal nutrition when consumed raw. Instead, several vegetables are more nutritious after cooking or when served with other ingredients, such as fats.
After a brief hiatus, Urban Agriculturalist is back! Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.
Last week, the New York Times featured a few part-time professional urban farmers in areas of New York City where a high demand and low supply of produce cause dietary and health problems. Increasingly, residents are seeing their abundance of abandoned lots as a new kind of food wealth.
In places like East New York, Brooklyn and the South Bronx, neighbors are getting together to create community gardens. But instead of toiling away on shared crops, each group grows and tends to his or her own plot. This allows more autonomy in deciding what to do with those hard-earned veggies. While some groups eat or give away their crops, many others decide to bring the fruits of their labor to market as a secondary source of income. One couple featured in the article, Denniston and Marlene Wilks, made over $3,000 dollars last year from four allotments. But the farmers insist it is not about the money: a South Bronx farmer, Karen Washington told the New York Times: “We’re selling so that people in our neighborhood have good quality. There’s no Whole Foods in my neighborhood.”
When the World Food Program (WFP) introduced free breakfasts to public schools in impoverished communities around the world, teachers immediately noticed a difference in their classrooms. Not only were students more alert and focused, they attended more regularly and were never late so as not to miss breakfast time. The quality of the students changed, but so did the quantity. The percentage of female students - most likely to be forced to stay behind to help earn income - sky-rocketed and the age of attendance fell. Four year olds began to attend school with their older siblings, sitting obediently in classes just for a free bowl of rice in the morning. In many impoverished families, children are forced to earn their keep in place of going to school. In addition to eradicating hunger, WFP made school attendance a central part of their goal for the breakfast program.
The WFP school feeding program has become a touchstone aspect of both the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the G8 action pact of 2002. Between the program’s inception in 1999 and its last data recorded in 2005, the number of children served has grown by 82%, which amounts to 21.7 million schoolchildren in 74 countries.
Now, despite its success and widespread acclaim, the International Herald is reporting that the WFP program will not continue in Cambodia - the first of many predicted shut-downs as rising food costs threaten the profoundly poor.
While browsing the St. Lawrence Market last weekend, I was elated to spot the paisley-shaped heads of fiddlehead ferns. I won’t get into my love for the regional delicacy too much, as Jennie already posted a great recipe, but I felt that - despite their season of only a few weeks - the wild, gamey greens deserved more than one ode to their deliciousness.
Before I’d left the market, I’d snapped up two bunches of ramps and a bag full of stinging nettles among my regular staples. In fact, the stinging nettles purveyor was kind enough to write out a recipe for tea (pictured below). It was my first ever stinging nettle experience.
More on that and other recipes inspired by my wild green windfall after the jump.
