Green Options

Until I started receiving local British vegetables through my organic veg box scheme, I had only ever purchased cauliflower as a large white vegetable swaddled in crinkly translucent plastic at the supermarket.  However, this week’s veg bag came with a huge green lump about the size and weight of a dodgeball. At first, I thought it was some sort of unknown English cabbage. However, upon peeling away a few of the thick, dusky green leaves, I discovered a tiny cauliflower the size of my fist nestled amongst the paler, thinner stalks.  I’ve never even seen so many cauliflower leaves before, much less a version of the vegetable that consisted of about 80% leaf and 20% flower.

There’s been plenty of recent talk in the media about “recession gardens.” I’ve kind of thought that urban gardening was just a good, wholesome way of healthy living.

Here in St. Louis, Backdoor Harvest seems to agree. And that’s fantastic news for me — and novice gardeners like me — because I’ve got almost no idea what I’m doing when I start digging into my yard.

Lucky me, my wife, who knows a little more than I do about plunging seeds and such into our tiny backyard plot, enjoys doing the research to figure these things out. Even luckier for us, Backdoor Harvest is hanging its open-for-business shingle in the coming days, just to help urban growers, even ones as inexperienced as in the Williams household.

Though gardens seem inherently green (literally, at least) that may not always be the case. From pesticides to over-watering, gardens can be a strain on the environment, as well as your back. But, when created with some consideration towards ecological harmony, gardens provide enjoyment, color and food, without disrupting nature’s delicate balance.

If you’d like to learn more about how to achieve a healthy, natural garden with a minimum of effort, there are plenty of resources right here in LA to assist you.

First up, the City of Santa Monica is offering a series of classes entitled “How to Green Your Garden.” Beginning on January 17th, each class will focus on a different topic, including:

As much as people might recognize that Ayurveda is an ancient medicine from India and that it enhances positive health, most do not realize how intricately it is connected to sustainability.

Translated from Sanskrit as The Science of Life, Ayurveda is probably one of the oldest known systems of sustainable living. Given that it enhances longevity goes to show how important sustainability is…not just as a marketing or lifestyle trend but as a method of achieving long term health.

I always struggle over what to buy my father and stepmother for the holidays. They have everything they need, and when I try to buy something for their home decor, it often ends up in a garage sale.  This year I had a brilliant idea: a share in a family farm.

This summer when my dad came to visit, I told him about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), and he sounded interested.  You see, my dad is a big Willie Nelson fan, and he grew up visiting family farms.  As Beth Bader explains:

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. It is basically a mutual agreement between consumers and a farmer that helps guarantee the farmer a reliable income, and the consumers each get a share of the produce throughout the season.

A CSA is a real partnership; the consumers take on some of the risk of farming as a bad season can mean less produce. However, the support through the tough seasons allows the farm to continue, and it certainly pays off during the good seasons. Most seasons, a CSA subscription provides enough produce to feed a family of four. Many will offer shared, or half subscriptions for single people or small families.

With Thanksgiving around the corner and (slightly) cooler weather here in LA, my thoughts are turning to comfort food. From stuffing to squash, it all sounds good right now. What better way to enjoy the best that the season has to offer than joining in the movement of community-supported agriculture?

These farms, or CSAs, provide fresh produce, and sometimes meat and dairy. For a fee, you get baskets of fresh food once a week. One well-known CSA in LA is the Tierra Miguel Foundation, which drops off batches of organic produce at designated spots around town. All you do is swing by and pick it up. Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can visit the North San Diego farm in person the first Saturday of each month. The farm is also a charitable foundation that supports education in sustainable agriculture.

You might be more green than the definition of the word at home but does this carry through to when you step into the doors of your office? Not according to Envirowise, British sustainability business experts who says that good domestic environmental practices do not necessarily translate to the workplace.

My CSA box this week contained sweet potatoes…lots of sweet potatoes.  The ugliest sweet potatoes you’ve ever seen.

This is what a sweet potato looks like when it’s been damaged by voles.  Pretty ugly, eh?  But other than the obvious cosmetic damage, there’s no harm to the sweet potato — you can trim off the damaged parts and use it as usual.  Vole-damaged sweet potatoes even store just as well as perfect specimens.  But of course a lot of people would be put off by the visual and pass these up in favor of more perfect-appearing sweets.  So when you’re hitting the farmers’ markets at the end of the season, if you see some ugly sweet potatoes cheap, snap ‘em up!  They’re a bargain, and  you’re rewarding a farmer for using organic methods.

I also had some excellent-looking young spinach in this week’s CSA box, and a few onions.  I’d picked up some wonderful linguica from a local sausagemaker a few weeks earlier, and I always keep chicken stock in my freezer.  It’s a blustery day here in Southwest Ohio, with the first sleet of the season.  Soup seemed like the perfect choice.  So I made one of my favorite rustic autumn soups:  Linguica, Sweet Potato, and Spinach Chowder.

Community Supported Agriculture is a form of farming which encourages the active participation of a farm’s surrounding community in the production of its food.

The scheme works by signing up people to receive locally produced food and veg one year at a time. How much they pay for this food depends upon the amount of time they commit to working on the farm: the more time they commit, they cheaper the food.

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Confess: You’re a closet cookbook junkie, too. I admit, my foodie reading gut tends to lean toward literature that involved ingredient lists, serving sizes and centerfolds of juicy eggplants. But I’m on a mission to diversify my diet, still under the umbrella of my passion for food – but stirring things up with perspectives on the bigger picture of our food system and the role we as individual eaters can play in advocates for change.

Warning: Reading such literature can prompt you to quit your day job, follow new dreams and move to a farm in southwestern Wisconsin – or other paths of change that may not currently be in your big picture life plan. That’s exactly what happened to my fellow farmer friend, Kriss Marion, who traded the Chicago scene in 2005 to launch Circle M Farm in Blanchardville, Wisconsin, running a CSA (community supported agriculture) and a fiber business. “People often ask me how it happened that we uprooted our city family and came to be market farming in southwest Wisconsin,” explains Marion. “The answer, plain and simple, is books.”

The next time you’re in Minneapolis and struck with a craving for pizza, you can satisfy both your hunger and your desire to save the Earth by giving Galactic Pizza a ring.

The uptown eatery, which was recently featured on CNNMoney.com, goes to exceptional lengths to be eco-friendly. When the Minnesota weather cooperates, for instance, Galactic Pizza employees (costumed as unique superheroes) will deliver your order by electric car. The restaurant also gets its power from wind energy, sends some of its food waste to local pig farms and prints its menus on hemp.

The pizzas, too, are created with a green philosophy: many of the ingredients come from farms in Minnesota or Wisconsin, other ingredients are organic and the mozzarella comes from non-rGBH cows. Even vegans can find a menu item to their tastes, with choices including vegan mozzarella, vegan chicken and mock duck.