The Quebecois, always more French in their approach to food than the rest of Canada, have decided raw milk cheeses are worth taking a risk on after all.
Quebec, like the rest of Canada and the U.S., has long required raw-milk cheeses to be aged 60 days before sale to ensure against the possibility of harmful bacteria in unpasteurized milk. Artisan cheese makers [...]
One of the more delicious ways to eat locally is to drink local milk. For most of us, this means raw (unpasteurized) milk. Unfortunately, raw milk is illegal to buy or sell in many U.S. states.
But often there’s a way around it: A herdshare program. Drinking raw milk from a cow you own is not illegal. When a milk drinker joins a herdshare, he’s buying a part of a cow — usually 1/25th of a cow — and paying each month a fee for that partial-cow’s board and care.
I own 3/25ths of a cow (a Jersey named Cinnamon), which I purchased from a local dairy farmer for $50 per share. (If I ever decide to sell my shares, the farmer will buy them back from me for the same price I paid.) Each month, I pay my farmer $22 per share for my portion of the costs of Cinnamon’s care, and each week I drive out to the farm (in Ohio, it’s illegal for my farmer to deliver my milk to me) and pick up 3 gallons of beautiful whole unpasteurized milk. It works out to $5.08 per gallon, which just a few months ago might have seemed like a lot to pay for milk. It was worth it to me because I wanted to buy my milk from a local farmer raising cows on pasture without rBGH — cows living the way cows are supposed to live — and in my area that means raw milk. It’s worth it to others because they want raw milk in particular.
Summer is my favorite time of year. The days are long and perfect for hiking, traveling, going to the beach, or just sitting on the porch. And summer is the season of my favorite fruits: berries, plums, and melons! I grew up picking huckleberries every summer in Idaho and am always on the lookout for wild berries. Free, fresh-picked fruit is always the tastiest, and wild blackberries and plums happen to be just ripening for the picking where I live on the Mendocino coast of California.
We took a walk to the beach the other day through an orchard overflowing with ripe plums. Further on, the path was lined with tall blackberry bushes. Needless to say, we had an excess of blackberries and plums for a while. Add to that the fact that a local organic wine was on sale this week, and I naturally just had to make sangria!
My sister lived in Spain for a semester last year, and I had some amazing sangria when I went there to visit her. Of course she knew a recipe for sangria, which the one below is based on. (Thanks sis!) So, with a little local foraging, some fresh-picked seasonal berries, and some local wine, I made a yummy summer drink that can be adapted for any kind of fruit that’s in season.
I love basil, and I even worked on a basil farm in college. One of my favorite basil recipes is pesto, and my children love it too! We make it from organic pesto we grow in our garden, and we eat it on baguettes, crackers, pasta, pizza, etc. It is really easy to make if you have a blender, but be careful to stop and stir often. You can easily burn up the motor on your blender if you are not patient.
Pulverize in a blender:
For as often as we do eat, it seems as if most of us don’t think too much about what we’re putting into our bodies. With food production so far removed from our every day lives, it’s easy to ignore where our food comes from and what it’s impact may be. But what we put on our plates has a larger footprint than what we drive. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,
“Livestock production is one of the major causes of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Using a methodology that considers the entire commodity chain, it estimates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.”
The things we choose to eat can obviously have an enormous impact on the planet and everything on it, including ourselves. Naturally then, our diet choices can say a lot about our ethics and beliefs. They can even be a political statement and a form of activism. I think that every choice we make has the potential to change the world, and certainly what I choose to eat has an impact.
There’s a missing ingredient in our diet today that’s imperative to our nation’s health. You can’t add it to your grocery list, forage it at the local farmers’ market or plant it in your garden. It’s media literacy — the ability to critically question the hidden agendas in our “media diets” and evaluate the manipulating media messages we’re bombarded with daily .
Have no fear, Melinda Hemmelgarn is here. A national public health advocate, registered dietitian and award-winning “Food Sleuth” columnist, Hemmelgarn is the cape crusader for helping us, particularly if we have children, develop the savvy-thinking skills to objectively understand the media and thereby support a truly healthy food system. “After decades of working in the nutrition field, I grew convinced that the ‘eat healthy’ messages from the public health community simply weren’t working,” explains Hemmelgarn. “People aren’t changing their eating habits and a key reason why is that we are constantly bombarded with media messages promoting unhealthy food choices. When Pepsi has an annual advertising budget of $1.3 billion, their messages dilute the National Cancer Institute’s “eat more fruits and vegetables” messages, promoted with a budget of less than $5 million.”
Knowing that healthy food message couldn’t compete on advertising dollars, Hemmelgarn instead chose to help teach people how to navigate the message minefield of today’s vast media empire.
What’s a local foodie to do if you don’t have the right spot for a garden? Maybe you just don’t exude the green thumb karma and enthusiasm for growing your own seasonal fare? Or what if there isn’t a farmers’ market nearby for one-stop local food shopping?
Join Charlene Torchia and be a local food forager, developing connections, routines and routes for regularly traversing your area and buying direct from area family farms and food artisans. “I call it my ‘food run’,” explains Torchia, who runs the eco-friendly bed and breakfast, Journey Inn, in Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, about an hour from St. Paul/Minneapolis. “Once a week I make my rounds and stock up on key supplies such as meat from Anderson Farm, goat cheese, organic parmesan from Eau Galle Cheese, apples and cider. Vegetables come from a local CSA – Community Supported Agriculture – and I can even buy bread through them as they grow and grind their own wheat.”
With no dirt under the fingernails required, Torchia exemplifies the spirit that if you’re passionate about the local foods movement and supporting sustainable agriculture, you can find direct sources for bootie in your area. Try plugging your zip code into the Local Harvest database for a starter list of area options. “It’s all about relationships that go beyond shopping transactions,” Torchia adds. “Friendships developed from my food run. I feel part of the community and my B&B guests love hearing the personal story of where each breakfast ingredient came from.”
Here are some starter tips for becoming a local foods forager in your area:
Lovin’ Fresh is a series of recipes designed to showcase produce gathered from local farms or grown in my own garden.
No matter how much I enjoy them, I always feel a little strange about eating dandelion greens. It’s also strange to think about somebody purposely growing dandelions, don’t you think? But the truth is, they’re mighty tasty, in that slightly bitter way.
The urban farm I volunteer on is growing dandelions for the first time this year, and the large bunch I brought home with me landed on the counter next to the mesh bag of baby red potatoes I’d just picked up at the store. Fate would have these two ingredients married together over the course of the next hour into a hearty warm salad, one of those concoctions where I raided the fridge and threw in whatever seemed viable, including some chicory from the farm too.
So much has been written yet so much is misunderstood. Everything from culinary publications, to monthly magazines, to daily newspapers, to blogs are hoping on the Green Cuisine bandwagon. I’m not saying this bad and not saying this is good. I am saying that in general, the more people that are exposed to sustainable, eco-friendly, green cuisine (or whatever you what to call it), is good.
Not knowing what it means, too many labels, confusing names, so called “experts” and even worse, “Green Washing“, is bad.
Ok, so what is Sustainable Cuisine? What does it mean to be sustainable? My definition of sustainability is “a way of growing, shipping, processing preparing and eating foodstuff that doesn’t deplete the natural systems that create that product.”
Having been inspired by one of my favorite gardening books to leaf through on a regular basis, The Curious Gardner’s Alamanac: Centuries of Practical Garden Wisdom, by Niall Edworthy, I decided to use my 4th of July party guests as guinea pigs. It is kind of fun experimenting on unsuspecting guests . . .
Of course, this was one of the great hits of the party and I did NOT make enough. I had to keep a secret stash so that late comers could at least give it a taste!
Mr. Edworthy offered a very simple recipe for lavender infused lemonade that I couldn’t resist. I put two and two together and realized I had plenty of lavender in the garden just ripe and ready for this sweet, cool, summer drink.
Here’s what I did (pretty much straight from Mr. Edworthy’s book - it worked very well):
How exactly does one make a vegetable farm less carnivorous than it already is? The practice of veganic - or “stock-free” - farming is beginning to take hold among some small-scale farmers in the United States and Canada. It has been a common method in Europe for years.
Veganic farmers practice organic farming by eschewing synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, but take it a step further by eliminating animal-derived farming products as well. Most organic farmers use bone meal, blood meal and animal waste fertilizer to make their plants productive, but veganic farmers and their customers see a number of problems with using animal biproducts around the plants.
Subscribe to our RSS feed or newsletter
