Recently in Food and Farmers Category

m o r e (hands on the farm)

Crop Mob.

It's Guerilla Gardening meets WWOOFing.

It's a bunch of people deemed by the NY Times as "landless farmers and the agricurious" who mob a farm on a given day. In a good way.

It's pretty awesome.

The self-description:

"a group of young, landless, and wannabe farmers who come together to build and empower communities by working side by side.  Crop mob is also a group of experienced farmers and gardeners willing to share their knowledge with their peers and the next generation of agrarians."

As suspected, we need farmers and farmers need us. A crop mob puts them together to learn about local, sustainable food and the community that can make it happen.

The e-mail list in North Carolina has 400 subscribers and the 15 sustainble working farms involed have seen 40-50 volunteers per mobbing (NY Times). A huge help for the harvest (and mulching and planting and pruning and pig penning, etc., etc.).

The original Crop Mob encourages that anyone can start a mob. And this map shows that there are some already sprouting from coast to coast.

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Photo credits: Trace Ramsey

m o r e (worms not waste)

The beginnng of a year brings a lot of talk about weight loss and as spring emerges, talk of the same in the context of bathing suits. But might this year be different? Knowing that one in eight Americans is food insecure makes me think more about the weight and mass of food waste than my own waistline.

There are some great resources on how to make your food last, like Love Food Hate Waste and Food Waste Fridays at The Frugal Girl--and following her lead, many other frugal-minded blogs.

And while not every kind of food scrap can go in the mix, composting is the best way to clean up one's food waste stream and get something fabulous in return (aside from feeling good about not wasting): compost! Pretty much the best fertlizer on the planet. And for free, after set up costs.

For those with backyard space, there's the compost pile or the compost bin. But for those of us in small spaces (and with little patience), there's vermicomposting. That's the kind where worms eat your garbage and, in just a few weeks, churn out castings (compost) and worm tea (fertilizer). And the bin might even fit under your kicthen sink--but I've got mine outside.

Worm bins like the one I have from Wriggly Ranch are inexpensive, made from recycled plastic, and easy to set up and use. And since worms eat their body weight everyday, they know just what to do with your carrot tops, stems, apple cores, eggshells, coffee grinds, leftover pasta and bread, paper, leaves, and grass clippings. Your plants, be they house or garden veggies, will thank you.

I used to have mine set up, but didn't have a shady enough spot for the critters to thrive. Now, with a new apartment, I've got a sun-shieled patio that's the perfect spot for my hundreds of tiny wiggling pets to do their thing.

Check out my 25th lim(b) project--vermicomposting--for all the details of how I set up my bin, and how you can set up yours.

For even more:

Worms Eat My Garbage.

Vermicomposting.net.

Do you compost?

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m o r e (food and fowl, not lawns)

A couple of years ago I wrote a brief post on Novella Carpenter, but I kind of can't believe I haven't mentioned her since. Well, now that I've read her book, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, here goes.

Carpenter has a family history of back to the landing, raising rabbits for food, for example. Her parents did it when she was a kid. But as an adult, she moves to Oakland, to a pretty rough and tumble neighborhood called Ghost Town, and does many a similar thing only this time, it's the 21st century and not back to the land but right in the city. Farming there with the freeway, the liquor stores, the people living in cars, and the shootings.

She, with some help from her boyfriend, plants a garden on an abandoned lot next to her duplex, then acquires turkeys, chickens, rabbits, bees, and finally, pigs. She's a farmer, a grower, a beekeeper, a person who raises and harvests her own meat, hanging it sometimes in her bathroom to rest.

The concept and the writing inspire. Between the antics of the animals and the neighborhood and Carpenter herself (like dumpster diving three nights a week just to keep the pigs happy), it's hard to put down. And any foodie (who's not a vegetarian) will appreciate the connection between barnyard animals and what ends up in the kitchen and on the table.

There's also some fascinating history about Black Panthers in Oakland and urban farms all over the place, like the stat that "Shanghai raises 85 percent of its vegetables within city limits." They do it in Cuba and Tanzania too.

Even without an interest in transforming the agricultural system to be closer to home or self-sufficiency, Carpenter's combination of edge and sincerity are worth the ride.

You can always keep up on her blog, too: Ghost Town Farm.

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m o r e (healthy eats, simplified)

I don't do recipes. I never have. In fact, I once schemed a no recipes cookbook but it never got off the burner.

Mostly I don't use them because I have a very plain palate and because I like to just throw things together. (Of course, I do get out the instructions for baked goods.)

This is easy when all my 99% of my produce comes from the farmers' market and  I get grains from the bulk bin. I sort of always have whole foodstuffs on hand and veggies go nicely with anything. My protein--I do eat poultry and fish--comes from Whole Foods at this point because I can purchase it from a farm pretty closeby that doesn't use antibiotics or hormones and treats the birds better. Ideally, I want to venture to the larger Hollywood Farmers' Market for chicken raised by people I can meet in person sometime soon.There's been little motivation though as my husband currently walks to ours every Saturday.

For fish, I get sardines that are on the green light list when considering health and overfishing and mercury. So, this winter, I'm just steaming or stewing up what I've got and am usually ending up with a soup. Like the one pictured: a miso base with chard, shitake mushrooms, millet, and kabocha squash, which I can't find at my f.m. and consider a splurge. (Here's one way to cook it--I just cut in half and put said half face down in some boiling water; it cooks pretty fast and is done when soft and crumbly--yum!.)

There are a few details and photos of my simple, daily creations at my Flickr set called simple cooking if you want to see what's in my bowl some days of the week this winter.

I've got the rundown of my healthy, efficient cookware as well.

And you can browse all my lim(b) projects here.

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m o r e (perpendicular problem-solving)

"Researchers have argued that to grow some of his own food is the most effective action an individual can take for environment, not only because of the food industry's heavy carbon footprint but also because participating in agricultural production cultivates a valuable skill set around [a] sustainability issue"

So says Windowfarms. The people behind the curtains there encourage urban-dwellers to string up some recycled materials like empty plastic bottles and create a hanging, hydroponic (that's watetr, no soil) garden. The first windowfarm produced a salad a week in the middle of winter in NYC. And I suppose the bigger your window, the bigger the harvest. What a way to get fresh food to the city! Just hang it in your window.

The beauty of Windowfarms is that they get space-starved citydwellers connected to food using materials that already exist and are recycled or are easy to come by. It's kind of a DIY-er's dream. And perfect for people in whose climates the farmers' markets take hiatus during the cold months.

Check out photos of farmy incarnations so far. And check out how to make it happen.

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m o r e (mindful money)

I've written here about slow fashion,  slow food, and slow communities, so why not slow money?

Our financial system has already shrunk down with the recent economic meltdown, (something I'm not qualified to comment on). However, as we look to rebuilding, might things be different?

According to the NY Times, Americans are buying less and doing more in this recession. In fact, I think with signs like many more people planting so-called "recession gardens," buying local, learning to knit, looking for life/work balance, and desiring sustainble products, it's possible that our values are shifting.

Woody Tasch of the Slow Money Alliance has as new set of money values for us to consider. Instead of building on growth at all costs and mega returns, he wants to refocus our financial system on something that matters, and that takes a while to see bear fruit: local food.

What if we invested in something worthwhile within 50 miles of where we live?

He's proposing that we "invest with more realistic return expectations" and subscribe to principles that:

"enhance food security, food safety and food access; improve nutrition and health; promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity; and accelerate the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption to an economy based on preservation and restoration."

The idea is that we invest in small farms who need help and get the rewards, some in the form of dividends, some in the form of a better world.

The Alliance is striving for a million signatures to its principles and there's a slow money gathering at a farm this June.

(Heard about it at Good.is.)

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m o r e (sweets in season)

I have been practically living on yukon gold and sweet potatoes. Okay, not really living on, but enjoying immense amounts of these wintry tubers.

Now I'm onto a new one. My acupuncturist recommended Japanese Sweet Potatoes as being especially good for one's tummy. I tried one of these with purple skin and white flesh from my farmers' market and really, even if they weren't good for digestion, they'd be in my bowl.

I boil them or steam them. When cooked, they are yellowish and slightly translucent and taste amazingly sweet. Slightly floral, slightly nutty, they are fabulous. As for texture, they remind me of the insides of fried bananas and mooncakes I ate as a kid in Singapore. Yum. I've been eating them completely plain either as a snack or as dessert (if you close your eyes you might believe you're eating a sweet, moist, dense cake).

More on sweet potatoes (oft-confused for yams) here.

And here's a sweet potato cake recipe you can try out.

Potatoes are in season practically everywhere in the country during the cold months. In a few places, they're the only thing in season. See this graphic to find out what's popping up where any time of year.

Photo credit: culinate

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m o r e (serving up local)

Leave it to Slow Food to organize a day for getting together and enjoying local foods together, with relish. This Wednesday, December 10 is Terra Madre day to celebrate mother earth and her bounty.

The pillars of slow food include access to fair, good food, biodiversity, small-scale production, and sustainable agriculture and trade relationships.

If you can get behind those, then there's still time to organize a little slow food soiree with your family or friends or school...

Or find one where you live anywhere in the world. I don't see any for Los Angeles, so my dinner with my husband prepared with foods from the farmers' market and local bulk bin will have to be extra celebratory tomorrow night!

Any day of the year, Slow Food USA has so many resources for conscious eaters (and growers). You can find an event, a dinner, a panel to attend; get involved with your local chapter; or get the resources to plant an endangered food in your garden.

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