Agrariana Blog

We've moved!

2010-11-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

Agrariana has updated our website to host our own blog, so check us out at www.agrariana.org for the latest.

Backyard Seed Banks on QUEST

2010-09-20T13:50:00.000-07:00

Agrariana is proud to announce coverage of the Backyard Seed Vault on KQED's science program QUEST. Agrariana Executive Director Mat Rogers talks to reporter Lauren Sommer about the genetic savings in our own backyards, developing landrace crops, and promiscuous corn.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Colbert to become farm worker

2010-07-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

United Farm Workers president Arturo Rodriguez was the guest on Thursday's Colbert Report, discussing the UFW's "Take Our Jobs" campaign. Host Stephen Colbert accepted UFW's challenge to come work as a farm worker to experience the jobs that undocumented workers are taking away from American citizens. Sign up for your own day in the pastures of plenty at the Take Our Jobs page.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Arturo Rodriguez

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

2010 Election

Fox News

Friday Multimedia Melange

2010-04-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

For your perusing pleasure on a Friday afternoon, three tidbits from the food world: a slideshow of Slow Food Berkeley and friend-of-Agrariana Peter Jackson's latest workshop on making tasso and andouille, King Corn filmmakers' raising funds to finish a short film about a very small farm, and a video from Ohio about why farmers do what they do. Enjoy!

CUESA Story on Stocking the Plastiki

2010-04-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

This story originally appeared in the CUESA newsletter and was so interesting it deserved a cross-post here. Check out this video of the Plastiki's garden and see the story below.

Local Ahoy: Farmers Help Stock the Plastiki

When Nona Lim and Jennifer Tuck of Cook! San Francisco set out to plan, gather, and prepare the food for the Plastiki expedition, they had no small task ahead of them. In fact, planning and sourcing meals for six people at $15 a day for an 11,000-mile trip from San Francisco to Sydney was a voyage in and of itself.

Near the end of last year, Lim and Tuck responded to a call from Jo Royle, the skipper on the Plastiki, Adventure Ecology’s catamaran made from 12,000 post-consumer plastic bottles made in part to document the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. Royle wanted an alternative to the pre-packed meals that sailors often take on such trips. “She described long journeys where she’d live for months on freeze-dried food and the ill consequence that has on the body,” recalls Tuck.

The pair — and the crew of chefs that Nona employs to prepare the ready-made meals she sells through Cook! San Francisco — were up for the challenge. “We wanted to provide something healthy and flavorful over a three–month period, which is pretty tough,” says Lim. And, seeing as how the Plastiki expedition is focused on sustainability, Lim and Tuck decided it would be a great opportunity to incorporate as much local, Bay Area-produced food as possible. The answer, they soon realized, would be to prepare meals based largely on home-canned stewed meat and dehydrated vegetables. They added a pressure cooker to the equation, collected and developed recipes (including quite a few by pressure cooker expert Lorna Sass), and set about making it happen.

That’s where Everything Under the Sun’s Bill Crepps, a farmer known for his wide range of dehydrated products, entered the picture. When Tuck approached him with a list of ideas, Bill saw it as an opportunity to try out some new things. “Finding Bill was a dream come true,” she says. “He was willing to dehydrate any and all veggies he could get his hands on – and the experimentation began!”

“She would tell me what she needed; if I had it I’d dry it for her,” recalls Bill. “If I didn’t, I’d find someone who did. That’s how Dirty Girl Produce got involved—with carrots and beets—and Eatwell Farm with leeks.” Once dehydrated, most of the produce weighed around one tenth of what it had fresh; for instance, 20 pounds of fresh carrots became a mere two boat-friendly pounds of dried carrots. Crepps also experimented with olive oil and salt to create chips with vegetables like kale, eggplant, and cilantro (his personal favorite). And with the help of some regular customers, put together a Plastiki-inspired soup mix that combines his kale, onions, garlic, and peppers for his every-day shoppers who want an easy way to flavor beans or broth-based soups.

“The crew were the guinea pigs for a lot of stuff I hadn’t dried before,” says Bill, who tends to dehydrate things like apricots, mandarins, and tomatoes. He ended up donating a portion of the food (such as a big batch of summer squash he’d dried last summer) and selling a great deal of it at cost. In return, he says the effort reinforced the fact that he could dehydrate fresh produce that doesn’t sell year-round, and market it to backpackers and others who need a nutritious alternative to the pre-packed meals sold in stores like REI.

As for meat, Tuck and Lim ordered more than a hundred pounds of organic grass-fed lamb and beef from Marin Sun Farms (with the goal of providing seven to eight ounces of meat per person, per day). In the Cook! SF kitchen, they canned 110 quart-sized mason jars full of beef bourguignon, lamb ragout, Thai chicken curry, lamb tagine, and some additional meat in stock for the crew to use in their own recipes. “We had four pressure cookers that each fit four mason jars that had to cook an hour and a half in order to properly preserve the meats. If you do the math, we were in the kitchen many, many hours.” The crew was also given back-up jerky and other forms of preserved meat from sources like Fatted Calf, in case the canned meat doesn’t hold up in tropical temperatures. (See a video of Jo Royle preparing Beef Bourguignon on the boat.)

The Plastiki left Sausalito on March 2, with an initial supply of fresh fruits and vegetables (see their kitchen at right), but have been transitioning to the preserved food over the last week. There is also a small hydroponic garden on board the ship, which will provide occasional fresh greens for the six crew members. And. of course, they enjoy occasional fish when they can catch them. (To date they have only caught one tuna and hope to call attention to diminished fish populations while on their journey.)

In a recent email from onboard the ship, where the crew regularly blogs and shoots footage for a film about the voyage, Royle discussed her efforts in the boat’s kitchen. “I am trying to move the guys away from simply opening the yummy Cook! SF canned food to experimenting with the dried. I made Lorna [Sass]’s veggie bean chili — and adapted it a little to include lots of Bill’s vegetables. It was sooo good.”

Before the boat launched, David de Rothschild, the founder of Adventure Ecology and the Plastiki expedition leader, also commented on the community-wide effort to stock the vessel with local food. He wrote: "The Plastiki has [been] exposed to many diverse, curious, passionate and incredibly generous individuals and none more so than the committed and diverse group of organic farmers and local suppliers who have not only overwhelmed the team and myself with their carefully crafted meals, snacks ands treats but they have also deeply inspired me with their unrivalled commitment to authenticity, quality and community spirit."

Announcing the Backyard Seed Vault

2010-04-05T09:34:00.000-07:00

The 1979 children's book Ox-Cart Man describes a colonial family who spends all year raising a crop and an ox, building the ox's cart, making mittens, brooms, and candles. Then the ox-cart man sets off to market to sell the crop and the mittens, brooms, and candles, then the ox, then the cart. He returns home carrying the supplies from the market the family will need for the next year and everyone starts over again raising a crop and an ox, building the ox's cart, making mittens, brooms, and candles.

Maybe at one time we all shopped at markets visited by ox-cart men. Since then, farmers, artisans, cooks, and eaters have had to develop ways to recover from the American institution known as the supermarket. Starting with farm CSAs, we've developed ways to reconnect with our communities and share the bounty of fruit trees, meat, wild foraged food, ferments, canned goods, backyard fruit, ready made traditional food, charcuterie, homemade goods, wild game, and on, and on, and on.

But what about the genetic diversity underlying all of that delicious food? Can we grow out heirloom crops in our backyards and share the collective gene pool using all the know how and social networking we've developed for these other models of sustainable food? Allow me to explain.

If you're not on the Texas or Kansas Boards of Education, or have read Darwin and his ilk, you know that in biological systems, variation and the transfer of genes between individuals is essential. Despite the controls industrial agriculture operations try to impose, agricultural systems are ecosystems that rely on this genetic diversity. Governments, NGOs, and seed companies alike know that crop genetics are all important.

Seed companies seek to develop new, better crop varieties, but also want to protect their investment. One way to do this is by producing and marketing F1 hybrids. These hybrids are a uniform variety of the first filial generation of two parents with desired traits and expressing the characteristics of one or both parents. While F1 hybrids often express hybrid vigor or other desirable traits, they do not "come true from seed," that is seeds from an F1 hybrid parent will not produce offspring of the same variety and cannot be saved from year to year. Hybrid seed is the first biotechnology that allowed seed companies to develop a value-added product and protect their property from being co-opted by others. And this is without even mentioning the controls offered by the modern biotechnology of GMOs. Here, on a Cooking up a Story segment, organic seed producer Frank Morton describes the predicament.

Today, Big Seed works as hard as ever to maintain control of their investment and is not always interested in maintaining diversity or continuing to produce your favorite variety. This causes major problems for farmers, as Judith Redmond pointed out in a recent Full Belly Farm newsletter discussing difficulty in securing Early Girl tomato seed.

In contrast to corporate control of seeds, seed banks have been established both as a library of genetic diversity for lending to research facilities or as doomsday vaults to "back up" important plant varieties in the event of major global catastrophe. The U.S Department of Agriculture maintains the National Seed Storage Laboratory. The Millennium Seed Bank Project is the largest ex situ plant conservation project in the world, saving seeds from the around the globe dried and frozen in underground vaults. Smartest, and scariest, of all is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility bored into rock on remote Spitsbergen island in the Arctic. The joint project of the Norwegian government, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international consortium, serves as a back up of the back up from the world's seed banks in case of global catastrophe.

In an era when we worry about peak oil and climate change wreaking havoc on food prices and availability you can even buy your own little seed bank to keep in the freezer. Disaster preparedness companies are marketing personal Survival Seed Banks to the survivalist fringe. You know, for the post-health-care-bill apocalypse, when the socialist Antichrist Obama tries to round up patriots into FEMA concentration camps. Stephen Colbert just had to poke fun.

Having a stock of seeds on hand to sew a yearly garden and some extra for larger community plots in case of food supply disruption does appeal to agrarian self sufficiency and a DIY ethic. Official seed banks have their place as libraries and back-ups, but those remove us from a 10,000 year old lineage of crop seeds developed by our ancestors to suit the particular tastes and growing conditions of a region and saved every growing season over these many millennia. Seed savers form an in situ seed bank and reconnect with this heritage by saving seed from their gardens and farms and exchanging genetic diversity in cooperatives and seed swaps.

Correctly saving seed can can be a bit of a challenge in small, urban garden plots. The main issue is separation distance, the space required between plantings of the same species of crops of different varieties to ensure the variety remains pure. Some vegetables such as tomatoes, lettuce and peas are inbreeders, with closed flowers that almost always self-pollinate, but to be safe should have a small separation distance. Other crops are outbreeders and rely on spreading their pollen far and wide and are fertilized by the pollen from other individuals. These crops include corn, carrots, onions, beets, and brassicas (broccoli and the like). To complicate the issue, outbreeders can suffer from inbreeding depression if there aren't enough individuals grown in the same plot to maintain genetic heterogeneity. The number of individuals to stave off inbreeding depression varies from 6 to 40 individuals and recommended separation distances range from 25 feet to 1 mile, which would be hard to achieve unless you have a very large garden.

But what if you grew Bull's Blood Beets, Cosmic Purple Carrots, and Country Gentlemen Sweet Corn; the couple on the next block grew Chiogga Beets, Arkansas Traveler Tomatoes, and Perisienne Carrots; and the family across town grew Amana Orange Tomatoes, Strawberry Popcorn, and Tete Noir Cabbage? Then you met up regularly to exchange surplus produce, ensuring everyone experienced the full variety of the crops grown. At the end of the season all the seed was saved and distributed, and next season everyone grew different varieties than they did this year (and hopefully some new folks were able to join up). You and your community would have a chance to sample a greater variety of produce than you could grow yourself and you would create a living seed bank held in common trust.

With this idea in mind, Agrariana is pleased to announce our new program, the Backyard Seed Vault. We'll collect your contact info and information about your gardening experience and space, then provide opportunities to get seed and planting information suitable to your skills and garden. We'll organize meet ups to trade produce and gardening advice, and lead workshops on saving seed at the end of the season. The Backyard Seed Vault will also improve participants' gardening skills by providing access to cover crop seed and teaching how to make and use compost tea. Gardeners of all skill levels are welcome to jparticipate and we hope you will join us.

I like to think that the ox-cart man socialized with his fellow farmers at the market and returned home with a few traded seeds in his pocket to try in the family kitchen garden. A bit like at the Bailey Building and Loan, the ox-cart man's genetic 'savings' weren't locked up in some vault or owned by a company, they were in the soil of his neighbor's plots, awaiting a withdrawal should anyone need it. In an era of uncertainties - economic, environmental, political or otherwise - this is a plan I can feel certain about.

Mapping Food

2010-03-20T15:07:00.000-07:00

The Edible Geography blog covered it much better than we can, on their post United States of Food, but you absolutely must check out the USDA's Food Environment Atlas. For food nerds like us, you can spend hours clicking around plotting demographic data on food in the U.S., like this one on adult obesity.

Oh, and on a mapping note, you have to see this video about how obesity is interconnected in social networks.

School Lunch Blogs Two Ways

2010-03-19T23:47:00.000-07:00

We ran across both of these school lunch blogs recently. Mrs. Q blogs school lunch in the American Midwest on Fed Up With Lunch. Mr. Ferguson teaches English to kindergarteners in Fukuyama, Japan and blogs at Mr. Ferguson's Classroom. The differences, as illustrated by the above photos, couldn't be more pronounced. We'll let you guess which meal is from where.

Crock Pot Apple Butter

2010-03-15T01:14:00.000-07:00

Quick! While there are still apples coming out of cold storage and now that they're starting to go a bit soft and mealy, cook up a batch of apple butter. Here's the recipe.

Crock Pot Apple Butter

Yield: 1 dozen half-pints of apple butter, plus a couple bowls of applesauce to sample while cooking.

Ingredients:

18 lbs. “cosmetically challenged” apples of various varieties, preferably organic, from the farmer’s market, U-pick, backyard trees, or your own orchard

A few lemons (to make acidulated water to prevent apples from browning)

3 cups apple cider or water

2-5 cups of sugar (Depending on how sweet you want the apple butter. I like about 2.5 cups)

3 tablespoons fresh ground cinnamon

Instructions:

This project is best for a long weekend at home while the weather is still crummy.

Give the apples a dunk in a sink of water to wash. Peel, core, and quarter apples and drop in a LARGE container of acidulated water.

To one or more large pots (you may need more than one), add the apples and cider or water and cook over medium heat until tender, occasionally stirring and mashing with a wooden spoon or potato masher. This will produce chunky applesauce.

To continue making apple butter, blend the applesauce until smooth in a blender, or better yet, use a stick blender. Transfer the smooth applesauce to a crock pot set on low and cover. All the applesauce may not fit and you may need to add the rest after the applesauce in the crock pot has reduced in volume by a quarter. Stir the applesauce occasionally, scarping the bottom and sides of the crock pot. When the applesauce has reduced in volume and begun to darken, add the sugar and cinnamon. The added sugar along with the apples’ natural sugars slowly carmelize with the gentle heat of the crock pot, yielding apple butter’s characteristic color. Continue to heat in the crock pot and stir until the applesauce has reduced to approximately half its original volume attained a thick and silky consistency. This process may take several days, depending on if you need to turn off the crock pot to leave the house, but it’s better than keeping a fire going under a big copper kettle like they did in the old days.

Check the acidity of the apple butter, adding lemon juice or ascorbic acid if necessary to bring pH below 4.6. Can your apple butter in sterilized half-pint jars following the instructions that came with the jars and canner. Published processing times vary between 10 and 20 minutes.

A Traditional Foodway Meets the Food Movement

2010-02-18T12:03:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, February 9, the Saul's Deli hosted a 'Referendum on the Deli Menu' panel featuring Good Food host Evan Kleiman, Michael Pollan, Gil Friend, author of The Truth about Green Business, Willow Rosenthal, urban farmer and founder of City Slicker Farms, along with Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt, Co-Owners of Saul’s. The event was covered extensively on The Ethicurean and Civil Eats and you can watch the video of the talk

I'm proud that this Berkeley institution has the matzo balls to take a cuisine steeped in tradition and reevaluate its sustainability, despite the risk of alienating staunchly traditional clientele.

I grew up in the Midwest, far from a Jewish deli, and have learned to love deli food mostly through the lens of Saul's. Despite my lack of familiarity with Jewish food, the panel struck a chord with its discussion of a food culture based on thrift and a response to scarcity, much like the Southern and farmwife food of my youth. These themes are universal to regional foodways and will hopefully speak to your background too.

The fact that the panel covered seasonality, especially as it pertains to meat/eggs and that we shouldn't expect to eat the same dishes year round, is profound and something we need to hear more about.

Jamie Oliver at TED

2010-02-12T11:47:00.000-08:00

I'm poaching this story after it was covered on Civil Eats. If you've never seen anything from TED, it is a great organization, with the mission devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading" and you can check them out for a variety of intriguing talks.

Oliver's talk is probably the most enthusiastic and succinct summary of the problems of the Western diet as it affects children and how we fix it. You should watch it. Now.

Pig Business Trailer

2010-02-12T10:43:00.000-08:00

A new film out of the UK, examining the global pork production industry. We hope to add it to the 4-F lineup.

Jonathan Safran Foer on Colbert

2010-02-09T15:33:00.000-08:00

Eating Animals author and guy who knows that chicken is chicken, Jonathan Safran Foer, was the guest on Monday's Colbert Report.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Jonathan Safran Foer

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Economy

Temple Grandin Biopic

2010-02-05T15:14:00.000-08:00

Temple Grandin, a giant in the field of humane animal treatment and slaughter, the subject of a new biopic which airs this Saturday on HBO. Dr. Grandin is the author of many books and papers including Animals in Translation, Animals Make Us Human, and Thinking in Pictures. Grandin happens to be autistic, and her unique neural structure allows her to see as an animal would and to think in pictures, which has enabled her to use her talents to become a nationally-recognized expert in designing humane slaughter facilities.

Today, Fresh Air on NPR airs clips from four interviews with Temple Grandin in anticipation of the film's release.

A trailer, clip of the film, and more information are available from HBO.

Trailer

A More Humane Approach

Farm Conference Podcasts

2010-01-28T16:52:00.000-08:00

If you couldn't (pitch)fork over the 300 plus bones to attend last week's EcoFarm conference or 7 bucks a pop for session podcasts, you're not alone. It's a shame that all the knowledge and insight of the conference aren't available open source to the public.

If you're itching to hear a name brand farmer talk about the big picture of food and farming, at least one farming conference, the Northeast Organic Farming Association winter conference, doesn't disappoint. Hear Joel Salatin give the keynote address.

Thanks to Grace Note Farm for recording and hosting the files. Go to their site to download mp3s of the keynote and a three-part livestock seminar given by Salatin. And thank you to Joel Salatin for making what he has to say freely available.

Value of Nothing

2010-01-27T15:03:00.001-08:00

A short video from our friend, Raj Patel. It may be an ad (which, btw, you can win a copy of), but it succinctly sums up the thesis of the book, which is 'How should we place value on stuff, the environment, and people?' And the 'value meal' bit was classic.

Bakesale for Haiti

2010-01-22T08:32:00.001-08:00

To save the world, market like Pepsi

2010-01-18T13:00:00.001-08:00

In the December 2009 issue of Outside, human rights journalist Nicholas Kristof argues that by following the psychology used by marketing companies to sell stuff like Pepsi or Nike, those in the First World can be convinced to pay up to help people in the Developing World.

Raj Patel on Colbert

2010-01-12T11:04:00.000-08:00

Raj Patel was Stephen Colbert's guest last night to discuss his new book The Value of Nothing. Patel explains how, if environmental and social costs were counted, a fast food burger might cost $200.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Raj Patel

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Economy

Pollan on the Daily Show

2010-01-05T11:01:00.000-08:00

Here's MP discussing his new book Food Rules and trading witticisms with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Michael Pollan

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Happy Girl Kitchen Party

2009-11-11T14:58:00.000-08:00

There's a great fundraising party in Oakland this Saturday to help raise the money for a delivery truck for Happy Girl Kitchen, the makers of local tasty canned goods.

Details are below or visit Happy Girl

“a party to pay for a delivery truck so that we can deliver the bounty of the harvest to your neighborhood”
Saturday, November 14th 2-6pm
in the oldest surviving barn in Oakland!
Old time drinks, local organic dinner, cuban folk music, raffle, preserving contest with prizes and more!

$35-$200 and up donations.
all proceeds go to paying for a delivery truck so that we can deliver the bounty of the harvest to your neighborhood.
For every $5 you donate, you will receive 1 raffle ticket. Raffle items include: happy girl mega sampler (22 jars), antique canning kit, workshop gift certificates, catered dinner party for 10 and more!

canning contest: show off your canning prowess and share your preserved bounty to become Prestigious Processor of the Pantry!

old time drinks: Featuring hard cider made by Todd Champagne with champagne yeast! Fancy that!, wine by naki, chai cola, kombucha on tap and more.

dinner: Buffet style delicious dinner catered by Happy Girl Kitchen Co. using all organic and local ingredients. This is going to be good!

Music: Bluegrass and old timey music that will move your feet for you and a special visit from SF DJ Juggle Geof. (maybe he will even juggle for us?)

Raffle items: For every $5 you donate, you will receive 1 raffle ticket. You may buy more at the event once you see how fabulous the raffle items are!

Farm City on Public Radio

2009-09-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

It was so so good to hear our friend Novella on the radio the other day talking about her book, Farm City, on KQED's Forum and The California Report. Novella's Ghost Town Farm in Oakland is a huge inspiration. You can listen to Forum streaming and see a slideshow of the farm from the California Report.

Cuturing Vinegar

2009-08-28T12:12:00.000-07:00

What do you do with a partial bottle of that nice red wine you had with dinner a few nights ago and forgot to finish? If I uncork a bottle of wine for cooking and drinking, chances are in my house that even if a vacuum seal topper is used to preserve it, the wine will be too oxidized before I want another glass, making me hesitant to open a bottle unless there are friends around to share.

Here is a solution. I'd been intrigued with the thought of making my own vinegar since hearing an episode of Good Food with a segment on reusing wine. When a midsummer bonfire left me with too many partial bottles, I decided it was time to start an experiment.

You can buy fancy vinegar-making kits online that come with small oak casks and sell for $150, but what you really need is a nonreactive vessel and some vinegar culture. A spigot at the bottom is recommended to draw off finished vinegar, because often a thick, gloppy layer of "mother" culture develops on the top. Many folks use nice crocks or other pottery vessels, such as a ceramic water dispenser for around $50. I thought an economic alternative would be a glass sun tea container I bought at the hardware store for $6. For the vinegar culture, if you have a friend with a culture, you can take a piece of their mother culture. I found a red wine vinegar culture at Oak Barrel Winecraft in Berkeley for $12.

Vinegars can be made from nearly any sugar-containing solution. Yeasts, from the air or introduced by the maker, convert sugars to ethanol, in the familiar fermentation process utilized to make alcoholic drinks. A genus of microbes known as Acetobacter in the presence of oxygen convert the ethanol to acetic acid and other organic acids, which give vinegar its distinctive flavor. Winemakers and brewers consider Acetobacter a contaminant and do everything in their power to stamp it out. It produces cloudiness and gives and "off" flavor to alcoholic drinks. You can imagine an Acetobactor outbreak converting an entire cellar of wine to vinegar. But to make vinegar from an alcohol solution, such as wine, the fermentation step is skipped, and an Acetobacter culture from the air encouraged to develop.

The Household Cyclopedia of General Information, published in 1881, encourages all households to procure two barrels for vinegar making. The first is to be placed in a sunny spot, the bung covered with a piece of slate, and a small tap installed at the bottom of the barrel. After several months of culturing the finished vinegar should be drawn off and stored in the second barel in the cellar, with a pint of spirits added for preservation.

For my vinegar experiment, I sterilized the jar, then mixed the wine, culture, and a bit of water as directed. The opening was covered by a layer of cheesecloth to keep out the vinegar flies but allow in the necessary oxygen and the lid was screwed into place. The vinegar culture has been sitting quiescently on a shelf in my storage closet for almost two months now. In a month I'll bottle the vinegar and then age it for a few more months. If you'd like a bit of culture to start your own, let me know.

Onion Saver

2009-08-09T23:41:00.001-07:00

Here's a helpful food and garden tip, the kind of old timey advice you'd find in a corner of my small hometown newspaper.

I've been getting a lot of onions and garlic from our CSA. Normally I'd braid the stems and hang them in a cool but dry dark place, but these are coming with the stems off. Knowing that with so much piled in the onion/garlic basket in the kitchen, it would be only a matter of time before rot set in and wanting to hold these alliums for fresh use if at all possible, I was thinking of ways to best keep them. Then I remembered Alton Brown's Vidalia onion episode where I'm pretty sure he hung the onions in old pantyhose, with knots between each onion. When hanging you can work from the bottom up, cutting the section holding the bottom onion below the knot and the rest remain in place. It's been a few weeks and everything looks fine. The stockings allow plenty of ventilation and cradle the bulb to avoid bruising.

Independence Day

2009-07-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

A quick note wishing everyone a happy Independence Day. Before you head out to a barbecue for some all-American SOLE food, here's a postcard I recently received, reminiscing about summer cookouts past.

It's from the MoMA collectio n by British graphic designer Abram Games, commissioned by the British War Office in 1943 as part of the war effort. Of course, this was to encourage the British equivalent of the Victory Garden campaign. The visual parallels between field/table, pitchfork/fork, shovel/knife are just great. On a day devoted to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I can think of a better move that could be made to secure individual freedoms and national security than to follow the advice from this poster and grow your own food!

Emptying the squash savings account

2009-06-29T12:16:00.000-07:00

Doing some spring cleaning the other day and thinking it was June and enough with the winter squash already, I hauled the last Cinderella pumpkin and butternut squash out of the "root cellar" (a cool, dark shelf in a closet). Here they are sliced in half for roasting.

It's a small miracle that the rich, nutritious flesh can be grown and harvested in the late fall and protected all winter and spring by their hard rind. It must have seemed like an amazing caloric savings account to our agrarian forebearers. I'll think of them and celebrate the gift of these squash in a meal, then tend my deposits in the form of seedlings reaching for the midsummer sun outside.

Winter Projects

2009-04-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

Before the season slips too far into spring, making it too late to mention, let me summarize some of the cooking projects that kept the hearth going this winter.

Lebkuchen are a German holiday cookie my father remembers fondly from his youth. I'm trying to revive the family tradition by modernizing a recipe attributed to my great-grandmother Anne Hammersley (nee Frank), tracked down from handwritten copies from estranged relatives and transcribed an unknown number of times (if you'd like to try it, or give helpful pointers, here is a copy). The instructions say to start before Thanksgiving, but due to other commitments I put off the baking experiment until after the new year, which fortuitously is when Buddha's Hand Citron is available locally. I candied it per the instructions in the Tartine cookbook to delicious results and used it in the recipe. The notes added to the typed version of the recipe call for molasses and brown sugar, which I tried this year, resulting in a cake-like gingerbreadish cookie, which were tasty, but not what my dad remembers. I suspect Great Granny Annie's recipe really did use only honey and I'll try again with this adjustment next holiday.

Also at the beginning of the year, when apples from cold storage were still crisp and fresh-tasting, Jennifer and I made apple butter. We know a few families back home who still have apple butter making days, where they set a huge kettle over an oak and hickory fire to boil, stirring great amounts of apples into the brown spice-infused spread, and we have fond memories of gifted quarts. Some 10 or 15 pounds of "cosmetically challenged" apples were procured from the farmer's market for an extremely reasonable price. The first step is to wash, core and chop the apples, then make applesauce on the stovetop. The rest of the conversion to apple butter occurs in a wide crock pot. The low even heat slowly drives away moisture and concentrates sugars until the sugars eventually caramelize. Only a few pints made it into long term storage, so I think the effort will have to be redoubled next year.

For Saint Patrick's Day I corned brisket of beef, a food full of American history and ingredient in many fine dishes. I took inspiration from Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall, but ultimately more closely followed a recipe of Martha Stewart's because Fearnley-Wittingstall called for what seemd at the time to be an impertinently large piece of meat for only two people. I bought a beautiful piece of meat from Prather Ranch, boiled and cooled the brine and set it to pickle in the refrigerator for a week. The result was exactly what you would want from a piece of corned beef. Tender, not stringy, and deeply infused with brine flavor and melting fat when cooked. But after only one meal of corned beef and cabbage, a couple orders of corned beef hash with eggs, and a round of Rueben sandwiches, the corned beef was gone. I've learned my lesson that there can never be too much corned beef and will never doubt the wise words from the River Cottage again.

It is always a great thing to retrieve food cached away at the peak of its flavor, and it's even more enjoyable when you can do it twice. In February, just as the earliest dafodils were blooming here in the Bay Area, I pulled out blueberries and blackberries quick frozen on trays in the freezer during the height of the last summer, when I was too busy to do canning, and converted them to a deep, dark jam. It was incredibly nice to be able to add a new jam flavor at the end of winter to remember the quintessential taste of summer and enjoy the harvest in a second format.

The projects described are a great way to stay involved with your food when winter has driven you inside from the garden. These projects cultivate lost and subtly nuanced flavors you can't find with "quick and easy" recipes. But they are suprisingly easy in an markedly earnest and homespun way. These foods require patience, which builds anticipation, and heightens the joy of remembering recent seasons or family gatherings of many years past. They bubble slowly in the kitchen while you play a game or watch a movie while a rainstorm batters the windows, and that is about as comfortable as food can get.

Farming opportunity in Thailand!

2009-03-29T22:33:00.000-07:00

If anyone is interested in exploring the reaches of experimental alternative rural community activism into the lush lands of Thailand, read the letter below from my friend Watjai, whom I was fortunate enough to spend time with as a WWOOF volunteer last February. Him and his wife, Chabaa, are two amazingly generous and openhearted individuals who live on a gorgeous and tranquil piece of land near the Burmese border in southern Thailand.

Seeking partnership for alternative living project.

Dear Friends,

My name is Wat and I live in Thailand with my wife, Chabaa. WE are a young couple who have a dream of seeking an alternative way of life. We do not believe in the modern mainstream life style under consumerism, because it forces us to work too hard to become wealthy and indulge in natural resources extravagantly for greater happiness. For these reasons, we decided to leave the urban life for the rural area. Two years ago we bought 17 rais (7 acres) of land at Pa-La-U (about 50 km west from Hua Hin) for experimental simple living. Our land is surrounded by beautiful mountains protected by the National Forest and close to Pa-La-U waterfall and Kang Khra Chan National Park. We believe that living simply and close to nature allows us to gain peace within.

In our two years here we have begun to learn about organic farming and making as much as we can by hand. We grow fruit trees, vegetables, herbs, and forest trees. We make compost and create our own fertilizer with waste and microorganisms we collect from our land. We cook healthy food and eat mainly brown rice, vegetables, legumes, and fruit. Sometimes we also have fish or seafood but no chicken or meat. We love cooking with different styles from around the world using local ingredients. We enjoy making what we use and need by hand. We produce our own natural soap and shampoo. We stuff pillows with Kapok fruit and make things from coconut shell, bamboo, etc. Other interests of ours include permaculture, sustainable technology, holistic healthcare, local wisdom, including religious and spiritual aspects.

For a future dream we would like to build up an alternative community and open this land to become a place of retreat for people to understand themselves and other by learning about living simply with nature. We will share some of our skills such as mud house and bamboo hut construction, Thai vegetarian cooking, hill-tribe weaving style, organic farming, and Thai massage. In doing this we will cultivate the seed of peace within to share with other people. Together we can change the world.

All of this we can not do alone. We are looking for partnerships with people who are interested in contributing to the project. We are looking for people who have ideas to help this project grow and who have English skills that would help us publicize the project in order to connect and bring people here. We need someone to share the long-term responsibility of the project, but we are flexible about the specifics of the partnership. This means a partner wouldn't have to live here year round.

We are currently trying to expand the project to be able to house more people so we can plant more seeds of peace. This means we need to build some more houses and a larger communal area. For this reason, any donation you can give would be very appreciated.

If you are interested, please contact us and we can work together to outline the details according to your needs.

For more information, visit our website at: http://mantarniwas.exteen.com/

Our e-mail is: watjai@gmail.com

Sincerely,

Wat & Chabaa

Whey cool!

2009-03-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, SAFE hosted a lacto-fermentation workshop on the UC Berkeley campus, led by our very own Monika Roy. Moni spent last semester farming in the Caribbean and developed a fermentation fetish after discovering the book Nourishing Traditions. Upon returning home, Monika continued refining her recipes, trying out new techniques, and incorporating these foods into her diet.

Lacto-fermentation is a process that uses lactobacilli bacteria to preserve foods. While many of the foods at the workshop used whey and other dairy products to facilitate the fermentation, lactobacilli can be cultured in vegan foods as well. Moni explained all of this, plus told us the benefits of eating fermented foods (better digestion, more available vitamins and nutrients, really tasty) and talked about the gaps in nutrition in our current industrially produced diets. Afterwards she let us have a go at sampling at two long tables worth of projects she had ready. These included buttermilk, kefir, curds, fermented ketchup, ginger beer, kraut, and double fermented orange cake. She also gave a short demo on how to set up your oats to ferment overnight for a faster, creamier version of traditional oatmeal.

Everyone stuck around for a long time eating, asking Monika questions, and just hanging out. I think the best part of this workshop was Monika's ability to appeal to both the beginning fermentation dabbler as well as the seasoned lactobacilli junkies. One woman commented that she even liked Monika better than Sandor Katz! I love them both!

For more info on fermentation please check out:

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon

Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz

Also, if interested please stop by the UCB Student Organic Garden (Virginia and Walnut St) on Sunday March 29th around 1pm for a work day and impromtou kimchi making party! Monika and I are both facilitators of the Organic Gardening Decal at UCB and will be in the garden from 12-4 hanging out, doing work, and talking about veggie ferments.

Travis Meinolf: Interactive Textile Artist

2009-03-04T18:25:00.000-08:00

Anya and I were recently brainstorming for our "letter from the editor" for our soon-to-be-published third issue of Lettuce Turnip the Beets. This issue has the theme of Reclamation. Reclamation of land, skills, words, traditions, and more. While we were raving, ranting, jotting notes, and prowling the world wide web, we came across the blog of this wonderful fellow...

If any of you hang out in the Mission, you may have spotted Travis Meinolf perched at the top of one of the sloping hills of Dolores Park with his loom. He is a weaver and a textiles artist who "advocates for alternative economic and pedagogical models through a craft-based relational art practice." The blog is filled with some pretty amazing pictures of things he's made and a few videos of the creative process. I hope that it will inspire you as much as it inspired us!

Forcing Bulbs for Color on A Grey Day

2009-03-01T14:46:00.000-08:00

From 2009_2_Forced Bulbs

Forcing many flower bulbs indoors is extremely easy and a great way to bring spring color to your home when those rainy days keep dragging out. It's probably too late this season, but buy bulbs next October or November to brighten your winter kitchen table. The narcissus and hyacinth above are forced in water and pebbles, probably the easiest method.

Clear, glass containers with pebbles work well. Place the pebbles in the bottom third of the vessel, then put the bulb on top to the pebble layer and fill in with more pebbles to the top of the container. Add water to the container to just below the bottom of the bulb. If the bulb is in water, it will rot. The vase is then kept in a cool, dark room (preferably under 50 degrees F) until the root system has developed and a green top elongates. At this point it should be placed in a bright window, where the plant soon will blossom.

Directions say to throw out the bulbs after forcing, as they will never flower well again. I prefer to "let them out to pasture" in a underutilized part of the garden. They might grow and gain strength and some spring years from now you'll be greeted with new blossoms. You never know.

Interesting graphic showing obesity trends

2009-02-26T21:14:00.000-08:00

From the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. There's a neat flash animation showing the trend through time, but unfortunately we can't embed it, so you'll have to go see it

Visit to Devil's Gulch Ranch and Clark Summit Farm

2009-02-16T13:35:00.000-08:00

Here's a slidehow from our rainy and wondrous Valentine's Day visit to Marin County farms

And a short video clip of vignettes from the day. The cacophony was amazing!

Abraham Lincoln on community food security

2009-02-14T12:45:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from Mr Lincoln's address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural
Society.  Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1859

"...And thorough work, again, renders sufficient, the smallest quantity of
ground to each man. And this again, conforms to what must occur in a world
less inclined to wars, and more devoted to the arts of peace, than
heretofore. Population must increase rapidly -- more rapidly than in former
times -- and ere long the most valuable of all arts, will be the art of
deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No
community whose every member possesses this art, can ever be the victim of
oppression of any of its forms. Such community will be alike independent of
crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings...."

Source: Full text at USDA's National Agricultural Library, Special Collections

My heart beets for you

2009-02-11T21:29:00.000-08:00

In light of Valentine's Day approaching this weekend, I've decided to share one of my easiest and most trusty recipes. Though I make these beet muffins for just about anyone at any time of year or day, they have great potential as a lovely accompaniment to a romantic breakfast in bed that no lover could resist. Their pink color, high vegetable content, and sheer deliciousness make them a favorite among my housemates.

Ingredients:

2/3 cup vegetable oil

2 eggs (to make vegan, use 4 tbsp of cornstarch and enough almond or soy milk to make the mixture batter-y)

2/3 cup sugar or evaporated cane juice

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla

2 cups flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

1 1/2 cups shredded beets

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degree Fahrenheit

Grease and flour muffin cups

Beat oil with eggs (or substitute), sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla

Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon

Combine wet and dry ingredients, stir well and add more almond milk now if it seems dry

Fold in beets

Fill muffin cups 3/4 of the way up

Sprinkle with more cinnamon

Bake 20 minutes or until fork comes out clean

Eat them warm with jam or butter!

(artwork and post by jackie: jackieclark88@yahoo.com)

Meet your Meat

2009-02-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

The Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology is proud to announce an upcoming series of tours, panels, and workshops on good, clean, and fair animal husbandry and meat production. The series, called Meet Your Meat , is a portrayal of the local meat economy in the Bay Area and how that model can be improved and spread. We want to show how animals can be part of a vibrant and diverse agricultural system and some part of our diet as responsible omnivores. Meet Your Meat is offered as a counterpoint to the brutal industrial meat system and the rightfully appalling PETA video of the same title.

The series will metaphorically follow an animal from farm, to slaughter, to butcher, to cook, to plate in the following events:

Visit to Devil's Gulch Ranch and Clark Summit Farm

Saturday, February 14, 8am-4pm, Marin County
Meet at 8am in the West Circle on the UC Berkeley Campus
With Mark Pasternak (Devil's Gulch Ranch) and Liz Cunninghame (Clark Summit Farm)
Limit 50 people, please RSVP to agrofoodecology@gmail.com with subject line 'Marin'
Potluck picnic lunch hosted at Devil's Gulch Ranch (please bring a dish to share and your own plate, silverware, napkin, and cup). Come prepared for inclement weather.

Local Slaughterhouses, Local Meat

Thursday, February 19, 7pm, UC Berkeley Campus (location TBA)
With panelists Sallie Calhoun (Cutting Edge Meat, Inc., Paicines Ranch), Sam Goldberger (North Coast Meats), Mac Magruder (Magruder Ranch), Mark Pasternak (Devil's Gulch Ranch), Paul Canales (Oliveto), Marsha McBride (Café Rouge), and journalist Heather Smith as moderator.
Please RSVP to agrofoodecology@gmail.com with subject line 'Slaughter' so that we may secure a location with adequate space.

The Art of the Butcher

Hosted in collaboration with Meatpaper
Thursday, March 5, 7pm, UC Berkeley Campus (location TBA)
With panelists Ryan Farr (Ivy Elegance, CHEFS Program), Nate Appleman (A16, Urbino), Melanie Eisemann (Avedano's), Mark Pasternak (Devil's Gulch Ranch), and Marissa Guggiana (Sonoma Direct, Secret Eating Society) as moderator.
The discussion will be followed by a demonstration by Chef Ryan Farr on how a whole carcass is broken down into cuts of meat.
Please RSVP to agrofoodecology@gmail.com with subject line 'Butcher' so that we may secure a location with adequate space.

Fête du Cochon and hog roast

Saturday, March 7, details forthcoming

A working visit to Soul Food Farm and a tour of Meridian Jacobs Ranch

Saturday, March 14, 8am-4pm, Solano County
Meet at 8am in the West Circle on the UC Berkeley Campus
With Robin Lynde (Meridian Jacobs), Alexis Koefoed (Soul Food), and Samin Nosrat (Eccolo)
Limit 50 people, please RSVP to agrofoodecology@gmail.com with subject line 'Solano'
We will be helping with chores at Soul Food Farm. Come dressed for work and prepared for inclement weather. Please bring a picnic lunch. Samin Nosrat, Sous Chef at Eccolo Restaurant in Berkeley, will discuss using Soul Food Farm products over lunch.

Hide Brain Tanning Workshop

April 11-12 or April 18-19, all day, Ghost Town Farm in Oakland
Cost $100
With Tamara Wilder (Paloetechnics, author of Buckskin: The Ancient Art of Braintanning ), and Novella Carpenter (Ghost Town Farm)
Braintanned leather is a beautiful, soft, durable, and washable material which is made using the same natural, non-toxic, and biodegradable methods employed by most Native American groups. In this two day class, participants will partake in the whole process using using goatskins and/or deerskins—from scraping the hide to smoking the softened hide.
Limit 16. Please RSVP to agrofoodecology@gmail.com with subject line 'Tanning' with your preferred weekend so that we may pick the weekend with the most interest.

Salumi Tasting

Hosted in collaboration with Slow Food Berkeley
April 20, details forthcoming

Unless otherwise noted, there is no admission charge for any SAFE event and no one will be turned away for lack of funds. We do request a $5 donation to SAFE for each event attended to defray the cost of the event and reimburse the travel costs of the panelists who so kindly donate their time. We ask those with more resources to consider a greater donation to underwrite the attendance of students or community members with limited means.

Please distribute this announcement freely. If you received this message indirectly and would like to be reminded of future SAFE events, please visit Agrariana.org and subscribe to our announcements list.

For more information, please visit Agrariana.org or contact Ma

Smart Holidays Menu Makeover Recipe Contest

2008-12-22T11:29:00.000-08:00

Hello!

Do you want a free stand mixer? Well, you can win one if you've got a good walnut recipe. Don't miss out! Stand mixers go for $500!

Check out http://www.walnuts.org/contest/ to enter the Smart Holidays Menu Makeover Recipe Contest!

Best of Luck and Happy Holidays,
Melisa Lin
Cooking Club- President
Sustainable Food Business '10
University of California- Berkeley

A Food Agenda for the Next Administration

2008-12-17T10:05:00.001-08:00

The podcast (video and audio) for the speaker panel held October 1, 2008 with Michael Pollan, Michael Dimock, Mark Ritchie, and Judith Redmond is available from Berkeley Webcasts. Give it a listen and think about who you'd want for Farmer in Chief and let us know.

Obama's Next Ag Secretary

2008-12-11T19:59:00.000-08:00

The morning after the presidential election, I had a brilliant thought to start a discussion on SAFE about who should be nominated Obama's Secretary of Agriculture, perhaps our biggest chance to affect farm policy until the next Farm Bill. John Ikerd and Mark Ritchie popped into my head. Then reality set in and my mind drifted back to school work and nothing came of it Well, some folks had the gumption to keep going and bring their ideas to reality. Now there's two versions of a petition to name and Ag Secretary who will promote a sustainability agenda, one from Food Democracy Now and another from Organic Consumers Association. It can't hurt to sign both. Additionally there's a bunch of commentary out there encouraging nomination of Michael Pollan, but the two petitions stick to nominees who are policy or economics wonks and could address those issues nationally.

Cross-posted at The Light Tree

Update from our quail slaughtering, butchering, and cooking workshop

2008-12-08T16:57:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, November 2nd, JM, a friend of SAFE who owns a small farm in Berkeley led SAFE members and friends in a quail preparing workshop. I milk goats as part of an apprenticeship program, and so J obliged to help us organize a workshop, eventually coming to the idea of a slaughter to better connect us to our meat. We chose quail because they are small and therefore they're easier and faster to slaughter, prepare, and cook than, say, chickens. It was also much more convenient for J to get them and keep them on his limited space until the workshop, and allowed us to have more people participate.

While there is a spectrum of beliefs in SAFE concerning the eating of meat and the morality of that decision, there is a general belief that if a person wants to eat meat, they should know that an animal must die to produce it and be willing to participate in that death. The bloodless, skinless, Styrofoam backed and cellophane wrapped meat in a grocery store reduces an animal’s sacrifice to a neat chunk of protein, robbing the eater of a connection to the animal and the land (or feedlot) on which it was raised. This disconnect encourages wastefulness and unhealthy overconsumption of meat. Diverse agroecosystems, which have reintroduced animals in balance with crops are the best models for young farmers to emulate, but managing these systems requires a knowledge of animal husbandry. Furthermore, in a future of scarcity, if we are to continue to eat meat, perhaps at least some of it should be raised and slaughtered as locally as possibly - in our own back yards. People grappling with these issues have a desire to learn the techniques of humanely killing and cleaning and animal, then decide if they have the temperament to slaughter, or even eat meat, ever again. For these reasons and more, we coordinated this workshop.

Some of my friends told me that it was one of their favorite workshops that we've done. I too, enjoyed the experience of this event. There was a very respectful and intimate atmosphere and a strong current of discussion about some of the tradition behind raising and killing animals. Before the slaughter, J discussed his views on sustainable meat eating, and throughout the event he kept an open space for checking in emotionally. Everyone present offered help and support to one another. We had a vast range of experience present, but each person came away with some new ideas and perspectives on meat eating, not to mention a full belly. I also came away with a very valuable personal lesson. I’ve been a vegetarian for over ten years. You might find it strange then, that I helped organize an animal slaughter. Being a part of SAFE and learning about different perspectives of food activism has made me a supporter of responsible meat eating and has caused me to question my long standing vegetarianis. I went to this workshop not intending to participate but curious about the process, thinking if I did start eating meat again I would want to be highly involved in its production. I left knowing that I am not currently capable of killing an animal. One day I hope to own or work on a farm. I realize that death is a huge part of farm life and even having animals for eggs or dairy requires culling of some. The day will come when I will have to confront my decisions again. But for now, being a college student and living in an apartment in Berkeley, I feel secure that I took the time to witness a slaughter, appreciated it, and realized it’s not for me. For now that seems like a good enough reason to stay vegetarian, and I feel much more at ease holding onto that choice that I made ten years ago.

I must admit I am a biology and anatomy lover and so snapping pictures kept me busy for most of the event. Here are some of my favorite shots. Please do not view the slideshow if you may be sensitive to images of animal slaughter. If you are interested in the process, note the captions of the slideshow, which guide you through the steps. (Photos by J.C., B.B., and M.R.; editorial assistance by Mat)

Farm Fresh

2008-12-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

From the SAFE library of bookmarked videos. Enjoy!

obama's food politics

2008-11-10T20:59:00.000-08:00

I thought this might be an encouraging read during such bleak times.

From our friends at the ethicurean:

So what might we expect from an Obama administration when it comes to food policy? Maybe quite a bit. In his plan for rural America, he lays out a number of policy positions that are a departure from the status quo. Obama:

* Supports subsidies as a safety net, but calls for a $250,000 payment limitation and closing of loopholes, so that the program supports family farmers, not corporate agribusiness.
* Supports regulation of CAFOs (factory livestock operations).
* Wants to enforce anti-trust laws that so that smaller farmers can compete against large-scale meatpackers.
* Wants to cap the size of agricultural businesses that can receive government funds for environmental cleanup so that taxpayers don’t subsidize cleanup for large, polluting corporations.
* Supports Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) for meat, a critical issue as we learn how widespread melamine contamination of animal feed is in countries like China.
* Wants to increase support for organic agriculture and local food systems by helping farmers with organic certification/compliance costs.
* Wants to provide incentives to encourage and support new farmers, land conservation, renewable energy on the farm, and microenterprise for farmers and other rural Americans.
* Calls for greater food safety surveillance and communications.
* Plans to encourage local foods in schools.
* Supports providing farmers with incentives that will prevent agricultural runoff.

for the rest of the article...

I am just happy to know that our President-elect possesses the word organic in his vocabulary!

Slow Food Nation 2008

2008-10-27T01:36:00.000-07:00

The blogs were humming during and after this coming-out party for the American Slow Food movement. Critiques and analysis kept me busy reading for days. Since the buzz has died down, my pointed opinions about SFN have faded and I've come to see that Slow Food Nation was what it was. Days and days of celebrating and enjoying the production and consumption of superb food and drink.

Cross-posted at The Light Tree

Garden Party Pictures

2008-10-12T16:11:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Here are a few images from SAFE's first event, the fall Garden Party, hosted at UC Berkeley's Student Organic Garden. We welcomed new members, made butter, pickled vegetables, raffled off tasty homemade preserves and pies, and generally had a good time. A big thank-you to everyone who helped out, played music, and came to enjoy the atmosphere.

Stay tuned for pictures from our third annual Harvest Festival and olive harvest!

Cal Cooking Club Meeting!

2008-08-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

Hello!

My name is Melisa and I'm the Cooking Club president. This year, the Cal Cooking Club officers and I will be working with Bay Area food businesses to bring the culinary arts and slow food movement to you!

To start, I’d like to invite you to the first ’08-’09 Cooking Club meeting. We're featuring a live cooking show by Berkeley Gourmet Ghetto's Kitchen on Fire chef, MikeC.. Using local, organic, and seasonal ingredients, Chef MikeC. will be making two warm and hearty soups- Creamy Sausage & Corn Chowder and Seasonal Cream of Mushroom Soup!

Our meeting will be held on Wednesday, September 3rd at 8pm in Room 2050 Valley Life Sciences Building in UC Berkeley. Please view the map below for building and parking locations. We welcome all so please invite your friends!

See you at our cooking show!

Yours in the search and creation of good food,
Melisa :D

The Food Prices Crisis

2008-07-31T01:43:00.000-07:00

This is the best article I have read about the creation of the food prices crisis. I urge every person to start asking questions about U.S. agricultural policy, GMOs, and the manufacturing of hunger.

Manufacturing a Food Crisis
By Walden Bello

This article appeared in the June 2, 2008 edition of The Nation.
May 15, 2008

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as "unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism" designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.

Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.

This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico's status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.

With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.

It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of work--many of whom have since found their way to the United States.

Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As Food First executive director Eric Holt-Giménez sees it, "It will take time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not appear to be any political will for this--to say nothing of the fact that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated."

Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines

That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries have become severely dependent on imports.

The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net food importer. The Philippines is the world's largest importer of rice. Manila's desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of the global crisis.

The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were 900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.

Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in Mexico the World Bank and IMF, working on behalf of international creditors, pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino acquiesced, though she was warned by the country's top economists that the "search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one." Between 1986 and 1993 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the Philippines yearly in debt-service payments--roughly the same proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994; capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short, debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.

Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s only 17 percent of the Philippines' road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production. The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico Filipino peasants were confronted with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive support--a role they had come to depend on.

And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade liberalization, with the Philippines' 1995 entry into the World Trade Organization having the same effect as Mexico's joining NAFTA. WTO membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of rice, discouraging farmers and keeping growth in production at a rate far below that of the country's two top suppliers, Thailand and Vietnam.

The consequences of the Philippines' joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports--much of it subsidized US grain--farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries.

During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for by the new export industry of "high-value-added" crops like cut flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created yearly by the magic of the market; instead, agricultural employment dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.

The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session in Geneva. "Our small producers," he said, "are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the international trading environment."

The Great Transformation

The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one of the main goals of the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture was to open up markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986, "The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost."

What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From $367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Since the late 1990s subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25 percent in the United States.

The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the French-owned Carrefour.

There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls "de-peasantization"--the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a 'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally."

African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance

De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent's peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank's wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.

At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.

Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.

Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state "crowded out" rather than "crowded in" private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, "they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers," leaving "farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows." The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that "many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists."

The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank's encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana's expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.

As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country's grain reserve should be sold and to whom.

Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.

According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001--46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank's chief economist for Africa admitted, "We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming."

In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that "the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets... [are] crowding out more productive spending."

By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.

Malawi's defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.

Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?

It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers' groups that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO's Doha Round of negotiations to a standstill.

Farmers' groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant's Path). Via not only seeks to get "WTO out of agriculture" and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an alternative--food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via's platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.

Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious "class for itself," contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage--and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers' movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital's vision for organizing production, community and life itself.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080602/bello/print

About Walden Bello
Walden Bello is senior analyst at and former executive director of Focus on the Global South, a research and advocacy institute based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is the author or co-author of many books on politics and economic issues in the Philippines and Asia, including, most recently, Deglobalization (Zed), and recipient of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize." In March he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for 2008 by the International Studies Association

Don't let good veg go bad!

2008-05-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

paul hawken to speak in berkeley

2008-02-21T09:30:00.001-08:00

Who: Paul Hawken in conversation with Kevin Danaher

What: The Green Movement: Hope for the Future of the Earth

When: Thursday, February 28, 2008, 7:30 pm

Where: First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way (at Dana), Berkeley

Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and author.
Starting at age 20, he dedicated his life to sustainability and changing
the relationship between business and the environment. His practice has
included starting and running ecological businesses, writing and teaching
about the impact of commerce on living systems, and consulting with
governments and corporations on economic development, industrial ecology,
and environmental policy. He is the author of many articles and books,
including his latest book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the
World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming.

Praise for Blessed Unrest:
“Exciting, compelling…it will inspire millions to take action.” – Jane
Goodall, UN Ambassador for Peace

“A manifesto of hope for the 21st century...” – Terry Tempest Williams,
author of the Open Space of Democracy.

“Powerful” – Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy and The End of Nature

Kevin Danaher's analytical expertise, sense of humor and blunt eloquence
make him an exceptionally dynamic speaker. Kevin Danaher is a co-founder
of Global Exchange (1988), founder and Executive Co-Producer of the Green
Festivals (2001), and Executive Director of the Global Citizen Center
(2004). Most recently, he is co-author of Building the Green Economy:
Success Stories From the Grassroots.

“(Kevin Danaher is) the Paul Revere of globalization's woes." – The New
York Times

Tickets: $10 advance, $13 door. Students with ID: $5 (at door only).
Available at Cody’s Books and independent bookstores and
atwww.globalexchange.org/hawkendanaher
Telephone ticket order: 415.255.7296 X253

Come Grow Food at People's Park!

2008-01-24T15:44:00.000-08:00

Join us at our first gardening session at 1pm, Sunday January 27th at the West end of People's Park! All are welcome! Terri Compost, People's Park's Gardening Manager, will start off the meeting with a brief history of the park before we begin weeding and picking out plots to tend.

Carlos A. Martinez is delivering free mulch gathered from UC Berkeley within the next four days.

Beebo Turman is delivering free compost from the Berkeley Marina on February 29th.

In addition, I've applied for two grants from the ASUC and will submit a third application to Cal Corps on April 20th. If we receive the funds, we'll be able to purchase more tools, seeds, seedlings, and plants for People's Park.

Still, it'd be great to receive donations of both gardening materials and plants. Please contact me if you know any nurseries, businesses, or foundations that can help us out. I look forward to seeing more new faces at our gardening sessions!
Melisa Lin
Melisa.Lin@gmail.com

Raw Milk

2007-12-05T17:18:00.000-08:00

At last week's fermentation lecture with Sandor Katz, a nice woman gave me some kefir grains (which have since multiplied - let me know if you want some), and I decided that I want to use predominantly raw milk for my kefir. Today I was tooling around on the internet and found an somewhat amusing, informative video that someone on youtube made about raw milk. The man is impassioned, but he's got good facts, too.

harvest festival pictures!

2007-12-02T22:24:00.000-08:00

coming soon!!!

The brining of the olives.

2007-12-02T22:18:00.000-08:00

recipe and essay by Severine von Tscharner Fleming

This is a visual instruction to brining olives—an easy thing to do, and a very affordable way of bringing this tasty snack into your life. Many of the olive trees in California, especially urban olives, end up as an oil-slick on the pavement. Rescue these olives by laying down a tarp or old bedsheet and using both hands to ‘comb’ them down.

Once you have harvested the olives follow the instructions below.

The olives were harvested at UC Berkeley, in front of Giananini Hall.

after a ten day custodianship by Bonnie Powell-during which the water was changed every day.. them came to live at my office under an orange tree. The cooler was found on the street, as were the olive amphora—well, on the street outside the cheeseboard.

here the olives are soaking. Amazingly, everyday the water that poured off was brown.. clearly there is some major leeching of tannins or other bitter brown substances as yet unknown to this author, and amateur olive briner.

so, after about seventeen days of soaking in pure water. Here I am draining the olives. And putting them into the amphora filled with brine,

Brine: Brine is salty water. You don’t have to worry that much about the proportions because water will only dissolve a certain amount of salt. The rest stays on the bottom, like a precipiate. Basically that is a waste, so my recommendation is to add the water first and then gradually add the salt until no more can be dissolved. That way you don’t waste the salt.

Be aware. Salt kills plants. Do not splash salt all over the lawn.

This is the clean amphora.

here I am adding salt to the amphora. Do as I say, not as I did. I added too much salt.The salt came from Rainbow grocery. I went there on my bike and carried it home on the bart and it was heavy. The problem is that I wanted to use sea salt, not salt produced by Cargill on the edges of the bay. (weblink) The total cost for the sea salt was $3.25- and I have a whole bag of salt left over. Also I bought a few olives (maybe
twenty) at Rainbow and they costed more than $5—so a better deal by far is to brine own’s own.
Water into the salt makes brine. Here come the olives.

olives, meet brine.

And now for the additions>

For extra flavor.

1. bay leaves.

2. harvest from tree. California Bay Laurel. Ubiquitous in Berkeley. Native.

rinse urban grunge off leaves.

wear play clothes. peel garlic. This garlic was a hardneck variety grown by Ned Conwell and Ryan Casey at Blue House Farm.

chop it up. By whatever means feasible. I am quite satisfied with this method, I must say. I cleaned the blades of my Felco 2 prior to use.. and they were plenty sharp thanks to that wonderful man at the farmers market who sharpens knives.

hot chillis from Full Belly Farm. WholeSage from the hardy little sage plant that lives in my office. It was propagated by Spiral gardens.

Everything looks good. Everything comes from a good local place, everything is beautiful and well loved.
Combine and mix. Be aware. Salty water is quite an experience for your whole arm, and the driplets make salty stains on everything. But is very exhilarating, and the olives float.. like in a fairy tale where the
bandits hide the gold underneath the olives. et. Voila. Our very own olives, curing away. To be served upon
completion to all those who helped with the harvest, and even some who never did lay a finger on a tree at all who none the less love olives. Sharing is caring. Especially when you have more than ten gallons of olives.

After a few weeks of brining we’ll remove the brine and preserve the
olives in olive oil.

The end. Bon appetit!
Please join the SAFE email list to be alerted of the olive-tasting party. I think we’re going to make it a political event. So keep your ears pricked.

Between a rock and a hard place, we find winter squash and stone fruit

2007-11-24T16:17:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Sev for letting us know that locavore is the 2007 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year

Between Global Warming and Peak Oil, it is more important than ever to get the oil out of our food.

“Of all the tools for social change, the fork might just be the strongest.” Roger Dwaran

check out

http://locavores.com/

Forest Restoration Project

2007-11-15T13:20:00.000-08:00

I thought this post I wrote for my own blog might be appropriate for SAFE

Behind my apartment, on the slope between Glen and Monte Cresta Avenues, is a neglected and degraded remnant parcel of land. It's severely overgrown with non-natives - Cape Ivy and Acacia trees. Despite being a marginal habitat, I've seen lots of birds and squirrels, raccoons, opossums, turkeys, and even deer in this little woods. The owners of the properties don't much care about the land (I've asked) and it's an occasional campsite for the homeless and clubhouse for no good teens. I'm trying to create a sense of place for myself here in Oakland, a connection to this landscape, and I just can't stand to see any piece of land so uncared for, so I've launched into a restoration project. I have been, when I get a chance, heading back to "the woods" to clear half-fallen Acacias and brush and clean up some trash, including a dumped couch. My idea is that if I can bring back the native trees I can later think about adding understory plants and eventually some components of a forest garden, such as a beehive or mushroom logs .

This fall I've been picking up the seeds of California Coast Live Oak, California Buckeye, California laurel, California Black Oak, Big Leaf Maple, and Madrone from locations in Oakland, Berkeley, San Anselmo, and near Olompali (8000 years of habitation! Amazing!!). Following the directions for seed propagation from the Native Plant Network, I've been soaking the seeds. Today I did the final preparation for cold stratifying (simulating cold winter dormancy) by soaking the seeds in a dilute bleach solution and packing away in perlite.

All the seeds are now sitting in the refrigerator until they sprout. Check back for updates on the project as I keep an eye on the progress of the seeds. When they're ready I'll be transplanting them into tree pots out in the garden. If you have native understory plant suggestions (or better yet some, seed to give me) let me know.

Now I have to decide what to do about that damn Cape Ivy. It's covering a huge area over several properties and if you don't get it all, it grows right back. It's a huge amount of manual labor to remove it and I just don't think I can put enough time into it to make headway against the weeds. The Golden Gate National Receation area has a a small army of volunteers working to remove it. Do I dare give it a spray with Roundup? That seems like an all out act of war on the woods. I've found a few references online to using goats to control Cape Ivy. I don't have a goat, but would be interested in borrowing one. I'm not sure what the milk might taste like when produced on a Cape Ivy diet, so I wonder if we'd have to throw the milk away while the goats are on the ivy. Any ideas?

Growing Food at People's Park

2007-11-15T12:09:00.000-08:00

At the Cal Cooking Club's first meeting, the issue of gathering herbs from one's garden arose. Unfortunately, almost no Cal students tend or harvest from gardens. Instead, most students rely on the nearest Safeway for all grocery needs, purchasing fruits and vegetables that have traveled, on average, 1,500 miles. This unhealthy fossil fuel consumption pollutes our air and drives up the cost of our produce.

Conversely, organically growing and harvesting our own fruits and vegetables is the most sustainable form of agriculture. Through ESPM 117's field trips to the City Slicker Farms and the Spiral Gardens, I realized that small, fallow lots have the potential to yield relatively large quantities of produce. In addition, these urban farms socially strengthen their communities, bringing neighbors together to cultivate crops, relax in the shade of fruit trees, and purchase affordable, organic produce. Everyone in the community is affected by an urban garden, even the homeless. Heaped outside the Center Street City Slicker Farm are a few disheveled articles of clothing and stained sleeping bags, the owners of which guard the farm at night from vandalism. Thinking of our surroundings, I realized that we could emulate these farms in our own public space, People's Park.

At the November 5th People's Park Community Advisory Board Meeting, residents, the homeless, and representatives of MK Think (hired by UC Berkeley to assess conditions within and perceptions of our park), came together to discuss the future of People's Park. MK Think's proposals to build structures or create "sight lines" through the park by cutting down trees were strongly opposed by most members of the community. Speakers at the meeting generally advocated the preservation of open green space, but presented conflicting views on the safety within the park. UC Berkeley repeatedly attempts to alter People's Park under the guise of making it safer, whether by constructing dorms or felling trees. One speaker voiced an especially astute observation, that there have been recent incidents of crime at Cafe Strada, Sproul Plaza, and apartment complexes within Berkeley, but no attempts to alter those locations.

Perhaps you think, as I did, that People's Park is the center of criminal activity. To learn more about the residents and agriculture of People's Park, I was given a tour by Terri Compost, the volunteer gardening manager. While showing me the great variety of edibles, including a number of native species, she also introduced me to the garden's primary utilizers, the homeless. Together, we lunched on donations from Cheeseboard and the Monterey Market, prepared and distributed by volunteers of Food Not Bombs. This lunch included bread, steamed rice, stewed lentils, a dark green salad with grated red cabbage and carrots with a light vinaigrette, a flavorful yellow pepper salsa, an asian pear and apple salad, pizza, and a buttery cookie. While enjoying this nutritious and tasty meal, we discussed the future of People's Park. Everyone was content with its current state, but looked favorably on growing more fruits and vegetables on site. Currently, a handful of residents, students, and homeless individuals are gardening at People's Park. However, there is still much more arable land available for cultivation.

I propose that we begin a subclub of People's Park gardeners within SAFE, comprised of students interested in sustainably growing and harvesting their own fruits and vegetables. After mentioning this plan at the Community Meeting, Mr.Bishop, an employee of Cal Corps, approached me to offer funding for such an endeavor. With the help of Cal Corps, we can buy seeds, plants, and tools for the East and West ends of People's Park. Additionally, a few homeless individuals have offered to guard our crops during the night in exchange for some organic produce. Together with neighbors and the homeless, we can, in the words and full implications of Voltaire's Candide, "take care of our garden."

Peak Soil- An Inconvenient Truth

2007-11-14T16:33:00.000-08:00

Soil erosion as big a problem as global warming, say scientists

Saturday February 14, 2004
The Guardian

Erosion of topsoil - already a serious problem in Australia, China and parts of the US - threatens modern civilisation as surely as it menaced societies long since vanished, researchers warned yesterday.

Jared Diamond, a physiologist at University of California Los Angeles and author of Guns, Germs and Steel, told the AAAS yesterday that Iraq, part of the Fertile Crescent in which agriculture started 10,000 years ago, was once the wealthiest, most innovative, most advanced country in the world. But today it was a "basket case", mainly because of "soil problems, salinisation, erosion, coupled with problems of deforestation".

An area big enough to feed Europe - 300m hectares, about 10 times the size of the UK - has been so severely degraded it cannot produce food, according to UN figures.

In many places, soil is being lost far faster than it can be naturally regenerated.

Attempts to irrigate arid lands have produced soils so salty that nothing will grow.

One speaker, Ward Chesworth of the University of Guelph, Ontario, told the conference that farming had produced an "agricultural scar" on the planet that affected a third of all suitable soils.

Societies in the past had collapsed or disappeared because of soil problems. Easter Island in the Pacific was a famous example, Prof Diamond said. Ninety per cent of the people died because of deforestation, erosion and soil depletion.

"Society ended up in cannibalism, the government was overthrown and people began pulling down each other's statues, so that is pretty serious. In another example, Pitcairn and Henderson island in the south-east Pacific, everybody ended up dead. Another example was Mayan civilisation in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and Guatemala. Again, people survived but about 90% of the population was lost," he said.

Other examples, he said, include Iceland, where about 50% of the soil ended up in the sea. Icelandic society survived only through a drastically lower standard of living.

He said the media focused on fossil fuel problems, climate change, biodiversity, logging and forest fires, but not on the soil because it was less spectacular.

"There are about a dozen major environmental problems, all of them sufficiently serious that if we solved 11 of them and didn't solve the 12th, whatever that 12th is, any could potentially do us in," he said. "Many of them have caused collapses of societies in the past, and soil problems are one of those dozen.

zerzan's "agriculture"

2007-10-22T22:26:00.001-07:00

http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/agriculture.htm

WELCOME!!!!!!

2007-09-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

hopefully this blog will become a useful tool for cyber congregation, for s.a.f.e. and friends.

check out agrariana's website for information about our organization.