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Holiday gifts for the sustainable-minded
Our editorial staff's annual suggestions for good gifts to give or to keep. |
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The Farmer and the GrillA Farmer tames her barbeque for a renaissance in backyard gourmet. Reviewed by Victoria S. Smith Farmer Shannon Hayes’ new cookbook is making me reconsider meat for my family. “The Farmer and the Grill: A Guide to Grilling, Barbecuing and Spit-Roasting Grass Fed Meat....and for saving the planet one bite at a time” is a cookbook with a new vision. Readers learn that pasture life is healthier for the animal and that grass-fed meat has an Omega-3 ratio of good ocean-fed salmon. E. Coli O157:H7 is less likely to be found in the meat of animals raised solely on pasture. Because grass-fed meat promises so much to the consumer, there are already impostors. Some grass-fed products might go unnoticed, like lamb from Iceland. In contrast, more self-promoting products now boast “free-range,” “prairie-raised,” and “all-natural” when they may eat little off the land except grain. Such inconsistent labeling allows grain-finished animals to masquerade as a version of authentically grazed ones. To deliver all the benefits of grass pastures, an animal must be grass-fed its whole life. Grass-fed livestock producers are often chided for not delivering a consistent product. But consistency, or homogeneity, is the business card of industry. In the same way inconsistency in cheeses or wines is prized—the variation influenced by place and so many factors—so can it be for our meats. Grass-fed animals respond to the natural conditions of the farm in which they are raised—the nuance of rainfall, the diversity of grass species, and the skillful rotation of pastures. Unique eating experiences result when animals graze from nature’s buffet, a world away from the monotony of the feedlot. When your palate is educated, you won’t be fooled. Pasture-based poultry and meats have flavor, and a different mouth feel than those raised in feedlots. They are often leaner, more variable and with a more pronounced muscle tissue. A quintessential devotee (in his own words) of pastured livestock, Joel Salatin is well-aware that the dining experience must be as good as the health factors. Perfectly grilled grass-fed steaks will cause the most hard to please gourmet eaters to set down their knives and forks and say, “Oh my God, I’ve never tasted anything this good.” But Hayes did not get here overnight. Before necessity came knocking she was the last person in her family to use the grill. Hayes always advised her customers to cook her grass-fed meat cuts slow, using oven and stovetop. But one day a new customer insisted on taking the meat home to grill and that was that. When she returned with bitter disappointment at the results, Hayes made it her goal to never have a grass-fed meat customer go grilling without good guidance. Befriending butchers To get educated, the author and her husband went to Europe and South America to befriend butchers in France, and cultivate grilling techniques in Argentina. In the process, Hayes became a devoted charcoal user. She adjusted her Weber so she could develop a method that uses slightly lower temperatures than the USDA requirements for unground beef and bison, 120 to 140 degrees F, but otherwise, but comes in to the recommended range for lamb, goat and pork. Dinner can still be ready in 30 minutes, but it requires a little advance planning. You’ll need a few extra thermometers as you learn to tame that flame and operate differently when grilling, indirect grilling, spit roasting and doing barbecue. Each recipe has a lead paragraph that tells you if it is elegant or child friendly. Some require minimal preparation, and almost all are budget conscious. Hayes gives serving suggestions and the serving size. Watch for the guidance on prep time, as some recipes take a long time. You’ll find side dishes like barbecue slaw to accompany your barbecue pork and Tamari Ginger buckwheat noodles to go with your sesame grilled lamb chops. In between kid-tested recipes you’ll get to know this farmer, and how she takes care of grass-fed animals in winter. You’ll learn about barbecued pig in the real southern tradition and where ham comes from. There’s Rosemary’s studded beef and Carolina-style pulled pork. Just hold the store-bought barbecue sauce, especially if high-fructose corn syrup is on the label, so as not to smother the unique meat taste. Victoria Smith is an ARCPACS certified soil scientist, mother and freelance writer in Athens, Georgia.
Heirloom: Notes from an accidental tomato farmerWinging his way to success, author shares his nightshade world wish shades of humor and insight Reveiwed by Dan Sullivan Tim Stark will tell you he started out to be a writer and accidentally became a farmer (hence the quirky subtitle of his book). Fourteen years ago, as you will learn from his first essay, Stark decided to start a few tomato plants on the rooftop of his Brooklyn apartment—3,000, to be exact. So his transformation to “Tomato Man,” as he is known at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City, wasn’t so much an accident as it was an obsessive compulsion. Stark reveals this trait about himself and more throughout the pages of “Heirloom,” in funny, witty, lyrical, insightful and unabashedly self-deprecating prose. Strung together, Heirloom is not only the memoir of a slightly mad post-modern farmer, it’s the story of our food system—a story that, as Stark’s own progress illustrates, ultimately bears hope. The memoir cum history lesson traces Pennsylvania's deep farming roots from Europe's 17th century Mennonites to the author's own bustling tomato stand in the heart of Manhattan. Along the way, he introduces a colorful cast of characters as diverse as the 125 varieties of heirloom tomatoes you’ll find bursting from the vines in his fields, including Stark's own idiosyncratic parents, an endearing and ever-changing crew of castaway field hands he dubs the "Tomato People,” his Old-Order Mennonite farming mentor and one unfortunate groundhog. Farming well in the 21st century is about building relationships, and Stark's great gift is his ability to convey these connections to the reader. Whether he is bantering with a customer at a farmer's market or graciously accepting a free meal from a 5-star chef, it's the spark of human interaction that effortlessly comes through in his prose. And while Stark does a pretty good job of shattering the romantic myth of the small family farmer, one still can't help but wish they were out there with him, battling the noonday sun, picking dead-ripe fruit, up to your elbows in tomato tar. Dan Sullivan is senior editor at the Rodale Institute.
The War on BugsThe true story, in words and pictures, of how America became addicted to agricultural chemicals Reviewed by Victoria Smith You won't find insects in Will Allen's “The War on Bugs,” nor a discussion limited to insecticides. Instead, you'll first be entertained by eye-catching advertisements spanning the late 18th to the 20th century. Together they present a damning trail of evidence showing how we were all led to dependence on chemicals (not just farmers). But farmers in particular were thwarted from putting land stewardship first. The consequences of chemical-driven farming range from nitrate contamination of groundwater to anoxic zones in the Gulf of Mexico. American agriculture has become enormously efficient at the expense of the farmers on whose shoulders we would stand, if they had not been turned into chemical dependents. The power of Allen's own story makes the preface a must-read. For it is the lessons of his youth and young adulthood that make this book so compelling and that motivate each of the chapters that follow. Allen grew up on a post-World War II family farm in Southern California, when small farmers had a healthy fear of the chemicals coming into common use. Allen's own family had rarely used chemicals on their farm. His childhood friends knew the claims about the safety of farm chemicals were suspect; they knew real children who died from arsenic poisoning or had suffered chemical burns. Allen joined the military in the ‘’50s and trained as a chemical warfare paramedic. When he went to South America to become an anthropologist, he studied traditional agriculture in the forests of Peru. His saw abundant yields on these pre-industrial farms, where crops were raised without pesticides despite a plethora of insects. Returning to California, Allen found American farming more poisonous and dangerous than when he was a child. A pesticide applicator’s course in the 1980s put him face-to-face with pesticides modified from the nerve poisons and anti-personnel weapons he had studied in the Marine corps in the 1950s. He found his farmer friends unconcerned about his discovery. Wouldn't the regulators have banned the chemicals if they were so bad? Bu Allen knew that these same chemicals, or very similar ones, had been used in genocidal warfare by the Nazis (and later by the U.S. in Vietnam and Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Curious where this new nonchalance among his peers came from, Allen seeks perspective from now-elderly farmers. He finds no one has a complete picture of the origins of chemical use on U.S. farms. But he finds clues that suggest the roots of chemical agriculture may be found in the history of colonization in the New World. He leads us through the morass of the mass exodus of farmers from Europe to the New World, which was fueled by the large-scale disenfranchisement of those farmers from the historic commons they shared with their churches. Next came a powerful push for profit from corporations ready to exploit the colonists. The British, Dutch and French corporations did little to promote agriculture that preserved habitat and maintained fertile topsoil. By the 1800s, farmers still comprised nearly 90 percent of U. S. population. They were a big market for periodicals and information to address rural issues and farm problems. Many smaller farmers were leery of chemicals. By the early 1800s, American aristocrat John Taylor developed a form of agriculture that maintained soil fertility through constant feeding of naturally occurring amendments. His ideas were promoted in early American farm journals but ignored by larger landowners. Land in the New World seemed endless, and those with money left behind eroded fields to seek out virgin lands. Those farmers who needed to restore impoverished soils were a new market for industrialists of modern chemistry. The industrialists harnessed South American slave labor in importing soil fertility from exotic places like Peru, shipping guano back to America. By 1824, the first guanos were promoted with advertising in urban American journals. As slavery ended in Peru and the good guanos ran out, Justus von Liebig in Germany crafted chemical fertilizers that we continue to use to this day, initially derived from Peruvian mining waste. Liebig became the first great propagandist for chemical-industrial agriculture and grossly oversimplified the essentials of soil fertility. He narrowed soil fertility to three essential elements for plant growth, NPK, ignoring other important characteristics of fertile soils, such as tilth, texture and soil type. A major thesis of this book is that it has taken an advertising war of seven generations to create the average farmer's comfort and dependency on chemicals. Rural magazines like California Farmer influenced the farmer long before television or radio, and by the end of the 1800s more revenue was produced by advertising than by subscriptions. So the farm journals became free, and the increased circulation was used to attract more advertisers. In fact it was farmers’ resistance to chemicals that motivated the corporations to advertise more creatively, using fear and authority as their tools, according to Allen. Industrial agriculture first misled farmers by telling them that making their own fertilizers using compost and manures was too space and energy consuming. Then there was humor that could be used to breed familiarity with pesticides. And it had to go beyond just farm applications for the mass of farmers to acquiesce. Standard Oil’s final trump was to enlist Dr. Seuss to illustrate advertisements for the bug killer, Flit, so as to infiltrate all American homes. The pyrethrum that gave Flit its killing power was a natural insecticide that was relatively harmless. But it paved the way for acceptance of an entire “Better Living through Chemistry” model that has become increasingly hard to scrutinize when most of the public have never taken a chemistry course. While Seuss now holds a special place in childhood with regard to environmental messages because of "The Lorax" and other illustrated stories, he made an indelible mark with the American public through cartoons and humor that heightened intolerance of bugs while assuaging fear of the weapons used to kill them.
Hands across America’s Heartland2009 calendar celebrates food and place in America’s breadbasket Give the gift that keeps on giving. A new calendar that’s a shared effort between frequent Rodale Institute website contributor, syndicated food columnist and credentialed nutritionist Melinda Hemmelgarn and her husband, photographer Dan Hemmelgarn, was created as a labor of love to help fund a permanent pavilion for the Columbia, Missouri, farmers’ market. The calendar, which can be viewed and ordered online, celebrates “food in place” with evocative black-and-white images of local farmers' hands as they go about their work and lives. The subject matter is only fitting, as the fundraiser will help the Columbia community move one step closer to food sovereignty year-round. The calendar, entitled “Farm Hands,” features words and images reflective of farm life and food ways in and around the Columbia Farmers’ Market, home to more than 70 local growers and producers who contribute to the health, environment, economy and culture of mid-Missouri. Local in subject matter, the calendar’s words and images are universal in their simplicity, beauty and appeal. All proceeds from sales of the “Farm Hands” calendar go to the Farmer’s Market pavilion campaign, and bulk discounts are available. |
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