Secondhand Nation

Mobile Abattoirs Coming to a Farm Near You?

Figure 1: Lititz, Pennsylvania. Butchering a steer in Lutz's slaughterhouse by Marjory Collins. Photo via Library of Congress website.

Since I'm a Michael Pollan groupie and think about the Balding & Bespectacled One nearly every day, whether I'm crunching into an Oreo or riding high on a local food bender at my farmer's market, this recent article in the Wall Street Journal provoked me. 

Remember how in The Book, Joel Salatin, the Polyface Farm and grass-fed "beyond organic" farmer, is having problems finding a way to make more money on his meat because of all the bullshit regulations from the USDA concerning slaughtering the animals and butchering them.

Perhaps these mobile abattoirs are the answer to local, small-operations farms that want to provide butchered products direct to the customer without having to build a costly, regulation-minding facility?

Or will these traveling units just spread disease as they go from place to place?  I can't help but wonder what old Michael Pollan or Joel Salatin have to say about this.  I wish one of them would blog already so I can know what's in their minds at any given moment. 

Locavores Delight: Farmer's Markets in the St. Paul/Minneapolis area

Here are two great features from that dead tree behemoth, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, that will come in handy while you try to hit local farmer's markets during our cruelly short produce season:

Interactive Map of Farmer's Markets

Day-by-Day List of Farmer's Markets

Yes, I am partial to my local readers, but aren't we supposed to be doing everything locally these days?

For those folks who don't live in glorious MN, I'll throw you a bone, too.

Local Harvest

Local y Deliciosa: El Burrito Mercado

I am all about local food.  I love food and I love having power over big companies that are trying to get my food dollar.

That's why I was thrilled that my local Cub Foods has started carrying Authentic Chips and Salsa from the premiere Latino grocery store and restaurant, El Burrito Mercado. 

The chips are crunchy and thick, with just a hint of salt.  The ingredients involve the following:

Stone ground corn, white corn, corn oil, salt, trace of calcium hydroxide.

Wow.  A corn chip that's mostly corn.  Flabbergasting how something that simple is also highly delicious.

The mild salsa isn't that tomato-y mush that most Midwesterners seem to slobber for; it's a spicy blend of peppers and tomatillos - and yes, tomatoes - that has real punch.  Perfect for chips or dousing your hashbrowns and eggs.

Hooray for Cub Foods!  They are my favorite local food provider, with great emphasis on Minnesota Grown products.

For more information on what's good in Minnesota, check out the Minnesota Grown page from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

To find out about what's good locally where you live, go to Local Harvest.

Deconstructing The Grocery Store

 

Figure 1: Grand Grocery Co, Lincoln Nebraska by John Vachon.  Source: Library of Congress.   

Thanks alot, Micheal Pollan.

As household errands go, I used to really enjoy a trip to grocery store.  Now my nerd ass can't even pick up a few groceries without internal dithering over the offerings of each aisle.

A few days ago, I visited my local Rainbow, which I normally don't visit (I prefer Cub Foods) but it is close to my daughter's preschool and gas ain't cheap.

I went in to pick up some fruit and cereal and spent 45 minutes contemplating the astonishing array of ludicrous food products that come boxed, packaged, canned and stacked, marketed to our hungry famine genes and sure to make us fat. 

Once you've read Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma:  A Natural History of Four Meals , every single motherfucking choice in the grocery store is freighted with politics.  (And Pollan's gone and written a new tome called In Defense of Food:  An Eater's Manifesto, which I tremble just thinking about.  Jesus, man!  Can't you let the ramparts of my fragile world stop shaking before you unleash more?) 

Oh, don't throw out that "Just Go to the Farmer's Market!" tagline to me.  I live in the heartland, where we grow corn that gets processed into fruit roll-ups and fattening syrupy fillers, where our farms are currently under 2 feet of snow.  Ain't nothing local to eat right about now, cepting twigs and dogshit supplied by my annoying neighbor's bug-eyed Basenji, who've we've renamed Silent But Deadly.

Among my ponderings:

• To buy bananas or to let growing leg-pain-having child suffer the liver-crushing wrath of ibuprofen every night, when bananas help relieve these torments of youth?  Those feminists were right.  The political truly is personal.  And it's waking me up every night screaming in pain.
• Frankenfood?  What the fuck is this?  Toaster strudels, Disney-embossed fruit leather, instant pasta bowls, pesto-flavored crackers - what would  my great-grandmothers think of all this shit?
• Why must everything be fortified with something else?  Breakfast cereal made from whole grains and enhanced with decaffeinated white tea extract - why not just drink white tea and boil up some oats?  Granola bars fortified with Omega-3 acids?  We've gone totally crazy with our ideas of what food should be and that's why Americans have no national cuisine to speak of.  Instead we're bereft amidst the legions of marketing campaigns for foods that don't taste good, don't resemble food and usually end up making us unhealthy.
• Dieting experts have been recommending recently that we shop around the perimeter of the grocery store, eating "whole foods" like vegetables, fruits, cheeses, meats and grains.  Shocking, isn't it?  That what keeps you fit are actual plant and animal products that are more resistant to the greedy clutches of marketing campaigns?  The majority of the store is dedicated to food products that are bad for you, that are packaged wastefully and that line the pockets of Big Ag. 

Figure 2:  Negro Grocery Store, Black Belt, Chicago, Illinois by  Edwin Rosskam.  Source:  Library of Congress.

I often think about Cargill when I grocery shop.  When I worked there, looking at the directory of departments was sickening.  For example, here are some department names: 

Sweeteners.  Sauces, Oils and Dressings.  Juice. Cocoa and Chocolate. Texturing Solutions. Animal Nutrition.  Meat Solutions. 

I don't know about you, but personally?  I have never had a problem that requires a "meat solution." 

Insert dirty penis joke, I know.  But really, the only "meat solutions" I can think of would involve avoiding BSE, E.coli, and the exploitation of workers.  None of which Cargill, with its global approach to food distribution, can fix for me.

And texturizing?  Ugh.  That just means, hey, let's stick some of our surplus corn product into your yogurt/cracker/ice cream and thus stretch it out further and change the mouthfeel so you'll slobber down larger quantities.  Saves us money while you get less and spend more!  Woo! 

What this means to me is that there is a huge refrigerated case full of yogurts I don't want to buy.  They are covered in Disney characters and packaged in non-recyclable plastic and filled to brimming with high fructose corn syrup, starches and other junk that has nothing to do with milk.  In fact, all I want is the plain yogurt, please, and that is the most expensive one, even when compared to the brands that brag "Enriched with Vitamin A" or "Live Acidopholus Cultures!" on the container.    

Figure 3:  New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  Stairway with display of a sample of the foodstuff collected by one household Uptown from Red Cross food distribution in October.  Source:  Wikimedia Commons. 

So go live in California, some might say, where you can pick oranges off trees and live the good life.  Quitcher bitchin about grocery shopping!

I don't think there should be an end to refrigeration or survival in cold climes.  I just think it's a damn shame that 95% of that building we know as the grocery store is full of shit that makes us unhealthy, fat and/or sick. 

Food that we can afford, that is free of chemicals and unhealthy bullshit, is nothing less than a human right.  Bugger off, Big Ag, with your grandiose notions of "Nourishing Ideas. Nourishing People."  You're making a shit load of money because you're making us sick. 

Eco-Crushes: That Dreamy Michael Pollan...

+ SHN = LUV!

If you're like me and get all tingly whenever Michael Pollan comes around or just haven't read The Omnivore's Dilemma yet and want to get all lubed up for the greatness that lies within its pages, have a listen to a talk he gave at the Minnesota Arboretum, courtesy of our pals at Minnesota Public Radio.

photo via Michael Pollan's website

Tomato Time?

 

Is it time yet?  How much longer can the local harvest hold out?  I've got my jars and lids and a fresh copy of the Ball Blue Book.  Is it time to swoop in to my local farmer's market and buy a few bushels?  Do I wait?   

Since I can't shut up about local foodsheds it seems, here's a general guide to the harvest schedule in the United States.  Since it's general and not taking into account the recent weather fluctuations, I'm not sure what to do.  Help!   

Reader Recipes: Canning Tomatoes

Our tomatoes are still green here in Minnesota, but my recent foray into seasonal harvesting at Bauer Berry Farm in Champlin has got me all sweaty for food preservation. 

In response to my previous post on canning, reader Edell Fiedler shared with me some recipes she likes to use in the fall with tomatoes.  I'm especially partial to the idea of tomato juice, as I've been gulping that down like crazy lately, with the crazed "5 a day for health!" mantra circling around my brain.

Edell, the book-reviewing bibliophile extraordinaire from Prose Matters, sent me some tomato recipes for all of you lycopene fiends out there.  The first recipe for Tomato Juice is one her husband's grandmother followed. 

"My husband hates tomatoes," Edell writes, "but he'll eat this."

Canned Tomato Soup

15 pounds of tomatoes
3 stalks of celery
2 large onions
1/4 cup green pepper

Process above ingredients in a food processor.

Add the following to the juice mixture:

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 cup of flower
1/4 cup salt
1 tsp pepper
1/2 cup of butter

Bring all ingredients to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes. Add flour and water mixture (or cornstarch and water mixture) for thickening. Place in clean jars and can using a hot water bath for 15 minutes.

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Tomato Juice

2 quarts tomatoes (blanched, peeled and cut into pieces)
1 1/2 stalks of celery (par boil in same water)
Add celery and water to the tomatoes
Add 1 large onion, cut up
Add 2 garlic cloves, cut fine
Salt to taste

Cook on low heat until vegetables are done. Put into blend and chop fine. Put through a strainer. Put juice back on high heat.  Add worcesterchire sauce to your taste.   Pour into jars, add 1 tbsp lemon juice to each quart.  Process 40 minutes in hot water bath.

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Got any canning recipes you'd like to share?  Email or comment!

Local Blueberries

Listening to Barbara Kingsolver discuss her new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, on Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith program (check your local NPR listings) got me totally wound up.

Here I am, in the beating aorta of the heartland, and still buying foods from the grocery store!   My ambitions for next year's garden shot up into the stratosphere. 

Of course, then I got blueberries on the brain again.  There are tons of pick-your-own operations across the nation - check listings by state at Pick Your Own - and in Minnesota, you can find many of them here at the Minnesota Grown directory.

The Bauer Berry Farm in Champlin, Minnesota, was the closest pick-your-own blueberry site I could find.  Still, it is a good 40 minute drive from my house.  After much math, factoring in gas and time and the rate at which complications cause motivation to atrophy and die, I popped up on a Saturday morning, tossed a coupla of buckets in the car and went out to pick.

The Bauers have a pretty well-oiled machine out at their farm and with sweet corn season just revving up, they had plenty of help on the premises to serve people.  With my big blue bucket, a little guidance on picking technique ("Pick the blue ones, avoid the pinkish-purplish ones, just twist between thumb and middle finger and let them fall into your bucket") and three hours under the sun, I picked myself 10 pounds of blueberries.

They're triple-bagged to protect from freezer burn (after all that work, squatting and twisting and lying beneath the bushes, they are totally precious to me) and may not look like much, but I'm betting the first winter day I meet with a bowl of steaming hot oatmeal and some juicy blue berries will be quite satisfying.

Somehow eating local, picking the low-hanging fruit, as it were, has been snipped from national memory.  It's no longer intuitive for us, when foods are in season. I remember only eating grapefruit and oranges in the winter.  After February, my mother told me, they weren't any good.

This is still true.  But somehow, we still think we're entitled to put anything on the menu, at any time.  If it can be picked and plopped on a plane, we think it's fine to eat it.  The result is that we get pink baseballs for tomatoes and strawberries that taste like wet newspaper.  Eating in season - not a drastic concept, people.  Yet here I am, in 2007, struggling to relearn it myself.

Get more local eating inspiration with the originators of this movement, the Locavores, see how it can be done at One Local Summer and then put yourself to the test with the Eat Local Challenge.

I'd be interested to hear from readers on eating local.  I myself won't be able to do this quite yet;  I'm setting up grow lights to create a mini-coffee plantation in my basement.  It's either that or move to Kenya.     

Getting Off My Can

Have you ever preserved food with home canning?

I've got canning on the brain these days.  I can't stop thinking about food and health and sustainability.  Chalk it up to hearing Michael Pollan speak on NPR or Marion Nestle on The Splendid Table or my obsessions and failings about eating and nutrition or the fact that I want to save money wherever and whenever possible - whatever the cause, I'm convinced I've got to do some serious canning this summer. 

When I was growing up, each summer my mother used to can pickles, peaches, pears, tomatoes and crab apple jelly.  I remember listening for the sealed jars to pop as they rested on dishtowels spread over the counter.  And I loved it when she opened a mason jar of pears for me to eat at lunchtime.  She taught me how to can tomatoes, which I have done exactly three times, because she finds tomatoes to be the easiest canning recipe to learn.

Though I came to hate pickles as an adult, the idea of canned fruit sounds luscious, especially in the dark days of winter up here in Zone 5 where nothing more exotic than a cold-frame potato is available locally in winter.  In frigid February, canned berry jam sounds decadent and fabulous. And canned tomatoes?  I use them constantly.  One of my most favorite easy dinners involves a can of tomatoes, 3 cloves of garlic, salt and pepper and spaghetti.

This summer I'm fixing to can some berries, pears, peaches and tomatoes.  I've got to figure out where to get some peaches and pears that have any flavor (Russ Parson's' new book How To Pick a Peach is also weighing heavily on me lately). And in mid-July the husband and I plan to head out to Bauer Berry Farm and bring home a whole mess of blueberries to freeze and preserve in jam.  (I'm voting for freezing;  he thinks they'll freezer burn and would rather try jam.) 

What do you like to can?  What would you like to can? Who taught you how to do it?  I'd love to hear your stories, see photos of your prized preserves and get your recipes -- comment below or email me at:  secondhandnation AT hotmail DOT com    

photo:  The Jeffersontown, Kentucky Community Cannery, started by the WPA. Women paid three cents each for cans and two cents per can for use of the pressure cooker to can home-grown vegetables. (Library of Congress WPA collection, LC-USW3-034355-C DLC, Howard Hollem, photographer.)