Having broken down and gotten a cell-phone in deference to the fact that pay-phones are now either extinct or in such poor health that they barely work, I tried taking some pictures with it.
Woodstove with blazing fire March 4 2011
Cheese Scallion Drop Biscuits 1
Cheese Scallion Drop Biscuits 2
Cheese Scallion Drop Biscuits 3
Cheese Scallion Drop Biscuits 4
Some pictures of early-season currants and peas:
Denise picks some Blueberries out back
I just verified it. Those tall sunflower-like plants that appeared over to the high side of the garden last year were Jerusalem Artichokes! We wanted to plant a small patch of potatoes this year, and the logical place to plant them was on that sunny ridge where that FOREST of tall plants had popped up. I could have sworn there were just three or four of them last year, but this year there are hundreds! I chopped them down and started digging up the stalks, discovering the Jerusalem artichokes attached to their feet, some of them as big as small potatoes. They are pointy and bulbous, dry and light. Inside is the white fibrous pulp that we sometimes get stir-fried in fancy restaurants.
Jerusalem Artichokes are native to North America, and they are a treasure trove of nutrients. Instead of carbohydrates, they consist mostly of inulin, and their vitamin content is high. They are the principal ingredient in my favorite pasta, DeBoles spaghetti.
So, while we hope to get some decent carbohydrates and flavor from the “new potatoes” that should be popping up in a few weeks, we’ll be eating Jerusalem artichoke right away!
This evening I heard a piece on NPR about the plan to introduce genetically-engineered roundup-ready sugar beets into the US Northwest. GE corn is already in most of our food. Now all foods that contain sugar will also include this unwanted ingredient; my guess is that 100% of processed foods contain either corn or beet sugar.
The radio show had a (large-scale) beet farmer who was overjoyed with this new “weapon in the war against weeds”. There is no such thing as a war on weeds, any more than there is s a “war on terrorism”. Weeds are plants, our relatives, cousins to the plants that we all must eat. Roundup and similar herbicides kill all broadleafed plants (except the ones genetically engineered to survive). As with all the previous frankenfood ideas that have been introduced, this is a massive experiment on all humans and all living things we share the planet with… All the same argumants against the idea apply, but they are waved aside when there is a large profit to be made. (See, e.g. http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_4682.cfm for more information)
I wish everybody could hear Lucy Lepchani‘s wonderful poem-story The Wisdom of Bees , in which genetic engineering is about to wipe out the bees, and all sorts of people finally rise up just in tome to prevent it by working together against those who would shove this mindset of intrumental thinking down their throats.
Instrumental thinking says that the means don’t matter, just the goals. Dirty, even monstrous, methods are fine in pursuit of something ideal at the end, be it salvation or better-living-through-chemistry. If we have to wipe out thousands of species and poison our own bodies and those of our kids, so be it, so long as the economy improves/food-security is attained/everyone has cheap sugar in the end… Kurt Vonnegut’s ice nine is another analogy that comes to mind: who cares if all the water on earth turns to ice at room temperature, if all our blood congeals, so long as soldiers are saved the messy business of having to slog through mud?
I got a call from my daughter ths morning telling me that the Union Mill Market and Cafe in West Peterborough NH is shutting down and laying off all its employees. She has been working in both the store and cafe since they opened, and this is sad news for all the waitresess, cooks and store clerks as well as for the musicians who had found a congenial place to play and the customers who had become “regulars”
This is the place where my daughter sang last month with Full Cold Moon, as reported in the earlier blog posting.
The building in which the store and cafe are located is a green building that uses no petroleum or coal for heat and light. The philosophy of the business was to buy local whenever possible and organic otherwise. I went to the store and had a talk with one of the co-owners, Frank Meehan. The owners are still looking to get more investors on board and hoping that the operation can be brought back to life in a while, but for the time being, it’s shutting down. A handwritten note was attached to the door, reading in part:
It’s not that, it’s just that we tried to open without any financial cushion. We grew much too fast, as did our staff and all our overhead. We did not have our systems worked out well enough, and befrore we knew it, we were in financial trouble.
We intend to put our heart and as many hours as necessary to come up with a solution and some backing so that we can reopen with everything the way it should be.
We love you all! We did it for you, and it brought us untold happiness and fullfillment. Send us your good energy and if you have any helpful ideas, please call:
Lauren Decatur 617-610-6882, Luc Monzies 603-924-6035
A new food store and restaruant has opened up in West Peterborough, New Hampshire at the long-boarded-up Union Mills as part of a comprehensive smart-growth plan for the village. The store and restaurant are committed to the concept that everything they sell should be either organic or local, with a preference for local. The management is also committed to bringing back to life the spirit of Peterborough’s legendary Folkway, where I had many of my favorite musical moments in the 1980′s and 1990′s, with singers like Leon Rosselson, Mad Dog, Alouette Iselin, Lui Collins, Garnet Rogers…
Eating locally-grown and prepared food may be the most important thing most of us can do for the future of the human race and its mother/matrix Gaia. Fossil fuel used in transporting food is nearly as great a source of greenhouse gases as commercial passenger air travel. Combining organic techniques with local farming does even more for the earth’s survival by cutting down on petrochemical use, soil depletion and water pollution.
Barabara Kingsolver’s new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life ( about how her family ate locally for a year in Virginia) is going to be a major topic of discussion in my Quaker meeting during the next few months. The presence of Union Mill, along with local retired farmer Helen Coll (author of the bumpersticker slogan “Support Your Local Farmer or Watch the Houses Grow”), and our family membership in Darling Hill Community Farm (a CSA), will ensure that thoughts of local food will never be far from my mind.
All this has reminded me of how I became a vegetarian, why I have not (yet) gone any farther, to being a vegan or a raw-foodist. I feel a need to put this down in writing, and I hope some of you are interested. I’ll start the process now, and hope to continue the discussion later
I sense that I had been a vegetarian in a previous incarnation (if there is such a thing as a previous incarnation 
), but my first intimation of this destiny was my experience, as a child, of caring for our small flock of chickens.When I was in preschool and in grades 1-3, I lived with my parents, brother and sister on a farm that we had purchased from an Amish family that was fleeing suburban sprawl in eastern Pennsylvania. For over a year we had no electricity, using gas lamps, wind-up phonographs, sad-irons, a hand pump and outhouses. My father’s college teaching job paid so little that he was forced to take a second job at the local Nike radar site as a night watchman. My mom tried to do some door-to-door sales, but she was no good at it; mainly she took charge of our large garden, small orchard and cornfields. As a student of the Rodales and Walnut Acres, she gardened organically, and the whole family lent a hand. We ate very locally out of necessity in those days. When my father got a huge promotion, we had to sell the house and move to Rhode Island. The chickens had to be disposed of. I was horrified; I wept and pleaded to let the chickens go or take them with us, but to no avail. My dad got out his axe and beheaded each chicken in turn, guttng them as soon as they ceased to run around, and handing me the guts to take to the dog. This helpless acquiescence in the killing and dismemberment of animals I thought of as pets and friends made a deep impression on me… the tears and red-anger of a child is a more powerful transformational force than any adult can know.
Later, I would sporadically rebel against eating animals I had known, but I was part of a meat/milk/egg culture that ensured that I would never consider giving up these foods.My grandfather exposed me to the works of Gandhi, my first teacher of vegetarianism, but I would not consciously meet a living vegetarian until after my father’s death. Within six months of meeting a Quaker vegetarian, who made a good ethical argument for not eating meat (I argued vigorously with him), I had made the transition, using the excuse of starting to practice yoga. Since that decision at age 18, I have not intentionally eaten meat or fish.
Over the years, I learned a lot about the health benefits of vegetarianism. I tried many different varieties of diet. There is a pornographic novel in which I was a minor (non-sexual, I’m afraid) character, which portrays me fairly acurately as living on avocados, raw sunflower seeds and wild watercress. I tried following a macrobiotic diet for a time. I foreswore eggs for several years (I still avoid them when possible). Much of the time that I was experimenting with these diets, I was as concerned (or more concerned) with saving money than with health, and I found that I had frequent bouts of respiratory disease that were probably due to nutritional deficiencies.Why is poisoned food, transported long distances, always so much cheaper than pure food from around the corner? Why is there so little local food of any kind conveniently available? It’s an industrial system, and there are powerful disincentives to leaving it.
In some sense, switching to a local-food, vegan or raw-food diet is a much more cooperative project than switching to a merely vegatarian or organic diet. With enough money, anyone can get high-quality organic vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts and pulses from farms half a world away, but these other transitions require community with both consumers and producers taking part. Farmers that I have known generally depend on animal manure for fertilizing fields. In places like China, farmers have relied extensively on human manure, but the worldwide trends are away from such practices (with our composting toilet, we use humanure to grow a tiny amount of food and flowers around our house). Few farmers rely exclusively on plant-based manure, and no farm can last long without replenishing the nutrients in soil. A local vegan farm would need to find a source of green manure or night-soil. The other part of the problem is providing steady income to local farmers while providing affordable food to local eaters. All the economies of scale favor the factory farmers in low-wage parts of the world.
(more later)
