Posts from — September 2009

I left the island today in the wee hours of morning. It was dark, but not too cold, as I hurried downstairs to put my last pot of water on to boil for tea and took out my last trash and stuffed my jar of kombucha (yes, really) and raincoat and hiking boots in the back of my car.

Packing turned the watertower into a maelstrom for the past few days and I’ve had no time to cook, and only a few hours of work on the farm — just to help out with the harvest.

Instead, I spent all my free time saying goodbyes and preparing my 7-day itinerary for the drive home. I’m stopping at five universities to talk with ten or so professors in Sustainable MBA programs and MS/PhD programs related to food systems, sustainability and business.

Day One: UBC

It went well, but I’m too exhausted now to go into the details. Tomorrow, Bainbridge Graduate Institute, where they actually offer a food industry focus. Amazing. I cannot wait to chat with the folks there and with the alum who’s offered to meet with me.

Here I go, back to school…

I think this is what it means when people talk about “community.” In the past, I’ve studied and even written about community in the educational context: “community based organizations,” “community-school collaboration” etc., but I feel now like I never really understood what it could mean to be in a vibrant, healthy, active community where a weekend in August means non-stop music and free food at the Island Village Barter Fair, Sunday mornings mean brunch and yoga at Sweet Earth Farm or coffee at Credence and Andreas, and there are so many potlucks you’re always afraid you’ll run out of enough quinoa to cover them all.

I guess that’s a lovely small town for you.

And not just a small town, but a town that seems to attract a certain kind of individual who cares about his neighbor more than the average Joe.

I guess some folks come to the island to retire and hide out and lay low, but it seems like most people, especially the young ones, are looking to carve out a niche in a place that’s different from your run-of-the-mill city. A place where you can go see your lamb being slaughtered, where you can work-trade a jar of jam for a haircut, where you know your server in a restaurant and the cashier at the supermarket and the teller at the bank, and so on.

I’ve only been here 6 months, but I already feel the island creeping under my skin. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s not just that. It’s also that there’s this overwhelming sense of connectedness and support and enthusiasm for each other that is like a super contagious mega-virus, the tropical kind that you think you’ve kicked, but that comes back to haunt you 10 years down the road.

I heard a story on NPR today about Flint, Michigan considering a physical downsizing of the city as a means to lowering costs and improving services to a core of city-dwellers. Interestingly, the story offered a community garden as an example of the potential benefits of this sort of plan, the idea being that as residential buildings were consolidated, it would leave more land for parks, gardens, and other shared community spaces.

I know this touches on many different issues: sprawl, infrastructure costs, homeowners’ rights — but I’m most interested in how this sort of change will actually affect interactions between people, everyday.

How do you experience community? In your family, in your neighborhood, through an organization or club?

Tonight Pritha and I are giving a presentation at the San Juan Island Library: an intro to Community Supported Agriculture and a farm-fresh cooking demo.

We’ve got a powerpoint.

But don’t worry, it’s mostly pictures like this:

If that’s not enough excitement for you, click here to download all the slides. They really are spartan, though! Our notes are where the substance’s at.

None of that nonsense of slides dripping with words so small they can’t be seen. We’re trying to keep it simple and charm people with our enthusiasm for small farms and chard and community love.

After we do a little indoctrination on the wonderfulness of community-supported agriculture, we’ll try to further ingratiate ourselves by appealing to the audience’s stomach.

Pritha’s making a simple summer squash soup, and I’m going to do poached eggs on kale and tomatoes, and green beans in thyme and butter. I devoured my test run on the eggs as I started this post — just a little tomato splashed on my screen as I shoveled from plate to mouth.

It’s been such a very long time since I’ve done anything like this. I was over in the tackroom at Heritage Farm last night where Pritha works, both of us huddled over my little black macbook, walking through our “talking points” and feeling like we were in college again.

This morning before we headed out for the Friday harvest, I blanched the green beans and chopped the garlic and started to put together my bag of supplies:

• knife? CHECK
• cutting board? CHECK
• veggies? CHECK
• utensils, plates, napkins? CHECK

and so on and so on.

I love that it was so easy to make this happen — all it took was an email exchange with the lovely library’s programs coordinator, Adrienne. She even offered to pay for the supplies for the class. Only on this island!

Or maybe not? I should try to do this again when I return to Orange County. I feel like they would cite health code and tell me the fire marshall wouldn’t allow an electric burner. Am I too cynical?

With all these foodalicious sustainabodacious, socially aware thoughts crowding my brain it feels good to force the thoughts into action and do something, not matter how small.

What kind of little actions have you taken lately on something you care about? Change a lightbulb? Plant a tomato? I’d love to know.

I’m applying for graduate programs in food & sustainability for 2010 and it is hard.

It’s hard for your average smartie-pants and in nearly a year of operating outside of your traditional “get-it-done,” information heavy, fast-paced, analytical work environment, I’ve definitely lost some of my so-called edge. My brain was never a knife — more like an awesome antique grinder that chews up various pieces of meat and adds some spices and leaves it to age until it’s spicy and delicious and totally new — but now the grinder’s dull and I’m feeling like I may never get back into any sort of game or groove.

I’m trying to juggle work here on the farm with packing up to go and setting up appointments with professors. And as if that wasn’t enough, I feel like I have to go into these meetings with my future life already laid out in my mind’s eye and my mind’s eye has pinkeye or perhaps is permanently nearsighted and there’s no lasiks doctor to be found.

So instead of impressing the hell out of professors with my intense focus and passion for just one thing, I’ll have to settle for telling the professors the truth. The less sexy, and quite complicated truth that I’m not sure what I want to do, but I do know that it has to do with figuring out the role that social enterprise and social responsibility and business innovation plays in creating a more sustainable food system and using what I learn to do something.

Does that mean I want to open a french-fry truck that grows its own potatoes on the roof and uses excess fry grease as biofuel? Maybe.

Or perhaps I’d like to work as a program manager for someone like these guys. Or do research and teach and consult on the side for small food start-ups. Who the heck knows? If I’m honest, not me. At least not yet.

What I have realized is that I do know some things about food and sustainability and business and I need to start sharing what I do know with others instead of just piling up knowledge in my brain without really processing, organizing and using it for something.

This puts me in mind of a story I heard once (or maybe it was a dream?) about a hermit who holed himself up in a shack for years and years and years and read and read and read exhaustively, refusing to talk to anyone or engage with the world until he had figured out the meaning of life and secrets of the universe. Eventually, when he was old and wizened and barely able to stand, he emerged from his shack in the middle of the desolate woods, pronouncing triumphantly that he had solved the secrets of the universe. Then, if I recall correctly, he fell down and died.

Let me not be that hermit.

I’ve been cleaning potatoes for days now. It hasn’t been nonstop; there’s been planting and bed prep and flats and the harvest to break up the day, but I’ve been going strong, at least a few hours each afternoon, sitting at the potting table in the barn with a few trays of Yukon Golds and the radio on to the CBC and a small scrap of burlap.

Wipe, wipe, wipe the potato with the scrap of brown cloth against my leg; two potatoes in the sack, and I switch to holding the potato in my left hand and polishing with my right. A couple more shiny yellow potatoes ready for winter storage, and I’m already restless again. I shift to hold the burlap in my right hand and rub the potato against the cloth with my left. Is burlap the same as a hairshirt, I wonder aimlessly? (Apparently not — hairshirts are made from the hair of a goat — Obvi!)

The radio announcer’s talking about Chungking Mansions and I wonder how many potatoes they use for the samosas in their curry houses and who in heavens name cleans them all.

But, duh, I know the answer, whoever grows all those potatoes totally has a barrel washer or some other kind of industrial machine and obviously isn’t communing with the potatoes like I am.

The orange-brown dust falls off onto the floor, onto my Keen boots, and sometimes into clouds in front of me until I have to get up and walk across to the big open barn door and take a breath and walk back. Switch position, potato in the right, then in the left. Until I fill a 20 lb bag, and another and another.

There are a lot of potatoes.

So it isn’t that weird that I started daydreaming about all the lovely things I could make with potatoes. Not that weird right?

Obviously mashed potatoes, and potato latkes a la Martha by way of Matt, and those delicious potato rolls that Jaime’s parents make on Thanksgiving. One night I actually made tortilla espanola, like the kind I ate in Madrid as an exchange student, only it wasn’t as delicious without chunks of manchego alongside… And then last week, Rachael of Fuji Mama told me about Rouxbe and I saw the gnocchi recipe with Yukon Gold potatoes and I knew it was my destiny to make them.

So tonight, I made a date with Pritha and we found a ricer, of all things, in the stash of Heritage Farm cooking treasures and we riced those potatoes and fluffed in the flour and kneaded in the eggs gently and made gnocchi.

We didn’t wait the 5 hours to let them rest before boiling because we had to catch the 9:15 showing of Julie and Julia (both of whom probably would have been appalled by the shortcut), but the little potato pillows still came out lovely and soft and melty. We made one version, swimming in sage butter with fresh sage on top and another with Pritha’s fresh pesto. Temporary intern Jesse made a salad with our huge Brandywine tomato and some farm greens. I was happy.

No photos tonight. If I could send you wafts of sage butter, I would!

I hate the ferry this morning. It’s nothing against the boat really, but just the way the rigid, unsympathetic inflexibility of the schedule seems to mock me — makes me feel secure in a plan, and then pulls out of the harbor with a naughty smirk just before I arrive to board.

Really, this morning’s ferry debacle was all on me, but that’s the rub with the ferry — sometimes the system actually foils you, and sometimes it just makes your personal inadequacies really really obvious.

Like it was not my fault the time Jim and Jacqueline came to visit for Jaime’s birthday and arrived more than an hour in advance of the next ferry and were told they could not wait in line until 6 o’clock. Then at 6 o’clock, when they pulled round to get in line, they were told “no, not time yet” by a harried ferry worker on a stress-induced power trip. And by the time Jim had made another round with the car, there were no spaces left and he had to wait for the 10:55 pm ferry. Totally lame.

But today was way lame-r. Sean arrived yesterday with my car, which he drove all the way from LA to the farm. We planned to send him off this morning on the early ferry so he could catch a shuttle to Ferndale to meet up with an aunt and then get to the Bellingham airport in time for his afternoon flight.

I checked the schedule: 6:10 am.

So we both roused ourselves in the dark foggy morning, I fixed him some fig bread and blackberries and fake mocha drink; like the good Navy boy he is, out he came at seconds to 5:50.

We headed out and arrived in town at 6:00 am just in time to see the 6:00 am ferry pulling out of the dock — literally 10 feet away. I was tempted to tell Sean to jump, but he was a sonar technician and not a Seal, so I figured maybe it wasn’t in his MO.

I hadn’t checked the schedule and neither had he and somehow I had gotten it wrong. All I could say was “oh my god, F@#&!, I’m so so sorry” and watch as the ferry continued on its journey.

I’m generally pretty on top of things like schedules, but somehow, today of all days, when I was supposed to get my friend to the ferry on time, somehow TODAY I let things slip and the unforgiving ferry made me pay.

GR!