Category — people who feed us

I heard just this morning that I’ve been accepted into the Community Development Graduate Group at UC Davis. I’m thrilled because the more I meet folks here in DC and the more I hear about exciting projects going on all over the country, the more I crave action — the hands-on work on the ground that I’ll be able to do in that program.

When I visited Davis back in September, I had a wonderful time meeting with professors and students; now I’ve some other folks from food and ag organizations in the nearby area — Community Alliance for Family Farmers, Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association, and California FarmLink and it seems like there would be a lot of potential for interesting projects with each of them.

Other things that make Davis awesome:

• I’d get to work with Professor Ryan Galt who recently got a grant to work on an project studying production and consumption in CSAs in the region.
• The Agricultural Sustainability Institute. While they don’t specifically have a program for working with grad students yet, it seems like there’s an opportunity to get involved in helping to define role(s) for graduate student involvement.
• The new undergraduate major in sustainable agriculture, which I might be able to participate in as a TA.
• The Center for Regional Change and particularly the community and regional mapping laboratory…

Which brings me to the post title… while stumbling around the Davis website, I came upon this moving, beautifully executed project by Tracy Perkins, a graduate of the Community Development Program. It’s called “25 Stories from the Central Valley” and it’s a multimedia project about the effects of agricultural pollution on local communities. The main event is a series of 25 photographs and captions that make up an online “exhibit” taking you through the human suffering that results from environmental abuses in the Central Valley. You have to visit the site to get the full effect, but I found this caption particularly moving:

“Josefina Miranda shows her daughter how she protects herself when she works in the fields. When Miranda was four months pregnant with an earlier child, she and her co-workers were put to work in a field still wet with pesticides. By the time they left, her clothes were so soaked that she could wring the pesticides out of them.  She miscarried the next day.”

So much to learn and do in California, and then it’s so close to my heart’s home in San Francisco and not too far from my parents.

I only worry about getting involved in a food system that may have a less than glorious future given the already frightening, and increasingly dire problem of water scarcity. Perhaps there’s hope, but on the other hand, maybe I should try Michigan!

Way back in November, family friends Lynne and John Orr took me and my parents to some wineries in the Inland Empire, a region that exemplifies that sad, but common story of agricultural land and open space succumbing to sidewalks and superhighways.

After the wineries, we drove over to the Graber Olive House, a small third-generation family-owned olive production and processing facility. Graber is Ontario’s oldest business, in operation since 1894. Our tour guide was a cheerful, white-haired woman, who had been best friends with one of the Graber daughters since they were both blushing teens. She remembered when the family would leave buckets of olives out by the back door for locals to pick up when they were away.

The main orchard is located in the Sierra Foothills, but the olives are cured and canned in the factory in Ontario. Clifford Graber designed most of the equipment himself, including the olive-sorting machine that’s still in use today. There’s so much beauty in a thing well made, and the sturdiness and appropriateness of these machines made me want to know more about the man who created them.

The olives themselves are special, Manzanillo and Mission varieties, brought to California by Spanish missionaries in the 1700s. Unlike commercial olives which are picked green, and then cured to deep black, Graber olives are picked ripe, when they’ve turned from green to warm brick brown. Experienced pickers who have worked for the family season after season (and some for multiple generations) pick the olives by hand, no more than 15 at a time so as not to bruise the delicate skin.

The olives go back to the factory where they are cured, then sorted by size and canned by workers who, again, have been with the company for multiple years.

The finished product is a firm but yielding, rich and buttery flavorful thing that doesn’t really resemble most olives I’ve tasted. The olives are slightly mottled, not perfectly unblemished like your typical black olives, but more like a forest floor.

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I’ve been meaning to post some of the photos from the factory because it was just so cool, but it came back to mind after I attended an event all about Community Food Enterprises co-sponsored by the Wallace Foundation and Business Alliances for Local Living Economies (BALLE). The workshop centered around the results of a three-year project studying two dozen community food enterprises in the US and abroad. The  work was based on the premise that locally owned businesses are the bulwark of strong, resilient, regional economies and socially vibrant communities.

When business is rooted in community, it seems to be more accountable to its neighbors, socially, economically and environmentally.

Food business, in particular, are interesting because of the clear links between food and land and food and place. The study set up a definition for what it meant to be a “community food enterprise,” and came to some conclusions about common challenges and common strategies for success as a starting point for replicating good models.

As a successful locally-owned food business, it wasn’t surprising to me that Graber fit a number of the indicators for success identified in the study. As a small start-up, Graber’s success relied on hard work, innovation, local delivery (see above for that anecdote about delivery in pails), some vertical integration (with production, processing and marketing), better taste, and a better story. No doubt because it is small and locally owned, Graber appears to be loyal to its workers and pays them fair wages.

I’m sure it faced many of the challenges of a small local business as well, but somehow it managed to survive and thrive despite the rapid changes in the surrounding community.

In the midst of the asphalt and strip malls and housing developments of the IE, it’s no surprise that Graber stands out. Is it strange to yearn for a world where there are more Grabers and fewer car dealerships and box stores full of housewares?

This poster was made by Veritable Vegetable for the Wild Farm Alliance.

It’s a spoof on food safety regulations that make it very difficult for growers to maintain ecologically sound growing practices (like buffers and vegetation that might provide habitat) and nudge them towards less desirable habits — like using fences, traps and poison to keep wildlife away — that undermine biodiversity and may not actually have the desired effect on food safety.

If you can’t read the tiny print. The top three read left to right: “Toxic Pesticides, Toxic Fertilizer, Fueled by Fossil Fuels” “Unknown Food Value” and “Unknown Pathogens”

The blue part says “Please grow only between the red and yellow flags. The food is patrolled for the safety of YOUR food system.”

To read a great article on alternative strategies to improve food safety while maintaining biodiversity and supporting small farms with good stewardship practices, check out this awesome report by Food and Water Watch.

If you care about the issue and want to act, consider calling your senator and asking s/he to support Senator Stabenow’s Food Safety Training bill that would help deliver training and technical assistance to small farms to help them provide safer food.

Funny how much the poster reminds me so much of these (real) signs in Singapore. But I’ll have to leave those thoughts for another post!

I’m in DC! Until May!

And it’s wonderful so far.

After a brief work-jaunt to Santa Fe, I’ve settled into a lovely house with awesome housemates, gotten down into work at the office, hung out with old friends and made a few new ones.

New Friends

Introducing, Marcie, a friend of a friend from the islands. We met for first time at the farmer’s market (where else) last weekend for squash and coffee; it was, needless to say, an encounter of kindred spirits.

This Wednesday we inaugurated what I think’ll be an especially fruitful cooking partnership.

I didn’t feel like trekking to the market and the pickings were slim. Since I just arrived a week ago, I was lacking some of my usual stockpile of goodies, but I figured a little bit of creativity and some love could yield something good. On hand: rapini on sale at Whole Paycheck, a jar of white beans, yukon golds, chicken broth, and some hot Italian sausage from Cibola Farms out in Virginia. It had been a grey day, so I was thinking soup. Marcie was in agreement.

Sausages in soup

The sausage made the meal.

Cibola Farms raises free-range heritage Tamworth pigs and grassfed bison. Buffalo-pork cranberry sausage? Buffalo summer sausage? Yum! I’m curious how they process their buffalo because a source in New Mexico mentioned that the USDA inspector charges some ridiculous hourly rate to inspect “exotic animals” like bison at their mobile slaughter facility. A question for the next market.

The sausage is made by Simply Sausage, a company out in Landover, MD that packages sausages for a number of different farmers. They’ve featured recently on Smithsonian.com in this sausage-making video

Plus their website has a friendly page on storing extra sausage.

So the soup was a success: sauteing the onions and garlic until the smell wafted upstairs into my bedroom where I could smell it 3 hours later, throwing in the harder stem ends of the rapini and the potatoes, then the broth, then the sausage as an afterthought (may have been even better if we had thought to brown it with the onions). Last the leafy bits of the veg, the beans (canned and already cooked), and a healthy dose of chili powder — not an entirely intentional pour, but an entirely welcomed one.

Accompaniments

And to go along, I made a batch of the buttermilk crackers that’ve been a table staple recently. So so simple, and so so delicious, although in this case they were slightly more difficult to make since our kitchen lacks a proper baking tray. I flipped over a smallish roasting pan and used the bottom. The crackers got mostly crispy, but I definitely need to invest in a proper pan.

Some family friends invited me and my parents out for a wine picnic last weekend. Napa and Sonoma are known as wine kings today, but in the past, the Southland (and San Bernadino in particular) boasted acres of vineyards and a number of well known vintners.

As you can see by the bottle sagging with the weight of its medals, some products like Rancho de Philo’s Triple Cream Sherry can still hold their own.

Our first stop was at Rancho de Philo in Alta Loma. Each year, the winery opens up for just one week for sales to the public. We munched on snacks and tasted the different vintages, while other from our party stood in line to pick up their year’s supply.  The wine’s made from mission grapes brought over way-back-when by the Spanish missionaries. The founder, Philo Blaine learned his sherry-making techniques back in Spain and then passed them on to his daughter Janine who runs the place now with her husband, Alan.

Janine was standing outside and handed me this sample as she talked about her childhood, growing up and learning the grapes.

Later, we headed over to Galleano winery in Mira Loma, not too far away. We drove down the freeway, through some suburbs and a couple of car dealerships and ended up at a driveway turn-in that looked a little like the entrance to a corporate park.

Instead of manicured lawns and tortured palms, we were greeted by a beautiful oasis of rural calm. We pulled out our picnic gear, and went to coo over the donkeys and guinea pigs before settling down to our meal.

I brought buttermilk lavash crackers and rosemary-meyer lemon bean dip.

And arugula and cherry tomato pasta salad with fresh herb sauce (everything from the garden!)

It was a seriously impressive spread — just the kind of thing to fill your stomach before wine tasting!

Mini pickles, quiche, black beans, corn & red pepper salad, wild rice salad, crudites, and fresh mozzarella & tomatoes on lettuce.

Another wonderful place to add to the Good Food Map:

Other articles about Rancho de Philo, Galleano, and San Bernadino Wine Country

• Rancho de Philo in Inland Living Magazine
• Rancho de Philo in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
• Wine history in the Inland Empire’s Sun
• Galleano’s website

October’s come and gone, but I had to post this picture of me in the pumpkin patch at Tanaka Farms in Irvine. This is a two-part post, so if you have no patience and just came from the food, then click here to skip ahead to the recipe for pumpkin gnocchi.

I dragged Christina down to South County to get my farm fix. It was a wonderland of tiny adorable children and rows and rows and rows of perfect organic glowing orange pumpkins. Tanaka opens up a you-pick pumpkin patch every year and families flock from miles around (they’ve also got Strawberry tours in late spring and watermelon tours in the summertime).

Many kids already know the farm because it hosts field trips during the week and also sponsors an awesome CSA program that doubles as a fundraiser for local schools, business, and churches. It’s brilliant. Tanaka packs and delivers the boxes to the schools, but the schools handle all the subscriptions and collections. Subscribers pay $25 per week. The farm pockets $20 per box, and the PTA gets to keep $5. They’ve got a great list of participating schools and examples of what goes into their boxes on their website.

We were a little late in the game, just a week or so before Halloween, but there were still plenty of gems to be had. The pumpkins were already cut and the vines had died back, so there was minimal pricking and poking as we selected our prizes.

Yes, that is an LA Fitness tent you see in that third picture. Not so good for the ambiance. Would you like a spin class with that kabocha squash? Oh, the subtle joys of Orange County!

Afterwards, Mr. Pumpkin sat on my counter for a couple of weeks. I meant to carve him, but he was on the small side and I was on the lazy side so it just never got done. Afterwards, though, I was grateful because I got to turn Mr. Pumpkin into not one, but two delicious dishes for the Good Food Potluck: Pumpkin & White Bean Chili (a la April McGreger of Grist) and pumpkin gnocchi, inspired by the beautiful and talented Jaden of Steamy Kitchen.

The gnocchi was a huge hit. Soon after the party, my mum got an email from a family friend asking for the recipe for “those yummy little nugget things.” Score!

That’s me, serving up the gnocchi. Funny faces behind belong to my “Uncle” Chuck (left) and Dad (right).

That’s what it looks like when it’s in the frying pan — aren’t they a pretty golden color? For some really gorgeous photos of this recipe, check out Steamy Kitchen.

Pumpkin Patch Gnocchi

Adapted from Pan-fried Pumpkin Gnocchi from Steamy Kitchen
Serves 6-8

I made a couple of changes to the recipe, in particular, adding the steps to cook down the fresh pumpkin. Ideally, you’d use a sweet pumpkin or squash, but ornamental Mr. Pumpkin actually did just fine. You’ll only need part of the pumpkin, so you can save the rest of the raw pumpkin for a curry or chili, or cook it all down in the next step so you’ll have pumpkin puree for pie or ravioli. Be sure to keep a light hand when mixing, or your yummy little nuggets will turn into yucky little chewies. This means in the mixing step, just turn over the dough a few times until combined, then stop!

1 cup skim milk ricotta
1/4 medium sized pumpkin, about 1 1/2 pounds, or 1 cup pumpkin puree
1 cup freshly grated parmegiano reggiano, plus more for serving
2 eggs
2 teaspoons lemon zest
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour, sifted and more for dusting
5 tablespoons butter, and possibly more for frying
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
10 fresh sage leaves

Preheat oven to 300F

1. If you’re dealing with a whole pumpkin, carefully cut it in half, then in quarters. Scrape out the insides with a spoon, saving the seeds for roasting later! You’ll use about 1/4 of a medium pumpkin or 1 1/2 lbs. Cut this piece into 4 chunks, leaving the skin on.

2. Put the chunks in a steaming basket in a pot and add 2 inches of water. Steam for about 20 minutes on medium heat until the pumpkin is tender and begins to be transluscent. Drain the water and let cool for 5-10 minutes. Peel the skin from the pumpkin and chop into 1-inch cubes.

3. At this point, if you have a ricer, you can rice the pumpkin for an even more fluffy gnocchi. I only had a blender, so I put the cubes in my blender until the lumps were gone.

4. Add two tablespoons of butter to a large saucepan on medium-low heat. Add pumpkin puree to the pan and cook for about 10 minutes, until the pumpkin has reduced by about half and the color has deepened to a golden brown.

5. Combine ricotta, pumpkin, parmagiano, yolk, zest and salt in large bowl. Mix well. Sprinkle half of the flour on the mixture, gently turn with spatula a few times to incorporate. Dump mixture on clean, lightly floured countertop or you can still do this in the bowl. Sprinkle remaining flour on top of the mixture. Gently knead with your fingertips, just bringing together the mixture until flour is incorporated through. This only should take a minute or two. Any longer and you will be over-kneading.

6. Dust a clean, dry surface with a generous sprinkling of flour. Divide dough into 2 parts. Working with one part, press into a rectangle 1/2-inch thick. With a pastry cutter, or sharp knife, cut the rectangle into strips 1/2-inch wide, then cut each strip into “nuggets” about 3/4” long. At this point, you can do fancy things to the gnocchi like rolling them on a gnocchi board, but I think they’re pretty cute as is.

7. Heat a large frying pan or saute pan with 1 tablespoon of the butter and 1 tablespoon of olive oil. When hot, add a few gnocchi – enough to cover surface but not touch each other. Fry on medium heat for 1-2 minutes, turn and fry for another 1-2 minutes. Remove gnocchi, place on large baking sheet to put into oven to keep warm. Repeat with rest of gnocchi, add butter and oil to the pan as necessary.

8. When all gnocchi is finished, discard butter/oil in pan and clean pan with paper towel. Heat pan on medium heat and when hot, add the remaining 2 tablespoons butter and the remaining tablespoon of olive oil. When hot, add the fresh sage. Let the sage brown and sizzle (but not burn) for a couple of minutes until very fragrant. Remove the sage and discard. To the pan, add the balsamic vinegar and whisk. Let simmer on low for 1 minute and pour over the gnocchi.

Other delicious sweet and savory things to do with pumpkin:

My amazing mum sent me two galangal stems & tubers, a few stalks of lemongrass and a piece of turmeric from the fridge. I planted them all a few days ago and have been keeping the kitchen steamy and hot in the hopes that they’re tricked into thinking it’s tropical.

Unfortunately, the turmeric rhizome got moldy, so I think it’s going to have to go in the garbage. Perhaps I’ll be able to find a replacement in Bellingham or in Seattle if I ever make it out there.

That’s one thing that gets me about this “eating local” business. In general, I love love what “local” stands for. Eating what’s near you makes sense — it can be fresher, it takes fewer resources to transport, it’s technically easier to involve yourself with your food by actually talking with the farmer or (gasp!) going out to actually visit the farm where it’s produced. Plus, I understand and support strengthening local economies — I do believe when you buy food from your neighbor, you’re ultimately doing yourself a favor.

But then how do I get things I love without guilt? I love cooking Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Burmese foods. Let’s say my little indoor pots of tropical tubers don’t work out or they don’t produce enough for all the lovely curries I want to make. Do I eschew curry or make adjustments that essentially change a dish? I’d say neither.

I’ve certainly been eating differently since I arrived, less meat, more gorgeous produce, and that adjustment has been wonderfully delicious. But I miss curry and spice and tropical fruits. So when do you draw the line between practical, ethical, joyous eating and overzealousness tied up with guilt? Especially when what’s practical and “right” for me and practical and “right” for you is so different.

The NY Times columnist Mark Bittman says we should avoid labels and just strive to eat “wholesome,” “good” food. I agree, but here you bump up against the problem of definition — some folks have been brought up with very different standards for “good,” and folks have different levels of access to “good.”

I guess it really does come down to a question of ethics and making complex moral tradeoffs. I’m going to see what some of these books have to say on the subject and get back to you.