I love airports and airplanes. I love the feeling of being between places, in transition. And I love the anonymity — it’s the best of places for watching people, and also for meeting folks you might not otherwise meet on the street.

Yesterday, when I squeezed into Seat 14F (a window seat), it just so happened that the man already occupying the middle seat was a farmer. I noticed this, not because of any hint from his dress or demeanor, but because when he kindly got up to let me in,  I noticed his bag — a freebie from some sort of national ag association.

So I asked him about it and he told me that he was a farmer who grew sugar. “Beets?” I asked, and his face lit up. “You must know farming then?” he said. “Well, kinda,” I shrugged, and told him where I worked, and about my brief farming experience.

We talked the rest of the flight — about his clever daughters and about how my parents met and about the time he took his son to the Rose Bowl. I found out that in addition to farming part-time with his son, my new friend was a crop insurance agent and a representative of the Michigan Bean Commission. He traveled around the world to trade shows and meetings marketing Michigan dry beans: azukis, great northern, black beans, to name a few. He had been recently to Cancun and Barcelona and was soon off to Paris.

Apparently, Saginaw is the capitol of dry beans and sugar beets in Michigan. Sugar beets, in case you didn’t know, make sugar — the regular white grainy kind you pour into your coffee or sprinkle on your cereal (do people still do that?). Saginaw Valley, where lots of these beets are grown, lies between the thumb and forefinger of the Michigan glove, about two hours by car from the metro Detroit airport. My friend explained that people grew sugar beets there because the processing plants were nearby in the thumb. This awesome article from MSU tells more about the history of sugar beet production and processing in the state.

Beyond beets, I also learned a little bit about crop insurance. My friend had been in DC to chat with folks at the USDA and on the Hill about the crop insurance business and the proposed cuts to crop insurance in Obama’s 2011 budget. It was fascinating to hear his perspective — “Why should the government penalize me for making a profit?” — and compare it to the perspective I share with the Obama administration and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition where I work:

From Obama’s 2011 budget proposal: “Crop-insurance companies currently benefit from huge windfall profits due to the structure and terms of the Government’s contract with the companies.” The Wall Street Journal reports that “a USDA study showed that a reasonable rate of return on equity for private crop-insurance companies is 12.8%, but the average now is 16.8%. USDA data show government payments to crop insurers have more than doubled in recent years, jumping from $1.8 billion in 2006 to $3.8 billion in 2009 while the total number of policies held by farmers has declined.”

Add to this the fact that my friend explained that until recently, when a former employee set up shop and became competition, he was the only insurer in his local area. I felt less sympathetic then to his side of the story, but it made me remember once again that in the end, farmers are businessmen and to him, these cuts might mean that he won’t be able to pay for his adventurous daughter to study abroad in Paris or to help his son buy land to start his own farm. And there’s the rub of government — how do you distribute resources equitably? How do you re-distribute when something’s not working — it seems much easier to give than to take something away.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on life cycle assessment or energy use in food production (yet!); this is just a way to dip my toe into obviously complicated issues that I find fascinating… Also all this discussion really is a really really long lead-in to talk about the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at University of Michigan, where I’ve been accepted! Hooray!

Numbers can lie, but sometimes they can be gosh-darn illuminating.

Here’s some data that hammers home the extent to which our food system here in the US has morphed into something that just plain doesn’t make sense.

It seems that we consume about 10.3 Quads of energy per year to produce, process, package, transport, sell, store and prepare our food. For all that, what do we get? 1.4 Quads of actual food energy.

Graphic from the University of Michigan that I also used in a presentation that I gave at the Fullerton Public Library back in October.

Interestingly, this 10.3 Quads used to produce our food is about 10% of the total energy consumed annually in the US. But what, you may ask, is a Quad? According to the illustrious Wikipedia, it’s:

• 8,007,000,000 Gallons (US) of gasoline or…  about 530 million 15-gallon fill-ups at the station?
• 293,071,000,000 Kilowatt-hours (kWh) or… powering 1 million 100 watt lightbulbs for 334 years

Yeah, I know that still doesn’t help much, sorry. I tried.

But really, the sheer amount is irrelevant. It’s the ratio that matters. This means that for every SEVEN units of fossil energy we’re putting in, we’re getting out only ONE unit of food energy. Huh?!

I’ve heard stats that “in the past” (e.g. pre-industrialized ag) one unit of fossil fuel energy would produce TWO units of food. Nothing at my fingertips to corroborate that, but it makes some sense if we can agree that food was grown with fewer industrial inputs (requiring fossil fuels), traveled shorter distances, was less processed, and used less packaging.

Some quick searching confirmed my expectation that organic production seems to require much less energy for many farm products than its conventional counterpart. This 22-year study by the Rodale Institute and partners showed that organic farming of corn and soybeans used an average of 30% less fossil energy, even when yield was accounted for (in fact, yield over the period of the experiment was the same for organic and conventional because soil fertility declined on the conventional plots).

But as we can see from the chart above, production is only about 20% of the story. After we’ve grown the food, we’ve still got to send it somewhere and wash it and pack it and maybe grind it up into something totally different and send it somewhere else and then cook it. It makes sense that organic production would use fewer fossil fuels when you consider that it restricts the use of pesticides and fertilizers, but in some cases, I’d imagine that when you look at the full product, some organic foods have a higher total energy cost than their conventionally available counterparts because they are transported further distances and in smaller (less efficient) batches.

This study by the UK’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has a fascinating breakdown of energy use for organic versus conventional products per unit of output. The chart also breaks down the energy costs into categories: distribution, collection transport, fertilizers, etc. When all is taken into account, the organic crops they studied still used less energy for the most part, except for carrots.

However, the full report shows that the model they used assumes that produce is imported only as far away as Southern Europe and does not account for the large amount of imported organic produce from even further afield.

Isn’t the devil always in the details?

Anyway, it’s complex. It makes me wonder if we’ll ever get to the point where right under the nutrition facts, our labels will include a little line for joules of energy and kg of GhGs. Pepsico has really already gotten this started by labeling its Tropicana juices with the carbon footprint.

But seriously, will some text that tells me this orange juice costs 1.7 kg of carbon really ever mean anything to me? We talk about consumer literacy, but this is a case in which I tend to think that change needs to come at the system level, not at the level of individual consumers. It’s just too much to ask of a person to weigh all those choices: nutrition, price, environment, social… for every product, every time you’re purchasing food.

Fascinating stuff, and all things I could pursue if I decide to go the University of Michigan for their MS program in Sustainable Systems at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment. That graph up top came out of a study by Dr. Greg Keoleian who teaches in the program and is a guru of life cycle assessment, not only based on environmental indicators, but also incorporating social indicators for a variety of products. Plus, I could apply in my first year for the joint-MBA program in the Erb Institute to learn about how to bring these metrics into the business of food.

Pretty different from Community Development at Davis: more technical, more science-y, perhaps more of a birds’ eye view of sustainability (though there are also folks in the school who focus on Behavior, Education and Communication so I could bridge the two).

I like that I would learn tangible skills (life cycle assessment) in the U-Mich program but on the other hand, I know that I want to be a practitioner at the community level — in a small company or nonprofit — and not a researcher or a sustainability manager at Pepsico (at least I think) so it’s hard to say.

Other things influencing my thinking:

• plus: U-Mich has already committed to giving me some financial assistance,
• plus: I’ve never lived in the middle of the country and there’s so much interesting stuff going on in Michigan food-wise (especially Detroit!),
• huge, potentially deal-breaking MINUS: Boyfriend Jaime did not get in there.

My boyfriend Jaime sent this to me. He is on his way to becoming a fancy scientist who studies the impacts of salmon farms on wild salmon populations. He is incredibly supportive and, if you can’t tell, he has a sense of humor.

from Toothpaste for Dinner

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?

Forget warm wontons!!

Courtesy of VT at The Sap Also Rises

Oh Hot, soupy, slippery wontons on a clear night after a deep snow.

The perfect portion of pork and scallion and soy wrapped in a soft, just-a-bit-chewy skin, topped with Sambal Oelek and a couple ladels of steamy broth with sliced cabbage.

What could be better?

Saturday night, I had the wonderful fortune to be invited to a wonton-making party down near Dupont Circle. I met up with friend Andy beforehand and we had a hot drink at Big Bear cafe and chatted about agriculture and business and solar power. Then we trudged through the slushy streets with our hands in our pockets and grins on our faces dodging the few silly motorists who dared to break the happy humanity of the evening.

It was a crowd of jolly 20-somethings, convening to drink and devour dumplings and delight in one another’s company. It was a crowd of many former classmates, whose faces I recognized, but who I couldn’t quite place. It made the party seem vaguely comforting and also a little unsettling.

A little after 10, I bundled up and headed outside, my hand on my belly, warm with beer and soup. I met up with Marcie five blocks away on the corner of 18th and Columbia and we trudged to a tall apartment building, where we went up to a party where no one knew anyone, but everyone was talking about love.

The party had cheese and wine and bread and those bright red roasted peppers in oil that have such a strange texture, like raw flesh. So we found a little corner and nibbled on things and talked about things until it was after one and we were sleepy, so we headed back to Marcie’s house.

The next morning, we got up and brought the computer to bed to seek out a breakfast spot. We shared some okay-but-not-great eggs and pancakes, had a mini-adventure at a furniture store nearby and then we each went our separate ways.

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!

By the end of Saturday night, everyone could speak for a full bottle of wine, plus a plastic bottle of unfiltered rice wine and a few delicious beers, the most wonderful of which was the Dogfish 120 minute IPA that made me feel like I was smack in the middle of a field of hops with my head thrown back, drinking in golden sunshine.

But it wasn’t just a night for booze.

There were friends. Lots of lovely friends.

We started at 6:30 and talked about food and wine and cutting up cows. We moved into music and farming and what makes ambition. Then into love and bike rides to Mt. Vernon. We contemplated climbing mountains. And around midnight, when most of the crew had left for the bars and their beds, the last comrades standing threw their hands in the air for an impromptu happy dance that lasted at least 5 songs.

The recipe for pajun is from the New York Times — I doubled it with no incident. For the flour, went with 1/2 tapioca and 1/2 all-purpose for a slightly chewier, bouncier pancake.

For veg, I used green beans and scallions, minced finely into little green polka dots. I made the pancakes in a small pan so they’d be easier to flip and they’d work as appetizers. I served them with okonomiyaki sauce: spicy, tangy, perfect with eggs.

The curry was standard panang from a can — in this case, the Mae Ploy brand, doctored with sugar, fish sauce, kaffir lime leaves, lime juice, chilis and basil.

The eggplant basil tofu was a variation on a staple basil _(insert protein here)_ dish that I often make when I can get my hands on quantities of delicious basil and feel like something quick. The basic recipe follows below — the amounts are pretty flexible and up to your particular tastebuds.

Playing hostess…

Marcie and new roomie Chris with rice and rice-cakes from H-mart.

It snowed this weekend and it was beautiful. The white fluff piled up and up and up around our doorstep and in the street, disguising cars as white lambs, peaceful and chill.

We were warned that people in Washington couldn’t hack it on the roads in the snow, but still, we were determined to make the trek out to Falls Church, VA to the Korean superstore for provisions.

I was craving chili and strange smelling greens and products made of rice and tapioca. I wanted to rest my palm on the spikes of a durian and gape at a tank of geoducks and wrinkle my nose at the dried fungus. I wanted to stare at bewilderment at the choices of nori and buy bottles of soy sauce: light and dark and maybe some variations in between.

We were fairly warned, but still, the two hour trip (in fairer weather, 20 minutes or so) was long and I got cranky, but tried not to be because DC has been so beautiful so far that I didn’t want to ruin it over some ice and silly drivers.

And in the end it was worth it because H-mart had everything I wanted and banana flowers.

That’s them on the right up above. And they had all kinds of greens like the funny long Thai “parsley” and the shiny lemony leaves that look like they come from a tree, but are soft, and all kinds of basil and mint.

And, yes! Back there, in the plastic wrapping, there’s fresh turmeric and galangal and other hard-to-find, but totally awesome items.

Which means that I can go back there soon and get everything I need to make NOAM BAN CHOP, also known as Cambodian’s national dish — noodley goodness atop banana flower, cukes, topped with a fragrant, fishy, lemongrass, galangal, coconutty goodness and finished off with beansprouts and all kinds of fresh greens.

H-mart also had a fantastic selection of prepared foods, including crunchy, spicy pickled Daikon with sesame seeds that is so ridiculously yummy and refreshing that I could live off that and rice and a wee bit of egg for days straight.

That’s new roomie Chris on the left, eating one of the fresh rice cakes from H-mart — the kind that don’t taste like cardboard, but more like sweet, crunchy, light melty yumminess. According to this Washington Post review, the rice cakes are made by Suk Pyo Choi and his wife, Hae Young out of rice, soybean, water and a little bit of artificial sweetener. I wonder if it would ruin the recipe to add some stevia instead? Perhaps I’ll suggest it to Mr. Choi next time I’m there.

Twas a good trip and when the snow melts again, I plan to take my bike out there for a little adventure. I wonder how a whole striped bass would look strapped over my back rack. Too great for words? Perhaps.
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