Take the scenic route

We stumbled on a lovely post by Elizabeth Thompson on the Piedmont Biofarm blog, excerpted here with permission:

Bee on mustard

Community Supported Agriculture was born of a hunger for deeper connection in an increasingly fragmented world. I love how the hungers that planted the first seeds of this movement continue to be fed in the CSAs of 2010.

Our Piedmont Biofarm CSA offers plentiful and delicious vegetables, but it also offers gems of connection and relationship to the land, our food and our neighbors. This, I believe, is life on the scenic route.

Being a part of a CSA is taking an active stance in living a slower, more present life.

The reality of life’s business and speed is constant, from the whirl of email to the buzz of the highways.  Yet we can take little stances of connection and interaction that give our life some breathing room like the pauses in music or the blank spaces on a page.

Coming to the Biofarm is a breathing space for me, a bit like meditation.  I inhale more deeply and connect to the earth, my food, and my neighbors.  I feel, in a more direct way than is possible at a supermarket, the web of connection that keeps people and land in constant conversation.

I see the wind bending the flowering tops of the mustard greens down towards the ground. I feel the grit of the dry, red clay between my toes. I see the soil stained overalls of my farmer.  I see neighbors who are nourished by the same soil, and I go home to taste the richness and freshness of these connections in my meals.

– Elizabeth Thompson is a member of the Piedmont Biofarm CSA.

Quote of the Week: From two chefs, many

Karen and Ben Barker, the chefs/owners of  the award-winning Magnolia Grill in Durham, N.C. “are regular shoppers at the Carrboro Farmers Market. They have long-standing relationships with places such as Peregrine Farm in Alamance County. Their kitchen alumni recall foraging for morels and black trumpets. Recent menus tout Columbia, S.C.’s Anson Mills rice, Siler City’s Celebrity Dairy cheese and Chapel Hill’s Eco Farm arugula.

“Their commitment to local food may be common now, but it wasn’t when they started in the late 1980s. Those who passed through their kitchen have continued securing high-quality ingredients and working with local farmers. Joshua Applestone, who has become a media darling of the cool profession of the moment – butcher – credits his experience at Magnolia Grill with leading him to start Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, N.Y.”

–Andrea Weigl, “From Two Chefs, Many,” The News and Observer. Photo by Shawn Rocco.

Carrboro Farmers’ Market will take credit, debit and food-stamp cards

Truck Buck token

Holy plastic.  Buying fresh, local, healthy food at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market will soon be much more convenient. Starting May 1, the market will accept credit, debit and EBT/Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cards.

As part of the new Common Currency Program, customers using plastic will receive “Truck Bucks,” wooden tokens that can be used like cash to shop throughout the market.

As an added incentive to shoppers using SNAP cards (formerly known as food stamps), the market will match up to $20 in expenditures with $20 in additional “Market Match” coupons, until supplies run out.

The idea is to boost the local economy by making it easier for more people to buy fresh local food — helping local farmers and keeping the money in the community.

With the new program, “we will be able to offer the best in local foods to even more members of our community,” said market manager Sarah Blacklin.

Founded in 1978, the Carrboro Farmers’ Market is one of the oldest and best farmer-owned-and-operated markets in the country, and the first in the greater Triangle Area.   It’s also been a leader in trying to increase access to sustainable food for low- and fixed- income shoppers. For example, the market already accepts coupons benefiting senior citizens and consumers in the federal WIC program providing supplemental food for low-income families. And last year it launched the Farmer Food Share Program which provides 500-1,000 pounds of  fresh market food to local hunger relief organizations.

The Common Currency Program is made possible by a grant from the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) in partnership with Leaflight’s 21st Century Farmers’ Market Program, The Splinter Group and the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.

– Dee Reid

Quote of the Week: Tobacco town turns to local food

Matt Neal (Neal's Deli) at Carrboro Market. (Travis Davis/NYTimes)

“….. hundreds of outlying acres of rich Piedmont soil have ‘transitioned’ from tobacco, and now sprout peas, strawberries, fennel, artichokes and lettuce. Animals also thrive in the gentle climate, giving chefs access to local milk, cheese, eggs, pigs, chickens, quail, lambs and rabbits.

‘You can see the change, just driving from here to the coast,’ two hours away, said Amy Tornquist, the chef and an owner of Watts Grocery, a restaurant near the Duke campus. Ms. Tornquist, 44, has lived in the area all her life. ‘You never saw sheep when I was young, you never saw cattle in the fields — it was all tobacco all the time,’ she said. Ms. Tornquist’s restaurant isn’t blatantly farm to fork: it’s simply a given in Durham these days.

‘One of our farmers said that at this point, it would make more sense for us to list the things on the menu that aren’t local,’ said Drew Brown, a chef-owner of Piedmont, a restaurant a few steps from Durham’s farmer’s market and right next door to the city’s public herb garden.”

– ‘A Tobacco Town Turns to Local Food,’ New York Times, April 21, 2010

Sandhills Farm to Table

By Lyle Estill

Today at work I encountered a pile of neglected snail mail, including a homemade DVD with a hand-written note, the signature of which I could not decipher.

I popped it into my computer and was greeted by “A Sandhills Farm to Table Conversation,” the story behind an innovative  new cooperative of farmers and consumers in nearby Moore County, N.C.  

The video began with a farmer talking about their diversification efforts.  It moved to an organizer who talked about how they had managed to build a broad base of support-from churches to agricultural extension agents to surrounding farmer’s markets.  And it ended with a woman who is committed to slipping recipes into every box of food.

My response to the video was mixed.  As a committed maker of bad movies with my own You Tube Channel, I could relate (and as a film school drop out, I was horrified).  But as someone who has been to the Sandhills many times to talk about resilient communities I was intrigued.

I’ve met these people.  They have come to Pittsboro to tour our Eco-Industrial Park and our farms.  I’ve been down to their community centers and hotels and restaurants. We have communicated with email.  And in some strange way I felt the DVD was part of a broader correspondence.

They have gone out and built a community-wide CSA (community supported agriculture venture where consumers pay in advance for fresh food from the farm) with some 750 members.  That’s giant.  All of the CSAs that I have been involved in number less than 100.  Most are closer to 50 subscribers.  

As I watched the video I realized I was peering into raw, uncut footage of how a community figures out how to feed itself.  Forget production values.  It was the stuff of resilience.

As a newly minted cooperative, their tagline is “We Are All in This Together.”  And by that they mean they are not simply eaters who are demanding the lowest possible price for the food they consume.  Or simply growers who are trying to fetch the highest possible price for the food they produce.  Rather, they are in it together, and attempting to feed as many people as possible.

Like many communities in America the Sandhills region is a place of vanishing farmland.  As conventional agriculture recedes, and golf course communities continue their ascendancy, the Sandhills appears to be a place that has decided to figure out how to feed itself.

With area farmer’s markets enjoying less than a 1% penetration rate, these people have decided to create a community wide CSA with multiple “Gathering Points” where people can pick up their boxes of food.

And when they do, they will find some recipes included-in case the eater has forgotten what to do with a whole vegetable or fruit.

I was inspired by the video.

In a time when so many people seem either hopeless or lost, this group has rolled up its sleeves and taken direct action on how they might feed themselves.

I’m in awe.

Action Alert: Call your Senators to reform S510 before it’s too late

Congress could act  soon on S510, the Food Safety Modernization Act. If it passes without reforms to address the needs of small-scale farming and food processing,  it could kill sustainable agriculture.  Now is the time to call your Senators and ask them to add important changes to the bill.

Here’s what Roland McReynolds of Carolina Farm Stewardship Association suggests you tell your Senators to do:

• Require FDA to write new, flexible rules for small businesses. Small food producers are already subject to state and federal rules.  S 510’s on-farm and HARPC rules should not be applied to these small businesses.  Support the Sanders and Tester amendments.

• Establish USDA training programs for small farms and food entrepreneurs. The Senate should include S 2758, the Growing Safe Food Act, in S 510, and fund programs to get critical food safety information into the hands of small food producers.  This is the best way to ensure the safety of local food.

• Eliminate pointless traceability rules for farmer-marketed products. Farm-identity preserved products should be exempt from bar-coding or other schemes meant for tracking products through the “Food Inc.” supply chain.

• Focus on real animal risks, not wildlife and farm dogs. FDA should use proven science to identify animal sources of pathogens and appropriate controls, instead of the current approach of treating all animals on farms as a food safety threat.

Here are the numbers to call:

Sen. Richard Burr, NC, (202) 224-3154

Sen. Kay Hagan, NC (202)-224-6342

Keeping up with the greens

By Camille Armantrout

I recently figured out an easy way to process the abundance of greens Bob and I take in from our garden and two CSA’s.

It’s my job to keep the produce flowing from farm box to plate, and the bulk of it is greens. Making sure we eat them is the best health insurance we can buy.

Prolific and inexpensive, greens are packed with an impressive array of vitamins and minerals including vitamins B1, B2, B6, C, and E, calcium, carotenes, copper, folic acid, iron, magnesium, manganese,  phosphorus and potassium. Our immune systems are bursting with vigor from eating so much kale, chard, spinach, beet, turnip and mustard greens.

Greens weren’t a part of my childhood. I was raised in the north on northern vegetables, many of them frozen, taken from the freezer and plopped into the steamer as solid bricks of peas, corn, broccoli, spinach, lima beans or brussel sprouts. My least favorites were okra, a slimy mound of fibrous discs and frog’s eyes, and the whole-leaf spinach which made me gag as the long veins worked their way down my throat.

It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I began cooking with fresh greens. It began with stirring a pound of chard into a pot of curry and evolved into greens as a side dish in its own right. This time of year, we’re eating half a bushel of greens a week.

Each week we pick up our weekly half bushel of fresh picked produce from Edible Earthscapes.

This week it was packed with kale, chard, mustard greens, mizuna,carrots, and salad greens. This past Friday, Bob brought home a grocery bag full of kale and a half bushel of radishes, turnips and carrots, greens attached from Central Carolina Community College’s Land Lab.

The challenge of turning all of these greens into food can be daunting. Last night while I stood at the sink,rinsing and chopping greens, I couldn’t help but stare at the enormous kale plant outside our kitchen window, crying out to be harvested.

“Any day now” I thought “Bob’s going to walk inside with his arms full of kale.” I caught myself hoping today wasn’t going to be that day.

Last year I froze a fair amount of greens and that worked out great. I just wash and chop and put them into plastic freezer bags and squeeze out the air. We cooked and served these frozen greens at a New Years Day party and they were just fine.

This year, I’ve challenged myself to keep up with the greens by cooking them as I get them to eat that night or keep for another meal. Save the freezer space. Get the vitamins at their fullest. It doesn’t take that long to fix them up when we get them and a grocery bag full cooks down into six or seven cups which takes up a lot less,space in the refrigerator.

Sauted onion and mustard greens base, ready for the other greens to steam on top.

Here’s what I do. I chop an onion and sauté it in peanut oil in a large pot. I put all the greens in the sink and rinse them, then stack the leaves on the cutting board and chop them into bite sized pieces. I’m finicky enough to remove the large veins from everything but the chard but that’s up to you.

Stir the chopped chard stems and the heavier greens (kale, chard, mustard greens and collards) into the onion, add a couple of tablespoons of tamari or soy sauce and cover to let them steam. After a few minutes, I stir the greens up with the onion and add the lighter greens – spinach, turnip, radish and mizuna to steam for another minute.

This delicious green vitamin dish is now ready for storage or can be cooked a little longer and served immediately. And that’s how easy it is to keep up with the greens!