NYC Launch of "Eating Planet 2012"

It is a time of both excess and scarcity. One billion people go hungry while much of our food goes to waste. One billion people suffer from obesity while our industrial food system produces as much as one third of our greenhouse gasses.    Biological, cultural, regional and economic diversity in our food supply is rare.  In this time of incongruities comes a book that explores the complex problems that lie beneath our most pressing problem of how to feed ourselves. Check out “Eating Green 2012” and the NYC launch with some of the world's best food thinkers here.

Solstice Sustenace

spinach soaking up some rays.

The summer solstice has long been an astronomical event that inspires celebrations of the sun's all important rays through, rituals, poetry, songs, and meals.  I always end up musing a bit about the magic-like process of photosynthesis that makes the world's food system go around--this capture of the sun's energy is really the basis for all life of planet earth so a bit of musing seems appropriate. And appreciation as well.  Today at my weekly cooking class, we celebrated the Solstice with goods form our community garden in a salad of Lolla Rosa and Speckled lettuces, Bloomsdale spinach, sweet Cascadia snap peas, shelling peas, and the edible  flowers of our French Breakfast radishes.  When celebrating, I also like to enjoy the wild things that grow, untended, in fields and yards and gardens, which is why I appreciated this piece on NPR that led me to this beautiful blog on foraged foods.  After a quick onceover today, in my own urban yard, I can find wild garlic mustard (for pesto), purslane and lamb's quarters in the garden (for salads or sauteeing), daylilies (for stuffing with chicken salad), and mulberries (for snacking or baking or canning)...all available due to the sun's constant shine. 

Spring Apple Affair

Isn't apple blossom time just so beautiful?  

Thinking ahead to the fruit these blossoms will create with the help of some pollinator friends & envisioning a time when diverse, heritage apple trees thrive--the rare Milwaukee varietal included--its been exciting to plant & distribute some of our region's most endangered apple tree varietals this Spring.  

Spring is the time for grafting and planting and tending heritage fruit trees.

To celebrate the beauty of springtime and to sell some heritage apples for backyard, farmstead, professional orchard growing, Slow Food WiSE is hosting a special event tomorrow.  

Please join us for the first ever Spring Apple Affair on Saturday, May 12th from 12-4pm at the Stahl-Conrad Homestead in Hales Corners, WI.   

Bring your friends and family (including mom--it is the day before Mother's Day after all.)  Bring a picnic and your favorite apple recipe to exchange.  Bring your work gloves if you want to help clean up our tiny heritage orchard. Leave with a heritage fruit tree, local honey, a Mother's Day present, more knowledge, and new friends. 

Spring Apple Affair

• Heritage Apple Tree Sales
• Holistic Apple Tree Care Education  (with organic grower Joe Fahey of Peck & Bushel) 
• Local Product Sales, including Viola's Honey & Hack Farm's eggs & vegetable
• Spring Clean-up of our Heritage Orchard
  Apple Recipe Exchange (bring your favorite!)  
• Apple Preserves Tastings
• Special Mother's Day & Kid Friendly Activities
• And B.Y.O.P.-Bring Your Own Picnic!

  

For more info, to RSVP, or to volunteer, contact Jennifer - Jcasey@slowfoodwise.org.

To read more about our heritage trees and our grower, and to learn more about Slow Food WiSE, read the latest Slow Times.

Spring=Garden=Good

Spring is such a beautiful time for good food.  The wild—ramps, wild onions, fiddelheads, morels, dandelions, violet blossoms.  The cultivated—radishes, pea shoots, asparagus, chives, rhubarb, garlic scapes, tender greens, scallions.  That particular green of sunlight on leaves and the scent of fruit blossoms shake us out of hibernation.  It’s a wonder that we all don’t succumb to spring fever and skip out of work each fine day to forage and tend and till.

Spring is a time when we can set ourselves up to eat well all year-round by grafting fruit trees, planting our gardens, signing up for a CSA, or using that tax refund for a food dehydrator or pressure canner.  It’s gardening that’s on my mind this spring the most.  With a freshly tilled new garden at home and an increasingly popular community garden program at work, I’ve been reflecting on the powerful positive impacts of gardens. Which is why, of course, they’re spreading like wildfires in Milwaukee and across the country—supported by community activists and public health officials alike.

People garden for many reasons—the pleasure of being outside, the remarkable taste of fresh food, the connections made with other gardeners, the security offered by a plot of food, the money saved by growing your own groceries, and so on.  Intuitively, people feel that gardening is good.  And there’s been some good scientific research into the benefits of community gardens to support those intuitions.  A few of the benefits I like to remind people of if there’s even a whisper that they think its all just feel good fluff:

• Gardening is a promising practice for diabetes prevention and control through healthy activity and food.
• Children & adults who garden eat more fruits and vegetables.
• A garden program promotes healthy food security.
• Gardening reduces stress and calms the nerves.
• Gardening helps youth with self-esteem.
• Gardens strengthen communities.
• “Horticultural Therapy “can help with mental health issues, such as post traumatic stress disorder, depression; and anxiety and may help ex-convicts with rehabilitation
•  Gardening can reduce food miles & support local economies & cultures

Gardening can also promote food biodiversity.  The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity estimates that “300,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct over the last century.”

By growing heirloom and endangered foods in our gardens we can help save these foods from extinction.  The vegetables that have been boarded onto Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste are a good place to start if you’d like to grow endangered veggies—they are rare and delicious and storied.  Some Ark of Taste vegetables (seeds may be sourced through Seed Savers Exchange for most of these) that may be well suited for growing in Wisconsin include:

• Amish Deer Tongue lettuce
• Grandpa Admire's lettuce
• Speckled lettuce
• Tennis Ball lettuce (black seeded)
• Early Blood Turnip-rooted beet
• Beaver Dam pepper
• Bull Nose Large Bell pepper
• Fish pepper
• Hinkelhatz Hot pepper
• Jimmy Nardello's Sweet Italian Frying pepper
• Sheepnose pimiento
• Amish Paste Tomato
• German Pink Tomato
• Sheboygan Tomato
• Red Fig Tomato
• Aunt Molly’s Husk Tomato (ground Cherry)
• Valencia Tomato
• Lina Cisco’s Bird Egg Bean
• True Red Cranberry bean
• Hidatsa Shield Figure bean
• Yellow Indian Woman Bean
• Hutterite Soup bean
• Mayflower Bean
• Turkey’ Hard Red Winter Wheat
• Roy’s Calais flint corn

If you want to learn more about growing food and/or want to be a part of an organized initiative to install home and community gardens in Milwaukee, consider being a part of the 4^th Annual Great Milwaukee Victory Garden Blitz. Their motto at VGI: “Move Grass. Grow Food.”  My thoughts exactly…

Connect with Local Food Producers

This weekend is one of my favorite events of the year; the Local Food and Farmer Open House at Milwaukee's Urban Ecology Center.

You can stop by the UEC from 11am-4pm to meet CSA farmers, attend workshops, find a local source for meat or milk or eggs, and visit with other community members as interested in sustainable food as you.... 

Find all the details, and a list of local CSA farms here.

Adopt Your Own Milwaukee Apple

Milwaukee Apple—Fall of 2011 

Maple Valley Orchard

Join Slow Food WiSE and the handful of orchardists, chefs, and food activists who are bringing antique apples back to our tables by "adopting" your own Milwaukee Apple for your backyard or community space. 

There are only five known Milwaukee apple trees in Milwaukee County. One located in the Urban Ecology Center’s Washington Park fruit orchard, was planted by Slow Food WiSE along with a group of youth and volunteers in 2011.   The other four Milwaukee varietal trees were planted in the Spring of 2010 by Slow Food WiSE volunteers at the Historic Stahl Conrad Homestead in Hale’s Corners, along with Pewaukee and Oneida Apple varieties.

Because the Milwaukee Apple is just one of hundreds of thousands of endangered or extinct apples that have disappeared from our plates, and we are promoting place based biodiversity, we are also adopting additional rare varietals with roots in Wisconsin--the Pewaukee, Oneida, Bonnie Best, and Wolf River.

To learn more and to adopt you own, follow this link.

Happy & Healthy in 2012

In Midwinter, dried beans from the garden lead to me reflecting on the amazing but simple power seeds have to nourish our bodies and propogate life. Planting a seed can change your relationship to life.   In 2012 I'm planting a few new seeds, of sorts, and I'm immersing myself in a project that will keep me off the blogosphere for awhile...maybe I'll have more to share soon.  For now, here's to a happy, healthful, delicious and grace filled year. 

Protect the Wilds of Wild Rice

Photo from a wonderful, in depth article on Wild Rice at Circle of Blue.

Real wild rice is at risk of disappearing.   

Manoomin, the “good grain” in Anishinaabeg, the only native grain to Northern America, the richly delicious and nutritious aquatic seed that is a keystone traditional food of Anishinaabeg tribes (Ojibwe/Chippewa, Ottawa/Odawa, and Algonquian) has yet another threat to its existence.   Unique to the Upper Great Lakes' region, Manoomin, which is on Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste (and one of only seven US Presidia) for its amazing depth and diversity of flavors and its rich cultural heritage, is respected around the world as a true American food.  

But can we protect it here in Wisconsin?

Wisconsin State Assembly Bill 426, said to have been written “for” mining corporations, would repeal several environmental protections and limit public participation to streamline mining projects.  Of particular note is Gogebic Taconite's plan to open an open-pit iron ore mine in the Penokee Range in northern Wisconsin—a move which would directly affect the nearby Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe.  An open-pit iron ore mine with relaxed environmental standards would be devastating to the tribe’s watershed—including the wetlands that are home to wild rice.   

Concerned? If in Wisconsin, contact your legislators. The Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters makes it easy here.

              

You can also help by supporting producers,  read more about wild rice and find Native distributors from our region in a recent post of mine and at Native Harvest..  

And, if you need some more inspiration, listen to my friend, writer and environmental advocate Eric Hansen, speak about the risk of mining to the ecology of the Upper Great Lakes here.

Buon Terra Madre Day

On this day,  Slow Food's Terra Madre Day, people all around the world are celebrating their own unique food sheds; supporting the good, clean, and fair foods and producers that are important to their communities.

Here in Wisconsin, we can celebrate the raw milk cheeses, heirloom winter squashes, antique apples, like the rare Milwaukee Apple that keep our agricultural traditions alive.  We can celebrate wild things too--venison, blackberries, hazelnuts, wild rice...  I'll be heading over to the winter farmer's market to pick up a few things like fairy winter squash, golden russet apples, red wattle pork salami and then will , and Saxon cheeses to share them with loved ones today and throughout the holidays.  You can check out how people are celebrating, in over 120 countries at the Terra Madre day website.

Good Food Thanksgiving

Planning for Thanksgiving—a favorite holiday of foodies across the nation—can be, well, downright frustrating for the meal planners.  One guest is watching their cholesterol intake, another their glycemic load, one hates veggies, and one is a vegetarian….  I recognize that to add to this potentially divisive list of demands the esoteric concepts of environmental and social responsibility might seem mad to some, but I believe this holiday devoted to giving thanks should be based on these concepts.

In my book, delicious, healthy, and ethical food is worth any extra effort for the deeply honest pleasures it can provide.  And with some planning, it might not seem extra at all.  Slow Food USA is trying to make it easy on meal planners trying to please both palate and conscience with a Thanksgiving Guide, replete with recipes, tips for easy meal planning, and thoughts on the origins of the holiday (the story of which was explored here in 2009.) 

Top 5 tips to have a Slow Food Thanksgiving:

1. Shop for fresh, seasonal, and local foods at a farmers market;
2. Take the time to learn about where your food comes from and how it was raised;
3. Give thanks for the labor that brought your food to your table and the earth that grew it;
4. Get all hands on deck in the kitchen. Teach others what you know and learn from them;
5. And then sit back and savor the meal with family and friends.

When I plan Thanksgiving, there are a few key ingredients—delicious, nutritious, place based ingredients—that I consider the stars of the table.  What follows is a bit of musing on some of these fine foods:

Apple varietals, once numbered in the thousands across this land, are now quite limited, with industrial foodways leaving room for only a few varieties in the grocery stores.  But a trip to the Milwaukee County Winter’s Farmers Market, or one of our local antique apple orchards, will yield many varieties such as the Wolf River, Autumn Berry, Willow Twig, Lady Apple, Golden Russet, Northern Spy, Black Giliflower, Arkansas Black, Northwest Greening, Snow, Winesap, etc....all autumn varietals in our region.  On my table, I might feature local apples on a cheese plate or in an apple cranberry sauce, in an apple crisp, as an ingredient in the stuffing or by serving an artisanal apple cider with dinner.

Pumpkin or winter squash, a truly American food, is a must at Thanksgiving, and need not be limited to the realm of pie.  The bright orange flesh (due to all that beta carotene) is a reminder that they sat in the field all season, soaking up sun.   Unique varieties of squash, like Sibley, Boston Marrow, Amish Pie, Galeux d'Eysines, Buttercup, Marina di Chioggia, each have their own unique flavors and textures and stories though they are, for the most part but with many caveats, interchangeable.  My all time favorite, the Marina di Chioggia, comes from Italy and has dense flesh, and a rich, nutty flavor that finds a good home in biscuits and breads, pies and purees. This year I’m likely to use the Long Pie Pumpkin (otherwise known by the name Nantucket) or Fairy Squash grown by my friends at Pinehold Gardens for a pumpkin and sage bisque.  In years past, squash has been served up simply; halved, brushed with real maple syrup, roasted and sliced or diced large and roasted along with root vegetables or baked and stuffed with the next key ingredient, wild rice.

True Wild Rice is precious—an important traditional food of the Ojibwe and Menominee people of this region, it is still hand harvested each year by “knocking” the rice into canoes as they glide through the wetland stands in which the rice grows wild.  This tradition is at risk, due to polluted waters, changing land use, and shifting foodways, which is likely why real wild rice has gone up in price in the past couple of years, making it unaffordable to many Native people who don’t harvest it themselves.   To seek out  and serve wild rice at the table not only supports people continuing an important traditional foodway, but is a truly nutritious and delicious regional food.  Always nutty and aromatic, real wild rice flavor will vary from rice bed to rice bed.  It’s hard to compare the real thing with the much more common cultivated “paddy rice” which takes much longer to cook and has a very different taste and texture.  Wild rice is wonderful served on its own, but I often like to serve it as a dressing/stuffing; mixed with ingredients like cranberries, celery, hazelnuts and apples.  Learn more and find distributors of real wild rice here

And then there’s the turkey.  Heritage turkey breeds, like Narragansett, White Holland , Bourbon Red, Bronze, are uniquely American and very, very unique. Today 99% of turkeys are the same industrialized breed; the Broad Breasted White is raised to grow so fast, that they’ve no ability to forage, fly, or mate naturally.  To serve a heritage turkey supports small family farms and it also yields a much richer, more flavorful meat due to the slow growth rates.  The Slow Food Thanksgiving guide has more information on heritage turkeys and through my local Slow Food WiSE chapter, we compile an annual local heritage buying guide to promote the restoration of heritage breed turkeys within our region by pairing farmers with eaters.  

“Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”         ― Wendell Berry

 Happy Thanksgiving

Happy FOOD DAY!

Food Day, created by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is a day for everyone to get involved in the movement for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way. Visit the website to find an event in your area or to get inspired by what communities across the county are doing to celebrate, find recipes, watch videos and sign a letter telling congress to support Food Day's goals:

Celebrating Traditional Foods & Stories

Before french fries, pizza, ice cream and soda became mainstays of the American Diet (with an average of 29 pounds fries, 23 pounds pizza, 24 pounds ice cream and 53 gallons soda consumed annually per person,) before even apples or honeybees were brought by early colonists, there was widely diverse cuisine enjoyed by Native people across the Americas.  Foods like wild rice, corn, beans, squash, wild greens, roots, herbs, seeds, berries, fish and game just begin to tell the story of this land and its people.  Now the relative rarity of these foods, overshadowed by heavily processed commodities, bespeaks of drastic changes in a remarkably short period of time.   Interested in exploring the stories of Native food and people and how they might lead us on a path to wellness, I helped to create a compilation of Milwaukee area Native elders’ stories along with seasonal, healthy recipes to celebrate the traditional foodways of this region in book form.

Years in the making, this project was born of a long-time relationship between my health center, the Gerald L Ignace Indian Health Center (GLIIHC), and the Indian Council of the Elderly through the WOLFE group—a weekly fitness and food group for elders.  The project grew with the help of Milwaukee Public Theatre, Native Punx, Southeastern Oneida Tribal Services, and with funding from the Forest County Potawatomi Foundation.  At its root, the Mino Ayaa Project supports knowledge sharing of traditional foodways that promote wellness in the Milwaukee area Native community.  The e-version of the book can be downloaded for free here.  A spiral bound version is available at GLIIHC, where donations are appreciated and go to WOLFE group programming. 

As I frequently contend, all cultures have their healthy traditions. But the vast majority if the world’s cultural traditions have given way to the consumer culture and its modern monotonous landscape of sedentary activities and heavily processed, corporate foods.   Culture naturally changes over time, but I wonder how we might embrace these changes without losing the core traditions that keep people and places healthy.  Of relevance, is The Cultural Wellness Center’s People's Theory that says, “Individualism and loss of community and culture make us sick.”  Using this as a premise for understanding how to overcome our challenges, we could then say that reconnection with key aspects of culture (such as food) and building community (such as through foodways) can heal much of what ails us. 

We all live in a very different world than our ancestors just a few generations past.  The way we communicate, sleep, purchase, move goods, entertain ourselves, travel and commute, feed ourselves, stay warm or cool, work, think, move, seek information has changed.  With these changes has come the ability to do some very brilliant things—finding long lost relatives on Facebook, purchasing olive oil at the corner grocer, eating Korean barbeque squid one night and Ethiopian injera with lentils the next, taking women’s literature and nutritional genomics courses in a single college education, build grassroots movements through the internet, view images of people and places from around the world… And with these changes have come some real horrors—global warming, epidemics of diabetes and obesity, patenting of seeds and resulting loss of seed sovereignty, species extinction, rampant pollution, worldwide economic calamity…  It’s a brilliant, scary world we live in, in need of balance in so many ways.  I think the key in restoring balance lies in shedding the reigns of the consumer-corporate culture and re-embracing traditions that have served people very well for centuries—with a necessary modern twist because we and the world are always changing.   In our global society, we have access to a wide berth of cultural wisdom from a wide range of cultures.  We can look to these cultures for suggestions on how to live well.   And eat well.  With good food, the basic sustenance of life, we have an entry point for growing community, understanding, prosperity, and wellness.

What I Did this Summer

I saw a flock of Canada geese heading south on my morning walk.  With kids back in school, apples ripening on the trees, and the fall equinox quickly approaching, I find myself reflecting on the ways in which I spent the long days and warm nights of summer.

In an effort to find some balance during the fleeting, precious months of summer, I tried to limit my time on the computer (as evidenced by a longer lapse than usual between posts.) Instead, I chose to spend as much time out of doors as possible; hiking the woods and prairies, biking on paths and on streets, picnicking in city parks to the sounds of live music, camping in state parks to the sounds of bird song and night creaks, enjoying long meals on the porch or in the backyard with family and friends, swimming in a few of the many thousand freshwater lakes in the region, visiting new and old friends' farms and markets, tending home and work gardens, and taking long, long walks along Lake Michigan. 

This seems, to me, a sustainable way to enjoy life; to create more opportunities to make food, grow food, seek out real food, share food with loved ones, listen to the sounds of your neighborhood, meet your neighbors be they people, plants, or wildlife, feel sunshine on your skin,  and celebrate each and every moment of peace.  Not to stray to far from the usual format of this blog to wax poetic about the summertime....but it seems to me that I reclaimed a precious, wholesome peace by unplugging from my various e-connections and plugging into my visceral surroundings.

I also found time to read.  Fiction and nonfiction alike inspired. Among the several food books whose pages I burrowed into, including books about salmon, cod, chef-fing, and food rebels, I found one of the most enjoyable tommes to celebrate America's fine fare: American Terroir.  Through these pages, I gained a deeper appreciation for the likes of oysters, chocolate, and coffee, and remembered my fondness for wild edibles, raw milk cheese, apples, maple syrup, and honey.  Rowan Jacobsen takes North American terroir--the taste of place is the way I like to think about the term--to a new level.  I highly recommend this book for anyone who cares deeply about place based foods, farming, pleasure, and soil.

Speaking of terroir and books, my work at Milwaukee's urban Indian health center this summer involved celebrating regional food traditions through the editing and publishing of a new traditional food recipe and storybook; Mino Ayaa.  More on this soon, but in brief, the book promotes wellness through sharing seasonal wild and cultivated food recipes as well as stories from American Indian elders.  We unveiled the book this past weekend at Indian Summer Festival during our elder group's Three Sisters Stew cooking demo.   The 25th year celebration of Indian Summer, the countires largest American Indian cultural fest, included a new Tribal farmers' Market, several cooking demos, pow wows, and some really great traditionl food (wild rice cakes, bison chili and corn soup, among my favorites.) Our health center was on hand raising awareness on the ways to prevent and control diabetes.

And now its time to make the most of the harvest by canning, freezing, pickling, and drying summer's bounty and toil...to enjoy a bit of sunshine during the long, cold nights of winter.

"food ark" in national geographic

 

Our Dwindling Food Variety

As we've come to depend on a handful of commercial varieties of fruits and vegetables, thousands of heirloom varieties have disappeared. It's hard to know exactly how many have been lost over the past century, but a study conducted in 1983 by the Rural Advancement Foundation International gave a clue to the scope of the problem. It compared USDA listings of seed varieties sold by commercial U.S. seed houses in 1903 with those in the U.S. National Seed Storage Laboratory in 1983. The survey, which included 66 crops, found that about 93 percent of the varieties had gone extinct. More up-to-date studies are needed.

I had forgotten how much I loved National Geographic (whose tagline is "Inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888") when I was handed a copy of the July Issue...for it contained an article on a subject near and dear to my heart: food biodiversity.  The article Food Ark starts us off with this:

A crisis is looming: To feed our growing population, we’ll need to double food production. Yet crop yields aren’t increasing fast enough, and climate change and new diseases threaten the limited varieties we’ve come to depend on for food. Luckily we still have the seeds and breeds to ensure our future food supply—but we must take steps to save them.

Author Charles Siebert highlights work being done by Seed Savers Exchange: a Slow Food USA partner in the Renewing America's Food Traditions alliance and chief seed source for many of the foods on Slow Food's Ark of Taste.  He also re-tells the story of the "Green Revolution" --an effort to feed the world through industrialized agriculture, which in a tragically ironic turn of events, has turned out to put us at risk of the aforementioned food crisis. With climate change and growing pest threats, putting all of our eggs in the proverbial "one basket" of GMOs or any monocrops, leaves us at high risk.  No matter what the biotech industry would have us believe, we do not need expensive, resource intensive, patented seeds to feed the world.  Thousands of varieties of plants and animals have evolved with traits uniquely suited for their particular ecosystem niche. And people have been feeding themselves healthfully in unique ways for centuries.  By industrializing the food system, we've ended up with an industrialized, heavily processed, unsavory diet...and an epidemic of diet related diseases to boot.

As I've mentioned many times before here and when public speaking: biodiversity is a marker of a health in any system... Diversity in the food supply and in nutrition help to keep a healthier planet and population of people. For some ideas on how to protect and restore food biodiversity on your plate or in your own backyard, check out these previous posts.  Here too.