food museum blog

Spuds Are In At Summit Springs Farm

Reddale, Carola, Butte, Cranberry, Russian Banana Fingerling, and All-Blue--they are in!  Potatoes, of course. Glorious tubers orginating in the South American Andes and now growing worldwide.
Our intrepid farmers in Poland, Maine not only planted them in recent days but they've already harvested some local media coverage in Portland from a tv journalist who has joined SSFarm's CSA and wants to chronicle her experience there over the season. The details at 10!

( Sonya plants, in the trench dug by John.)

SSF Mainiacs Visit Fabled Indian Farm

The Summit Springs Farm-ers, ( you may recall their ongoing effort to erect a large greenhouse on their spread,) recently have returned to Maine after an incredible 5-week trip to India, and their spokesperson on all things ag, John Sayles, sent us this report:

" One of the most rewarding experiences of the trip was a visit to Navdanya, an organic research farm and seed bank about 10 kilometers outside the city of Dehra Dun in the Indian state of Uttranchal. The 20-acre site was founded in the 1980’s by Dr. Vandana Shiva, a scientist, environmentalist, and activist, “to support local farmers, rescue and conserve crops and plants that are being pushed to extinction and make them available through direct marketing.” The Navdanya website also notes that the farm is “actively involved in the rejuvenation of indigenous knowledge and culture. [Navdanya] has created awareness on the hazards of genetic engineering,  ( and)defended people's knowledge from biopiracy and food rights in the face of globalization.”

After looking through the small bookstore and administrative center, we walked around this unique farm with a guide. In small plots, different combinations of crops are grown together to see how they do. One plot may have carrots and onions together; another may have carrots, onions, and coriander (cilantro). Crop density is also studied. One plot of wheat has been intensively planted, and another less so, and another even less, but perhaps also interspersed with another grain or even another variety of wheat. Dozens and dozens of these plots cover the farm’s open spaces. Nearby is an orchard, and in the opposite direction is the seed bank.

We took a short walk down a tree-lined lane with bright green parrots flitting about overhead, to reach the seed bank, a modest rectangular building with an adobe appearance. We all took off our shoes and filed in. Over 300 varieties of rice are kept here in metal boxes, plus about 70 varieties of wheat, numerous other grains, and vegetable and fruit seeds. It is probably the most extensive private seed bank of its kind in all of India. The building itself, though, was much smaller than expected, quite modest, and decorated with lively paintings of flora and fauna on the walls. Outside, the spirit of experimentation and variety continued with the compost area. We saw four or five different composting methods being tried, everything from pit composting to compost bins with removable sides to elaborate composting trenches designed to make the worms happy.

  Our friend and traveling companion, Nicole, is an amateur herbalist and was thrilled to spend some time with the farm’s herbal guru. He showed us around his modest plots of medicinal and cooking herbs and also allowed us a peek into his rooms where he dries and prepares the herbs. All of this was followed by an excellent buffet-style lunch in the farm’s mess hall. We took a brief look around the farm’s library and bookstore and purchased a few books, including an Indian cookbook, before thanking our new friends and hitting the road for the drive back to our ashram in Laksman Jhula. The Navdanya experience was moving, inspiring, and thought-provoking. I would love to return for a longer stay and perhaps do some volunteer work there as a way to help this noble effort. "

For more information on the remarkable visionary Dr. Vandana Shiva, a physicist trained at the University of Western Ontario, click here.

(Pix by shaggy, baggy Farmer John who can be seen just above on the right.)

Spuds on NPR

On New Year's Eve we donned our potato skins and did an interview with Melissa Block for All Things Considered on National Public Radio. Her producer called us in line with the United Nations' dubbing of 2008 as the International Year of the Potato.
For those of you who do not know our story, we started out in the food history biz focused on the powerful potato. Tom began The Potato Museum in 1975 as a classroom project for his students at the International School of Brussels in Belgium. It grew as word spread, its pioneering  museum about a food effort turning up a few years later as part of two major exhibitions--the Smithsonian's Seeds of Change event for the Quincentenary and Canada's remarkable Amazing Potato exhibit at Ottawa's National Museum of Science and Technology.
The FOOD Museum On Line and this Blog is an offshoot of that venture. Listen below...

Toiling Under the Spreading Avocado Tree

In response to a Post from fellow Blogger Kathy F. at

http://whatdoiknow.typepad.com/what_do_i_know/ , I wrote the following.

"Usually I am not blogging from a small cafe table outdoors under an enormous avocado tree. Yet since I am in St Petersburg, Florida, for several weeks, working on a food history book, this site seems appropriate to a Blog dedicated to all things eclectically food. ( My usual workplace is a messy home office in New Mexico.)
My new workspace is not always tranquil. Acorns from surrounding live oaks hammer down on adjacent sheds and squirrels natter loudly.
If only my new digital camera worked with this traveling laptop, I would enclose a pic. Maybe later, after a huge avocado and grapefruit salad. The adjacent yard has numerous gfruits and friendly neighbors..."

This reminded me that eons ago, in our parlor floor apartment on the Lower Eastside of New York, just off the Bowery, we had a lovingly nurtured scrawny avocado tree in a pot, grown from an actual seed, as urban pioneers did in those days.  It did have extravagent arms, as I recall, and it became woefully dusty, but it gave a shot of rich, ripe greenery to a windows-at-each-end, none-at-the-sides little pad. It may have gone to a friend when we moved to Brussels, or perhaps it was the plant my mother found a home for at a car dealership in the 'burbs.

In any event, its cousin, the exuberant tree under which I toil, connects me with the Florida of old--the lush acres of trees and citrus groves planted by Hamilton Disston's people in this very neighborhood that later sprouted 1950's bungalows. Initially, Disston bought 4 million acres of FL land for 25 cents an acre back in 1881 and proceeded to create agricultural land. He is perhaps best known for his tireless effort to drain" the worthless swamp you people call the Everglades."

A complex fellow with vast influence over Florida, Disston's dealing went sour in the late 1890's and he died in 1896, either from a heart attack, or, as one report has it, by a single shot to the head. He was found in his bathtub.

Disston Heights, the small neighborhood where I am staying, is the one area in the entire county that does not require flood insurance. It's a dizzying 40-60 feet above sea level, thank you, and its inhabitants need not evacuate in times of hurricanes.

But if the hurricanes doen't get them, the squirrels will--the avocados, that is. We are vigilant each morning, ready to pick up the heavy fruit that have tumbled to the ground during the night. Most of them have tiny toothmarks by dawn.

A Tuber and A Grass--Smithsonian Magazine

The little-known role the powerful potato played in the development of color photography is described in a beautifully-illustrated piece in the September issue of Smithsonian Magazine. In 1903 Auguste and Louis Lumiere of Lyons, France, adhered dyed microscopic potato starch crystals to a glass plate used by photographers. The resulting images called autochromes are still lovely today--soft, true colors--a portrait of Mark Twain makes the clever curmudgeon almost cuddly. The autochrome is just one facet of the amazing spud, well-chronicled on our sister site for The Potato Museum. Alas, the author of the Smithsonian piece, as usual for writers unfamiliar with the terrific tuber describes the potato as "lowly and lumpy."

The harvesting of wild rice by native Ojibwa in northern Minnesota is chronicled in another piece in the same issue of Smithsonian. Each September Indians use the traditional "knocking" method to gather 50,000 pounds of rice into their canoes. Most is then sold to local mills.

Museum for a Melon

The watermelon, long associated in the American mind with southern summer seed spitting contests, sweltering hot days, and ants paddling in rivers of pink juice on the creaky old picnic table, is native to Africa.  It was part of the Egyptian scene by 2000 BC and may well have grown wild throughout much of the continent, including the Kalahari desert.

It is only fitting, then, that there's a Watermelon Museum in China.

( Like that segue?)

China, as we are all painfully becoming aware, grows more of everything than any other country on earth, including watermelon. ( Turkey is a very distant second in watermelon production.)  A  small area in DaXing province has held a watermelon festival yearly since 1987, and the province grows 1/3 of all the world's watermelon, apparently. The museum in Panggezhuang Village  opened in 2004 and features over 170 different watermelon varieties, watermelon art, info on growing and harvesting, plus "the world's largest watermelon," whether in waxwork effigy or oozing on a pedestal we do not know.

The Japanese have been growing square watermelon in glass frames for decades now, and yellow watermelons, seedless watermelons and mini perfectly round watermelons are becoming commonplace. And for more on all this see the website of the National Watermelon Promotion Board.

For The FOOD Museum's exhibit on watermelon click here.

ps  True to its name, the w.melon is 92 % water,  but it also is vitamin rich and packs lycopene, an ingredient that supposedly has many health-giving qualities...

Triumph in the Tubs, Glee in the Garden

Uncork the champers! Raise the roof! I, Foodie, recently harvested, admired, and ate a sweet, glowing, 5 inch long Ichiban eggplant, the first fruit of my brand new veggies- in- pots growing attempt.  ( Well-- I had done some cherry tomatoes in the past, natch--and earlier this spring, some radishes that were woody and dry, alas, but they do not count. Nor do herbs.)

I am the kind of gardener who spends some time every day obsessively peering at my plants, seeking  signs of fruition--as in the teeny tiny cukes I espied this morning in one of my bins. Hubba hubba! Now I am patiently waiting for the female flowers of my zucchinis to appear--the guys have been flowering for days--but Google assures me the females start to come in later, after they've finished shopping or whatever.  Eggplant, tomatoes, cukes and peppers are my starter crops on this grand experiment. All either tucked into bins or the grass green tubs from Israel I stumbled across.

Part of the fun with Ichiban was coming upon the fruit unaware--I had been clucking over the tiny e.plants emerging from flowers, utterly overlooking the shiny purple offering right in front of my nose, and ready to pick. Is there a life lesson here?

Bliss.

Garlic from There and Here

The WaPost has just discovered that most of the garlic sold in US supermarkets is coming from China. I asked my local grocer months ago about his garlic--it was from China-- because it looked suspiciously overly uniform.  (It was also mighty cheap. )

Here in New Mexico I can get terrific and diverse varieties of garlic at the growers' markets so I buy the Chinese only in the depths of winter.  But the American consumer has to face facts--Chinese growers and food suppliers are dominating world markets in multiple categories, whatever their  standards of integrity and cleanliness.

As the Post piece puts it:

"The FDA, responsible for inspecting some types of food from 130 countries, last year was deluged with 21 million shipments of food imports, among them 199,000 from China worth about $2.3 billion. FDA inspectors refused 298 food shipments from China in the first four months of this year: They included catfish laden with banned antibiotics, mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides, and others. The rejection rate for Chinese goods is about 25 times that for Canadian goods."

FYI  A lovely book about growing garlic in NM is this one:

Crawford, Stanley, 1991: A Garlic Testament - Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 10 E. 53rd St., New York, NY 10022, ISBN 0-06-018207-5, 241 pages.

( Pristine-looking Chinese garlic pic from http://dq-food.en.alibaba.com/product/50086691/50399618/Nuts_Seeds_Vegetable/Chinese_Garlic.html)

( Earthy, skinny NM garlic from http://www.spicelines.com/2006/09/the_pungent_clove_part_1_looki.htm)

Gorgeous Plants to NOT Eat Unless You Want to, Like, Die, Or Get Really High

Cruising through an old catalog from Plants of the Southwest, an Albuquerque  nursery that only offers what will grow here happily with much sun and little water, I learned the following about the remarkable datura plant, also known as jimsonweed, with the large white trumpet-like blossoms.

"The term jimsonweed was derived from Jamestownweed due to an extraordinary event that occurred when General George Washington's army was starving in Jamestown, Virginia. The French cook prepared basketloads of Datura greens for the army. The soldiers were immobilizied for days with hallucinations. But they did pull themselves together, as the outcome of the Revolutionary War attests."

Wikipedia has another version of this wacked out soldier tale :

" British soldiers sent to quell Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 were accidentally served this unfamiliar plant as food, causing many to be incapacitated for 11 days. "

Now-- the native people of the Americas, and many in Asia, have known about Datura's special qualities for thousands of years.........duh. The plant is sacred to many groups but, perhaps understandably, banned in the state of Connecticut.

( Thanks to www.seedman.com for the photo.)