foodmuseumblog

Great Stuff from the Seed Front: Growing Libraries — Emerging Ideas — Utne Reader

Borrow books, borrow seeds--new attempts to keep seeds freely flowing, in spite of mighty Monsanto.

"Free vegetable seeds are now shelved at the public library in Richmond, California, where patrons can check out tomato and lettuce seeds alongside the latest Stieg Larsson novel. Come harvest time, participants are encouraged to practice the centuries-old art of saving seeds and return a few to the library’s shelves. It’s a naturally sustainable system because, explains Amanda Kimble-Evans in Organic Gardening(Sept.-Oct. 2011), as “each grower saves seeds from the most productive, healthiest plants, the varieties become more adapted to the specific bioregion with each generation.”   

Seed-lending programs have taken root in at least four other public libraries in California and Connecticut, writes Greg Landgraf in American Libraries (April 6, 2011). The bookworms also host seed-saving workshops for those of us who aren’t yet master gardeners."

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Environment/Seed-Lending-Programs-Public-Libraries.aspx#ixzz1Z6NLl0ye

 

 

 

 

Courtesy of Hudson Valley Seed Library / www.seedlibrary.org

via www.utne.com

USDA MyPLate? YourPlate? Not Really Mine.

So--this MyPlate imagery from the USDA is a decent attempt to make visual to Americans what previous food pyramids apparently have failed to do. The fact that it resembles a plastic kitchen toy may not be a plus, however.

Eat more veggies than proteins ( though beans, spuds and sweet pots, of course, are protein-filled veggies...,) and OOPS--are they implying we all have a hearty glass of milk with our meals, instead of water or wine? Not a great idea, but then again, the dairy lobby is alive and well.

Also--how much of everything should we eat? Deck of cards worth of protein?  I rankle when I read 3 ounces of this and 6 ounces of that, as if we all have little ounce measuring devices available. 8 ounces to a cup is embedded in my brain, but 3?

An alert pal sent me this visual interpretation of MyPlate--source unknown-- that is close to nauseating in its lack of appeal. Overcooked, canned green beans, milk, a slab of unadorned salmon, maybe, a slice of bland looking bread and, can it be, canned mandarin oranges???  Aaaargh.

Clearly the USDA swiftly needs to put together some plates that show real, tasty food.

Here's one, from a Thai restaurant lunch I had.

 

 

 

Rice, slice of orange, loads of veggies, and tofu in a red curry sauce.

Here's another from an earlier post:

 A roll, a slew of steamed summer squash w/onion and spinach, grilled eggplant topped with mozzarella ( dairy!,) tomatoes, yellow pepper, fresh basil, olive oil with spices.....

But wait! The USDA MyPlate shows us no oils, no nuts...how can this be?

And finally, a lunch we had on the road from Florida to NM, in a small town in Texas.

 

 

 

A cup of "baked potato soup," comprised of spuds, cream and bacon, a salad, assorted unnecessary  bits of carb (!) and a decent piece of spinach quiche, with a fine handmade buttery crust. The soup was a tad over the top, but then, this was Texas.

So, USDA, high marks for rethinking the imagery, but methinks the American public needs a wide range of actual plates of food in order to get the message.

On the other hand, one of my favorite writers, M.F.K.Fisher, who happened to focus on food, once wrote, "Balance the day, not the meal." This plan works well for those with some food savvy. I keep it vaguely in mind, but more importantly, like many people, I choose what looks fresh and good, and dive into an enjoyable meal.  And ignore the rules. Sheesh. 

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler, Peeps! And Visit Louisiana's Own Southern Food & Beverage Museum

SOFAB appropriately is closed today, Fat Tuesday, to honor Southern food, drink, dance, and excess--and we hope y'alls are doing the same today--but otherwise this museum dedicated to:

"...the discovery, understanding and celebration of the food, drink and the related culture of the South, " is open, daily, at Riverwalk Marketplace in New Orleans. Its focus:

        ---The many ethnicities – African-American and Caribbean, French and German, etc. — that have combined to create unique Southern food and drink traditions;

        ---The farmers, fishermen, and hunters and gatherers who have produced the food;

        ---The processors, inventors, chefs and business people who run the restaurants and stock our stores with Southern products, and the home cooks and families who have passed down recipes and food traditions for generations.

Liz Williams, the prime mover behind SOFAB, told us that a few years ago she just decided to open the project, still not well-funded, or prepared, but they had scored a deal on the retail space, and Liz felt they should just plunge ahead. The result is a mix--some exhibits utterly professional, some frayed around the edges, all of interest to any foodish person. Liz, a lawyer with a specialty in food-related issues, is well aware of the limitations, of the gap between the vision and what is possible to achieve given limited resources and staff.  But she and her colleagues and volunteers have done it--started a major food museum in the U.S. Bravo! 

Another New Orleans favorite to anyone with an interest in booze has its home at SOFAB: the Museum of the American Cocktail.  The New Orleans "Sazerac" identified with the city is rye whiskey based.

Current large temporary exhibit: All About Sugar. (Thank you, Domino Brands.)

 

(Above right: the Katrina Deli exhibit, with Heckuva Job Brownies down front. Levee Leak Soup is also on the menu... )

 

 

Kitchen Classroom

Michelle Obama sees potential in the WH kitchen as a focus for learning. Here's hoping she also will be making possible the creation of a kitchen garden on the grounds.  From a snippet of the Vogue cover story:

"I am excited about the potential of the White House kitchen being a learning environment for the community. The current chef, Cristeta Comerford, is the only female chef in the history of the White House. She's a young Filipina woman, a mother with a young child, and I am excited to get to know her and for her to know us as a family. If you think about all the kids interested in finding out about all of the inner workings of the White House—I'm hoping that we can build a team to reach out."

Women Who Know Beans

 As a volunteer at a women's shelter in the late 1980's in the Denver area, retired social worker Jossy Eyre  observed that many of the women she worked with lacked any means to be self-sufficient. They had inadequate education, poor work skills, and many were utterly depressed. 

She had a notion. She spent $500 of her own money on beans, and involved two women in creating packets of 10 Bean Soup. That first year the women prepared and sold over 50 packets of the soup mix to area health food stores.

Last year the Women's Bean Project sold products worth $750,000, enough to meet 60% of the endeavor's budget requirements. The 20 year-old project offers women over 21 up to 6 months of training and experience to help set them on the road to independence.

The WBP mission:  "The Women's Bean Project is a social enterprise that offers a transitional job in gourmet food manufacturing designed to provide immediate income, arrange support services to overcome barriers to employment, and teach the job readiness skills needed to get and keep a job. Program participants come from backgrounds of chronic unemployment and poverty, and the program helps them develop the work and interpersonal skills needed to function independently in the workplace and community.

But the Women's Bean Project does not hire women to make and sell bean products. We make and sell bean products to hire women."

Food for Thought: It's Grammar Time, Again, Kids!

Has anyone noticed----

• "different than" taking over from "different from?"

• the demise of "an" before words like historic?

• the misuse of "fewer?"

Does anyone care?

I do. With one caveat. I  know that language is a living, breathing, thingie--it evolves. Fine. But when did we vote to replace "different from" with "different than?"  Huh? When I was in middle school, then known as "junior high," we were rigorously trained in these matters, including--"You lay the book on the table. You, personally, lie on the table." ( Embarassment in abundance in 7th grade English class.) The dog is ordered to "Go lie down."

Etc., etc.

ps Living in New Mexico I ONCE unwittingly offered up this unforgiveable phrase--"Where is it at?" Because that's what people say here! 

On Fat Kids and Stingy Buffets

The Washington Post is running Part 2 of a major piece on childhood obesity in America, an exploration of the excesses of one country's love affair with bad food and drink choices, among other things.  But always part of this not-new story, is that in the poorest of our country's neighborhoods are the fewest decent supermarkets. The well-off have access to good food, gyms,  personal trainers, and multitudes of how-to books and magazines on health and well-being.
( My unsolicited advice to all new parents--never take your kid to McD's or the equivalent, period. One visit and they are hooked. )

Meanwhile, to buffets---I returned to a favorite Indian joint recently and found two of the three primary veggie offerings were 1--potatoes and a few green pepper hunks; 2--carrots and peas. Neither dish had much appeal, even though I enjoy both spuds and carrots. But I felt I was witnessing the "cheapening down" of what was once a worthwhile buffet, a phenomenon written up on the Internets recently.  And, puzzled by the not so fine taste of the chapati bread, I decided that they were made with inferior flour, to save costs, given the huge rise in wheat prices.  I will ask about that the next time I stop by, if I stop by again, but before parking myself for lunch, I will more closely scan the buffet offerings.   

Happy Tercentenary Birthday, Carl!

Carl Linneaus, the Swedish botanist and medical doctor who codified the naming of plants and animals, is celebrating his 300th birthday today, May 23. Well, the rest of the world is.

According to an informative website from the University of California Museum of Paleontology, Linneaus is not only credited with establishing a set and simplified pattern of binomial naming--a Latin name for the genus, and a type of shorthand name for the species--but he was also a gifted teacher. One of his most famous students during his time at the University of Uppsala was Daniel Solander who sailed with Captain James Cook on his first voyage around the world, bringing back to Europe the first plant specimens from the South Pacific and Australia.

Linneaus' farm at Hamarby near Uppsala is a food heritage site one can visit today, as is the first botanical garden established in Sweden in 1655.  1300 species grow here, all familiar to Linneaus. The garden has been restored to a design dictated by him in 1745.

Linneaus was a controversial figure in his lifetime, accused of being too sexually explicit in his system.  And he started out calling humans  Homo diurnis , or "(hu)man of the day," but later settled on the more flattering, Homo sapiens, "wise human."  Hoping to boost Sweden's economy, he tried and failed to grow coffee, rice, bananas and cacao, plants that were decidedly inappropriate for his country's chilly climates.

Dr. Jude Philp of the University of Sydney sums up Linneaus this way: "Linneaus was an extraordinary man. He was a doctor who wrote on everything from the evils of coffee and tobacco, to syphilis and healthy eating. He was an astute political person with royal contacts and connections with the Dutch East India Company. He was a teacher, gardener, traveller and a magnificent self-promoter."

( Portrait of Linneaus thanks to the Swedish Museum of Natural History,  http://linnaeus.nrm.se/botany/fbo/welcome.html.en)

Barging into Veggies

As I launch my own green revolution here in the high desert--growing veggies in large pots and bins, in order to conserve water--I read with great delight about the Science Barge  moored at Pier 84 in New York City's Hudson River. It's growing veggies with recirculated water and no pesticides and is intended as a model, along with green rooftop growing, for sustainable urban agriculture.

Designed by the New York Sun Works Center for Sustainable Engineering, the Science Barge operates this way, according to a report on CNET news:

"Powered by a combination of solar energy from photovoltaic panels, five wind turbines and a generator that runs on biodiesel and waste vegetable oil (commonly known as "french fry grease"), the Science Barge generates zero carbon dioxide emissions.

An on-board greenhouse uses hydroponic technologies to grow vegetables using a quarter of the water that traditional agriculture would. Inside the greenhouse, tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, herbs and lettuce are germinated in "rock wool" made from basaltic rock spun into cotton candy-like fibers. They're grown using recirculated water, and a mix of coconut husks and rice hulls--waste products that otherwise would be sent to landfills--in lieu of soil."

( Barge pic from http://nysunworks.org/science_barge/about_the_barge.html)

Stone Barns Center in New York--Splendor in the Snow

In the good old days, if you were a Rockefeller and you wanted to have only unpasteurized milk on your table, you hired an architect and built your own fine damn dairy on your property. That's what John D. Rockefeller, Jr. did in the 1930's on his family's huge landholdings in Pocantico Hills, New York.

Today the dairy barns and some 80 acres of their surroundings comprise the stellar non profit Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a place made possible in 2004 through the largesse of David Rockefeller, to honor his wife, Peggy, who died in 1996. Peggy Rockefeller was a hands on farmer who created, and oversaw more than one Rockefeller family farm in New York's Hudson Valley. She also founded the American Farmland Trust. 

Stone Barns is firmly committed to sustainable farming, based on traditional and even artisanal methods, but all with a modern spin. And food education is a key part of the mix. ( We include Stone Barns in our list of food heritage sites--an example of farming that honors the past and yet seeks out the most reasonable high tech approaches available today.)

The day we visited, a cold rain on its way to becoming snow was driving against the folks enjoying lunch outside the tiny cafe--we joined them and tasted assorted winter root vegs including Jerusalem artichokes in a salad built on cooked wheat grains. This was after our tour of the impeccable greenhouse---lined with young green salad sprouts and a perfect tribute to the upcoming St. Patrick's Day. The young woman working there sported a "Farmy" tee shirt and said she had never been happier. A former employee of the parks department, she said she had always "wanted to grow food instead of flowers."

Stone Barns is working hard on its educational mandate--even in the supposedly elite counties just up river from Manhattan according to ed director Judy Fink, "wealthy and poor commingle." Younger student visitors learn not only what sustainable means and how to pluck greens, but also explore their way around a white tablecloth and cutlery. Apparently people of all ages touch base at Stone Barns. While we ate lunch a bevy of Italians, including a couple of chefs, arrived in the heavy snow, to take a spin through the place.

Alas, we didn't get a chance to eat at Blue Hill, the handsome high end restaurant at Stone Barns that features the finest of the food produced there, augmented by the finest of the food produced in the relatively immediate area--their reservation list involves a two months  wait. Chef Dan Barber and his crew have made their reputation by stressing the actual fresh raw materials they work with, rather than fanciful manipulation of sauces and spices. This review from the NYTimes attests to that approach.

As we drove away, I recalled a visit to another magnificent  farm originally created by old American money--1400 acre Shelburne Farms in Vermont, once a Vanderbilt holding, now an educational center and food heritage site whose mission is " to cultivate a conservation ethic." More on this later.

If you visit Stone Barns, do not bypass the shop--its buyers have rounded up superb farm/gardening/culinary items in one spot.