This week began another stint working at Local Harvest CSA. I’m back to soil blocking, planting seeds in trays and seedlings in the high tunnel in preparation for another season of vegetables. This year the plan is to work until the regular crew arrives in May—a month of physical labor to reinvigorate after winter’s inactivity. I’ll help with the first deliveries to members in two weeks.
The fields we burned earlier in the week look great, and the green up should be spectacular.
The work has been going a lot faster this year. With experience I’ve become better able to move from one task to the next. By the time I get fully proficient, my one-month stint on the farm will be about over.
That said, the rain has kept me out of the home garden where most of this year’s produce will originate. The green up in our yard has begun.
It is part of the brassica family of plants. A cruciferous vegetable, broccoli is often an acquired taste, but once developed, one can’t get enough. The plan is to grow lots of broccoli in this year’s garden.
I don’t know how to do it. Most seeds I plant are straight-forward. Put them in starter soil, or in the ground, and watch them grow. Broccoli presents challenges, and in most previous years our supply grew from store-bought seedlings I transplanted, or excess from nearby farms. This year I am determined to grow them from seeds. There is a lot to learn.
Spindly Broccoli Planted March 14
My germination shed is a table set on a south-facing window. It’s not the best. Tomatoes, celery, peppers and basil have sprouted and grow toward the light. They look normal. The broccoli got immediately tall and spindly, and that is never a good sign.
Rather than compost the lot, I decided to transplant some of them into deeper cells. The leaves looked healthy—it was worth a try. Left as is, there would be no crop. I set up a work station in the garage with a goal of producing 24 suitable seedlings for the first batch.
Moving the Seedlings
Because the plants were so spindly, it was also easy to bend them over and crease the stalk. That couldn’t be good. The starter tray had 72 cells so there was room to experiment and still get 24.
I inserted two craft sticks, one into each side of the starter cell, and carefully lifted the clump of soil into a new cell lined with half an inch of starter soil. In many cases, the long taproot would hang down from the clump along the way. Protecting the stalk, I pressed gently and filled the new cell with starter soil. Success! Slowly the new tray began to fill.
Transplanted
This is basic gardening. Absent guidance or written rules, participating in the trial and error of producing a crop is fundamental to how and why we live. Yes, we look forward to broccoli itself, which is not assured without intervention like this.
It is not about the broccoli. It is more curiosity about other life forms and engendering survival and growth. It’s so basic to our lives on Earth, but often forgotten in a world where we can purchase broccoli year-around at the local mega-mart.
Good news is all the transplanted broccoli was still standing this morning.
After delays, the early lettuce is planted in two places. I raked a small patch of ground and broadcast four varieties with maturity days of from 45 to 50, and finished it with broadcast turnip seeds. If all goes well there should be lettuce by May and early turnip greens for stock.
I also tried something new.
Open Compost Pile
With three barrels of composted horse manure from a friend, I cleared out the branches and covered the surface of my open air compost heap with the organic matter. Then I broadcast some Nevada 56 days to maturity lettuce on top, along with the remains of 2013 French Breakfast Radish seeds. Assuming this goes as planned, there should be radishes by April 10, and lettuce afterward. I don’t know if this is a good idea, but I’m not ready to turn the compost and spread it on the garden, so let’s see if I can get some production beforehand.
Compost Bin with Manure
The rest of the compost—mostly dropped by horses the last couple of days—has been placed either inside or beside the kitchen compost bin and is already at work. As more kitchen scraps are added, I’ll use the manure to cover them.
Today was my first work day, and while I got some things done, I’m not in the groove yet. The productivity index is low. But like with everything just beginning, exercising diligence will get me into a groove before long. Maybe by the time the radishes are ready.
Our freezer shows a little space, but is still loaded with food.
I grabbed a pint jar of pesto and about three dozen cherry tomatoes from the freezer, some Parmesan cheese from the ice box, and a box of farfalle pasta from the pantry to make dinner.
It’s easy.
Cook the whole box of farfalle al dente. Strain and pour the lot into a big bowl. Spoon about half a pint of pesto on top, add the tomatoes (cut in half or peeled, the latter being easier with thawed, frozen tomatoes), and a cup of Parmesan. Stir gently with a rubber spoon, salt and pepper to taste, and it’s dinner.
Serve with a vegetable, some white wine, or lime sparkling water, and it is dinner, as good as it gets.
The broccoli seeds I planted three days ago—a full tray of 96 cells—have begun to sprout.
This year we hope to harvest enough broccoli from our home garden to freeze some for next winter. It is a numbers game: starting a large number of seeds and devoting more work and space in the garden to tending them. We’ll see how it goes. With the newly sprouted life, I am hopeful. The down side is we never use chemicals, so there is risk of a poor crop even before we get started. That has never been a deterrence.
The Coralville Lake was mostly open water last night on my way home from the warehouse. The eagles have gone. A wild turkey was browsing near the roadway. That pretty much sums up modern life: we are left with the turkeys.
In the 1930s there was a sense that something substantial had been lost since the land was settled and converted to farms. The name of our township, “Big Grove,” refers to an ancient forest that stretched from the Cedar River to the Iowa River.
“Before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the land which is now Iowa was heavily wooded,” wrote Golda Leighton Jenkinson in her 1969 A History of Lake Macbride State Park. “As the time passed, it gradually became depleted until all that was left consisted of second and third growth, and even this was rapidly disappearing because of the owners’ need for cash, excessive pasturing and other forms of destruction.”
We take the current farm landscape and new growth trees for granted but it wasn’t always so. Today, local farmers are still removing buffers, installing tile, and keeping farmland empty of animals except for occasional post-harvest browsing. Most farming is about seed genetics and inputs these days, combined with managing a profit on thin, subsidized margins.
Our garden plot used to be part of the Kasparek farm. When we arrived, the topsoil was mostly gone and rumor was the best of it had been sold. Over 20 years, I’ve built back the soil so our garden is full of worms and other life. It was a long time coming with irregular progress.
Still there is hope. The sprouting seeds create a yearning to plant more, and it won’t be long until we are past the last frost and ready for the growing season.
Today’s sprouted seeds are a sign that hope is not lost. There will be another growing season—at least for another year.
The United Nations asserted that food production must double by 2050 to meet growing world-wide demand and to combat hunger which affects a billion people who are already here.
The 2009 report explained, “to achieve food security, investment in agricultural research, natural resources, financial services, local infrastructure, market links and safety nets are pivotal. Food prices, already high and volatile, could spike again as droughts, floods and other climate-related events affect harvests.”
In Iowa almost everyone has an opinion on how to feed the world, and there is no denying that the factors listed at the UN are important. There is also a role for increased productivity, measured in food produced per acre, in feeding the world.
To an investor—the kind that derives a living from Wall Street trading—opportunity presents itself. Synthetic biology writer Maxx Chatskoexplained on The Motley Fool:
To boost yields and combat pests, farmers will need to increasingly rely on technology ranging from high-yield seeds to agricultural biotechnology to even the Internet of Things.
While progress is being made, consumers in many wealthy nations are demanding that their food be grown using organic farming principles. Some consumers rationalize their purchasing decisions by claiming the health benefits of organic food (which have been thoroughly debunked), the avoidance of health risks associated with genetically modified foods (with which the scientific consensus disagrees), or the more environmentally friendly and sustainable approach to agriculture that organic farming enables.
This chart from Tom Vilsack’s USDA, cited by Chatsko, is a bit misleading:
For anyone who has been in a popular grocery store, box store or warehouse club, the proliferation of organic products is no secret and people are buying them. Growth of this market segment may represent an investment opportunity, or as Chatsko indicated, “the trend in organic food sales hints that opportunity does indeed exist, even if it’s fueled in large part by outsize marketing budgets, a fundamental information gap, or, worst of all, misinformation.” What’s most misleading about the chart is that it is only a market segment, not the global picture. That’s what the UN report was describing.
Local food production doesn’t come up in the UN report or on the Motley Fool analysis, and some of us believe it represents an answer to eliminating hunger. So where is it?
Partly, we are enamored of a few rock star farmers like Joel Salatin. It is hard not to like the stories Salatin tells in books like “Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World.” If Salatin and his ilk are great promoters of eating “real food,” such punditry doesn’t get to solutions to real problems. Thoughtful nuggets like this one distract us,
The world is awash in food and 50 percent of human food goes to waste because of anything from pernickety consumers, or because a Red Cross truck can’t get through a border. If you and I could figure out how to double food production, there would still be people going hungry for a whole lot of socio-economic issues.
We like Salatin, and some of us are glad he is able to make a living by speaking, farming and writing, but a few rock stars will not feed the world.
The story of Cuba tells a different, and I believe more sustainable story. Cuban agricultural systems were disrupted the end of Soviet support, oil imports particularly, in 1989. Reacting to change in the agricultural system became a national necessity as Cubans literally lost weight due to lack of calories. Cuba went local and semi-organic. Christopher D. Cook is among the most recent to recount Cuba’s story in “Cuba’s Harvest of Surprises.”
Cuba’s farmers shifted to organic fertilizers, traditional crops and animal breeds, diversified farming with crop rotations, and non-toxic pest controls emphasizing the use of beneficial plants and insects. This blend of measures is part of a sustainable-agriculture approach known as agroecology. It’s often described as a promising innovation — which is a little ironic given that it draws on age-old peasant farming practices.
There is a case to be made for peasant agriculture as a way to feed the hungry in a sustainable way. In doing so, there are substantial world-wide obstacles, not the least of which is access to land. In the United States people perceive a return to peasant-style lives as unappealing when they already cannot find time in the day. If Cuba represents a possible solution, it needs an advocate, and I don’t mean U.S. normalization with the island nation or a rock star promoter of it’s semi-organic food system.
There is a growing local food movement in the U.S. and it has had successes and challenges. A lot of folks are entering the local food movement only to find that it is tough to make a living. To clarify, by local food movement I refer to producing consumer goods to support a Community Supported Agriculture project, restaurant, farmers market or other geographically local food sales.
How people access land is a key constraint to entering the local food business. Local food production also relies on cheap labor—barter agreements, volunteers and lowly paid professional staff. Like with so-called traditional farming, success has been elusive and often requires government subsidies or working off the farm to pay basic, year-round living expenses.
Jaclyn Moyer, a Slate writer who operates a 10-acre farm in California, asked some key questions of the often rosy picture painted of small scale, local food producers. “Do you make a living? Can you afford rent, healthcare? Can you pay your labor a living wage?” She answered her own questions, “if the reporter had asked me these questions, I would have said no.”
Global hunger is a real problem, to which “feeding the world,” especially from Iowa, is no solution. Increasing food production is, has been and will remain a key challenge to agriculture as long as the value of a day’s work is eroded by marketplace demands. There is nothing new about that, and the introduction of farm subsidies during the New Deal is rooted in this basic problem with farm life.
There is a lot we can do to alleviate hunger. For urban dwellers, there is a substantial opportunity in food recovery, about which I wrote for the newspaper. Donations of food, money and time to a food bank all produce positive results toward hunger elimination. The use of urban space has potential for local food production. Whether one grows herbs on a window ledge or plants some kale and tomatoes on a few square feet in the backyard, everything helps increase the amount of available food for people who need it. These are small things that can make an impact.
Growing world population is not a new issue, but the limits of our ecosystem to sustain people are becoming increasingly evident. While a row crop farmer may be able to carve out a living by increasing yield or reducing input costs, it isn’t a solution to world hunger. As the UN pointed out, it is about more than productivity. It is about climate change, political issues, finance and land as much as it is about growing food. Until those issues come to be recognized and closer to resolution we can do as many small scale things as we like and people will continue to go hungry.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t do what we can. We should. At the same time, if we don’t accept what the UN has said is the problem, then someone with standing, and less of an axe to grind, should get to work on the issue. Don’t look for a rock star to do it. Hope is the solution lies within each one of us working together.
The warehouse club sells packs of six 8-ounce bars of cream cheese. I bought one.
A basic use-it-up strategy is to make a spread for crackers and bread for after work snacking or luncheon. It’s easy.
Soften a bar of cream cheese on the counter until it reaches room temperature. Unwrap it into the bowl of a food processor.
On the bits and pieces shelf in the pantry locate some roasted bell peppers. Add about one whole pepper’s worth to the bowl. Roast your own if you have them, but in winter, who does?
Add one peeled clove of garlic and process until the texture is smooth.
The basic spread could be seasoned as you like it, although I found garlic is enough. Spread on crackers, toast or bread, Top it with pickled bits from the ice box: cucumbers, olives, beets or radishes and no finer winter snack can be found. If we lived in Russia a shot of vodka would be a mandatory accompaniment.
Much though I enjoy thinking and writing about cooking and processing food, it’s not why I blog. That is, the food’s not the story, the process is.
My first blog in 2007 was an effort to provide a place for our daughter to keep up with the home front. Not sure how much she reads it now, but she has been and remains a primary audience regardless of where I have gone with this writing. Luckily, I have grown a larger, supplemental audience.
Learning and writing about food preparation exemplifies a main process for understanding complex topics. There are few recipes simpler than the one above, but its simplicity belies complexity that led me to it. It is easy to collect recipes, more difficult to decide which batch of 25 will go into a seasonal repertory, and harder still to align a cuisine to seasonal, local food. Writing this blog helps with all of that behind the scenes, when all the reader sees is the end of the process in the form of a recipe.
So it is with the other main topics: sustainability, politics, the environment, worklife, climate change and local food. A constant trying-out of ideas and phrasing. Most of what I see in daily life is complex and simply recording what may have happened through a viewpoint not that interesting.
This blog is a process that leads hopefully to better living. I am thankful for anyone who follows along.
Had to have known this was coming from my seed company:
Earlier this season you placed an order with us which included 365.11, Winterbor F1 PKT. Unfortunately, due to a supply problem we have canceled your order for the item listed.
The operator of the CSA where I worked last summer explained the kale seed problem in more detail:
For the past three years weather conditions around the world have impacted seed supplies. For the second year there is a shortage of kale seed. Turns out the big hybrid kale seed suppliers are in Europe and they were all affected by disease. Fortunately I had ordered and saved seed from my favorite varieties last year. So for those of you who were secretly happy there might be a shortage of kale it’s not going to happen.
Kale Seeds
The seed shortage is only half the problem. Demand for the leafy green vegetable has soared, with many people now including kale in smoothies, soups, casseroles, and salted snacks in the form of kale chips. Luckily I have two packets of kale seeds received as a gift last fall.
Kale was one of the most common green vegetables through the end of the Middle Ages. Because it grow and tastes better after the first frost, there has been plenty of it to go around.
Immediate plans are to look at garden stores to see if there are some packets of seeds available. However, I may have to make do.
When there are two of us, dinner is usually a snap. I cook some dishes like there is a whole crew, and it leaves an ice box full of leftovers—it’s easy to grab a jar of homemade chili and call it dinner.
The six-pack of eight ounce packages of cream cheese needed to be used. Yesterday I made a spread of one package, roasted red peppers, three cloves of garlic, and a tablespoon of mayonnaise. Once the cream cheese is to room temperature, everything comes together in the food processor. Three cloves of garlic bordered on being too much, but the spread will serve for a couple of days.
This morning a pot of mixed beans is cooking. On the cutting board are generous mounds of carrot, celery and onion. Once the beans are cooked, the whole lot will go into the pot with some bay leaves and enough homemade stock to cover. It will simmer a couple of hours until it becomes soup—just in time for lunch before I head over to the warehouse for a shift.
While there is prep work, and transformation with heat, is this really cooking? At a basic level it is. Acquired knowledge about spreads, soups and chili makes the work quick and easy. Even a long prep and cooking time, like there is with bean soup, is not hard. However, it is certainly not glamorous or particularly inventive. It is subsistence at the most basic level: turning raw material into food for sustenance.
As easy as this type of cooking is, there is a temptation to use prepackaged, precooked food as the main course in a cuisine. There are so many varieties of processed food, a person could go for months without having the same dish twice. At a price point of around $10 for a multi-serving package, processed food seems cheap, even if it isn’t. In the end, any home cooking is leveraged from the idea of controlling what we eat and the ingredients from which food is made more so than food cost. For the most part processed food is an infrequent convenience or comfort.
With the abundance of food in the U.S., it is hard to figure how people go hungry. They do. Even in our community of about 5,000 people we have a food bank that is well used. Perhaps we have gotten too far from producing meals in a kitchen from raw ingredients.
My mixed bean soup is easy to make, but there is a process to be learned and followed. It will make a dozen servings, and whatever the cost, that is cheap both in money and in work. We need to eat, so why not some bean soup? Why not indeed.
As a vegetarian household, we have never had a rotisserie chicken within our walls. In fact, if we brought home chicken of any kind, I can’t remember it. As an omnivore, my chicken eating takes place elsewhere, and even so, I recall eating exactly zero rotisserie chickens in my lifetime, although I made soup out of the carcass of one a single time in Colorado.
Rotisserie chickens are so not us.
Yet I see them everywhere. In arguably the most liberal county in Iowa—the only county that did not vote for the Branstad-Reynolds ticket last year—one would think this cultural phenomenon would have long ago surrendered to home-grown poultry, self-cooked. It persists.
I posted this on Facebook over the weekend:
I see all these people toting around rotisserie chickens and wonder what they do with them. Not just a few. A lot. Do they tear off the legs and eat them first like a poor man’s version of King Henry VIII? Do they cut them up with a knife to make another dish? Will the carcass become soup or stock? Do they extract the breast and throw the rest away? Do they eat them in the car and throw the bones out the window? I don’t know, but I do see a lot of these chickens when I’m out in society. I had thought with Ron Popeil’s device no one would ever buy a rotisserie chicken again. The answer is probably simple, but I don’t get it.
The Facebook friends who responded confirmed my beliefs about what people do with these cooked birds with surprising uniformity. A couple talked about the economics of chickenry, but that is really not at issue. Chicken is and has been a poor person’s protein, and for those leaning vegetarian, not a choice at all. Why kill the chicken that lays the eggs for ovo-lacto vegetarians?
What I wondered most, and was confirmed, was that people make soup and stock of the rotisserie remains—at least they said as much. Soup is life more than bread is the staff of life. Although the anti-gluten craze has reduced bread eaters to secretly coveting and eating their loaves, or making ersatz bread from barley and rice flours, it is fitting that bread and soup go together to make a meal. Chicken soup is tasty and satisfying to most omnivores.
So what’s my point?
Don’t you ever wonder what goes on behind external appearances? One sees the device that cooks the chicken and the warming display case. One sees people choosing and toting rotisserie chickens into the parking lot. There are testimonies about what people do with chickens, recipes and more. In the end, though, rotisserie chicken is not about chickens. It is about life.
Finding meaning in society is challenging and some find it in carrying a rotisserie chicken home. It is easy to make something of what everyone can observe. What is hard is to understand the motivation for life in society in its many manifestations. In the end the motivations and designs people have are more important than any chickeny artifacts.
Rotisserie chickens help us see into a deep well of life in society and forgo the question of the chicken or the egg. A better question is what shall we do with our lives today?
And that’s the meaning of this post about rotisserie chickens.
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