Grow, Cook, Eat

Sustainable(r) Living

2011-05-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

I'm a pretty big believer in putting my money where my mouth is and walking the talk, and so on. Fortunately, for me, I have been blessed with parental units who think the same way (and have the skills to make it happen). My mom and her husband, Wayne, came to visit me last week, and the "honey-do" list was long. We made it all the way through it, and then some. I can't thank them enough. I feel so lucky and blessed and loved.

Wayne is about as handy a man as you'll find, and he isn't happy unless there is a project or two to finish, followed by lunch, a nap another project, and a beer. So, we started each day of their 10 day "vacation" with a new project, followed by a trip to Lowes (or two). As promised earlier in this column, we got the insulating blinds on the wall of windows (on the *southwest* side of my house) hung first thing. I think this might have been self-preservation on their part--to ward off the heat of Georgia that was already thinning their Minnesota blood. The blinds make a HUGE difference. In years past my house would have been a airless oven in the afternoon, even as early as April. Now--even after a couple of 90 degree days I come home to a cool, shaded haven. They set me back $70 each from BlindsChalet.com and will likely pay for themselves in a few months. And, they are beautiful. Do it.

Next up was removing and replacing the old kitchen countertop, which I must say I *hated*. While not a sustainable living improvement, it sure improves my mood in the kitchen, which is sort of essential to the kind of sustainable living I chose to do. I observed that all the improvements I have made to my house and yard are all about food. Um, yeah. I choose to believe that I do *not* have an unhealthy obsession with food, rather a unusually consistent theme in work, life and play... Anyway, my new beautiful kitchen, which includes a new sink, a new energy-efficient light fixture, a fixed dishwasher and a gorgeous tiled backsplash, has made even more joy out of being in my favorite place in the house. Is it even possible? Yes.

A new raised bed, a potato tower and two rain barrels came next (and a clothesline, which I have yet to use because I lack the necessary accoutrement--clothespins!). Mom and I tackled the wood-working while Wayne got to work with the rain barrels. Watching Wayne work, I realized that it was an unbelievably easy exercise to trim the downspouts and install a few new elbows to direct the rain into the barrels. Even though I am mostly a novice with tools, I am going to tackle installing three more on the remaining downspouts on my house. That night, the 50 gallon barrels filled up in less than 5 minutes in one of Georgia's famous downpours. Water that would ordinarily have been redirected god knows where through the storm sewer now makes watering my food forest a breeze. Incidentally, I use on average, 50-100 gallons of water/day, so it's a nice visual reminder of my actual impact on the water world. They cost me $50 each + a few dollars for the downspout attachments. It's hard to assess the savings that accrue from "free" water, but this will surely save me a lot of money this summer since I have amped up my gardening a great deal from years past.

The raised beds and potato tower (of which I could use about 5 more!) have yet to see much action (more later!), but the chickens have taken to roosting on the edge of the raised bed at night, and are helpfully fertilizing the garden while they sleep. This pregnant lady sure appreciates this little favor from them. On the last day of their trip, after the wonderful baby shower organized by my dear friends, Mom painted the nursery while I put my feet up. I can't think of a better couple of people to help me through this thing called life. Thanks to them, and following their example, I can live life a little better, and bring this baby into a world of love, mutual aid, right living and closed loops.

Live, love and work for each other--we're all we've got.

Blueberry Jam

2011-04-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

No, this is not another apocalyptic manifesto; just a little (slightly ranty) observation about how we really have to buy a lot less stuff than we think.

I had a bunch of blueberries from 2009 in my freezer that I needed to deal with because they were getting a bit too stale to eat. After cleaning out the last jar of purchased jelly, I thought, hmmm...I prattle on a lot of about food sovereignty but I still buy a lot of stuff that I eat. Maybe it's time to make jam. I've made jam in the past, but being a lazy bum, I got out of the habit. And I *try* not to eat jam because it's not so good for my health, but I eat it anyway, so why not do it myself and make it low or no-sugar?

This past weekend I bought some jars and some pectin and some organic unrefined cane sugar--about $10 bucks worth of stuff, half of which can be reused. And on my lunch break today--feeling a bit inspired to do something other than answer emails, read proposals and revise papers, I found my canner, got out my blueberries and washed up the jars. The rest went a bit like this: heat blueberries, add sugar, boil, put in a jar, walk away. The acid in the blueberries and the sugar is more than enough to preserve the jam, and the jars seal themselves as they cool.

Making a year's worth of jam (at the rate I eat it anyway--about 1 pint/month) took approximately 20 minutes, and cost me less than a dollar a jar (the blueberries were free). My jam tastes like heaven (I must say) and only has 3 grams of carbohydrates per tablespoon--4-5 times less than many store bought varieties, and has no corn syrup or other nasty additives. I'm going to try it with honey and without pectin when the honey harvest comes in June. I am surprised (again) at how easy this whole DIY thing is---and that kind of makes me mad.

WHY on earth do we buy stuff? Who has hoodwinked us into believing that we can't do this ourselves, and in the process takes our money, robs us of our health and leaves us without the skills we need to fend for ourselves? It's time to take it all back!

Food sovereignty now!

The People's Socialism

2011-04-10T09:51:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I am rapidly losing faith in our government to do anything at all, much less cope with the impending social, economic and environmental crises looming large in our future. I've been thinking and talking about privilege and equity a lot this semester with the awesome students in my Gender and Geography class. We often arrive at a point where we see capitalism and the monetary exchange of everything as the source of a lot of inequities. We get stuck here and feel helpless, so one day I asked them (and me) to do an exercise where we do one of three things: 1) undermine capitalism, 2) undo privilege or 3) create something new.

This challenge stumped all of us, and required us to generate possibilities for things that don't yet exist. I liken this process to the end scene of the Truman show, where Truman sails his boat through the bubble he has lived in all his life. The mast of his ship breaks the skin of the "sky" and the light of another possible world breaks though and floods onto him. (Another example of this is Plato's Allegory of The Cave. Check it out.) We remain in a paralyzed state because the things we need to live better and more fairly don't exist anymore. We need to find them and remake them through shifting our ontology--which just means we have to dream, envision and create the groundwork for a future that doesn't exist right now.

In the case of my students and myself, everywhere we turned we had to buy something. It was virtually impossible to undermine capitalism--even by bartering or home-based crafts. One student observed that she felt as though the exercise required her to give away some of her privilege--and this includes the privilege to buy whatever we need. We discussed this at length. How did we acquire privilege? How much do we actually have? How do we continue to accrue it? In most cases, capitalism and our physical and social locations afford us the lion's share of our privilege. But how would we give it away? Or stop it from accruing? These are thorny, epistemological problems that require the overhaul of entire systems.

Evening the playing field and redistributing wealth (one kind of privilege) is one of the basic premises of socialism, or at least one of its functions. Even if we wanted a socialist democracy, like those in Norway or Sweden, we are going to have to wait a long durn time for it in the United States. I, for one, am not holding my breath. I am, however, trying to think about how I can redistribute resources without having to create an entire political-economic system. What if I just used less water, less energy? In some ways this is making a socialist system possible already--voluntarily and without a lot of bureaucratic waste of time and money. As Utah Phillips famously says, "if you want something done, don't come to me to do it for you. You got to get together and figure out how to do it yourselves".

The Global North (that's us) is only about 6% of the world's population, but uses almost half of its resources. There are two scenarios that are likely to evolve from this precarious situation: The first is that the other 94% of the world is eventually going to cut off our heads, a la Roman, French, Russian, etc, revolutions. Extreme inequality doesn't usually find a bloodless resolution, and I'm pretty sure this is already underway. The other possibility (already underway) is that the rest of the world is going to want to live like us. We don't have enough Earths for that. (Take the Ecological Footprint quiz to see how you stack up: http://www.myfootprint.org/) See China eclipse the U.S. as the largest emitter of CO2. See everyone in the Indian middle class buy a car. See world food prices rise as more people start eating meat.

See Amy install solar panels. And rain barrels, insulating blinds and a clothesline.

I assigned the ecological footprint to my students in my lower-division class, and the average number of planets we need for everyone to live like us is about 5 planets. I retook the quiz, changing the parameters, until I could get it below 1 earth. This involved installing the above amendments to my house, reducing the miles I drive by taking the bus, biking etc; *never* flying ever again, purchasing carbon offsets (and/or doing it myself by planting trees) and going local and vegetarian (although there is no option for grass-fed vegetarian, so I'm sticking to that for now). These are tall orders, and it will take some time, money and patience to get there. I started thinking about this by examining my daily water and energy consumption in my house--easy enough to do by looking at your bill.

I currently use 377KwH/month or about 13 KwH/day. There is a fair bit of math involved with figuring out what that means in terms of solar panels, but I'll keep you posted! I also currently use about 82 gallons of water/day. My first goal is to reduce these numbers and see how low I can comfortably go--washing clothes 2x month, drying clothes outside, keeping the AC to a minimum, taking bucket showers...hmmmmmmmm. This seems a lot like life in India last summer on the farm. I survived. And thrived. You will too.

Examine your power bill. Think about your privilege. Have a breakthrough. Get together and do it yourselves.

Thinking Pre-Seasonally

2011-03-27T06:23:00.000-07:00

This is not my usual thing, but I think it's worth blogging about because I feel change is a coming, and not in a good way. Those of you who know me will find this sudden turn toward apparent pessimism a bit disturbing, but I see it as an opportunity to anticipate and prepare for what is heading down the pike toward us. If you have a feeling that things are just not quite right, don't ignore it. This is not just fear-mongering, doomsaying or 2012-apocalyps- hysteria--I'm saying that if you look at history, we've got it coming. I'm writing about this here, because I have an audience, (thanks for reading and sharing), and dealing with what is coming has everything to do with food and community.

A bit of backstory:

A few years ago my Dad (AKA Dr. Doom) shared with me a book by the name of the 4th Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. Around page three the authors (writing in 1997) predicted September 11th--roughly the time-frame, the method, and the aftermath. This got my attention. I read most of the rest of the book, and the jist of it is this: every hundred years or so, western societies go through a convulsive change, known as the 4th Turning, which ushers in a new era, also known as the 1st Turning. This is largely driven by cycles of history (social theorists will recognize shades of Wallerstein here), and the generations of people who are born and come of age during various periods of history. They refer to these cycles as seasons of history, and according to them we are now entering a "saecular winter". I am of the Nomad generation (called Thirteeners by Strauss and Howe) that will (with the Boomers) have to take leadership through this seasonal change. So, here, in the way that I can, I am going to start leading.

Strauss and Howe could see the 4th Turning beginning in 2005, give or take a few years. I would argue that 9/11 and the 2008 economic crash are highly related, and manifestations of a system in trouble seeking change and equilibrium. I believe we are well on our way into the 4th Turning, which lasts about 20 years, on average. Strauss and Howe call it a "crisis", which I think is just a slowly unfolding global set of events that will be more or less horrific depending on where you are when these crisis events erupt. There are economic, social, political and ecological dimensions of this, and every place will have its own unique manifestations. How we react to, lead and organize through this crisis will determine how we end up on the other side of it. Forget about American exceptionalism (if you ever believed it). The 4th Turning levels the playing field. I highly recommend that you read the book yourself, so I won't narrate much more about it here, other than what I see coming and how we can deal with it.

Here in Athens, we have economic problems with poverty that are clearly related to racial inequalities, past and present. This is related to our social problems that leave our communities deeply divided, both within and between. We have political problems that are related to our economic problems--corruption in government and tax/spending priorities that privilege the super rich. Our ecological problems relate to climate change and our susceptibility to drought, which will limit our primary economy activities (agriculture and forestry) from providing capital to the economy. Case in point, wildfires in SE GA, today. The 4th turning is, of course a social, not an ecological phenomena, but climate change and the crises this generates will only exacerbate the challenges of the 4th Turning. In Athens these will be the deepening of poverty and eruptions of violence not unlike what just happened here with the shooting of a police officer. The state, in an attempt to gain control, will increase its powers, and this never bodes well for human or civil rights. Inflation is likely to increase (and/or the devaluing of currency) and the fragile and flimsy basis of our economy will continue to falter. Investments may soon be meaningless, so we need to think about real material security through food and real social security through community.

Strauss and Howe suggest that we can best weather the 4th Turning if we start thinking now--what they call pre-seasonal thinking--about how we will have to live during the crisis, and what we want life to look like on the other side. As for me, I am saying adios (to the degree that I can) to the infrastructures that I depend on for food, water and energy. I believe these infrastructures will fail (or will fail to meet the needs of most people), and our manifest vulnerability to corporations and governments will be laid bare. I also believe that this crisis will be manifested by inflation and further contractions of our economy, which will limit our ability to consume (and make our consumer-based economy shrivel). We need to learn new habits that reflect our limited choices in the coming year. I will blog about this and more as these efforts get underway.

The second general area of preparation is linked to our dependence on institutions and our lack of inter-dependence as a community. I have eggs to share (and soon lots of other produce), so I am going to start using them to build community in my neighborhood. We'll have to stand together, or we all will fail. I have to say that I know precious few of my neighbors, but I aim to get to know them, and make the food forest of my yard a resource for our whole community. I also intend to reach out to the wider community in Athens through a community kitchen in one of the poorest, but most historic, neighborhoods in Athens.

Showing up is 90% of life, and I intend to show up for peace, community and self-sufficiency in the coming years.

Show up with me, y'all.

Toward a Reciprocal Social Economy of Food

2011-03-06T06:21:00.001-08:00

It's been a good week for the traffic in banned foods. I bartered my illegal backyard eggs for illegal backyard honey from the Normaltown Beekeeper and I lucked into a source of raw m__. (Woohooo! Let the cheesemaking begin!) In the wake of the supreme satisfaction I got from both of these transactions, I decided three things.

1) the banning of backyard, homescale, out-of-the-system food production is not only unethical, it's a violation of human rights. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3, I have the right to life, liberty and security of person. Given that waterboarding is legal and article 5 guarantees the right to be free of torture, I understand that I won't get much traction with this argument. Having said that, somewhere, I am guaranteed the right to provide for myself (i.e., life) when it doesn't hurt anybody else (chickens don't, bees don't, raw m__ doesn't). I have a right to liberty, which means I am free to do what I wish on my private property (as long as I don't hurt others), and I have a right to liberty in my economic transactions. Suck it, neoliberals. Last, salmonella-contaminated eggs and the like, threaten the security of my person, *from the inside*, and I have a right to alternatives that don't threaten my health, or the health of my unborn baby. (Just try it, Bobby Franklin).

2) the participation in the purchase and sale of food is the stupidest thing humans have ever done. (don't feel offended...I have been doing this for 35 years...and it's not too late to get smart). Buying and selling food not only stripped us of useful skills that could be exchanged for food (for more on this, see K. Marx, Capital, vol 1), it also handed over all of our rights in the food system to the brokers who buy and sell. For the most part those jokers who make money on transactions don't give a damn what goes into your body. The only reason they pretend to care is because, legally, they have to. This means that as long as they don't get caught, they will encourage (even demand) the farming practices that get the salmonella in your egg and the e. coli in your milk. Technical fixes, like pasteurization, are unnecessary when proper farming practices are followed, but they funnel a lot of profit toward the processors (oh, right the jokers who profit from transactions...). Let's get out of this system. Now. Here's how.

3) instead of a transactional system based on money, we need to have a reciprocal exchange system based on calories. I am borrowing this partly from the solar economy literature, but I also appreciate the beauty of it's logic. First, commodities like coffee that usually come at great cost to human and ecological life, would be worth nothing since they have no calories. Therefore there would be no incentive to ship it halfway across the world. (Coffee addicts, I don't envy you the headache you will have when you wake up from the dream of global capitalism. In the meantime, sleep well and dream of large cups of coffee). Second, calorie dense foods like meat would be very expensive, thus, limiting their consumption. I am a carnivore (see the 1 chicken, 10 meals blog post), but I do recognize the incredible waste, ecological devastation and animal cruelty caused by conventional meat production. Third, low calorie, nutrient-dense foods, like kale, would be widely available (a bit like 1 dollar bills are ubiquitous) and easy to get, which is not the case now. They are incredibly easy to grow as well, so they may even disappear from circulation eventually, as we get smarter. Fourth, grains and sweeteners would be very expensive, and would force us to figure out ways to grow our own, barter for them, grow them cooperatively or find substitutes, like potatoes and honey.

I could go on, but you get the picture. We need to move toward a steady-state food system in which the inputs are equal to the outputs. One way to do this, is to start increasing our awareness of the calories in our food and use this as a basis of exchange. We can all become growers of something and exchange this on the basis of calories. Or we can examine the kind of work we do, and the calories we expend doing it, and exchange food on the basis of this. Physical labor has sustained us for millennia and should be the basis of our health and vitality of our society and economy.

So, if I follow my own logic, I owe the Normaltown Beekeeper a dozen eggs. I exchanged a dozen eggs for a pint of honey this week. I should have given the beekeeper two dozen eggs if we follow the calorie math. A dozen eggs has about 1000 calories, while a pint of honey has 2000 calories. Now that I know, I'll catch up with him next time. I had to pay for my raw m__, only because I don't have anything to give the farmers that they don't already have. I've traded skills for money, and, I realize now, that that's a real shame. But...maybe they would like some ricotta cheese...

Make cheese, make a difference.

Superfood Sunday

2011-02-06T17:18:00.001-08:00

Tonight for supper I ate baked wild salmon, mashed sweet potatoes and sauteed kale with blueberries and yogurt for desert, topped off with tea. I am literally bursting with micro-nutrients. All these foods just happened to be what I was craving for supper, and they all just happen to be available locally. (More on how the salmon is local in a minute.)

All these foods have also been identified as "superfoods" by one dietetic association or another. This just means that these foods will cure what ails you, namely cancer. Crammed full of quaint (or scary) sounding nutrients like "flavonoids" and "carotenoids" these foods have everything you need to live forever. Eating well never tasted so good. This food is "good to think" too, to borrow from anthropologist Levi-Strauss, because it's come from local, organic sources.

I know, I know, you're saying, I get the sweet potatoes, but wild salmon, in Georgia? Come on. Well, climate change has not brought salmon to Georgia, but Athens Locally Grown has. A local family goes up to salmon country in Alaska and brings back the catch to sell here through ALG. While it's not local in the strict sense of the word, it does a lot of the work that "local" consumption/production does.

We buy local because it completes the three legged stool of justice--social, economic and environmental--in sustainability. It is a complete and functional system within which people are compensated fairly, social capital is built through direct connections, and the ecology of the environment is protected to the greatest extent that it can be. Buying direct is almost as good as buying local when it provides income to a family business and doesn't exploit workers or treat animals inhumanely. And let's face it, the salmon I just ate wasn't going to live a long peaceful life into its reclining years. It was likely heading directly to death after spawning in the river in which it was caught. The ecological piece is obviously lacking in this purchase, since this food came from more than a thousand miles away from here. That part troubles me enough to keep this food a luxury, not a staple. (This also makes me want to cry, or move to Alaska).

As I have found in my research on fair trade and organic food products, the interference of middle-people creates a lot of the problems in our current food system. (And the minor detail that we have to *buy* food.) When food is for sale, and lots of people get a cut, the least powerful actors take the biggest hit. In the case of organic bananas, these are Haitian workers who have little more than the shirt on their back. In the case of organic produce in the United States it is migrant workers in the same situation, who often work for less than minimum wage.

The best way I see to work out this food puzzle is that I have to eat healthy, and I have to eat righteously, which means eating with ethics and with an eye to justice. This means, that I can't place animal lives above human ones. No way. I'll eat a lot of animals before I knowingly consume something (like a banana) that puts workers lives at risk and permanently erodes their life chances in the same way that slavery has and still does. Fortunately there are some good options for eating healthy food that doesn't come at the expense of human lives. Even if it happens to come from across the continent, I'll take it.

The beauty of all this lies in the fact that these locally produced and directly traded foods are *the healthiest* foods on the planet! I didn't buy any of these things because I knew they were good for me. I bought them because they were delicious and righteous. The fact that they will make me live forever is just the blueberry on my yogurt.

Live, eat and love righteous.

Back to Local Chow

2011-01-25T03:35:00.000-08:00

Hi Friends and Followers!
Now that I am home for awhile in Georgia and eating locally, I'm going to start posting to my other blog. You can find it at localchow.blogspot.com.
See you there, and thanks for following!
Amy

One Chicken=Ten Meals

2011-01-24T08:14:00.000-08:00

It’s good to be home. I enjoyed my travels so much, but I am so grateful for my own bed, a closet (instead of a backpack) and my roach and frost-free bathroom (southern and northern hemispheres, respectively) really close by. I am especially enjoying my kitchen. After enjoying the cuisines of the world for the last 7 months, I am reveling in the chance to create my own cuisine again. This past week I have spent restocking my larder and buying out the stock of Athens Locally Grown. There is NOTHING like local food, and I have missed Georgia’s local food so much. Kale and sweet potatoes top my list and I’ve been getting my fill of them this past week.

For one reason or another, I’ve been eating a mostly vegetarian diet for the last several months, and I was really looking forward to getting back to some high quality, delicious pastured and grass-fed meats. Everyone who thinks about food at all approaches the problem of eating meat from a different perspective. Some go vegan. Others think cheese and eggs from factory farms are okay but killing animals is not. My own approach to this is that meat production and processing when done humanely on pasture by small-scale organic farmers is the most sustainable, healthful and ethical answer to the problem of getting the requisite amount of protein in my diet. Protein from animal sources (as opposed to plants) is critical to me because I have juvenile diabetes. Animal proteins reduce my insulin requirements and delay metabolism of carbohydrates without adding extra carbohydrates the way grain or legume sources do. A balanced diet is the only diet for my particular body.

There are some other low carb protein options, but each comes with its own serious downside. Soy based proteins come wrapped in plastic from 1000s of miles away and carry the risk of high levels of phytoestrogen exposure if over-consumed. (Read, if this is your only protein source, you are overconsuming). Plant monocultures are also devastating to the ecology of any place, and you better believe that even your organic tofu, soy milk and seitan come from monocropped sources. It is not hard to imagine that many animals whose destiny was never someone’s plate (butterflies, birds, fish, fungi, bacteria, worms…) die from the production of a serving of wheat, rice and other grains.

Eggs and cheese have their own ethical problems. Chickens in factory farms are tortured, imprisoned and poisoned for their eggs, as are the cows and calves that produce the milk and rennet required for your industrially processed cheeses. The humane slaughter of a chicken for a meal is way more ethical in my mind than eating eggs or cheese which were extracted through the living death of animals. Locally produced eggs and cheese usually don’t have these issues but this is an expensive option at $15/pound. I have also found that a steady diet of eggs and cheese also wrecks havoc on my cholesterol levels. Strangely, a diet of varied pastured meats, including a lot of bacon (go figure) puts my good cholesterol off the charts and my bad cholesterol in the basement. I volunteer to be a research subject should anyone want to find out why. But I think I know why. When grains form the basis of a diet, it often leads to high cholesterol levels in you or the critter who is eating them. Pastured beef cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and chickens often subsist solely on grasses, legumes and other forage, and so have very low levels of cholesterol themselves.

The killing part is still a thorny issue for many. Having been raised on a farm where my playmates became dinner more often than not, and coming from a long line of farmers who did their own butchering and processing after giving their animals a beautiful life and ultimately a purpose to provide for them, makes this a less abstract issue for me. I don’t want to eat my dog or my horse, but they aren’t in my life for that purpose. When I bring animals to my farm with the purpose of having them perpetuate my chain of being, it seems that the only way forward is to give them a natural and humane life and death.

I trust that the farmers who raise meat for me give their animals this. I also know that no one was exploited or poisoned to produce this food and my money goes to the farmer who did this for me, not to some nameless faceless corporation. I also know that small-scale diversified pastured animal production fits beautifully in a variety of ecological niches here in the U.S., and cows, goats, pigs and chickens are often beneficial to diversity and health in many ecosystems. This food also comes from somewhere in my immediate geography and this has benefits beyond the environmental. I boost the local economy and foster social relations at the same time I lower my carbon footprint. I can’t do that with grains, not here, not anywhere (only exception is Minnesota with wild rice, which may be the world’s most perfect food).

Since my body won’t have my diet any other way, I choose this path with my eyes wide open. I give thanks for the sacrifice of the animal who provides me with life, and offer my best love, skill and care in the preparation and consumption of the food, knowing full well that I have taken life for my own. It is a sacrament dedicated to life, not just a meal.

This week, I bought a pastured chicken from Greendale Farms. It was my first taste of chicken in 8 months, and I had plans for all my favorite meals. First I roasted the chicken rubbed with a garlic-herb butter that I made myself from local cream. Then I made stock from the bones and made a sweet potato and kale chicken soup for the freezer to be pulled out when I don’t have time to cook. For lunch, I had leftover root vegetables and chicken slathered in gravy from the pan drippings with some steamed local baby broccoli heads. Tonight I am making chicken and wildrice hotdish—a favorite of mine from childhood. One chicken, four different recipes; at least ten different meals. One chicken, one thriving farmer, one local place, one intact ecology. One chicken, one sacrifice.

I won’t convince anyone already convinced that their way is right, and that is not my intention. It’s just one answer to a multitude of questions about how we do this thing called life. For me and my life, this is the answer and the way for me. Come over for dinner if you want to join me.

Think well, live well, be well.

Fat Babies

2010-12-07T16:29:00.000-08:00

There is a narrative of poverty about the Dominican Republic, perpetuated by people like Angelina Jolie that most people accept as par for the course in “developing countries”. I do not dispute that people here are poor, and to be sure, there are people here, like everywhere, who live in conditions of grinding poverty and desperation. I would also add that a lot of those living in poverty here are Haitians, whose struggle for existence is exacerbated by lack of documentation and unreliable work visas. But, poverty has many faces. One of them is dignity. Another is perseverance. Another is the strength of women and families.

I questioned my own assumptions about poverty and this place when I first came in 2007. I saw things in the rural areas that surprised me—well-fed animals, neatly swept yards, freshly painted houses and lacy curtains waving in the windows. But it was the fat babies that really turned my head—then and now. Everywhere we go, we see fat babies waddling around, and it makes me really happy for lots of reasons. One reason is that infant mortality is usually a result of malnutrition, and this is also related to maternal malnutrition. The fact that we see a lot of fat babies suggests that both mothers and babies are getting enough food—which is usually not the case in poor populations.

I puzzled about this for a bit, and wondered if maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to see, or rather, just had my head turned by cute babies, until I ran across a very interesting statistic. Almost a quarter of the world’s children under five years old are underweight. The average percentage for the Caribbean and Latin American region is 8%. The percentage for the DR is 5%. So I was right, babies here—are at least statistically fatter than they are elsewhere. But why? The DR is slightly below the world average in terms of income (using purchasing power parity as a measure), as has an average annual income per person of around $8000, vs $10,000 for the world average. This on par with the rest of the region, which have (in some cases astonishingly) higher numbers of underweight children (15% for Ecuador). The DR also has the same income per capita as Thailand, but they have rates of underweight children closer to the world average (20%). If it’s not income, then what is it?

I would like to suggest that it is because women are the main breadwinners and heads of household here. I know this is paradoxical, and flies in the face of conventional wisdom. It is well documented that female headed households are generally poorer than male-headed households. But what I see here is that female-headed households have complex relations with other women in female-headed households, and that a reciprocal social economy revolves around children that prioritizes sharing resources, including food. For example, in our guesthouse, our housemother, AnaJulia is a single mother and she regularly babysits (for no money) for her sisters, sisters-in-law and other female neighbors while they work or go to school. She also regularly feeds a large extended family every time they visit. Roosters and rum (the provenance of masculinity) do not compete for resources in these households, and women in the DR regularly forsake relationships with men because they have failed to support their children. Tellingly, the countries with the highest levels of underweight children (Bangladesh, Yemen, Ethiopia) are also those countries where women have the least amount of autonomy, mobility and control over their bodies.

I don’t know if I’m right or wrong, and I probably won’t pursue the question any further than this. I’m just happy to see fat babies, and I hope to keep seeing them for a long time to come. I’m also happy to see the ways in which people cope and prioritize in the face of scarce resources, and turn the narratives of poverty and hopelessness into narratives of dignity, resourcefulness and strength.

Casabe Cottage Industry

2010-12-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

The high point of today was a trip to a home-scale casabe factory. Casabe, which is made from yuca (also known as cassava or manioc) is a staple food in the Dominican Republic. Moncion happens to the be the casabe capital of the DR--maybe even the universe. There are several large scale factories here, but we drive by a home-scale factory at least twice a day. Today, we decided to stop and see how they do it. Yuca originated in the Caribbean, and has since spread throughout the world, via colonialism. It takes a long time to grow (18 months), and resembles a small tree. The root is waxy and brown and tastes a bit like a potato when boiled. Casabe is made from the crushed yuca root.

There are several stages of washing, crushing, straining, pulverizing, sifting, etc. before it becomes a kind of lumpy powder. This dried powder is spread inside cast iron rings on a wood fired griddle and roasted until it gets crispy. More yuca root powder is added, and the casabe is turned to cook on the other side. When done (a process that takes a few minutes) the casabe is stacked, cut (with a bandsaw!) and wrapped for sale.

Mechi, the woman who owns this factory, sells her product mostly on the "Road to Moncion" but also in Mao (the closest large town). She was delighted to share her very fine product with us and sent us home with a couple freshly wrapped packs for the equivalent of a couple dollars. The price of food continues to rise due to CAFTA-DR (Central American Free Trade Agreement), the consequent increase of food imports and the decline in the viability of food production in Dominican Republic. As we are finding out, the rising food prices are causing a tremendous amount of anxiety among poorly paid banana workers.

I hope that small-scale, home-based production of indigenous and locally-produced and consumed foods can remain viable in a rapidly changing economic situation. Indeed, given what we are finding out about the impact of globalization here, it may be the only kind of enterprise that does. Or dare I say, should...

On Chickens and Roads

2010-12-03T12:47:00.001-08:00

Chickens are a rather important (and at times fairly irritating) part of the social economy here in Moncion. Right now, as I sit in my "office" on the porch of our guesthouse, I am watching the neighbor train his roosters for fighting. This involves a practice fight (traqueo) between his various roosters and consequent selection of a few who are taken away. My guess is that a cock fight is in the works for this evening or weekend. There is a constant din of crowing throughout the town of Moncion, and the sound of it pulses across the valley all day and most of the night. As we inadvertently determined via an interview recording a rooster crows every five seconds in our neighborhood.

The roosters of Moncion only take time off from crowing between the hours of 7 pm and 3 am, which is now when I sleep. There must be thousands of roosters here, which is an indication of the role cockfighting plays in the entertainment "industry" here. It's a blood "sport" during which roosters often fight to the death (and then are eaten by the crowd), and it has huge social significance for the construction of masculinity here and in the wider Caribbean region.

But...if you think the roosters have a terrible fate, consider the fates of the hens. The Dominican Republic has adopted much of the North's industrial models of farming, and just up the road there are several chicken houses. Whether they are layers or broilers is not clear, but what is clear from menus and our meals in the guesthouse, is that eggs and chickens are a staple food for Dominicans. What is also clear is that these chickens live short, miserable lives crammed into cages just so we eaters can have cheap food, and those farmers can make money. (Incidentally, livestock farmers have the nicest houses in Moncion).

After our housemother AnaJulia made Erin and I (industrially produced) eggs for breakfast five days in a row, we began to worry about our health and the impact of our "choice" to eat these eggs. And so we took matters in our own hands. One day, I saw a woman on the beautiful "Road to Moncion" (a book I will write someday) selling small, brown eggs in the shade of a small stand. I am not kidding when I say I slammed on the brakes, almost got us flattened by a truck and backed into a tree just to get me some of those eggs. Turns out the hens are housed in wooden cages, but out in the open air, and they probably live lives a lot like the hens in my own backyard. The hens belong to the "sister of Emelita" and the eggs they produce are for sale along with sweets, cake and casabe most days of the week.

Even though AnaJulia has three sweet hens and a Foghorn Leghorn rooster in her backyard, she still buys the white eggs in the colmados (small local groceries). We weren't sure how she would receive our donation, and haven't explored the issue yet, but I suspect that she thinks we want the industrial products. We have slowly and gently been steering her towards the idea that we actually *like* to eat local fruits and vegetables. (We both have been having green vegetable fantasies...). This seems to mystify her for the most part, but she does her best to please us, no matter how weird our tastes might seem.

While the roosters and the layers of Moncion have uncertain and often horrible fates, the "wild chickens" of Moncion lead lives that most chickens would envy. They are literally everywhere, in all shapes, sizes and colors. They bring back fond memories of my own little Banty chickens, and it makes me happy to see livestock freed from the bonds of human desires for profit, pleasure and captivity.

So to answer the age old question, why did the chicken cross the road? Because, here in Moncion, it could.

Re/Displacement

2010-11-29T11:31:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving used to be my favorite holiday. Any holiday premised entirely on cooking and eating is my kind of party. But, after encountering indigenous people and the remnants of their civilizations, all over the world (Adivasi in India, Anishinabe in Minnesota and Taino in the Caribbean) who have been pushed off their land by colonizing populations, I have lost my appetite for this particular celebration. In the runup to the holidays in the U.S., it’s easy to overlook the foundations of this holiday, and the tragic aftermath of western contact in the Americas.

Being in the Dominican Republic over this holiday, and having just left White Earth Indian Reservation, I was more than usually conscious of the impact of European contact and settlement in the western hemisphere. Colombus landed here first, and his brother, Bartholomew got the loot (slaves, land, gold, etc) for the Spanish crown. The Taino, not having immunity to European crowd diseases died in waves of epidemics. Those that did not die immediately were drafted as laborers for the colonies and were worked to death. African slaves were imported to work the sugar cane, and the children of Spanish plantation owners and African slaves now compose the population of most of the D.R. The only Caribbean island with any remaining native population of Taino is the island of Dominica—which is now an eco-reserve for tourists and the setting of the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

This Thanksgiving, Erin and I were staying in the house of AnaJulia and her daughter AnaMaria. Their house is our home base for banana farmer interviews in the region. For obvious reasons, Thanksgiving is not celebrated here, and given that we missed our families, we asked Dona Julia to cook us a special (vegetarian) meal to be shared in the afternoon. She knocked herself out! We had two kinds of rice (yellow and white), the typical Dominican tomato-based bean stew, fried sweet plantains, stewed eggplant, stewed squash (tayote), potato salad, green salad and fresh fruit. The whole meal was traditional Dominican food--minus the meat—which is a huge part of almost every meal here. Dona Julia joked that she bought every vegetable available in Moncion for us. We ate really well, and we felt pretty lucky.

We also felt pretty inspired. Next Thanksgiving, instead of gorging ourselves on food from factory farms in a macabre facsimile of the imagined and distorted origins of this holiday (see Eating Animals, by Jonathon Safran Foer), why don’t we honor the memory and legacy of indigenous people, and their agri-cultures in a conscious way by incorporating wild foods and local foods into our Thanksgiving meals and share these meals with a wider community? Why don’t we dedicate Black Friday as a day of service to rectifying the legacies of colonialism instead of a day of indulgence? Why don’t we organize ourselves to help return land to the landless in whatever way we can? We cannot make up for the sins of our forebears, but we can definitely stop being part of the problem. Start making plans now!

Intercropping Magnet

2010-11-20T16:49:00.000-08:00

I have a new theory--well two--that I need to test. (With more travel obviously...) So, either more people than I think practice permaculture, or I am somehow magically spirited to places where people practice this. I am going to go with the latter, no matter how incongruous that might be, and hope that all evidence of the first theory means really good things for the world.

Erin and I arrived in the Dominican Republic yesterday afternoon and after a ridiculous amount of rigmarole getting a rental car, set off for our guesthouse in the mountains in Moncion. We didn't make it there because the sun set pretty fast, as it does in the tropics, and going on five hours of sleep, I decided I would rather sleep than drive in the pitch black up a winding mountain road to a place I had no idea how to reach.

We stayed in Mao--a town named for a Taino chief, not the commie--in a giant hotel with three karaoke bars--blaring at us from all directions. Fortunately our blackout curtains kept out the sound--and the sun. When we woke up (after miraculously getting some sleep) Erin opened the balcony door to the dazzling morning sunshine. Both of us--being accustomed to the weak sun of the high latitudes recently, were physically thrown back by the intensity of the tropical light. Erin shut the door, and said "Let me try that again--more slowly this time".

After thawing ourselves in the sun like a couple of landlocked, high latitude cats for a gorgeous half hour, we set off for our guesthouse. We were mighty glad we stayed the night in Mao because the views up the mountain road were outrageously beautiful. Moncion is kind of a sleepy town with fresh, sweet air and a fair amount of chicken and donkey traffic. (Don't get me wrong--there is still merengue music belting out 24-7). Our guesthouse--Casa De Las Anas--is down a bumpy dirt alley and is nestled in a forest of fruit trees.

I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing on my round of the gardens this afternoon--oranges, avocadoes, cassava, bananas, cherries, mangoes, plantains, sugarcane, chinole and other ornamental and food crop plants I don't recognize were all growing in happy intercropped profusion in this little tiny space in the middle of the city. The oranges we ate for lunch came right from the tree in the yard and they were like nothing I had ever eaten before.

Noel, our guide--a very mature boy for his age, told us that the soil was very good, and produced very nice fruits. I am looking forward to a few more weeks of being treated to such nice fruits--grown in a sustainable way, for household consumption. I have seen this everywhere I have been in the last many months and I know that we can all do this! Anywhere!

Urban Permaculture Art

2010-10-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

My permaculture peeps in Athens are meeting next Monday to talk about the role of art and murals in social change. Thought of you guys today! Here's some inspiration!

Walnut Way Forward

2010-10-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

I have a serious amount of blogging to do, and I will catch up, but here’s a short update. I have a few weeks between leaving Minnesota and going to the Dominican Republic. In the interests of money and time, I decided against going back to Europe (turned down an opportunity to go to Terra Madre, agggggghhhh—what WAS I thinking?) and decided for staying in the United States and taking a tour of food sovereignty movements in my own backyard. There are a whole slew of urban gardens, sustainability initiatives and fabulous farms between Minnesota and Georgia, and I’m hitting as many as I can!

Yesterday, I left Minneapolis (after a fabulous local breakfast at butter café) and drove to Milwaukee to visit some of the urban agriculture projects of which I have long been a fan. Colleague and friend, Nik Heynen, hooked me up with Walnut Way, which is a non-profit urban renewal project in a previously vibrant community, but until very recently a red lined, drug and prostitution haven on the border between two police districts. This neighborhood was a no man’s land until Sharon Adams came back to town and straightened a thing or two out.

The project started with community meetings to identify pressing needs. Among other things, there was a dire need for storm water runoff management. This is not the first time that I’ve heard of waste management as a pressing priority in poor, urban neighborhoods, but the global scope of this local need was really striking. The runoff of contaminated water affects this neighborhood, the regional watershed, the Great Lakes ecosystem, and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. Sharon, and her partner Larry, researched the best way to do this, and among other things, including cisterns and rain barrels, started “rain gardens”.

Rain gardens are shallow wells built into the yards of the neighborhood residents that literally siphon rain water off roofs via downspouts, into small—virtually unnoticeable--wildflower gardens. A second need in the community was restoring the neighborhood continuity with housing in the community’s numerous vacant lots. The neighborhood, once a vibrant African-American community in Milwaukee’s jazz scene was redlined, disinvested and abandoned in the 1970s and 1980s. The detruction and removal of hundred year old houses left the community with a blighted landscape and no prospects for renewal. Except for a planned freeway through the heart of it, which was later abandoned. Thank god.

The city sold the vacant lots for a $1 to encourage building in the neighborhood. There are now home to peach trees, raspberry bushes and raised beds for vegetables. The majority of the produce is sold in the not for profit “Fondy Market” and the remainder is distributed throughout the community. The project has since expanded, with a very large grant by real estate tycoon Joe Zilber via the Zilber family foundation, to the Lindsay Heights neighborhood, to the north of Walnut Way.

A few kids down the street, like kids all over the world, wanted me to take their picture (I love this so much), and then proceeded to take me on a tour of their neighborhood. They, like their mom and her sister, are recipients of the food grown in Walnut Way gardens and are growing up in better housing, a more cohesive community (everyone knows everybody) with healthier bodies and with opportunities for meaningful work in their neighborhood, that was unheard of ten years ago.

The gifts of gardens keep on giving.

(Almost) Losing Seneca Pink Lady

2010-10-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

This morning, I discovered why the mice have been so noisy in the night in my cabin in the woods. They have steadily and industriously stripped the seeds off the cobs of the Seneca Pink Lady corn and stored them in various places, including my suitcase. I have been cursing them nightly for their noisy projects, but Lord Ganesh, the Hindu god with the elephant head who removed obstacles and rides on the back of a rat, daily stays the hand of execution. My firm belief in the sanctity of life tells me that there is nothing more senseless than me destroying the life that carried on before I got here, and will remain carrying on long after I am gone. Little did I know that in my magnanimity, I was feeding them endangered heirloom corn!

I discovered this to my horror, this morning. As I picked out some clothes to wear, three kernels of pink corn rolled out of them. I ran, half naked, to the kitchen, and saw the now completely naked cobs of corn. I was already processing a tremendous amount of painful present and past emotional damage in my isolation here, and I don’t think devastated could really cover how I felt at this complete failure of my responsibility to these seeds. Trying to put on a brave face, I held the three remaining kernels in my hand and told myself it didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. And how was I going to grow corn in my backyard anyway. Forget about it.

I then realized that I was feeling that the mice had taken everything from me and left me with nothing. This seems to be the story of my life, and a better allegory could not be made for my present emotional state. Through my tears, however, I realized that they had taken what they needed, and left me with what I needed. With great care and diligence, I could plant these three survivors and bring the corn back to plenty. Just like I had everything I needed to bring back—with great care and diligence--my own emotional life to plenty. I carefully wrapped the seeds and stored them in a safe place, promising that when I finally had the chance, I would plant them out and grow them (along with other endangered heirlooms) on the Trauger farm.

Feeling better, I finished dressing. As I dug through my clothes, I discovered dozens and dozens more kernels that had been carefully removed from the cob and laboriously carried to the bedroom and stored in the safe place that just happened to be my suitcase. Life is strange and wonderful when you just let it live. My furry friends had packed my share for me.

With hope and joy, you can turn anything around, and when you carry on, you will very likely find a lot more than you thought you had. I said a little prayer of thanks to Ganesh. And to those little noisy mice for taking care of themselves, and for taking care of me.

Walleye supper

2010-10-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

The walleye supper is an institution in the Northwoods. Walleye pike is a much prized and delicious fish found in Minnesota’s many lakes. Churches, fraternal organizations and other associations of civil society regularly hold a walleye fry as a way to gather people together and more often than not, as a fund raiser to send kids to camp, or to help raise money for someone’s emergency medical bills. People brake for walleye. Tonight, after a weekend of superlative connection with my family, including a blissful several hours with my beautiful, charming and talented nieces--I am not biased-- I hosted my own walleye supper in my incredible cabin in the woods.

I have been staying here for a few weeks, and it is a virtual paradise. In spite of a rather significant mouse/bat/squirrel problem, this cabin has been my refuge and sanctuary. There is no internet and no cell signal, so I find myself with a surfeit of hours with which to occupy myself. I manage by reading—and have managed to do more reading in the past two weeks than in the last two years. I also find a luxurious amount of time to cook. My nieces, Taylor and Alexis, and I spent a long time last night talking about the joys and pleasures of cooking. As Taylor put it-with complete sincerity—“I like to cook. And eat afterward”. I feel like I have found the sisters I have never had.

So tonight, after we all went our separate ways—they back to work and college in the Twin Cities—and me to my cabin in the woods, I decided to make a very special dinner for myself. I took my cue from Alexis, who now has a “big girl” 9-5 job, and who spends her entire evening after work shopping, cooking, sharing and cleaning up after a delicious meal made from fresh, organic, and local ingredients. It must be genetic. She also spent a year with a vegetarian family Paris, so she knows something about how to cook righteously.

I went to the grocery store this afternoon, and as we had discussed, following Michael Pollan’s, rule # whatever, in Food Rules, I stuck to the edges of the grocery store. I spent a lot of time in the organic produce section, and as I wheeled over to the dairy section, I happened to pass the meat counter. I have been craving walleye for a week or so, ever since Tony mentioned taking me out to “net” walleye. The native population in Minnesota has rights to net rather than line fish on the lakes. (Having spent more than a few completely hateful hours trying to catch a fish on a hook, I can totally get behind netting as a way to get your year’s worth of walleye in the freezer). Natives cannot, however, sell any of their harvest.

Since I couldn’t buy it, I volunteered my time in exchange for a few filets. This fishing expedition never came to fruition for various reasons, so I was stuck with a walleye craving and no fish in the freezer. I found that the local grocery store (for which my brother worked about 30 years ago) was stocking some walleye filets from Canada. A meal of fish, rice and greens, materialized in my head, and I went for it, in spite of all kinds of reasons not to go for it, including not having the faintest idea where it came from in Canada, under what conditions it was caught, and for whom the $9/pound benefited. But I had rice, and it needed walleye all of a sudden.

A few weeks ago, I went to a drum ceremony on the reservation in Naytauwash. This ceremony constitutes its own blog post, so I won’t go into a whole lot of detail about it now. In short, a “big” drum which was gifted to the Ojibwe by the Lakota is brought out to the community and is played. The reasons for bringing out the drum are vast and complex, and I will do my best to explain this elsewhere. As part of the day, the women who guard the drum (ogichidakwe) distribute gifts of welcome to all those present and I was the incredibly lucky recipient of a pound of manoomin—wild rice. Wild rice constitutes its own blog post as well, and I have been remiss. Mea culpa. More later on that…

Wild rice grows in the lakes in the Upper Midwest and Cananda and is one of the staple grains for the Anishinabeg people distributed throughout these territories. The gift of rice was humbling in the extreme, and I passed on half of it to an elder who spoke with me at length about food sovereignty. The remainder sits in my kitchen waiting for a beautiful moment like tonight.

I have been helping to put the Farm-to-School gardens to bed for the winter and there is a surplus of broccoli in one of them. The big heads have been harvested already, but the tiny side shoots sweetened by the recent frost have been finding their way into my harvest basket on more than one occasion. Tonight, I panfried the walleye in a little salt, pepper and coriander and topped it with cremini mushrooms sauteed in garlic and oregano. If I knew more, I would be eating wild mushrooms, and if I lived here, that oregano would have come from my backyard not a farm somewhere fortunately not too far from here. The garlic came from a garden I visited somewhere on this journey. A big pile of the rice and an even bigger pile of broccoli shoots and greens topped off a plate full enough for two.

As I have said before on more than one occasion, eating in your local foodshed requires knowing when, where and from whom to get your food. In this case, everything I put on my plate was available locally, and all of it was, or could have been, obtained without money, in exchange for showing up and participating. In less than a month of showing up here, I have all of this already in place. It can be done anywhere, at anytime, by anybody who brings a spirit of reverence, cooperation and dedication.

Show up. Participate. Enjoy!

Keeping My Mouth Shut

2010-10-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I figured out why I have had writers' block and I am only taking pictures of swans and fall foliage. By some fantastic stroke of luck, I have been taken under the tutelage of a White Earth man, who has introduced me to some important animate nouns including ininatig, manoomin and asema, brought me to elders and shared with me the drum ceremonies of White Earth. I'm not at all sure I understand any of this in any deep way and I certainly don't know enough to say anything about it. I do know after a month of being here, that food, tradition and spirituality are all intimately linked, and that food sovereignty does not exist outside of spiritual and cultural sovereignty. But, until I know more than that, I'm keeping my ears and my heart open and my mouth firmly shut.

Dinner with the Other Amy T.

2010-09-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

I've been so out of it, that I've actually had not one-but TWO-dinners cooked by the other Amy T since I last posted to this thing. The other Amy T and I went to grade school together, and when she got all growed up she turned out to be a chef--and I got to be a lucky guest at dinner-twice in the last week. You can check out her blog here: http://www.sourtoothjournal.blogspot.com/

So the first time I had dinner with Amy T and her husband Aaron, and her small son Hank, was the day I stopped being homeless. Amy and I had (re)connected (over food, of course) on Facebook and since I was up in the area where we grew up and where she now lives and works teaching cooking clases, I kind of invited myself over for dinner one night. That night Amy made homemade pasta and we drank a lot of wine and chatted late into the night in their beautiful cabin on a river in the deep woods. I was relating my housing woes, and well, as luck would have it, there is a beautiful cabin sitting empty on the property next to theirs (owned by an artist friend of theirs from Brooklyn). Would I like to stay there? How quickly can I say yes?

They are going to have to throw me out. Or I will start paying rent. One or the other. I'm not leaving.

To sweeten this sweet deal even more, Amy invited me over for dinner again. (I really like how this is going.) She made chicken cacciatore from chickens they had just purchased from George and Mary's Best Darn Chicken 'Round in Frazee, Minnesota. I swear I am not making up, elaborating on or in any way hyperbolizing the name of their business. It was also the biggest darn chicken 'round--weighing in around 8 pounds a piece. She cooked up some broccoli from Hmong farmers in Minneapolis--blanched and pan fried in butter and garlic. Same with the potatoes from her garden--Yellow Fins, also blanched and roasted in olive oil til they were crunchy, tasty perfection. And she also slow cooked some chicken breasts in brown butter and herbs until that was mouthwatering. But the piece de resistance--for me--had to be the chicken of the woods mushroom that she roasted up in the oven.

Right now, I am regretting deeply the fact that I left my camera back at my cabin. I should have known better--but a girl respects another girls blog, eh? This was the biggest darn mushroom I've ever seen and it was so beautiful, sitting with warm earthy tones in the soft light of the kitchen. Words cannot really describe the incredible taste--it was like a big beefy morel--unlike anything I've ever eaten. I have seen these guys out in the woods--but never dared to eat them.

How's that for growing, cooking and eating outside the system!? Right outta them woods!

Writer's Block

2010-09-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

Not sure what's up with me lately--haven't been taking pictures, haven't been writing, haven't been doing much but thinking. I think this is a good thing, but I regret some missed photo ops and some creative thoughts that got away before I caught them on paper. I think it's a combination of a lot of things--one of which was being semi-homeless for a week or two. I was bouncing around a bit from home to home, feeling a lot like Goldilocks. But I think I've settled on the perfect spot for the rest of my time here-a gorgeous art studio cum "pond-home" on the edge of a bog on the edge of the woods, on the edge of the prairie. Maybe I've just been a bit lost in the beauty of it all.

My companions are a rafter of turkeys, a convocation of eagles and a whiteness of swans. I stumbled across this great good fortune through the generosity of old friends, after a series of unfortunate events involving mice in my bed and other obstacles to sleep. This new place also does not have internet which is turning out to be a durn good thing. Finally figured out why I can't ever get any reading done. So, I've been walking, reading, thinking, communing with nature--thinking about all the things I really don't need in life. And now, hopefully I'm back to writing. Since pictures are worth a thousand words, I might have to spill a lot of ink to share with you the events of the last two weeks. It's been pretty amazing. Stay tuned.

Mom

2010-09-19T15:50:00.000-07:00

I guess I come by this food stuff honestly. I just spent the weekend with my family in Northern Minnesota. Most of that time was spent with my mom, who I am pretty sure killed herself to put food on the table when I was kid. She worked in Bagley, Minnesota as a public health nurse for almost all of our time in the big woods of this great country. She got up at 5:30 am to milk our goats and feed our chickens and my horses. Then she drove an hour to work after getting my brother and I on the school bus for our hour long ride to school. She came home late at night and fed all the animals and cooked us dinner and made my lunch, helped me with my homework and put us to bed. We ate almost all our food from our land and she worked full time to support us.

When did she have time for herself?

This weekend she and I drove around the White Earth Indian Reservation, where I am currently "stationed" and checked out the local food scene. This included a trip to Winona LaDuke's farm where we picked raspberries and I photo-documented the local guys parching the rice from this year's harvest. Then we went to see Daryl--who grows a lot of food for the White Earth Land Recovery Project's "Farm to School" program at Pine Point Elementary School. He fed us apples from his orchard and sent us home with two ice cream pails of apples for 4 bucks.

Mom and I spent the night near Itasca State Park and went out looking for the Wild Food Summit on White Earth in the morning. We missed them cuz they were already out harvesting by the time we got there. We tried to make up for this by going to Tamarac National Wildlife Refuge for a hike. We came across a mycologist there giving a lecture to his students on wild mushrooms, and found out about what we missed with the White Earth folks. We went for a hike anyway and saw all the beautiful mushrooms in the woods, enjoying their last hurrah before the winter.

We saw a beautiful family of trumpeter swans, and seeing them made me think about the beauty of family and the bonds of love that transcend everything. In spite of all the miles between us, we manage to stick together and give each other a lot of love. That's more important than anything else, and I feel so blessed by all the sacrifices and the wisdom my mom has shared with me. Thank you. Love you.

Saving Seneca Pink Lady

2010-09-15T13:04:00.000-07:00

So, I’m up at White Earth, settling in and finding myself doing a lot of grant-writing. Putting a lot of resources into grant-seeking seems to be the fate of most non-profits, I’m afraid. It makes sense from a financial point of view, especially for farms and food-oriented enterprises. There isn’t a lot of money to be made on producing or distributing food. There are reasons for this—most of which I don’t agree with—such as cheap food policies that make food plentiful and mostly bad for us, and which drive farmers to bankruptcy when the costs of production are greater than the market price. This also tends to keep would-be farmers from even trying out the project of agriculture at all. These structural constraints leave a few farmers with big operations producing a few crops that are engineered to be big yielders that need to be babied with a lot of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. These crops are then turned into value-added products such as high-fructose corn syrup (soon to be relabeled “corn sugar”). Yeah that would be the mostly bad for us (and them) part.

In the meantime, thousands of varieties of food crops which have been locally developed over centuries to provide good food for small communities of growers and eaters have been lost in the push towards monocultures of high-yielding hybrids and GMOs.

Seneca Pink Lady is one such variety.

So, I was minding my own business the other day, toiling in the money mine, almost ready to call it a day and think about supper, when Winona came home with five garbage bags full of corn. Clear the table, she said, this corn needs to be husked and braided tonight. Facing 300 ears of corn at 8 pm, suddenly made me very interested in budgets, narratives and justifications. But there was no way out of this one, and once I fully understood the project, I was very turned on to the idea.

Winona had been given a few ears of a variety of pink and red colored corn (as opposed to white, yellow and blue) that is grown for cornmeal by a First Nations tribe in New York. She made an executive decision (as executive directors of non-profits get to do) to grow it out as the White Earth Land Recovery Project’s special corn variety. It’s not hard to understand the value of doing this. It’s not only visually beautiful to behold, it’s also like looking at a living museum. And, these three hundred or so ears of corn are some of the only remaining seeds of this corn ON THE PLANET. I was a little awestruck. And made haste to clear the table.

That evening we sat around and chatted late into the night while we “undressed” (as Winona put it) the ladies. The traditional way of drying the corn kernels for use as food, and for preserving the seeds for the next year’s crop is to braid the corn husks so that it could be hung up. The husks needed to be peeled back, with the silks and any underdeveloped tops removed. As I delicately peeled back the husks to reveal the speckled magenta kernels, I felt like I was handling jewels. The corn was fat, smooth and glistened with the luster of health and life.

The corn had been grown out by a local farmer (in a lot of horseshit, according to Winona) and it was remarkably robust and completely free of worms and mold. That would be because it was adapted over centuries to growing in northern climates. Duh. All it needs is some old fashioned fertilizer. No pesticides and no genetic engineering to turn a few ears of corn into tens of thousands of seeds. It is not a minor miracle, and was impressed all over again with the ingenuity intelligence and eye for beauty of our ancestors who took a wild plant called teosinte and turned it into this amazing food. More on this here: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=104207&org=BIO

The next morning I, and another volunteer, Erica from the Shinnecock tribe on Long Island, braided up the pink ladies and hung them up to dry in a room in the upstairs of Winona’s cabin. It felt like a sacred ritual, and in many ways it was. It was a tribute to the wisdom of the past and a pledge to work toward the preservation of life for the future. If that isn’t a ritual worth doing, I don’t know what is.

Grow, Cook, Love

2010-09-15T12:33:00.000-07:00

A lot of people have been joking around that my Grow, Cook, Eat tour is emulating the book/film sensation Eat, Pray, Love. Even though I know yall are teasing me, I’m still pretty flattered. Difference is, I’m not interested in putting love at the end of this thing. Love is woven into every moment of all these gatherings around growing, cooking and sharing of food. The best part of this leg of my trip has been a return to love—with friends and family in Minnesota. I understand a lot better now how I came to be where I am, and why I care about the things I care about. And why I’m on this journey in the first place. It’s a real blessing to land here—in this place so close and so far away from home—in the middle of my journey. It’s a reminder and an inspiration.

My mom and my sister-in-law both indulged my invasion of their kitchen on my way here, and I only barged my way in because I saw local food sitting there in the kitchen that needed to be cooked and eaten. And in both cases it wasn’t food that was purchased in the local farmers’ market or CSA or anything anywhere near that. They—or their family members—grew it themselves. I come by this honestly, I guess.

After hanging out here on Round Lake and invading Winona LaDuke’s kitchen for a few weeks, my best friend for over thirty years, Becky, alerted me to a Harvest Festival in Duluth. I brake for harvest. So, I packed up a weekend bag and drove over to one of my favorite places in the world. I think the festival was just an excuse though--we just ended up flying kites on the lakeshore with the kids instead of doing much with the festival. And the real highlight was reconnecting with my kindred spirit, her kind and wise husband and their bright, inquisitive and beautiful children.

And we shared two completely locally produced meals together. When I arrived the first night, the chicken Becky and Brad has grown that summer was already on the grill, the roasted veggies (potatoes, onions and carrots) from the garden (complete with whole heads of roasted garlic!) were sweetening up in the oven and the sweet corn was waiting to be shucked and boiled. It was my kind of place, alright. Becky has had a dream realized this year when she started a small CSA. She has been dreaming about farming for many years and this year she sold three and half shares, and fed her own family on a small but ambitious garden. I am so proud of her!

And happy too—especially when I get to enjoy the fruits of her labor. I am promised pork chops when I come back next month.

The next morning we took the kids and headed over to a local dairy and pulled raw milk right outta the bulk tank. Take that Georgia and your raw milk paranoia. This is how real people get real milk. (Unless of course you are in India and you actually milk the buffalo yourself). The smell in the milk house transported both Becky and I back to our childhoods when we would go over to our neighbor (and her relative) to get raw milk from his bulk tank. I was especially proud of her as she poured the milk into beer growlers. When you can’t get beer, get milk.

When we got home, Nik, Becky’s son, who has some very special gifts when it comes to food, discovered that I had a box of Indian spices in the back of my car. I don’t go anywhere without my kitchen anymore, and out of sheer laziness these hadn’t made it into Winona’s kitchen yet. This provoked a keen interest in Nik to sample, smell and taste what could be done with them. I couldn’t have been happier to oblige. I offered to cook up a “full Indian dinner” for them and made a potato and kale dish and a tomato cheese dish. We all went out to Becky’s garden and harvested everything we needed for dinner. An hour later we were enjoying the fruits of her summer labor. The paneer was a special joy to make out of the fresh raw milk, and it was a crowd pleaser for sure.

Before we ate, we gathered around the table and prayed a prayer of thanksgiving for the special gifts of being with each other and for the food that we had been given so graciously by the land.

Love. Pray. Love. Eat. Love. Repeat.

Farm to School, Literally

2010-09-08T17:54:00.000-07:00

So, I was feeling a little alienated from where my food comes from. You know, not feeling connected to the process. Just eating food grown by who knows who, who knows where. Feeling a little bit like a fraud, or at least a travel writer, just relating adventures in restaurants in exotic places. Not anymore, no. I’m getting up close and personal with it ALL. I am currently on White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota, a mere stone’s throw away from where I spent my childhood. I am also, incidentally, living *in* Winona LaDuke’s house. I think it goes without saying that living with one of your idols (in a gorgeous cabin on a lake) is a great deal more than a person really can and should ask for—and certainly whoever is in charge up there, thanks for answering my prayers (or whatever muttering you heard)--in spades.

So, my jobs as a volunteer have so far included dog walking, tomato picking, melon schlepping, corn husking, grant writing, rice parching, pow-wow dancer assisting and horse petting. That’s just been the last three days. Whew! I think salsa making, picture-taking and rice harvesting are in my future. The melon schlepping is how I got up close and personal with the grow, cook and eat thing, and yeah, there’s a reason why we let other people grow the stuff for us in some warm climate somewhere else and it gets put in a little box and we put that little box in the big box in the kitchen and when the timer goes ding we eat. Well, I don't. But I like pain.

I was minding my own business the other night, cooking my dinner (sweet corn, broccoli and raspberries from Winona’s farm, that I didn't grow, but I picked). The phone rang and it turns out that Bob, who helps with the Farm-to-School program didn’t have wheels, and the melons, lopes and sweet corn needed to be at the school by 8 the next morning. And it’s pouring rain, freezing cold and getting dark. Sure, I would LOVE to help. There is a reason there are no pictures of this part, dear reader.

An hour later, down long twisty gravel roads that are getting a bit slushy and slippery from the rain we arrive at Henry Miller’s farm. 18 dozen ears of corn are lying on the lawn and we scurry back and forth carrying a few ears at a time and throw them in the back of the truck. Next stop is Robert Johnson’s farm for 30 watermelons and 30 cantalopes. Bob and Robert make a lope brigade and toss the melons in the back seat. Mercifully, pretty soon we’re dry and warm and on our way again. Both Henry and Robert are Amish farmers, and recent arrivals in this part of Minnesota. The Amish communities further east are facing tremendous development pressure and are moving west and north to escape it. Did I mention that it snows for 6 months of the year here? Not a huge amount of development pressure here, no.

I got the melons, lopes and corn back to the house and my work was done for the night. But the next morning Winona asked me to help out with shucking a hundred ears of corn for open house at the first day of Pine Point Elementary school. Sure, why not? It turns out that the school only has one part time cafeteria manager and she has one part time assistant, which is not enough hands to shuck corn or cut melons. (And a horrific under-prioritization of health and well being of our children, if I might add.) I ended up staying long enough to hand out the corn too, and it was a pure joy to watch the little kids eat it. See for yourself.

Can we have more of this, please?

Random Acts of Locavore

2010-09-04T11:58:00.001-07:00

Breakfast at home when I returned from India. Local melon, kale, eggs, bacon, cheese, bread...oh my! All from the farmer's markets in Athens. Ate this out in the garden thinking about how good life is.

Supper at Mom's--the Indian feast I was dreaming of while in INDIA! Appetizer of papad, salad with chunky chat masala and cilantro chutney; main course of paneer makheni, chicken tikka, aloo gobi, cucumber raita, roti, mango pickle and brown rice kheer for dessert--the works! Lots of stuff from Mom's garden.

Squash soup at my brother's house--squash and leeks from family gardens; rosemary from my shrub in Georgia and apples from an old tree growing in the woods around the corner from my brother's house. Perfect for a chilly fall day in Minnesota!

In a Nutshell

2010-08-29T15:29:00.001-07:00

Grow.

Cook.

Eat.

Dirty Hippie Festival

2010-08-29T14:00:00.001-07:00

It's taken me a long time to mentally get back to the United States. I am still (literally) dreaming that I am in India, and I find it very hard to adjust to living alone again. This will all change tomorrow when I get in the car for a 30 hour drive to White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota. But first, I have some unfinished business from Belgium to take care of. On my way to India in June, I stopped to visit my friend and colleague, Stijn, who introduced me to a bunch of permaculturalists in Belgium. I got an invitation I couldn't refuse from one of those kind folks, Cyrille, to return at the end of my time in India for a permaculture festival in Belgium. The timing was perfect so I rerouted myself from a decidedly unsustainable stop in Dubai, to a beautiful grow, cook and eat week in Nethen, Belgium.

Permaculture tends to resist definition, and like everything else, has its fair share of contradictions. It has its roots in sustainable food production, but extends to virtually everything that humans need for life. It is also a philosophy about better ways of living. Permaculturalists believe there is a fairer, cleaner and more joyful way to live. The "perma" part of permaculture is the idea that all our destructive and temporary systems based on finite fuel sources can be replaced with something more life-giving that lasts. There was plenty of evidence of this at the festival--all the local, organic food cooked up in the kitchen; the tents, yurts and teepees that provided beautiful shelter; joyful people who gave workshops on everything from biofuels to loving; bucket showers and composting toilets that kept us all clean; and healthy, happy folks working hard with big smiles all day long.

I gave a little workshop on setting up community seed banks and donated a good amount of time to the kitchen--chopping, stirring and serving up good food in a lot of really good company. My friend Regan finds chopping vegetables relaxing, and had she been working in the kitchen at the festival she would have been as blissed out as a yogi in an ashram in Rishikesh. I have never chopped so many vegies in my life. I'm not complaining, mind you--it was incredibly fun work with so many kind hearts, and this is what it takes to feed a lot of people really well. A lot of sharp knives, strong wrists and good natures.

For the first few days I was there the cooks provided meals for the organizers--about 50 in all. On the last day of the festival, which was open to all the festival attendees and the community, the kitchen staff cooked food for close to a thousand people. Needless to say, to feed this many people three vegan meals per day with local food takes a small army of vegetable choppers working non-stop. It was a beautiful sight to behold. And proof that it can be done.

The festival was held on an organic farm about an hour outside of Brussels. The farmer donated his cow pasture to 750 dirty hippies for a week (imagine that happening in the U.S. post Woodstock?) and donated about 40% of his vegetable production to the festival. I'm not sure what came from where, but I spent an afternoon chopping swiss chard, and enjoyed a nice swiss chard and mushroom saute that evening. The next day I wandered around the farm and came across evidence of a lot of swiss chard production. It gave me a really good feeling to think that food was grown, cooked and eaten in a space with a radius of about 20 feet. In my opinion, this is the way it should be.

This was all a stroke of incredibly good fortune, and a turn of events that still leaves me a bit shocked. I set out on this journey with few expectations, but hoping to find a few examples of how people are building alternative relationships with food and agriculture throughout the world. I was amazed to find out how much is going on outside the capitalist system, and really impressed with all the efforts of individuals and communities to do food and agriculture differently. This festival was a defining and shining example of how to do this, and how to do it well.

It was a beautiful and unexpected gift to have this festival arrive at the end of this phase of my travels. Permaculturalists believe in the importance of closing loops to eliminate waste and generate harmony in systems. This beautiful full circle in my intellectual and emotional travel is tremendously symbolic and poetic. I am grateful, humbled and awed. Permanently.

Captain Geography (AKA Miss India) Finds Cake

2010-08-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

And now for something completely different. My new beautiful friends at Navdanya made a special going away present for those of us leaving the farm in the coming days: a scavenger hunt!

I am pretty sure the whole point was to get us to dress up in silly costumes and do silly things so that we could kill ourselves laughing. Well, they nailed it. Our costumes, on the orders of our scavenger hunt masters, were to be collected from one article of clothing from all the interns. Mine consisted of a cape with a map of the world on it (from Hannah) and a turban (from Raquel) which I tried to wear like the women from heaven in Garhwal. Glasses from Abhyudia. Sweaty sock from Julia. One sandal from Kamal. One flip flop from Rachel (who has very small feet). I named myself Captain Geography, but Sunil, bless his heart, said I looked more like Miss India. The treasure at the end of the hunt was a banana spice cake that my darling friends had lovingly and secretly prepared earlier in the day.

We made it to the cake just in time for the dinner bell to ring. Since I had already made sure there were plenty of Indian sweets to go around, we proclaimed it saved for breakfast.Yes. Cake and chai for my last breakfast here. I couldn’t ask for anything more indulgent.

Part of the reason for our late start was because Sunil and I took a late afternoon stroll to the Indian sweet shop to get a kilo worth of sweets for everyone on the farm. Indian sweets are like nothing else in the world. Almost all of them are composed of milk that has been boiled until solid, sweetened with cane sugar and studded with pistachios, almonds, cashews, etc. You get the picture. They are pretty hard to resist.

I think the best Indian sweet came from him though. He climbed a tree and picked two guavas, perfectly ripe. Sweetest of all sweets--shared with me by a new and loyal friend, picked fresh from a tree organically tended and enjoyed on my last walk through the mango grove.

And so, my time at Navdanya ends as it began. In the kitchen, sitting in a circle sharing food, lots of jokes and laughter and genuine affection. We cross many geographies and histories, all of us brought together over a meal and a shared passion for the doing the right thing with food, the earth and each other.

Good bye, Navdanya. I miss you so much already.

Faces of Navdanya

2010-08-15T21:39:00.001-07:00

Hannah from Canada, intern

Sunil, field worker

Abhyudai from India, intern

Raquel from Spain, volunteer

Satya, master chef

Kamal, food artist

Sheela, field worker

Massi from Italy, volunteer

Jai Singh, field and kitchen worker

woman farmer

Sumi

Suwan

Kieran from Italy, volunteer

Gloria from Italy, volunteer

woman and son at the farm where we get milk

Bean, puppy

Notes to self, re: India, attn: Rishikesh

2010-08-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

Do bring your cell phone charger, batteries you charged the night before and sensible shoes.

Don’t just agree to go on a “walk” to a waterfall without asking if sensible shoes are required. This is especially important if you have not brought sensible shoes with you.

Do bring your own laundry soap. Failing that bring Benadryl for the allergic reaction you will have from whatever is in laundry soap in India.

If you have not brought your own laundry soap and have recently washed your pants, take them off before bathing in a waterfall. Take Benadryl anyway.

Do let a waterfall in the Himalaya be really worth a little bit of misery.

Do eat yak cheese sandwiches.

Do eat ghewar (Garhwali cake) and masala (spicy) tea for breakfast.

Don’t eat Chinese food.

If you must eat Chinese food, find fantastic, bombastic company and a restaurant with an outdoor terrace and watch the first day of the new moon set over the Ganga.

Allow strangers to show you the way.

Meet old and new friends in the middle of the bridge.

If you believe in the power and mystery of the Ganga, allow peace to live.

Return to love.

Peak experiences

2010-08-11T04:13:00.000-07:00

Two days ago, Hannah, Abhyudai and I, had the tremendous privilege of traveling with Dr. Shiva and some other scientists here at the Navdanya to a village for a meeting of women farmers in the Garwali Himalaya. My vocabulary of superlatives isn’t big enough to adequately describe this experience. And saying it was amazing, is simply stating the obvious. It was beyond wonderful, and a little hard to digest, if not summarize in a blog post. I’ll do my best.

Traveling with an international figure (who, by the way, doesn’t have a assistant, and answers her phone personally) was an experience all in itself. There was a recent oil spill near Mumbai and floods in Ladakh, and Dr. Shiva, when she had reception in the mountains constantly took calls from the media about these recent events. She explained in her own special way, that I characterize as unrelenting outrage, how the world was going to hell because of climate change, loss of biodiversity and chemical farming. I liked this part a lot. When she wasn’t on the phone she bombarded us all with ideas about how to change the world. This part almost put me in a catatonic state.

In a welcome break from these rather esoteric mental exercises, we stopped suddenly when Dr. Shiva pointed to an especially nice (and accessible) example of intercropping. Intercropping is an ancient technique for preserving biodiversity, farmland and conserving space. It is practiced all over the Himalaya, and in this example we found something even more interesting. There were two botanists in the car who, along with Dr. Shiva, have probably seen (and collected seeds from) every variety of millet grown in India. They found in this field a variety they had never encountered before. Excited conversations were held in (extra) rapid-fire Hindi with the owner of the plot, samples were collected and plans were made to come back in a month for the harvest. I think I might have swooned at one point.

Or maybe I was carsick. Our six hour journey to Uttarkashi (on the first day) involved an infinity of twists and turns on narrow mountain roads, which our driver took with an extra spurt of speed giving those of us in the back of the van whiplash about ten times a minute. I think every cell in my body has been relocated to a new and uncomfortable place. But on the second day, when we climbed even higher into the mountains, my discomfort turned to enchantment. Civilization fell away, cars disappeared from the road, streams gushed down the steep slopes and splashed across the roads and ancient trees grew out of rocks. It felt like we were disappearing into the mists of time, going back to the source, the origin.

In a way we were. The source of the Ganga is here in these hills (only another 4000 feet above where we were at a mere 8000 feet) and we followed one of its branches to this village. India is home to the world’s oldest civilizations, and the Ganga is the source of all life in this region. Time suspended for me as I watched the velvet green terraced hillsides slide by us, and I secretly wished the journey would never end. But end it did, abruptly at a village seemingly untouched by modernity. The women gathered to meet us wore their traditional clothes and their finest gold jewelry given to them at their weddings, sang their old songs and shared their ancient seeds. If I had been left there to die in their arms, I would have died happy. The only thing that got me back into the car to leave was a promise made to me by them, and to myself that I would come back one day.

They welcomed us all with turmeric and vermillion for our foreheads, garlands and flowers, touched our feet (a tremendous honor reserved for elders) and fed us tea and traditional foods. In the hour that followed they shared their concerns about the erratic rainfall they were experiencing. That had forced them to save five times more seeds (bija) because their crops were failing. They were grateful to Navdanya for helping them to set up a seed bank that gave them more collective security. That simple thing allowed them to avoid buying hybrid seeds which would put them in debt and not allow them to keep their seeds for the next year. My heart burned to think about this way of life teetering on the verge of extinction by destructive forces and machine mentalities completely beyond their control.

To say these women are beautiful is a serious understatement, and sells a bit short their courage, their dedication, their generosity and sweet humor. Their faces are lined with time and by the sun, but their hearts sing with pure joy, and they all shine with health, pride and vitality. I felt incomplete as a human being in their presence. I am so occupied with things that don’t matter at all. So invested in things that are ephemeral and don’t last. And in so doing contributing to the very forces that threaten this paradise. I can only hope to find the courage and strength to follow, teach and live peace, justice and ecology in every moment I take a breath.

In spite of the extra burden on seed saving due to their lack of rain, when I picked up a few seeds of millet that had spilled out of a bag to save, they gave me a sample of all their millet, amaranth, sesame and soybean with pure hearts, pride and joy. The gift could not be refused, and I accepted it with tremendous humility. I hope I can “be the bija” and plant seeds of hope for a more gentle society in my own world.

Strangers at the door, we departed as kin, with hugs that express all the saudad a person can feel at farewell. Strong, work worn hands clasped our heads and our cheeks touched, both sides. Hand to the heart, and fingers lifted to lips in a kiss. Love remains, joy lives forever.

Many hands make joyful (if smelly) work

2010-08-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

In India, almost all work (kam, in Hindi) is done collectively. Usually with a large group of family members in the case of the many families I’ve seen planting rice. Or with extended family or friends in the case of the local markets or repair shops. Or in the case of Navdanya, virtual strangers from all over the world who have become fast friends. It is strange, now, for me to see someone working alone, and makes me think about the work my mother did alone most of the time on our farm. And about the way we shared heavy jobs like wood cutting, butchering and haymaking with friends and neighbors.

The way work is organized at Navdanya is very random, and we volunteers generally just go out to some field and find what is being done and pitch in. This can make for some very interesting surprises, as I found out yesterday. I went out with Hannah to the fields behind the seed bank and found Sunil, the Rachels (there are three here right now) and Babaloo carrying cow dung into the vermicomposting shed. Hmmm.

Well, this is the work to be done, so we did it. The pile of cow dung had been sitting for about a month and was pretty ripe. Sunil and Rachel were carrying it with a makeshift “stretcher” made out of a burlap sack and two poles. Babaloo shoveled and two of us took turns carrying it into the shed and dumping it into rows. It very heavy, smelly work and it was quite hot, but there was a lot of light-hearted black humor about filling the “beds” in the “hospital” with the patients we were carrying on the “stretcher.” There was also some impromptu Hindi lessons with Sunil about taking the stretcher of cow poo AKA the patient to kamra number saat, che, panch, char…, (room number seven, six, five, four…).

Then came the even more fun part. When all the “patients” were arranged, with about five stretchers worth of cow dung, they are shaped, by hand, um yes… by bare hand… into neat heaps and then the worm filled “starter” is piled on top. Cow dung is actually thought to be antiseptic and sacred in Ayruvedic medicine, and is burned during weddings and other rituals. It is used to retard mold growth on the walls of rooms, including the one I am leaning against while writing this. So I stopped worrying and learned to love the cow hooie…on my hands, feet, pants, face... When we finished our smelly job, we covered the cow dung heaps with burlap sacks. The piles will then be watered weekly to keep the worms happy and hydrated. After 45 days the compost is finished and spread on the fields. And the process is started over again.

After our work the Rachels and I washed in a small stream, until Sunil beckoned us over to a shallow well filled with water, temporarily, for washing. Rachel from Spain stuck her foot in it, and from the look on her face, it was obviously divine. We all sat down on the edge and put our feet in the well and took a nice long post-cow dung soak in our makeshift spa. Amidst a lot of giggling and joking, Leeatt from Israel brought us chai while we soaked our feet like rural royalty having a country pedicure. Complete with cow dung. Not a bad way to spend a morning, really.

While soaking my feet, I reflected a bit on how an American farmer would do this heavy work. Alone, with a wheelbarrow and it would take five times as long. And feel five times longer too without the joking, laughing and learning. Not only was there about seven of us sharing this work, there was the work of the cows and the worms who start and finish the job to make the soil for the organic fields. Together , this community of beings all did their part to make hard work easy and exhausting work joyful, so that we can grow food in healthy, rich soil—the source of all life.

My new favorite food

2010-08-08T07:11:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, the season for greens is decidedly NOT NOW in India. Since we eat seasonally here on the farm, we eat a lot of rice, dal and chapatti for our meals, with only the occasional okra, (picked fresh from the vast field of it behind the kitchen) to break up on the monotony. I’m not a fan of okra to begin with, and having it pressure cooked turns it into slimy mush. Having it twice a day for a few days in a row was a bit much even for this vegetable lover. The interns and volunteers do a lot of dreaming out loud about spinach and kale.

Okra is occasionally replaced with a vegetable called “bitter gourd”, which is a pimply looking cucumber- like thing that people have variously described as tasting like “nail polish remover” and “paint thinner”. They weren’t kidding when they named it bitter gourd. It’s also supposed to be capable of curing diabetes and Satya hinted around at making a juice out of it for me. I said no, thank you. I’ll take my shots.

So when “patol” or “patra” was being prepared in the kitchen, we all got a little excited. Patra is stuffed taro leaves (also known as cassava, yucca and tapioca, in Africa, Latin America and North America, respectively) that are steamed and fried. The beautiful big taro leaves (which I think look like elephant leaves) are picked (this day by me and Sheela) and trimmed and folded around a chickpea and rice paste. The filling is made chana (chickpeas) and chawal (rice) that have been soaked and ground and seasoned with lots of sour mango powder (amchur), loads of garlic, red chili, garam masala (a mix of hot spices), salt and pepper. The paste is spread over the leaves in layers four or five deep which are then folded, rolled and tied with a stem of lemongrass. The process of making them is fragrant, messy and wonderfully participatory and hands-on.

The taro leaf rolls are then steamed, and if eaten for breakfast the next morning, are sliced and reheated by frying. They are served with a sauce of the chickpea paste. I am told that this is Dr. Vandana Shiva's favorite dish, and so we were treated with this for her recent visit here. It was a humbling pleasure in so many ways to participate in the harvesting, preparing and sharing of this delicious, unique food with such a tremendous woman.

Weeding and the Spirit of Fukuoka

2010-08-06T11:24:00.000-07:00

Everywhere on this trip (in Belgium, Portugal and India), I have met people talking about the book One Straw Revolution written by a Japanese man by the name of Fukuoka. I had never heard of this book or this visionary man, until I started this journey. Cyrille in Belgium first told me about it in the Soul Food bar, and then Yve talked about it in her urban garden, and Sreedhara described the beauty of Fukuoka’s system in the back of a jeep during a long ride between Pachmarhi and Bhopal. In the penultimate full circle, I write this now, in the heat of a monsoon night, across the yard from a house built in honor of this man. And while cataloging Navdanya’s seed bank I found rice varieties that he preserved and shared for the future of farming.

Fukuoka’s ideas are revolutionary, and rest on four basic principles: 1) no plowing, 2) no fertilizer beyond a little chicken manure and green manures, 3) no weeding and 4) no dependence on any chemicals. Sprinkled in with this is a fair bit of beautiful prose about nature and landscape, Taoist philosophy, natural diets, stories, jokes and just plain common sense. It makes for a fast, pleasurable and inspiring read. I found it free online (and you can too) here: http://gyanpedia.in/tft/Resources/books/onestraw.pdf Run, don’t walk, toward reading this book. I have no doubt that it will change the way you think about food and farming.

It has permanently changed the way I think about weeding, which has created some ethical and epistemological problems for me here, since we do a lot of weeding right now on Navdanya’s farm. The season of rice planting has just finished, and now we wait for harvest. And weed. Fukuoka refers to his farming as “do nothing” farming. Which doesn’t mean he literally does nothing, but he has created a system of intercropping that makes for much less work. He lets his “weeds” do the work of ground cover, soil building and fertilizing, which is a basic principle of permaculture and biodynamic farming.

For example, Fukuoka intercrops wheat, rice and white clover—the seeds of which are all sown at the same time. The wheat germinates and grows while the rice grains wait for rain. After the wheat is harvested, the field is flooded, either by irrigation or by rains (Fukuoka’s preferred method). The white clover is easily mowed (and makes mulch)after the wheat harvest. It is weakened enough by the short flooding of the fields so that the rice will germinate and grow above the clover. The clover is a nitrogen fixer, so the “weeds” he has planted, actually put back what the rice and wheat take out. A perfect, renewable system. Read more from him about vegetables and fruit orchards, please...

Fukuoka’s argument against plowing and weeding is simple. The act of turning the soil actually brings weed seeds to the surface, and bare soil is literally begging for cover. What we call weeds are actually plants highly adapted to growing quickly to protect the soil. We can do the same by planting things we want to grow in between our crops, or use mulches, both of which Fukuoka uses in his systems. I now think of bare ground as a wound, and find ways to sneak the weeds we pulled back over the bare ground. When I find myself a part of a team that is weeding, I say a little apology for the soil and try to think of ways to stop this madness.

I (temporarily) convinced Jai Singh of the effectiveness of mulch while we were weeding the flower garden. Some weedss had dried in a pile for a few days. Underneath, the soil was weed free and moist. The soil around it was dry and had already sprouted weeds. I suggested we arrange the pulled weeds around the flowers. He shrugged as he does often, and shook his head in that characteristic way that Indians do when they do and don’t agree, maybe, maybe not, koi bhatt nahin (It’s nothing). And then agreed to try out what I suggested, I think only because I was a minor pain in his ass about it. Nevertheless, a small victory.

Fukuoka argues convincingly that it is the appearance of a weed free patch of ground that makes us think the plants are healthy and more productive. In other words, we perceive this “weed-free” system to be better. His experiments with a variety of mulches and intercropping indicate that plants actually thrive and produce more when they are surrounded by other plants. They are not robbed of nutrients by competing plants; rather they are enriched by their mysterious associations in the soil.

In case I have painted a dim picture of Navdanya’s methods, I must say that not all the farming/gardening operates under the influence of a weed-free worldview.

Today I helped Sheela pick taro (also known as cassava, yucca, tapioca…) leaves for a delicious dish, I um, yum, love, but the name of which I have yet to nail down. (The word I thought it was turns out to be an insult in Hindi. Hello, learning curve. Look for future blog posts on this, never fear, after I get properly educated.) So, today we harvested the leaves of several volunteer taro plants growing with joyful abandon among papaya, lemon grass, squashes and some other mysterious “vegetable trees”. (More education and/or translation needed, here I’m afraid). I looked at this messy “weedy” mix with new eyes, and thought, how beautiful, how perfect. Just the way it should be.

Grow, Cook, Eat-The Mango Pizza Edition

2010-07-26T01:17:00.000-07:00

The point of this blog is to demonstrate how people the world over are working together to grow, cook and eat their own food. Also known as food sovereignty movements, the idea is to disengage from the capitalist world economy of food to the greatest degree possible and to produce and distribute food as community effort.

Thus far, I have featured some growing, some cooking and lots and lots of eating. (Dear reader, in case you are wondering, I don't weight 300 pounds. Yet.) In every case, no one cooking the food actually grew it, and in most cases the people eating it didn't have much to do with growing it OR cooking it. This is how our food system works.

I understand the reasons for this of course. It's hard work to grow food. And it takes a long time to learn how to cook properly. Everyone eats of course, and this is the reason we should take a bigger role in where food comes from. We know precious little about the food we put in our bodies, and in so doing, we unwittingly consume toxins of all kinds-unfair labor practices, extortion of profit from farmers to multi-nationals and poisons of all kinds peddled in the name of efficiency.

Even here at Navdanya the roles of cooking and growing are segregated. The cooks, Satya, Kamal and Ramji never do field work. The field workers, Sunil, Jai Singh and Jeet don't really help much in the kitchen. Few of the volunteers are really here long enough to see food from seed to table, and even those are not really involved in cooking. Satya is a formdible force to reckon with in the kitchen. Small, soft-spoken and sweet he might be, and try as I might to win him, he doesn't suffer fools messing with his cooking.

In any case, Navdanya does function as a collective, and much of the food we eat has been produced here on the farm. Just today I saw a huge pile of bhindi (okra) sitting on the kitchen counter. My guess is that we'll have some kind of bhindi subji for supper. Every day for lunch and dinner we eat pulses (lentils) that are all produced here on the farm, grown from seeds saved in the seed bank and collected for generations by farmers. We also eat rice every day-and a large part of the farm is dedicated to growing rice and wheat, both for our consumption and for seeds for the seed bank. Jai Singh brings jack fruit fresh from the tree on occasion, and although I'm not a fan of it much, I do like it deep fried with salt and chili powder. What's not to love? One day when I asked for a lemon, Jai Singh waved his hand in the direction of the mango orchard. When I didn't understand, he harumphed and took me out to the lemon trees. Duh. And every day now, after much wheedling, we have mangoes from the orchard for breakfast.

Roles reversed a bit last Friday because Massi, a traveler from Italy, had whipped us all into a frenzy talking about pizza. Pizza. Pizza. Pizza. It was enough to drive us all mad. So, it was Sarayu's last day at Navdanya, and since she and Massi love a good party, we splurged and bought vegetables from the Friday night market in the local village, cheese and olives from the imported food store in Dehradun and picked mangoes from the orchard on the farm.

Massi took over the kitchen and poor Satya was left to wonder what happened. Kamal, master chapati maker, rolled out superb pizza crusts with atta (whole wheat) flour. Dozens of pizzas emerged from the kitchen, three at a time and were greedily consumed by us foreigners, and skeptically sampled and enjoyed with increasing enthusiasm by the kitchen and field workers. All that was missing was beer.

My favorite pizza of all--and Massi's masterpiece--was the mango pizza. The onions, garlic, basil, wheat and mangoes were all from the farm, and the tomatoes came from local farms. Without cheese, it was superb, made even better by the joy and mystery of sharing the magic of food and fellowship.

Together, we grew, cooked and ate.

Great big beautiful day

2010-07-22T02:05:00.000-07:00

Hannah, one of the interns here, and I asked for something not so sweet for breakfast before we went to bed last night. We've been eating porridge and pancakes, which are pre-sweetened by our sugar loving cooks. So, now Sunil, Kamal and the other kitchen boys don’t know what to do with us. Half of us “angrese” like savory breakfast, half of us like sweet breakfast. So today, we had spicy peanut chutney for breakfast with paratha. Which some of us took with spicy peanut chutney (YUM) and some of us took with honey. Some of us also took it with peanut chutney and honey. Some of us took it with Nutella.

After several cups of steamy spicy sweet tea, Hannah took a few of us on a tour of the farm. Navdanya grows crops on its 54 acres for consumption on the farm, for the seedbank, and for the network of several thousand organic farmers who grow and sell organic food in India. Today we saw fields of millet, rice, taro and corn intercropped with beans, okra and peanuts. We paused for a moment in our walk right before we got to the seed bank and an eagle flew over our heads.

Navdanya is dedicated to food sovereignty through returning the control of farming to farmers through seeds. Farmers are free to take any seed from the bank, as long as the return what they took with an additional fifty percent more. They are encouraged to save their own seeds and start their own seed banks for exchange amongst themselves. There are 42 such seed banks throughout India and countless more in homes and small villages. Navdanya keeps more than 400 varieties of rice alone, and several hundred varieties of other kinds of crops. In case you don’t know, the Green Revolution in the 1960s brought hybrid seeds to India, which can’t be saved. In a few decades the indigenous varieties of crops had disappeared and farmers were dependent on buying seed from multinational companies. Navdanya returns seeds to farmers as a way to return autonomy to producers and sustainability to agriculture.

The seed bank is managed by a woman named Bija, whose name also happens to be the Hindi word for seed. Bija wasn’t working today, and we stood in the hush of the mud and brick building, in silent wonder at all the ancient wisdom accumulated in this one place. The seed bank does not appear to have a catalog in English, and upon hearing this, I knew what I would be doing for the rest of my time here. Cataloging thousands of different seeds may not be your cup of tea, but I got chills of pleasure and wonder at the thought of intimately knowing all these ancient races of grains and vegetables that came to life long before my own people even existed and which will live on past my little lifetime in the farms and fields of this amazing land.

After this awe inspiring experience, we got down and dirty and helped weed the turmeric field. Weeding turmeric! I’m not sure why this thrills me so much, but weeding anything satisfies a little bit of the OCD in me, and getting my hands in the soil in which a powerful medicine, an essential flavoring of Indian food and a sacred element of many Hindu rituals, grows is just about a peak experience for me. All of us, angrese and Indian workers alike, crowded into the kitchen afterward to share a simple meal of dal, rice, potato curry, roti and peanut chutney while sitting on the floor, trading Hindi and English jokes and laughing the whole time. So so so beautiful.

More tea and an afternoon nap, after which Hannah, an Italian guy named Masi and I went to Ramgarh, the local village to buy some mangoes for breakfast. Another curve ball for the kitchen boys. And we want yogurt with them too! We stopped for a snack because my blood sugar has done a surprising nose dive here in spite of the relentless barrage of carbohydrates morning, noon and night. I think Swami Ramji, who promised to cure me, may be chanting some mantras that are working. We had aloo tikki—a fried potato pancake served with a sweet-spicy sauce, yogurt and raw onions. Delicious.

On our way back to the farm, we saw Sunil heading to the neighbor’s farm for fresh milk. We asked to come along, as part of our scheme to get some yogurt, and when we arrived, we were invited to stay for tea. We declined, to be polite, but of course, as is the custom, we were not really given an option. Cots were pulled out, neighbors stopped by and kids piled up for pictures, and more pictures. An hour or so passed, and the monsoon clouds loomed, and I wondered if we should go. Sunil shook his head, no. So we stayed. I took some more pictures of the kids and the beautiful women, and stopped worrying and loved the rain that actually never came.

It soon came out that it was Suwan’s 13th birthday today and there was going to be a party. We hadn’t put two and two together yet, and I think the surprise birthday party was on us! We were invited into the master bedroom of the house and candles were lit and blown out, balloons popped and sweets shared. We then were told to go back to our cots in the courtyard, and one of the beautiful daughters of the house came out, laughing, with beer glasses full of tea made with the milk fresh from the cow.

Gracious, funny and loving people, living a simple life in this beautiful place. I want to stay forever. Salud!

The kindness of strangers

2010-07-19T02:16:00.000-07:00

At Navdanya at last. Some fantastic birds are working up a great whoop dee doo outside my little room at the farm as the monsoon rain comes again. I made it here just in time, thanks to the helpfulness of some kind people and my own resourcefulness and determination.

So, just in case you were wondering, Delhi blows. Rachel, an Israeli woman I talked to in the elevator at the Park Inn, described it as hell. I couldn’t agree more. H.E. Double Toothpicks. Hot, scary and rank. And according to Rachel, the crowning blow is that it’s expensive. I think that’s probably relative, and since I just read Raj Patel’s Value of Nothing, I don’t know what to think about the cost of things anymore. Much less the costs of things in hell.

But anyway, dodging heaps of garbage, clattering over rubble, stepping around beggars and shouting “nahin” –No!-- and “jaao” --Go Away!--at “porters” trying to extort money for my bags, I managed to reach the right platform at the right station in the right city at the right time (a half hour early, actually). I was sweating bullets in the heat at 6:30 am, but pretty damn proud of this little farm girl from the Northwoods who was surviving on her own in the 4th largest city in the world. Also known as hell.

Once the train came, I had a little trouble finding the car, since I decided to spring for the AC 1st class ($20) on my first trip alone in India. The website I consulted suggested I would be sharing the car with doctors and military types—who I figured are usually good in an emergency, and charged with helping people. And I am a doctor too. Sort of. My car was all the way at the end—or at the beginning—depending on where you are. I rolled my bags back and forth across the long platform a few times in the 110 degree heat. A little more sweating and nimble navigating through a literal sea of humans never hurt anyone. When I was in the right car--finally--a girl was in my seat, but she wanted to sit by her sister, so I took her seat and waited to see if a doctor or a soldier would sit next to me. Um, no.

Swami Ramji in a saffron robe with a dreadlock twice his height sat next to me. Of course he did. I shook with suppressed laughter (dare I say hysteria?) as he settled into his seat with a happy sigh, his crazy dreadlock snaking around our seats and in my lap. This is really and truly, my kind of luck. Apparently he’s famous and he flies First Class too when he visits his devotees in America. He helped me with my Hindi homework, asked personal questions and then accidentally whacked me in the face with his dreadlock after he piled it all up on his head to leave. He has an ashram very near here, and gave me his phone number and told me to come see the river Ganga in his backyard. OK. Sure. Why not?

Arriving in Dehradun, I got out of the train, and was dispatched immediately to an auto-rickshaw by a nice fellow named Vinay. Last name Kaka. He was super helpful and nice and pointed out the mango trees, rice paddies and the tea plantations and told me about the Hollywood movies he likes and gave me both his phone numbers and told me he would drive me anywhere, just give him two hours notice. No, one hour. For you.

I just smiled to myself and held my dupatta over my mouth to keep down the laughter. Part of the reason I was getting such a kick out of all this was because the little girl from the sticks was completely petrified about the prospect of navigating Delhi, Indian trains and auto-rickshaws to someplace in the vicinity of nowhere, south-central Asia. The fact that it wasn’t completely traumatizing and actually really fun made me a little giddy with relief.

Finally we arrived at Navdanya—Biodiversity Conservation Center—along a bumpy lane lined with gigantic mango trees. Fields of vegetables and neatly kept lawns, brightly painted bungalows, happy healthy dogs and my favorite sign of life—laundry.…aaaah. Away from the empty, sterile missions…out of the stinking hot city….this one feels just right.

On my arrival (even though I was unexpected given the usual whisper-down-the-lane communication problems in India), I was promptly fed a delicious dal and a subji of potatoes grown on the farm and escorted to a lovely room with a view to the mango grove and told to take the day to rest. Disobedient addict to the internet that I am, I checked first to see if I could get wireless in my room. What luck!

While writing this, Julia and Sarau---interns here—came by and offered to share some Italian coffee with me and took me some other fine folks on a long hike in the forest and through small villages, which ended with eating fresh mangos in a mango grove…

Somebody pinch me please.

Food for the Soul

2010-07-17T00:51:00.000-07:00

I was so eager to get on with the global part of this tour, that I--yes me--forgot about the local. The day of my departure from the Dirty South, best pal in all things life, love and henna related, Erin Mitchelson, took me to Flying Biscuit, a restaurant in Atlanta, GA specializing in southern comfort food. And how comfort was needed...

Erin, with hubs, Matt, moves on to greener pastures in New Hampshire before I return to Georgia at the end of this trip, and so this was a kind of big goodbye for us. Happily, we will reunite in the Dominican Republic later this year for a few weeks, but this day marked the end of the Mitchelson Era for me at UGA. No department has ever been graced with the likes of Matt and Erin, and I think I speak for many people when I say that any department on the receiving end of these two generous, big hearted people will be a lucky one indeed. They both will be missed deeply by us all, but especially by me, as they helped me more than anyone to find and make a home in Georgia.

So, it was with great saudede--a word I was to discover in Portugal that is sometimes described as the "the love that remains" after someone is gone--that Erin and I shared a last meal in Georgia together at the Flying Biscuit. We partook in huge mimosas; creamy dreamy grits; collard greens; tender, flaky biscuits and fried green tomatoes with goat cheese. Basically all the soul food hits...minus the pork and fried chicken, and a few little extras. Delicious and nourishing to a saudede soul.

So good in fact, that I forgot my debit card on the table--a terrifically bone-headed thing to do given that I was leaving the country for 6 months. But maybe I was just seeing if they would hold a place for me and Erin so we could come back. I guess I'll give all the money I've got to continue to enjoy the company of a fabulous woman who has made Georgia a terrific place to be.

The love remains.

Health, Taste, Joy Trifecta

2010-07-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

The signature dish of Hyderabad is biryani, a dish of Muslim origin that combines some kind of meat (or vegetables if you're "vej"), lots of rice and and spices in one pot of yummy. We've had two radically different versions of biryani, both delicious in their own way. We ate a mutton based one heavy on cloves and cinnamon, at Irani Chai--a well recommended restaurant and hookah lounge. Our driver misunderstood what we wanted, and took us to a tea shop filled with Iranian men... Um, no. We ate our second biryani at Cafe Bahar, which was recommended to us by our driver (who, I am quite positive, questions our ability to find decent food for ourselves). Our meal was half a chicken roasted in rice with cumin and coriander, served with a thick gravy and yogurt.

At Cafe Bahar, and at a tea place in the Charminar market, we ate in the "family room". The street level and/or main part of the restaurant is exclusively for men. Women, with male family members, eat in the family areas of the restaurant. I'm not sure what would happen if we tried to go to the not-family side of things, but we weren't really given the option at either place. Interestingly, with the conference attendees last week, we ate as a mixed group (Indians and westerners, men and women) at the truck stop, which also had a "family room". No one stopped us from doing that, but no one stopped staring at us either. I am fairly confident that we were the first and possibly last western women to eat outside the family room at that particular place.

Being "brought up" North Indian in my tastes, however, I am still looking for spic-I-E-R curries, cilantro chutneys and wheat based flat breads. While we have been eating fabulously at this hotel--dosa, idly, sambar, uttapam to name a few dishes we've enjoyed a lot--I have been feeling a bit short on the fruits and vegetable end of things. But, happily, my search ended tonight. Our usual spot for dinner was closed for a private party so we went to the upscale place in the hotel--not my usual choice given that food is usually overpriced and under-good in these kinds of places. Not so here! Wow!

I saw palaak paneer (a north Indian spinach curry with cubes of cheese) on the menu and my greens-deprived immune system cried out, Yes! Yes! Yes! I want that! But, give me a side of garlic naan, and I could be back in the US at the ubiquitous "Indian restaurant" which serves the under-spiced, overcooked, Americanized, "north Indian" hits. It's a little bit like Tex-Mex--good enough if you're lucky, but not exactly the real thing. I was prepared for, well, spinach cooked to death, and decided to take one for the team--nourishing my body that is, over satisfying my taste buds. What I wasn't prepared for was eating one of the best meals of my life.

I realize this is high praise, cuz y'all know I've eaten a lot of good food, but I'm not kidding. The garlic naan (I couldn't resist) was crispy, thin and literally covered in roasted garlic. The paneer cubes were soft and soaked up the rich flavors infused from slivers of ginger and whole cayenne peppers (yowsas!) in the subji. The spinach puree was the greenest I have ever seen, and although I have no idea who grew, picked or cooked this food, it tasted as fresh as if it came from my own garden. Having made this dish myself, I know it takes several pounds of spinach to make one kadai (single serving bowl) of palaak, and I scooped up every last bit of rich deliciousness with a bit of yogurt, mango pickle and garlic naan in every bite. Finally, the flavor explosion, I have been seeking! And a yogurt, garlic and spinach health trifecta on top of that! Add to that, the privilege and joy of sharing this meal with a friend, whose presence in my life means more to me than words can say, and I feel blessed beyond imagination.

After eating all this healthy goodness and sharing all the laughs with Jen in these crazy last two weeks, I think I might actually live forever. But if I had died at any moment during that meal, I would have died happy. But, then I might have missed dessert, which was a small chalice of exquisitely ripe papaya sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. In season here, fresh, whole and beautiful in simple, unaltered perfection, promising the eternal return of life.

Delivering (or not) in Hyderabad

2010-07-12T08:48:00.000-07:00

Jen and I have come to Hyderabad in Andra Pradesh for a little bit of R-n-R before she heads home and I head to Navdanya's farm in Uttaranchal. Hyderabad is an interesting, cosmopolitan city, and home to the Telagu language Bollywood studios and high-tech central. It is littered with colorful temples, has an eclectic and bustling street life and sports luxury homes in the "hills". Hyderabad was once part of an independent Muslim state, established in 1347, and was held in various forms by Muslim rulers until India was created with independence from the British in 1948. The Muslim influence in the city is strong, although only about 8% of the population is now counted as Muslim. There are gigantic mosques, lots of women in abayas on the street and mughal architecture. The state legislative assembly is housed in a building constructed in 1905 to celebrate the 40th birthday of Mahbub Ali Khan, the 6th Nizam of Hyderabad, who, incidentally, was also famous for the size of his wardrobe.

Our first hotel here was in a gated, upper middle-class Hindu neighborhood. Staying there gave me an unusual peek into an everyday India that I don't know much about. Every block had a park and every home had a fleet of servants, including dark-skinned nannies of Dravidian ancestry, walking light-skinned babies in strollers (not unlike certain parts of Manhatten says Jen). Every home had a spacious walled garden and a water tank on the roof with a solar panel for hot water heating. The homeowners association was decorated with swastikas, a Hindu symbol for luck.

We left this hotel in a few short days, largely because of the relative inaccessibility of the city from this location (basically a suburb), and because internet access (to which we are both hopelessly addicted, and to which access might not be unreasonable in one of the hi-tech capitols of the world) was promised but not delivered.

Also not delivered was our (clean) laundry. We sent it out and waited two days for it to return, only to be told repeatedly that it was on it's way, etc, etc. On the day we checked out we were prepared to sit in the lobby and wait for it. Two minutes before checkout the clerk at the front desk called our room and said "Actually...your laundry is here. But...it's not washed." Great! We'll take it! I don't think I've ever been quite this happy to see my unwashed laundry, and likely never will again.

Almost not delivered was a bouquet of orchids from a certain admirer of mine in Belgium. There was some confusion, which required an immediate conference of all hotel staff, about to whom these flowers belonged, because my name wasn't actually on the room. My flowers were rescued from a terrible fate by Jen's heroic dash to the lobby, and they still sit in serene and silent beauty on the table in our new hotel in Secunderabad, giving me a little jolt of joy every time I see them.

Arrival at the Minerva Grand in Secunderabad with dirty laundry and orchids. Classy.

Rock Art and Truck Stop

2010-07-09T23:38:00.000-07:00

Things have gone from bad to worse. We have been displaced again.

We have moved from our quiet little Catholic mission in Pachmarhi, a tourist area, to a Catholic mission in Bhopal, a major urban center. Given the academic and activist orientation of our "study circle" I find the whole concept of staying in a mission a bit peculiar, and in the case of our first rat-infested room at this new place, quite disturbing. We are in a walled, probably locked, compound, and our presence is thus viewed by the local people in a certain way—one in which I feel quite uncomfortable participating, since I am not here representing or working with the mission.

The local area is mostly middle class Hindus living in “colonies”-- the Indian word for developments or subdivisions. They live in semi-detached houses that look a bit like condos. Like our other mission, a temple is a stone’s throw away, as if to remind the mission that Hindus have been around for about 4000 years longer than Christians. Hinduism will likely outlast Christianity in this place, if the emptiness of this mission is any indication. In a city in which people live under tarps in nothing short of appalling conditions, this locked walled compound with dozens of empty rooms is sort of sickening.

On the way to Bhopal we stopped for breakfast in a town called Pepiriya and had really amazing aloo paratha (potato stuffed flatbreads) and dahi. We then stopped at a prehistoric rock art site that supposedly dates from the Neolithic. This stop only further convinced me that I am incurably interested in gardens. Show me a garden and I perk right up, but a world heritage site boasting one of the wonders of the world only makes me want to take a nap. It was a pretty place with a nice breeze that refreshed me, but all I could think of was what is must have been like to live here in these shelters of stone. An unanswerable question, surely, but one that occupied a few of my daydreams perched on a rock. It was also a welcome break from the jeep, in which 9 of us and all our luggage were wedged for the better part of the day.

Right around the corner from the rock art, (not quite—but it seemed like it) was an “all vej” truck stop. All vej means only vegetarian food is served, and as such caters to Jains, Sikhs and Hindus. We were all a bit skeptical of eating in such a place, but Sreedhara told us that the food was delicious. Truck stops in India are not all that different from truck stops in America. The place is almost exclusively populated by men, long on rich food and short on comfort and style. The seating is cots with a board across the middle. Men sit opposite each other and share the board “table”. There are toilets and showers (well, any tap with a bucket is a shower in India), a place to park an elaborately decorated truck for a long or short amount of time, and/or space for repairs, snacks and probably prostitution, although we didn’t see any visible sign of that.

We had a table and some surprisingly delicious food—the usual, dal and paneer curry with roti and a plate of raw vegetables referred to universally as salad. It usually consists of onions, tomatoes, cucumbers and carrots. I’m living on the edge a bit eating cucumbers and carrots, but I will risk it for some roughage. It all goes down with lots of lime, some spices and a little prayer to the stomach gods.

Monsoon Wedding

2010-07-09T23:25:00.000-07:00

We had a major uptick in excitement yesterday evening when we were invited to a wedding. The manager of the local hotel which has been providing our food got married, and we were honored guests. We appeared just as the groom was leaving for the temple to do the final rituals of the two-day process, and therefore, everyone’s attention was freed up for us. We were chatted up by the local boys, greeted cheerfully by the little girls and shook the hands of small scared children who had never seen “Anglaise” before.

I was asked by one handsome young man to meet his aunty and a plastic chair was pulled up for me in the aunty circle—the circle of matriarchal power in the family. I know this doesn’t sound like much, but it was a really huge honor. I was sort of trying to hang back, because it isn’t my style to be in the spotlight. I wasn’t even appropriately dressed—wearing jeans and a tunic. I’m not sure why I even went to the wedding, because I knew we would not go unnoticed. I had my speech all prepared to get out of going, but Sreedhara convinced me.

It wasn’t hard, because I really wanted to dance.

I hadn’t moved my body properly in an entire week because women’s movements in public space are somewhat circumscribed and/or subject to heckling by the local boys. But, I knew that the wedding would be a good place to move my body with some vigor, and that I could dance my ass off and everyone would love it. Sitting in the aunty circle felt good too. We sat in silence and one of them patted my knee to the music. It felt a bit like being home. I was handed a baby and pictures were taken and my handsome young friend told me that I was the "best guest".

The groom came back and met his bride, who, for many and various reasons was visibly devastated. Her life with her first family was over and her new life with her husband would mean the end of any freedom she might have ever enjoyed, depending, that is, on how open-minded he is. My heart ached for her, and I could only see these rituals as the celebration of her bondage. Threads were tied, turmeric applied, blessings given by the priest, and the deal was done. The whole party (a couple hundred probably) then picked up and moved down the road to a community hall for the reception.

The whole procession, headed up by a wall of speakers thumping out Bollywood music (with two oxcarts outfitted with generators) and a bunch of boys carrying, on their heads, electric flashing lights running on car batteries, proceeded slowly down the street in the ominous sprinkles of a oncoming monsoon shower. Our party arrived at the hall in a few minutes and we debated a bit about going back to the mission because we had an early morning start back to Bhopal.

But the food at Indian weddings is supposed to be really good…

By then our hesitation was noticed and we were swept by an enthusiastic crowd into the courtyard festooned with Christmas tree lights and set up like the state fair with food booths. Our host ushered us to the front of the line and we proceeded to smack our lips around the best food we’d eaten in India yet. Dal (lentil stew), carrot curry, paneer maater (cheese and pea curry) and two kinds of paratha (stuffed flatbreads). Just as we started to eat the sky opened and the rain came pouring down. We took refuge under an overhanging eave, and were soon joined by about 25 other soaking wet wedding goers. Most of whom were young men with wet cell phones and soaked wallets.

We finished our meal while watching everyone scatter for dry ground--most in the hall, which was packed. We also enjoyed watching the young men peel off their shirts—Bollywood style. I perched for awhile on my little ledge, holding my empty plate savoring all this awesomeness, and feeling the beat of the music start to make me move. First my head, then my shoulders, then my feet. The young man closest to me took my plate and threw it on the ground. I think it was breaking such a western taboo that started the little bit of mayhem that followed.

The rain slacked a bit and I jumped out from under the eave, bolted for the hall and found myself smack dab in the middle of a bunch of beautiful young women in gorgeous saris. They wasted no time pulling me into their circle for dancing. It was like a gift of pure joy. I danced and danced and danced. Danced in the rain and felt the dust and sweat and accumulated sadness like silt on a river bank, wash off me, carried down the street, into the river, into the ocean.

Open to the sky, falling rain. Gift of life.

Farmers Market

2010-07-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

Last night we all went to the weekly farmers market in Pachmarhi. I am told that it is only a few years old, but given the size of it and the congregated crowd, it’s a hit! There were middle class tourists from cities and poor tribals from out of town and locals including Father Claude, the wait-boys from our restaurant and the Sikh man who sold us mosquito netting. The produce is grown in the valley (Pachmarhi is in the mountains) and brought to the edge of the city and sold to the vendors in the market.

My favorite vendor was a man selling garlic, ginger and chili--the three base ingredients of every Indian curry. My second favorite was the man selling dal (lentils) of every shape, size and color. I knelt down plunged my hand into the pile and ran the dal through my fingers. And then there was the spice man who had piles of fragrant powders and seeds arranged in colorful array around him. Sreedhara, a conference attendee and professor at a university in Bangalore nicked a piece of cinnamon bark and gave it to me to chew. Sweet and softly spiced, it was a perfect piece of candy.

I positively drooled over the fresh vegetables. My fingers itched to take home the pearly cauliflowers and purple mustards and shiny green eggplants. I haven’t been homesick once during the past two weeks, but in the moment of looking at all these beautiful vegetables, I positively wept for my kitchen. Any kitchen. Language to haggle. Shopping bag to put on my head and carry home. Sharp knives and cutting board. Gas stove and stainless steel pots. Spicy fragrance filling the house and floating out into the street. Come in and share.

Good Luck with Food

2010-07-08T09:45:00.000-07:00

No luck on finding yogurt—well, not yogurt I could take away. Fresh curd is sold by the gram in the little shops in the town, and in theory a person could take it away. But there are electrical outages every morning and afternoon, so keeping things refrigerated is a bit of a trick, and furthermore, I don’t personally have access to a fridge. I am sure that I could use my wiles to accomplish this, but my Hindi is not that good yet.

Cilantro chutney (a mixture of cilantro, lime, garlic, ginger, salt and spices used for dipping and adding flavor) also seems to be a foreign substance in these parts, which surprises me. But perhaps it has something to do with the way in which I butcher the pronunciation of “hara daniya chutney”.

It is harder than I thought to be without access to a kitchen, and I had hoped that the “communal” living promised as part of this conference would include cooking together. It’s hard for me psychologically because cooking is a way in which I generate joy—for myself and others. It’s also hard physically because my health is rather dependent on access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

The food we have been eating borders on terrible, as I have mentioned elsewhere. For the most part it’s the tasteless remnants of vegetables (tomatoes, eggplant, peas, potatoes) that have been simmered in boatloads of oil, served with plain rice, dal (lentil soup) and wheat flatbreads called rotis (which, when fresh, are pretty amazing). But, um, fat and carbohydrate overload. We occasionally get a tiny little “salad” of fresh tomatoes, onions and chilis, served with poppadoms which I gobble up like a crazy person. But, this is not sustainable.

So, first stop, yesterday—mango stand. Mangos are in season and I have been endeavoring to eat them every day. Father Claude brings us some from his garden in the morning on occasion—sliced in half, with the pit removed. The flesh is so tender and sweet that you scoop it out of the skin with a spoon. Yes. Eating mangos out of season and in the United States is something I never do, so the unbelievable taste experience of eating one fresh and a few feet away from the tree was incomparable. We bought some local varieties at a stand yesterday—smaller and sweeter (if that is possible), with a pleasant citrus taste.

Next stop was a South Indian restaurant where Jen and I ordered dosa. Dosa is a South Indian dish of a thin pancake-like roll made of fermented rice and lentils, served with a tomato based broth and a ginger-mustard-coconut chutney. Yum. Not exactly fresh vegetables, but lighter and actually really really tasty. Finally! I think the local cooks see Westerners (although we are the only ones here) and knock down the spices a bit or something, because until yesterday I haven’t had a decently spiced dish yet. Maybe the cooking of India I am used to is just spicier (ha…my own!) or there are regional variations in spice. Spicy pickles are on the table at every meal, so perhaps this is how spice is customarily added.

Later in the day I had aloo gobi (potato and cauliflower curry) and palaak paneer (spinach and cheese curry) at another restaurant with veg pakora (fried vegetables). It was all delicious although the palaak paneer didn’t have enough spice. (What is up with this?)This is as good as it gets for eating vegetables so far.

Paanchmari is not what one would call a culinary hotspot. I equate it with the little town I grew up in that caters to holiday makers and tourists. Not great food, not bad food, but lots of it and for cheap.

In a few days we move on to Bhopal, where I am told the food is different. I hope that means better.

Bland Food in India?

2010-07-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

I am a bit unhappy about the food here. I think I have spoiled myself with my own cooking. It’s happened before.

In a classic Indian scenario, we were displaced from our hotel in Panchmarie at the request of a local minster because his cousin was getting married and they wanted the whole thing for themselves. Out we go. A Dominican Father who presides at a Catholic mission across the road from our hotel found out and offered us the dormitories as a place to stay.

The Hanuman temple is just a few steps away, and the morning and evening chanting can be heard in our spartan rooms. It’s an odd, and thoroughly Indian experience to hear the Hindu mantras while under the gaze of a very graphic crucifix. I say it’s thoroughly Indian because this kind of juxtaposition seems only possible here where everything is so mixed up . Cows are revered but eat garbage. Women are regarded as goddesses but are harassed in the street. Monkeys are protected for religious reasons but are serious and sometimes dangerous nuisances in every public place. Even our toilets are a paradox. We have western toilets for some reason that I can’t quite fathom. Monks who go without almost every luxury, including a decent mattress, for some reason have imported toilets from the West?

I digress.

We still eat our meals at the hotel, and on day two, I am done with it. We have had bland (yes, bland) curries every night and we have to ask for yogurt or chutneys if we want them. Most of the time they don’t bring them. And we can’t get any tea with our evening meal. I think they presume we are Westerners and aren’t expected to appreciate a proper meal (some of our group does appreciate it as is, so I know it’s partly my problem). Or the restaurant is just bad. Or we aren’t paying them enough. Probably all of it. Tonight was the last straw. One of my favorite dishes is baigan bharta—a smoked eggplant dish with spices and chiles and fresh daniya (cilantro). A very sad and bland facsimile of this dish appeared on my plate and I choked it down without chutney, yogurt or fresh cilantro. Well the cilantro did appear eventually, but it looked a little scary to me. Okay, so it’s food. But I’m paying for it, and I want every bite to be the flavor explosion it is SUPPOSED to be.

And furthermore, I can’t write home about tasteless food.

So tomorrow, I am going in search of my own yogurt and chutneys to bring to the table myself. Or, I am going to ask the kind Father if I could use his kitchen and cook with all the beautiful vegetables in the street stands. Or, I am going to go eat somewhere else. Stay tuned.
By the way, breaking all the food rules has so far not gotten me into trouble. I think it’s the yogurt.

Driving in India

2010-07-08T09:03:00.000-07:00

It is best to visit India without fear. No. It is not possible to be here WITH fear. The functional anarchy that is Indian traffic can only be endured with the peace of the Buddha--which you learn to find very quickly. No need to go to an ashram. Just take a long, or even short, journey by car, preferably with a professional driver and you will find God instantly. Fortunately, I had already found God on the plane from Delhi to Bhopal. The monsoon is pushing huge thunderheads north and naturally, we flew THROUGH them, our big jet, shuddering and bucking the whole way.

That experience was mildly pleasurable, however, in comparison to the car journey from Bhopal to Pachmarhi. We drove through traffic of all shapes and sizes--species even--all of which regards lanes as mere suggestions, turn signals as useless curios and speed limits as laughable oddities of modern life.

Driving in India is a non-stop game of chicken--sometimes with chickens--in which the horn is the only--and constant--source of communication. Our driver had an auxiliary horn with a button on the dashboard--his finger always at the ready when overtaking another car, cow, ox cart, truck, jeep, tractor, human... At times, there are four lanes of traffic going on what would be a single lane anywhere else. It's best not to look.

We stopped for tea at truck stops several times, which our driver took by himself on the cots that fill the makeshift hut that houses a cold beverage cooler and a kitchen with a tandoori over and several kinds of subji (curry) for sale. We got out and stretched our legs. I got out and blew my nose. Again.

Our last stop was in the last big city before our village--Pepiriya (sp?). Deepak brought us two samosas from a street vendor. At this point, I was about to break all the rules about eating and drinking in India. Don't drink the water. Don't eat fresh fruits. Don't eat street food. Well, you only live once, and I did eat that yogurt. Deepak warned us that it was very spicy, but to be kind, we took it and tried it. Very spicy was an understatement. It was so hot the cayenne pepper colored it red. These things almost blew our heads off. Which, in my case was great. My sinuses cleared instantly. I was a new woman! A woman who suddently needed all the tissues for sale in all of central India, but a new woman nevertheless.

Eventually, we arrived, sweaty, cramped and tired at Pachmarhi, a beautiful hill station in the middle of Satpura National Park. India is as shocking and gorgeous as I remembered it. As hot and mysterious and colorful and generous as I knew it would be. Which is to say I am thrilled to be here, and looking to find India different--and better--this time.

Welcome to India

2010-07-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

So my adventures in Belgium left me with a fairly serious cold, that after 15 hours of flying from there to here (landing three times--owwwww), had left me completely deaf and totally miserable. Fortunately, I am traveling with my best girlfriend from grad school, Jen. We met up in Amsterdam and flew to Delhi together. After a "sleepette" in a hotel in the sweltering heat, we left early the next morning for Bhopal (via Indore...even the planes run like trains).

Once in Bhopal, we were picked up by Deepak, a human rights activists for Dalit and Muslims in Madhya Pradesh, and were whisked away by our driver to Pachmarhi (a tourist town in a national park where our study circle was to be held). Or so we thought. Packed tightly around our luggage in a tiny car and sweating in the heat with the AC on full blast, Jen and I dozed off. We woke each time we made a stop, hoping we had arrived. But no--an errand...another errand. Which, we found out was for the tea we would share with Deepak and his wife at their home.

Perking up a bit at this unexpected generosity, we shared dahi (yogurt) and aam (mango) various biscuits, Indian junk food (chickpea flour noodles deep fried with assorted spices and nuts and salt) and milky sweet tea. (I take mine bina chidi--without sugar). I slurped up three packets of yogurt in an effort to get my guts sorted before I ate anything else. It feels really rude to refuse water in India (and we were really thirsty), so we gingerly sipped some water.

At the end of our hasty meal, Deepak rearranged our luggage, and in response to our inquiring looks, he told us his wife and 11 month old son (who is adorable) were coming with us in the tiny car. The journey would take 5-6 hours...would we like to use the restroom?

Welcome to India.

P.S. In case you were wondering, it is in fact possible to arrange 6 people with all their luggage (even our ridiculous baggage) in a hatchback Hyundai and drive for 6 hours. Let's just say we stopped a lot.

To be continued...

Organic Market

2010-07-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

On Saturday before I split for Amsterdam, Yve and Monica took me to the first organic farmers market in Lisbon, which was started by a local organic farming organization a few years ago. It was still early in the day so the market was small, but all the baskets were filled to overflowing with every fruit and vegetable imaginable. And wine. This market allows for the resale of produce from other places, as long as it’s organic.

Conventional produce markets have permanent housing in the “mercado” of each neighborhood. You can go get fish, bread, cheese and vegetables every day of the week within a few steps of the neighborhood center. These institutions are dying, however, as people everywhere spend less time cooking and supermarkets convince us that having everything all in one place is better than just about everything else, including taste, freshness, quality, relationships and service.

After we shopped and I took pictures and bought a fig, we went to have coffee and croissants for breakfast. I added my fig to my breakfast plate. It was huge, mildly sweet and juicy just like a fig is supposed to be.

The only thing I liked more than laundry in Lisbon was Monica’s social circle. I met a vibrant, whip-smart, funny and passionate woman every day of my stay. Not all of them are from Portugal, so I know it’s not something in the water, but there has to be something about this place—my guess is that it’s probably Monica—that makes it a great place to be.

Typical Lisbon

2010-07-05T11:27:00.000-07:00

On Thursday we met up with Yve again, and after watching the sunset while drinking beers on the terrace of a 15^th century palace with a bunch of permaculturalists, we headed, very late in the evening, to a restaurant that Yve said was “typical Lisbon". Good Lord, if this is "typical", then I want to live, die and be buried in Lisbon. At 9:30 on a Thursday, the place was buzzing and we found a spot on the end of a table right in the middle of the action. We started with some beer, but quickly switched to “vinho verde” so named because it is a “young” white wine. It was light, crisp and delicious.

It was the perfect complement to the shrimps and garlic that appeared, sizzling on our table. And then cold shrimp still in the peel, which are firm and sweet because they have been soaked in ice water, and we dipped them in mayonnaise mixed with hot sauce. Somewhere in there soft-shell crab also appeared. After that taste bud extravaganza, a plate of mussels in garlic broth appeared. Monica enjoyed my expression (of sublime joy) as I tried it the broth with a little piece of crispy buttered bread. You can see everything on your face—the pleasure you get out of just a little taste. A little taste of heaven is all a person really needs. A little sip of vinho verde, a little conversation about gardens, a little bit of love and laughter over food. A little taste of the perfect something that is Lisbon.

If all that wasn’t enough, we had a little bit of lemon sherbet for dessert, to which our generous and jovial waiters added a shot of vodka. I sailed out of there and home in the cab, absolutely euphoric, feeling so blessed, so lucky and so happy under a full moon.

Typical Lisbon.

Pasteis de Belem

2010-07-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned elsewhere, Monica and I have been exploring the concept of “typical food”. We are foodies, after all, and intellectual foodies to boot. We spend a lot of time discussing social theory as it relates to food, which, in my humble opinion, is second to none in ways I want to spend my time. I enjoyed so much our conversations over little tiny coffees, especially at Pasteis le Belem. Belem is a neighborhood in Lisbon, which has a coffee shop specializing in a typical Lisbon treat of small custard tarts. We ate them all over the city, but here they were superb. Fresh from the oven, flaky, creamy, sweet, they are the perfect complement to a tiny shot of bitter coffee. It’s a great way to start the day. On our walk to the coffee shop, we passed a tantalizing garden high above the street. It was locked, but looked suspiciously like a community garden. There was just a tiny bit too much disorder for a private garden. I hope that I can find out more the next time I head to Pasteis de Belem.

Cod fish and beans with a beak

2010-07-05T10:58:00.001-07:00

Monica has terrific friends in Lisbon. Monica and I met in Norway in 2004 at the European Society of Rural Sociologists Annual meeting. I’m not a rural sociologist, but this conference rocks, and that’s good enough reason for me to go. Lots of geographers moonlight as rural sociologists in Europe because rural geography is relatively undeveloped in the United States. The conference is structured around 4 days of meetings and presentations on a theme (such as organic agriculture) and one day of tours in between on Wednesday. Did I mention that the (interactive) tour almost always revolves around food or drink?

The Norwegian holiday included a tour of the mountains and maybe some other stuff, but all I remember was a traditional rural Norwegian feast. The table groaned with moose, reindeer, sausages of all kinds, fish, potatoes, fish, cream soups, klub, flatbreads, cheeses… No calories here. After the meal it looked like there had been a mass suicide of rural sociologists on the front lawn. All we could do was lay down and groan over our full stomachs in the long shadows of a high latitude afternoon. I don’t think Monica was on that tour, but I do remember she asked a great question in one of the sessions and I thought she was super smart.

We met again in Kesthezy, Hungary in 2005 at another one of these conferences. This time we spent the whole week together and even shared the same tour of some of Hungary’s thermal baths. Yes. If you have not been to Eastern Europe/Balkans, run don’t walk, to make a booking for a holiday there. There are hundreds of smartly outfitted resorts specializing in mineral springs, most of them hot. The springs, I mean. After enduring literally hours of government officials introducing themselves and explaining the relevance of thermal baths to rural development, we finally were free to take a sample ourselves. (BTW, the Hungarians specialize in anticipation—we waited for hours through speeches for the conference banquet as well. I think this also explains the high incidence of public making out in Budapest…lots of buildup to the main event seems to be quintessentially Hungarian). Anyway…the baths were incredibly rejuvenating and relaxing and Monica and I became friends.

We’ve kept up mostly be email in the intervening 4 years since her visit to the US during the last World Cup, and she has been insisting that I visit her now that she’s back in Portugal working for the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS). At ICS, she has some really amazing colleagues, one of whom is Joana, who is doing a PhD in climate change adaptation. She hosted a dinner party for her friends, including Monica, while I was in Lisbon, and so I tagged along. It was probably the most documented meal in the history of eating. Three of Joana’s guests work for a private company producing documentaries, and they put the camera on us while we ate. They were interested in generating some ideas about a documentary about ethical consumption, and they were interested in what a group of intellectuals (some of whom are foodies) might have to say about food. I also took pictures of everything, took notes about everything and generally conducted research during dinner.

Monica and I had been having a lot of conversations about “typical” Portuguese cuisine. It’s easy to assume that maybe there is some indigenous way of cooking that still exists in Europe, given it’s rich food culture. But, like everything, everywhere, global influences have taken hold. Joana served hummus and olives as appetizers, tabouli as a first course, meat loaf as a main course and chocolate lava cake for dessert. Most of this has roots in Middle-Eastern cuisines that Portugal has borrowed from, but it has also become a part of global cuisines as well. The only “typical” Portuguese dish (i.e., a dish not eaten outside of Portugal) was salt cod and chickpeas—also a first course. Cod is a very common food in Portugal, and I ate it twice during my four day stay in Lisbon. This dish is also heavily influenced by the Arabic culture in the region from the influence of the Islamic empire. Literally translated, chick peas in Portuguese means “beans with a beak”. The name chick peas also refers to the shape of the garbanzo bean which looks like the head of a chick. Cod fish and chickpeas also has onions, boiled eggs and olive oil. A simple, delicious dish.

We didn’t talk too much about food ethics, but we did spend a lot of time talking about carbon markets and mitigation vs adaptation to climate change. It was a stimulating evening with a lot of lovely warmth and affection (I’ll miss being in a place where people kiss each other upon greeting—even strangers. But namaste isn’t so bad). I felt really lucky to have been a part of this dinner party and to have met such smart people. Joana is a passionate, outspoken woman with a side-splitting sense of humor. I look forward to knowing her for a good long time.

Horta Popular in Lisbon

2010-07-05T07:14:00.000-07:00

Monica took seriously her task of showing me gardens and introducing me to sympathetic activists and colleagues. The second day of my visit we walked up, up, up through Lisbon,s winding, narrow and laundry festooned streets, to a Horta Popular (community garden) on a hill with a breathtaking view of the ocean, harbor and river. It is situated between a South Asian immigrant community (Bangladesh mostly), a neighborhood with retired folks and a trendy area with lots of young people. The young people started the garden, but were viewed with suspicion and hostility by the retirement community who resented any intrusion into their neighborhood, especially by dredlock sporting, anarchist hippy-types. The garden was thus the site of much controversy, and took a great deal of negotiating to get the existing community to accept the presence of the garden and its gardeners. Patience prevailed, however, and the garden is now a site of cooperation between multiple communities. Residents walking their dogs in the garden (AKA leaving piles of dog poop in the garden), produce theft and an ambiguously legal and thus tenuous water supply are still problems that plague the project.

Like the gardens in Brussels, no one has individual plots, although this is in theory only. The retired residents of the neighborhood resisted efforts to make it communal and if they participate, they do so in their own fashion. A sign saying “participa” encourages anyone to get involved. Across the street above a wall of graffiti, there is a provocative mural behind the garden which suggests that gardens as much as streets belong in the city because food has to come from somewhere, no? The gardeners are involved in an environmental organization called GAIA and every Thursday, they host a vegan popular dinner for the gardeners and the community. Like many of these efforts, which are plagued by the friction of social distance, the long-term residents belong to different food cultures and stopped coming after a few times. The dinner costs 3 Euros and consists of greens, beans, rice and fruit. Simple, hearty, healthy fare.

Another garden in the city is tended by Yve Le Grand, a student at ICS and a member of GAIA. An energetic, dynamic and really funny lady, she characterized her experience of this garden as a story of failure. I call it a Sleeping Giant. It’s an incredible swath of land in the center of Lisbon which has never been cultivated. It is home to a number of pines and palms (love that combination), open grassy areas, a well, fruit trees and multiple terraces. The soil is in terrible shape, and could really benefit from a lot of TLC. Yve and Monica are excited to try out some “sheet mulching” using restaurant green waste. I wish I could be a part of this project. I felt an immediate affinity for the space and have asked Monica and Yve to plant a fig tree overlooking the ocean for me.

And to put a bench beneath it and save a spot for me. Lisbon, I’ll come back to be with you, I promise.

Update from India

2010-07-05T03:14:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone!

Please accept my apologies for the delay in posting to the blog! It's been an interesting week, and has included a lot of moving around, inaccessible internet connections and a really bloody bad cold.

I'm on the mend and we're on our way soon to a hotel with an internet connection in the room. Look for lots of posts from Lisbon and India. I was too busy having fun in Lisbon to write!

Look for tidbits on driving in India and monsoon weddings too!

Caipirinhas, Cod and Full Circles

2010-06-25T17:19:00.001-07:00

Today was a light day. Slept off too much vinho verde (green wine) til 10.

Had a breakfast of yogurt and Rocha Pear--a pear variety developed specifically for small scale production and year-round consumption (i.e., excellent storage capacity) in Portugal. I bought two yesterday for 15 cents in a little bodega on a picturesque street in the Old City. Sweet, juicy--out of season. Really, really out of season.

Went to have a little tiny coffee at 11. These coffees are amazing. They are like an electric shock to the heart. It's approximately 5 sips of coffee, but you won't need any more for about five hours. If that.

Monica's office at 12:30 for lunch with her colleagues. Got an invitation to come back to Lisbon and present a paper at the Institute for Social Sciences in November. To which I replied, no really, I couldn't possibly. I'm too busy. Dumbass. Let me try again. Yes, of course I would love to accept your kind offer and I will make it work.

Lisbon is amazing. I feel myself relaxing into this beauty and the easy going feel of this place and I really really don't want to leave. I am sure it is a facade and there is a difficult side to this country, like every other country, but I find it hard to hate a place that is constantly sunny, consistently 23 degrees C, endlessly supplying beautiful buildings festooned with laundry, cheap, easy transportation, great wine, amazing food, and beaches.

After the generous invitation that I turned down like a fool, (I am hoping it's not too late for me to come to my senses) we hopped on the subway at 2:57 to go to the beach for a few hours. The football match between Portugal and Brazil started at 3:00 and the tube was full of fans for both sides. Rowdy but jovial, the train emptied at a square broadcasting the game. I would like to know more about how these post-colonial relations really work. If only there was more time in the day.

After the beach we went to a Alto Bolto, a restaurant in a trendy part of town. The place took itself a bit too seriously, but had good food and a nice atmosphere. I had salt cod with onions in port wine, the restaurant specialty. Monica and I enjoyed a red wine from the North of Portugal and some nice Portuguese cheese. Later we met up with Yve, a graduate student with a rich life story, who is also interested in seed and food sovereignty and is a stewardess of a forest garden in the city. We went to a bar and had caipirinhas at a bar in her neighborhood. We talked about soil building, plant guilds and planting a fig tree for me in a garden overlooking the ocean.

Lisbon reminds me a bit of Manhatten. It has a very cosmopolitan and youthful feel. Just add colorful painted tiles from the 15th century on every beautiful building, luscious magnolias and bougainvillas festooned with flowers and mouth watering cuisine, and you have Lisbon. Um, yeah, pretty much a perfect city. Monica and I realized that the last time we had spent time together was in New York during the last World Cup. It is funny how these cycles of time bring us full circle. I'm in a very different place in life, and so is she, but the blessing of friendship is that we can share our lives, support each other and grow personally and intellectually together. Still. Again.

Obrigada

2010-06-24T05:38:00.000-07:00

Obrigada is Portuguese for thank you. Thank you doesn't quite cover it, but it will do. Lisbon is a gracious place, filled with soft sunlight, breathtaking views, gentle breezes, incredible architecture, and my favorite sign of life, laundry hanging out the window. I'm not sure why anyone would want to leave here. I certainly don't.

I've discovered a wonderful secret to happy travels. In the past I have wandered around a bit thinking I have to absorb and enjoy the historic monuments, castles and miscellany that supposedly defines a place. It was always an exhausting experience for me, and I have never felt like a good tourist or traveler. This time, however, by focusing on food and gardens I have come alive as a tourist! Every time I see a garden I am filled with happiness like a surge of energy and I am fueled once again. Truly, my love is for gardens and growing things.

Monica, my friend and colleague is hosting me here in Lisbon and she also has taken seriously the charge to show me Lisbons gardens and foodways. Our first meal together was a traditional Portugeuse soup made from purslane (beldroegas). Now, most gardeners find purslane the bane of their existence. It's a colonizing plant and therefore will enthusiastically cover bare ground. Naturally. It's bad for dirt to be bare, so its important that plants like purslane cover it up. We can work with this need for covering the soil and enjoy the benefits of free greens too.

Beldroegas, as it's called here is actually for sale in the organic shops. One year I could have made a fortune selling the stuff that was growing in my garden. I started eating it because it was the only thing that was growing. I didn't know it was a delicacy, super nutritious or part of any cuisine.

This soup is simple, and according to Monica is made special with the addition of oregano and a salty, strong goat cheese that is reminiscent of queso fresco. The soup starts with a base of onions and garlic and the purslane is added and cooked in water til tender. Oregano, cilantro and salt and pepper season it, and the cheese is added at the very end. Serve with crunchy bread, more cheese, tinned fish and wine. Simple, healthful and with ingredients freely offered from the earth.

Flemish Food-Eating Out

2010-06-24T04:47:00.000-07:00

On my last night in Belgium, which was also the summer solstice, Stijn, Karolien, Cyrille and I went to a typical Flemish restaurant for dinner. Let me take a moment here to put the record straight about "French" fries. I don't care who came up with this idea, if it's French, Dutch or whatever. Belgian style is where it's at. Please, for the love of god, don't ever consider eating any other fried potato. Karolien demonstrated how to make Belgian fries, the secret of which, lies in the fact that they are fried, not once, but twice. Yes. And if that wasn't bad/good enough, eat them with mayonaisse. Don't argue with me. Just do it. You will not regret it. Well, not now.

There is also something sort of important about being in Belgium when making Belgian fries. As many ex-pats have come to find out (even if they bring the most important kitchen item--the deep fryer--with them on the train to England...) Belgian fries are not possible to make anywhere else. As a food geographer, I find this wonderful. As a lover of Belgian fries, I find this is a bit perplexing. I deduced that it has something to do with the variety of potato, but I suspect that it also has something to do with the soil in which the potatoes are grown. This warrants further investigation, and I shall apply for a grant to return to Belgium so I can eat more fries. I mean, study, fries.

So, this special variety of potato (unclear to me since I don't read Flemish, nor know anything about the Flemish potato varieties--hence a return visit to do "research") is peeled and washed in cold water and dried and cut into thin (or wide) strips. Karolien tells me that this removes some of the starchy residue from cutting and peeling, and leaves more of the starch in the tater to be exposed to the oil in the fryer. Yes. Do that. It seems to me that this is a medium starch, somewhat waxy potato, and if I had an extra set of arteries, I would experiment at home with which variety might work abroad, for all Belgian ex-pats. Since I don't, I'll just come back to Belgium.

There is also some debate in my host household about the proper width of good Belgian fries. Stijn likes them thick, Karolien, thin. Never completely resolved, like all domestic disputes, there is just compromise. Thin one time, thick the next. Karolien's fries were light, crispy and perfect. More perfect than any fries I've ever eaten. We ate them with a fried egg, salad and an almond tart for dessert. Decadent. Lunch. Nap.

So, for my last supper in Ghent, Stijn suggested a kind of carbonade flamande which is a simple tomato based stew of beef cooked in beer. Served with Belgian fries. Yes. I don't think I need to say anymore, and I will just share this picture. Both Stijn and Karolien ordered this as well...I am sensing that it's a favorite, and I understand why.

Afterward, we went next door to "Soul Food" (the name of which made me really happy for lots of wonderful reasons). This was an amazingly cozy, and according to Stijn, typical Belgian bar. It was an amazing cross-cultural experience with thick smoke greeting us as we came down the stairs, "Purple Rain" playing on the jukebox, American whiskey on the menu and the locals greeting each other with kisses and ribald Flemish jokes.

I had an amazing visit to Belgium and I can't thank Stijn and Karolien enough for their gracious hospitality. I can't wait to come back.

Gardens Galore! Part 4

2010-06-24T04:31:00.000-07:00

The third garden we visited is part of a community center in Schaarbeck, and is largely a product of the efforts of a husband and wife team who found a garden space behind the community center. They are both artists and provide programming on a variety of topics, many of which now include the garden space. Their philosophy is that people can be simultaneously delighted, educated and fed. I like these people.

One driving principle of their work is that space should not be a limitation to the productive possibilities of cities. Time and again we found large garden spaces available, but polluted. Or squatted and threatened with development. Or accessible only at the whim of the city or the state. These artists were innovating with ways to grow gardens vertically in small spaces on the side of walls. Beautiful, whimsical and productive, these experimental gardens are an interesting answer and solution to the problems of space.

The pair also "rescue" trees growing on buildings and in gutters and put them in pots in a nursery. They have a vision of a forest in the city, which is incubating in this little oasis of creativity and joy. The have also planted "miniature gardens" in the sidewalk. Each hole that is drilled in the concrete is home to up to 8 different kinds of plants.

Grow outside the box!

Gardens Galore! Part 3

2010-06-24T03:38:00.000-07:00

The second jardin collectif we visited in Brussels is long and narrow and tucked into the ground along a wall on a hill above the old train yard. It is filled with apple trees, currant bushes and blackberries and has many small to large annual vegetable beds with herbs and medicinal plants sprinkled throughout. No one really knows the history of the space, but it has a fig tree that was allegedly planted by Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century. The fig tree enjoys the micro-climate of the wall and the south facing slope, and already has figs the size of baseballs. In Belgium! (...which, BTW, was as cold as February in Georgia while I was there...yikes!). The tree is clearly historic, and the organizers of the garden hope to use its historic status to protect the entire garden from "development" of one kind or another.

Like the garden in Ghent, this garden also has its roots in labor and industry. The garden emerged four years ago as part of an attempt to reclaim a garbage dump that had grown under a bridge in an old train yard near the port. It is also a mere stones throw away from the "Little Manhatten" of Brussels, a central business district that the city planned and developed from the 1970s. The high rises are visible across the industrial wasteland from the vantage point of the garden.

The gardeners are both local and from neighborhoods far away. Some belong to permaculture organizations, some are just curious and sympathetic and some like, Abdil, are unemployed and looking for productive and meaningful work. The woman pictured below echoed the sentiments of gardeners in the first garden we visited. The garden belongs to us all. I am just planting these leeks here because they are ready to be planted. The spirit of cooperation and sharing is striking. No one seems to claim any part of this space as their own and everyone is welcome to whatever they want, whenever they want it. Needless to say, they have not had problems with theft or vandalism. It also doesn't hurt that you would never know it was there unless you knew, or you just happened to read the small sign on the only entrance.

This garden also sports a composting toilet housed in this terrific little building. To the left is the toilet, and to the right is a work room, which also doubles as a seed bank for the garden. The building is constructed of wood pieces that are soaked in oil, which are then surrounded by an insulating material, such as cork and then plastered with a kind of concrete, the name of which I don't remember. It has a green roof, tiled floors and an incredible view. It also comes with instructions.

This garden has had the benefit of some longevity, and having a strong community of workers with many skills, and apparently some access to capital. There is a greenhouse that one of the gardeners built and also two rain barrels that address access to reliable water, one of most intractable problems of community gardens.

There is also a small theater space in which children from the local community produced a play about nature. It is times like these that I feel the strictures of time and space. I want to be here for all of this, and to be there for all of that. I want to know all about this, here, and know all about that, there. I guess we just do the best we can, and this is me, doing the best I can to know about and share these imaginative, hopeful and joyful efforts of kind-hearted people.

Many times during this beautiful day of wandering through these oases of joy, we turned to say goodbye and our new friends were already lost to us, back in the bliss of tilling the soil and nurturing life. It makes my heart glad.

Gardens Galore! Part 2

2010-06-24T02:13:00.001-07:00

In the 1960s, the Belgian government signed an agreement with Turkey to allow the migration of low-skilled Turkish workers to Belgium. The migrants were recruited to work in industry to help fuel an economic expansion of the Belgian state. Development turned out to be slow, and the work not as lucrative as the migrants had hoped. As a result, for the last twenty years a pattern of chain migration of family unification developed from the closing of migration for work related reasons, political problems in Turkey and the long-term residence of family members in Europe. With the opening of borders in the European Union and political tensions in the Balkans, ethnic Turks from all over Europe (Bulgaria and Macedonia) also began migrating to Belgium in the 1990s.

Thus, there is a large population of ethnic Turks in certain areas of Belgium, especially the Schaarbeek district of Brussels, where we ate Turkish pizza on Sunday after our garden tour. In this neighborhood (with densities of ethnic Turks as high as 40%), if you had not told me I was in Belgium, I would not have known. I became the subject of some light hearted ribbing when I said I wanted to eat Turkish food. Mind you, this is after I said I didn't like Belgian beer. My culinary requests thereafter were viewed with a certain degree of (well-deserved) skepticism and amusement.

Joeren recommended a good place, though, and somewhat to our surprise, we (Stijn, Cyrille and I) found ourselves in a pizzeria. Turkish food, because of the omnipresent kebab shops, are often seen by Belgians as "fast food" AKA cheap, convenient, sometimes good food, but potentially dangerous. Our meal consisted of a cold yogurt-cucumber soup and a hot lentil soup, cucumber and tomato salad and a variety of different kinds of freshly baked bread stuffed with vegetables, cheese and meats (and an egg...?). It was delicious and Cryille and Stijn concurred that this was "a proper Turkish restaurant," even though it was both Turkish and European in its influences--you will not find "pizza" in restaurants in most Turkish places.

There are similar hybrid foodways as a result of Jewish immigration and the now famous Reuben in New York, or Italian immigration and the now infamous cheese steak in Philadelphia. I imagine that the development of these kind of foods are a logical outgrowth of the experience of having small kitchens, a lively street culture in the home country, over-crowded housing, low-incomes and a longing for the taste of home. Maybe also in the beginning of this migration history, there were few women--who likely were the ones who knew how to to cook proper meals--and few grocery stores sourcing proper ingredients. Now, however, there are many generations of families in Belgium, but they still live in marginal situations. Their neighborhoods, like that of most migrants, are often in or near areas of poverty, crime and prostitution. Efforts to improve the situation of Turks (and other migrants) in Belgium have included the development of community centers, and in Ghent, a garden.

Let me be clear, however, that gardens are not the answer. These efforts do not remove, and sometimes they efface, the underlying problems of ethnic differences, systemic inequality and the intractable tensions around the perception of insider and outsider status. They also tend to assuage the feelings of guilt for Westerners around the history of exploitation, and do nothing to really change the situation of most migrants, which is directly related to capitalist labor practices. Ghent has a long, rich and glorious labor history. In the city center there is a large monument and building dedicated to a labor organization called "Voorhuit"--means "forward". For a variety of reasons, many of the Turkish migrant laborers have not been brought "forward" and still live in over-crowded derelict housing from the 19th century.

Social workers helped develop some gardens for the residents of this community (which houses both ethnic Belgians and ethnic Flemish) on an old industrial site. The soil is polluted in the whole area, but the gardens could be located in raised beds on the concrete floor of an old factory. It is a traditional community garden, with individuals having responsibility of separate plots. The garden has suffered from vandals and thieves, and I wonder if it isn't because the privatization of space within the garden invites (and perhaps even defines) theft. The community space also houses a soccer field and a public barbeque. Without intending to be a multi-cultural project, the garden has brought members of the community together in a shared interest in food and foodways.

Like all collective and community gardens, this garden is threatened by development. In this case, by the city of Ghent, which wants to build new housing here. The idea is to move residents of an even more disadvantaged community (largely composed of eastern Europeans of a variety of ethnicities and some Roma) into this neighborhood, rather than tear down the old housing and build better housing in its place. In addition there is a development project that will bring gentrification to the area, something that does not bode well for housing costs, open space or community cohesion. In the meantime, residents continue to use this "public space" to grow onions, play soccer, share meals and make art.

Gardens Galore! Part 1

2010-06-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

Stijn took very seriously my mission of visiting gardens and delivered on his promise to show me food gardens in Belgium with exceptional form. Before I get into that, first let me say a word for serendipity and the strength of loose ties. Stijn and I met in 2004 at a conference of junior scholars in economic geography. We both were finishing PhDs at the time, and while we talked some then, never really kept in touch. This past April, we chatted at a party at our professional society's annual meeting and Stijn offered to host me in Belgium on my travels. Never one to say no to things like this, I jumped at the opportunity. Then and now, I am humbled and amazed at this generous gift of trust and hospitality.

That conference in 2004, more than any other for me, has influenced my life and career in unexpected and truly exceptional ways. I am in debt to the organizers and their efforts to generate the kind of social network that I now have as a result of that conference. Stijn’s work focuses on urban sociology of labor and urban renewal projects, and as such, he has little experience with my areas of interest, but… he just happens to have a new colleague, Barbara, who does. Let's here it for serendipity! Barbara put Stijn in touch with Cyrille of “Le Debut des Haricorts”—literally, the "start of the beans", and Jeroen of Auto-Suffisance (http://auto-suffisance.blogspot.com/). These two picked us up at the Brussels train station in a very organic VW and we were off through the streets of Brussels in search of "jardins collectifs".

We visited four gardens in a few short hours, and they all were magnificent and exceptional in their own way. The first was a collective of about 5-10 regular gardeners who share space for vegetable, flower and fruit production, community composting and cooperative food distribution. The vegetable beds are raised and mostly support the dynamic accumulators of permaculture philosophy--plants who make nutrients available for plants in the soil. Medicinal plants, flowers and fruit trees and plants, including kiwi vines, also abound. While we were there, two people planted Jerusalem artichokes and another two brought in buckets of compost to add to the heap. When I asked the two gardeners if they had a plot of their own, they said, No, it belongs to us all.

The garden sports a greenhouse, a central pavillion and a composting toilet. I *actually* paid to use the bathroom at the train station, not anticipating that I would have such great facilities to use! Cyrille offered to lend me a book and a few minutes of private time if I want to just enjoy the experience anyway... The garden is next to a magnificent 19th century house with a large walled garden of it's own in the back. The garden houses several fruit trees, including two massive old cherries, beehives and until recently, a couple of goats. The house belongs to a grocery multi-national, which plans to expand. That expansion will destroy the gardens. Of course. The gardeners resist, but keep growing anyway.

Flemish Food-Cooking

2010-06-22T16:35:00.000-07:00

After our tramp around Ghent, we returned to the house and commenced to cooking. While the water for the soup heated, we refueled--my favorite way--with a little wine and cheese and bread. The first course of asparagus soup is made with spargal, a white variety of asparagus, produced by the plant underground. It has a mild flavor and gives the asparagus soup an ethereal white color. Karolien’s recipe calls for butter, leeks, asparagus, potato, sock, parsley and cream. The leeks are sautéed in the butter til tender, and the potato and asparagus is added with water and stock and cooked til soft. The whole thing is pureed and thickened with cream (or milk) and served with salty little North Sea shrimps.

The main course consisted of potatoes, baked cod and sautéed chicon, also known as Begian endive. Chicon is the bitter green part of the super-plant chicory. Chicory has edible roots that can be roasted as a coffee substitute, produces healthful bitter greens, is used as a dynamic accumulator of nutrients in permaculture gardens and has beautiful flowers. These chicon were grown underground (as is traditionally Belgian) to prevent them from turning green, and have a delicate flavor. They were sliced, and the hard inner core removed, and sautéed in butter for a few minutes. They became a bit crisp around the edges and tasted buttery, delicate and slightly bitter.

Karolien mashed the cooked potatoes with a little butter, milk and egg. They were light, creamy and perfect in texture. The egg adds something mysteriously good! The fished was baked with tomato wedge and sprigs of sage (for no longer than 9 minutes, says the fish guy) and came out of the oven flaky and tender. We enjoyed the whole feast over a bottle of organic (or Bio, pronounced “bee-yo”) sauvignon wine. A delicious light and healthy repast! We ended the meal (although there wasn’t much room for it) with cubes of bread pudding and mattentart. I don’t remember much after this. The wine, the walking, my full tummy and my 36^th hour of being awake and taking in the rich, wonderful world on two continents put me deep in dreamland soon after the table was cleared.

Flemish Food-Shopping

2010-06-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

For the past four days, I have been kindly hosted by Dutch speaking Belgians in Ghent (pronounced “Hant”), which is part of the Flemish speaking part of Belgium. Karolien, one of my hosts, is a fantastic cook. The meals she cooked were infused with delicate flavors that enhanced and complemented the natural flavors of the foods. She has an adorable garden in the back of the house she and Stijn purchased a few years ago. The house is awaiting renovation, but the garden, through much effort, has been reclaimed from years of neglect. The herbs she used to season many of the foods came from her garden. I hear that chickens and maybe some rabbits will be finding a new home in the back garden as well.

I am told that the Belgian government supports and actually *encourages* backyard chicken production. How civilized. Given the number of front and back gardens attached to houses, and the fruit trees growing in most of them, it seems that subsistence agricultural production has long been encouraged throughout the country, at least among the middle classes, as most of the working class housing has no gardens. There appears to be a recent resurgence in this, perhaps as a result of the economic downturn. Karolien saw a goat on a leash being walked in her neighborhood, and the monastery around the corner, although we visited and didn’t see them, has been rumored to hostel cows and goats in recent history—like the last few weeks. There is also a livestock market in Ghent, where you can buy laying hens for your backyard or live chickens for your stew pot. Or a goose. Or a duck. Or a rabbit. Guinea pig, anyone?

My first evening in Ghent, Karolien showed me how to prepare a traditional Flemish meal of baked codfish, asparagus soup, chicon and potatoes. While Karolien went to the fish shop and to buy the vegetables in the neighborhood, Stijn gave me a walking tour of Ghent, which included sharing with me the rich history of labor politics, migration and conflicts over territory in Belgium. Our walking tour included several stops for ingredients for our supper, at a cheese shop, a bakery and a mustard shop… (!). We also visited some community gardens and parks, which will appear in later posts.

Our first stop was at a cheese shop that makes its own cheeses 4-5 times per week from locally produced, organic milk. Cheese makers unite! Cheese eaters swoon. We chose the house specialty Pas de Rouge, which is a semi-hard, very flavorful, medium aged cheese. We also choose a mild, soft traditional Flemish cheese called Damse, which comes with or without herbs (in this case parsley) in the middle and on the rind. A third choice was a delicate and lacy blue cheese, made by the Hinkelspel cooperative and named Pas de Bleu...dressage and dance enthusiasts who love cheese will dig this.. There is a movement in dressage called a pas de deux, which is basically a dance for two horses/rider pairs. I couldn't resist. And last, a goat cheese called Cabriogand.

Our next stop was to a bakery specializing in breads. I am told that bakeries, for unknown reasons, generally focus on breads or sweets, and not both. This bakery was one of the best in Ghent for bread, and had a line two dozen deep out the door. We got whole wheat flax seed bread for eating with our cheese—sort of cancels out the unhealthiness of the cheese, doncha think? Maybe it could cancel out everything unhealthy I have eaten…ever? For breakfast, we picked muesli bread (Karolien’s and now my favorite) that is studded with nuts, grains and gigantic dried apricots. Wheaties, eat your heart out—you are NOT the breakfast of champions. Also for breakfast, we tried a handful of white and “brown” (whole wheat) dried fruit “sandwiches”—small bun-like breads sprinkled with dried currants and those green, red and yellow fruit jelly thingees that populate horrendous rum fruitcakes at unfortunate Christmas gatherings. I was incredibly rude and picked them out of my sandwich when I ate them, but when I actually tasted them they were quite nice. Of course they were. Another conversion. But for the record, I will only eat those thingees in Belgium. For dessert (and a snack on the canal side, as it appears to be Stijn’s favorite) we got bread pudding (another amazing taste sensation) and mattentart, a pastry made with buttermilk, milk and almonds. OH MY GOD.

Next door, a specialty food shop featured artisanal mustards. Stijn bought me a small sample of some very spicy variety, and I have not yet tried it, but the smell of vinegar and spices in the shop was indescribable. I cannot wait to crack it open when I get home and slather it on some homemade bratwurst from Nature’s Harmony Farm. The shop made their own mustards and you chose which size of container you would like, and they filled it for you from their supply under the counter. You could even bring back your container for refilling. I look forward to doing that someday.

Belgian Beer

2010-06-20T15:19:00.001-07:00

It was strongly suggested to me tonight, in spite of the fact that this blog is about food, that I make some sort of public retraction of an ill-informed statement that I made last night... The statement went a little something like "I don't like Belgian beer". I regretted it the minute I said it.

I love regretting things when making up for it tastes this good.

My incredibly gracious hosts, Stijn and Karolien, have fed and watered me well in Belgium. Stijn has also walked my legs off, shared his encyclopedic knowledge of Belgian cities and along with Karolien, introduced me to Flemish cuisine (more later on that). Stijn has also introduced me to some really rad collective gardeners in Brussels. One of whom, Cyrille, would not allow me to leave Belgium without sampling some "real" Belgian beers. This effort led us to a neighborhood in Brussels with the beer store featured in the first photo above. There are Belgian beer aficionados in Athens who I know would drop dead in throes of ecstasy walking into this store. I walked in with my toes curled.

Cyrille, in attempt to get at why I didn't "like" Belgian beer, was amused by my response, "It's too sweet". So you want a light beer? Maybe an industrial product like Stella? He offered, sweetly, with a sly smile. Um...no. Maybe one with a low alcohol content? Really, no. Maybe some honey beer...? Gag. In the end and after being convinced that I really will like it, I made a rather large investment in a selection of Belgian beers to take to the party in one of the collective gardens. The diversity of beers was also Cyrille's attempt to ease me into liking the Belgian style beer. He succeeded. As evidenced by the empty bottles in photo number 2. My favorite was an 9% IPA. Um. Yea. What is not to love, really? We also enjoyed a goat cheese, spinach and walnut tart made by one of the collective gardeners, the remains of which is next to the remains of the beer.

So, this garden is cool as shit and totally worth a digression from beer, and another post later. It's composed of raised beds on wheels that take up as much space as a parked car and are used in public to demonstrate that non-car owners could have a right to public space the size of a parking spot for a car. Really flipping brilliant. (Third photo).The last photo shows one of the mobile beds and it's "license plate"--radish. These gardeners meet on Sunday afternoons and work in the gardens, share a meal and beer and grow up all kinds of good stuff together in the yard of an old school.

But, back to the beer. Allegedly, true Belgian beers are fermented with naturally occurring yeasts, which produce a high alcohol content after many years of fermentation. The American breweries doing Belgian style ales speed up this process by adding extra sugar so the high alcohol content is produced faster. Of course they do. Of course they cut corners on quality by cheating. That's the American way. The Belgian way--of brewing beer, growing food and sharing meals--is gracious with what is offered by nature, patient with the process even if it takes a long time and of seriously good quality.

I like it. A lot.

Sendoff and Kickoff

2010-06-16T18:57:00.001-07:00

So, the kickoff of my Grow, Cook, Eat tour involved beer, bluegrass, pork, hugs and a farmer's market. All in one place. I love you Athens.

The most recent development in local food markets in Athens is in the parking lot and terrace of a great bar in downtown Athens. I imagine that the impulse buying at the market goes up a bit when a person can shop with a frothy beverage in one hand. A true innovation in marketing, I must say. Regan, my awesome, cheese-making and raw-milk banditing best girlfriend who co-facilitated my recovery from too many nights of popcorn and beer, made grass-fed pork and beet green epanadas to share with the folks who gathered over the course of the evening to wish me well on my travels. I really can't imagine a better send off, and I feel really really blessed.

We then went to Farm 255, a restaurant with it's own Full Moon Farm (www.farm255.com) and indulged in the "butcher board"--a charcouterie consisting mostly of variations on enhanced pork (confit of pork belly...oh my). In other news, I ate bacon from BPH farm twice today. I had bacon and eggs for breakfast to recover from the indulgences of last night, and I made a mad BLT for lunch (I substituted goat fromage blanc for mayo, and arugula for lettuce...) I made a sausage (Greendale Farm), potato (McMullan Farm) and broccoli green (TaylOrganic) saute for supper. Given that neither Hindus nor Muslims eat a whole lotta pork, and India is consequently a relatively pork free country, I am getting my fill. Now.

I also had a finger of Auchentoshen scotch neat for and with dessert last night. (It's all gin and tonic from here on out...) Dessert was a blueberry torte and peach galette, both of which are actually in season right now. (This just proves that there is a goddess and she wants me to be happy.) There was also this white chocolate thing that somehow appeared on the table, and which was actually orgasmic but really not local at all... Life is very very good.

Tonight, I went out to Don Young's patch of ground and worked in the herb garden a bit, drank beer in the shadow of a thunderstorm and talked about the aliveness of things, and how food shouldn't be for sale. The silver of a moon rose in front of thunderheads that promised a lot of rain for our figs and blueberries and tomatoes and rosemary and a fresh, clean day tomorrow. I drove home with all the windows open to the sultry air and I realized how much I'm gonna miss this place and the people here, and how deeply I have fallen in love with Georgia... I am absolutely bewitched by this place, and thank the universe for landing me here. Tonight ima gonna sleep in my screened porch and listen to the rain fall all night long.

As for growing--you gotta tell me what ISN'T growing in Georgia these days. Hells of sun and rain have my tomatoes toppling their cages and my cucumbers racing across the yard. But the growing part in grow, cook and eat isn't just about food...I aim to grow myself on this trip. Goddess grant me the grace to do it. I realize the parallel (and I am a fan) to Elizabeth Gilberts', Eat, Pray, Love. I'm not gonna get Julia Roberts to play me, and that's alright. Ima gonna learn about how food is freedom, and ima gonna bring it all home to the people and the place I love. That's enough for me.

So in between my bacon centered meals today, Don and I picked up a gas stove and a fridge for the CounterSpace kitchen--a community space shared by Don, Evan McGown, myself and many many others which promises to be a radical space of community, life and love. This is one thing, among many, that wrenches me to leave (this also includes a certain yellow hound dog and a big red horse and a lot of really sweet people who are too good to me). But, like all things, this place, that space, these people and this life will be here when I get back.

Holla. I'll be back in two months. Then you send me off agin, alright?