"I bet you don't even bother to compost your own feces!"

Last week someone made a joke about how I should write a blog post about going to the bathroom in a stranger's apartment and it reminded me of another joke someone made to me about how I should write a blog about urinating in public, with photos of all the places I've made my mark. Layers upon layers. So many jokes about composting feces in Robin's sleeping bag! So many!

There was a time when the outdoor relief list would have been very short, non-existent really. A female growing up in the city has few opportunities to pop a squat that don't leave her frighteningly vulnerable. Then a couple years ago I was in Utah with my roommate Claire tailgating at a rodeo and could not fucking take a piss behind the pick up truck. Not kidding when I say it was totally embarrassing. What's so hard about peeing?

Anyway, when I was at Frosty Morning Farms they had an outhouse or 'composting toilet'. It was a little wooden shack up a flight of stairs full of dust, spiders and peat moss to throw down the hole after your bizness. Now, I drink a lot of water and am often self-conscious about the number of times I run to the restroom during the day. But out in the hot sun, weeding or god knows, drinking water and going to pee was the best way to get out of the heat and break the monotony (partially true for working in an office as well) so I did it freely, lighting the way with a candle by the peat moss bucket. After a couple days, Allison took me aside...

She let me know that urine really isn't so good for a compost toilet because it gets too acidic and she usually went, oh, behind the tool shed or by the paddock or behind any convenient tree. A few days later a visitor to the farm was in the outhouse and I could hear the stream like a gushing white water rapid-poor Allison had been listening to me ruin her compost!!

So yeah, peeing outdoors. Once the floodgates were opened...I kind of dug it. Especially at night, in the pitch black, coyotes howling madly in the distance, chickens scattering, night bugs hopping around and down my throat in one noteable instance...it has a kind of magic.

(The view into the farmhouse as I peed on the doorstep)

If you haven't developed the muscles to do it, ladies, get on it. Okay, I almost gave Allison and Karl's teenage sons a free show one afternoon but it's worth the risk.

All jokes about urinating aside, composting toilets are awesome and though I am currently bound by my landlord's stifling restrictions, if I ever build my own house I'd have a composting toilet put in. You wont be contaminating rivers and streams or disrupting soil systems by installing pipes. You can build them anywhere that plumbing is inconvenient. And if you're very bold you can use that compost to fertilize your garden...just don't pee on your garden. That's what behind the tool shed is for.

Incidentally, I didn't get over my outside/bathroom fear on the farm (though they did bring my comfort to an unprecendented level). I got over it just a few days after the tailgating party. I was at the top of Timpanogos, a mountain in Utah, leaning against the summit shack, in front of god and everyone. Which shows if you set a goal for yourself there's nothing you can't accomplish.

Black Bean Soup

Hot off the presses! Hot of the stove actually. I just made the most amazing black bean soup!! It was so good I wanted immediately to tell the internets about it. Hopefully, some poor protein deprived soul will come across this and fill the bean shaped void inside. I was told about this recipe just last night by my pal Robin, so props to her for spreading the word via her mouth.

Black beans and black bean soup always remind me of National Cafe, a tiny Cuban restaurant that used to be on first avenue, where I spent large parts of my allowance in my youth. Or it would be a reward after going to the dentist or something and I'd eat from the side of my mouth that had feeling while food dribbled out the other. They made incredible beans, rice, stewed chicken and banana milkshakes. The day it closed a little part of myself was shuttered and hung with a 'for sale' sign, ya know?

But still I feel National Cafe's influence. Rice and beans, cooked in a variety of styles, is my comfort food. So Robin told me about this recipe and I was like well I don't have rice and I don't have beans, but I have all the other bits so I ran around the corner to my local friendly deli guy and bought a 99 cent can of Goya black beans and got down to business. Delicious comfort.

Recipe for vegetarian black bean soup:

Can o' beans
veggie stock or bouillon cube (you could make it non-vegetarian and add chicken stock or pork which is I'm sure what was going down at National Cafe, though I was blissfully uncaring)
a few scallions
couple cloves of garlic
lemon
healthy teaspoon of red cider vinegar (any kind would do except maybe balsamic)
tiny pinch of cayenne pepper
dash of black pepper
olive oil
optional, yet highly recommended: slices of avocado

Chop up your scallions and set some aside. Put the rest in a pot with a bit of olive oil and minced garlic. Cook them on low heat till they're soft. Open your can o' beans and rinse them then throw them in the pot when the garlic/scallions are ready. Add enough water (or stock) to cover the beans and set it to boil. When it's boiling add the bouillon unless you used stock. Add the cayenne and black pepper and stir. Turn the heat down to a simmer. At this point if you want to thicken it you can puree some of the beans and liquid then add it back in. I have a hand puree thing which is awesome. Add the vinegar and stir. Pour some in a bowl and squeeze in lemon juice. You don't need that much, use sound lemon judgement. Sprinkle the rest of the scallions on top and avocado slices and you have a bowl of heaven.

I don't have a picture of the soup because I ate it so fast, sorry. Make your own and you'll see how it looks.

UPDATE:

I was thinking about this post the last couple days, because I'm a dork and I realized everything I espouse about eating locally and seasonally is kind of thrown out the window here. I mean-lemons? avocado? In New York? In December? That's fucked up. I guess beans could be worse, they are canned not refrigerated. No icy trucks to get them around but still, trucks. New York being the cultural capital that it is has many different cooking histories from every part of the globe and they all import their sensibilities and ingredients. Cuban cooking (though its pretty presumptuous to align my soup with Cuban cuisine) has infiltrated my personal tastes and I haven't yet gotten to the point where I can cast aside black beans because they don't grow in my back yard. What do you love that's out of season or from far away? What do you love that's only east coast?

Seeds

This summer I neglected my garden. I was away in other people's gardens and had no time for things like weeding or watering. The sun was there doing its thing. Sometimes the clouds would part. That's it.

Of course upon my return the place looked like ass. Nothing had been transplanted on time and all the herbs were sadly strangled in their pots, by their own roots no less. And yet...things grew.
Nature-what a crazy bitch she is.

So here was the total:

Six tomatoes, a handful of beets, and enough beans to replant them next spring. There were also enough basil leaves to flavor a mixed drink. Speaking of which there's a lot of mint growing randomly around, so mojitos for everyone! I have grand plans for next year. There's going to be a pea place (where I grow peas) and troughs of Magic Mollies. There will be strawberries (we have a few in a big yellow tub now but my mouth didn't harvest any) galore and chickens. Chickens.


There is a chance it will all fall to ruin again. That's the chance everyone takes any time they attempt something positive because unlike things that are bad for you doing something good for you is hard work. Diets, exercise, educating yourself, being nice to people... All practically impossible!! At least this is what we're conditioned to believe. Eating organic is too expensive, shopping from local growers is too complicated, eating healthy is too boring, recycling is a waste of time, no one can remember to take canvas bags to the grocery store don't bother, nothing you plant will ever grow.

My garden marched on without me much as the planet will march on without humanity once we've wiped ourselves off it. But if I'd done a little more with it, some weeding for instance, we could have supported each other! No one would have to be wiped off anyone's face. I'm trying to say that you can work with nature or you can ignore it-guess which action turns out better? It's not a perfect analogy since my garden's decline isn't causing climate change but you get it.

Personally I'm not very active on the doing things for the planet front but I've noticed my awareness and interest has increased with every seed I plant. Every seed. We have a compost bin so now I don't throw organic waste into the garbage (for anyone holding their breath to find out what happened with my almost full compost bin, one day Claire just picked it up and dumped the whole thing over a garden bed. It had actually turned to dirt! Didn't need that help line after all) and I reuse bags and recycle and buy organic and am trying to just buy local (if only Europe didn't make such awesome cheese) and these are all pitiful small things, seeds if you will, that hopefully will grow into something more, with time. But only if I put in a cultivating hand. Mmm, mixed metaphors are delicious. Like Mojitos.

I guess what I'm saying (and reminding myself of) is even though a seed looks small and insignificant, plant it because it's amazing what it can produce.

Raymond Sings!

Hey here's that song about pie making Raymond wrote. I hope he appreciates me putting his picture all up on the internet. Kisses, Ray!

"Liveblogging" Thanksgiving

Wednesday November 26th, 7:52 PM

So I wanted to record my cooking experiences this year since it is my first Thanksgiving where I've taken a really active part in any kind of preparation (As I type cranberries are popping merrily on the stove. Wait, are they supposed to do that?) But I can't really keep up with today's modern technologies of whatever the hell live blogging is...partly because I'm not particularly tech savvy and partly because I've imbibed a good deal of the cooking wine and bourbon for the Kentucky Derby Pie. I should be so lucky to escape this ordeal without any third degree burns.

Isn't it interesting that on Thanksgiving everyone is eating more or less the same dishes all across America? I haven't decided if that's creepy or cool but as I compiled my grocery list for this undertaking I noticed that the traditional dishes are composed of ingredients ACTUALLY IN SEASON. Refreshing.

I just plan to write what I'm doing when it gets interesting (...to me) and post it all on Thanksgiving night with pictures. You're welcome!

8:07 PM

Hmm, cranberry sauce smells a lot like mulled wine. Or is that me? Oh well, everything is better mulled...with wine. Moving on to stuffing. Jeez, that's a lot of bread. Stuffing is fascinating-like many soggy bread dishes it was obviously once a solution to the eternal question, "What the fuck to do with all this stale bread?"


8:38 PM

MC Hammer just came on the iTunes. Thank god.

8:46 PM

Okay, the cranberry sauce is a little too sweet but you can't unsweet what has been sweetened. Life lesson, people. Cut up my potatoes for the first bake of the twice-baked potato recipe and have them precariously balanced in the oven with the stuffing. What to do, what to do? So much of cooking is deliberate planning and timing. The pecans have been stewing in bourbon time to make a crust. And dip into the bourbon supply.

9:01 PM

Let's Get It On was playing as I kneaded my pie crust. I'm anticipating some sexy pie...which considering who it's going to feed is fairly disturbing.


9:20 PM

As I formed my pie crust into a pretty border my friend Raymond's song about pie came on iTunes, he wrote it for my little movie about a pie making villain. The recording is excellent and made me smile. I'm gonna find a way to post it here so you can all listen as you make your next pie and imagine you are Holly, the Pie Socialite.

9:37 PM

I used caraway seed sour dough bread for the stuffing, it's tasty but doesn't quite have the right texture. It's supposed to be like glue right? More vegetable stock and back in the oven...is this the beginning of disaster? I KNEW it was going too smoothly!

9:44 PM

I'm waiting for the potatoes to cool and drinking Jack Daniels on the floor. Ahh, the holidays.

9:50 PM

Found a cranberry on the floor. Ate it.

10:34 PM

Okay, cut up sweet potatoes and put them to boil. Now I'm digging the potato insides out of their skins, leaving the shell intact. In the battle of me vs. skins, skins is kicking ass. I probably should have baked them longer! Pie and stuffing have come out of the oven and look good though the stuffing has baked down a bit. No one likes stuffing anyway, right?

10:51 PM

The last skin is empty!!!!!


11:35 PM

Skins refilled! I am horribly sober and should probably have a glass of water.

Thursday November 27th, Thanksgiving, 12:03 AM

Oh God, what's the point?

12:04 AM

Rallying, I made the first part of my sweet potato souffle to be baked tomorrow morning because I don't know how it'll survive being heated up. Next year I need to find recipes that don't rely so heavily on sugar or at least stock up on more honey earlier (One day I'll have my own hive!) so I can do some substitution. I did a bit in my S. P. mix and we'll see how it tastes.


12:23 AM

Okay, twice baked potatoes have been baked twice and I seem to have consumed an entire meal through osmosis. Now some clean up so my roommate doesn't strangle me in my sleep.


12:45 AM

While struggling to make room for all this prepared food in the fridge I came across containers full of materials that can not be identified. After hours of delicious cooking smells I'm being sent to bed with the gagtastic leftovers of meals past...I ran out to the garbage to get rid of the horrorshow as quickly as possible and almost ran into a guy walking a three legged pitbull. Sad...Time for sleep.

Black Friday November 28th, 12:07 AM

I wrote a bunch of stuff between last night and now and it was all deleted. Let us say sweet potatoes were sweetened, showers were taken and I eventually made it out the door. And what happened? Mostly eating. Also a fair amount of waiting since the turkey wasn't cooked as soon as we'd all hoped. And what of the turkey, indeed?


Well, I wasn't responsible for cooking it. I did ask that we buy a free range organic turkey this year and was graciously indulged. Mr. and Mrs. Ed accompanied me to the Co-op and bought that fancy turkey just for me and it was awesome once it was finally roasted through. So dinner was mostly all my side dishes until about six 'o clock.

There are a few stages of learning re: Thanksgiving. First you learn about the desperate Pilgrims aided by friendly Indians who helped them through a terrifying American winter and the delightful feast they had to celebrate their new friendship. Then you learn about the Trail of Tears. After that, the scope of America's gluttonous consumerism obscures all positive aspects of the holiday. But, finally, I've settled on the idea that whatever we dress it up as, Thanksgiving is really a celebration of the harvest, a good old-fashioned animal sacrifice(yay, Buffy!). Winter is ahead. For the Pilgrims and everyone that meant long nights, cold days and the very real possibility that they might not make it through. On my cozy couch, stuffed with pie, that possibility seems so remote it's almost offensive to consider it. But there are dark times always where we think spring will never come and on Thanksgiving we're setting aside one day to appreciate that it WILL come and with it the bounty and life before us will be renewed. It's a cycle humanity has trusted and relied on for a long time and part of the reason I think and write about food so much is because of how important and rare it is to really be connected to that cycle.

Sharing some food with some folks renews that connection in some small way, I think. I am thankful I did it today. And for the half a Derby pie in my fridge right now.

Recipes:

Cranberry Sauce
-a 12-ounce bag of cranberries.
-1/2 cup cabernet wine
-2 tablespoons of orange zest.
-1/2 cup orange juice
-1 cinnamon stick
-some salt, a pinch, and also a pinch of cayenne pepper.

Add 3/4 cup of sugar to a sauce pan. Pour in the juice and the wine; add the zest, the cinnamon stick and those spices. Bring that up to a simmer on medium heat. When it's simmering, add the cranberries. They are going to start to pop, it's going to take about 10 minutes. The sauce will also start to thicken. Throw in a 1/4 cup of cold water and turn off the heat. Take out the cinnamon stick.

Herb Stuffing
-12 cups slightly dry bread
-1/3 cup snipped parsley
-1/3 cup finely chopped onion
-1 1/2 tsp. salt
-1 tsp. ground sage
-1 tsp. dried thyme, crushed
-1 tsp. dried rosemary, crushed
-2 cups of vegetable broth
-6 tablespoons of butter, melted

Combine bread, parsley, onion, salt, sage,thyme, and rosemary. Add broth and butter; toss lightly to mix. Use to stuff a 12-pound turkey or bake covered, in a 2-quart casserole at 325º until heated through, about one hour.

Sweet Potato Souffle
-3 c. mashed sweet potatoes
-1 c. sugar (or one cup honey so your teeth don't fall out)
-2 tsp. salt
-2 eggs
-1 tsp. vanilla
-1/3 stick butter, melted
-1/2 c. milk
Mix all ingredients and pour into greased baking dish. Cover with topping.
TOPPING:
-1 c. brown sugar
-1/3 c. flour -1 c. chopped nuts -1/3 stick butter, melted
Mix thoroughly and sprinkle over top. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

Twice Baked Potatoes
I had a recipe but didn't follow it...cut your potatoes in half, bake them till they're soft enough to scoop out the insides then mash those insides up with everything fattening and delicious-milk, chedder, butter, sour cream, salt, pepper, green onions. Put the filling back in the skins and baked 'em till they're brown on top.

Derby Pie
Again didn't follow a particular recipe...made a crust from butter and flour soaked my pecans in bourbon, mixed them in a butter/sugar/egg/flour/vanilla mix, laid the bottom with chocolate chips, pecans on top, baked till goldeny on the edge. I should write a freaking cook book.

So Many Beautiful Men, So Little Time...

So this has nothing to do with food, farming or even my life actually but every single media outlet I enjoy (and they are not all websites built around fart jokes, I swear) is going nuts over Twilight the existence of which I was not aware of until about a month ago. Whoa out of touch with nerdy fantasy porn, what?? I have to say it's piqued my curiosity. I'm a little jealous that I'm no longer a tweenager with a pretty boy to swoon over, Mr. Pattinson...then I remember I've already experienced the as good as it gets vampire fantasy.

I want to share with everyone, because we all deserve to see it once more before time completely ravishes the memory, the beauty and awesomeness of James Marsters as Punk era Spike:


That is what I am talking about. Again:


Nice. And how bout that Hugh Laurie, huh?


Ah, men on TV. Without them what would emotionally stunted women do?

Forking and Groveling OR Don't Fear the Potato

Oh, Potatoes! Potatoes! Say it loud and there's music playing, say it soft and it's almost like praying...

Dear Reader, I would like to relate a short anecdote about a dish I made. In this dish were the following ingredients: quinoa, kale, tomatoes, onions, some olive oil, and little bitty pieces of potatoes. It sounds simple but it is out of control delicious. I made a bunch, ate some, put the rest in a bowl for the next morning.

Next Morning: Open the fridge. My beautiful bowl of food which I so lovingly prepared has been decimated. Kale: Gone. Onion: Gone. Tomato: Gone. Little Quinoa Sprouts: Gone. All that linger are the potato bits, clustered together at the bottom, shell shocked by the ravaging of their cohorts. Perhaps tormented by the guilt of survival.

Of course I experienced the usual rage that comes with finding your roommate has eaten sustenance you set aside for yourself. Of course! But the insult to the injury was leaving the potatoes behind, like they were something tainted and wrong. So agonizingly wasteful. Since that day I have been determined to spread this life changing message: DON'T FEAR THE POTATO!!!

Potatoes do not make you fat. Bread does not make you fat. Pasta does not make you fat. A constant buffet of these things with no vegetables, lots of sugar, and mostly fried WILL make you fat. But as a part of a balanced diet-a small component of a dish with many healthy ingredients like kale, quinoa, onions, tomatoes for instance-they can be quite good for you. Potatoes thicken soups. Absorb flavor. Chock full of vitamins. Easy to store. What I'm trying to say is stop ruining my cooking.

Since I have friends and apparently roommates who have no interest in potatoes it's hard to find a place to talk about my love. Which is why blogs are great. I can just get it out there! An alternative to blogging is farming and Frosty Morning Farms grows lots and lots of potatoes. When I was first there the potato plants were all leafy and tantalizing. I kept insinuating we should just rip them right out of the ground now and I'd make some soup. But no, there were still flowers on there, still secret rooty things happening underground and the only things I could do in the potato patch was weed or squash potato bugs. WITH MY HAND. THEIR INSIDES ARE ORANGE.

After days of coming back covered in dirt and bug juice with nothing to show for it I had begun to resent those plants a bit. When I revisited the farm in September I was hoping to even the score, pull them up and mash them good. What I saw was shocking. Those proud plants had fallen, limp and brown to the ground. Around them the weeds had taken over (yay, more weeding!) and it was hard to tell where the rows had been.

If, like me, you've never harvested potatoes you probably have visions of pulling up a plant with lots of nodules just hanging off it waiting to be plucked. Or you have no idea where potatoes come from and don't really care but I'm about to tell you anyway, so suck it. Basically the potatoes are taken out through a process Allison called Forking and Groveling. If you're lucky enough to have two people to share the work, one will use a pitchfork to gently loosen the earth while the other (kneeling on the ground) runs their hands through the soil trying to differentiate the potatoes from lumps of earth or rocks. You have to be careful not to make two many cracks in the soil ahead of where you're groveling because the best place to store the taters till you need them is in the earth unless you're prepared to lug bushels to the root cellar. And cracks let in sunlight. Which ruins them! Don't eat a green potato, it has been exposed to the sun and is not good for you. If it has little eyes though, it's fine.

SO that's the boring story. I asked Allison if the word groveling came from the way potatoes are picked, grovel=down in the dirt at someone's feet, but when we did a bit of a search there was no indication of where the expression came from. We all grovel sometimes without knowing why, I guess...

My back broken from alternately forking and groveling we carried loads of fingerlings and yellow potatoes back to the farmhouse to be washed and sorted by size. There were also a few Magic Molly's, an 'experimental' (F.M.F. sometimes runs tests on new plants to see how they do organically and what kind of tastiness they produce) potato that comes in a deep beautiful purple. I snuck some in a bag and plan to plant them this spring and fork and grovel on my own. That night I made an amazing potato, carrot and celery soup with goat yogurt to make it creamy and full of all the dried spices Allison grows around the house. Yay!

Usually I try to tie in my mundanities with some pretentious conclusion I've drawn about life into an annoying package. This, however, is a simple message coming from a heartfelt place. Don't fear the potato. It's more afraid of you than you are of it...that's why it's hiding underground.



P.S. Fun fact. In upstate New York they have a dish called simply Salt Potatoes. The area used to have many salt mines and the workers would throw their potatoes into the vats of boiling salt then fish 'em out and chow down. Nowadays the tiny round taters featured above sell at a higher price to make this 'delicacy'. Funny how time makes all things for the rich. Except being poor.

Is There No Love More Sincere Than the Love of Food?

On Saturday, the Lord's favorite party day, I went over to the Red Hook Harvest Festival with my pal Ray who took a series of crappy phone photos of me posing with hot cider and desperately clutching a copy of Edible Brooklyn. I now regret not bringing a real camera but will try my best to illustrate all my important points through these images.


First of all, wow. I've never been to see the Red Hook farm though I've touted their organizers, Added Value. Added Value works in Red Hook on community programs that clean up parks, teach leadership, good nutrition, provide access to healthy affordable food and build urban farms, like the one in front of Ikea. That's right, there's an Ikea next door if you weren't sold before. I went without even knowing about the Ikea so just imagine my delight. In fact I had so little knowledge about where I was going or why that Ray and I wandered around for almost forty minutes before by the grace of an unseen force (Ikea?) we stumbled across the festival grounds.

Now I don't know what I was expecting but those expectations must have been low because I was pretty blown away by what from most perspectives was a less than breathtaking affair (Ray's perspective). First of all, they had the South Bronx bee man there, Roger Repohl giving a demo on the ways of the bees and violently disputing the lies promoted by Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie to the little children all around. Having seen a few demos of honey harvesting and bee hypnotizing I opted out but came back later for a tasting. Can I just say Wow! And Whoa! Roger harvests a few times a year, through summer to late fall, and every batch has a different color and flavor. Most larger distributors just mix all their honey in one big pot so they can get a consistent product. No generic sweetness here, each bottle contained a separate and unique bouquet of aroma and sensation. It's times like these that I wish I had a more colorful food vocabulary... particularly considering my supposed investment in food. Hmm. Let us just say they were fruity and burst across the palate with an amber fist of nostril flaring-eh, forget it. Let us just say instead that I spent my last six dollars on a bottle, six dollars that may break the bank for rent this month. THAT'S how good it is.


I wasn't going to go on and on about honey again but in that issue of Edible Brooklyn I'm clutching there happens to be an article about urban beekeeping and how New York is one of the few cities that outlaws it. It's pretty interesting and I think once I have enough start up capital (never) I may flaunt the law and my landlord and start up a hive of my own. Their fall issue isn't up yet or I'd link to it, but it is really interesting and can be picked up around town or you can check in later this month here.

Also Roger has a blog that seems to be largely about politics, oddly, and I haven't really reviewed his opinions...but he has a few funny articles about bees too.

There were a lot of vendors around but since I had a budget of eight dollars and spent six on honey my choices were limited. A dollar for cider and a dollar for a raffle ticket-fingers crossed I'll win that vintage bike! Amongst the people selling edible fall goodies were various organizations handing out information and free swag. Big ups to Heifer International for bringing loads of colorful lapel buttons featuring such classic slogans as 'Go Goat' and 'Bee Sweet'. Raymond took so many I was embarrassed to continue the button-glutton, but did manage to snag those two. Because I can get behind Goats and Bees, for realz. We weren't alone in our attraction to shiny colorful objects- a local step dancing troupe outfitted in fringed tie dye (hurray for classics again) had clearly stopped by the table before their performance. Maybe they'll look up what Heifer Int'l is when they get home...


There were also representatives from Compostville, or The New York City Compost Project. I don't want to belittle what they do or say that their table was anything but covered in pamphlets and helpful info on how to compost, but the guy I talked too seemed completely baffled by all my questions regarding my compost bin, which right now is just a garbage can full of rotten food.

"But, that's what compost is...", He said, smiling uncertainly.

"Yes, but it's almost full!! What do I do?"

Pointing at pictures from the pamphlets of what my bin looks like and reiterating that it's almost full had no effect. Luckily there's a compost helpline (Seriously): 718-817-8543. I haven't called it but may this weekend as my roommate and I have vowed to do something about the compost situation. Stay tuned for further reporting...Anyhow he loaded me down with booklets and magnets and sent me away to bother someone else.

The farm itself, which I realize still hasn't been described aside from being blessed by Ikea as a neighbor, sits on a piece of land that looks like it was once a park or playground surrounded by chain linked fence and rowed all across with hay and beds and its own tall compost pile. They have a greenhouse and a few chickens, plus a demo hut which in addition to the Bee Man also featured a canning/jarring how to. There was a even a pumpkin patch in the back filled with parents and shrieking children and some sadly crushed pumpkins. Better than sadly crushed children. Am I right?

The pumpkin patch encapsulated the urban farm for me. It was kind of crazy in there, full of diverse families crushing pumpkins...actually I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe I mean to say that we think of farming and nature as being exclusively for rural parts of the country, and it's true that when you take farming to an urban setting it's not as picturesque as we like. But it is lively and inclusive and brings people together.


This image is beautiful. I may get a carrot-pierced heart tattooed on my chest.

After all that fresh air and love of nature we walked to Fairway and ate all the samples. I call it Urban Foraging. Here's another link to Added Value. They're great. Did I mention they have a farm next to Ikea? (I really couldn't care less about Ikea)

Red Barn, Blue Roof

So something I've been doing since getting back from the farms is eating red meat. I never really did before except out of curiosity and for a while after giving up factory farmed chicken I was pretty much a vegetarian, being too lazy to cook meat for myself. Much better to subsist on pasta and potato chips, right?

In a way I respect vegetarians (I'm stealing off Micheal Pollan right now, I'm sure he doesn't mind because we have a deep soulful connection) because they consider what they eat and what the ramifications of their food choices are on something other than themselves. There are probably vegetarians out there who do it purely for health/beauty reasons but mostly they're sad about the wittle animals (Gross Generalization Alert!) I'm constantly on the fence about this because I wuv animals myself, but there are lots of places in the world where raising meat for food makes a lot more sense than any other kind of farm production.

Okay, but I live in America, land of plenty where I can have food shipped to me all year round that no animals were murdered to produce. Well, what is all the shipping and out of season vegetable/fruit eating doing to the planet at large? Who's exporting their own produce to me? What's the cost of the fuel to our environment? What went into this veggie/fruit production in pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers? If I'm eating processed grains what kind of energy did that take and what about all those poor little mice in the threshers? And the birds?? And the manatees! God, think of the manatees!!!!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my priority is ultimately with people (I've noticed lately I use the word ultimately a lot). The only reason I give two toots about the planet is because without a planet there are no people. The food choices you make today influence the environment of the future and eating meat under the right circumstances can be the better environmental choice.

Aside from that, grass fed beef if quite tasty. It begins to quench my thirst for blood....blood...

This summer after reading about how horrible corn fed beef was for the environment and how depressingly cruel people are to cattle just to get those McD hamburgers ground out I was pretty curious about these other cows living so dreamily off GRASS/CRAZINESS. So I visited a grass fed beef farm. I've told several people this story and each time it was met with a resounding Meh. Why is it so exciting to me that I went to a place where a bunch of cows are standing around chewing cud?


Well, since I decided not to eat meat without knowing where it came from, actually seeing a place where the meat is being raised is kind of a big deal-I could see how they were living and decide if I was okay with it or not instead of just accepting that grass fed is better, the way I accept organic is better though a lot of places are organic through loop holes rather than practical application.

Also farms are cool. Obviously.

We were greeted at the barn by Veronica, a very small Korean woman with a grip like a vise. She and her husband run the place with their son, raising and selling both sheep and cattle. We drove out to the fields to see the cows. NY state has great clay-ey earth for growing hay (though that makes it challenging for other kinds of produce without a lot of mulching etc.) so Veronica grows all her own hay for the winter months. The rest of the time the cows move from one pasture to another and as their designation implies, eat grass.


We stood on the side of the road and watched them chewing. They watched us back, tearing up the grass and occasionally lowing for attention. They started to wander closer and Veronica yelled, "No, it's not time yet! You stay there!" at which they mooed. As I looked one of the black Angus lifted its head and a stream of mucus drained from its nose. Gross. I asked Veronica if they give the cows antibiotics and she laughed. They don't need it, cows get sick when they're kept in close quarters and force fed corn, which isn't easily processed by their delicately evolved stomachs. So I guess mucus is normal?

After we got bored of staring at the cows and them staring at us we went back to the farm house which was a whole other menagerie. There were half a dozen dogs, a couple sheep, like twenty goats and a gaggle of black (?) ducks wandering the premises without the benefit of a fence between them.

There were chickens somewhere too as evidenced by the somewhat comical bucket of eggs in their foyer.



Dani, my WWOOF hostess who arranged this lovely visit, bought a bunch of beef and helped Veronica brainstorm ideas for self promotion. Dani loves the business aspect of her organic farm, PR I guess you could say. Veronica has a lot of beef and a lot more coming (though grass fed cattle have longer life spans than corn fed generally, about two years before heading to the slaughterhouse as opposed to seven or eight months). Despite this she seemed pretty lackadaisacal (sp?) about the whole thing, casually eating blueberries as she talked about maybe starting a web site or putting up signs along the road. I weirdly admire the kind of impracticality that resists outside influence but I could see Dani getting worked up about how little action the beef farm was taking to sell itself. Finally we left with our beef and that night Dani cooked it up.

My god. It was a revelation.

So here's this amazing web site about how factory farming is affecting the environment, the water we drink, our health. There are a few pictures of CAFOs but it isn't one of those sites that just throws how the animals are suffering in your face. It's pretty easy to distance oneself from the wittle animals especially when they're not super cute and snot mucus all over the place. But you cant distance yourself from the fact that corn fed beef is destroying parts of the planet and by supporting grass fed beef farms you're supporting a sustainable mode of production. Which is awesome. And tasty.

Oh and I forgot she had horses. It's not a very clear picture because she said one of them likes to bite and I didn't catch which. And they were closing in.

The Mosquitos! Oh God, The Mosquitos!

This weekend I helped my pals Ella and Pete weed their new garden. After five years of living in a boxy little place with many tiny rooms and no sunlight they moved to farther afield pastures, a place equipped with a back yard.

I'd heard about it, I'd seen pictures but I still wasn't mentally prepared for the horror show. While I was fantasizing about going with Ella to pick out chickens and a pygmy goat I ignored the reality of how much work rehabilitating an overrun garden would be. I'll say right now I didn't contribute much to the process. Mostly I drank beer, swatted mosquitoes and identified the one plant they didn't want to rip out of the ground. Hibiscus. Someone who lived there long ago loved hibiscus and it's sprouted up in tall shrubby trees everywhere. What a fun kind of archeology to look back and see what meant something to someone who existed there, what made their heart sing to see blooming on a bright summer morning. Coincedentally, I found a used condom next to it's wrapper. It was a Magnum.

There are three levels of hell to this yard and it's only in the back where the ivy has completely taken over that you can really appreciate the extent of the neglect. The fence tappers off except for where its remnants are bound together by an old hospital bed frame and rusty rake head. The back is where we also found the source of the mosquitoes. Seriously, I know it's fall and that's when they like to have their last hurrah but it was like a plague. All day into the evening they swarmed and followed us around from one room to the next. Killing them and measuring the blood streak was a crowd pleaser. The breeding was going on in an abandoned dog crate filled with water and larvae and fear. Around the crate were a few toys, a bowl and a broken chain. It's only a matter of time before they find the dog.

But you know what? I'm jealous. I have my lovely little yard but I've had to build most of my garden boxes. There's no helpful ground to throw compost on, just our alarmingly full bucket. As 'we' raked over the earth iridescent worms squirmed hysterically back into the soil. There's life there, potential for growth and lots of nutrients from all the buried dog carcasses. One day, if they can maintain their current crusade, Ella and Pete are going to have someplace beautiful to grow tomatoes and herbs and a pygmy goat. Of course, Ella's mom came down with hives from something that may or may not be poison ivy out there and Pete treed himself sawing dead branches so who knows? Growing stuff is hard work. And I'm sure as hell not gonna help.

Just kidding. That whole 'tend your own garden' thing is really not such great advice. We should all tend each other's gardens. If we all do a little the world will be a bit greener, more beautiful and soon everyone will know a hibiscus just by looking at it. And poor unsuspecting people who were wearing work gloves praise Christ wont be finding deteriorating condoms under very leaf. Or if they do, they'll know who left them and that person will be held accountable by God!!

Also I need some weeding assistance myself. They owe me for cleaning out all those beer bottles.

Cheating

I love to bake. Baking is closer to science then most forms of cooking. Things like baking soda and baking powder can be confused so easily or added too much or not enough and KABLOOIE! Like the particle accelerator. Or just really bad tasting cookies. Anyway there's a weight of responsibility when you're baking that isn't there in the average stir fry or soup. Like Spiderman but with cake.

When I was at Frosty Morning Farms Alison and Karl grew pretty much everything they ate. A lot of people on Commonplace did and it made them think in a kind of luxurious fashion-they can talk about how great it is to eat and live sustainably and how wrong it is to buy food shipped from far away or grown with pesticides etc. On a farm you can pick your food. You can jar it, turn it into jam, store it for winter. What ever's leftover, if something spoils, you can feed it to the pigs or chickens or just the compost heap and it will eventually feed you too. The circle of life! It's a lot harder to find the time and space and animals for all that in the city, stacked up to the sky like we are.

So after being judged as a wasteful city dweller who throws out her egg shells it was kind of a relief to see that the Frosts cheat. They sneak in all sorts of stuff even ::gasp:: bananas. That shit is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. How do they do it? Well, I'd like to point fingers here but even as cheaters they're kind of doing a service-they get buckets of compost from the Syracuse food coop that would just go into a garbage/land fill otherwise. During the summer the buckets often get pretty pungent and melt into something gloppy and good for livestock. Occasionally you get a bucket of out of season tomatoes, a bunch of fresh spinach for soup, avocados for the guac or some overripe bananas. As the weather cools what's inside the buckets stays edible for humans longer and they have some true delights for those cold winter nights. Avocados and bananas don't grow round these here parts and I can't imagine the Frosts buying them under any circumstances...but for free, hey, why not?

Anyway after days of fennel, kohlrabi and other not sugar filled veggies I was about to bite someone's throat out. If there was carbs inside. A load of stuff arrived and I begged Alison to let me bake something with the browning fruits. First we had to empty the oven which works as a kind of rudimentary dryer for her, the pilot light slowly sucking the moisture from a dozen baskets filled with herbs. She uses the herbs to make teas and tinctures or just for cooking. They all had to be sorted and crunched through to remove stems and air them out. When the oven was finally empty I looked up a recipe for banana bread in the Moosewood Cookbook. If you're a vegetarian this book is where it's at. The vegetarian recipes that is.

Since I was using all these foreign ingredients, the bananas and sugar and wheat and baking powder (or was is baking soda?), Alison suggested I go collect berries from around the farm. Late July is an amazing time for berries. Things were blowing up all over the place! Blueberries, black currants, mulberries, gooseberries. They all went in the pot. It's kind of sad how little berry experience I had, what I didn't even know I was missing. The next time you have the chance try a new berry out.

There were also a few soft pears courtesy of the compost buckets and we threw them in too. Plus almonds. I'll just say, GOD IT WAS GOOD! I WISH I WAS EATING IT RIGHT NOW!

All this made me think about the ways the Frosts cheat being good organic farmers who care about the earth, like the buckets and...well, they're pretty good. Caring about the earth is tiring because a lot of fun stuff involves shrugging off thoughts of consequences or responsibility and you barely ever eat cake. But I shrug all the time. So then I started thinking about the ways I could cheat being someone who throws stuff out when it spoils or who buys stuff from another hotter hemisphere.

We compost. Today I made soup from some leftover lima beans. I buy stuff grown locally. Not sure what to do with my big can of compost yet. Any other ideas?

In the mean time I'm going to bake what ever's around into cake. Ingenuity is really what's behind eating good food because you use what's available. It makes you a better cook too if my banana bread is any indication. Of course, if I keep up my own form of 'cheating' I wont be eating bananas for awhile.

Here's a cool site about worm composting which is pretty manageable even in a small apartment, I've seen them, they don't smell and you'll be making great fertilizer:

http://www.cityfarmer.org/wormcomp61.html

Coincidentally, I'm listening to Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. It's available free on Hulu.com and it's great. Hurray for Neil Patrick Harris and Joss Whedon, they're like every delicious berry baked into a tart. A saucy tart.

Back On the Dark Horse

Hey, It's been awhile since I hollered at y'all. I know it seems like the Sophomore Blogger Slump (the second month is Sophomore) but actually it was just a general mental slump. My life has a hilly terrain and, much like upstate New York, there are lots of ups and downs. So I went to the actual upstate New York again to spend another week on the farm and rejuvenate myself. It's worked pretty well overall. I learned lots of new interesting things that I plan to drone on and on about in the coming weeks (sneak peak-Garlic Braiding! Yeah!). So don't abandon my ramblings, tell your friends and tune in tomorrow. Same Bat Time, Same Bat Station.

A lot of people start eating organic food for selfish reasons. I've eaten organic fruits and vegetables pretty much my whole life and it wasn't because I spared a lot of thought about the benefits for the planet. Really it was my mom who sent me down the organics road and she wasn't thinking about Mother Earth either. I'd guess the logic for her was that organic food was healthier for our bodies and would make us more attractive with nicer skin. My mother would probably drink powdered kitten bones stirred into puppy tears if someone told her it would reverse sun damage. She's a lovely woman though.

What the word organic means has changed a lot over the years and if you think about food for a while you realize how many words are used to manipulate our food choices, even words like organic that are supposed to signify something. Natural, healthy, gourmet, traditional, farm fresh. It's someone's job, lots of someones, to place those words in a pleasing fashion across all kinds of packaging so you and I will happily shell out a little extra money for them. And I have to admit they get me all the time. It's because I'm a snob and have been since my mom started feeding me solid foods, bits of fruit that she hoped would turn me into some sort of eternally youthful organic super being who could keep away cancer with a flex of the muscle. I got used to the taste and the smell and the look of it all.

Of course it's the look of things that's most easily manipulated by human hands, we quite excel at it. Packaging I associate with healthy tasty things are covering all sorts of crap and unless I'm very careful I don't always discern the difference between the two until after I leave the store. One answer of course is to eat whole foods, nothing processed or as little processing as possible. Processed items have lots of ingredients and the more ingredients something has the less you can know about what you're eating, the more places these ingredients came from, the more fuel that went into the machines to transport and make them. But, meh, I like cheese puffs. Much to my detriment.

Another solution is don't be taken in. Something has begun to change for me over the last year and I can't say why it's happening or if it'll last. I don't necessarily eat organic for me anymore. Or even eat organic at all if there's a minimally treated option available grown within a few hundred miles instead of Argentina. I don't buy things just because they have nice wrappings (well, there was a recent incident with some cheese wrapped in a leaf but a lesson was learned). Now I'm trying to eat organic and locally for the environment and makes the world a healthier place not just my body. I haven't really tried to do this through a winter yet, so I think a lot of canning is in my near future. We'll see.

Anyway I was in a farmer's market and thinking about all this and how smug I am when I noticed a table covered in little plastic containers. There were pretty labels glued to them and inside were a few stems of Johnny-Jump-Ups. These flowers are edible and very pleasing to the eye and I stopped to look at them and admire how clever this farmer was selling something cheaply produced as Gourmet. They have little nutritional value, aren't filling or even that flavorful but they look great! Cleverness appreciated, I then thought, What A Scam.

Plastic containers? Four dollars? Gourmet flowers? What? Nuts!

There will always be something exhilirating about buying a little special something for yourself, there will always be a need for organic farmers to make money through 'specialty' items. But this particular item is a call to arms (exaggerration). A lot of people could reduce their food costs, get in touch with the cycle of planting and harvest, find a use for compost in their own homes just by growing something on their window sill or fire escape or yard if they're lucky enough to have one. Why not start with flowers? They're easy to grow, pretty, don't require a lot of space and you can put them in drinks, on cakes, make them into candies, put them on spreadable cheese, in salads, and teas. Wont really cut your food costs but maybe adding a decorative element to a meal that was produced by their own hand would inspire people to grow something more challenging the following season and the one after that. First the thing that pleases the eye, then the thing that pleases the body and then the thing that pleases the world. The order should be reversed-World, Body, Eye- but you have to start somewhere. And no plastic containers required!

This is a great list of edible flowers and recipes for them:

http://whatscookingamerica.net/EdibleFlowers/EdibleFlowersMain.htm

The Old Ennui

The last couple weeks I've been moping around and immersing myself in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon and generally falling off the Living Right Wagon. Until pretty recently I didn't have a very firm idea of what living right means exactly. More like a vague outline- no students loitering after school, no horrible murders with hearts being removed. And also no smoking. Buffy Huzzah! But as a day to day guide those aren't issues I really wrastle with. Smoking, bleh.

So if I had to make a new living right code it would look something like this-exercise, eat healthy food that is good for the environment that you can share with family and friends, slay demons. Easy! Well, I haven't been managing any of my to-do list and am in a shame spiral. This happens to me pretty much every year in late summer. It's probably common for most peeps to look back on the long languorous days of possibility that make up June July and August and think, "WTF was I doing??". It's odd because many of us look forward to the season as being a time to sit on our lazy asses, watch stupid movies and fall asleep on the beach. I've done those things in spades this year and now that the shortening of days is visible I feel like I've accomplished nothing! Though I've accomplished everything summer's meant for! A Paradox.

When I'm feeling depressed all my actions compound and beget. So I haven't written a blog post in awhile? Might as well not bother then! Haven't gone for a run in a week? Might as well not for another month. Or ever (fuck running). When you feel like you haven't done anything right in a long time the effort to change becomes monumental. I think this is why we don't do things we know we should, because it seems like all the times we were doing the wrong thing can never be balanced out...or we'll get on the Living Right Wagon just to get knocked into the dust further down the road. That's pretty much why I've never flossed. Though I really should. Oh god, I'm going to hell! Or some alternate dimension composed entirely of shrimp (Buffy Huzzah!)!

Which brings me to my low point today. I went to Chipotle.

I wont say going to Chipotle is the low point for my entire life because that would certainly be an exaggeration. But definitely for today. Fast food restaurants have become bad to think for me, by which I mean they're now mentally in the category of the inedible. I was a Chipotle believer for quite awhile, particularly working in Midtown where choices were slim and disturbingly gritty. A burrito from Chipotle seemed like a pretty clean tasty alternative. I knew they were owned by McDonald's and had a kind of 'boo corporate' thought when I found out, but rice and beans are my fav.

Then I read Fast Food Nation and threw up in my mouth. I couldn't walk into Chipotle and not see the evil wrapped in every burrito. It didn't help that the last one I ate (before today) was draped by an employee's dirty dish cloth before my very horrified eyes. Anyway, it's been awhile since I've been inside a fast food restaurant except to use the bathroom and I was surprised by the list of numbers paralleling the prices on the menu hanging above the counter. What could they be trying to tell me? Okay, so they were labeled 'calories' but a salad was listed as being 118-813 calories. Huh? That's quite a range there. So is that the leaves and then the cheese with sour cream? Mm. Sour cream. All the items were like that, with a calorie low several hundred integers from its high.

I'd heard this whole calorie listing thing was going to become mandatory but hadn't witnessed it though now dimly recall the gals at the office screeching about having consumed 1800 calorie lunches all year. Personally, I don't count calories. I know what I'm eating and what will be likely to make me fat and what it feels like to be stuffed to the gills. When I make bad choices and eat a family sized bag of potato chips for dinner instead of a balanced meal I don't look at the bag and flip out because I've eaten my caloric intake for the week in one sitting. I flip out because I'm an idiot...hmm there goes the Living Right Wagon again!

I'm kind of on the fence about this whole calorie listing thing. Yes, nutritional information should be available, but is counting calories the same thing as knowing about good nutrition ? Is it good to ask corporations to take responsibility for their customers health or are we passing the buck and ignoring the question of health education in schools? Are these listings so vague that their informational value is just a kind of scarecrow to the wary i.e. 'look out you may possibly be eating 813 calories or maybe just 118, no knowing'? And if you do risk, then it's your own fault you obese diabetes-courting fuck up!?

Anyway, I ate one. A burrito bowl this time since the calorie content ranges about a 200 less than the burrito. But I got chips so that probably added the overall. Jesus. I might as well just eat a bag of potato chips and go die under a rock. I'm feeling terrible remorse and have sworn off the fast food again. Because of the evil thing not the calorie thing. It really is all about choices, the choice to eat something you cooked for yourself from healthy whole ingredients, the choice to change out of your footie pajamas and go out to enjoy a warm summer day, the choice to floss. Tomorrow I'm going to make a better choice and if the day after that I fall back on old habits it's okay. I can catch the Living As Best As I Can Carriage.

This is a website from that helpful NY gov trying to tell us how to be, which I found reading about this whole law thing and it tickled me. Very sensible advice overall though they recommend reducing television viewing hours. You know what I say to that?

Buffy Huzzah!

I Will Feed You Nothing But Yogurt and Honey

My first day on Frosty Morning Farms Karl drove me from Cortlandt to Commonplace. Jason and Alison were at the Farmer's Market in Cazenovia. My bus was an hour late and I was starving and experiencing the usual anxiety I get whenever I'm physically discomfited. We stood silently in the kitchen I'd get to know pretty well over the next ten days until Karl politely asked me if I'd like some yogurt.

I mentioned before that he makes his own yogurt from their goat's milk. How you make yogurt-heat a bunch of milk, add a container of yogurt. More yogurt ensues. Sorry, didn't write down the recipe. Really I'm not a huge yogurt fan but I'd taken a personal (and thus easily broken) vow to embrace whatever foodstuffs were thrown my way during this little trip, since that seemed like the spirit of eating locally and off your own labor. So I said yes, a bowl of yogurt would be dee-lightful.

From one of the coolers he plucked a mason jar full of white liquid. It didn't have the consistency of milk, exactly. Cream was gathering on top and it dripped slightly slower than water into a bowl the size of my head that he'd set out for me. "That's plenty!" I shrieked but it was already full up to the brim. I was holding a spoon and looking at the glop despondently when he pushed a second mason jar my way-this one was opaque gold and the top came stickily away. Honey, raised right there on the farm, unfiltered and the perfect compliment in a heaping spoonful to Karl's yogurt. I'm not exaggerating when I say these two things together were in the top five best flavor combinations I've ever had in my whole life. I slurped that mother up.

While the mysteries of yogurt propagation are less than intriguing to me, bee keeping is like Jedi Knight mysterious...by which I mean COOL. Honey itself is an amazing entity, something edible that never goes bad or sour or molds or does anything but taste like heaven sauce. Something my main squeeze Michael Pollan writes (about apples, not honey, in The Botany of Desire) is that in this day and age with sugar cheaply abounding we take for granted the transcendent power of sweetness. How precious a bee hive would be in a world without sugar. Can you picture the anticipatory mouth watering that happens in your mouth when you long for something sweet? How when it touches your tongue it's so overwhelming it's almost like pain?

A few weeks later at Cross Island Farms I got to peak into actual beehives and wear the hat and everything. David Belding keeps three beehives, two that he harvests from and one that is just building up its brood now. They're Buckfast, a popular variety that is a hybrid from England known for its gentleness...except in the Americas where they're known for their swarming and possible hybridization with the African killer bees blah blah. David prefers the Italian honey bees which are supposed to be quite sweet but they're very vulnerable to harsh winters and there are quite long harsh winters up by the St. Lawrence river. His last Italian hive died out awhile ago. He does still have an Italian Mentor, a man named John who came by the house one day to check on David's hives while David was out. I watched him open up the Buckfast hive and cut out combs the bees had been building in a gap between frames. He had a wild turkey feather he used to brush the bees out of his way and told me in a heavy Italian accent that David's bees were nasty and made no honey unlike HIS bees which were totally awesome super great. Later I found a wild turkey feather of my own by the house and have kept it to start off my bee keeping kit.



A couple days later David decided to check on the hives himself at John's urging. He and another bee-keeping friend, also confusingly named David, donned their suits. After watching John perform the same tasks with nothing more than a hair net and turkey feather they looked a bit like overdressed aliens wandering down the road in the blazing heat.

David Two was a very mild-mannered man who proudly showed me his swollen thumb, stung just a few days before. One of his hives had flown suddenly off which is not an uncommon occurrence. He'd found them in a tree near his house about fifteen feet off the ground and was considering how to reclaim them without being swarmed and stung at the top of a ladder. The interesting thing about bees (one of the many interesting things) is that even the most domesticated varieties might pick up and leave you someday or a wild variety might fall under the spell of man's hand, lured by sugar water and protection from mites or simply the hazy dream of a smoking bellow.

Perhaps you've heard about the sudden death of honeybees we've been having the last few years, huge populations dying out dramatically and unexpectedly. Most of the deaths are taking place in the large commercial migratory beekeeping sector. That's exactly what it sounds like-companies that tie up their bee hives, shove them on the back of a truck and cart them from farm to farm. It's mainly for pollination and without that pollination vegetable and fruit growth is detrimentally affected. David One and Two agree that the deaths aren't necessarily environmental factors such as pollution, the more likely cause is just plain old stress. Bees aren't meant for the highway (also the idea of a giant angry bee filled truck driving beside you sounds kind of like a bad idea on steroids). They're yet another example of something in nature that can be hugely beneficial to its caretakers when managed on a small scale, on site, but when taken to a commercial size will collapse in on itself.

Bees have some advantage. Unlike livestock shoved in CAFOs or genetically modified corn they can decide when they've had enough, close up their combs and set off for the wild wild woods, leaving us behind. With our sour yogurt.

Feel It In Your Heart

Friday night I dozed in a garden and got bitten by bugs. The garden was in Queens at P.S. 1 in their gravel filled courtyard that's been transformed into an urban farm of sorts, a giant structure of cardboard tubes rising above our heads growing a variety of produce suited to the intense sunlight beaming down on industrial L.I.C. It's kind of embarrassing but I had no idea that this thing was here. Or there, actually. The only reason I was at P.S. 1 was to hear a lecture by Michael Pollan and though completely appropriate it was a surprise to discover the rows of fresh greens, tomatoes and zucchini plants (shudder). The structure is supposedly built with environmental consideration and all the building materials are completely recyclable- which is more than you can say about most art right there. Here's the website page describing the project in flowery language:

http://www.ps1.org/exhibitions/view/201/

One thing this page didn't answer for me was how do they pick the stuff at the top? Also how do the chickens fit in? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they do. What is life without animals crammed into every nook and crevice? An empty shell. If anyone has answers to my first two questions please pass them along.

Disorder and lackadaisy were pretty much the mode of the event and it wasn't long before me and my friend Zach were shotgunning free wine at the 'private' reception. Michael Pollan sat behind a table in the corner signing books and chatting up his guests. I'd seen him arrive in the courtyard and giggled like a school girl. If you don't know who M.P. is let me introduce you to a truly engaging writer. He's the author of Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and most recently In Defense of Food. All of these books are about food issues in America and to some degree across the world and they're all pretty enjoyable to read. Some of Pollan's 'big ideas' that run through out his books, in a very general list, are how plants have in many ways domesticated us by appealing to our desires the same way a flower manipulates a bird or bee with its color and scent, how corn has crept into our food supply across the board and now our cars as well, how we view nature as something that must be slowly depleted for us to survive and the alternative systems of farming that give back to the land in ways that make it richer, and how nuttycakes people are about what they put into their mouth without the strength of regional diets to give us some direction (we can get anything anytime! even when it's not in season or from this hemisphere! what do I cram in my mouth?!).

What to cram in my mouth is a pretty consuming question for me so naturally I'm one of Michael Pollan's many groupies. Rosy cheeked from wine and sunshine we hustled up to the lecture hall, a big circular room with a spinning mirror on the ceiling. Zach and I took seats on the already crowded floor since chairs had long ago been staked out. When the crowd was ambling around the courtyard it had seemed like a sparse turnout but now we were crammed thigh to thigh in a way very reminiscent of a fire hazard. The mirror reflected the crush down on us and the room heated up to pressure cooker levels. In the mirror I could see a few other friends seated in the front row. I waved.

Finally the man himself appeared! I have to say at first I was nervous. M.P. built up his speech slowly, recounting his first stoner musings out in his garden watching bees hover around his apple blossoms which went a little something like this (paraphrasing): Hey, bees think they're important but really the flowers are making the bees work for them...whoa, what if the potatoes I'm planting are making ME work for THEM by being so tasty? Fuuuuck...We are all both Subjects and Objects.

Which is all basically the basis for Botany of Desire and the overheated crowd was obviously having this collective thought, "We know, already! Inspire us with something new, ok? It's hot as fuck in here." So he did.

"It's one thing to know something. It's another thing to feel it in your heart," said Michael, splaying his hand across his chest. Essentially he was saying that many of us know what industrial farming is doing to us both ecologically and as a society but until you feel how important it is you can't make a change in your own life or the world. That's where art and writing come in, the tools to bring the meaning of a situation from people's heads to their hearts. Which is why he was at P.S. 1. It's called SYNERGY.

I say that without sarcasm. I say that with very little sarcasm. Michael Pollan's books, particularly The Omnivore's Dilemma, were truly the catalyst for feeling all this organic farming shizzy in my heart. Perhaps it had been building from a thousand different experiences throughout my life, from eating organic fruit and vegetables growing up to working in a neighborhood garden all through junior high and high school, but without his writing I might not have reached a place where I wanted to make meaningful choices about what I eat and also how I live. One aspect of his work you can't help but notice is the intensity of his desire to know. There are so many things we let pass by without challenging their origin, meaning and affect on us because it's such a burden to find out and then carry the weight of that knowledge around. Michael Pollan wants to know everything and he wants to share it. That kind of curiosity is incredibly moving.

Anyway, after the lecture we went out to dinner with a couple other attendees at a restaurant in Fort Greene called iCi that buys fresh local food and cooks it verrrry deliciously. They buy some of their produce from Added Value, a program that grows produce in Red Hook with city kids as a way of connecting them to healthier living and eating choices. It was a beautiful evening, cool and breezy out in iCi's garden/yard where I was also bitten by bugs. We ate from each other's plates, appreciating the flavor and the company.

Here's a link to Added Value, they're pretty cool:

http://www.added-value.org/announce/