Its not just about the food

So I am a little behind on my blogs.  I made Jerusalem Artichoke bisque from local sources, but didn’t document it well, so maybe I’ll get that another time.  However, today I want to write about something different.  I want to take a moment to think about local food as part of becoming rooted in a new society and culture.  On the surface, this seems like a pleasant metaphor, but I think there might be more to consider.

When I was at the market getting my Jerusalem Artichokes, greens, salad turnips and more for our dinners, I stopped at an information table for a group, Transplanting Traditions Community Farm.  You can find out more at ocpyc.wordpress.com.  They also have a facebook page and are on twitter @FarmTraditions.  I was struck that they are taking local food ideas on a global scale.  The organizaiton is a CSA farm run by Karen refugees living in Orange County.  The farm is run by refugees who were farmers in Burma, but now live here as refugees.

I was struck first that this approach and movement allowed people whose lives were dramatically and traumatically uprooted to maintain some connection to their identity as farmers while trying to develop a transnational identity in a new land.  I’ve never thought of food and food production as a means to bridging cultural migrations in this way, but I liked the idea.  I like that the Karen people were able to hold on to something, even something modest, while also providing for themselves, and also maybe helping us know a little more about their culture.

This pushed me to consider my assumptions about the local food agenda I am pursuing. I wondered if this agenda was overlooking some important unifying power that food and food production has in an increasingly tense, hostile, and at times scary world.  Transplanting Traditions Community Farm offers a peaceful approach to intercultural understanding and border crossing between cultural groups.  Thus I am thinking that local foods might offer hybridized cultures and discourse communities that can benefit the common good in more than environmental ways. 

I think this is just one more reason that we should all go to our local farmers’ market.  You never know what you might see, experience, or learn by being there.

Everything but the quinoa

Tonight was another dinner that came mostly from local sources, except a crucial ingredient.  A favorite meal, Roasted Potatoes with Quinoa comes form Mark Bittman’s How to cook everything vegetarian.  It is a great cookbook and also has many great cooking tips. Tonight, I had some steamed green beans on the side; it’s a great meal.

The real question is what was in the meal? The main dish had fingerling potatoes and sweet red pepper that I bought at the farmer’s market from Bluebird Farms, a hot pepper from our yard, quinoa and cheddar cheese.  The last two ingredients are the killer in this meal.  Quinoa is typically grown at high altitudes in equatorial regions.  Ours was Earthly Choice and the package lists it as coming from either Bolivia or Peru.  So this one ingredient traveled a long way to get to my plate.  The cheddar cheese came from Whole Foods, and as I’ve posted previously it’s really hard to know the origins of cheese.    The green beans came from our friends at Brinkley Farms.

The potatoes and pepper traveled about 29 miles from the farm to Durham, while the green beans only traveled 13 miles.  But what about that quinoa?  I don’t know for sure, but it is around 4000 miles to Bolivia and about 3500 miles to Peru.  That doesn’t count packaging and transportation within the US.  So this one ingredient added a LOT of mileage to my meal.  Like I said, I don’t know about the cheese, but my guess is that it also traveled 1000s of miles.  I rate this meal fairly low on the goal of getting food local since two ingredients traveled a really long way.  I could have modified the recipe or cooked something else using locally sourced foods.

This meal meets the Unprocessed October goal which I described in another post. All the ingredients, except maybe cheese are unprocessed. So from that view it is a better deal.  I think the unprocessed goal is really manageable.  I eat many unprocessed foods.  Lunch was a peanut butter sandwich on bread I made.  I guess my point is that if you are thinking about these issues, maybe try unprocessed.

Tonight was a great meal, the beans were crisp and tasty and you can’t beat roasted potatoes and quinoa.  If you don’t care for quinoa, I do suggest roasting it.  The quinoa becomes crunchy and it brings out the nutty flavor. Sometimes, good food is all you can ask for.

Maybe this won’t work or maybe I need to think differently

This is another week when I never got the market and struggled to manage a complete meal from local sources.  I’ll tell you about one meal this week and then think about whether I’ve got the right idea in this blog.

Friday night I made Chana Masala, an Indian Chickpea curry with white rice.  This is a great fall dish and loaded with good carbohydrates and proteins that are important for an active life.  If you are curious about Indian Food, Manjula’s Kitchen has great videos and tips for making Indian foods.  The challenge with this dish is that we don’t grow chickpeas or rice and I haven’t found a local source of those ingredients.

Let me describe the main ingredients.  Like many Indian dishes, you being by toasting spices in a dry pan and then add oil, onion and garlic and cook until the onion is transparent and the fragrances are knocking you off your feet.  In this curry, you then add chopped tomatoes  and let them cook down, finally you add cooked (or cannned chickpeas).

So in this meal, tomotoes and peppers came from our yard. Nothing else was local, the rice, chickpeas, onion, and spices all came from the grocery store and were probably shipped a long distance. The bigger problem is that they are food commodities that are very difficult to trace the origins. So I don’t feel like this agenda I had is working out well. I’m not able to trace most of the sources of my food unless I go to the farmer’s market; sometimes that is too hard in my life.

But can I think about this differntly? Recently I learned about “Unprocessed October” from the blog Eating Rules. It’s a great site, so go look at it. But the big point is rather than focusing on local, try to focus on eating unprocessed foods during the month of October. The news is that this meal passes the kitchen test (see the website for explaation). Everything in the meal was unprocessed. I cooked the chickpeas from dried beans and used whole tomatoes, onion, etc. in the dish. So, that is the good news. I have an unprocessed and potentially vegan meal (I added some butter to the rice when cooking.).

I’m not giving up on more Farmer’s Market meals. But I will let unprocessed meals be a reasobnlable alternative. Some might argue that unprocessed could be as benefcial as trying to eat local. But that is a post for another day.

Eggplant – Round 2

Finding ways to eat Eggplant is important in creating variety in a vegetarian diet.  I was challenged me to create a vegetarian sandwich using Eggplant.   So, I thought, lets see if I can put both together.

Here were the ingredients:

1. Eggplant – from near Roxboro, NC
2. Tomatoes – from home garden
3. Peppers – from home garden
4. Cheese – I wish I knew where the cheese came from.  I used two cheeses.  Shredded Cheddar from Whole Foods and sliced Swiss Cheese from the grocery – Sargento which has Plymouth, Wisconsin on the package.
5. Rolls – from the grocery.  I believe they are baked on site.  I don’t know if they are made from scratch.
6. Sweet Potato – from Brinkley Farms near Creedmore, NC

Here’s what it looked like:

OK, so hits on most, but a miss on cheese.  If you didn’t know, cheese turns out to be really hard to trace.  There are a couple reasons for this.  First there are a modest number of producers who have plants around the country.  In addition, what may look like a multitude of brands in the market may not reflect as much diversity as you think.  The other reason is that many cheese producers aren’t also dairies.  So the cheese maker is buying the milk to make cheese.  They don’t always know where the milk came from.  You can but local cheese.  I bought cheese from Chapel Hill Creamery, but the flavor didn’t match what I was needing.

Making this was a commitment to the idea.  I thought the eggplant could be like what had been the meat.  The sandwich needed something and I didn’t want a faux meat, so I concocted this idea.  I sliced the eggplant, marinated it in spices that would be in sausage, and then oven dried the slices at 250F for about 2 – 2.5 hours.  At the same time, I oven-roasted some roma tomatoes.   Then I took the peppers and roasted them as well, but at 450 to get them crispy and caramelized.  All this was stacked on the rolls and baked at 375 for 8-10 minutes to melt the cheese and toast the bread.

This was a hit! So much that I tried again tonight.  The problem was I needed another eggplant, so this one came from the grocers.  That did not work.  Lesson is, Eggplant is MUCH better fresh from the farm.

Clearly, I also made sweet potato fries.  There are many recipes for this on-line.  Here’s the lesson I learned from this first time exploration.  Our first night, I didn’t make a sauce.  Just add a simple garlic aioli and this becomes a totally different dish.  I think you could even get kids to eat this.  And, Sweet Potatoes are much better to eat than regular potatoes.

Here’s my point for tonight.  First, don’t give up on something.  Second, keep looking for local options.  As I go to the farmers’ market in the coming weeks I know I will need to get even more creative to keep my food coming from local sources.  But the idea to take a spice from one item (the sausage), a treatment from another (oven drying was something I’ve done to tomatoes, but never anything else), and put that with a third ingredient to end up with something can have great results.