Tales of local food, blueberry soda, and tofu

By the time I arrived at the Boston Local Food Festival (held next to the Boston Children's Museum on October 2) it was in full swing, and frankly, quite crowded. I took this as a positive. The local, slow food movement is far from fringe now; it is front and center and taking off.
There were dozens of entrepreneurs at the festival, showcasing all manner of local, organic, and artisanal foods. Local chefs gave demonstrations, including the carving of a whole roasted pig (but I did not want to see this--I just heard it was spectacular!) We sampled cinnamon-chocolate chip ice cream, purchased fresh produce from a community garden in Roxbury and fresh mozzarella from the Narragansett Creamery (RI), and drank the best root beer in the world from Maine Root, who also make a mean and surprisingly delicious blueberry soda. Other vendors sold vegan cookies and pastry, seaweed salsa, locally-caught seafood and organic pizza.
The place smelled heavenly, and it was a glorious breezy sunny fall day, with live music and dancing babies and people looking pretty happy. Of course, food tends to make most of us pretty happy.
To my great delight, the festival also featured dozens of nonprofit organizations that work to promote everything from the banning of bottled water, to zero-waste events, to helping neighborhoods launch their own community gardens. I got a fantastic agricultural map of Massachusetts, that identifies every farm in the state and what it produces. I met an urban gardening advocate who teaches Boston residents how get a vegetable garden growing, no matter how small their outdoor spaces might be (they use paint buckets if that's what it takes!).
I met the folks at Green City Growers, who will come to your house and build your organic garden and get it growing for you, for a fee. I came away inspired and also newly armed the with information I need to propose that school garden to my PTO. That will be happening this week. I'll post the outcome as soon as I can.

Later this week, A Teachable Feast will hold its third food workshop, "Taking the Eeew Out of Tofu", taught by personal chef Lester Esser. We have a small but enthusiastic group of students who are curious about the best ways to prepare this enigmatic curd. We had an interesting thing happen while enrolling folks for this class. A person dropped out, saying her health-conscious neighbor told her that tofu "is not good for you anymore."

I was surprised by this comment, and looked it up. Sure enough, tofu has come under fire in recent years, with some people denouncing it for causing deforestation as rainforests were cleared to plant more soy farms. Others say it messes with your digestion in large quantities. But there are plenty of soy defenders who say it is still a healthy source of protein-- especially if you are a vegan and don't have other traditional options. Lester and I both feel that moderation with any food is the key to health and happiness. You wouldn't expect to eat cheesecake every day, but I bet you would still take a cheesecake-making class. You wouldn't eat a whole loaf of bread every day, but still you might be glad to take our breadmaking workshop. Moderation, people, is the sweet spot of life.

Happy eating,
Margie

Come to the Boston Local Food Fest, Oct. 2

Tomorrow, my chef pal, Lester, and I will head out to the Boston Local Food Festival in Fort Point Channel. I have never attended one before, but have high hopes of meeting people and finding resources that will help me to bring food knowledge to you .

If you have any interest at all in slow food, local food or sustainability, you may want to get yourself and your appetite over there.

You can find details here. I will post my own impressions on Sunday, and welcome your comments, if you also attend.

Happy eating,
Margie

It's a beginning

I've started the ball rolling towards one day having a garden at my child's elementary school. I'm getting lots of support, inspiration and guidance online at these wonderful sites, posted here so you can consider a garden at your local school....

The Edible Schoolyard

Kids Gardening.org

Sustainable Table

Slow Food in Schools

See what the future can be

Sustainability is our future. Kids get it. See what kids at the Boston Latin School have figured out:

BLS Youth Climate Action Network

I know I'm inspired. How about you?

Dig these links

The Boston Local Food Festival is coming up on October 2.


When is your favorite produce "in season" ? Check out this availability calendar.


Need help building your organic garden? Check out Green City Growers, a local company that does all the heavy lifting to get your garden growing. Now you have no excuses!


On October 10, 2010, (10/10/10) organizations and individuals around the world will be taking actions to raise awareness about climate change and how to stop it. See 350.org to get involved.


Do you know what's really in your food? Find out at Food Facts.com.
You can look up those hard-to-pronounce ingredients and find out what they're all about. I looked up an easy-to-pronounce one and this is what I learned:

"RED 40 ... Artificial coloring: Soda pop, candy, gelatin desserts, pastry, sausage. The most widely used food dye. While this is one of the most-tested food dyes, the key mouse tests were flawed and inconclusive. An FDA review committee acknowledged problems, but said evidence of harm was not "consistent" or "substantial." Like other dyes, Red 40 is used mainly in junk foods. Ref : Center for science in the public interest. Banned in Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria and Norway."

Food Food Everywhere

In case you haven't noticed, we seem to be experiencing a Food Renaissance here in America. Look in your local newspaper, turn on the TV, go anywhere online, and you will find ads and programs and articles about cooking schools and urban gardens and the slow-food movement. Entire TV networks are devoted to food, and other networks—like the History Channel— can't resist offering full-on food-focused programs. Boutique cooking schools touting classes for kids or moms' groups or bachelors seem to be popping up by the dozens, and I just read about a company that sends chefs across the country to give live cooking demos to large audiences in restaurants and expo centers.

Local food, slow food, real food, fresh food. Whatever you call it, food is on our collective mind. No wonder I have a food-related blog! And I am not even a "foodie"!

Still, we have good reason to bring our focus back to food. We have learned that our food isn't always treated very well by big corporations that grow, harvest, process, and distribute it. Issues with food safety, the environment, workers' rights, international trade and inspections, and costs add up to a growing distrust of the food industry as a whole.

So it follows that we are taking a whole new look at how and what we eat these days.

Food is at the center of our personal economics.
Food is about health — if you're eating right, you're hopefully going to be healthier, and that should keep your health care costs down.
Food is about the earth. If you buy locally-produced foods, you are no longer contributing to a global distribution system that requires huge outputs of energy to get those apples from, say, New Zealand, to your lunchbox in Boston. You also support agriculture in your own community, and you have the chance to learn about and contribute to a sustainable local economy.
Food is about community. Humans have always connected around food. It is celebratory, ritual, spiritual, divine. We live or die by its availability and quality. We work together for it and share in its abundance. Have you ever celebrated something, anything, without food?

I guess what I'm saying is,well, food is life.
Old idea, basic truth.
But modern living has had a way of distracting us from the basics. In America at least, we can really get a lot of food without knowing one thing about who made it, how they made it, or where they made it. We've become lazy-- we can grab the loaf of bread off the shelf instead of harvesting the wheat or at least kneading the dough. We're obese and disconnected and half-asleep and trusting our very lives to a system that's too large to take our welfare into consideration. That's a kind of trust we need to reconsider. I doubt the global food industry will collapse if I buy local or grow my own veggies. But maybe if enough of us do it, that industry will get wise that we're getting wiser, and good changes might come.

So hail the Food Renaissance. Let the local food fests flourish! Let the cooking classes multiply! Let the gardens grow!


Happy eating & thinking,
Margie

Shine on, Harvest Moon!

I've been thinking about the fall, and the harvest, and suddenly wondered about the origin of the Harvest Moon, the full moon of September in the Northern Hemisphere. I looked it up online and found this cool explanation on wisegeek.com:

"A Harvest Moon, also known as a Singing Moon or an Elk Call Moon, is the name given to the full moon right before the autumn equinox, around 22-23 September in the Northern Hemisphere, and around 21 March in the Southern Hemisphere. The first full moon right after the autumn equinox is known as a Hunter's Moon. In fact, all full moons have names. For example, the full moon in May is known as a Hare Moon, and the full moon in November is a Snow Moon.

The Harvest Moon is so named because, traditionally, it helped farmers work on their crops at night. Its spatial location in relation to the earth means the moon rises 50 minutes later each evening, except around the time of the Harvest Moon, when the moon rises only 30 minutes later. This means that moonlight shines on for longer, thus helping farmers who are still working on their crops after sundown. Other cultures considered the Harvest Moon as the last full moon before autumn started, and so it became the time mark for when all crops had to be picked up.

While the Harvest Moon seems larger than other moons, this is only because the Harvest Moon is lower in the sky, which gives the viewer the impression that it is bigger. This has originated a series of myths and traditions. In Wales, for example, people climb to the top of the Snowden mountain range to wait for the rising of the Harvest Moon. The climb is done at night, guided only by the light of the moon. Celebrations and candle festivals are carried on at the top."

If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, look for the Harvest Moon this year (weather permitting) on September 23, 2010 (check out this UK middle school's great Moon page. )

For me, Harvest Moon may as well mean FOOD Moon! When I think of fall in New England, I automatically think of apples and pumpkins, and pulling in the last bounty from gardens. I think apple pie and cider donuts and mashed potatoes and beef stew and deep-dish chicken pot pie and vegetable soup and... Well, you get my drift. Fall is about FOOD. It's about the final harvest from field and farm to fill our tables and our cupboards for the long winter ahead. The summer heat is behind us now, and we can't wait to spark up the stove and start baking until our houses explode with sweet aromas.

Around here, farmer's markets are offering the widest array of locally-grown produce right about now, until roughly the end of October. I urge everyone to take advantage of these last 6 or so weeks to get out and support your local farmers and take home this fresh local bounty while you still can.


Here are some helpful websites to help you connect with your locally-grown markets:

Massachusetts Federation of Farmers' Markets

Local Harvest

Farm Fresh (Rhode Island)

And don't forget to check this out:

Boston Local Food Festival


Enjoy the bounty!

Margie