Wednesday, November 30, 2011

What's in Season?

Just when I was starting to get discouraged -- having started this local, seasonal vegetable kick as farmers' markets and farm stands were winding down for the year -- I came across this wonderful list of in-season produce in the Washington, DC area for every month of the year.

What's in-season in December?

Apples
Beets
Brussels sprouts
Cabbage
Carrots
Cauliflower
Celery
Garlic
Kale
Kohlrabi
Leeks
Mushrooms
Onions
Parsnips
Pears
Potatoes
Pumpkins
Radishes
Turnips
Salad Greens
Sunchokes
Sweet Potatoes
Winter Squash

I can live with that!

Monday, November 28, 2011

Roasted Cauliflower

Cauliflower is one of very few vegetables that are still "in season" in Maryland.  I was able to find some local (Maryland) cauliflower in Whole Foods recently.  I'm not a big fan of cauliflower generally, but I know I need to learn to like it, because it will certainly come in my CSA box next year.

I've been having a lot of success with roasting lately, so I broke the cauliflower into florets (I had truly no idea what cauliflower looked like in its original form until I did this) and then spread it on a pan, coated in olive oil and cracked black pepper to roast at 425 degrees for about 20 minutes.

The result was nicely browned, but still surprisingly creamy cauliflower.  With a light sprinkle of salt at the table, I could learn to like it yet!

Lentil, Spinach, and Wild Rice Soup

My mom and my grandma make a wonderful, thin lentil soup.  It is one of the unique tastes of my childhood.

Their original recipe, as told to me by my grandmother, is as follows:

1/2 cup green lentils (dry)
1/2 cup ditalini pasta (dry)
1 onion, chopped
1 tablespoon of chopped garlic
"some" olive oil (about 1/4 cup)
"some" water (enough to fill the pot, probably six or seven cups)

Throw everything in a pot, bring to a boil, and then simmer for about an hour.

Serve with either a) lots of salt or b) lots of white vinegar.

Either way, enjoy by dipping bread into the broth.

I dare not attempt to "improve" on such a simple, healthy, and delicious recipe, which is perfection in its original form. Instead, I add the following only as a variation on a theme:


1/2 cup green lentils (dry)
1/2 cup wild rice (dry)
1 onion, chopped
1 tablespoon of chopped garlic
2 cups frozen chopped spinach
"some" olive oil (about 1/4 cup)
"some" water (enough to fill the pot, probably six or seven cups)

Throw everything in a pot, bring to a boil, and then simmer for about an hour.


Serve with either a) lots of salt or b) lots of white vinegar.

Either way, enjoy by dipping bread into the broth.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Thanksgiving Menu

This year's Thanksgiving menu was made largely from scratch and largely from local ingredients.  The herb-spiked stuffing was admittedly a boxed stuffing mix from Trader Joe's, spiked with fresh sage and thyme.  The steamed corn was little more than frozen kernels heated in the microwave.  But the links to everything else are provided.  It was a healthy, whole-foods feast fit for a king!


Starters

Salad

Main

Sides
Herb-Spiked Cornbread Stuffing
Steamed Corn

Dessert

Traditional Additions
Cheeseball, courtesy of my Sister
Ham, Garlic Mashed Potatoes, and Mushrooms, courtesy of my In-Laws
Desserts, courtesy of my Parents and Uncle

Thanksgiving Cheeseball

The most fun food at our Thanksgiving table this year was my sister's amazing, home-made cheeseball.  With three kinds of cheese rolled in nuts and herbs, it's indulgent and delicious.  [I won't divulge her secret recipe!]

This year's addition of grape plumes might have been tasty with the cheese, but the world will never know.  My toddler ate every single grape off of the skewers before anyone else got a chance!

Roasted Turkey Rubbed with Olive Oil, Sage, Thyme, and Rosemary

My husband prepares the bird each year with the same whole foods: roughly-cut apples, celery, carrots, and onion inside, a quick rub of olive oil outside, and fresh herbs (sage, thyme, and rosemary) where ever they will fit.  The meat is always moist and fragrant!

Here are this year's birds going into the oven...


Next year, I think I'd like to try a local breed.  But this year we didn't get our act together in time...

Apple-Thyme Carrots and Parsnips

I love to roast vegetables at Thanksgiving, but my old standbys were getting a little stale.

I mixed it up this year by roasting carrots and parsnips together.  I topped them with snips of fresh thyme and cracked black pepper, and then coated them in olive oil and apple-cider vinegar.


I roasted them at 325 degrees for about a half hour.

They came out sweet with a vinegary bite!

Green-Bean Casserole Topped with Shallots

Having just indulged in a delicious (if deadly) canned soup / fried onion version at an office potluck, I knew I wanted to try a green-bean casserole for my own Thanksgiving dinner.  I wanted it to be light and healthy, though, with a focus on the vegetables instead of the cream and "fried."  I also wanted a recipe that would have rich mushroom flavor without the risk that one of those slippery, slimy suckers would wind up accidentally in my mouth.  I HATE mushrooms.

The Gracious Pantry has a lovely recipe for Clean Eating Green-Bean Casserole that I was able to adapt to meet all of my needs.  I followed the instructions for the Clean Eating Mushroom soup, substituting low-sodium vegetable broth for the chicken broth.

Half a pound of mushrooms (whatever type you enjoy most)
2 cups low-sodium vegetable broth
1 tsp. olive oil
1/8 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
1 cup non-fat milk

Wash and slice the mushrooms.

Saute the mushrooms in the oil. This is a very small amount of oil for one pound of mushrooms. But if you keep the heat low, the mushrooms will release their own moisture and before you know it you’ll have a bunch of water in the pan that won’t allow them to burn. Just get the pan hot over high heat and then immediately turn to low heat. Stir frequently.


When the liquid comes out of the mushrooms, add the balsamic vinegar. Then, the flour, which will soak up all the liquid pretty quickly.

Put the chicken broth into your soup pot. Transfer the mushrooms to the same pot and combine with the broth.

Add milk.


Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for approximately 10 minutes.

Once the soup was made and sufficiently cooled, I pureed it in my blender.  This took away all of the slimy mushrooms and also made the soup very thick.  I was then able to pour it over the green beans without added extra flour or cornstarch to thicken it.

I topped my casserole with crumbs I made out of whole-wheat Ezekiel bread and almonds, and then layered on shallots that I had browned in a bit of olive oil on the stove.  I then baked the whole thing on 325 (the turkey was in the oven...) for about an hour.


It came out creamy and crispy, but left me wanting a bit for salt.  A sprinkle at the table made it perfect!

Green Salad with Radishes and Herbs

This is a German recipe and my husband's specialty.  We always serve this salad alongside our holiday meals (Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, etc.), but I'm not sure why we only save it for special occasions.

It's easy and would be enjoyable at any time of the year.

Two heads bibb lettuce
One bunch of radishes, sliced
Handful of dill
Handful of parsley
Handful of green onions

Toss to mix and serve with olive oil and red wine vinegar.


I was especially happy that for this salad, which we served at Thanksgiving, I was able to find local lettuce and herbs.  Surprisingly, though, I was unable to find local radishes.  I think I have a lot to learn about where to find local food once the farmers' markets shut down for the season...

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Autumn Salsa

I always like to have an appetizer or two available for people to munch on when they first arrive for Thanksgiving.  But I've found that no one wants anything heavy because they're saving their appetites for the meal to come!

This autumn salsa, which was inspired by this recipe for butternut squash salsa, combines some of my favorite fall flavors, and is perfect for snacking before the feast.


Teaspoon of olive oil
Teaspoon of nutmeg
Half a butternut squash, peeled and diced
1 onion, diced
1 apple, diced and dredged in orange juice to prevent browning
1 pomegranate's worth of pomegranate arils
White vinegar (to taste, about 2 tablespoons)
Honey (to taste, about 2 tablespoons)
Parsley (to taste)

Coat the butternut squash in olive oil and nutmeg.  Roast at 325 degrees for 15-20 minutes.  Remove from oven and allow to cool.


Combine squash, onion, apple, and pomegranate arils in a bowl.

Add vinegar and honey and mix well to coat.

Add parsley and serve with blue-corn tortilla chips.

So pretty and unexpected!

Corn, Apple, Spinach Bread

I'm not Superwoman!

Which means that not everything I'm making for Thanksgiving is from scratch.  I chose to make cornbread from a (relatively) clean Trader Joe's boxed mix.  But, I made it a bit healthier and veg'd it up.

The package directions called for oil and and egg.  I substituted unsweetened apple sauce for the oil and used two egg whites instead of one whole egg.

Then, to veg it up, I added about a cup of frozen, chopped spinach to the mix.


The bread turned out sweet and delicious.  The dark green spinach lent some needed color and didn't take away from the corn taste at all!

Crustless Pumpkin Pie

It's not Thanksgiving without a pumpkin pie!

I used the same recipe as for Crustless Maple Squash Autumn Pie, but this time I used a pumpkin instead of a squash.  It came out just as beautifully as the squash pie.  [It is actually somewhat unfair to refer to these pies as "crustless."  They actually crisp up on the top, sides, and bottom so that they have a sort of crust on the outside with a velvety-smooth inside.  It's actually BETTER than regular pumpkin pie with a standard pie crust.]

I really love that this pie is so healthy: The main ingredients are tofu, vegetables, and milk!  I might be known to eat leftover pumpkin pie for breakfast; with this version, I don't even have to feel guilty about it.



I was feeling froggy, so I even cleaned the seeds from the pulp and toasted them.

I coated a baking pan in cooking spray and then drizzled a very little bit of olive oil over the seeds, rubbing them to coat.  I roasted them for 15 minutes at 400 degrees (in the same oven I was using to roast the pumpkin quarters).  When they came out, I gave them the lightest shake of salt.


Toasted, crunchy, and delicious, I'll plan to have them out as an appetizer/snack when guests arrive on Thanksgiving.

What a great deal -- A salty snack and a sweet pie from the same pumpkin!

Monday, November 21, 2011

Cinnamon-Clementine Cranberry Sauce

The folks at Whole Foods are just SO GOOD at marketing to me.

As I gear up for Thanksgiving dinner, I’ve had cranberries on the brain. 

And, voila, just inside the entrance to the Annapolis Whole Foods, I found a huge tub of fresh cranberries floating in water, ready for me to scoop out and “harvest” from the bog. 

Such fun. 

As if I needed further convincing, the cranberries on offer were from Pemberton, New Jersey.  That’s within a half day’s drive from Annapolis (and therefore pretty local), and also about a ten minute’s drive from where I used to live in New Jersey.

I found a lovely recipe from The Gracious Pantry for Clean Eating Cranberry Sauce, and that was my plan:

About 3.5 cups of fresh cranberries
½ cup honey
1 cinnamon stick
Zest of one large orange
Cup of water

Throw everything in a pot and let it cook for 30 minutes.

Awesome.

Except I didn’t have an orange; I only had clementines.  And my grater was in the dishwasher, so I couldn’t make zest.

Instead, I peeled a large clementine and threw the segments in the pot with everything else just to see what would happen.



It turned out great!

It made a cranberry sauce that had the perfect consistency, even if it was a little tart. 



Make that VERY tart. 

VERY, VERY TART. 

I loved it, but I think I’ll serve it at Thanksgiving with a small note of warning.  This is not cranberry sauce for the faint of heart.    

Having successfully added my Clementine to my cranberry sauce, I was feeling like a very accomplished, enterprising cook. 

Until I saw this recipe on the Whole Foods blog this morning. 

Apparently, I am not the first person to come up with cinnamon-clementine cranberry sauce.  However, my version avoids 3/4 cup of refined sugar, which would, admittedly, probably take away from the extreme tarness if I added it. 

But where's the fun in that?

UPDATE: I remembered at the last minute that I was supposed to bring a side dish for a pot-luck Thanksgiving lunch at the office.  I grabbed my cranberry sauce out of the fridge and ran.  Given the tartness, I was a little concerned.  But I said nothing and watched in amazement as my co-workers piled it high on their turkey, spread it on their bread, and even ate it by itself with a spoon.  There is no greater compliment than when someone looks up from his food approvingly and says, "Who brought the cranberry sauce?!"  As it turns out, the tartness is just perfect when paired with the other sweet and savory dishes served at Thanksgiving!

The Wild Orchid Cafe

My husband and I left the kids with their grandparents and went out for a lovely dinner at The Wild Orchid Café in Annapolis on Saturday night. 

We had never been there before -- What a gem!

The atmosphere was swanky.  The décor was modern, clean, and unexpected: The tables were adorned with striking dark blue and violet orchids.  There was live music, which included a violinist.  [As a violinist myself, this made me very excited.]  The service was attentive.  Overall, it was exactly the kind of fancy place you want to step into when you’ve left the kids behind.

In Maryland, a crab dip is almost required by law on restaurant menus, so when we saw “Crab and Cheddar Broiled Fondue” on the menu, we had to try it.  In a twist on the usual dish, it was served with strawberries, apples, and grapes for dipping, as well as bread.  The light, sweet, cool fruit contrasted perfectly with the thick, salty, hot fondue.  It was so much fun to eat the fruit, I could have done without the bread entirely!

For dinner, I enjoyed pumpkin ravioli from the “farm-to-table” menu and also tasted the broccoli that was served with my husband’s local (Roseda Farm) steak.  Everything was fantastic.

For a restaurant that specializes in local cuisine, though, I was disappointed not to find any local wines.  We had a lovely Malbec, but I was hoping to find a Maryland or Virginia wine that would have paired nicely with the otherwise mostly-local offerings.

Our night out felt more special than many others we’ve had at more pedestrian restaurants.  There’s something to be said for the care and attention that a purveyor of local food puts into a menu and a dining experience.  The Wild Orchid Café was more expensive than the restaurants we’re used to, but it was also worth the price.  That’s more than I can say for many other restaurants at which we’ve previously spent $100 plus for dinner.

Cinnamon Apple Pie

After finding lots of local apples at Whole Foods late last week, I came across an amazing recipe from The Gracious Pantry for Clean-Eating Apple Pie



My toddler and my eight-month old helped me out with the preparation, which is why I had to change the name to "cinnamon apple pie."  The toddler may have taken it upon herself add an extra heaping tablespoon of cinnamon to the pie filling while Mama's back was turned...

This recipe was extremely easy (who knew pie crust from scratch could be so simple?) and very tasty.  It's not overly sweet -- in fact, it's not really sweet at all -- which makes me think it's closer to an authentic apple pie (think first Thanksgiving), than to a super-sweet, supermarket concoction full of high-fructose corn syrup and partially-hydrogenated oil.  [That's a good thing.]

Having given up sweetened, processed foods long ago, this pie was PERFECT for my taste buds.  But I'm not sure I'll make a version to share at Thanksgiving dinner, because my extended family may not agree that a dessert with no refined sugar is worth eating.

That said, I loved it and will definitely make it again for myself and my immediate family.  I'm also looking forward to using the simple pie crust for lots of other things...it seems equally perfect for chicken pot pie or something else savory.

Crust:

2 3/4 cups whole wheat pastry flour + extra
1 tsp. salt
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup low-fat or skim milk + an extra 1/4 cup additional

Spray your tin with a coat of spray-on olive oil.

Add about 1/8 cup whole wheat pastry flour to your tin.

Shake your tin around until the flour completely coats the surface. Set aside.

Put flour and salt into a mixing bowl and mix.

Measure your milk and oil into the same cup.

Mix well by hand until you have a firm dough. Depending on your climate, you may need that extra 1/4 cup of milk. I did. If you add the extra milk at the end, it will seem like it was a really bad idea at first. But keep mixing and you’ll end up with a really nice, firm dough. It takes some doing, so don’t give up.


Place half your dough on a large piece of parchment paper. Flatten slightly with your hands or rolling pin, and then place another large sheet of parchment paper over the top so the dough is sandwiched in between. Roll with your rolling pin until your dough is about 1/8 in to 1/4 inch thick. You may need to lift the parchment occasionally or flip the whole thing over to get rid of wrinkles in the parchment.



Remove the top sheet of parchment, and roll out any wrinkles left in the dough by the parchment. You should have a nice, even and smooth piece of dough.

Place your tin upside down on your dough. Flip the whole thing over, and mold the dough into your tin, being careful not to rip the dough.

Cut the excess dough around the edge of the pan. Keep your knife upright so you get a nice even cut.

Roll out the other half of dough and set aside (to use to top the pie).


Filling:

Apples, cut and seeded – Enough to fill the pie tin. [About 6 apples, I used only 3 and was disappointed...]
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 cup honey
1 tbsp. organic cornstarch
1 tbsp. lemon juice or orange juice [I used orange juice]

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large mixing bowl, combine your apples, cinnamon, honey, cornstarch and lemon/orange juice. Stir well to coat the apples thoroughly.


Pour the apples into your pie crust.

Top the pie with the second crust and pinch all around the edge to seal it, then crimp with a fork.

Cut a vent in the top so steam can escape and transfer the entire pie to the oven.


Bake for approximately 1 hour. It’s done when the juices start to bubble up through the vents you cut in the top.


Allow to cool and then enjoy!



P.S. -- My littlest helped with preparing, but she's only eight months old, so she couldn't have a taste.  Babies under one year old shouldn't eat foods containing honey.  I also don't allow my babies under one year old to have foods that have been sweetened or salted (they'll have the rest of their lives for that!).

Friday, November 18, 2011

Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Caramelized Grapes

When I saw Brussels sprouts and grapes together in one dish on the cover of this month’s Whole Living Magazine, I knew I HAD to try the recipe.

As usual, I went off the reservation (not wanting to add salt, not having any thyme, and forgetting yet again to purchase any balsamic vinegar). But, I figured, how bad could Brussels sprouts and grapes roasted in a bit of olive oil and then sprinkled with cracked black pepper and chopped walnuts be?

I spread quartered Brussels sprouts and whole, red grapes on a tray until the ratio looked right to me. Then I gave everything the lightest coating of olive oil and popped it in the oven for 15 minutes at 450 degrees. Roasted brown and caramelized sticky, the results were ooey-gooey but not at all too sweet. I tossed the mixture with cracked black pepper and added some chopped raw walnuts (hard to say how much…just until it was about the ratio I wanted).


Very easy and very delicious, plus fancy enough to look like it took all day. I might make this again and serve this thoroughly unexpected side dish at Thanksgiving!

Portuguese Kale and Blue Potato Soup

I had been flirting with various recipes online for Portuguese Kale soup for a few weeks, but I couldn’t commit to making any particular one. Some had potatoes, others didn’t. Some had beans; others didn’t. Some had tomatoes; others didn’t. All of these are good ingredients in concept, but I wasn’t sure which combination I was in the mood to try.

Finally, I decided there was sufficient variety on the theme that I’d be just fine if I went my own way, and didn’t follow any one particular recipe (with apologies to the Portuguese people for what I’m sure is a bastardization of their proud national dish).

After a quick trip to Whole Foods (…unfortunately the epitome of “supermarket pastoral” per The Omnivore’s Dilemma…there are some things I sort of wish I didn’t know…), I had one lovely Italian sausage, carrots, onions, garlic, kale, and some gorgeous blue potatoes.


I decided to use only one sausage in order to flavor the soup, but not more than that in order to keep the focus on the lovely veggies. I also didn’t bother seeking out pre-packaged Portuguese or Spanish sausage; I stuck instead with the freshly-ground stuff in the butcher’s case, which happened to be Italian pork sausage.

The blue potatoes were an impulse buy; they were just so pretty that I had to get them. I’m not actually a huge fan of potatoes, especially in soup, but they were so pretty, and I knew my husband would appreciate the spuds (he’s a huge fan, in all culinary contexts).


Cooking the soup couldn’t have been simpler.

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
2 chopped carrots
1 chopped onion
1 quart low-sodium vegetable broth
4 chopped blue potatoes
1 teaspoon chopped fresh sage
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 bunch of kale, stemmed and torn into pieces

I put about a tablespoon of olive oil in the bottom of a large pot, and then put a heaping tablespoon of chopped garlic, two chopped carrots, one chopped yellow onion, and the sausage, which I had freed from its casing, in the pot.

When the sausage was cooked and the onions translucent, I added a quart of low-sodium vegetable broth and six cups of water. I then added the chopped blue potatoes. I seasoned the soup with fresh sage and crushed red pepper (I used about a teaspoon of each, but you could very it according to your taste). I couldn’t believe how colorful and gorgeous the carrots and blue potatoes were together!


I let the soup come to a boil and then turned it down to low to simmer. I then ripped bite-size pieces of kale off the stems and added them to the soup while it simmered.


The soup would probably have been ready in about 30 minutes, but I let it cook on low until my husband came home from work, which probably brought the cooking time to about an hour.

Before I served it, I skimmed the fat off the top. There wasn’t much (because I only used one sausage), so it probably could have stayed in the soup. But I’m crazy like that.

The soup was warm, spicy, and comforting. Very nice for a chilly evening in. We didn’t have any crusty bread to dip in it, but it was kind of calling out for some. Recommend for next time. My husband also requested that I make polenta to serve with the leftovers this weekend. Yum! Will do, honey.


Thursday, November 17, 2011

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I just finished reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan. [If you haven’t already read this book -- which you probably have, as it seems I am the last person to have done so -- you should run and get yourself a copy.]

It is the perfect book to read in the week before Thanksgiving.

If not the perfect book to read while on a flight home from Paris.

Let me explain.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” explores the environmental and moral implications of various food choices. It manages to do so in a an existential way that had me questioning the very meaning of what it is to be human. This is not an exaggeration. This book is no mere indictment of industrial food; it is instead a surprisingly spiritual exploration of what it means to nourish oneself.

I learned from “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” that to be fully conscious of how and where our food was grown, fully aware of the true costs of putting it on our tables, and fully “in the moment” when we eat it, is to be fully thankful for it.

An excellent lesson to have learned in the week before Thanksgiving.

Which brings me to my flight home from Paris yesterday.

Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, more than 30,000 feet above the earth, in a cramped, darkened economy-class cabin, I turned the pages of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” I felt a certain kinship in those moments with the industrial chicken, and a certain longing to be the pastured cow. But, more than anything, as I read Michael Pollan’s beautiful treatise on connectedness to the earth, to food, and to fellow humans, I felt suddenly so lost, hungry, and alone.

And then, as if on cue, the stewardess delivered a tray full of industrial glop as my “meal,” including a warmed chicken sandwich wrapped in cellophane, stamped with an expiration date well into 2012. I couldn’t recognize anything she put in front of me as “food.” I couldn’t trace it from farm to table (or tray, as the case may have been). I couldn’t feel a sense of communion with the soil, the chicken, or even my fellow passengers.

This was not what it is to be human, or to nourish oneself.

And yet, I was hungry, so I ate it.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, indeed.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Pumpkin and Kale Pasta with Sausage

It's always dangerous to cook a recipe that you've never tried before when you're having guests for dinner.

But I like to live on the edge.

And I'm so glad I do.

This dish knocked my socks off. I don't consider myself a good cook (in fact, that's sort of the whole point of this blog), but I really outdid myself on this one. I enjoyed this more than just about any meal I've had -- at home OR in a restaurant -- in a very long time. It took a lot of time to chop and prepare everything, but it was absolutely worth it. Especially the fresh pumpkin cubes.

I found this recipe for "Fall Favorite Pumpkin Kale Sausage Pappardelle Pasta" and followed it almost exactly. I subbed in whole-wheat spirals for pappardelle, low-sodium vegetable stock for chicken stock, and fresh sage for dried.

1 package of whole-wheat pasta
1 pound, ground Italian pork sausage
2 cups, peeled & seeded pumpkin – cut into small cubes
1 bunch of green kale, trimmed w/ ribs removed, cut into small pieces
1 1/2 cups, low-sodium vegetable stock
2 shallots, chopped thin
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup, dry white wine
fresh sage
fresh rosemary
2 tsp, dried red pepper flakes
1 tbsp olive oil
salt + pepper, to taste
shaved Parmessan

Cook the entire package of pasta as per the instructions on the box – strain and set aside.

On stove top, warm a large skillet on a medium-high heat, then add the tbsp. of olive oil.
When the oil is heated, reduce heat slightly and add the sausage. Cook sausage until it is mostly browned, about five minutes.

Move sausage to the edges of the pan, and add a little more olive oil (if needed – there may be enough fat from the sausage to do the trick!) – then add the garlic and the shallots.
Cook until the shallots become translucent and garlic becomes fragrant.

Mix the sausage, shallots, and garlic together.

Add the cubed pumpkin, rosemary, sage, and red pepper flakes and stir.

Add the white wine and slightly reduce heat – allow to cook for about 5 minutes, alllowing the wine to simmer, stirring often.

Add the vegetable stock and stir.

Cook sausage and pupmkin in stock at a simmer, for an additional 8 minutes or so – allowing the stock to reduce.

Add the kale and cook for an additional 3-5 minutes.

Toss the pasta in the mix and allow the pasta to heat.

Season w/ salt + pepper until desired flavor is achieved. [I skipped this step and allowed folks to salt and pepper at the table].

Serve hot – topped with a generous helping of shaved Parmessan.


This was such a rich, colorful dish. The sausage is more of an indulgence than I normally allow, but it was three sausages spread over the entire meal, which served four for dinner and left four more servings as leftovers. The pumpkin and kale really came to the center, while the sausage and pasta served as background.

This dish was spicy, warm, and absolutely perfect for a cool, fall evening with friends. I'm so glad I took a chance on a new recipe! I will definitely make this one again!

Butternut Squash and Green Apple Soup

After my last death-defying experience cutting up a butternut squash, I have to admit that I nearly succumbed to the oh-so-tempting, pre-peeled, pre-cut cubes that I found at Whole Foods. I even put the packaged butternut goodness IN MY CART.

But I know that when I have my CSA next year, I won't have that choice: I'll have to man up and face the squash. So out went the beautiful, golden hunks wrapped in cellophane and styrofoam (eek! are we still using styrofoam?) and in went the fresh-from-the-ground, whole butternut squash.

When I got home and got out my huge knife, I had a pang of regret. When I tried to scoop the flesh out of the skin and it kept getting stuck, I had more than a pang of regret.

But it was worth it. I'm finding that there is nothing more satisfying than starting with a whole food and ending up with a finished meal. Especially when it's really hard to do.

Cutting the butternut squash was really the only hard part about my butternut squash and green apple soup. I started with this recipe, and then made it my own.

1 medium yellow onion, chopped
1 rib of celery, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 butternut squash, peeled, seeds removed, chopped
2 tart green apples, peeled, cored, chopped (chop second apple only just before serving)
3 cups low-sodium vegetable broth
1 cup water
1 teaspoon garam masala

Set a large saucepan over medium-high heat and heat the olive oil. Add the onion, celery and carrot and sauté for 5 minutes, taking care to turn the heat down if the vegetables begin to brown.

Add squash, 1 chopped apple, broth and water. Bring to boil. Cover, turn the heat down to a simmer and cook for 30 minutes or until squash and carrots soften. Puree with an immersion blender.

Serve into bowls, sprinkle with garam masala, and top with chopped apples (it is best if you chop the apple right before serving so that none of the pieces turns brown).


This beautiful soup was really easy to stay on top of while entertaining (read: drinking wine), but looked and tasted special for a nice dinner with friends.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Fall Harvest Dinner Party

My husband and I entertained friends for dinner last night, which is not something we do often.  It was easy for me to plan a menu, though, because I knew I wanted to start with fresh, seasonal ingredients.  I also knew I had a bunch of kale in the 'fridge that it was time to use.

The menu?

Butternut Squash and Green Apple Soup
Green Salad with Pomegranate and Walnuts [No recipe: Just romaine lettuce, pomegranate arils, and walnuts with apple-cider vinegar and dijon mustard mixed together as dressing]
Pumpkin and Kale Pasta with Sausage

Here are my ingredients.  Literally the only things I cooked with that are not pictured are olive oil, vegetable broth, and walnuts (forgot to put them on the table!).  I'm pretty sure this is what it means to eat a plant-based, whole-foods diet: The natural plants overwhelm the meat, cheese, bread, and pasta!

Friday, November 11, 2011

Bulgogi with Fresh Mint and Chard

My husband brought home some lovely shaved beef from the gorcery store last weekend, and it made me think immediately of a great use for a huge bunch of chard I had in the 'fridge. We visited Korea several years ago and fell in love with Korean beef (bulgogi) wrapped in leafy greens with a side of rice.


I found a recipe for the unique bulgogi marinade here. I was pleased to find that the sweetness comes from a pear and honey (I omitted the additional refined sugar).


Make marinade sauce for 2 pounds of beef by mixing following:
½ cup soy sauce (I used tamari)
12 cloves minced garlic
1 medium size onion (crushed)
1 small size pear (crushed)
½ cup of water (can be replaced with cooking wine)
1 tbs of honey.
*tip: Using a food processor is very convenient.

Prepare a large stainless bowl and pour the marinade sauce in it. Place the sliced beef into the marinade and add 1 or 2 tbs of sesame oil and some toasted sesame seeds. Mix it by hand and keep it in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours.

After 3 hours, grill the meat on charcoal bbq, broil it in oven, or grill it in a pan.

Then wrap it up in halves of chard from which the stems have been removed and enjoy.

[In Korea, bulgogi was often served with mint leaves for wrapping, in addition to other leafy greens. I couldn't find any mint leaves big enough, so I just sprinkled some fresh mint leaves over my meat before wrapping in the chard leaf].

Delicious!

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Eating Sunlight

An excellent piece published in the New York Times. It touches on many of the reasons CSA Virgin is embarking on this locavore adventure.

Farmer in Chief
By MICHAEL POLLAN

October 12, 2008

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little — a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.

Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, “I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.”

This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food — organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that “this is a conservative cause if ever there was one.”

There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

How We Got Here

Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it’s important to understand how that system came to be — and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare — black — from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.

This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year — a half pound every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope — thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy — for trucking food as well as pumping water — is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we’re not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized.

In drafting these proposals, I’ve adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security.

I. Resolarizing the American Farm

What happens in the field influences every other link of the food chain on up to our meals — if we grow monocultures of corn and soy, we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates. Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land.

Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children.

Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing “specialty crops” — farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops — including animals — as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.

The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale “alternative” farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can’t survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don’t survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason — save current policy and custom — that American farmers couldn’t grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that today’s sky-high grain prices are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the making.)

Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green — that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don’t farmers do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility.

In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields — a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America’s garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the U.S.D.A. are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in “conservation” or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration. The Conservation Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to “perennialize” commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses — without having to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon.

But that is probably a 50-year project. For today’s agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm — as in Wendell Berry’s elegant “solution.” Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season’s grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste — all without our help or fossil fuel.

If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these — the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it — has just been kicked away. The second strut is F.D.A. approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do. The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality.

It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will — as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.

It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you’re proposing feed the world?

There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don’t know, because we haven’t tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn’t produce comparable yields. Today’s organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve 80 to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world — with a population expected to peak at 10 billion — survive on these yields?

First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today’s organic levels could increase the world’s food supply by 50 percent.

The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn’t everything — and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we’re growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations.

The final point to consider is that 40 percent of the world’s grain output today is fed to animals; 11 percent of the world’s corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone — however we choose to grow it.

In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels — performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals — is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely “driving and spraying,” which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living.

To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food — millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don’t. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production — as farmers and probably also as gardeners.

The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn’t expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today. For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for “better” jobs in the city. We emptied America’s rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America — not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day’s drive of our cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do “food-system impact statements” before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do “open space”) in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center.

The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a regional food economy — one that can support diversified farming and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet.

A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.

Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers’ markets, of which the U.S.D.A. estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:

Four-Season Farmers’ Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds.

Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won’t ever have food-safety problems — it will — only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.

Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local, grass-based meat production is the disappearance of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the U.S.D.A. does little to support the ones that remain. From the department’s perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The U.S.D.A. should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat.

Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the same way the shift to alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable, the sun-food agenda — as well as the food security of billions of people around the world — will benefit from government action to prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation.

Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases — whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons — go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.

Create a Federal Definition of “Food.” It makes no sense for government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because it is, nominally, a food, albeit a “junk food.” We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them “junk food” — and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you’ll recall President Reagan’s ketchup imbroglio), but defining food upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only “food” is exempt from local sales tax.

A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers’ markets — all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers’-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers’ markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies.

III. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal — not just federal policy and public education but the president’s bully pulpit and the example of the first family’s own dinner table — to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda.

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to “edible education” — in Alice Waters’s phrase — by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day — the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.

But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial.

There are other kinds of information about food that the government can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible — the other sense in which “sunlight” should be the watchword of our agenda. The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.

Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White House. If what’s needed is a change of culture in America’s thinking about food, then how America’s first household organizes its eating will set the national tone, focusing the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil.

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn’t be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you’re in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence — at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans’ TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week — a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement.

You’re probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: “rocket.”) But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry — the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat — meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher “family value,” after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal?

Our agenda puts the interests of America’s farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry’s. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more “populist” or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative “economies” depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America’s agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century’s most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment — that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”
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