Springfield Locavore

What's Cooking? Not Us!

One of the interesting tidbits that I picked up while reading locavore-related books was the inverse relationship between cooking and obesity: More cooking leads to less obesity; less cooking leads to more obesity. As you might have noticed, there's not much cooking going on these days. (No, throwing a frozen pizza into the oven or a frozen dinner into the microwave does not count as cooking.)

Last week Michael Pollan wrote a very good article in the New York Times, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. It discusses the decline in recent years of cooking, which ironically corresponded to a simultaneous increase in the popularity of food-related TV shows. Here's an excerpt:

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

What is wrong with this picture?

A few months ago, I saw the documentary Food Fight at Liberty Brew & View. (Not to be confused with the new documentary, Food, Inc., which I haven't seen yet.) Frankly, I was disappointed. The movie spent far too much time discussing celebrity chefs and expensive restaurants, which very little time spent on actually buying and cooking food yourself. If eating local food meant spending $30 (or more) per person on dinner at a fancy restaurant, how often would you actually do it?

Part of the catalyst for the appearance of Pollan's New York Times article is the new movie Julie & Julia, which deals with Julia Child, the original television cook, and Julie Powell, who decided to cook -- and blog -- all of the recipes in Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It looks like it could be an interesting movie! Here's the trailer:

Here's another excerpt from Michael Pollan's article:

It’s generally assumed that the entrance of women into the work force is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but that turns out to be only part of the story. Yes, women with jobs outside the home spend less time cooking — but so do women without jobs. The amount of time spent on food preparation in America has fallen at the same precipitous rate among women who don’t work outside the home as it has among women who do: in both cases, a decline of about 40 percent since 1965. (Though for married women who don’t have jobs, the amount of time spent cooking remains greater: 58 minutes a day, as compared with 36 for married women who do have jobs.) In general, spending on restaurants or takeout food rises with income. Women with jobs have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.

Those corporations have been trying to persuade Americans to let them do the cooking since long before large numbers of women entered the work force. After World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant everything. As Laura Shapiro recounts in “Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,” the food industry strived to “persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.” The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating.

Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the “baker” to do — specifically, crack open an egg — she could take ownership of the cake. Over the years, the food scientists have gotten better and better at simulating real food, keeping it looking attractive and seemingly fresh, and the rapid acceptance of microwave ovens — which went from being in only 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent today — opened up vast new horizons of home-meal replacement.

Anyway, after you watch the trailer for Julie & Julia, go read Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. It's a lengthy article, but Pollan makes very good points throughout. And it just might inspire you to learn to cook!

(And after you're done reading the article, you can listen to Michael Pollan on Cooking as Spectator Sport, a  20-minute radio segment from NPR's Fresh Air.)

Taking 'Local' Back

This article at Good Times, Taking 'Local' Back, discusses another aspect of the topic of my earlier post about corporations abusing the term "local". It's not just local foods, but "buy local" campaigns in general that are finding very non-local corporations attempting to horn in on the action. Here's an excerpt:

Carrying local produce in their stores may promote environmental sustainability and even help local producers' pocketbooks, Heiman says, but it is still detrimental to a town's overall economic sustainability, since much of the profits generated are siphoned by Whole Foods' corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas. Furthermore, he says, with retailers like Wal-Mart using the word "local" as a promotional tool, and the London-based international bank, HSBC, touting itself as "the world's local bank," the Whole Foods campaign is only the tip of the iceberg.

The Wal-Mart in Gilroy—the nearest location with a produce department—does carry locally grown produce. However, the local growers, according to a representative from the produce department who asked not to be named, are a Dole location in Salinas and an Earthbound Farm location in San Juan Bautista. Dole's official website proclaims that it is "the world's largest producer and marketer of fresh fruit and vegetables," while Earthbound's site says it is "the nation's largest grower and shipper of organic produce."

"They're really trying to leverage the word, 'local,'" Heiman says. After all, he says, if a company claims to be "the world's largest" or "the nation's largest," how local can it really be?

Wal-Mart is local now? Wal-Mart?! Yeesh!

Faux Local

Faux Handmade

Consider this hypothetical scenario.

Suppose that you discover a tiny furniture shop. You go inside and find a man making furniture — entirely by hand. Without the use of any power tools, he is crafting tables, chairs, stools, bookcases, and more. He shows you the tools that he uses; talks about how his grandfather taught him how to make furniture when he was a boy; explains that, after his wife died, he rediscovered his interest as a form of therapy; and demonstrates some of the techniques he uses to build this handmade furniture. You're fascinated by his story and impressed by the results, so you buy a couple of chairs. Later, whenever someone visits, you point out the 2 chairs to them and tell the story behind them. Their stories make them unique.

Suppose it turns out you're not the only one who enjoys buying handmade furniture. Suppose there is a growing trend all across the country for people to seek out tiny furniture shops where they can buy handmade furniture. Numerous little shops which had previously been struggling to get by begin to enjoy a steady stream of handmade furniture enthusiasts coming through their doors. Fans of handmade furniture explain that they like the individual stories behind each piece, the knowledge that they are helping a small business, and the little thrill of owning one-of-a-kind furniture.

Suppose the big furniture chains notice this handmade trend. They then create factories to make handmade furniture. The factories contain no power tools or robots, but instead have hundreds of identical work areas, each stocked with an identical set of hand tools. In each work area sits a worker, carefully following the company's prescribed instructions, step by step, for how to make handmade chairs, handmade tables, handmade stools, and handmade bookcases. Before long, department stores and furniture stores all across the country carry a wide variety of this "handmade" furniture.

Suppose a government agency, to protect the consumer from fraud, works with the big furniture manufacturers to create regulations requiring the inspection of the factories and the certification of all items sold as "handmade", ensuring that no power tools were used. There is considerable paperwork and bureaucratic red tape, not to mention a significant annual filing fee required to cover the administrative costs. The little shops, with just one or two employees, generally can't afford the time to complete the paperwork or the expense of the annual filing fee. As a result, they continue to sell their furniture, but they can no longer claim that it is handmade, because it hasn’t been certified.

In any case, the "certified handmade" furniture, while it is technically handmade, completely misses the point. The term "handmade" was just shorthand for the entire experience — furniture made without power tools in a small shop by someone who enjoyed what they were doing and who sold it themselves. Yes, the factory-produced furniture is "handmade", but it's no different in any other way than the rest of the mass-produced furniture available.

Faux Organic

The hypothetical scenario I described above is basically what happened in the area of "organic" food. Originally, when food was described as being "organic", the term covered more than just the type of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides used to grow it. It described an entire philosophy behind the way the food was grown on a small scale, with an attempt (admittedly not always successful) to minimize harm to the environment.

When organic food became popular, the big industrial agriculture companies recognized a marketing opportunity. Of course, they couldn't do the whole organic philosophy. However, they could change what they sprayed on their crops, so they worked with the USDA to create "USDA certified organic" standards. As a result, you can buy a large variety of "USDA certified organic" foods in the supermarket, generally from the same industrial agriculture companies that sell the non-organic stuff, although under a different brand name. (Michael Pollan refers to this as "industrial organic".)

Ironically, many of the foods sold at your local farmers' market are not "USDA certified organic", because these small scale farmers often can't afford the time, energy, and fees required to become certified.

Faux Free-Range

Once upon a time, chickens roamed outside in a yard or pasture, scratching in the dirt and pecking at bugs in the grass. Industrial agriculture changed that. Chickens were now generally kept within cages so tiny that they could neither stand nor spread their wings.

Some farmers continued to raise their hens the old fashioned way — outside in a yard or pasture. They called these “free-range chickens”, to distinguish them from the caged variety.

People who were concerned about humane treatment of chickens began buying “free-range” eggs and chicken.

The big industrial organic companies, again recognizing a marketing opportunity, began raising their own “free-range” chickens. They let the chickens out of the cages, but kept them in massive coops holding thousands or even tens of thousands of chickens. Then, after the first six weeks of their lives (when they’d grown accustomed to the boundaries of their existence), a small door at one end of the coop would be opened. Outside would be a small strip of grass — which few if any of the chickens would ever actually venture onto.

Thus, technically, these could be labeled “free-range” chickens. It was perhaps slightly better than keeping them in cages, but only slightly. (And even that is somewhat questionable, since the crowded conditions often results in more disease and violent pecking than is found in caged chickens.)

But again, this missed the point. They weren't really free-range chickens, not the way the term was intended to be used. So now, although you can buy eggs in the supermarket labeled "free-range", they're probably not what you're really wanting. So now you need to look for a new term, "pastured", which small farmers are using to indicate what they used to call "free-range".

Faux Grassfed

Once upon a time, cattle roamed in a pasture eating grass. Once again, industrial agriculture changed that.

Cattle now were moved into "Animal Feeding Operations" (AFOs), where they were feed corn. For cattle, corn is junk food. It rapidly fattens them up, but isn't very good for their health. In addition, since they are crowded together in large numbers (particularly in "Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations" or CAFOs) and in generally filthy conditions (a CAFO produces as much waste as a small city), disease is a problem. To combat that, the cattle are given regular doses of antibiotics. This keeps the cattle from getting sick, but it also contributes to the frequency of drug-resistant bacteria.

Small farms began to market "grassfed beef" and milk from "grassfed cows", signifying that they were doing things the old-fashioned way.

However, technically, even the cattle in CAFOs eat grass for the first few months of their lives; they are only "finished" on corn. So industrial agriculture, seeing a marketing opportunity, began selling their CAFO beef and milk as "grassfed".

Small farms have now begun to refer their their cattle as "100% grassfed", "grass finished", or "pastured", so you'll need to start looking for those terms.

Faux Local

Given the above, you knew it was only a matter of time before the term "local" began to be misused by the corporations.

How about "local" Lay's potato chips? That's right, Frito-Lay now has an advertising campaign in which they promote their potato chips as being locally made. You can even go to their web site, enter your zip code and part of the product code from a bag of Lay's potato chips, and they will tell you where that bag was made. Of course, that doesn't necessarily tell you where the potatoes were grown. They're talking "locally made", not "locally grown".

But, once again, that misses the point. Buying "local" is about more than just how many miles the product traveled. It's about buying something directly from the person who grew it, raised it, or made it. It's about shaking the hand that feeds you.

It's definitely not about buying junk food out of a vending machine, no matter how "local" the advertising firm for the corporation that produced it claims it to be.

The corporations aren't changing their methods; they're just changing their marketing.

If this keeps up, we'll have to come up with another term that means "local".

Another weekend, another trip out of town with plenty of non-local food!

Last weekend we went to Bristol, Wisconsin (just north of the Illinois/Wisconsin border) to the Bristol Renaissance Faire! We love going to renfaires, and this one is a great one! It runs every weekend from just after July 4 through Labor Day. We were unable to go last year, since we were busy buying a house and moving, so we were really looking forward to this year's event! Two days of knights, bellydancers, wenches, rogues, musicians, jugglers, comics, games, shopping, and food! Lots of food, none of it local!

When we started this locavore thing and agreed that there would be a "social exemption" for trips, visits from family, and gatherings with friends, I hadn't realized how common those things would be for us! Since May 20, we've been on 3 trips out of town, had visits from relatives on 2 occasions, and attended 2 picnics!

I think we're done for awhile, although we'll probably do a trip to St. Louis sometime this summer.

One difference this year was that we had a laptop with us. The availability of free WiFi meant that I could access email and even check on the blog from the comfort of our hotel room. Nice! I didn't actually update the blog, mind you -- much too tired to do that -- but at least I could confirm that it was there!

Okay, that's it for the trip update. We now return you to your regularly scheduled locavore updates!

Here are some possible topics for future posts:

• Local milk from Kilgus Farmstead
• Kids Day at the Farm with Slow Food Springfield
• CSA updates
• garden update (first tomatoes!)
• local butter from the Vincent Family Farm
• faux local
• locavore skeptics
• cooking chicken
• Colorado sweetcorn
• homemade ice cream

I've no shortage of topics. I just need to do the writing!

Urban Fruit Foraging in the Illinois Times

Did you notice the article Free food can be yours for the picking in the July 23 edition of the Illinois Times? Here's an excerpt:

"Urban fruit foraging" is a grassroots phenomenon that has arisen spontaneously as local folks have taken a look around their neighborhoods and suddenly noticed that yard after yard contains all sorts of trees bearing a cornucopia of apples, plums, pears, oranges, peaches, loquats, pecans, avocados, lemons, mulberries, pomegranates ... and so much more. The "aha" moment comes when these folks realize that most of this abundance goes unpicked.

So, rather than just let it rot, why not find new ways to gather, distribute and share this free food with the larger community? From coast to coast, people are doing exactly that, with each group finding their own clever ways to spread the concept of "public fruit."

One of the simplest is in Oakland, Calif., where neighbors created a small exchange they call Forage Oakland. Some 200 people have signed up — those with lemon trees, for example, open their yards for harvest when the fruit ripens; in exchange, they get access to other yards when their fruits come in.

We don't have any fruit trees on our property yet, but it sounds like a great idea! The best part, in my mind, is the effect of reinforcing a sense of community, since people will actually (*gasp*) talk to people!

(Oh, and in case you're wondering: loquat. No, I'd never heard of it before, either!)

Fresh Produce - Use It or Lose It!

A coworker mentioned the other day that he had some fresh green beans recently, but that they weren't as good as the ones that came out of a can! They were leathery, and he had to throw out about a quarter of them!

Then he told me that they were about 3 weeks old. Ah-ha! I think we've found the problem!

That's one thing that takes a little getting used to when switching from processed food to fresh food. Fresh food doesn't stay fresh! You have to prepare and eat it soon! With processed food, we're used to things keeping for weeks, months, even years! (All those preservatives in the ingredients list? Now you know why they're there.)

Even fresh produce from a supermarket tends to be varieties that were bred for their durability and extended shelf-life. The fresh produce you get from the farmers' market — or your garden — tends to be varieties that were bred for their taste!

We have a book, From Asparagus to Zucchini: A Guide to Cooking Farm-Fresh Seasonal Produce, that provides plenty of useful information about what to do with fresh produce after you bring it home — how to clean it, how to store it, and how quickly to use it! We've been putting our produce in Ziploc bags, marking the date on each bag with a Sharpie so that we know which is the oldest.

We've been feeling guilty about going through so many plastic bags. True, we could wash out the bags and reuse them, but finding room to prop open the bags so that they could dry was a challenge. We recently bought some reusable plastic storage containers which we'll be trying out, in the hopes that those will work better.

Another book, Keeping the Harvest: Discover the Homegrown Goodness of Putting Up Your Own Fruits, Vegetables & Herbs, is a great resource for learning how to store produce for later use. It covers freezing, canning, drying, root cellars, and more. However, even if you aren't going to eat those green beans until months later, you still need to freeze or can them while they're still fresh!

In the case of sweetcorn, it is particularly important to process things quickly. The sugars in an ear of sweetcorn start changing into starches almost as soon as it is picked, resulting in a less-sweet taste. If you're blanching sweetcorn for freezing, it's best to have the water already boiling when you go to the garden to harvest!

When you go the the farmers' market and buy stuff, you should use it as soon as possible. Because we have farmers' markets on 3 days during the week (Wednesday morning, Thursday afternoon, and Saturday morning), you don't need to do a week's worth of shopping. Our great-grandparents would have bought food multiple times during the week, particularly in the days before refrigeration!

If you can, try planning meals in advance, then buying what you need for those meals, rather than just buying a bunch of whatever is there, then trying to figure out how to use it all up before it goes bad.

For example:

• At Wednesday's market, you could buy the food for Wednesday's lunch and dinner; and Thursday's breakfast and lunch (4 meals).
• At Thursday's market, you could buy for Thursday's dinner; Friday's meals; and Saturday's breakfast (5 meals).
• At Saturday's market, you could buy for Saturday's lunch and dinner; Sunday's meals; Monday's meals; Tuesday's meals; and Wednesday's breakfast (12 meals).

By planning and buying smaller quantities, you'll have fresher food!

Do we do that? Uh... no. We're not that organized yet! But it's a good idea, and I'm hopeful that someday we'll be that organized! I'll alert the media when that happens.

How Quickly They Grow Up!

It seems like only yesterday that this was a small, unnotable zucchini in our garden. Wait... It was just yesterday! What the heck happened?! I know there are larger zucchini than this, but the speed with which it went from "That'll be ready to harvest soon" to "Yikes! Harvest that before it grows any more!" was quite surprising!

The Locavore and Luca Pizza

Last week I discussed how being a locavore helps me lose weight. This morning I weighed 238.3, a loss of another 2 pounds over the last week! Can I maintain that weight loss as we start another week?

• Breakfast: Scrambled eggs (eggs, milk, butter -- all local)
• Lunch: Corn on the cob, broccoli, nectarine (all local)
• Dinner: Umm...

Dinner: Luca Pizza

Dawn was tired of sweetcorn, and I didn't mind saving what sweetcorn was left for tomorrow's lunch. We hadn't been out to eat for awhile, so we decided to do so. I was in the mood for pizza, but our favorite pizza place, Bellacino's, recently closed under mysterious circumstances. (Translation: They didn't tell us why!) Besides, Bellacino's is a chain, and if we're not going to eat local, maybe we should at least buy local.

So we decided to try Luca Pizza. They used to be located in White Oaks Mall, but are now located across the street. So how were they? Here's my mini-review!

Menu: They have a fairly large variety of items on their menu (pizzas, calzones, pastas, subs, etc).

Service: Helpful and reasonably fast.

Atmosphere: Plain. Nothing to entertain a 4-year-old, unfortunately. There was a TV on. Whether that's a plus or a minus depends upon your point of view. It was tuned for Fox News. Your opinion of that will also vary! For me, it was a definite minus. There was some airhead Republican spouting off about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and... Oh! Err... sorry. Where was I?

Food: The food wasn't anything special. Dawn had the fettuccine alfredo, while I had a sausage & pepperoni pizza. In both cases, the food was "eh". Definitely not bad, mind you! Just nothing that blew us away. It was also surprisingly expensive. I suspect he might have figured up the total wrong, but I didn't double-check his math.

Oh, and I did say that I had "a pizza", not "a slice of pizza". They do sell pizza by the slice, but I wasn't thinking clearly and ordered a 10" pizza. That's their smallest size, but still....

I suspect I won't still weigh 238.3 in the morning!

Today's Meals

Life is good!

Breakfast - Cheese omelet

• Eggs from Bear Creek Farm & Ranch (Palmer, IL)
• Cheese from Ropp Jersey Cheese (Bloomington, IL)
• Milk from Kilgus Farmstead (Fairbury, IL)
• Butter from Vincent Family Farm (Rochester, IL)

Lunch - Sweetcorn, with ice cream & blueberries for dessert

• Sweetcorn from the Old Capitol Farmers' Market
• Butter from the Vincent Family Farm (Rochester)
• Homemade ice cream made from non-homogenized milk from Kilgus Farmstead (Fairbury, IL)
• Blueberries from the Old Capitol Farmer's Market
• Non-local vanilla extract

Dinner - Potatoes and broccoli, with bread

• Potatoes from Veenstra & Heck's CSA (Rochester, IL)
• Broccoli from Veenstra & Heck's CSA (Rochester, IL)
• Homemade bread made from Hodgson Mills semi-local bread mix (Effingham, IL)
• Butter from the Vincent Family Farm (Rochester, IL)

Snacks - Nectarines and donut peaches

• Nectarines from the Old Capitol Farmers' Market
• Donut peaches from the Old Capitol Farmers' Market

Oh, and a Coke.

My Locavore Weight Loss Plan

One of my hopes in becoming a locavore was that it would help me lose weight. After all, nutrition experts say that, instead of eating french fries, hamburgers, shakes, cookies, candy, chips, etc, we should be eating plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. That's pretty much exactly what happens when you become a locavore.

Think about it: If you had to make your own potato chips, how often do you think you would eat them?

Counting Calories

I've always found that it is very difficult for me to lose weight during cold weather. For whatever reason, when it's cold outside, I tend to eat more. So I decided that I would start trying to lose weight on the first day of Spring, which was March 20 this year.

I've never done any sort of fad diet (e.g. Atkins, South Beach, etc). All I do is count calories. It works pretty well.

On March 20, I weighed 256.2 pounds.

By May 20, I was down to 248.2 pounds, a loss of 8 pounds over the course of nearly 9 weeks. I'm 6'1" tall, so my BMI went from about 33.8 to about 32.7. I averaged a drop of 0.9 pounds per week.

I steadily lose weight when I count calories, but the actual mechanics of counting calories is a pain! Inevitably, I always eventually stop counting. Have I found a better way?

Not Counting Calories

May 20 was the official beginning of our locavore challenge. From that point on, I stopped counting calories. By June 20, I was down to 241.2 pounds, a loss of 7 pounds over the course of 4½ weeks. My BMI dropped to about 31.8. I averaged a drop of nearly 1.6 pounds per week.

In other words, I lost weight at nearly twice the rate without the tedium of counting calories!

Of course, whenever I would "fall off the wagon" — going to a picnic, or travelling out of town — I would gain weight. And unfortunately, there have been 2 picnics and 2 trips out of town over the past 3 weeks! If not for them, I would probably have lost another 8 pounds by now! Instead, I'm only down to 240.3 as of this morning, a drop of 0.9 pounds over the course of 16 days.

Even with the non-locavore setbacks, since May 20 I've lost an average of nearly 1.2 pounds per week. And I haven't exactly been starving myself — eggs, sausage, broccoli, green beans, tomatoes, potatoes, salads, homemade ice cream, cherries, strawberries, blueberries, peaches, sweetcorn, whole milk, butter, etc. Do you think you could survive on that?

The lesson I would draw from this is not that you can stuff yourself and still lose weight. Rather, it's that by becoming a locavore, it's easier to avoid stuffing yourself, which allows you to lose weight without the tedium of counting calories!

Tomorrow the boss is bringing pizza to work. No, it's not local. I think I'll be bringing some local blueberries to share, but I'll also be eating some pizza. (I never turn down pizza!) And I know I have some other non-local eating in my future as the summer activities get underway. However, if I can keep the non-local eating to a minimum, I hope to be back to losing over 1½ pounds per week soon — without counting calories!