Food...Glorious Food

Let’s talk about a subject that is likely near and dear to all our hearts – food! You can’t live without it and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to live with the ways our food has become this mass-produced “thing” that lines the shelves of most grocery stores.

This food stuff is a big, big topic. You’ve got Jamie Oliver educating schools and families across the country, Mark Bittman making us rethink the way we consume meat (and food in general), grass-roots movements of small farmers shedding a bright light on the tyranny of the FDA and how it affects consumer choices and a virtual universe of blogs dedicated in one way or another to the big F-O-O-D. So let me caveat this by saying, I don’t consider myself to be an expert on this topic (though I am a good little eater ;) and I certainly don’t intend to cover this topic comprehensively in this post or this blog. I do intend to share my own personal experience with striving to produce and preserve our own food at the farm, support our local farmers (some of whom are also neighbors :), eat more “kindly” and create and eat just plain_good_food.

Whole, organically grown food is not only better for you (way better) it also tastes better. Anyone who has ever compared the taste of a tomato fresh from the garden with those pale red orbs in most grocery stores understands this. For me, there is nothing like lunch after our Saturday morning shopping trip to the Farmer’s Market and our new local Co-Op. Here’s what was on the lunch menu at the farm this past Saturday…Spinach salad where every ingredient (included those I used to make my own honey-mustard dressing) was fresh from the market and our local Co-Op and sooo yummy!

Lately I’ve been reading up a bit on the art of food preservation. This was spurred by my realization last year, that we (rather shamefully) ended up with a decent amount of food going to waste in our veggie and herb gardens because we were simply unable to consume it.

So this year I’m committed to utilizing the complete harvest from our garden and to preserving seasonal foods from our local farmer’s market and newly opened Food Co-Op through the same canning, freezing and drying techniques that generations past have used (well maybe not quite the same, I am being aided by modern technology like The Foodsaver).

Of course for past generations, food preservation = life preservation. Grocery stores were not the “cornucopia” they are today and were fewer and farther between. Food itself was also not able to sit on the shelf for as long as our highly-processed foods can today (go to your pantry and read the shelf life of most of the stuff in there – it’s kinda creepy). And it ‘s not just boxed/canned food, even our whole foods (like fruits and veggies) are being injected with Lord knows what to keep them “fresh” on the shelves. A friend of mine told me a story about some Kiwis she purchased at the store that sat in her fruit bowl for days without being consumed. Naturally, she thought they would be soft/turned and need to be tossed, but remarkably they were not. So she decided to conduct a little experiment. She put up a sign that read “Do not eat” and let them sit. End of story – at nearly 3 weeks old, these kiwis showed no signs of aging! My friend at this point modified her sign to read “Toxic – Stay Away”. What did she do with them? I have no earthly idea. I may have spread them on my face to see if I could stop the aging process, but likely she just shot and buried them in the back yard.

So as I share more on our quest, stay tuned for food preservation adventures to come from our farmhouse kitchen (and for those (smart asses) who know me well, yes, I do know how to can and have done it before. I learned the same way I’ve learned most anything useful – from my Grandmother and my Mother :).
Wow…this made me really hungry…