According to Kitchen Gardeners International, when WWII ended, backyard gardens were producing 40% of the country's vegetables. Eleanor Roosevelt had planted a victory garden at the White House to encourage the trend.

Roger Doiron wants to convince the next White House occupant to do the same, and has produced this video of tearing up the lawn in front of his own white house for a victory garden.

My own victory garden is over 1300 square feet (up from 500 last year), mostly in the form of 3 community garden plots. If all goes well, we'll have potatoes and onions to last us all winter long.

What's in YOUR victory garden?

Michael Pollan had another excellent article in the NYT this week, called Why Bother? about whether individual choices, like planting a garden, can effect social change.

Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

...

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

This reminds me of something I swear I read on You Grow Girl recently (perhaps it was somewhere else) about gardening changing one's mindset - you become a producer, not just a consumer, which is pretty subversive in a culture that's all about consuming.

Here is another interesting idea, also from the NYT. A children's shelter in Texas is preparing to care for the kids from that fundamentalist polygamy sect.

Forget bologna and white bread for lunch, too. Because the children, from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or F.L.D.S., have never eaten processed foods, the new shelter mantra is whole grains and fresh vegetables.

...

Then there is the issue of prairie dresses for the girls.

“Wal-Mart doesn’t sell them,” Mr. Downey said.

It may not matter how many of us grow a garden and feel like producers and change our "sense of dependence and dividedness" when shelters and schools only use what can be bought cheaply, whether from the government or Wal-mart.

So it seems the answers to "How do I fix my crappy food supply?" and "How do we fix our crappy food supply?" are going to be different.

Gardening season has begun, here in my little corner of Zone 5a. I finally got around to starting my tomatoes. Speaking of parties I'm late to, I also learned what a good idea Square Foot Gardening is. Where I had previously dismissed it as a silly gimmick, I now realize that it's a silly gimmick that gets you to pay attention to exactly how you're using the space in your garden. One or more of my gardens this year may be square-foot gardens.

My whole crazed what-I-did-today story is over here on my myFolia journal, if you'd like to read exactly what I'm growing.

Once again, I'm trying to grow as much of my own food as possible, but this year I think I have a chance of actually succeeding! I learned a lot last year, including how to tell the difference between weeds and tasty plants when they are still young. Also, the importance of mulching.

My husband and I are gardening three plots this year:

a 20x25 foot plot on Freese Road
a plot about half that size at the Ithaca Community Gardens
a collection of containers and raised beds in our front and back yards

Wish us luck!

I just heard the news that Cornell plans on opening a teaching winery on campus.

Cornell (located approximately in my backyard) has lots of agricultural and food production programs. I really think it's awesome that the dining halls serve milk from Cornell's dairy and cider from Cornell's orchards. There is even an apple vending machine in the plant science building, where you can buy experimental varieties of apples and leave a comment card saying what you think of them.

There's even a student-run organic farm on campus, and they used to set up a farmstand once a week right outside the building I worked in. Excellent blueberries, and garlic scapes, and even (once!) they were selling pieces of the unusual and delicious chicken mushroom.

I really have to applaud Cornell for producing so much of its own food. (The university also buys about a quarter of its food from within a 100 mile radius). Just goes to show, when you grow what you can, you end up with a lot of good stuff.

Sustainable food is expensive. Even when the price tag is right, it may be expensive to live in a neighborhood near a market or co-op (or afford a car to drive there). And have we already forgotten that a food stamp budget is $21 a week and the stamps don't even work at farmer's markets?

Bryant Terry (author, "eco-chef", etc) is trying to change that. Here's an interview with him.

In order to ensure that historically-excluded communities have access to grub members of those communities need to ask/cajole/pressure/demand that existing institutions in the communities (i.e., places of worship, community-based organizations, and the like) take the lead in creating locally-driven and community owned food systems.

In addition to people, many of these institutions have financial capital, land, and other resources. By creating community gardens, rooftop gardens, urban farms, Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), value added businesses, food buying clubs, food coops, local restaurants, and independently owned grocery stores, these institutions would not only address food injustice but also spur economic development, community beautification, youth empowerment, and a host of actions that would strengthen marginalized communities.

This week I was out driving and saw an triangular patch of land that, despite its awkward shape and location, was plowed and looked ready for planting. The sign said it was a community garden for feeding the hungry. My first thought was, Why aren't there more of these?

Sustainable food isn't sustainable if it's a luxury for the rich. That's no way for a community to live.

It's the new book by Michael Pollan. Well, not that new, but my name only just made it to the top of the library's waiting list. Here are some notes about the book (I'm terrible at writing reviews, so I wouldn't call it that) in case you're thinking of checking it out.

The book is basically an expansion of his article, "Unhappy meals," that was supposed to be a condensation of everything we know about what you're supposed to eat. The conclusion, Pollan wrote, is that we don't know much besides that we should just eat our damn vegetables. Or as he put it, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." That slogan graces the bunch of leafy greens on the front of the book.

The book is, mainly, a critique of "nutritionism", the idea that one can proscribe what to eat based on what we know about the nutrients (fat, protein, vitamins, antioxidants, fiber, ...) present in those foods.

Pollan's conclusion is that the "western diet," with its processed foods and abundant sugars, is the problem. According to early research, almost every traditional diet is healthier than what Americans and Europeans have been eating for the past century or so.

So nutritionism benefits food producers (modifying the western diet to fit the latest theories), and possibly the medical establishment (they treat the results of the western diet) when really we should perhaps ditch the western diet altogether.

So the last chunk of the book is about determining what is the diet we should subscribe to. Even many whole foods are now products of industry, both in how they're made (modern varieties of many crops produce greater yields but less density of the nutrients we can measure) and convenience and frequency (meat being available cheaply enough to be a regular part of the diet is part of why eating lots of meat, for example, doesn't quite fall under the "eat whole foods and everything will be fine" theory).

The uncomfortable conclusion is that there are no scientific proscriptions of what to eat. Previous cultures ate (a) what tasted good, (b) what their mother ate, (c) what was available. Seems like B and C are no longer reliable. Neither is A, actually, now that sweeteners, flavorings, and preservatives fool our senses.

Key quote:
"Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people. Some of [the book's recommendations] may strike you as having nothing whatever to do with health; in fact they do."

Pollan points out that food is too fast, too easy, and too cheap, saying we should go a little "backward" to a time when people spent more time and money on food, and also more time enjoying it.

This idea comes up often among slow-foodies, and the question I've gotta ask is, who's supposed to spend that time preparing it? Are we going "backward" to a time when the division of labor had a wife spend a chunk of her day on cooking and cleaning time while her husband did not? That's what seems to happen, in practice, and we need to be careful that in our quest to eat better, we're not turning back the clock on other things too.

The last section of the book is a list of rules of thumb (with explanations) that will helpfully guide you toward the healthiest foods. As Pollan puts it: "Each proposes a different sort of map to the contemporary food landscape, but all should take you to more or less the same place."

The rules include seeking out plant foods, particularly ones that come from leaves rather than seeds, and seeking out meat (if you choose to eat any) that has eaten the same things. The footnotes contain lots of juicy information and resources, like a pointer to the "Livestock's Long Shadow" report and eatwild.com.

I take issue with some of the recommendations, like not to eat food your ancestors wouldn't have recognized (God help you if your ancestors were, say, Irish) and to take a multivitamin (Doesn't all that research say that vitamins do little good outside of the plants they come from?) ... but on the whole, the recommendations are good. Buy local and get to know the farmers. Eat a wide variety of foods, both for health and for biodiversity. No good food comes from a gas station. (This brings to mind the Futurama episode where Fry bought a sandwich from a men's room vending machine at a gas station. I won't spoil the ending, except to say the episode was entitled Parasites Lost.)

Not much in this book is news to healthy locavores, but many will be startled by the major claim, that it doesn't matter what's in your food, so long as it's good food produced with health and ethics in mind. Nutrition labels, he reminds us, are an advertisement for "nutritionism" - the theory that a scientific analysis of foods' contents is the way to decide what to eat.

I saw a robin this week, which makes it official: spring is almost here. "Almost" as in "when it stops being cold and snowy," which might not be for a while.

This means it's time to start thinking about your garden (or somebody else's). What kind of garden will you grow? What will you put in it?

Will you start plants from seed? Which ones, and how much time will they need? Where will your seeds come from - a catalog? a store? last year's tomatoes?

And just as importantly, garden design. For me, I've got to decide if I'm renting a garden plot in the same spot as last year (which isn't very close to my new house), or if I'll try to get a plot in the community garden downtown, or if there's a dog-proof spot in the yard to grow a few veggies.

If you're not growing a garden, spring is still an important time to get a few things settled. Are you joining a summer CSA? When does the farmer's market open? How much longer until that darn asparagus comes out?

Of course, as I was writing this, it started snowing again. If you need some on-screen garden inspiration because you're not getting any outside, check out MyFolia (I was a beta-tester for it last fall). It's like Flickr for plants.

Alfred U, my alma mater, has eliminated trays from the dining halls. Turns out they're not the first - a quick google shows them joined by Penn State, Colby College, Saint Joseph's in Maine, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Some schools have done the trayless thing as a one-off awareness raising event; others, like Alfred, plunged in head-first. No trays, starting today, was their announcement.

The dining halls are still all-you-can-eat, but diners have to make the decision: Is this worth taking now? Is that worth coming back for?

Compare to the usual M.O. of a student at lunchtime:

"They used to come in, grab a tray, grab something from the grill, grab something from the hot line, get a couple of drinks, put a couple of cookies on their tray. Then they'd sit down," Leckie [a dining services manager] said. "We noticed huge amounts of things coming back. Half a wrap, half a burger."

And the best part - the new system actually works. Here's what they found at Alfred:

The results from two separate test dates on Alfred University’s campus were astounding: Simply by not offering trays, food and beverage waste was reduced by 30 percent, and sometimes up to 50 percent, he said.

“At Alfred University, that equates to approximately 1,000 pounds of solid waste and 112 gallons of liquid waste on a weekly basis,” he said. “That’s a significant amount of waste – more than 15 tons a year in solid waste – that we can keep from going into the county landfill.”

Sustainability in food requires looking at the whole life cycle, from production through transportation to what happens after it's served. Supposedly 25% of food cooked in the US winds up in the garbage (unsupported statistic alert) so this is not a minor issue.

The important question now is - without trays to steal, what will students use when they want to go sledding?

This one looks delicious: black bean ice cream at Too Many Chefs. As author Barrett points out, we already eat ice cream flavored with vanilla beans, cacao beans, coffee beans, and red beans - why not black beans? The ice cream is seasoned with a pinch of cumin and cayenne, and looks delicious. Just the thing to go with the local black beans I noticed in my neighborhood co-op today!

I got an email over the holidays from Scott and Ruth Parsons, spreading the word about their self-published local foods cookbook, The Healthy Gourmet. It looks like they've got some cool stuff going on in Washington state - including a personal chef delivery service (sounds delicious) and a dinner/lecture series on healthy eating.

There are strawberry festivals and pumpkin festivals and apple festivals, but few winter vegetables get any sort of community-wide recognition.

Ithaca honors the rutabaga, though, with a curling competition on the last day of the farmer's market in December. Check out the article I wrote for a local paper: Veggies Are on a Roll at Farmer's Market.

Sustainable Food Blog is on a light posting schedule until the New Year.

I'm accepting guest posts to help relieve the emptiness (on any topic relating to food and/or sustainability) - email me if you're interested.

Tompkins Weekly, a paper I write for, turned the tables last week and interviewed me for
an article about this blog and its cookbook. The writer, Anthony Hall, does a great job of explaining the issues surrounding sustainable food.

A recently-begun Cornell project will study how "buy local" initiatives affect local agriculture in upstate NY. I'm looking forward to their results.

I've been looking for some snarky sayings or images I could put on my fabric grocery bags. This site has some really cute ones, like "F#@k plastic" and the more humble "one less plastic bag".

That link comes from the Garden of Eating, which also has gift ideas, delicious looking recipes, and a great header graphic.

There is a beautiful, massive, chock-full-of-ideas post at the Ethicurean about holiday foods.

Recipe ideas include garam masala pecans, mint sugar, herb infused vinegar, breads, cookies, and more. There are also ideas for turning a local food gift into an experience (for example, accompanying a bottle of local wine with a "gift certificate" for a shared outing to the winery).

Via Get Rich Slowly: The US government's Food Stamp Nutrition Connection has a recipe finder that lets you search based on price per meal, as well as goals like "eat whole grains" or "eat more fruits and vegetables". You can also search by cooking equipment, say if you have a microwave but no oven.

The cookbook is ready! Buy it here, $9.95.

Here is the holiday shipping information, if you want to be sure to get your copy before Christmas.

I've been putting the finishing touches on the cookbook, which means that every day I manage to dirty every pot and pan we own. Today, there was one piece of kitchen equipment that was clean, and that would be the mixer bowl.

So it was a wonderful coincidence that I found Farmgirl Fare's beer bread recipe. I also had a loaf pan in the back of a cabinet that I hadn't dirtied yet today, so I was all set.

The Farmgirl recommends giving a beer bread mix, complete with loaf pan and beer, as a holiday gift. Sounds great to me. Her post lists a bunch of kitchen items that are currently on sale and would make good gifts themselves.

Speaking of gifts, Teri was kind enough to give me The Bread Baker's Apprentice for my birthday, so you can guess where my interests will wander next.