The herbivore vs locavore smackdown

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, gardening, sustainability, vegetarian

 

Okay, I’ll just come right out and say it: The 2008 Local Food Challenge was not the transcendent experience I anticipated. Suddenly confronted with surviving on mostly starches and dairy, I gained five pounds the first week and promptly developed chronic indigestion.  Chocolate and avocados haunted my dreams.  Was it enlightening? You bet. Was it fun? No way.

On the positive side, the Challenge provided an ideal opportunity for The Perfect Man to master his techniques for making butter and cheese.  And, in the absence of spinach or broccoli, we discovered that fresh-picked kale makes a very respectable quiche. But drawbacks included large amounts of gasoline required to round up a very limited variety of veggies… and large amounts of time required to prepare basic ingredients.

I have enormous admiration for the brave souls who shepherded their entire families through the long month of local-only menus. Ang Jordan at Gulf Coast Local Food is at the top of that list, because she’s right here in south Alabama, where sustainability is a new and exotic concept. (Ask someone in Mobile if they support CSA, and they’re likely to assume you mean the Confederate States of America.)  Then there’s Cafe Mama, who writes about her local food quest in prose as spare and sweet as poetry. And Sarah Beam makes it all sound easy at Recipes for a Postmodern Planet.

Call me a curmudgeon, but my mood soured by the middle of the second week — around the time that I ran out of innovative ways to cook sweet potatoes.  When I turned to my fellow bloggers for inspiration, their posts sounded so…so… chipper. Was it possible that I was the only cranky Challenge participant, a vegetarian doing without vegetables, grumpily counting the days until the local-only pledge would finally end?

Well, bad attitude and all, I may have actually whittled away at the old carbon footprint much more than I thought — just by being a longtime herbivore. According to a study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, raising animals for food results in more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. Yikes.  But here’s the good news: even a modest reduction in meat consumption takes a big bite out of fossil energy use. 

 On Saturday, I accompanied The Perfect Man to a last-chance plant sale at Mobile Botanical Gardens. All the unsold plants left over from their annual autumn sale were offered at bargain prices. Fun! We brought home two big Bengal Tiger cannas, a new Louisiana iris for the water garden, a pot full of pineapple sage and a tiny container of the whimsical succulent my grandmother calls “hen and chicks.” Our loot is pictured below, but excuse the camera strap dangling in the upper right corner. It was early, and I needed some coffee.

 

Hmmmm…

Looking forward, looking back

                                                                      Black Swallowtail – gouache on vintage postcard      (c)Val Webb

The narrow, still space between Christmas and the New Year is a contemplative time… a chance to cast one final glance in the direction of 2007 as it trudges away over the horizon and then enjoy a brief rest while waiting for 2008 to arrive on the doorstep.

Out in the damp chill of the winter garden, the crucifers are ripening faster than we can eat them: friends and neighbors are finding themselves the recipients of bagged broccoli crowns; crinkly savoy cabbages were distributed along with Christmas gifts. I plan to test the theory that tender collard greens, consumed with blackeyed peas as a New Year’s Day meal, attract prosperity. Our cauliflower and snow peas — unhindered by the swarms of borers and chewers that plague warmer seasons — look like the pristine pictures in seed catalogs.  Ahhhh. The garden almost seems to tend itself. I love winter.

Contemplation is also the common thread connecting three books I’m reading now. The first is Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau, the great-granddaddy of simple living. It was written during Thoreau’s two-year sojourn living in his tiny, handmade cabin at the edge of Walden Pond. I’m glad I somehow missed being assigned to read this book back in my high school American Lit days, because Thoreau’s insights on community and closeness to nature would have been lost on my globetrotting teen-aged self. This is a book to be nibbled at and digested bit by bit. I enjoyed this 1845 comment on vegetarianism:

One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.

The second book is Elizabeth Gilbert’s rich and satisfying Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. It’s the fun and constantly surprising account of the author’s journey in search of life’s deepest lessons (and world-class pasta). Stitched into this crazy quilt of a travel memoir are flashes of pure insight. If this book doesn’t fill you with wanderlust, nothing will. Enjoy!

My current garden-related read is a visual feast, a kaleidoscope of scribbly botanical art goodness by Manhattan urban gardener Abbie Zabar. Her year-long illustrated journal, A Growing Gardener, is a thoughtful (and very, very colorful) account of her work to transform her apartment building’s rooftop into a garden paradise. It’s peppered with recipes, garden plans, lists of source material — lots of interesting stuff. If you happen to live in one of those unfortunate climate zones which are currently snowbound, this is some seriously inspiring fireside reading. Entertaining, too. And beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

My fifteen minutes (or three pages) of fame

“In the future, everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” – Andy Warhol

Today, amazon.com began accepting pre-orders for an upcoming book designed and edited by Dawn DeVries Sokol. The scheduled publication date for 1000 Artist Journal Pages is July 1 of next year, and three pages of the thousand are from my own personal journal. So I guess Mr. Warhol was right.

Here are the pages that were selected for inclusion in the book:

The first and second image were written about travels. The third was a critique of the three coffee houses in the little town where I lived. Inspired by a large accidental coffee ring on the right side of the page spread, it provided a first-second-third ranking with positive marks for quirky clientele and demerits for such unpardonable sins as using Hershey’s syrup to make mochas. Of course, never suspecting that anyone much would ever see the words, I had the local bookstore’s brew trailing the others in last place. Alas, no book signing events for me…

Sketchbook: Eight random things

Diane Schuller at the wonderful Sand to Glass, Word Cafe tagged me in my first-ever meme. Its rules are:
· When tagged, you must link to the person who tagged you.
· Then post the rules before your list, and list eight random things about yourself.
· At the end of the post you must tag and link to eight other people.

My tags are:

Charlotte at Casa de Charlotte della Luna

Linda at Sketched Out

Helena at Little Sketches

Robin at Bumblebee Blog

Sonia at The Psychotic Hobbyist

Jolynna at Turkey Creek Lane

Miki at Coffee Cup Club

Becca at Does it bother you if I change my title occasionally?

Plant a Row for the Hungry

 (c)2007 val webb

Roses always appear in images of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, patron saint of bakers and beggars, a courageous young woman whose feast day will be celebrated next Saturday. She was the wife of a prince, but she repeatedly defied the royal court to distribute bread to the hungry and homeless. On one such mission, a soldier stopped her in the street and angrily demanded to know what was concealed in her cloak. “I am carrying roses,” she replied. He pulled the cloak away, and to his astonishment (and probably Elizabeth’s, as well) all the bread had indeed been transformed into roses.  

I thought of St. Elizabeth today as I worked on transplanting two flats of collards, which will be grown to donate to Bay Area Food Bank. And I thought about Plant a Row for the Hungry, a creative and successful program that encourages gardeners to plant an extra row to help food banks and soup kitchens.  Since garden writer Jeff Lowenfels started PAR in 1994, participating gardeners have donated more than 10 million pounds of fresh produce.  Considering that each pound is estimated to yield four meals, those extra rows can prevent  lot of folks from going to bed hungry.

Here in the warm coastal climate zone, winter is our most pleasant growing season. Temperatures are moderate and pesky insects are scarce. The petunias that struggled through the blistering 100-degree days of July and August are growing like mad now. The broccoli is enormous, the snow pea vines rapidly ascending, the cabbages  and cauliflower expanding daily. Garlic, shallots and leeks are up. Best of all… this afternoon, the Perfect Man completed the big, new raised bed destined to house all the culinary herbs.

Hot day + Closed car = Sundried tomatoes

Right this very minute, there’s an enormous food dehydrator sitting in your driveway.

  

 Inspired by my late great-grandmother, a thrifty and innovative gardener who dried her apple crop on clean window screens inside the family car, we decided to make the best of the current heat wave and process a batch of sweet, tasty roma tomatoes.

 

 

Three hours into the operation, the  slices are drying very nicely and — as an extra bonus — the truck’s interior smells wonderful.                                                                                

Speaking of trucks, I found this one in an old sketchbook from the days when my girls were small and we were tenants on a working farm. The truck belonged to my neighbor, a gentle and ancient gentleman who was probably the most knowledgeable gardener I will ever meet.

My neighbor was also an amateur naturalist with an encyclopedic knowledge of our regional insects and wildlife. He was a frail-looking fellow and I was alarmed to look over my back fence one afternoon to see him sprawled, face down, in the cow pasture. But after wading out to him through the tall summer grass, I discovered that he was lying there very happily, absorbed in watching some particularly interesting insect activity.  I’ve never forgotten the pure delight he found in observing the orderly and unseen communities — from fire ants and webworms to scrub jays and coyotes — that lived within the woods and fields of the farm where he had been born, and had lived nearly 90 years. He was a deeply religious man — a member of a small evangelical church — and sometimes I saw him in town on Sundays, looking stiff and a little grim in a suit and tie. But I think he felt closest to his Creator when he was stretched out on his stomach with his nose just inches from the rich Alabama dirt, a witness to a thousand tiny miracles.

The good neighbor

For years, I produced and sold a line of hand-carved raku pottery tiles. One of the most popular designs was this one:

 Hundreds of tiles later, I still believe those words are true. But despite the fact that I always considered myself a very peaceable person — I mean, how could I be otherwise with a Quaker background and a cool peacemonger.com sticker on my car bumper, right? — I somehow got off on the wrong foot with our new elderly neighbor.

Maybe I was grumpy because her new home construction, adjacent to my garden plot, delayed spring planting by two critical months. And maybe I would use a gentler tone of voice, addressing my own relatives, than she uses to address hers. Then there was my tendency to take sides in some mild, business-related friction involving a family member. Whatever the causes, inconsequential as they may have been, I didn’t make any effort to bridge the gap. I just went about my business, and weeks went by.

Then, a few mornings ago, I was happily picking okra and tomatoes in the garden plot and I was in the state of peaceful well-being every gardenlover knows. Suddenly I felt a sharp pang of shame: I could carve peace platitudes into my artwork and advertise peace from my car bumper, but I had done nothing to promote peace where it begins: not between nations, but between neighbors.

I selected my biggest, ripest Ambrosia melon and cut an armload of mixed sunflowers. Five minutes later, when my neighbor opened her front door, astonishment and delight were written all over her face. Her profuse thanks — then, and again in a lovely email that arrived later that afternoon — seemed much too generous for such a modest gift. Why didn’t I do this weeks ago? It was a small gesture, but already the harvest has yielded a new friend.

If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.

If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.

If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.

If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.

If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.

• Lao Tzu (570-490 B.C.)