After Novella Carpenter’s critically acclaimed memoir Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer came out, she and friend Willow Rosenthal, the founder of West Oakland gardening nonprofit City Slicker Farms, started talking about compiling a manual on urban gardening. “We always got these random emails like, ‘My chickens aren’t laying anymore!’” says Carpenter. So she and Rosenthal joked that they should write a book so they could reply: “Buy the book!”

Three years later, they can. Their new book, The Essential Urban Farmer, is a 500-page nuts-and-bolts guide to farming in the city–complete with sample garden designs, detailed illustrations, and photos of rabbit genitalia. Rosenthal, who is also a Waldorf School teacher and runs a small CSA in Berkeley, wrote the first two sections of the book: “Designing Your Urban Farm” and “Raising City Vegetables and Fruits.” Carpenter wrote the section called “Raising City Animals.” With advice on how to fix a chicken’s prolapsed “vent,” and a detailed how-to on eviscerating a chicken, it’s not for the squeamish. But then, neither is raising livestock.

I talked to Carpenter and Rosenthal recently about the guide, and got some tips about  how to create a thriving urban farm.

Willow Rosenthal

Why did you write this book?

Carpenter: We were both trial-and-error urban farmers. We would’ve loved to have had a guidebook that showed us best practices. So this is the book that we wished we’d had when we were starting out.

In the intro, you write that the average urban backyard can grow all the fruit and veggies for one person in 25 x 40 feet, and that it makes economic sense to garden if you have more time than money. Is this book geared, in part, towards low-income readers?  

Carpenter: Yeah, definitely. I’m low-income, Willow is probably low-income, too. People are like, “You should eat organic food,” but when you go to Whole Foods or the farmers’ market, it’s so expensive. So this was our DIY way to eat organic, healthy food. If you do it right, it can be cost effective.

Rosenthal: I wouldn’t say that it’s only geared towards low-income people, but toward people who are interested in making their own solutions. It’s not going to be as useful for people who want to purchase everything at the garden store or hire other people to do work in the garden. To make an impact on the way that the food system is structured for environmental good, it’s necessary for people of all walks of life to grow food in the city.

What mistakes did each of you make early on in your respective urban farms that you hope to prevent others from making with this book?

Carpenter: Well, I remember that Willow and I had built a chicken shed and we were raising pullets (adolescent chickens) and we didn’t realize that raccoons are really smart. They can use their little fingers to pry off staples (which we’d used to staple the chicken wire to the chicken shed). Over the course of four days, the raccoon would slowly pry off more. And then one night, it came in and killed every single pullet–I think there were 25 in there. It was massive carnage. The lesson here was don’t put the staples on the outside.

In terms of the garden, I would say my problem is not harvesting stuff. You can plant all these really beautiful vegetables and there’s a tendency to not want to harvest them because they look so beautiful. You need to have a harvest day, like Fridays or Thursdays, where you go out into the garden and harvest everything that’s ready and put it in your fridge. I can’t emphasize how genius this is.

Rosenthal: What mistakes didn’t I make?  (Laughter.) Farming is a process of trial and error. Each farm is its own unique entity. You do need to find your own way. Plants are always gonna die and you’re going to have to figure that out.

Rosenthal: Many landlords have an altruistic streak. When presented with something to do for the community that’s no skin off their back–they’re happy to do it. I think we tend to make a lot of assumptions about who people are. But it’s important to have an open mind. Maybe two out of 10 landlords don’t care at all about the community. But there are eight who do, so let’s get those people involved. You’re politicizing them in a way–you’re bringing them into this activist movement.

[Another] real perk is your thanks! I know that sounds cheesy, but you should focus on informing the landlord of what’s going on and thanking them. The mistake some people make is, “I got permission and now I can forget about it.” It’s a relationship you need to cultivate and not take for granted.

Starting an urban farm demands a lot of work–not to mention money. You need to pay for water, buy liability insurance, equipment, wood and nails for raised beds, maybe even hoop houses. Are there funds would-be gardeners can apply for if they don’t have enough of their own money?

Carpenter: If you’re doing a community garden, you can approach your city government. Pretty much every city has a community garden association. I know in Seattle it’s the P-Patch.

Rosenthal:  There are a couple of important resources. Master Gardener programs exist in every county in the United States–they are a subset of the agriculture extension services run by local universities. The USDA spends money through these agencies to support farmers. They were intended to support primarily commercial farmers. But this is changing as people in urban areas are actually using those services more. I always tell people, this is your tax dollars at work and you have every right to utilize them!

If you have a pest, you can take a sample of the plant and put them in a baggie and send them to a specialist and they will ID that for you–for free.

In some states, like California, you can now get services through the [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)] program to help you start a home garden. You can use food stamps for all sorts of special vouchers for gardening supplies.

Regional and citywide organizations can often provide a lot of technical assistance. Some of them may provide materials free of charge–City Slicker Farms does. The other way that home gardeners can make it affordable is by producing their own vegetable seedlings. When you go to the store to buy a cauliflower seedling and it’s $3 for a six-pack, you’re hardly saving money on your food bill. But if you’re buying a packet of seeds–100 seeds for two bucks. In our book we give an outline of a simple setup for using fluorescent lighting to start seedlings indoors.

Novella Carpenter with her goats.

The book does contain many tricks for saving money on construction: getting softwood pallets for free to use as compost bins or boxed beds, using old bathtubs as containers. What are some other tricks the two of you have used over time to save money on construction supplies?

Carpenter: One of the greatest fencing materials is really cheap: concrete reinforcement mesh.  But you can buy this mesh at any Home Depot or local lumber yard and it’s $12 for a giant sheet of it. You can use it for making quick and easy fences. It’ll even keep goats in!

Also for me, one of the great parts of living in a city is there is so much waste that you can feed to animals. You [also] never have to buy pots. You can usually find those at garden stores–they’re trying to get rid of the black plastic pots.

I found this guy who makes redwood sculptures of giant grizzly bears. And he has all these scrap pieces of redwood that he throws aside. I actually built a little chicken coop from those once. So you have to look at your resources and think how you can repurpose [them into] building materials.

Rosenthal: Get your building materials for free or cheap, but invest money in hardware. If the bolts that hold your boxes together are rated for outdoor use your boxes will last a long time.

In terms of getting free building materials: I was blessed because here in the East Bay we have a wonderful company called the ReUse People. They salvage whole houses–including a lot of the framing lumber–and they sell it for a very affordable price, already cleaned of nails and screws. So check your salvage yard.

Extremely valuable materials go into the garbage, such as hardwood pallets. Softwood pallets, unless you line them with something, can degrade pretty quickly. Hardwood pallets are an amazingly valuable resource.

My other favorite free material is old burlap sacks. They’re great containers for planting. They’ll degrade over time but they’re free and have structure to them. You can get them at coffee roasters or chocolate companies. A lot of times you can find them on Freecycle.org.

I was surprised to learn that you can farm on heavy-metal contaminated soil.  Have either of you done that? And if so, which precautions did you take?   

Rosenthal: There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to health, toxicity, and safety. Rather than saying “do this or just do that,” our hope is to educate people so they can make their own decisions.

With our backyard garden program at City Slicker Farms, the first thing we do is go into a resident’s garden and test their soil for lead and heavy metals. There were some situations where we said, “No, we don’t think you should have vegetable gardens unless we cap the soil and put in raised beds.” We follow stringent guidelines with people.

First we cover the soil with mulch–or put down layers of cardboard and mulch. Dilution has an effect. If you bring in an equal volume of compost and mix that in with your soil, you’ve already cut the level of lead in half.

You say that native soil is better than potting soil, but what if your soil has chemicals or toxins in it?  Where do you go about getting healthy native soil to amend your own?   

Rosenthal: That’s a good question. We live in such an “I can just buy whatever I need” culture. And a lot of the potting soil is actually toxic to plants.

It’s possible to get topsoil. You can sometimes go on Craigslist and find people who are doing construction projects and need to get rid of some dirt. But often they’re like, “We need to dump it today.” And you should take a sample to the lab and test it before you buy it.

You can buy topsoil, potting mix, and compost. But you want to be sure they’re testing these products. Talk to the employees at locally-owned gardening centers. They often know a lot about what different potting mix companies are doing. Not all materials are equal. Making your own compost is a great way to get a high quality product.

What about theft? A friend of mine in Portland recently had all of her (perfectly ripe) persimmons stolen from their backyard. Any tips on how to deal with this? 

Rosenthal: It does happen. My strategy has always been to try to communicate with these unknown people. It’s easy to victimize a faceless person, but if you put a sign on the front of your fence saying, “Hey, I know you might be tempted by these beautiful tomatoes, but if you want some, why don’t you just come knock on my door and I’d be happy to share.”

We are living in desperate times. It’s up to all of us to do what we can to help and not to take it personally. What we did at City Slicker Farms, we did have to lock our gardens at night so they wouldn’t get vandalized. So we just set up planter boxes outside of them and put up signs saying “Help yourself.”

Novella, you emphasize how important it is to check your city’s ordinances to see whether it’s legal to keep bees, chickens, goats, rabbits, etc. Can you say more about that?

Carpenter: Oakland has kind of lax laws and the ordinances were ambiguous. For instance, I can have goats but I can’t have a male goat. I think actually you can’t have pigs, it’s buried into some weird law. I think it’s legal in Portland to have goats. It is in Seattle as well. In the book, we’re talking about super ground-level things like, it’s illegal to keep chickens in some cities. But then it becomes a question of who is watching those laws. If you had a neighbor that doesn’t like you, who is calling the city every day to report you, that’s when you’re gonna run into a problem. In that case, you  want to cover your ass and make sure that you’re legal.

You say that bees are the “gateway urban farm animal.” Yet it sounds like it’s a fairly expensive operation. What’s the ballpark amount you spent buying hives, supplies, extractors, etc.? 

Carpenter: To get a beehive with bees and the queen and all that, you’re looking at $250. So, it is definitely a fairly nice Christmas present or birthday present. Or for some people, it’s a really nice pair of shoes. There are ways to do it more cheaply. If you’re handy, you can make your own frames. You can build your own boxes. But I’ve found that usually anything that I build is shit. I spend more money being frustrated.

To me, $250 seems expensive, but when you harvest your honey, you get six gallons, and you can sell it for $15 for half a quart or pint. And those boxes will last forever.

You write that overfeeding is one of the biggest problems with backyard chickens–people give them scraps and kitchen waste but then forget to reduce the amount of pelleted feed. And as you mention, overweight chickens not only have trouble laying eggs, they can die prematurely. What’s a general rule of thumb for how much chicken feed to give a full-grown chicken per day?

Carpenter: Some people think of their chickens as their pets. That’s fine if you can afford to—you can buy scratch and hydrated mealworms. You can really go crazy with snacks for the chickens!  But each chicken needs about a handful of feed a day. So it’s not a huge amount.  You supplement with greens, weeds, grass, and they’ll be totally healthy and fine.

You say rabbits are the new chickens. Is that really true? I’m not a vegetarian, but I just can’t get past the notion of slaughtering a bunny.

Carpenter: There is a pretty big trend of people who are new meat eaters and they want to raise their own turkeys and chickens and now rabbits. They can save money and have this great source of low-fat, hormone-free meat. Some people just use their manure, though. It’s so good and they poop so much!  It’s really balanced–not super high in nitrogen. I know a guy who grows a bucket of rabbit poop and sells it for $10 to people who grow marijuana.

Which animal was the most rewarding for you to raise/keep?

Carpenter: You love them all for different reasons. But the animals I will have forever are bees. Bees are so giving. And I bought all that expensive equipment, so I better keep at it! There’s also just something so amazing about bees. They are such hard workers and you have this connection to the seasons that is really intense.

Originally published on Grist

When I was an intern in Santa Fe, New Mexico a thousand years ago, my mother sent me a three-page letter (yes, a letter. It was that long ago).  Worried that her underpaid intern son might be starving in the desert, she wanted to pass along her wisdom on how to cook and eat on the cheap.  It was called “Good Old Mom’s Three Days on One Chicken and Other Depression Folklore.”  It kept me fed that long hot summer and later became a family treasure.

I was reminded of it recently when I had the opportunity to read An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler.  Ms. Adler has certainly made her bones as a cook, having worked in such legendary establishments as Chez Panisse in Berkeley and at Prune in New York.  It may have been there, under James Beard award-winning chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton that she found her voice as a writer.  Hamilton after all is not only among the most talented chefs in New York, but is also the author of the widely acclaimed memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter–a must-read itself.

An Everlasting Meal is part memoir, part cookbook, and part self-help manual for all who wish to cook better with less; and these days, who is not among that group?  She points out, for example, that “Minestrone is the perfect food. I advise eating it for as many meals as you can bear, or that number plus one.”

The book is full of that kind of clever phrasing. Adler clearly shares my fondness for MFK Fisher, and can channel her at will, it seems.  Her writing is never pedantic, never preachy, always smart, descriptive, and leisurely.  It is as practical as the recipes she includes.

Her recipe for the classic Italian peasant soup is simple and uses lots of ends and bits, like Parmesan rind and the end of a good piece of hard salami.  These and many other ingredients are simmered “45 to 60 minutes, until everything has agreed to become minestrone.”

Adler reminds us that “Some vegetables are persistently underrated.”  Here I’d have listed turnips, but she looks toward ones we take for granted, like onions and celery, and finds both comfort food–onion soup–and less common dishes like celery poached with lemon and topped with a handful of breadcrumbs.

There is good food to be had in the barest of pantries, Adler assures us, if we are resourceful enough and know the basics of how to cook.  In a chapter entitled “How to Weather a Storm,” we find recipes for chickpeas with pasta, spicy green beans, and fish cakes made from canned salmon or mackerel.  There’s even one called Salad for a Natural Disaster, made of ingredients she found in a chef’s earthquake kit, presumably while in the Bay Area.

Perhaps most helpful for the frugal but passionate cook is the inclusion of an appendix subtitled “Further Fixes,” where we learn two dozen or so suggestions for what to do when things have gone wrong.  Meat a little dried out?  Make crispy lardons.  Chicken undercooked?  Remove it from the bones, simmer in butter and chicken stock and toss with egg noodles.  Curry too spicy?  Eggplant too salty? Rice or lentils overcooked?  Adler includes fixes for them all.

In a time when we can all appreciate the value of frugality in the kitchen, when each of us can ring a wry smile from the Tuscan proverb she quotes: Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio (“We were better off when things were worse”), it is refreshing to know that with just a little effort, and a lot of love, delicious healthy meals are waiting to be awakened from their slumber in the back of the pantry.

Bi-Rite Market is a well-known San Francisco grocery store located on 18th Street, just down the block from Tartine Bakery and Delfina Restaurant. Across the street, Bi-Rite Creamery is equally famous and if you ever get a craving for salty caramel ice cream, plan on standing in line, a very long line. (Even if it’s foggy and 54 degrees and you’re wearing sweaters and scarves, you will stand in line.)

So what’s a grocery store in San Francisco doing with a cookbook and why should you care? Take a peek at that lovely cake pictured and then read on for my review.

At first glance it may seem like Eat Good Food is for Bay Area shoppers only. After all, its co-author, Sam Mogannam, is a San Francisco native who is a second generation owner of a San Francisco grocery store, as well as a farm in Sonoma County. The book itself is loaded with pictures and profiles of hyper-local Northern California farmers, producers, and suppliers. This makes sense, since the Bi-Rite Family (there is also a second store in the works, as well as an ice cream store and a community center) is solidly built on a commitment to local foods and creating community and connections. But does Eat Good Food have any relevance for people who don’t live in the Bay Area? In my opinion, the answer is yes. Absolutely.

Eat Good Food‘s subtitle, “A Grocer’s Guide to Shopping, Cooking, and Creating Community Through Food,” pretty much sums up what this book is about. Every aspect of the grocery shopping experience is represented here in nine chapters: Community, Grocery, Deli, Produce Department, Butcher Counter, Dairy Case, Cheese Department, Bakery, and Wine and Beer.

Within each chapter the specific foods that can be found in these departments are thoroughly covered, each with a How to Buy, How to Store, and How to Use section. There are even boxes that cut to the chase with “At the Very Least, Look For” and “Ideally, Look For” pointers. This acknowledges that the ideal is not always available in your average grocery store, but still, it’s good to know what it is.

There are also sections that zero in on items such as canned fish, preserves, varieties of apples, etc. My favorite is a page that pictures 18 kinds of citrus; from large pomelo grapefruits to tiny mandarins, it’s great to finally know the names and characteristics of some of the more obscure varieties. The full-color pictures throughout the book illustrate recipes, cuts of meat, farmer’s in their fields, shots of the store and, most memorably, a group shot of the 80 plus employees that help to run Bi-Rite. (Sam says it’s now over 100.)

There are also dozens of recipes such as Curried Coconut Sweet Potato Mash; Brussels Sprouts Salad with Pistachios and Warm Bacon Vinaigrette; Moroccan Lamb Meatloaf; Grilled Pimenton Leg of Lamb with Cucumber Raita; Grilled Peaches with Blue Cheese and Hazelnuts.

So who is this book for? It’s for people who want to know how to navigate their grocery store as informed participants in their food systems; it’s for your nephew or daughter who are just starting out on their own and need some guidance; it’s for people who want to eat better but aren’t sure how; it’s for schools and church groups and community centers that want to teach children about good food; it’s for people who believe that going to the grocery store does not have to be an anonymous, impersonal event, that it can actually can be fun. If you love to eat good food, then this book is for you.

When I lived in San Francisco, I couldn’t always afford to shop at Bi-Rite but I would treat myself to a few meals from there on occasion. I would go when I was hungry but I didn’t quite know what I was hungry for. I knew that the food at Bi-Rite would answer that hunger in a way that was deeply satisfying and nourishing on many levels. From the beautiful display of flowers out front to the helpful and friendly staff, I didn’t have to worry if what I was purchasing was fresh or delicious or raised in a sustainable way. If it came from Bi-Rite, it was going to be good. This book captures that spirit and takes it out into the larger world and, hopefully, it will find its way into your kitchen where it will inform, encourage, and inspire you to Eat Good Food.

I buy local and organic food as much as possible, but find that not only do I have to force myself to eat vegetables, but I lack enough ways to cook them besides the handy but boring steaming and stir frying. Many farmers’ market patrons and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members have a similar problem. However, Basics with a Twist (available here), by Kim Sanwald, has truly inspired me to transform my own cooking with the same zeal and enthusiasm as blogger and author Julie Powell had when she cooked her way through Julia Child’s classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

As a truck farmer at Brickyard Farms in southwestern Michigan, Sanwald and her partner, Valerie Lane, grow 17 varieties of tomatoes, seven varieties of potatoes, hard garlic, three varieties of beets, seven varieties of carrots as well as different greens including collards, kale, Swiss chard, and spinach.

The five-and-a-half acre farm’s success is attributable to the production of fresh, flavorful vegetables grown in good clay soil that has “some amazing minerals” to enhance their “shocking taste.”  This is all done without chemicals or sprays, although the farm is not certified organic.

Last year Sanwald and Lane grew 4,800 tomatoes from 1,500 plants and from 650 seed potatoes, they harvested 7,000 pounds.  Their market customers couldn’t get enough!

In the book, Sanwald takes readers through the growing season by focusing on the farm’s most popular vegetables: Garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and beets. She provides tried and true recipes for salads, soups, stews, sauces, dressings, casseroles, and side dishes that go well with various meats. They make your mouth water just reading them.

But the book is more than a cookbook. It is also a memoir of Sanwald’s complete change of life after 36 years as a manager of a dental office in the city to become a truck farmer–a farmer growing a diverse range of vegetables on a small scale, often sold from truck to consumers or to restaurants–in rural Cloverdale.

Sanwald first started working on the farm in 2007 when she and a group of friends came to Lane’s aid after her partner, Cate Burke, had died unexpectedly from a blood clot at age 46.  Lane had purchased the farm in 2001 after leaving a career as a building and remodeling contractor.

Being close to the land and close to her source of food awakened something in Sanwald despite the fact that the work is hard and dirty and the days are long.

One day as she was harvesting kale she suddenly broke down in tears realizing that she was connecting to the earth in a deeply spiritual way.

“I’m home,” she said.  “I felt like I had arrived.”

Doing what others encouraged or expected her to do had made her unhappy and depressed through most of her life. She found happiness, however, by growing food. Today, she said she rejects hair coloring, make-up and stylish clothes, things that once held great importance for her.  She has also reduced her weight by 30 pounds and two dress sizes.

“I feel better,” she said, “And the better I feel, the more I want to do this work.”

Basics with a Twist shows readers what can happen to a person through greater attention to food.  Ever the cook, Sanwald expresses her appreciation for the aesthetic pleasures of food that is flavorful, healthy, homegrown, home-cooked—and shared with others around a table.

The whole project came about because Sanwald found herself giving out hundreds of recipes to customers at the Fulton Street Farmers’ Market in Grand Rapids, where Brickyard Farms is a vendor. Lane suggested she put the recipes together in a book, however, Sanwald was anxious to write about what her new life as a truck farmer meant to her.

“The book is a validation of who we are and who I am,” she said. “I love to write and cook. It’s my creative outlet and this book stretched me and my learning process. By combining both of these things, I am able to help others as well.”

She has plans to write a second book that encourages people to grow their own gardens.

The book also includes a resource list for people looking for information about self-sustaining and organic methods of farming and gardening as well as commentaries on the local food movement and environmental issues.

A version of this piece was originally published on olgabonfiglio.blogspot.com

Unless you travel in food policy or agronomy circles, you probably haven’t heard of Oran Hesterman. It’s time you had.

Hesterman, who runs the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based nonprofit  Fair Food Network, has written a book that just might wake you up and get you to care about what’s going on with the food you eat and how it gets to your table.

Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All is what Hesterman is talking about, and I’ve got to admit, this reporter covering food news cracked open his book (which landed in bookstores yesterday) a tad wary.

Would this highly educated and well-meaning agronomist-activist guy really offer anything new to the sustainable food conversation, I wondered, and more importantly, would he speak to regular people trying to feed their families in a tough economy and who might not understand the difference between grass and grain-fed (or why it matters)?

Boy was I wrong and thrilled to stand corrected. Hesterman breaks free from a tradition of densely written, muddled prose intended for inside baseball players and instead speaks to us all, loud and clear.  On the opening page of the book, he starts from a familiar point of reference–that our education, health care, financial and energy systems are all deeply troubled and in need of dramatic reform.  (No matter which side of the political fence one sits, no one would dispute that America is hobbling on these four fronts, all of which make daily headlines.) He is clever to point out that as we focus our attention on the ongoing debates over health care or financial reform, “there is another system that gets much less attention than it deserves, even though we all rely on it to keep us alive–if we are lucky, three times a day: our food system.”

And then he takes us straight to Detroit, America’s eleventh largest city and erstwhile mecca of the automotive and music industries, which has been without a supermarket since 2007.  (Take a moment to absorb that stunning tidbit.)  If you’ve been scratching your head over what a “food desert” means, here you go.

And if you’re wondering why you should care, a la “not in my backyard,” Hesterman’s got that covered, too. “Even those of us who live in ‘food oases’ and have enough money to buy virtually any food product from any place in the world are living with the fallout of a broken system,” he writes.

It’s a bleak picture alright and arguably depressing. But, I applaud Hesterman for keeping it real and shouting from the rooftops that yes indeed our food system is broken. If you read just the first 50 pages of the book, you will get your money’s worth because it succeeds (where so few others do) in explaining what in the hell is going on every time we chew and how we are all affected, regardless of our wallet size, politics and geography.

Lest you think the book is one big downer, Hesterman quickly shifts gears and proposes solutions for a redesigned (yep you got it) “Fair Food” system that operates on a guiding principle of equal access to healthy food. “In truth,” Hesterman writes in chapter three, “Equal access to healthy food will do more to level the playing field than anything we might change in our health care system.”

And this may be where some of us, new to the conversation, may wander to the list of resources (which is thorough and vast) or skip to the how-to “From Conscious Consumer to Engaged Citizen” chapters.  For the more fluent and well versed, there’s a chapter on public policy and another on the power and influence of big business and its role in the food system, broken or otherwise.

In short, Fair Food is like a good salad bar: You can fill your plate, or have a light snack, but whatever you decide to bite off and chew, you’ll digest every morsel.  Fair food for thought indeed.

It’s like one of those bar jokes: An ethnobotonist, an agroecologist, and a chef walk into a chile field…but there isn’t a punch line because this book is about climate change.

Thankfully, the writers of the new book Chasing Chiles manage to keep despair at bay as they carry the reader along on a fascinating journey in their van, “The Spice Ship,” visiting pepper fields all over North America to seek out iconic regional peppers and the people who grow them.

The three authors, chef Kurt Michael Friese, agroecologist Kraig Kraft, and ethnobotonist Gary Paul Nabhan, set out in The Spice Ship to learn how climate change is affecting one particular crop (chiles) in a variety of different places (parts of Mexico, the Rio Grand, Avery Island, areas of the south, and the Midwest). They investigated and documented how farmers are adjusting their growing practices to changing conditions in their fields. Each of the three brings his own perspective and unique brand of inquisitiveness to the micro-subject of chiles, providing the reader with a kaleidoscopic lens through which to view the macro subject of climate change.

The writing has a natural immediacy that made me feel as if I were listening in on their conversations with farmers, cooks, and seed savers in Sonora, Mexico, Iowa, and points in between. Some of the scenes were physically upsetting. I literally felt sick to my stomach as the three chile wranglers approached an orchard in the desert of Sonora, Mexico. They’d set out to see how the indigenous chiltepin chiles were faring a month after a severe hurricane swept through the region, and found Oscar González, whose farm had been hit without warning by a deluge that filled his well and irrigation system with sand, ruined his tractor, washed away his farmhand’s house, his chickens, and his dog, and took out more than half of his fruit.

As farmers shared details of the variability in weather patterns they must deal with in deciding when and where to plant and which traits to select for in their heroic attempts to stay one step ahead of climate change, I was struck by their tenacity in fostering diversity in their fields. If readers take one thing away from this book it should be that genetic diversity is key to protecting our food supply in the face of climate change. Variable weather conditions produce more than wholesale destruction of crops; they also produce a variety of new and unpredictable crop-killing pests and diseases. Crop variety must match these threats.

You don’t need to be a science geek to love this book. Even in the face of the dire effects of climate change, the pleasure principal is alive and well throughout the narration. All three writers are enthusiastic eaters and experiencing the chiles through meals shared with farmers and cooks along the way not only left me with tons of respect for farmers, it made me yearn for the complex, chile infused foods they were eating. Luckily the book includes recipes for dishes like Yucatecan pollo pibil, Datil Pepper sauce, pilau and carne machaca con verduras de Sonora sprinkled throughout, courtesy of Friese.

I hope the gastronomic aspects of this book get more people to read it because it’s going to take more than disturbing data about storm severity, droughts, and changing bird migration patterns to get people to make the connection between climate change and their plates. You’ve got to hit them in the gut. Now excuse me while I go try out the recipe on page 98 for a fiery habañero condiment called xnipek.

First let’s get one persistent canard out of the way. Yes, the tomato is technically a fruit, not a vegetable, but for purposes of economics the USDA classifies it as a vegetable, and as such it is the second most popular vegetable in the nation after that other burger staple, lettuce. This is surprising in only one respect: A vast majority of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. every year ($5 billion worth), are devoid of the flavor and nutritive value they once had.

Sure, that plant your neighbor gave you that’s just beginning to enjoy the summer heat will produce lots of delicious, succulent tomatoes come August or September. But in his new book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit, two-time James Beard Award-winning journalist Barry Estabrook tells us why the modern factory-farmed tomato in most grocery stores is a poster child for nearly everything that is wrong with industrial agriculture.  A recent USDA study, he points out, says that the average tomato of today, the kind on your Whopper or Taco Bell taco, has “30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s.  But that modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one respect: It contains 14 times as much sodium.”

This is because the tomatoes grown in the fields in and around Immokalee, Florida, where nearly one third of the tomatoes consumed in the U.S. are grown, are bred for one thing and one thing only. And it’s not flavor, and it’s not nutrition. It’s shipability, period. To qualify as grade A in that department, it needs to be a specific size, and a specific shape, and it needs to be picked while still green and rock hard. In fact, Estabrook relays a story of nearly losing control of his car as it was pelted with the tough green orbs bouncing off the back of a tractor-trailer on a Florida highway. The fruits hit the pavement at 60 mph and rolled to the gravel shoulder unscathed.

That truck was likely headed to one of the many enormous warehouses in the area, which “force-ripen” the fruit by smothering them with ethylene gas. This process does make them red, but it does not truly ripen them. Thus the sugars are nowhere near as developed as the ones in your back yard will be and the result is the mealy pink baseballs in your grocer’s produce section right now.

Our enormous appetite for having pretty much any food available to us at anytime of year has led to a system where yes, you can have a tomato in February, but the cost is a lot more than the $1.25/lb you’re likely to pay at your local Wal-Mart.  It comes at the cost of enormous environmental damage and shocking worker abuse. It utilizes thousands of migrant workers, some of whom are undocumented, and many of whom live and work in literal slave conditions. And since the muggy lowlands of Florida are not native habitat, a tomato plant there can fall victim to as many as 27 separate insect species and 29 different diseases, necessitating a plethora of chemicals that are as hard on the workers and the land as they are on the pests. Then there’s the 31 different fungicides in use. The list goes on.

Tomatoland is based on Estabrook’s James Beard Award-winning 2010 article “The Price of Tomatoes,” and is an in-depth investigation of what’s wrong with the modern tomato (and by extension, modern agriculture).  It is vital information that every conscientious eater–and parents of eaters–ought to know.  Hopefully, as more people read the book, they will begin to look beyond price, and start considering cost.

The life of a farmer is hardly mundane. There is constant work, little time off, and yet the seemingly homebody, non-lucrative career choice certainly isn’t short on hustle and bustle. As someone who is by no means a farmer, more a macro-gardener who tries to make some extra income from our one-acre excess, I am doubly impressed with Lynda Hopkins’ The Wisdom of the Radish. Her ability to balance life’s components makes her head first dive into the hardships of organic farming particularly triumphant especially since she has written a book to prove it.

Like any good story, this one begins with a love affair. A young, idealistic couple fresh out of grad school fall in love. They travel, dream, and come up with a wild vision for getting their hands dirty in a meaningful way: they move back to the boy’s hometown of Healdsburg, California and start a small farm. So begins Foggy River Farm and the real work that ensues.

The Wisdom of the Radish may seem like another utopian Northern California tale of happy harvests and sparkling sunshine, but in fact, Lynda Hopkins’ earnest, genuine writing tells a story of struggle. Yes, the two farmers are in a rare position of privilege (Emmet’s dad let them live and farm on part of his vineyard), and yes, they have been taught to value theoretical and actual possibilities for change in our broken food system. But the way in which Hopkins captures their learning curve, fully re-counting failure after failure, resentments and bitterness, speaks to the truth of strenuous labor and the commitment one must secure toward a challenging mission.

This book is also not just a personal story. The recounted experience is backed by thorough research, financial and historic data, and social commentary. Hopkins received a BA in creative writing and an MS in environmental science. She delivers her personal narrative with an amazing blend of research, journalist savvy, tender integrity, and humor.

At times, her graphic descriptions can be jarring. In writing about chicken slaughter, Hopkins skillfully reminded me why I don’t care to eat meat. Maybe the power of this section stems from her affinity for science or her argument for getting face-to-face with your food choices. As Hopkins was vegan up until raising her own chickens, she raises a solid point for debate and offers insight on many more in Radish: our current food valuation system, social accessibility, “organic” pesticide use, to name a few.

Ultimately, a reader who has dug into her own backyard garden and has uncovered some of the many challenges that come with farming, will find this book intriguing for its truthful portrayal of real life. But just because I can relate to the idiocy of massive labor output for little return (see “corn drying project”), I enjoyed The Widsom of the Radish for its personal evolution and solid evidence for why we all should keep fighting for the things that matter to us.

For most of us working in food policy, it’s hard to remember a time when food outbreaks of bugs like E. coli didn’t happen pretty much weekly. But reading the new book Poisoned by Jeff Benedict made me realize that bacteria-contaminated hamburgers are a relatively recent phenomenon; a striking reminder of how our food system has gone very, very wrong.

Given that the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak happened back in 1993, it seems odd that no one has written a book about it before. But it’s just as well, because Benedict’s style is tailor made to the task. His detailed and heart-wrenching story-telling makes the 18-year wait well worthwhile.

Each chapter tells the tale from the varying perspectives of several key players: From the parents of the victims, to the corporate executives, to the lawyers on both sides of the inevitable spate of lawsuits. But instead of relying on the past tense to tell their respective stories, Benedict chooses a novel-like style, with events unfolding in “real time.”

Within just a few pages, the reader is swiftly taken from the bedside of nine-year-old Brianne Kiner suffering from a bacteria-induced coma, to the office of Jack in the Box CEO Robert Nugent, wondering if the company would survive this PR disaster, to the laboratory of Dr. John Kobayashi, epidemiologist in the Washington State Health Department, where test results confirmed the source of the deadly contamination and how he decides to go public to prevent more victims.

The result is a fast-paced, incredibly readable, even if at times a tad overly dramatized, story. (Although, it is hard to overstate tragedy when it comes to the death of children.)

The author keeps coming back to one key player’s story: Personal injury attorney Bill Marler, a name familiar to anyone who keeps up on food safety. But in 1993, Marler, like most other Americans, never even heard of E. coli. When the news hit that contaminated fast food burgers were causing scores of admissions to Seattle hospitals, Marler’s career path was set into motion.

Since then, Marler Clark (“The Food Safety Law Firm”) has represented thousands of victims of foodborne illness outbreaks. But far more than a plaintiff’s firm, Marler and his colleagues also advocate for better food safety laws. (For example, last year Marler begged Congress to “Put a trial lawyer out of business” by increasing FDA’s authority and scope, was finally did happen.)

Two aspects of this disaster stood out as particularly startling from a food policy perspective. At least a year prior to the outbreak, Washington State had issued new regulations requiring restaurants to cook its hamburgers to a higher temperature than was required by federal law. But somehow that detail was missed by someone at Jack in the Box. (The quality control executive who blamed himself for not knowing about the new rule actually comes off as sympathetic, as do other employees.)

The other startling fact was that the federal government (USDA and CDC) had known for at least 10 years prior to this case that E. coli could be transmitted through hamburgers. Two outbreaks linked to “undercooked meat” from “the same fast-food restaurant chain” causing multiple illnesses were reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1983, and yet the public was unaware of this incident (which occurred in 1982). That chain was McDonald’s. While it’s obvious why the company didn’t want this information to be made public, executives apparently didn’t even bother to share it within their own industry. Jack in the Box’s CEO lamented that had he known, his company might have taken additional precautions.

To its credit, Jack in the Box subsequently hired a meat safety specialist to implement stepped-up “quality assurance” measures. Also, the company did not put up much of a fight in court. To the contrary, Jack in the Box (through its insurers) ultimately paid out record-breaking settlement amounts, thanks in large part to some very gutsy negotiating by Marler.

Another aspect of the book that was especially revealing was the inside story at Jack in the Box. You might expect the executives to be painted as the bad guys, but that’s hardly the case. These are just ordinary business men caught up in an awful mess, doing their best to figure out what went wrong.

As for who was to blame for the outbreak in the first place? While it was traced to a beef supplier to Jack in the Box, those details are not entirely clear and this was the one area where the book was lacking. We now know that such outbreaks are due mainly to factory-farms that create unsanitary conditions for animals, spurred by widespread distribution and lack of oversight.

But the heart and soul of the book lies with the victims and their families. When the damage was done, four children were killed and hundreds more sickened. No amount of settlement money could compensate for those losses and the author could only tell a small fraction of their actual suffering.

While the book’s subtitle (“The True Story of the Deadly E. coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat”) may be overly optimistic, Poisoned is an extremely important account of a heart-breaking story; one that unfortunately continues to be repeated all too often.

Originally published on Appetite For Profit

“Oregonians tend to be tough, hard-headed, and slightly insane,” writes Katherine Cole in her new book, Voodoo Vintners: Oregon’s Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers. Characteristics like these explain what makes Oregon so suited to play host to a growing number of biodynamic wineries. Cole, a Portland resident and wine columnist for The Oregonian, tackles her subject with welcome humor and a light touch which make for an informative and highly readable book. Her focus is mostly on Oregon, but the book also touches on biodynamics in California and France. 

Taking on the role of reporter, Cole chronicles a number of notable figures within Oregon’s biodynamic wine world–many of which veer far from the beaten path. Several of the vineyards profiled were established by immigrants whose choice to grow biodynamically suggests a link between today’s viticulture and long-established Old World agricultural traditions: plant and herb based remedies, compost, and crop calendars based on the position of the stars and the moon.

At a glance, biodynamic agriculture is not so different from organic. Both require farmers to avoid chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But unlike organic farmers, biodynamic growers rely on a repertoire of earthy–some say witchy–mixtures, known as “preparations,” which must be stirred according to exacting instructions, and then sprayed on the vineyard’s vines. Preparation 500, a “cow horn packed with the manure of lactating bovines,” needs to be buried at a depth between two and a half and five feet over the course of a winter. For another preparation (number 502), growers are instructed to stuff deer bladders with yarrow flowers and then hang them amid the vines.

Instructional preparations lead to labor-intensive practice which requires a fairly serious commitment from vintners. But hard work does not dissuade enthusiasts who believe in the basic principles of biodynamics. Describing her first impression of Jimi Brooks at Momtazi Vineyards, Cole captures a kind of spirituality that seems to come with the terrain:

The practice was so new to me then that I could have sworn there was a giant black witch’s cauldron in that shed. But really, I rather think in retrospect that it was a plain old barrel. His stirring implement was a handmade switch broom hanging from the ceiling—I think. Jimi struck me as a spiritual person, but he also had a wicked sense of humor. If biodynamics sounded like witchcraft to some people, so be it: he would make like a witch and stir his preparations with a broom.

The history of the biodynamic movement is not overlooked in Cole’s coverage of modern day vintners. Voodoo Vintners explores at length the legacy of Rudolf Steiner, whose lectures, “Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture,” provide the foundation for modern biodynamic growers. Steiner was a multi-talented doer who brought us the Waldorf school, published a book-length study of Goethe, and founded anthroposophic medicine, a discipline that focuses on homeopathic remedies and holistic healing practices like massage. But Steiner’s legacy can be as much an obstacle to a wider acceptance of biodynamic farming as it is an inspiration to advocates, in part because his lectures sometimes sound, well, insane: “In a horn you have something that can radiate life, and even astrality…If you could crawl inside the body of a cow…you would be able to smell how living astrality streams inwards from the horns.” Still for believers, biodynamic certification is offered through Oregon’s Demeter USA.

Biodynamic farming has a historic leader, modern day followers, and a certification program to legitimize the practice, and yet the concept still remains elusive and difficult to describe without lengthy explanations. “When discussing biodynamic agriculture, we struggle with a way to describe it in just a few words,” writes Cole. “It’s über-organic. It’s witchcraft farming. It’s voodoo in the vineyard. It’s all of these things, and none of these things.” The challenge in defining the term is that biodynamic represents a way of thinking more than any single practice.

The value of connectivity–that between vineyard and wine–can lead to better fruit with higher Brix levels. As a seasoned wine critic, Cole does not say outright that biodynamic makes for a better wine, but the wines she describes are often preceded by adjectives like “delicious” and “fascinating.” In a way, though, flavor is almost beside the point. A great wine may be the winery’s ultimate goal, but what motivates many biodynamic growers is harder to put a finger on: it’s spiritual. The biodynamic wine industry makes up only around five to six and a half percent of Oregon’s wine lands–just a small sliver of the state’s wine production–but given the potential for climate change to affect vineyards, greener growing practices will likely become more important in the years to come.

Old tastemakers, like critic Robert Parker, may be skeptical of the practice, but a new generation of wine lovers have emerged in recent years who are, according to Cole, “young, idealistic,” and “borderline certifiable.” Their ranks include madcap video blogger, Gary Vaynerchuk of “Wine Library TV” and the “Daily Grape” iPhone app; “poet-philosopher” wine importer, Kermit Lynch, whose small store sells a range of hard-to-find French wines; and “terroiristes,” folks vigilantly devoted to growing practices that let the soil and climate of the vineyard show through in the wine itself.

As a field report from Oregon’s thriving sustainable wine country, this book delivers. What’s more is that Cole’s book is not just aimed at wine geeks (though it will certainly appeal to them). Voodoo Vintners is an enjoyable—and necessary—read for anyone who might want to take wine in a more sustainable direction, or for those readers who would like to raise a glass to the people who are already working to make it happen.