When I first lost my job, we applied for emergency food assistance. Then, when I saw how little was provided for our family of five, I went into panic mode and bought the cheapest stuff I could find: a coffin-sized crate of ramen noodle packages, a box of Cheerios as big as an ottoman. No longer did I shop for the “best”—organic, free range, all natural—I was now shopping for the cheapest.

And I was not alone in trying to negotiate this shift from affluent foodie to poverty-level mom just trying to feed her family on next to nothing. Take a look at the numbers and be startled along with me. As you can see, there was an unprecedented jump in participants in the program after the Great Recession in 2008 began. Suddenly, families who were unaccustomed to financial struggle joined the ranks of the truly needy, and we didn’t know how to shop for it! And still, after a few years of this “New Poor” culture, we are looked at with derision when we try to maintain our values as careful consumers and healthy eaters.

Thankfully, however, there are ways to make a mountain (of produce) out of a molehill (of money.)

First of all: in a genius and enlightened move, SNAP allows for the purchase of food-bearing seeds to plant in your garden, if you’re lucky enough to have room for growing (we made space for raised beds by using our defunct driveway, an irony not lost on us.) I love the optimism the government has in my ability to nurture squash seeds to fruition! If you do your homework and learn everything you can about your own climate requirements, you can successfully supplement your family’s needs. We have also had luck with an informal bartering system with our neighbors, trading our little micro-harvests to add to the variety.

Also, keep an eye out for fruit trees in your community, and work up the courage to approach neighbors. We’ve managed to incorporate loquats, Asian pears, and blackberries to supplement our own abundantly-productive fruit trees—and we get to return the generosity. Or if you want to be more official about it, register at neighborhoodfruit.com. Even if you don’t have trees of your own, you can certainly enjoy the excess of someone who may not know what to do with all those plums that ripen at once.

Until recently, we had temporarily shelved our healthy, happy habit of shopping at farmers’ markets. Though it is heartening to see the foot-hold they’re gaining in the mind of the mainstream grocery shopper (see the good news for yourself here,) farmers’ markets were something we couldn’t enjoy as a family, as they were one of the few food outlets that didn’t take SNAP EBT cards. (And still today, only one-one hundredth of a percent of food stamp dollars are spent at farmers’ markets.) In a cheering development, that seems to be changing. Locally, our biggest farmers’ market-cum-swap meet has begun taking SNAP EBT as a form of payment for fresh produce. We are able to buy organic strawberries for half of what we’ve paid in our grocery store, and I can get a chance to interact with our local agricultural producers as well.

The Women, Infants and Children program (WIC) can be another option for adding to your family’s food coffers. They offer vouchers to exchange for simple, healthy foods such as brown rice, fruit, and vegetables, though it’s important to note that the program is limited to pregnant women, nursing mothers, and preschool-age children.

Sometimes I think we are the only family at the grocery store that buys collard greens and kale. We go through the line and, inevitably, the checker has to look up the code on her laminated cheat sheet. I expect it now, and maybe I could do these long-suffering cashiers the favor of memorizing the PLUs myself. Then I top it off by paying with my EBT card. Often this makes the cashier stop making eye contact.

It’s surprising how many people will criticize your desire to buy healthy, unprocessed foods on government assistance, while they think nothing of subsidizing the nation’s dependence on medications for type-two diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other illnesses with a lifestyle component.

Further, the intentions of SNAP have changed since the inception of the program. “Healthy Food Access and Affordability: We Can Pay the Farmer or We Can Pay the Hospital” by Gus Schumacher, Michel Nischan, and Daniel Bowman Simon sheds light on the history and inter-relatedness of the WIC and food stamp (now SNAP) programs. Originally the program sought to provide the nation’s poor to access to surplus agricultural product. This benefited the farmers, and yes, through this symbiotic system, ensured that the program’s dollars would be spent on the types of food that would add to the health of our populace as a whole. Issues of autonomy and choice gained a stronghold. Government decided that the way to influence healthy eating among the nation’s food stamp recipients was best served through allowing recipients to purchase whatever they want, and relying on educational interventions to guide them to better choices, which has yielded minimal success.

Thankfully, it seems that advocates are acknowledging the failings of the past, and have begun to embrace incentives that direct federal dollars toward local agricultural products, such as providing private funds to double the worth of food stamp vouchers when spent at farmers’ markets.

In our home—in spite of our education and our commitment to organic and healthy eating—we still struggle with trying to avoid the cheap-and-easy route, especially when you can get white bread and Doritos for pennies. Sometimes, during especially stressful months—usually when it’s cold and rainy, the fruit trees are bare, and the paycheck comes in as thin and pitiful as ever—it’s tempting to just fill our family with what will satisfy their bellies. Happily, though, that happens less and less as our options for healthful fresh local foods expand. It feels good to feed your children a rainbow of colorful produce every day, and it’s satisfying that with careful purchasing, gardening, bartering, and taking advantage of enlightened new food stamp policies, we don’t have to let go of that.

This weekend, Berkeley’s Saturday farmers’ market reaches its 20th anniversary milestone. Ben Feldman is program manager for the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, a project of the Ecology Center. Previously, Feldman worked as a market manager for the Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association.

The 30-year-old lives in Albany with his wife and two young children.

The Tuesday farmers’ market began in 1987 in South Berkeley. Three years later, Saturday’s downtown market started, followed in 2004 by the Thursday market in North Berkeley.

At the height of summer some 65 farmers or food purveyors stock the three markets; in the course of a year about 100 vendors sell their edible goods. Roughly 10,000 customers a week seek out produce from small-scale, sustainable farmers they trust.

The Ecology Center also sponsors a food justice program, Farm Fresh Choice, two weekly farm stands in South and West Berkeley set up to provide pesticide-free produce at an affordable price to the city’s poorest people.

Farmers’ market vendors provide produce for two other community farm stands at Spiral Gardens on Sacramento Avenue and The Local on the UC campus.

Find out what’s in season at the farmers’ market by reading Romney Steele’s Market Reports on this site.

I spoke with Feldman at the Ecology Center’s office on San Pablo Avenue in the lead up to the celebrations, which include a series of free cooking classes courtesy of Kitchen on Fire.

Q: What are some highlights of the Berkeley Farmers’ Market?

A: We’re zero waste and plastic free. We encourage vendors and customers to use reusable bags and packaging. Unsold produce is donated to Food Not Bombs, a local free food program.

We don’t allow GMO-products in any of our markets, and the pesticides methyl bromide and methyl iodide are banned. The Thursday market is all organic.

Culturally, the markets are the heart and center of the the local food movement. They connect consumers directly with local producers.  The people selling the food make or grow the food. That’s a special link.

Q: What kind of challenges does the market face?

A: Sometimes we run into situations where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Most of our customers are well informed about produce and food matters. But some of them also have strong opinions and aren’t always willing to listen to an alternative point of view. They’ll make assumptions about some things.

Organics is a good example. Some people will only buy food that’s certified organic. But maybe if they talked with a vendor they’d find that the farmer actually grows food in accordance with organic principles but hasn’t gone through the organic certification for whatever reasons, often financial.

Some people also have strong opinions about what should and shouldn’t get sold at the market. We have people who firmly believe we should sell meat and those who think we shouldn’t. The same is true for prepared foods and raw milk.

Q: Do you have a local food hero?

A: Joy Moore of the Berkeley Food Policy Council who co-founded Farm Fresh Choice about 10 years ago. She’s made access to food for Berkeley’s under-served communities a major part of her life’s work.

Q: What’s the best part of your job?

A: Working with farmers. They work incredibly hard to bring quality food to the people of Berkeley. I’m fortunate that I get to work with a diverse and talented group of local growers who put a lot of thought and care into what they produce.

People like Carl Rosato from Woodleaf Farm who grows peaches in Oroville. What he’s able to grow in relatively poor soil is a testament to his understanding of terroir. His peaches are outstanding.  Or Annabelle Lenderink from La Tercera Farm in Bolinas. She brings an unusual variety of flavorful dried beans and greens for a relatively short period of time in the summer.

Q: What do you personally enjoy about the farmers’ market?

A: I find new things to cook with all the time that I don’t know what to do with. As a vegetarian, I’m always looking for news ways to work with produce.

Recently it was pea shoot tendrils. We have a recipe for these in our latest newsletter.  Lemongrass was another one. I learned to just put it into the rice while it’s cooking so its flavor permeates the rice. If there’s fresh garbanzos I’ll make hummus. (Editor’s note: In markets now but briefly so buy some while you can. Fresh garbanzo beans make delicious raw additions to salads.)

And I think it’s great that someone can go to the market and get all their food shopping needs met. In addition to produce and meats we sell rice, bread, flour, olive oil, beans, eggs, yogurt, ice cream, preserves, honey, herbs, fresh pasta, juice, wine and pastries.

You can make an entire meal from a trip to the farmers’ market. We want people to see it as a place where they can shop regularly for their staples and save them a trip to the grocery store.

Q: What’s missing from the market?

A: We’d like to have a vendor selling raw milk, as we have had in the past. I’d also like to see a supplier selling a large range of different kinds of dried beans, like calypso beans. I’m thinking of the kind of selection Rancho Gordo offers.

Q: Where do you go for lunch?

A: Tacos El Ray, the taco truck near Ashby at Potter and 7th Streets.  I buy vegetarian tacos. I’m a regular. They know my order.

Originally published on BerkeleySide

Growing up in the era of George Reeves (aka Superman) I confess that my secret fantasy was to fly. For years, I would dream about lifting off and soaring up into the sky. It was so real and logical – of course one day I would find a way. Back to that later.

A grueling year approaches the finish line. There’s one more weekend to go. The party’s are pretty much over. Our President has demonstrated that compromise is a survival tactic we can believe in.

Standard expectations were lowered; budgets reforecasted and adjusted again and again. Staff trimmed, perks deleted and just to make things really interesting, competition became fierce. Victories and defeats so closely mingled it is at times hard to know which is which.

Let’s call out the good – new accounts, new ideas, good stuff at the farm and inspiring teamwork. Yet there has been little elation at the approach of the annual finish line. Tired bodies, anxious for holiday escape and restoration, will trudge into the office and kitchen for a few more days. I too, have been tired, something I would never in a million years have ever admitted before. After having been soundly rebuked by the economy and the evaporation of corporate business, we are all gun shy. I have not seen cautious optimism, only guarded pessimism when talking about 2010.

At a holiday party we hosted last week, in the Great Performances kitchen for our neighbors in the Hudson Square Connection, the conversation between business owners and executives echoed similar themes – “A tough year”, “We made it”, “Who knows what new year will bring.”

Get the picture – a little hard to feel that natural optimism.
Back to flying.

Midnight last Thursday found Sam and me at the first screening of Avatar. I was hooked. It transported me to a world of incredible beauty, the fight between good and evil, the power of an individual to change the world…and the dream of flying. Manohla Dargis in The New York Times review captured the feeling the movie evoked so succinctly: “Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life…if only because we were children.”

I sailed home and into the weekend with the magic of Avatar in my head. Somehow, I had been jolted out of the realm of anxiety and pessimism – hallelujah! Suddenly, the glass was once again, half full and my own worse fears receded. Almost instantly, I saw things differently – we have some great things planned for 2010 and our company though battered, is still unbowed. We will struggle to discover where the corporate clients are hiding, but we will find them. We will work smarter, and yes, harder, but with renewed purpose and belief in each other and the projects we are committed to. We will continue to try to make a difference in the food world for everyone who wants to eat.

A happy ending: Sunday was the final New Amsterdam Market of the year. In spite of a few snowdrifts, a lot of slush and blustery winds, the stalls were filled with purveyors and buyers. We featured our Katchkie Farm products along with some amazing mulled apple cider, butternut squash soup and crispy Latkes (served with Tomato Jam). It was a beautiful day – there was old-fashioned magic in the air – that was reminiscent of markets that must have stood were we were today. The fishmongers bulged under their layers of clothing, shucking oysters and wrapping smoked fish. There were spinners with wares of soft wool and vibrant patterns. Bakers displayed sweets one only dreams about and bread makers with loaves so unusual, within hours they were sold out.

There was craftsmanship and a celebration of the season. It was the old world way of respecting ingredients by carefully and slowly making something special.

Sometime it is better to look at the world with innocence and optimism and believe that the impossible is possible. That we can solve some of the overwhelming problems we are facing be it climate change, feeding the hungry, or simply growing our businesses and achieving our own personal goals.

Who knows, it might even be possible to fly.

This piece was originally posted on Huffington Post, 12/22/09.

In June of 2008, the Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Funders (SAFSF) Annual Forum featured a closing plenary session: Cultivating Economic Sustainability. Almost every participant of this multi-day conference stayed after hours to continue the conversation sparked by this session, which explored the various economic tools — in addition to grant-making — that foundations can use to promote food systems healthy for people and the environment.

One tool that garnered quite a bit of excitement amongst the audience and panel was Program Related Investment (PRI), which several food system funders have already begun using to leverage their philanthropic dollars.

PRI is made out of the 5% minimum payout required by foundation law. Unlike grants, however, PRIs provide a return on foundations’ investments, either through repayment or return on equity, which means that the funds can be “recycled” and applied to additional PRI or grants. (Note that PRI is distinct from Mission Related Investing, or MRI, which refers to the investment of endowment funds.) While PRI has been available to foundations since the 70s, only in the last few years has it been gaining in popularity amongst food system funders; three top PRI makers according to the SAFSF report Trends in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funding, 2003-2006 are the William Penn Foundation, the Blue Moon Fund, and the Presbyterian Hunger Program.

Enter the financial crisis, which has affected foundations in many ways: not only are many grantees scrambling to meet operating costs due to losses in revenues from government and individual sources, foundations find themselves with ever-smaller endowments with which to generate the grant-making pool.

Now more than ever, PRI offers foundations a unique opportunity to respond to the challenge of using fewer resources to provide support to communities with greater needs. Organizations that were already promoting PRI as a means for foundations to support their missions are now upping the ante.

“As we know, the turn of 2008 to 2009 caught many foundations by surprise,” says Dana Lanza, Executive Director of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. “Within the environmental grantmaking community, assets are down by an average of 30%-40% in many cases. We are noting that in this climate, PRI is garnering significant interest from our members as a means to continue to support innovative efforts while essentially ‘recycling’ funds. I expect this to become a critical form of grantmaking as we pull ourselves through this rough period over the next few years.”

The PRI Makers Network, which provides a wealth of resources and data related to PRI, organized a call last month for funders to discuss the results of a recent member survey: PRI in Tough Economic Times.  The survey revealed what callers confirmed: while there are reasons to be cautious, there are even more reasons to seize the opportunities inherent in PRI. According to the survey summary, “last year, in many cases, PRIs constituted [foundations'] highest performing asset class – providing downside protection in the bear market.”

If your foundation is considering doing PRI directly, this Council on Foundations interview with Carol Lewis, president and CEO of Philanthropy Northwest, and Doug Stamm, CEO of the Meyer Memorial Trust and co-chair of PRI Makers Network, includes a list of things to consider before diving in. It’s a substantial list, and not every foundation will have the staff, expertise, or back-end support to find and evaluate appropriate recipients, draft term sheets, and administer the actual investments over time.

We decided to launch the RSF PRI Funds after hearing from several foundations that they want to participate in PRI to maximize their social impact, and would rather take advantage of RSF’s 25 years of experience in social enterprise lending rather than start the learning process from scratch. Meanwhile, we’ve been hearing from staff at foundations that would prefer to do PRI through an intermediary like RSF rather than continue doing it on their own, allowing them to stay engaged with PRI while focusing their staff’s energy on grantmaking and support of grantees.

The RSF PRI Funds will launch next week, giving foundations an intermediated PRI option for focusing charitable PRI impact within specific regions and/or focus areas: Food & Agriculture (eg, loans to projects supporting local food systems based on sustainable agriculture); Education & the Arts (eg, loans to charter schools with holistic approaches to education); and/or Ecological Stewardship (eg, loans to organizations creating green jobs in low-income areas).

Our pooled PRI model means that each foundation’s investment will work alongside other funds, re-invested into a portfolio of borrowers doing critical work on the ground. This approach maximizes the power of leveraged PRI impact while also mitigating risk. Already, three foundations have committed to investing in the RSF PRI Funds, and we’re in active conversations with interested staff at many more. We’re inspired by this opportunity to catalyze positive social impact, and look forward to connecting with other foundations who want to learn more about PRI.

An earlier version of this post appeared on RSF’s Reimagine Money blog, an online conversation about the nature of money.

In response to some of the worst economic times since the Great Depression, I’m excited to present my “Grow. Cook. Grub.” series.  With unemployment climbing, diet-related illnesses increasing, and health care costs sky-rocketing, more and more people are looking to feed themselves healthfully, simply, and cheaply.  Using my family and community as an example, I will show readers how easy it is to cook health-promoting, delicious, and inexpensive meals year round using food from my home garden, CSA, and local farmer’s markets.

Sweet Sweetback’s Salad with Roasted Beet Vinaigrette

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Soundtrack (all songs that contain samples of Melvin Van Peebles’ music):

“30 Cops Or More” by Boogie Down Productions from Edutainment
“The Finest” MF DOOM from Operation Doomsday
“Come on Feet” by Quasimoto from The Unseen
“Hydrant Game” by Quasimoto from The Further Adventures of Lord Quas

Film: How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It) (2005), directed by Joe Angio. This documentary chronicles Melvin Van Peeble’s astonishing career.

In March 2008 I went to Los Angeles to film an episode for MVP’s Greenhouse, a television series that follows Mario Van Peebles, his wife, their five children, and his father (Melvin Van Peebles) as they renovate their LA home in an environmentally friendly manner and embrace a more sustainable lifestyle. I was excited to help Mario prepare a meal, but I was overjoyed to be in the presence of Melvin.

I created this salad not so much in honor of Melvin’s cult classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song or the moving biopic—Badasssss—written and directed by Mario, but more so for Melvin’s influence on me as a creative person. In addition to being a screenwriter, director, actor, and film editor, Melvin’s creative pursuits include being a painter, sculptor, children’s book author, dancer, novelist, journalist, translator, composer, recording artist, playwright, playboy, Broadway producer, and stockbroker (the first African American to hold a seat on the American Stock Exchange). And at 77 years old he’s still going strong. Black genius indeed.

Like Sweetback, the protagonist of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, this salad is bold (beets), bitter (argula), earthy (walnuts), and sweet (agave-sugar).

4 medium beets, scrubbed, tops trimmed, root tails left intact
Coarse sea salt
4 tablespoons plus 4 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon agave nectar
Freshly ground white pepper
3 large bunches arugula, trimmed and roughly chopped (6 to 7 cups)
1 1/2 cups Candied Walnuts ( see Vegan Soul Kitchen)

*Combine the beets, 3 quarts cold water, and 1 teaspoon salt in a medium pot over high heat. Boil uncovered for 20 to 30 minutes, or until the beets are easily pierced with a knife. Drain. Peel the beets by holding them under cold running water and rubbing their skins off with your fingers or a clean towel.

*Preheat oven to 400°F.

*Trim the tails off the bottom of the beets. Reserve two of them for the vinaigrette and compost the others. Cut the beets into 1/4-inch dice. In a medium bowl, toss the diced beets with 4 teaspoons of the olive oil. Transfer them to a parchment-lined baking sheet and roast for 15 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes to ensure even cooking. Remove the beets from the oven, transfer them back into the bowl just used, and toss with 2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar. Return to the baking sheet and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Set them aside to cool.

* In a blender, combine the reserved roasted beet tails with the remaining red wine vinegar, mustard, 1/2 teaspoon agave nectar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and white pepper to taste. Blend while slowly pouring in 4 tablespoons of olive oil. If needed, add more salt to taste.

*Place the arugula pieces in a large serving bowl, add the roasted beets on top, and add the candied walnuts on top of that. Immediately before serving, toss well with just enough of the vinaigrette to coat.

Few people have been working as tirelessly to preserve the diversity of American foods than Gary Nabhan. Nabhan is a man who likes to shun labels and boundaries. He’s a professor of Geography, a conservationist, a poet, a rancher, a prolific author, and the founder of two groundbreaking food advocacy groups: Native Seeds/SEARCH focusing on preserving indigenous southwestern seeds, and later the RAFT alliance of food, farming, environmental and culinary advocates.

The author of numerous books, his most recent title is Where Our Food Comes From, describing a round the world journey that Nabhan took retracing the steps of food pioneer Nikolay Vavilov.

When I caught up with Nabhan for this interview, we discussed some of the impacts of modern farming, the implications of biological complexity, and the direction of the sustainable food movement.

French: In an article a while ago I quoted a friend of mine who said “Agriculture has become one of the most destructive activities in the world,” and I received a lot of angry response from farmers.

Nabhan: But look at the floods in recent years – we caused this. We removed the bottomland forests and we simplified ecosystems. As I literally flew from Madison to Denver, and I just saw water moving soil to the Mississippi mouth and into the Gulf and we now have an anoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico killing fisheries for miles.

French: I’ve been looking for a farmer to stand up and say “This is a preventable disaster,” after the last floods, but I didn’t hear anyone say, “We can prevent this? We can keep our farms and soil intact.”

Nabhan: When RAFT came out with advice and went to the Plains states, I said “Look, when we had Bison on perennial prairies of legumes, grasses, and sunflowers, we also had micro Buffalo wallows that kept the water and nutrients in place, and created an array of water and habitat to support Prairie Chickens and game birds. And if we move back to a perennial wild-lands based food system and use bison to restore the prairies we wouldn’t have this flooding.

French: And did people hear you?

Nabhan: No, they responded “What are you talking about? I have my bison in a feedlot. People will expect free range bison, and we don’t have the land for that!”

French: So, now we’re in the situation where the direction we are going in isn’t working, but we’re exporting it worldwide as fast as we can while we’re retreating from it slowly ourselves…isn’t that a crazy conundrum?

Nabhan: It’s always tough when you tell other people “Oh, don’t go down that path.” And they look at your lifestyle and say “You’re telling us to be more sustainable??” There are incredible ironies there. We will never pump from the ground as much fossil fuel and ground water again as we have in the last century. It’s just never going to be that subsidized for cheap natural resources.

And so we are going to have to return to the biological wisdom embedded in the natural food diversity and local knowledge. And fortunately, other countries are still closer to those wellsprings of food security than we are.

French: But it’s changing so quickly, isn’t it? You probably heard about the decline of the Mediterranean Diet. As fast and convenience foods enter the small Mediterranean towns, people are getting heart disease and diabetes for the first time.

Nabhan: Yes, and not just there, but all over the world.

French: So, in this modern environment what guides us in the right direction?

Nabhan: Well, I live in the Arizona desert and make sun tea and drink it all the time. When I was on the road I used to get Arizona Iced Tea, without realizing that the number one ingredient was fructose, and that drinking all that fructose was changing my satiation patterns. And so my point is that things that formally worked in our bodies to keep that compass aligned are now getting mixed signals or being completely deceived by the chemicals embedded in our foods.

French: Just like the California condors are killing their chicks by feeding them bottle caps and other metal objects.

Nabhan: Right, good food is not hardwired. My Why Some Like It Hot book is on that topic of complexity. Being trained as a scientist we know there are gene-environment interactions. It’s not solely biological determinism, it’s also environmental feedback loops – that triumvirate of “cultural, environmental, and genetic” – gets you into some complex areas where the signals are easily fooled and confounded.

French: With the biotechnology industry trying to produce food that is “better,” on the website of Monsanto they cite a farmer-scientist saying, roughly, I’m comfortable knowing that farmers are good stewards of what they are doing. We should trust the farmers, therefore the food is good.

Nabhan: You know, I see so many parallels between what’s happening in our economy overall and what’s happening in our food systems, there are parallel philosophies. We’ve over-valued certain things, we’ve forgotten certain things. Just like the money between banks in this way that everyone is counting it as collateral and we have home prices ascending but everyone knew it was a paper empire that was going to collapse. This is the same as planting 20 million acres of a GMO corn in the first year that this corn is released. Inevitably, there are going to be problems with that. That we are going to break down the reciprocity with a particular pest control, whether it’s inserted into the genome of the corn or hand applied by an organic gardener corn silk, we are going to lose the effectiveness of any pest control strategy if we put it out on 20 million acres at the same time. So, the probability that we are going to see a collapse of industrial agriculture parallel with the related collapse of our financial system is just not prophecy, its inevitability.

French: Are we going in the right direction, for a sustainable food movement?

Nabhan: My hesitation is what Wendell Berry says “be skeptical of all movements. So don’t Missionize anything.” Because we already know what part of the problem that Missionizing creates, when you say “Think like me.” That’s a major problem.

There are really only two kinds of cultures in the world: the ones that try to convert others to their values and the ones that are susceptible to being converted – in part because they resist converting anyone to themselves.

French: There’s a new study, by the National Wildlife Federation, about the decline of teaching ecology and environmental topics in the United States. There are fewer courses taught, and fewer courses required, in America’s college campuses. Meanwhile, there is an increase of environmental awareness overall.

Nabhan: Why aren’t we teaching every kid natural history, rather than thinking that we can have good environmental scientists that don’t even know the birds and butterflies and plants that are in their ecosystem models? I mean, I really don’t understand the logic!

French: Because more than ever, as green and eco and buzzwords are flying around…

Nabhan: Well, I don’t think that sustainability has any meaning anymore, it’s been distorted so much.

French: Even the USDA says that “some terms defy definition. Sustainable agriculture is one of them.”

Nabhan: Unbelievable. Well, the USDA can’t talk to people about values. And sustainable is a values based idea.

Last week I spent $200 on food. I was traveling in Washington D.C., and the money was spent on two meals, just for me. The meals were great, but shelling out that kind of money, when I am committed to reducing the amount I spend, was a little shocking. It gave me a real sense of gratitude for the $130 I spent the week before for a week’s worth of groceries for my family of four.

In these interesting economic times, everybody is looking at ways to save money, and with rising health care costs we are also looking at ways to stay healthy. The answer seems to be in forgoing restaurants—both the big ticket and the fast food kinds, to spend more time in the kitchen and in the garden.

Experts say that whenever things get tight, people tend cut back on eating out. When you think about the fact that the average family eats 40 percent of its meals away from home (taking lunches into account), it’s easy to see how we can make a significant impact on our bottom line by hitting the farmer’s markets, CSAs, and our grocery stores to make healthy, nutritious meals at home. With a little bit of effort, you can save thousands of dollars on your food and medical bills by spending more time in the kitchen preparing healthy food.

Health Impacts

Ask any medical expert, and they will tell you that the majority of chronic and life-threatening illnesses can be prevented through lifestyle changes, such as eating a healthier diet. Studies show that people who eat most of their meals out not only spend more money on food, but they also tend to be more overweight and are at more risk for obesity, diabetes, cancer and other illnesses. Of course, this is not to say that as consumers, we can’t make healthy choices when we eat out. But it does show that we can have more control over what we eat, how much we eat and how much we spend.

By cooking at home we can control the amount of fat, sugar, and sodium that we expose ourselves and our families to on a daily basis.

Get A Plan

Trying to eat more meals at home without a plan is like trying to drive across country without a map. And hitting the grocery store without a list, or while hungry, are recipes for spending a lot more cash at the register. Figure out what you want to cook before you leave home. Look through your recipes and make sure you have all the ingredients on hand or on your list. Shop the sale papers to find out what’s on sale. Planning your healthy meals around what’s on sale, and what’s in season reduces the cost per meal, and your grocery bill.

Also map out your shopping trips. Some people will go to several places to buy their groceries in one week. Is it worth it to drive across town to save 50 cents on a gallon of milk, when you would spend more time and money buying it at the market where you buy the rest of your groceries?

And look at ways that you can get the freshest, local produce at a fair price. Planning your shopping around the days that the farmer’s market in your area is open, can make a big difference in reducing your food costs, and in the quality of  the food on the table. While fresh fruits and vegetables seem to bump the cost of your groceries up, they are healthier  and a better savings than the high calorie, high sugar processed food that  promise “ a quick healthy meal.” Scratch sodas, potato chips and junk food off your grocery list, and you will have a lot more money in the food budget for well balanced meals.

Just think about the money you can save if you give up just a couple of days of fast food or restaurant lunch, to bring your own. It could be the leftovers from the meal that was cooked at home the night before, or a nice green salad and homemade soup. Taking lunch is one of the quickest ways to see big savings. And bringing lunch is a much healthier alternative to old, stale sandwiches and chips from the vending machine.

Grow Your Savings

This year, I am going to reduce the cost of the food I cook at home by taking part of our back yard to grow my own tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and lettuce. I’m already thinking about the meals I can put together with my own fresh herbs, green onions, zucchini and greens. Not only will I have a foundation for the healthiest, freshest meals, but I will be saving a ton of cash. And even though I am going to try my hand in the garden, I am also going to support the farmer’s markets and roadside market stands. They also offer a great value.

Tips for Saving at Home

You may already be cooking more meals at home because of a sluggish economy. Or you may stirring up creative meals because you just love to cook, like me. But you may just be getting started on your quest to reduce your restaurant bill and save on cooking at home. Here are some tips to help you grow more savings by cooking and eating at home:

• Cut back on the meat. Meat is a high ticket item. Reduce the portion of meat in a meal, or even try cutting back and having several meatless days during the week.
• Buy into a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) group or a food co-op grocery. If you are not a member yet. look for one in your community.
• Invest in a good health cookbook and use it. You don’t have to sacrifice great taste and flavor to save money and eat healthy. With a good recipe and a little patience, your home meals can match or even trump anything you can get out.
• Try a new healthy recipe each week. You may not like everything you cook, but over time you will have a repertoire of meals you can prepare and enjoy for a lot less money.
• Shop the sales. Each week grocery stores and markets have plenty of bargains on the basics. Plan your meals around the deals.
• Make leftovers a part of your plan. Cooking enough to have leftovers of your healthy meal stretches your food budget. Don’t be afraid to freeze portions for later.
• Grow and share. Grow your own fruits and vegetables and save money over going to the grocery store for them.  And if you have a big bounty, share with your friends and neighbors.
• Buy what you will eat, even if it means having to make more frequent trips to the market. A bushel of apples may have looked like a deal at the time, but if you can’t eat or give them away fast enough, they will go bad. That includes bulk spices.
• Make the home cooked meal the rule, and eating out the exception.

Photo: theesit aua

The Peak Oil story was never about running out of oil. It was about the collapse of complex systems in a world economy faced by the prospect of no further oil-fueled growth. It was something of a shock to many that the first complex system to fail would be banking, but the process is obvious: no more growth means no more ability to pay interest on credit… end of story, as Tony Soprano used to say.

There was a popular theory among Peak Oilers the last decade that the world would enter a “bumpy plateau” period when the global economy would get beaten down by peak oil, would then revive as “demand destruction” drove down oil prices, and would be beaten down again as oil prices shot up in response — with serial repetitions of the cycle, each beat-down taking economies lower — the only imaginable outcome being some sort of quiet homeostasis. This scenario did not play out as expected. It was predicated on a mistaken assumption that all systems would retain some kind of operational resilience while ratcheting down. Anyway, the banking system was mortally wounded in the first go-round and the behemoth is dying hard.

The last desperate act of the banking system in the face of Peak Oil’s no-more-growth equation was to engineer species of tradable securities that could produce wealth out of thin air rather than productive activity. This was the alphabet soup of algorithm-derived frauds with vague and confounding names such as credit default swaps (CDSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), structured investment vehicles (SIVs), and, of course, the basic filler, mortgage backed securities. The banking system is now choking to death on these delicacies.

The trouble is that the EMT squad brought in to rescue the banking system — that is, governments — can’t remove these obstructions from the patient’s craw. They don’t want to drown in a mighty upchuck of the alphabet soup.

The collapse of complex systems is actually predicated on the idea that the systems would mutually reinforce each other’s failures. This is now plain to see as the collapse of banking (that is, of both lending and debt service), has led to the collapse of commerce and manufacturing. The next systems to go will probably be farming, transportation, and the oil markets themselves (which constitute the system for allocating and distributing world energy resources). As these things seize up, the final system to go will be governance, at least at the highest levels.

If we’re really lucky, human affairs will eventually reorganize at a lower scale of activity, governance, civility, and economy. Every week, the failure to recognize the nature of our predicament thrusts us further into the uncharted territory of hardship. The task of government right now is not to prop up doomed systems at their current scales of failure, but to prepare the public to rebuild our systems at smaller scales.

The net effect of the failures in banking is that a lot of people have less money than they expected they would have a year ago. This is bad enough, given our habits and practices of modern life. But what happens when farming collapses? The prospect for that is closer than most of us might realize. The way we produce our food has been organized at a scale that has ruinous consequences, not least its addiction to capital. Now that banking is in collapse, capital will be extremely scarce. Nobody in the cities reads farm news, or listens to farm reports on the radio. Guess what, though: we are entering the planting season. It will be interesting to learn how many farmers “out there” in the Cheez Doodle belt are not able to secure loans for this year’s crop.

My guess is that the disorder in agriculture will be pretty severe this year, especially since some of the world’s most productive places — California, northern China, Argentina, the Australian grain belt — are caught in extremes of drought on top of capital shortages. If the US government is going to try to make remedial policy for anything, it better start with agriculture, to promote local, smaller-scaled farming using methods that are much less dependent on oil byproducts and capital injections.

This will, of course, require a re-allocation of lands suitable for growing food. Our real estate market mechanisms could conceivably enable this to happen, but not without a coherent consensus that it is imperative to do so. If agri-business as currently practiced doesn’t founder on capital shortages, it will surely collapse on disruptions in the oil markets. President Obama at least made a start in the right direction by proposing to eliminate further subsidies to farmers above the $250,000 level. But the situation is really more acute. Surely the US Department of Agriculture already knows about it, but the public may not be interested until the shelves in the Piggly-Wiggly are bare — and then, of course, they’ll go apeshit.

The recent huge drop in oil prices has left the public once again convinced that the world is drowning in oil — if only the scoundrelly oil companies were forced to deliver it at reasonable prices. The public has been consistently deluded about this for decades. What’s missing so far is for the president of the US to lay out the reality of the situation in a dedicated TV address. I know a lot of you think that Jimmy Carter already tried this and failed to make an impression (and ruined his presidency in the process). I guarantee you that Mr. Obama will have to do this sometime in the next few years whether he likes or not, and he’d be well-advised to get it done sooner rather than later. And by this I don’t mean just vague allusions to “energy independence” or “renewables” in speeches devoted to many other issues. I mean telling the public the plain truth that we’ll never offset oil depletion and the intelligent response is to do everything possible to transition to walkable towns and public transit, not to sustain the unsustainable.

The alternatives — i.e. what we’re trying now — is to further delude ourselves into thinking that we can run WalMart and the suburbs by some other means than oil. Despite all our investments in these things, we won’t be able to run them by other means, and the news about this had better get out before enormous disappointment turns into titanic rage. If Americans think they’ve been grifted by Goldman Sachs and Bernie Madoff, wait until they find out what a swindle the so-called “American Dream” of suburban life turns out to be.

On this blizzardy week in the power centers of America, attention is fixed on the never-ending fiasco of AIG — a company whose main product turned out to be credit default swaps, and is now choking on them. Kibitzers on the sidelines of finance are forecasting a king-hell bear market suckers’ rally in the stock markets followed by a belly flop to Dow 4000 or lower. I myself called for Dow 4000 two years ago — and was obviously a bit off on my timing. All this is surely trouble enough. But while your attention is focused on Rick Santelli in the Chicago trader’s pit, or Larry Kudlow desperately seeking “mustard seeds” of new growth in financials, try to let one eye stray to the horizon where these other complex systems are working out their next moves. Farming. The oil markets. These are the coming theaters of alarm and distress.

Image: Card designed by PJ Chmiel, a designer and activist who maintains a great site with resources for each of the suggestions he makes on the card.

The fact that the cabinet door to my “pantry” is suddenly busted has made ignoring its contents difficult. For example: two cans of tuna packed in oil, and I cannot remember the last time I ate canned tuna. My concerns about seafood (un)sustainability have made me shy away from eating fish lately. When did I even buy those cans, and why?

Then there’s that half bag of quinoa. Um, how long until quinoa goes bad? Half bags, too, of pearl barley, lovely little green lentils, couscous, risotto….the list goes on.

Also, there’s the matter of my freezer, which given other freezers I’ve seen (like the one at my Mom’s house—sorry, Mom) isn’t so bad. But it’s got two big bags of corn kernels I froze in late August, and if I don’t eat them soon, they’ll be losing a competition against fresh summer corn at the market. Also, a plastic liter seltzer bottle full of whey, and about a dozen bagel halves from my nephew’s bris (n.b. he was born September 20th).

Eating what you have on hand has been a much-discussed topic these days for the food obsessed. For example, I’ve just discovered that our editor here at Civil Eats is also participating, via the Washington Post’s “A Mighty Appetite” blog, in what Kim O’Donnel is calling “Eating Down the Fridge,” a title I like.

I discovered the idea on the New York Times Diner’s Journal blog, which alerted me to a contest brewing on eGullet: “National Eat the Stuff in our Freezers and Pantry Week.” I don’t have the stocks to participate in this contest full on (I love eGullet because it’s hard core—these people have boxes of Parmalat, powdered milk even, for crying out loud); but I decided to read about the contest, and shadow, as best as I could.

First, there are rules, as explained by the staff at eGullet:

1 – No stockpiling.

2 – No endangering your children.

3 – No making yourself miserable.

4 – If you decide to participate in this experiment, you’re making a commitment to chronicle a week’s worth of meals starting on whatever day you normally shop.

5 – Have fun, and keep everyone posted on your progress!

SobaAddict70 shares a list of everything he had, and whoah—this dude must live in the suburbs, because where would I put all that? Steven Shaw (aka “Fat Guy”) discusses the merits of freezing milk and I feel like I am back in the scary wilds of my mom’s freezer; I may have a dozen bagels from 2008, but darnit, I have my limits.

OK, so first things first, I decide to use the quinoa. I cook up a half box and it makes an insanely large bowl of quinoa, more than I can imagine eating this year, let alone this week. I douse it with sesame oil from the pantry, and toss in some peanuts from my freezer (I keep a lot of nuts in the freezer: pecans, pignoli, hazelnuts, walnuts). It was pretty dull. The prospect of eating 85 servings of this makes me very sad indeed. So I go out and buy out-of-season-but-organic scallions and red bell pepper, and a small bottle of sake in which to sautee some onions from my fridge drawer. The first assignment and I have already broken the rules! In fact, these past few days, I keep learning this sad lesson again and again. I try to use the things in my larder, and to make anything halfway decent, I need to buy more things. And then to use those things, I need to buy even more things. It’s a vicious (if often delicious) cycle.

I take comfort in the loosey goosey goings-on over at eGullet. Plus, the photos are riveting. I cannot believe all the cool (and, well, strange) things people have kicking around. It kind of makes me want to live with some of them, or at least you know, hang out together at mealtime. One person harvested dandelion greens from their backyard in Texas! Also worth mentioning there seems to be a deep love of Costco over there on the boards.

OK, next dish. With the corn, a peak-of-summer corn chowder with a fridge drawer potato, some fridge drawer onions and celery, and the remainder of the red pepper. Then I buy some fresh basil—doh! I am really very bad at this indeed. (But, but, but, remember how Mark Bittman said dried basil is bad? I had agreed with him, but now I wish I had some so I didn’t have to transgress like this….)

But all is not lost; tonight I will defrost the pork chops from Bradley Farm, and with the rest of the frozen corn, a little of the precious remaining milk I’ve got, as well as the half bag of Wild Hive Farm stone ground cornmeal from my freezer (ohhh yeah, cornmeal and flour go in the freezer at my house) I will make a corn pudding.

I may not have much of a larder, and I may be buying a lot of supplements, but I am a) having a blast following the contest and b) doing a fine job of clearing out my stores, and c) spending less money as I do it.

This week I have made egg salad (very tasty on ancient toasted bagel); I have used those frozen overripe bananas to make a banana bread for my new parent friends; I have eaten down my fridge. I have looked it in the eye and shown it who’s boss.

Photo: Housetohome

“I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you… meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I hope it may thus go thro’ many hands, before it meets with a Knave that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money.”

-Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Benjamin Webb, 1784

These are normally the times when I cook, when days start to lengthen just enough to give one hope. I have noticed some things about how it is I always can, even when money is tight, and I don’t skip joyfully to the market daily. I think cooking well and simply without worrying about costs relies on the same hard-to-swallow concept as the most trusting kind of charity: you must pay it forward.

Cooking, against what many people think, doesn’t depend on the best recipes or having the right ingredients. It relies on having things lying around to cook with. I stock my shelves much like my mother has, keeping the same things that she did, stored in similar ways. My mother’s orientation in the kitchen is simple and sound: everything she buys, cuts, cooks, or stores, she does with a hope and keen eye toward a future meal.

There were always soaked and cooked beans frozen in little bags in our freezer. Whenever my mother decided to make fava beans or chickpea salad, she would cook at least twice as many and freeze what she didn’t need. Any tough outers from escarole or fennel would be stored alongside carrot peels and onion skins for a week and then dropped in a pot of water and simmered for an hour or so, strained, and frozen alongside. Leftover slices of bread were left to stale and then ground into crumbs (also frozen), or stacked side-by-side and frozen themselves, to be toasted and spread with butter and jam whenever my brother and I started to complain. Bananas nearing their end: frozen for an afternoon snack; leftover oily water from stewing artichokes or beans, stored in the refrigerator until the next day’s dinner and then used to cook the carrots, or add to the stew or drizzled over basmati rice. My mother spent money on good bread and fresh produce freely, though it must have worried her in the moment. But she seems to have known that when each loaf, bunch, or head pays for itself threefold, there’s no limit to how much you can afford to spend on one of them. The math is easy. I do it now and it works out without fail: $10/pound broccoli is a laugh when the florets are dinner, cooked through and tossed with last summer’s chilies and dried pasta and then all of it topped with those frozen bread crumbs, toasted with lots of oil; the stems diced, sautéed, and simmered in water to be tossed with rice, eaten on their own, or turned into soup; and any liquid left kept for the base for another soup, with leftover bits of other vegetables, stale bread, and a parmesan rind for heartiness.

There were the things that couldn’t be saved, and those were happily discarded. A sprouting potato should never be used, or frozen, or saved. But leftover pasta was allowed to be reheated in a pan and an egg cooked onto it, and rice was prized as the basis for at least two meals to come.

It is as easy, in the middle of the summer when making basil or mint pesto to make some extra without the cheese and store it, frozen. It seems atrocious to do when the sun is beating across the deck, but you’d be amazed how grateful you’d be to have it to dollop onto bean soup (made with cooked, frozen beans, vegetable stock you’ve made nearly for free, and a few tomatoes from a jar put up last August—I haven’t even gotten into tomatoes.)

The point is the same as it is with nearly everything: without being puritanical, save a little bit of everything, and throw nothing out. If it’s gotten to the point of rotting, chuck it, but take note of what you could have done to avoid it. Any bone can be turned into a whole second meal, just as good, if not as easy to glorify, as the one that featured its meat. Every kale stem can be quickly pickled and later diced and dropped on top of a pureed vegetable soup; every beet or turnip green can be washed well and sautéed in olive oil and mixed into an omelet or better, served by itself on toasted leftover bread drizzled with more olive oil and served next to the last pieces of some delicious cheese.

It is not expensive, I mean to say, to buy one bunch of kale, if its stems will later turn a boring meal into one you’d want to come home to and you’ll remember fondly. A chicken bought for $4 a pound doesn’t seem expensive when it gives you your first meal, provides scraps of meat for on top of soup or salad for your second, and its feet, bones, and head offer themselves up for a stock to be made into a third, fourth, and so on.

By the same token, if a $8 dozen of eggs seems obscene, consider what a bargain the eggs are if they make yesterday’s tomato sauce or pasta or rice not only edible but exciting today.

And for expensive things like herbs, the few leaves you use in one dish might not justify the purchase of the bunch, but the pounded herb oil you make by grinding them with some salt and covering them with oil to drizzle over chicken soup or eggs or toast makes it more than worth it.

For what is it we’re looking for when we cook, other than to be excited, to be nurtured and to worship and be worshiped back. It’s just a little bit of the sublime we hope for, and we imagine high food prices portend for what the sublime costs. It’s true and not; the bigger cost is the faith that another meal’s around the corner. If you truly believe it is, preparing the meal should be a question of quickly reaping the benefits of your own prudence. I don’t know how I would cook a meal without the bits and pieces I’d saved from meals before. I can’t imagine how I would write a recipe for any of them; it would not taste as good, never mind what it would cost, to start from scratch every time. It does seem, though, that thinking about it this way, learning to cook saves more money than it could ever cost, for whatever trials one has to endure in the learning.

Old Bread, Sauce, and the Heat of the Bone

(Save the insides of crusty bread, then you won’t feel bad about scooping it out for a more robust vehicle for sauce)

Leftover rye loaf
Butter or olive oil
What’s left in a pot after you don’t get every last bit of Bolognese, made with chuck steak, ground beef, breakfast sausage (from a whole pig), Onions, fennel, carrots, celery
2 jars home-jarred tomato plus 1 pint tomato sauce, also homemade
salt
½ bottle red wine
almost 1 quart to 1 quart milk
The bones you’ve removed

Scoop the bready insides out of a round dark, heavy rye bread. Toast the crusty ends and spread them with butter. Scrape the remainders from a sauce pot, adding a little more tomato to get any stuck bits up. Remove any final meat and fat bits from between small bones of a blade, or short ribs, or whatever is in your sauce. Scoop all of it onto the toasted, buttered bread.