We get it. Organic food typically costs more than conventional, that that’s a significant barrier for people under financial strain. Food activists are working toward big-picture, systems-wide changes that could make organic food more affordable, but in the meantime one company in New York State is trying to make organic food more affordable and accessible–one dozen eggs at a time.

Dean Sparks is already working hard to scale up the organic dairy and egg market in New York. His NYFoods company makes organic farming a viable options for farmers–and organic options more available for consumers. The eggs, cheese, butter, and milk sell in nearly 30 stores throughout the region and supplies all the milk and cream for Brooklyn’s adored Blue Marble Ice Cream. But after reading Start Something That Matters by Toms Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie, Sparks wanted to do more.

If Mycoskie could give away a pair of shoes for every pair he sold, could NYFoods give away a dozen eggs for every dozen it sold?

Sparks is trying out this model at the Mott Haven Farmer’s Market in the South Bronx. Working in partnership with fresh food distributor Regional Access and local community organizers, NYFoods gives away a dozen eggs to every shopper at the market. This not only delivers free organic eggs to the community, it also provides an enticement for the community to shop at the market in the first place. It didn’t hurt that at the program’s launch on September 28 shoppers got samples of Blue Marble Ice Cream as well.

“Organic eggs from pastured hens are a healthy source of protein that’s so hard to find in many food-desert communities, even in New York City,” says Dean Sparks of NYFoods. “Free, certified organic pastured New York eggs from our small, family-owned farms in upstate New York are full of protein, vitamin E and omega 3 fatty acids. Any family in need can use them at home, regardless of their cooking skills or kitchen tools.”

How is this a viable business model for NYFoods? By making judicious use of what the hens produce. The company selects only extra-large eggs for the cartons sold for a premium at stores like Whole Foods. But those pastured hens are also laying smaller eggs–a bit too small for retail but still high-quality and nutrient-dense. The smaller eggs would otherwise be sold as egg whites, but NYFoods is distributing them for free.

The food news has been devastating lately with widespread contamination outbreaks emerging seemingly every day. Hearing about a food company working on positive change gives me a bit of hope for our food system. Wouldn’t it be amazing to see similar programs spread across the country?

Many New York State farms have experienced devastating losses in the wake of Hurricane Irene. Wind and subsequent flash floods destroyed late summer crops and vegetables, while others have reported drowned cows and washed away barns. Many more farms are without power and, because of washed out roads, countless more do not have a means to distribute their milk.

The flood is particularly brutal because it comes at the height of harvest, which means it is not only a financial disaster, but also an emotional blow. In addition to losing direct sales through farmers‘ markets and grocery stores, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members might not receive further produce for months, since waterlogged produce is illegal to sell.

“Community Supported Agriculture is a partnership,” wrote Just Food’s CSA coordinator Paula Lukats in a recent newsletter. She added that investing in a CSA implies that you are taking a risk with the farmer, though Irene presents the most extreme example of what could happen. “No matter how skilled a farmer is, no matter how hard she works, no matter how hard he’s planned, there was nothing they could’ve done to prevent the severe flooding.”

Lucky Dog Farm in Hamden, New York, an organic vegetable operation that provides a local CSA and has a wholesale vegetable business, lost most of it’s summer vegetables. Scenes of waterlogged vegetable fields seem to be found all over the state, with the Schoharie, Mohawk, and Hudson Valley all experiencing extensive damage, along with the Catskills and Long Island. The black dirt area in Orange County, a region prized for onions and vegetable cultivation, sustained significant losses. “The whole region is under water and most of the harvest destroyed,” said farmer Cheryl Rogowski. “We need to get the word out, this region needs help.”

“There is widespread damage to the best cropland along river valleys in the Catskills and Hudson Valley,” said farmer Ken Jaffe, from Meredith, New York, who was quoted in a Village Voice piece about the impact the flooding has had on upstate New York. “Transportation is under lockdown in most Catskill counties, and will be slowed indefinitely by numerous bridges that have been washed out, and roads that are literally gone. There are major losses to farmers who are literally underwater, and often under evacuation.”

The Schoharie and Mohawk valleys were hit hard by flash floods, where there were reports of drowned cows and destroyed barns. Unfortunately, confirmed reports are scarce because of the nature of the disaster–many are with out power and have limited access to open roadways. Darrel J. Aubertine, the commissioner of the state’s Department of Agriculture and Markets, told the New York Times, “Clearly, it’s not good. I’ve been involved in agriculture my entire life, and there have been times when the weather has wreaked havoc on livestock and farms, but I don’t think I have ever seen anything on this scale here in New York.”

The fact that so many vegetable and dairy farmers have been washed out by the storm speaks to the unique topography of New York, which is an important vegetable growing state. Schoharie County farmer and author Shannon Hayes explained in a recent blog post that the best soil for vegetable crops is generally located in floodplains. She also wrote about what the loss means for farmers’ businesses. “Vegetable producers around here make most of their annual income from July through October,” she wrote. “In addition to the incredible damage to their homes, they’ve also just lost half the year’s income, and an unfathomable amount of topsoil and accumulated fertility.”

The timing of the flood makes this particularly hard for dairy farmers, since the winter depends on a successful summer harvest of hay, corn, and alfalfa. The Albany Times Union reported on the devastating effects at one farm: “The water flattened a corn field, ruining $500,000 worth of feed for the farm’s 375 cows.” There have also been reports of barn fires because of wet hay.

The New York Farm Bureau has been compiling damage reports across the state and working with state and federal agencies with disaster designations. They also confirmed that many animals have been lost and barns destroyed.

Challey Comer, the Farm to Market Manager at the Watershed Agricultural Council, is helping to coordinate efforts to help farmers in the watershed area. “We have people going out to farms to access the impact the storm and flooding has had and to help farmers connect to available funding,” she said. She noted that the local extension agents are armed with information to help farmers with flood related issues, like what to do with water logged hay and damaged crops. She also compiled a list of resources and fundraising activities to help area farms.

If you have photos, stories or fundraising information please share them in the comment section.

It’s an unlikely story: A vegan chef and his vegetarian wife open a butcher shop that becomes a commercial hit and an industry game-changer. It all started thanks to that omnivore gateway meat, bacon, which for years was Jessica Applestone’s one vegetarian exception. When she started craving more meat she searched for meat that aligned with her ethics: Something raised with respect for the animal and for the environment. But she found meat labels confusing.

She concluded her best option was to buy a whole steer from a farmer, but how to deal with a whole animal when she was the only meat-eater in the family? Jessica’s dilemma revealed a gap in the market: Butcher shops that break down whole, well-raised animals for the average home cook. Her husband Joshua saw an opportunity and the couple began the painstaking training and groundwork that eventually became Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, New York.

The couple have chronicled their meat odyssey in the book, The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat, co-authored by Alexandra Zissu. Told through the voice of Joshua Applestone, the book gives a succinct history of industrial meat to contrast with the Fleisher’s approach followed by an insider’s guide to butchery including the equipment.

Then there is an animal-by-animal manual on butchering and cooking meat, including diagrams of primals and recipes, with a final chapter on sourcing “well-raised” meat. But more than a guide to butchery, the book is an empowerment tool for ethical meat eaters. By getting to know your meat, inside and out, the book posits, we can change our relationship with food and ultimately transform the meat industry for the better.

The Applestone’s are clear about what they consider “well-raised” meat. Their standards for meat sold at Fleisher’s demand that animals come from a farm within 150-mile radius. The animals cannot be administered hormones or antibiotics, ever (they accept meat from farms that treat ill animals with antibiotics but will not buy those treated animals).

The four-legged animals must be fully pastured, meaning they are on pasture 100 percent of the time, though they can be fed grain grown by the same or a local farm. Their chickens are organic but (with occasional exceptions) not pastured, again a reflection of customers’ preferences. All animals must be processed (slaughtered) within a couple hours’ drive as travel is stressful for animals.

Living up to these standards can be a tightrope act. Applestone is honest about the difficulties of their approach. Timing the slaughter for pastured animals is dicey since animals don’t always gain exactly at the rate you them to in order to fit into a small-scale abattoir’s tight schedule. Due to processing regulations you can’t get everything you want, like organic sausage casings or beef cheeks from pastured cattle (though Fleisher’s and other butchers do sell pork cheeks). Fleisher’s supports farms that are small (60-200 steers) by industry standards but their supplying farms still need to be large enough to provide a steady volume. They currently go through about 300 steers a year.

Trials and tribulations aside, this book is mostly a lot of fun. Inquisitive home cooks will love the copious diagrams and charts that dissect all aspects of meat animals and meat cooking. The Applestones make a point of encouraging whole-animal cooking, which means they explain how to cook every cut, especially the lesser-known cuts that require slow, low heat methods.

Readers will learn not only how to cut up and cook meat, but also how to store it. The Applestones probably provide more insider knowledge about butchering than the average consumer will ever actually put into practice. But obtaining that more complete story provides readers with a thrilling sense of authority. I’m not talking about that annoying know-it-all-ship of foodie connoisseurs, though that is also a potential outcome of reading the book. The more you know about animals and meat the better use you can make of it and the more you can demand of your suppliers and the meat industry as a whole.

This knowledge also makes cooking with well-raised meat more affordable. Is an artisan-cut prime rib expensive? You bet. But it’s not your only option if you know how to cook the cheaper cuts. It’s not even necessarily the most delicious option. (Is it meat blasphemy to suggest this? How many of you love braised short ribs as much as I do?) Jessica Applestone can provide you with a shopping list that supplies 10 meals and adds up $50. You’ll be cooking ground beef, bacon, sausage, chicken, eggs, even bones, and many of those meals will feature meat as a garnish rather than a main course. The Applestone’s aren’t afraid to tell customers to eat less meat in order to eat better meat.

Joshua is clear about placing his shop within a political context. Former Fleisher’s apprentice and food writer Julie Powell described it in her memoir Cleaving, “It might be a neighborhood butcher shop, or it might be a political movement masquerading as a neighborhood butcher shop.”

“It’s both,” Joshua says. “We write in the manual we give new employees that the act of eating is inherently a political one. Though we didn’t come up with that idea, we realize that every bite of food we consume affects the animal from which it came, the farmer who raised that animal, the environment, and our health… we never forget that animals die for our business and your dinner.”

The book concludes with a guide for buying meat and questions you should ask and what to look for whether you’re buying at the farmer’s market, through a CSA or whole-animal share, or even at the supermarket. If your only option is a supermarket Joshua encourages you to ask the manager for pastured meat and to get friends and family to ask for it as well to incentivize supermarket owners. Finally, in answer to Jessica’s initial label disorientation, the book concludes with a guide to deciphering labels with the warning that label meanings can change and your best bet is to know the farmer/butcher.

Meanwhile, the ethical/artisan butcher movement is growing. Fleisher’s is expanding their business and opening a new shop in Brooklyn (a five-minute walk from my apartment, in fact). Fleisher’s is not the first sustainably-sourced butcher in New York City, though they are a welcome addition to the club.

We have enjoyed the services of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, The Meat Hook (owned by Fleisher’s-trained Tom Mylan), and Marlow and Daughters (opened by Mylan) for a few years. But Fleischers is helping to seed the movement by training apprentices, some of whom are opening their own shops. Fleischer’s alum Tim Forrester is expected to open his butcher shop Harlem Shambles later in the month. And in Los Angeles there is Lindy & Grundy, owned by Fleisher’s trainees Amelia Posada and Erika Nakamura. And so, little by delectable little, consumers, restaurants, farmers, and processors are carving out growing niches in the world of meat.

With the documentary movie Gasland making its national debut on HBO just last week, the nation is now more aware of the environmental issues natural gas fracking poses. What you might not have heard is that many farmers in upstate New York fear the impact that natural gas drilling will have on our grasslands and water, and ultimately our livelihoods. It is an issue that could threaten New York City’s food shed but many do not realize what is at stake.

Ken Jaffe, an upstate New York grass-fed beef farmer, is concerned about the devastating impact gas fracking could have on his farm. He penned an impassioned letter to the residents of New York City on the blog “Green State Fair”  and advised:

You should understand that the industrialization and pollution of rural upstate New York will kill the production of organic and sustainable food in this region.  The area of food production is almost all outside the NYC Watershed, and vulnerable. Massive amounts of toxins will be released into our aquifers and air. Many millions of gallons of these hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds, including known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors, are pumped into the ground during the drilling process, and released into the air from evaporation tanks.

The most frustrating part of all this is that upstate New York has been economically depressed for decades. It is in trouble, and the sectors that once supported us, like manufacturing and agriculture, have left or are so consolidated that they employ too few people. Who can begrudge communities for hoping that natural gas will give a must-needed economic boost? Promises of jobs and investment are a powerful lure in a place where young people flee, and the population continues to plummet because there are no jobs.

Yet, there is one bright spot in all this gloom: we are seeing a huge increase in our sustainable agriculture sector. We can thank local demand but also our superior pastureland and clean water. New farmers, both young and retired, are reclaiming fallow dairy pastures and raising grass-fed meats and organic produce. This has all been made possible by a passionate and renewed interest in local food and a belief that it is safer. All this progress and hope could be threatened by trusting our future to natural gas when the real future rests on our best asset: our water and superior grasslands, three million acres of which are currently unused. In fact, have so much pasture land we could locally raise grass-fed beef for all of New York City.

The BP spill, in all its horror, should serve as a lesson.  Because the federal government has dismantled safeguards that would protect us from pollution, the risk seems to be at the expense of our land. Alarmingly, gas drilling, or fracking, is now exempt from federal pollution laws. As Jaffe explains:

Pollution of water, air and food from the gas drilling industry is exempt from federal pollution laws, thanks to Dick Cheney’s 2005 Energy Policy Act and its ‘Halliburton Exemption.’ Incredibly, gas drillers can pollute without regard to the basic protections in Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, or the Clear Air Act.  For instance, it is legal for gas drilling to cause drinking water to contain high levels of carcinogens like benzene that violate the Safe Drinking Water Act because that law simply does not apply if gas drilling is the cause. The public and the environment have been essentially defenseless against gas drillers (who are  often the same companies as the oil drillers).  They have used the cover of this exemption to ruin the air, water, and landscape of large swaths of several western states, and are now moving east.

The gas companies have made sure to steer clear of New York City’s watershed because they know how powerful New York City is politically. But what New York City has failed to see is that they are threatening its foodshed. It is time for us to realize that local sustainable farming is under attack and under great threat just when it has become a positive economic force in our state. Jaffe says it best:

The gas and oil industry is relying on your silence so that they will be unopposed. Their current plans are for 8-10 wells per square mile, pumping billions of gallons of toxic water into the ground. They will pollute the air and water of a large region that represents most of New York State’s food shed, directly threatening the agricultural base that you rely upon for your food. This includes the western Catskills, and across the Finger Lakes to western New York. Most of Pennsylvania is also under the gun.

Watch the trailer for Gasland below, and then go here for a list of things you can do to make your voice heard.

I’m always amazed by the number of folks who think that most of Central Park is some kind of natural habitat of indigenous plants, a pristine terrain onto which we plunked our bike paths, boathouses and pretzel vendors.

In reality, nearly every square inch of Central Park was painstakingly landscaped back in the mid-nineteenth century to the specifications of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. A massive public works project, it required some 20,000 workers to subvert existing swamps and blow up bluffs to create a soothing pastoral landscape in the English romantic tradition.

Oh, and there was the little matter of evicting the Irish pig farmers and German gardeners who’d built shantytowns on the land. And destroying Seneca Village, the “first significant community of African American property owners on Manhattan”. The five acre settlement, which included three churches and a school, was seized through eminent domain and demolished.

All this, so that cooped-up city dwellers could get their fix of “nature”. Our civilized way of life is so removed from the natural world that Central Park’s manicured, manipulated acres are as close to a bit of wilderness as we can hope to get within the borough of Manhattan.

But you can catch a glimpse of what Manhattan was really like before we invaded it and tamed it by watching the fascinating video that architect/educator Fritz Haeg’s created in collaboration with The Mannahatta Project. The video documents Haeg’s Lenape Edible Estate installation, which was designed to “provide a view back to the lives of the native Lenape people, how they lived off the land 400 years ago” on the island that was then called Mannahatta.

The Lenape project was installed back in June when Haeg and a team of volunteers descended with shovels and soil on a triangle of uncultivated land in front of a Chelsea housing project to plant the beans, corn, squash, berries, and other edibles that the Lenape tribe lived on centuries ago.

The project offers a “meditation both on the historical facts and the future possibilities for our occupation of the island,” as Haeg notes. He hopes that it “may also serve as a model for modest small scale urban edible landscapes and as a possible prototype for future green spaces on similar housing sites across the city.”

I’m delighted to see Haeg bring his verve and vision to an American urban setting. His U.S. plantings have been primarily in the ‘burbs, as documented in his book Edible Estates: Attack On The Front Lawn (which also includes an installation at a London housing project). Edible Estates, written in 2007 and published in the winter of 2008, anticipated–and surely helped inspire–the recent kitchen garden renaissance. Haeg’s book sold so well that it’s now out of print.

Happily, a new edition will be released next spring. The new Edible Estates will include more stories of lawn-to-lettuce conversions and an expanded preface from Haeg on how the edible landscape scene has changed since the first edition. Urban ag genius Will Allen‘s contributing a piece, and there will be a nod to the White House kitchen garden, whose role in helping to inspire millions of new gardeners this year is indisputable.

As Haeg noted in an op-ed this past spring in the Guardian, the First Family’s 1,100 square foot patch of veggies is “not just a pretty garden, or an empty symbol, but a place for a family to grow the food that they like to eat, on the land that is around them” (that’s why there’s plenty of cilantro and tomatillos, for salsa, but no beets–Obama doesn’t like ‘em). Haeg adds:

Many American children today do not see evidence that food comes out of the ground or experience the pleasure of eating food fresh from plants. Instead their diet is causing epidemic childhood illness. The introduction of a food-producing garden into their early lives is our best hope for changing the situation in a meaningful way.

But there’s another compelling reason to start growing some of your own food, whether it’s in your yard, on a rooftop, or in a window box: it’s one way to help curb your carbon footprint, or, rather, foodprint. No one is seriously suggesting that city dwellers can produce all our own food in our yards, community gardens, or urban farms, but it’s just one of the many steps that we can take to lower our impact.

During World War II, planting a kitchen garden was pitched as our patriotic duty. Isn’t it time we made growing your own food a civic virtue once again? Only this time, the fight is against the fossil-fueled American life that’s given us an increasingly unhealthy populace and an overheated planet.

And we’re in imminent danger of losing that battle. “Current emissions trajectories” are hurtling us towards the point of no return, i.e. “the worst-case scenarios” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to the New York Times.

At a daylong conference on climate change held Tuesday at the United Nations, Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the world’s leaders that “Science leaves us no space for inaction now”.

This bleak pronouncement comes on the heels of a headline blaring “We’re Screwed“ on the front page of Monday’s New York Post–or, rather, a remarkably New York Post-like publication that was passed out to unsuspecting commuters by activists. The hoax was orchestrated by the Yes Men, that pair of pranksters who’ve so masterfully manipulated the mainstream media, as documented in their upcoming film, The Yes Men Fix The World.

It looked an awful lot like the real thing and fooled a lot of folks. But on close inspection, you could tell that it was a fake because, unlike Rupert Murdoch’s publication, “the faux Post is filled with factual information on the threats posed by climate change,” as USA Today observed.

You’d never see an article in the real Post touting the potential of rooftop farming to help curb New York City’s carbon foodprint, or a shout-out to an upcoming presentation hosted by NYU on Food and Climate Change: The Meat of the Matter, that explores the significant contribution that meat and dairy production make to rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, Monday’s edition of The Daily News ran an article about the 18,000 pounds of fresh produce that inmates on Rikers Island have grown this year to supply the city’s soup kitchens and food pantries–further proof of the tangible, quantifiable benefits of urban agriculture.

Monday’s Financial Times also echoed the Yes Men’s “We’re Screwed” headline with an article entitled “Scientific Consensus Over Dire Consequences,” which noted that:

The gap between the glacial pace of negotiations and the rapid progress of global warming is now endangering the safety of the planet, scientists are warning. Martin Parry, of Imperial College, London, says: “That is what is at stake. I don’t think people have realised. We are nowhere near tackling this.”

Can we muster the collective will to alter the way we live in order to avert the worst repercussions of climate change? Those of us who live in densely populated cities already have the advantage of mass transit–and, ironically, greater access through farmers markets and CSAs (though not nearly enough in many communities) to the freshly harvested plant-based foods that form the cornerstone of a low-impact diet.

I don’t know if we’ll ever manage to liberate ourselves from the petroleum-based processed foods that currently dominate our food chain. But I’m heartened by the sight of so many New Yorkers attempting to grow food, whether it’s on the roof of a Brooklyn warehouse or the back of a Brooklyn-based pick-up truck, behind the barbed wire of Rikers Island, or in front of a housing project on the island formerly known as Mannahatta. Let freedom spring!

Originally published on The Green Fork.

At the Eat-In on Labor Day at Slow Food Nation, we were asked to write a small step we could take to help change the food system on a banner. Some people wrote that they would host their own Eat-In (essentially a potluck with a purpose) or that they would stop buying bottled water. I had agreed to an initiative a friend in England had cooked up called Eat the Change, so I wrote what I’d agreed to: eating mostly unpackaged, local-as-possible food for one week in September.

I figured it would be a cinch, considering I get a box of fresh fruits and vegetables from upstate New York every week, and have access to various farmer’s markets around the city with foods like fish from Long Island, cheese, eggs, honey, beans, and oats, corn meal, wheat and buckwheat grown and milled in the Hudson Valley, and even local wine. (California, eat your heart out!)

I set about to create menus: Oatmeal with pears and honey, broccoli and pepper omelets and apple buckwheat pancakes for breakfast. Kasha with onions, peppers and grilled polenta, pinto bean and tomato stew with corn bread, and roasted beet and goat cheese salad with sea bass for dinner, accompanied by a glass of Tickle Hill organic white. Lunch would have to be leftovers. Dessert would have to be fruit.

I decided up front to allow myself spices, like the sea salt acquired from South San Francisco, as well as olive oil and vinegar for salads, and baking soda for the pancakes, and tea from California. (I even let myself indulge in California buffalo mozzarella, which was delicious.) But little did I realize what I would be craving like mad after day 1: chocolate.
Avoiding sugar for a week is a serious challenge. It made me think twice about how much I eat outside my locavore lifestyle. But aside from that dubious part of the challenge, which by the way I failed to make it a week without, eating local is not so hard. It just requires some thought. Market scouring, asking the right questions (Was the grain grown and milled locally?), planning your menu, and the fun part, cooking. Maybe there is less variety, but it forces you to be creative with what is available and in season.

While eating locally is the key to our future food security, I prefer eating mostly local food and supplementing when possible with fair trade, community-supporting goods that fall into line with virtuous globalization. (Yes, chocolate is back on the menu, along with its sister, coffee.) Of course, we can’t eat this way all of the time. As Michael Pollan said at the Food for Thought panel, Re-Localizing Food (You can watch it here), “Be realistic. It’s not all or nothing.”