By Jack Moffitt
Before I farmed, I noticed the weather. Now, I bet on it. Time spent, money for gas equipment, repairs, seed money, irrigation — all poker chips on a slow moving game of chance. Planted a couple of beds of Butternut squash in late winter. Still planting some Proso milo. Watch for some Butternuts in May. I’m feeling pretty lucky.
I’m reading Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and the diatribe in it about how we have been misled about our food for a good while. The Government, according to Pollan, led gullible Americans to consume more carbohydrates by warning about fat in the diet, sparking a wave of carb bingeing, obesity, and diabetes. The end result is not disputable. The arguments regarding how the end result came about are like any political argument — multi-faceted and influenced by more than just facts. Pollan points out that the food pyramid was not so much the culprit as the methodology it employed called nutritionism, the practice of referring to food by its nutritional make up (carbohydrates, fats, proteins, etc.) instead of its type (fruit, meat, veggie). Once you buy into nutritionism, health food becomes low-fat cookies with a low-carb beer chaser. And what the heck, since its low fat, double up.
Pollan’s conclusion is seven words of advice: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants," specifically food you can recognize that’s minimally processed. Onion. Steak. Carrots. Potato. Get some at the Brownsville Farmers’ Market Saturday mornings, the SPI Farmers’ Market on Sunday mornings, and other markets at varied times and places, fresher than you’ll ever find in a store, and pesticide-free.
A CABBAGE TO RULE THE WORLD
We are deep into the season the vegetables love. Cool weather, regular rains, foggy mornings, harvests of lettuces, greens, and carrots. Bunching salad onions are thickening up. There will be several more weeks of good quality citrus. The cool weather and rain has made for nice harvests of broccoli and trusty cabbage.
Cabbage seems to have Celtic origins, according to archeo-veggie-ologists. Perhaps the Celts were fueled by cabbage during their conquering days. Cabbage is very low in saturated fat and cholesterol. It is also a good source of Vitamin A, Thiamin, Vitamin B6, Calcium, Iron and Magnesium, and a very good source of dietary fiber, Vitamin C, folate, potassium and manganese.
There is a lot of cabbage at our markets right now, but the supply will dwindle as the heat comes on. Cabbage stores well. It can be frozen blanched or unblanched for later use in cooking. If you want to experiment with extremely retro food preservation techniques, try making some sauerkraut. Or make a huge bunch of egg rolls. They freeze well and can become a family activity tradition like making tamales.
ATOMIC REDS, YET ANOTHER CHOICE
In a country where the pursuit of cheap food is king, the Imperator carrot is the one most of us grow up eating. It gains weight well, so it appeals to the farmer, who usually sells by the pound. The Imperator stores like a phonebook, so the grocers like them, as well. Processors have found they can carve "baby" carrots out of them, so yet another faction drives the Imperator sales.
We are fortunate to have local farmers markets, otherwise we might never taste the likes of the Chantenay, the Nantes, the Atomic Reds and the other varieties of carrot. The Nantes variety is one of my favorites with a small blunt cigar shaped root. The Chantenay looks similar but is a bit wider at the top. Both make great baby carrots, with lots of color. We grew some Atomic Reds last year, and they were fun, but the red dissipates pretty quickly after they are picked.
Our pickiest customers prefer our smallest carrots. At first that seemed backwards to me, but the aroma, taste and texture of the baby is so superior that the extra processing per pound in the kitchen is well worth it. I’ve gone from tapping my foot waiting on growth, to apprehension that my carrots are growing too big. That is a real benefit in the farmers market setting — feedback.
Carrots are one of the veggies that actually have more nutritional value cooked and processed than raw and whole. We sell our carrots with the tops on … or should I say the carrots with the tops on, sell themselves. The tops wick away water from the root, which will become rubbery as it becomes dehydrated. You can combat this by cutting the tops off as soon as you get the carrots or soaking them in cold water for a few minutes. Or you can keep the roots wrapped in a wet cloth or plain paper towel while in storage. I have gotten my carrots to stay perky with their tops on for a week this way.
Last week we found a green tomato laying next to a plant, mysteriously severed at the stem. It looked nice so we put it up on the kitchen window sill, and over a week’s time it turned a beautiful red. We put it in with a box of salad mix for our favorite chef, Chef Nori at Cafe Shiraz, who informed us that we stumbled on the preferred way of treating heirloom tomatoes, picking green and ripening at room temperature. My mom passed a tip on to me as well, to never refrigerate a tomato; it destroys the flavor. Weird, but true. It was probably widely known before tomatoes became the mass produced tasteless product we are served today (other than at local markets).
FOOD ECONOMICS & MYSTERY POLICIES
By happenstance, two people brought a website (Farm Subsidy Database) to my attention, a site that has stirred a lot of thought. Type in a zip code and the people in the neighborhood getting government farm subsidies are shown, with amounts and crop programs provided by year. One puzzler was the huge government subsidies for cotton production. Is there a T-shirt crisis I haven’t heard about? No, in fact the world cotton supply is over-saturated by six months compared to annual usage. In other words, a year and a half worth of cotton was produced in the year.
I thought I might find some rational explanation for these policies by consulting the writings of one of my favorite economists, Stephen Dubner, author of the "Freakonomics: The Hidden Side of Everything" column and blog in the New York Times. That just led to more food for thought (pun intended). Searching his columns for references to farm subsidies discloses many references, usually combined with explanations for obesity. Dubner points out there is a correlation between farm subsidies and obesity rates. From Nixon to Obama, both have risen steadily.
Similarly, several economists and nutritionists have documented another strong correlation: food as a percent of expenditures has fallen while obesity rates have climbed.
Another mystery — putting the cheapest possible fuel into the only body you will ever have. Don’t do it. Buy quality, buy local, eat food that is clean, pure, and fresh. Take care of yourself.
