ARCHIVES.... Life In The Garden: Vol. 2, Issue 8 (August) The e-newsletter for Lionette's Market and Garden of Eden restaurant Your Boston connection to grass-fed meats and sustainably produced fare In This Issue: * Welcome * Events * Lionette's Produce of the Month * "Sustainable Supplies" * Sustainable Food in the News * End Notes from James *************************************************************** Welcome to Life In The Garden, Lionette's Market and Garden of Eden's subscriber-only mailing, bringing you monthly updates about in-house events and the good foods the Lionette family — Chef Robert, James, Bob and Mary — are bringing to you via Lionette's Market and our restaurant, Garden of Eden. Before you read on, indulge us for a moment as we quickly announce some "look at me" things about Lionette's Market and Garden of Eden: :: Lionette's Market once again received a Boston magazine "Best of Boston" award for "Best Takeout in the South End." :: Even more important to us than the mag's pat-on-the-back is this huge move of ours: Lionette's and Garden of Eden both now fully recycle and compost. We have reduced our daily garbage from five or six of those big blue barrels a day to about one. Everything else is composted or recycled. This was part of our agreement in joining the GRA -- Green Restaurant Association. Once James gets all of the paperwork, receipts, and sundry materials in order, both operations will be certified green by the GRA. That should happen this month (though it is summer, and everyone moves real slow, and he probably recycled all of those documents already). But rest assured that it will happen, giving you yet one more reason to visit us often, and to, as always, remember our missive: Sustainable farming is and will always be the only option. Happy reading. Clean eating. Family Lionette *************************************************************** LIONETTE'S EVENTS Saturday afternoon, 22 September Chocolate sauce tastings with Shootflying Hill Kory is one of our favorite local producers (and not just because we're chocoholics). Come by the market and try her amazing sauces like chocolate, peach bourbon, and butterscotch. She does demos at Lionette's a few of times a year and always brings in outrageous treats made from her sauces (and hands out the recipes so you can make them at home). Definitely swing by and meet her. ************************************************************** LIONETTE'S PRODUCE O' THE MONTH
Ahhh, August: Our slowest month of the year. Between everyone away on vacation and the high-end restaurants selling cheap food during Restaurant Week, we do our least amount of business all year. What a shame. Because this is the absolute best month of the year for New England produce. We already are getting the first apples of the year, tiny and tart as they are New Braintree, Mass, while we can declare that official "tomato madness" is upon us. We've also got onions from Blue Heron Farm, in Lincoln, Mass., as well as cippolini, Walla Walla, scallions, leeks. These onions are so delicious! We recommend cooking them up with some of our store-made sausages, ground fresh using our grass-fed meats. And so much more. August is the easiest month to eat only local food in New England. So while everyone else is out of town you can come in for some good, fresh produce for your own home cooking. We've got peppers, summer squashes, eggplants, so many different greens, potatoes, beets, cucumbers, cauliflower, and peachespeachespeaches! Even with just two fine ingredients like a tomato and cucumber you can drizzle them with some olive oil and make yourself the perfect summer salad. So come on in and make the effort to eat some local produce to remind you what fruit and vegetables should taste like. *************************************************************** SUSTAINABLE SUPPLIES at LIONETTE'S This may sound similar to past newsletters, but do yourself a favor and try these local diary products:
Monument Milk Let's be honest now: There's nothing really local about Stoneyfield. If you feel like we speak poorly of them all the time it's because, well, we think they deserve it. Almost none of the company's milk comes from local farms, it produces its milk from out West, and it ultra-pasteurizes it so it has a shelf life of several months. (And that doesn't count how long it takes to get to your market, how many refrigerated trucks and refrigerated warehouses it sat in, and how many miles it traveled to get here!). So instead, we invite you to meet Ms. Millicent J Rooney, from Weybridge, Vermont. Her mother founded Monument Farm in 1930 where today she has 358 milking cows, a son, and a nephew. They milk those cows by hand, every day, in their barns. When they're not being milked those cows get to roam the pastures, freely, and revel in that they're filled with grass (and just a little bit of corn the family grows themselves ... but not much) and no antibiotics, growth stimulants, hormones, or anything else you'd want your milk-producing cows to avoid.
Believe us when we say there are very few farms that resemble any of this anymore. Especially in Massachusetts, which at one time had the highest amount of workable farmland in the country. Millicent tells James that if one of the cows gets sick, the cow is administered antibiotics to save its life, but it is removed from the herd and not milked. This is easy to do when you have only 358 cows on one farm; very different when you have 358,000 cows in hundreds of factories across the country (we're just guessing those commodity organic milk numbers, so don't quote us on that ... but if anyone does have some cow estimates for commodity milk, organic or drugged milk, we'd be interested in knowing).
Weybridge is a small town near Middlebury, and the milk processing plant is a half a mile from the farm. When Millicent, her son, and nephew milk and process on Friday and Saturday, and the milk arrives at Lionette's on Monday. So why not make Monday, your Milkday. Because Monument's milk is the real deal, made the only way milk should be. Compared with all the other organics out there we really do think it tastes like the absolute best milk in the world.
Vermont Milk Co. Yogurt On every container of Vermont Milk Co. yogurt there's a little tag that reads: "Vermont can't afford to keep losing farms and farmers can't afford to keep losing money. Like anyone else, we need a fair return for the work we do and the products we make. Consumers want to buy local but the way the milk industry worked it's not so easy. Most Vermont milk gets mixed with milk form other states, trucked in from all over the place, and sold as a cheap commodity. Most of the money goes to big corporations -- not family farms. The Vermont MIlk Company started with dairy farmers of Vermont, a grassroots effort to improve the farm income, gain control of our milk and give consumers a local Vermont brand of milk and diary products. We are owned by Vermonters and controlled by Vermont farmers, use only 100 % Vermont Milk form 100% Vermont Farms, pay our farmers a fair and stable price and assure you when you buy from us you are buying local and supporting your farmer neighbors." Don't you just feel all clean and sparkly after reading that? If you're a yogurt fan, this is among the best. It is not a Greek or Swiss or Indian style of yogurt, it's decidedly New England and not as thick or custardy as the other styles. But the flavor -- oh. It's the perfect balance of creaminess and acidity. Add some local berries while they're still in season to make it even better, or sprinkle on some Woodstock granola to make it truly wonderful.
Fiore di Nonna Fresh Mozz & Burrata You want fresh? Come in Tuesday or Friday afternoon and have mozzarella and Burrata made just an hour or so earlier. We typically get in her wares every week, but do yourself another favor and come in some Tuesday afternoon to buy a ball of her mozz and a couple of local tomatoes, and be reminded that New England can not only feed itself, but has some seriously good eats. Lourdes's mozzarella is the only mozzarella we sell at Lionette's as we have no interest in getting cheese that was flown from Italy. Although it's delicious and has its place, it's just too much energy wasted when we can get wonderful fresh cheese made here in Somerville. *********** SUSTAINABLE UPDATE: FOOD in the NEWS Last week probably one of the most important pieces of legislation on the future of our food in this country was widely discussed in Washington: the Farm Bill. There are a lot of people putting a lot of time into making sure the Farm Bill has some good merits and that it tries to ensure that our food supply won't collapse in the next 20 to 30 years, so I prefer to use their words and research rather than my own. Here is a communique from Food & Water Watch. (To find out more about the Farm Bill and the Food and Water Watch, visit: http://www.foodandwaterwatch. org/food/us-farmbill): As you may have seen in the news, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill on Friday afternoon. And your e-mails made a difference! On several key issues, bad amendments were either withdrawn or defeated.
Here's the wrap-up:
Factory Farms: An amendment to lift the cap on payments to large farms from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program was defeated on the floor of the House. EQIP is a conservation program that gives grants to farms to improve their environmental practices. Removing the cap on farm size would allow large factory farms to receive grants to build systems for managing the vast amounts of manure their operations generate. The defeat of this amendment was good news for those trying to make factory farms pay to clean up the pollution they create.
Country of Origin Labeling (COOL): After lots of behind-the-scenes drama to head off a threatened amendment to gut the program, the House version of the bill clarifies how country-of-origin labeling will be instituted for meat and produce. And it keeps the process on track so labeling will be required in September 2008. In light of the furious opposition by the meat, produce, and grocery industries, this is a major victory for consumers who took action to say they want COOL now.
Organic Production: The House version of the bill includes funding to help farmers transition to organic production and also more support for research into organic production methods.
While we made good progress on these fronts, the Farm Bill is a much bigger package of policies. One of the cornerstones of the Farm Bill is policy on commodity crops like corn, soybeans, cotton, and rice. The House version of the Farm Bill leaves in place a broken system for these commodity crops. The House missed an opportunity to re-instate supply management programs that would stop the overproduction of these crops that leads to low prices for farmers and cheap feed for factory farms. Instead, they tinkered around the edges of bad policies that have been in place since 1996.
But the Farm Bill process is far from over: The Senate has to present its version of the bill, and then the two versions have to be merged together in a conference committee. Congress will start their August recess later this week, so you might be seeing your Senators and Representative out in your community. Tell them (especially the Senators) that you want a Farm Bill that: - gives consumers country-of-origin labeling - restores conservation programs like the Conservation Security Program - supports organic production methods - and establishes supply management for commodity crops instead of current programs that encourage overproduction *************************************************************** END NOTES from JAMES Try for a moment to think back to the cigarette debate over the last ten to 20 years, or even more recently, the debate over climate change and global warming. One word comes to my mind: Misinformation.
There was (and still is) a serious amount of money and energy devoted to producing misinformation about the effects and addictiveness of cigarettes by the tobacco industry. There was doubt within the scientific community over the harm and addiction associated with cigarettes. This doubt came from scientific think tanks and studies, which were funded by the tobacco industry. The idea was to create doubt and uncertainty within the American population by discrediting peer review and credible scientific studies and groups, by pointing to other studies (funded by tobacco companies) with different conclusions.
Today, companies like Exxon have followed the tobacco misinformation trail, with climate change. We first heard that there were some scientists who thought there was a problem, and some that said there was no problem. Over the last year or two, we've been told by newspapers that most scientists agree there is climate change, but there is still dispute within the scientific community whether or not humans are creating the problem.
Today it is usually worded in newspapers something like "most" or "much scientific research seems to suggest that possibly human activity is a possible factor in climate change," giving the American public a healthy dose of "what if." This is all part of misinformation campaigns. It is not conspiracy; it's wealthy people trying to stay wealthy at our expense. It's the perverted freedom of speech large corporations exercise. Read George Manibot's Heat, or even watch Al Gore's movie to get some specifics and footnotes. Misinformation is real, and it is malicious.
This brings me to the new public debate: Local food. First, I feel like newspaper journalists don't really write their articles and instead, public relations firms write the stories and try to get newspapers to place their "story." The journalist then does some of his or her own work, but the idea and even some of the body is submitted by the PR firm. Lionette's and Garden of Eden hired a PR firm once, and it got us some press -- more than when we do didn't have one. But sometimes the news articles sounded frighteningly similar to the press release that our able PR person had written. So now, when I read an article, I always try to figure out who submitted it, and what their interest was. The food sections of newspapers have an obvious bias to try to get readers to buy certain foods or visit certain restaurants. But what about articles on what kind of food to buy? (Just to save my behind, let me say that there are certainly some reporters who actually do find and write their own stories. I am not trying to demonize reporters, I'm just speaking from my own observations.)
Issue #1: Is it really fair trade? With the first, the less compelling and seldom used arguments by George Rosen seem to play on middleclass liberal guilt. "Buying local blueberries is hurting small pineapple farmers in Central America?" His idea is that we should focus our buying on "fair trade" and encourage more companies to practice this "fair-marketing principle." This idea that first-world consumerism is the best thing for third-world peasants is in my opinion part of disgusting paternalistic notion of globalization.
If it were not for us valiant privileged first world people, Latin American fruit farmers would go broke, and Latin America would starve? As Rosen points out correctly, "the majority of the world's population that lives off of agriculture ... are small landholders, if not landless workers toiling for others." The way globalization works, in a nutshell, is that a few large foreign (or to us in the United States, we say "American interests") companies hire landless workers to toil at pitiful wages so that we can get cheap food. His argument is "rather than reducing American and foreign products, to redirect our dollars to organizations like the 'fair trade' networks in coffee and tea, which encourage sustainable agriculture and a just return to farmers, and to spread the fair-marketing principle to other products we buy abroad." A friendlier free trade, a more balanced globalization is just not possible. Again, the reason imported foods are so cheap in this country is because American and European companies are in the third world ripping off the workers and farmers and shipping that food North. That is how those companies make so much money. They have no interest in changing how much money they make. Sure, for things like coffee and bananas, we should only buy products we know have no blood on them. But that is such a small percentage of food that is imported to this country. We cannot change globalization with our money. And while half of the world lives in poverty and malnourishment (yes, half the world: Ask the U.N.) why not just kick out Nestle, Dole, and Dupont and let the people who live and work the land grow the food they want and distribute it as they see fit? Now what does this have to do with climate change and local food? Seemingly nothing. But Rosen imparts more important misinformation:
"Even if the question is the energy cost -- the carbon footprint -- of transporting food long distances, the issues still are not clear-cut. To truly save the planet, the real challenges are the development of energy-efficient transportation and a clear-eyed assessment of the actual energy costs of different types of agriculture: finding the best ways and the best places to grow different crops and adjusting our diets when necessary. "To be a little brutal," he continues, "if semitropical rice and beans can be produced at a lower cost in nutrients and energy than northern wheat and Vermont butter, then perhaps we should be changing our notions of the staff of life rather than trying to support a boutique local agriculture."
First there is the question of whether or not transporting food long distances is less environmentally damaging than short distances. Rather than fall back on what we know has always been sustainable for thousands of years -- eating locally -- Rosen suggests we try to develop new energy efficient transportation! But we should also wait and have clear-eyed assessment? We do not have that long, nor can we be clear-eyed with all the misinformation and private and American interests at stake.
Then Rosen points out this pathetic American know-it-all rubbish, which I mentioned before: "...To be a little brutal, if semitropical rice and beans can be produced at a lower cost in nutrients and energy than…." The people in the semi-tropics knew how to sustain themselves for thousands of years, as did everyone else in the world. We even knew how to do it in this country until about 60 years ago. Now we are going to tell people in the semi-tropics what crops they are going to grow for us? It is not so much that I think Rosen is an arse, it's that this is how people are talking, and though this piece was an editorial, this is what is being spread throughout the media.
Rosen's ridiculous statement calling local products "boutique local agriculture" comes back to the real cost of food. When our wages and budgets are based on the price of cheap food imported from all over the world at cheap prices, real sustainable food -- local food -- seems expensive. So when only the wealthy can afford it, and when local is just a passing trend, it turns into something boutique. That concept should only show how far into the abyss our culture has come. "Local sustainable food is boutique." I'm sure the farmers up and down the Northeast seaboard would really call getting up at 4 a.m., daily, and gutting and griming all day for the sake of clean food really feel like they're working in a boutique industry.
If this is what you believe then just throw the towel in right now ... but hopefully you are still reading.
Issue #2: To truck or not? The second article I mentioned above hits on the biggest misinformation campaign out there on local food. Drake Bennett's piece didn't read like Rosen's editorial, and like many people I really enjoy the leisurely reading found in the Sunday paper's Ideas section, where Bennett's piece appeared. But unfortunately, Bennett's article was textbook misinformation.
Again: Think back to articles about cigarettes 15 years ago, or on climate change two years ago. Bennett says, "a gathering body of evidence suggests that local food can sometimes consume more energy -- and produce more greenhouse gases -- than food imported from greater distances." Honestly: We have not even begun to fully understand or admit to ourselves how we are destroying the planet, yet we are already producing studies show that a business-as-usual attitude toward farming will more likely save the planet than resorting to tried and true methods? Bennett's madness continues: "Moving food by train or ship is quite efficient, pound for pound, and transportation can often be a relatively small part of the total energy 'footprint' of food compared with growing, packaging, or, for that matter, cooking it. A head of lettuce grown in Vermont may have less of an energy impact than one shipped up from Chile. But grow that Vermont lettuce late in the season in a heated greenhouse and its energy impact leapfrogs the imported option...." I cannot give you a percentage, but hopefully you will respect me for knowing a little bit about local food production even without one: VERY LITTLE OF NEW ENGLAND PRODUCE IS GROWN IN GREENHOUSES. We have few enough local farms left to begin with ... but now we should criticize a few of them for producing some year round greenhouse food? Yes, we should realize that eating locally means local and sustainable. In New England we have so few mass-produced food factories that generally when we think of local we think of clean and sustainable. It should stay that way. Local food has to be produced sustainably. So if we have a few energy- consuming greenhouses, no problem; but lots of them, yes we have a problem. Truth is, right now there's no problem with local farms sucking up too much energy with winter greenhouses because there aren't many, so lay off them Drake.
And it's absolutely true that judged by unit of weight, ship and rail transport in particular are highly energy efficient. Ship is the most sustainable form of transportation; at least it was for hundreds or thousands of years. Sail boats, once made, need only wind to transport them. Which is why we should always be able to enjoy shelf stable things like coffee, tea, and olive oil.
Bennett goes on, using formula misinformation: "But the difference can be dramatic, according to Rich Pirog, a food-systems researcher at Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. A bag of potatoes shipped from Idaho to Boston by rail, he estimates, is likely to require less energy in transit than the same bag of potatoes driven from Maine to Boston in a farmer's truck. In recent decades, the national food-distribution system has shifted from rail to trucking, so fuel use has risen, but that still doesn't necessarily make local the best energy option."
Again, all you have to do is read this and think. Just think about the whole scenario. Ask yourself this: How many Idaho potato farms are on the railway system (despite the fact that this researcher himself states that trucking has replaced rail)? The potatoes have to be trucked from all over Idaho to the railway. Add that to the energy used by the rail. Then, how many restaurants and markets are right at the Boston rail depot? And how many chefs pick up their potatoes at the rail depot? None. So, they must be trucked to a warehouse (which also use lots of energy) then trucked again, possibly to another produce vendor or supermarket warehouse, then trucked again to the restaurant or market. The Maine potatoes? Some may go to produce vendors or other middlemen, but most New England farms deliver directly to the restaurant, market, or consumer. So there is very little or no added cost to the transportation of local potatoes, but the article fails to point out all the transportation energy needed to ship Idaho potatoes to Boston.
The article then blurs in and out and contradicts itself. I am curious if Bennett or the Globe editor noticed. But, by this point, the questioning of local food was already out there for the world to read. There is doubt. Maybe food from far away is more sustainable than local food. This is how misinformation works:
"A study Pirog did of Iowa's food supply in 2001 suggested that a transition to a more localized food system, at least in Iowa's case, would cut fuel use over today's international system. But the same study found that a multi-state regional system would be better still. The trucks transporting food in that model would be bigger and more efficient per unit of food than in the local model, while not traveling as far as in a national model."
So that would mean that the same study also found that while shipping potatoes from Idaho to Maine is likely to require less energy than from Maine to Boston, the same study also found that multi-state regional systems would be better, too. Boston is not in Maine. They are both in New England. That is a multi-state regional system. So local is better than local? Or is local better? But the article's title and main theme are suggesting that local may not be as good as long distance. Confusing, isn't it? This is how misinformation works. At Lionette's//GOE we consider New England, New York, and Quebec "local". Where there certainly needs to be some help in creating an infrastructure for a local de- centralized food supply, what Piroq's study suggests (the parts that actually make sense) are already in place. When Angelo's, the folks who used to deliver us food from dozens of upstate New York farms could no longer fill their trucks with food for Boston (because almost no one was purchasing from them) they stopped coming, and instead focused on New York City, where more people seem to care about what they eat than Bostonians. Had more people in Boston had the desire to eat locally they would have had a full truck every week. They did not, so they stopped coming. Efficiency. There are two trucks from Vermont who pick up from dozens of local farms on the way to Boston . Some are farm co-ops, others are local business selling and shipping local food. They are working together to fill the trucks and make it make sense to come to Boston. Would we all be better off if they had more efficient trucks? Yes. Thankfully our congressmen from whom we voted for to express our will just passed that killer energy bill on fuel miles for cars and trucks. (in case you missed it, it was just another gesture, and will change nothing but our climate.) So lay off the farmers, because they have always been sustainable, and are doing what they can to stay in business and be sustainable. Maybe if this city was not so dependent on supermarkets there would be no mess or confusion in the first place.
Lay off the cows, man! Bennett continues jumping around: "And for cattle, the greatest climate impact comes not from hauling cows and milk and steaks around the country, but from cow burps. Cows are impressive emitters of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide (contrary to popular belief, most of it comes out the front of the cow, not the rear). A cow with a bit of indigestion can contribute as much to global warming in a day as the average SUV." "How food travels, in other words, matters as much as how far it travels, and what happens on the farm or in the kitchen can leave a much bigger energy footprint than what happens between them."
But they never discuss what exactly happens on the factory farm. Yes cow burps and SUVs have got to go, right now. Seriously, unless you hate kids, smash your SUV and shut down every feedlot in this country. But do not blame the cows! They are forced into the feedlots and fed food and drugs they would not take on farm! And remember that most food that is shipped around has to be in large quantity, for the reason of profit, not necessarily to be "green." When we eat an orange, or West coat beef or California organic lettuce, it is not really from a farm. It's from a factory. There are not many small farms left, and generally small farms sell their food locally. So there is not much that needs to change there. The practices of mass-production monoculture factory farms, however, are bad; how bad? Worse than the carbon emitting SUVs! Whether they come by rail, ship, truck, or horse-drawn wagon, the agribusiness factory farms must be shut down right now. Which of course leaves us with most of our food supply coming from local, er ... "regional" multi-state farms (like new England New York and Quebec).
"'Often it's those activities and behaviors at the two ends of the production system that tend to dominate,' says Dr. Peter Tyedmers, an assistant professor in the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, and an ecological economist and researcher of the biophysical costs and sustainability of fisheries and aquaculture production systems. He, like other food analysts, point out that per pound of food, the grocery shopper's drive home from the store or farmer's market can often use more energy than the entire rest of the supply chain." Which has always been my point: Do not ever again get in your car and drive out of the South End to a Whole Foods or Shaws. Walk around your own neighborhood, meet and be a part of your own community. And in closing.... My absolute last rant about these two articles is about this name calling crap. Remember when you were mockingly called a "tree hugger" if you suggested that maybe cutting down all the rain forests was a bad idea. When they do not have logic, common sense, or even facts on their side, these morons will just call you names to discredit you. Now are we really supposed to be happy about some stupid catchy name like "locavores" or "locatarians?" If we want to platy tit for tat, let's just call people who shop at Whole Foods and Shaws "Carbonites" and "Methane-heads." There. We're even.