On Milk: Dear 16 year-old Me

Mona and baby Moonpie, two of our beloved Nubian dairy goats

Dear 16 year-old me,

Hey you, pulling your PETA literature out of the family mailbox on the rural route. Good for you. You're doing your best to do the right thing. I'm proud of you for realizing that food is important, and for grasping that the way most of the food you've been eating is produced is brutal, unhealthy, and morally repugnant.

Good job saying goodbye to your beloved quarter-pounder with cheese. I'm proud of you for believing with all of your heart that our small, daily actions are important and that personal decisions have the power to create social change. You are right. You will probably be happy to know that your 38 year-old counterpart still believes in that power. I so appreciate your passion and your conviction, and your desire to know the truth and do the right thing.

Specifically, you're right about the meat industry as it exists. The meat and milk and eggs you can find on the shelves of your supermarket in the late 1980s are beyond bad. But what you don't know now is that by the time you're in your thirties, the range of food options available to you will be very different. And your perspective will be more nuanced and complex. Things will have changed, and you will have changed. We could have a long conversation about meat, animals, vegetables, and health - I would love that and it would be spirited, contentious, and fun.

Maybe I'll continue to write to you here in this format that wasn't invented (the blog) on something called the internet, which was just a glimmer in Al Gore's eye back when you were reading Peter Singer's Animal Rights.

But for now, there's one thing in particular I hear you saying that I'd like to respond to: "humans are the only animals that drink another animal's milk." I know you think it's disgusting and unnatural, and it's also wrapped up in your new-found insight into factory-farmed dairy - where sick, exhausted milk cows are hooked up to milking machines, pumped full of antibiotics and hormones, and living miserable lives. Twenty years later, there are still articles circulating on Facebook (something else that hasn't even been dreamed of yet - Mark Zuckerberg is probably in preschool) about how unhealthy and unnatural milk consumption is for humans.

Yogurt from our goats' milk

But here is the answer that pops into my head twenty years later to your impassioned, heartfelt, and true statement:

Yes. Humans are the only animals that drink the milk of another animal. We are the only animals that do many of the things that we do. Let me name a few: cultivate gardens, plant seeds, cook, build fires to keep warm. There are many more examples.

Some of the things that we do that no other animals do are destructive and morally questionable. You and I do some of them anyway. An example in this category would be driving in cars on highways. Some of the things we do that no other animal does are not destructive or morally wrong just because they are unique to us. For example, we plant potatoes.

Would you be surprised to know, dear teenaged me, that the you of the future owns dairy animals? Our animals our healthy and happy, we milk by hand, and we drink the milk raw. I also plant potatoes, something no other animals do. I believe that the milk our goats produce, like the vegetables we grow in our gardens, is healthier and more nutritious than food you can find on supermarket shelves.

Potatoes au gratin with our goat milk and goat cheese. Cooked on a woodstove - note that no other animals chop firewood, construct woodstoves, or invented the cast iron skillet. Or have cameras or "The Joy of Cooking."

Oh dear sweet, sharp, scrappy, strident, loving, and well-intentioned me, here is what I'd most like to say to you: be as gentle with yourself and others as you are with the planet. Be open to change. Be open to changing your mind.

If you could know that after 20 years of strict vegetarianism and intermittent veganism you would suffer from debilitating health problems that very likely were caused or exacerbated by your diet, would you still make the same choices? Maybe so. And maybe those choices were the right ones at the time. Looking back, I think they probably were given your options at the time. But as clearly as you know that factory-farmed meat and dairy and eggs are wrong, I know that raising animals for eggs, milk, and meat can be part of an ethical way of life.

And as for milk, I say YES, humans stand alone as a species in having domesticated other animals in order to drink their milk and make cheese, yogurt, whipped cream, and butter from it. I'm so glad we do! Milk in its natural state - not factory-farmed, processed, and lifeless but fresh from the goat (or cow) is good food. Protein. Fats. Healthy bacteria. You can read a lot about it these days when information is so very accessible compared to the way it was in the late 1980s. (Here are a few things I've posted in recent years involving milk.)

I'm fascinated by the history of this relationship between humans and our domesticated animals, and grateful to be part of the continuing tradition of caring for these animals well on a small, homestead scale.

So there you have it, 16 year-old self. You will one day make butter. No other animal does that. And you will love that butter and know how good for you it is. You will know the animals that produce the milk you use are happier in your dairy-loving care than they would be just about anywhere else. And you will believe with all of your heart that it benefits the planet for people to produce their own food, including raising dairy animals for milk.

Oh, and you'll get to see R.E.M. live four or five times in the future (which is now my distant past), the prospect of which I know is pretty thrilling to you. Enjoy!

Love you!

~B

Occupy the Pantry. . .

. . .and the fridge, and the cupboards, and the stovetop, and the plate. And while we're at it, let's occupy the pasture and the hen house and the dairy barn and the vegetable garden.

Watching the Occupy Wall Street movement crop up, proliferate, and bloom over the past few weeks has been good for my soul.

Enough has been written about corporate control of food systems and how it serves the 1% while harming the planet, our health, and workers. I don't need to add my own long diatribe here. Suffice to say that the multinational for-profit food industry is part of the problem that OWS is rallying against. Industrial agriculture and the food policy it has spawned by way of corporate control of our political process contributes to hunger, pollution, and the destruction of small farms and farmland.

So taking control of your own food supply and working for community food justice is part of the solution. And it feels good to be aware of doing that one small part while a bigger movement grows all around us. I like thinking of planting lettuce in our winter gardens and gathering eggs in the morning and canning tomato sauce as actions in solidarity with the Occupiers all over the world.

Some of my favorite posts on related notes:

• Occupy Your Kitchen (great post with lots of tips for wresting your food supply from corporate control by Laura Everage/Family Eats)

• Revolution Begins In Your Kitchen: Occupy Wall Street from Your Kitchen (Lindsay Curren at Transition Voice)

• Occupy the Pasture (Steph Larsen at Grist)

Along the same lines, check out this great Ted Talk on gardening as a revolutionary, subversive activity:

Roger Doiron reminds us, among other things, that "food is a form of energy...but it's also a form of power. And when we encourage people to grow some of their own food, we're encouraging them to take power into their own hands. Power over their diet, power over their health, and some power over their pocketbooks. And that's quite subversive because we are also necessarily talking about taking that power away from someone else -- from other actors in society who currently have power over food and health. You can think about who some of those actors might be." I also love his statement that "gardening is a healthy gateway drug to other forms of food freedom."

To wrap it all up, here's a great quote from the ever-amazing, Frances Moore Lappé, one of my heroes, whose recent article in The Nation I highly recommend:

‎"At its best, [the food] movement encourages us to “think like an ecosystem,” enabling us to see a place for ourselves connected to all others, for in ecological systems “there are no parts, only participants,” German physicist Hans Peter Duerr reminds us. With an “eco-mind” we can see through the productivist fixation that inexorably concentrates power, generating scarcity for some, no matter how much we produce. We’re freed from the premise of lack and the fear it feeds. Aligning food and farming with nature’s genius, we realize there’s more than enough for all."
~Frances Moore Lappé, "The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities"

Local Food and Climate Change: Every Day is Blog Action Day

To celebrate today's blog action day, I'm posting photos of our recent stint selling at the West Asheville farmers market (see below).

Decreasing your foodprint is a great small step that individual people and families can take to help slow climate change. But individual actions--low-impact eating and living, conserving energy and resources, consuming less, reducing your carbon footprint --are a drop in the bucket. These actions are inherently political, but they are not enough on their own.

In addition to individual action, the world needs our collective political action for immediate and large-scale change. I'm grateful for and impressed with 350.org's organizing work building power, raising awareness, and advocating for such change.

In nine days, on October 24, 350.org is holding an International Day of Climate Action. The organizers of Blog Action Day are also putting forward a petition urging President Obama to make the US a leader in solving the problem that we have led the world in creating. Add your signature here.

Individual choices like eating local food and large-scale political action like participating in 350's Day of Action are essential, but there's more: we must build new systems to replace the dysfunctional one that's caused the climate crisis in the first place. We need to build the lifeboats, create the world we want to live in, and set up alternate structures to replace the crumbling ones that have caused so much damage to the planet. Building local food systems is part of that creative work.

So here's to actions small and large. May the systems of life on planet be healed by all of our creative individual and collective acts. Including these very small ones:

Food Justice For All

"Food justice is everyone having enough to eat; healthy food for our children; food that doesn't contain harmful things that we don't know about; freedom to grow our own food; ability to buy food directly from farmers; fair wages for those who grow, cook and work with food." 

~ The Urban & Environmental Policy Institute 

Photo credit: AP/David Adame

Lately, in food and gardening circles, there has been more and more talk of food justice.  Even before the severity of the economic meltdown began to be apparent, local food, clean food, and slow food movements were being pushed from within and from without to address issues of access to healthy food and justice for farm workers.  At the big Slow Food USA gathering in September, lack of attention to labor rights, food elitism, and food justice in general were rightly called out.  These issues were finally brought to the Slow Food USA table last fall, but people have been organizing around them for many years around the world.

I think that I first became aware of the concept of "food justice" when I read World Hunger: Twelve Myths by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins for a class in college.  ReadingTwelve Myths was one of those pivotal experiences in life -- it provided a lens through which I have seen the world ever since.  Beginning to understand the ways that food and social justice are related was similar for me to acquiring the lens of feminist theory: it gave me tools which with to understand the world around me and forever altered the way I would process information. 

Growing up in a family where Cesar Chavez was a household hero meant I had some awareness of farmworker rights from early on.  In the time I spent working as a union organizer, I began to understand labor issues around food -- namely the systematic violations of the basic human rights of the people who grow and harvest the food on our plates.

Twelve Myths, and the work of Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy, with which Lappe has been associated for many years, are still critical sources for me when thinking about the politics of food.  Farmworkers' rights organizations (several of which are listed in the resources at the bottom of this post) continue to expand my understanding of labor and human rights issues related to food.

Photo credit:  Farmworker Support Committee

My participation in the local food movement has been largely driven by a kind of personal "triple bottom line" -- wanting to eat the healthiest food possible; wanting to make the most ecologically responsible food choices; and wanting to know the people who grow and harvest my food and value their work, which produces the food on my plate.  

It has been encouraging to see the new attention being paid to food justice issues from within the local/slow/organic food movements lately.  Coincidentally or not, several "food challenge" projects have also cropped up lately to document the difficulty of feeding the family in the economic system that we live in -- particularly in light of the declines in wages and employment coupled with ever-escalating food prices.  Two that I'm aware of are:

The Working Poor Diet

and 

The One Dollar Diet Project

These food challenge diaries expose the injustice of hunger in lands of plenty (Canada and the US) and draw attention to the economic realities that so many people are up against in their day-to-day food lives.

It seems that the recent economic downturn, which we're told by President Obama could well turn into an economic catastrophe of Great Depression-proportions, has created an environment where the value of growing food, community food security, and food justice are on the tips of tongues all over the country.  

Some good reading along these lines: 

8 Ways to Eat Well in Hard Times

Four Food Groups of the Apocalypse on Food Justice Blog

Photo credit: Student Action with Farmworkers

Other reccomended food justice resources:

Civil Eats

Food First

"The Food Justice Movement: Trying to Break the Food Chains" by Mark Winston Griffith

National Farmworker Alliance

Grow Food

See all of my "Obamacons" and make your own here.

I love the idea of creating these Obama-esque images to replace the cult of personality/idol worship aspect of Obamamania with power-to-the-people.  What excites me most about the Obama presidency is the increased potential for power to spread out among more of us, for all of us to be agents of change, for all of us to put hope into action.  I am not counting on Barack to fix everything or even to do the right thing all of the time.  I am counting on us to hold him accountable and wield our own power to make positive change in the world.  

At an anti-Prop 8 rally, my friend K. and I inadvertantly ended up holding a banner that said "People of Faith for Just Relationships." We laughed about it because we are people of faith, deep faith, but not necessarily in the way that the words on the banner were meant. I have faith not so much in a "higher power" but in a deeper, broader, more universal power--the power that resides in all of us and in all life.  I have faith in the power of community, of creativity, of the earth and her living systems, of people coming together. I believe in the healing and redemptive power of love, compassion, and active hope. I have faith in our power to heal and to regenerate, and in the planet's power to heal and regenerate.  

So here's to being a person of faith ... and to an ethic of shared power and power-from-within replacing the ethic of power-over.

And more power to ya!

Inaugural bread-baking in the woodstove

Here's the first bread baked in the wood cookstove yesterday on President Obama's first day in office:

Nantahala Herb & Onion Bread

This bread is a nostalgic favorite of mine.  It used to be made fresh daily at the Nantahala Outdoor Center resturant.  Maybe it still is, for all I know!  

• 4 c water (I substituted whey leftover from raw milk cheese-making)
• 1/4 c active dry yeast
• 4 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp dried dill weed
• 1 tsp dried rosemary leaf
• 6 T sugar (I substituted honey for half of the sugar)
• 1/4 c butter, melted
• 1/2 c powedered milk (I omitted this. It's not necessary, especially if you're using whey instead of water)
• 1 c onions, chopped
• 10-11 c flour (i used 1/2 spelt and 1/2 whole wheat pastry flour)

1. Combine water/whey, yeast, salt, dill, rosemary, sugar/honey, melted butter, powdered milk if you're using it, and onions.  
2. Allow yeast to activate until mixture is bubbly, approximately 10-15 minutes
3. Add flour.
4. Mix by hand until uniform.   Turn dough onto floured surface and knead for 10 minutes.
5. Put the dough someplace warm and allow it to rise until doubled, approximately 45 mintues.
6. After dough rises, knead well.
7. Shape into at least 3 loaves (you can also make more smaller loaves, but don't do fewer than 3 or you'll have a doughy center) and place in greased bread pans.
8. Bake at 350 degrees for 45-55 minutes.  
9. Brush tops of bread with butter after removing, and allow to cool or eat warm!

The smell of herb and onion bread baking in the oven is orgasmic. And breathing in that aroma as it fills the house to the soundtrack of newscasts about Obama's plans to close Guantanemo and reverse the global gag order qualifies as peak experience in my world.

Below: The Obamas greet visitors at the White House open house on President Obama's first day in office.

inaugural

adjective

1.  occurring at or characteristic of a formal investiture or induction; "the President's inaugural address"; "an inaugural ball" 

2. marking the beginning of a new venture, serving to set in motion; "the magazine's inaugural issue";"the initiative phase in the negotiations"; "an initiatory step toward a treaty"; "his first speech in Congress"; "the liner's maiden voyage" 

And all around me, a voice was sounding. . .

Keep Farmers Farming

I serve on the Board of Directors of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP), the organization that produces the Local Food Guide, helped get the Asheville City Market off the ground, and does lots more to promote local food in western NC. If you don't know what ASAP does, you're not alone. Best known as "the people behind that green thousands of miles fresher bumpersticker" or "the people who put out the Local Food Guide," ASAP has been quietly creating and expanding markets for local food all throughout this region. If you live in western North Carolina and you've enjoyed local produce in recent years, you may have ASAP to thank, in addition to your farmers, whether you know it or not! ASAP also does a lot to increase access to local food, including coordinating a farm to school program, Growing Minds.

Danny McConnell, a local farmer who inspires me bigtime, is also an ASAP Board Member. He wrote the letter posted below, an appeal to "keep farmers farming."

I am posting this with deep gratitude for all of those growing food in these parts, and in hope that all of us who care about local food, healthy local economies, and preserving farming as a way of life will support the organizations working hard to create systems to support local food.

Click here to make a donation to ASAP.

Click on the image below to enlarge Danny's letter and read it.

Obama Victory Edition

A friend left me a message this morning that said, "Good morning. Welcome to the first day of the new paradigm."

I hope we look back on today and find that it really was the beginning of a new era!

My prayer is that we hold in our hearts the knowledge of how it feels when the efforts and hopes of so many people come to fruition. And that we stay organized, continuing to work together to create real change. And that we honor each other, the planet, and the web of life more and more each day. And that our new president holds as sacred all of the hopes for a just and sustainable world that motivated so many people to work so hard in this election. And that one day voting is the very least thing that people do to shape their world as we all come to understand our own power and our connections to one another and the planet. So may it be!

My photos from election day in Asheville (sampled above) are up on picasa here and some of the greatest hits of Asheville for Obama (sampled at left) are here.

"Farmer in Chief" -- Michael Pollan's Open Letter to the Next President

Michael Pollan has an amazing new article in the New York Times Magazine: "Farmer In Chief".

Addressed to "Dear Mr. President Elect," Pollan's letter briefs the next president (pictured above, let's hope!)about food policy and lays out the case that this will be one of the most significant sets of issues that the new president will address during his tenure.

Here's a snip:

"Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we’re not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized."

Pollan outlines specific ways that the next president can advance federal policies to encourage polyculture and discourage petrofertilizers, de-incentivize Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and factory farming, encourage Americans to reduce their meat consumption, preserve farmland, reregionalize the food system, and change the culture and politics of food in the US. The article includes specific steps that the federal government can take in all of these areas. In short, IT ROCKS. Michael Pollan strikes again with a perfectly-timed piece synthesizing and simplifying complex issues related to the politics of food.

Pollan ends the article with a fabulous idea:

"The White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden. When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. ... Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently."

Read the whole article here.

Read more about the movement to revive victory gardens here.

Apocalyptic rhetoric, the power of a single action, and a beautiful homestead

After coming across this beautiful image on a blog I recently discovered (Future House Farm), I followed the internet rabbithole to the website for the family home in Wales that is the subject of the photograph: A Low Impact Woodland Home.

This beautiful little building seems to have "the quality that has no name" described in A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building. In any case, this image makes my heart sing!

Here's a quick clip about why the people who live in this house are doing what they're doing: