Conscious Consuming

"You are what you eat, so don't eat crap." ~Timothy

"You are what you eat" is best served by knowing what you eat, which is of course achieved by bringing awareness to how you choose your food.

Here on the farm, I particularly enjoy knowing that the produce I grow just needs to have the dust (& occasional bugs) washed off it (if even that), and there is a special sense of satisfaction knowing that I've watched these items growing and know them fairly well. I just wish I had the same luxury of confidence when purchasing produce and products.

I was recently at the National Heirloom Expo, and purchased a cheese and tomato item for lunch. Having been put in the mood for some delicious organic heirloom tomatoes after wandering the halls of produce, it was an interesting shock to take a bite and, essentially, not taste any tomato, even though I could see them...hmmmm, I thought, it could NOT possibly be the case that a food vendor here might be serving cheap commercial tomatoes a the National Heirloom Festival. Well, fooled me. It was just such a shocking contrast after seeing piles and piles of the "real deal" to bite into something at the height of the season that bore no taste resemblance to what I had been seeing...so, even at an event where the focus is on organic & heirloom, one still has to be conscious of what one is consuming.

Later that day, I was talking to some of the specialty food product vendors and had a very interesting conversation. I'll keep the product category to myself as I don't want to be rude. I talked to two individuals who identified as "makers" of a type of product. It turned out that one of the imports the finished product from Europe and bottles it here, and the other vendor buys a cheap, bulk quantity of the "base" product and mixes it with something he does produce. Now, I don't fault their business model--we all know it's a pretty tough economy and many businesses function on the margin, but I do object to their using the term "maker"--one is a bottler, and one is a mixer...neither of them made the product they claimed to be a "maker" of.

Both of the products were tasty, and they were certainly makers of something, but just not of what their banners claimed.

Ferment your Health

Our Chief Dirt Officer, Timothy, and Sandor Katz talking fermentation at the heirloom expo. (c), 2012.

As seen recently on our Facebook page, I had the distinct honor of meeting Sandor Ellix Katz at the National Heirloom Festival this week. A personal hero for his years-long adventure as a "fermentation revivalist" (or activist). His core belief is that fermentation makes food more nutritious, and eating a diet rich in fermented foods leads to better health. His recent book, "The Art of Fermentation," provides "an in-depth exploration of essential concepts and processed from around the work," including practical "how-to" information. Fascinating and engaging, I highly recommend the book.

His talk at the expo began with an explanation of fermentation as transformation by microorganisms or, with food, "controlled spoilage," and short examples of this process being used by many cultures around the world, in a controlled way, to human benefit.

The basic connection with human health is clear in his mind: the evolution of life started from bacteria, and bacteria is essential to all life & functions. Humans host bacteria in a 10:1 compared to our unique cells that make us up.

(He made a point here that American culture's obsession with killing "99.9%" of bacteria with our soaps and cleaning products is not, on the whole, beneficial.)

So, the basic message is clear--consume fermented foods of several types, regularly, everyday. His website, introduced above, is fairly comprehensive in presenting his core message and philosophy clearly and concisely.

One final point I'd found quite interesting relates to the fine laboratory control and selection large companies might bring to the process of making cultured or fermented of foods. (Use as an example a large industrial yogurt company.) Industrializing and mechanizing the process of using cultures and bacteria in making these types of products has the same effect in limiting their nutritional value and destroying their nutritional complexity as industrial food production has had on produce and food products.

In Sandor's words:

"Wild fermentation is the opposite of homogenization and uniformity, a small antidote you can undertake in your home, using the extremely localized populations of microbial cultures present there, to produce your own unique fermented foods. What you ferment with the organisms around you is a manifestation of your specific environment, and it will always be a little different. Do-it-yourself fermentation departs from the realm of the uniform commodity. Rediscover and reinterpret the vast array of fermentation techniques used by our ancestors. Build your body’s cultural ecology as you engage and honor the life forces all around you."

Sandor, teaching the art of fermentation, © Sandor Katz 

Bird Signals

This past spring, there were a number of reports of odd bird migration patterns indicating an atypical winter and spring, and now, there are already signs that migration patterns are disrupted again, indicating the likelihood of an early, wet winter:

If so, the best weather forecaster in the West, the migratory sandhill crane, is predicting an early winter with plenty of rain and snow. (continued...)



Happy Fall!!
Come see us at the Harvest Fair!