I feel like I have been “all melamine – all the time” the past couple of posts, sorry. (Melamine, oh thy name is Legion and Melamine Toxic Tsunami) Its been a fast moving story and its relevant to all of us who eat food. Its my hope that, as a scientist, I can help people who might feel overwhelmed by this massive and frightening subject.

I would like to shift gears into a positive mode and tell you about what you CAN do so that this sort of problem and all of the food security problems that come from globalization can be addressed.

DeGlobalizing – ReLocalizing

In a nutshell – its all about 2 main things:

• Refraining from buying things that require global travel
• and
• Building your local economy and food systems

The first thing – you can do that starting right now. You will quickly find out that you will have to do the harder second thing – rebuilding your local economy.

A couple of months ago I tried to summon the people in my community for a food security meeting on just this. I sent out a press release and got in all the relevant papers. One person showed up and she was actually confused about the topic.

This is NOT easy work!

I am not the only one who is focused on this, not at all. There is a world-wide effort on, called the Transition Initiative and it is helping people build what are called Transition Towns. The UK is the leader right now but start up groups are nucleating all across the US as I write.

If you visit this link Transition Town you can see if there is an initiative near you (anywhere in the world).

• Transition United States
• Transition Towns Wiki (home of the UK’s Network)

If you live in the New England region, you are lucky because there will be a Transition Training conference this November in Cambridge, MA. There are actually two of these conferences. I will be going to the later one. If you decide to go, let Rob know I referred you and also let me know you are coming and we will meet up. Perhaps there is call for live blogging it! (mind is a churning).

The following is the release from the organizer, Rob Riman. Let me know if you have any questions!

Transition initiative Cambridge (TiC!) together with the Transition Center Portland Maine will be hosting these 2-day trainings to provide the in-depth knowledge, experiential tools and practical skills to successfully set up, run and maintain a Transition Initiative in your own community or neighborhood.

Course Objectives:

• To understand the context for transition
• To understand the Transition Initiatives model as it has evolved so far – from inspiration to working groups
• To understand the inner and outer aspects of transition
• To gain knowledge of the main ingredients of transition
• To develop a plan of action for your self and your locality
• To assemble the elements of an inspiring talk on Transition Initiatives
• To connect with others who are responding to the call for transition

See complete course outline at http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionTrainingDetail

When?:

Saturday & Sunday November 1-2 and 22-23, 2008

Training begins at 9:00 am sharp and finish at 5:00 pm both days. Please arrive by 8:30 am on Saturday for registration and welcome.

Where?: The training will be at the office of the Livable Streets Alliance located at:

Livable Streets Alliance
100 Sydney Street
Cambridge, MA 02139

For directions via various modes see: http://www.livablestreets.info/node/530

Also see the transit system map (and click on the ‘Boston Detail Map’ tab).

Bicycle parking is in front of 100 Sidney. Free weekend car parking is available on Pacific Street.

Sign up!: Course registration is via the RSVP option at The Transition Training Center Portland Maine website: (You will first need to join the group.)

Tuition:The cost for the course is $215/person and full payment or a minimum deposit of $100 should be received in advance of the course start date. Checks should be made payable to ‘Transition Center Portland Maine’ and sent to me (Rob Riman) at the below address.

Lodging:Participants are responsible for arranging their own accommodation.

If you can offer or are seeking a local homestay during the training, please reply to the related post or start a new discussion on the Meetup site message board. Note that all activity for a given discussion is trackable by clicking on Track this discussion. I also have additional leads.

For information regarding local hotels and B&B’s, please contact me.

Travel:If you can offer or would like a lift to or from either of these trainings, please reply to the related post or start a new discussion on the Meetup site message board.

To Bring:

• 1) Any Transition related materials that you can share: posters, leaflets, brochures, any printed/audio/visual material that you have used in your Transition Initiative. This will be a mutual learning environment!
• 2) Lunch to share in the training room. If you prefer, there are local venues to purchase food within easy walking distance. Other meals are entirely up to you. Warm beverages and light snacks will be provided throughout the day. Toward a zero-waste event, please bring your own mug, water bottle, utensils, etc. as needed (some will be available should you forget).
• 3) Laptops and/or recording devices if you feel these might help you, however they are not necessary. Please bring a 330+ mb memory stick for copying background material and training presentations.
• 4) Your story. Take some time to reflect on your journey regarding transition: When did you realize that we needed to make big changes to the way we live? How did you hear about Transition and what got you interested? Why do you want to be part of a Transition process?

Reading: In addition to The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins, the following resources offer valuable background and will help prepare you for the course:

• Transition Initiatives Primer
• Transition Network Structure Document

Resources: For more information about current Transition activities:

• Transition United States
• Transition Towns Wiki (home of the UK’s Network)

More Info: See who else is coming, learn about the trainers, find related events in the Northeast, etc. at:

Transition Center Portland Maine

Contacts

Cambridge Trainings Coordinator:
Rob Riman
robriman@gmail.com
92 Henry Street
Cambridge, MA
02139

Trainers:

• Alastair Lough – jlough1@maine.rr.com
• Pat Proulx-Lough – proulxlo@maine.rr.com

Thank You to our Sponsors!

Green Decade Cambridge
www.greencambridge.org

Livable Streets Alliance
www.livablestreets.info

Mass Climate Action Network
www.massclimateaction.org

Melamine is the scourge that was completely optional; it really didn’t have to happen. It’s all about greed and industrial food gone wholly amok.

Melamine poisoning spans animal feeds, pet foods, milk, baby formula, fish, wheat gluten, and now EGGS.

Wheat gluten, eggs and milk are everywhere. If you think you can protect yourself from tainted dairy and egg products from China, think again.

This post is all about melamine: what it is, how it hurts you, how it got in your food.

What exactly is Melamine?

Melamine is an organic compound (learn more) that is a key component in fire retardants and it is also a pesticide (this sets off major flags for me, more later).

It can be combined with formaldehyde to make a plastic compound and a foaming polymeric cleaning product. It is a primary component of a colorant in inks and plastics called Pigment Yellow 150.

A specific type of melamine is added to cement to make it hyper-plastic, flexible, so that it can have more attractive structural qualities.

In the 50s and 60s there was some use of melamine as a fertilizer but it proved to be inefficient as it would crystallize into salts and not be available to plants.

The thing about melamine that made people interested in using it as a fertilizer, the nitrogen aspects (amines), is what brings us closer to the current problem.

Plants need nitrogen to make proteins.

The use of melamine as a NonProteinNitrogen (NPN) in animal feeds was tested back in the 50s but it was shown that the cows didn’t use this sort of nitrogen very well.

Melamine is not that great for helping plants or animals make protein BUT it fools low-cost testing methods into thinking that it IS protein. (tests like Kjeldahl and Dumas tests estimate protein levels by measuring the nitrogen content, so they can be misled by adding nitrogen-rich compounds such as melamine. See note at bottom of this post).

Melamine itself is relatively low in toxicity but it becomes quite lethal when made into melamine cyanurate.

IMG pending http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Melamine-cyanuric_acid_chemical_structure_color.png

What the Chinese are putting in food, milk, feed and lord knows what else – Melamine Cyanurate

The kind of melamine implicated in the Chinese scandals is called melamine cyanurate (learn more), a chemical that is commonly used a fire retardant (as with straight melamine). It is considered more toxic than melamine or cyanurate, from which it is made.

When melamine cyanurate is ingested by mammals (those poor dogs and cats in the massive melamine Chinese pet food scandal (learn more)) it hurts the kidneys and throws the animal or person into acute renal failure.

LD50 in rats and mice (ingested):

• 4.1 g/kg – Melamine cyanurate

From USA Today’s article “Poison pet food woes seem to hit cats harder”:

“FDA scientists explained that when melamine and cyanuric acid are absorbed into the bloodstream, they concentrate and interact in the urine-filled renal microtubules (sic), then crystallize and form large numbers of round, yellow crystals, which in turn block and damage the renal cells that line the tubes, causing the kidneys to malfunction.”

Besides renal failure (which is seen in the recent baby formula scandal – something like 94,000 children hospitalized and 4 dead from melamine poisoning Learn More), melamine has been implicated in possibly causing kidney stones, bladder cancer and reproductive organ damage.

For recent information on the scale (94,000!) of impact of the tainted milk scandal read this October 8, 2008 report from Reuters “China milk victims may have reached 94,000”

The government has not updated figures issued on September 21, when it said that 12,892 infants were in hospital, 104 with serious illness, and close to 40,000 others were affected but did not need major treatment.

But reports from local media across the country compiled by Reuters suggest the number of affected children has risen to nearly 94,000, although most are not in a serious condition.

China Floats in an Ocean of Melamine

China is one nexus in the coming and current collapse of food production (fertilizer, falling acres of non-toxic land, water shortages, etc). They, like the rest of us, MUST find a way to boost soil fertility even though they (nor any other large concern) is going about it in a rational way, only in an industrial, non-sustainable way.

To this end, China has been deliberately pushing to increase it’s melamine production (from coal gasification) in recent years. Coal gasification is used to make urea – the key nitrogen component in plant fertilizers around the world. Urea, being derived from a non-renewable resource that is under massive demand pressures, is becoming more and more expensive. Because of this, many melamine manufacturers and suppliers outside of China have found it too expensive to make locally and so chose to source this from China’s growing surplus of melamine.

Even though melamine is a poor fertilizer, it is also a pesticide, so it “seems” it is attractive still. This may be scary, true, but this may be NEXT WEEK’s scandal as the melamine outbreaks we have been suffering through in recent times is due to something else.

As I mentioned, melamine can be used to dope foods so that they can LOOK protein rich while being very weak knock-offs of the original. Its like a sick pathetic rational extension of the piracy ethic in China, “fake it till you make it” no matter the costs. The same thing happened with the Baxter Heparin scandal, exact same sort of doping only with different chemicals for a different use.

The contaminant has been identified as an “over-sulphated” derivative of chondroitin sulfate, a popular shellfish-derived supplement often used for arthritis. Since this “over-sulphated” variant is not naturally occurring and mimics the properties of heparin,the counterfeit is almost certainly intentional as opposed to an accidental lapse in manufacturing. The heparin was cut from anywhere from 2-60% with a counterfeit substance due to cost effectiveness, and a shortage of suitable pigs in China. (SOURCE)

It’s the Eggs, kids. Its in the eggs, in China. Are we next? Is it already happening to us?

The New York Times reported on 10/26/08 in an article “Tainted Eggs From China Discovered in Hong Kong” by David Barboza:

SHANGHAI — Hong Kong food inspectors have found eggs imported from northeast China to be contaminated with high levels of melamine, the toxic industrial additive at the heart of an adulteration scandal in Chinese milk products.

and

The discovery of contaminated eggs in Hong Kong was announced Saturday by the Center for Food Safety, a Hong Kong government agency, which said the eggs had been imported from a farm in the city of Dalian, in northeastern China. The center reported that the melamine level was almost double the legal limit for food sold in Hong Kong.

The general wisdom is that the melamine gets into the eggs because the chickens are fed feed doped with melamine (by feed producers to fool the farmers or is it farmers who are desperate for any nitrogen in the feed – I am guessing the former).

This phenomenon is called bioaccumulation (learn more) of toxins in eggs and tissues of animals fed a poison (think about how DDTs were making some birds go extinct due to DDT buildup in scavenger birds leading to egg failures). Its also known as Biomagnification (learn more)

An article out of China on two possible sources of melamine in chicken feed (“Melamine Scandal Hits China’s “King of Eggs” October 28, 2008 at Chinastakes.com):

According to Wang, two reasons most probably account for the melamine in eggs. Feed producers may add melamine directly into chicken feed, or the feed may contain overdue milk powder with high level of melamine content. “Either can lead to melamine residue in eggs.

“Many illegal additives, appearing as “new technology,” have brought an unprecedented crisis over quality to China’s feed processing industry,” said an expert of a national research institution to China Business News.

This is why we grow our own chickens for our own eggs and drink milk from our own goats in our backyard

You can learn a whole lot more about the Chinese and US FDA inaction on the problem of toxic eggs from Chinese and potentially US producers by a former emergency programs specialist with the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) on DailyKos at this diary “Melamine just reported in eggs…as I warned in 2007” and this diary “The ominous silence about eggs from gluten-fed chickens”

Is there an even larger crisis “we” are not talking about?

I am just going to throw this out for those of you who have had the tenacity to read to this point. This may be an algebra that will become critically important to the entire world as time passes.

- If we know that melamine has some nominal and sub-par attraction as a fertilizer
— Then it may be being used in China (elsewhere?) as a fertilizer

- If it is known that melamine falls out of solution and accumulates as salts in soils
— Then misguided use of melamine as a fertilizer and pesticide will lead to increasing retained toxin loads in soils across China and the world (3rd world countries?)

- If China has a melamine surplus
— Then China may be channeling that into even more melamine for local and misguided global use as a fertilizer, pesticide, and dope for feed stock (land and water livestocks such as fish farms that under massive pressure to source cheaper and more abundant protein)

- If there is a growing soil toxicity with yearly added melamine
— Then more and more crops will become and maintain dangerous levels of melamine toxicity
It seems to me that this is MUCH more relevant and dangerous than any GMO crop yet this crisis is flying totally under the radar.

To me, that is a global malfeasance on the part of all countries.

In one of those Daily Kos diaries, the comment stream reveals these nuggets:

The FDA, USDA, and the EPA is not our friend in these matters, especially Bush’s FDA, USDA, and EPA. For example, in 1999, the EPA tolerance level for melamine was lowered after a request by Novartis.

Melamine is also a breakdown product of cyromazine (pesticide) which bioaccumulates. It seems that (all?) the testing (ever?) done on cyromazine was done by Ciba-Geigy.

And there is this comment:

A few months ago, the Admin made subtle changes in oversight requirements for regs. If you aren’t familiar with reading this sort of language, you would not see flashing red lights – assuming you stayed awake past the first few lines.
Among the agencies affected was the FDA. Here are a few links to posts on these changes:
The Executive Order’s Effect on Regulation: Science & Technology Hearing;
White House Power Grab by OMB Regulation

Bottom Line(s):

• DeGlobalize/ReLocalize your food, take it back America
• Need I really say it? – EAT LOCALLY, ALWAYS
• Eat NOTHING from China
• Find out if your favorite prepared foods or even your fresh veggies and fruits are sourcing from China, they way well be
• the FDA has grown VERY lax under the Bush administration and is not protecting us from this grave Chinese-related risk
• Melamine contamination (and what else?) should be considered potentially widespread throughout our food system and that of others
• The ubiquity of gluten, dairy, and egg products almost ensures widespread and nonconsensual exposure to these tainted source proteins in prepared foods and infant formulas
• Be vigilant

Resource Pages:

• Melamine – Wiki
• Melamine Cyanurate – Wiki
• 2007 Pet Food Recalls – Wiki
• Chinese Protein Export contamination (wheat gluten)
• Baxter’s Heparin Contamination recalls – Wiki
• Chinese Milk and Infant Formula Melamine scandal – Wiki

About the Kjeldahl and Dumas tests:

Traditionally, food protein is measured by a method developed by Danish brewer Johann Kjeldahl in the late 1800s. In this analytical technique, a strong acid digests a sample, breaking down the organic matter and releasing nitrogen, which is then converted to ammonia. The amount of ammonia indicates how much nitrogen was in the original sample and, hence, the amount of protein. This “proved to be a robust, precise method,” says Julian McClements, a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It is attractive because it can be used for a variety of products and protein types. Another, similar nitrogen-based technique, called the Dumas test, is also popular with industry. It relies on burning the sample to release nitrogen. The Association of Analytical Communities (AOAC) International, a scientific association that sets standards for analytical methods, lists the Kjeldahl and Dumas techniques as the standard methods for measuring protein in food.
(SOURCE)

See what this does for your taste buds – Smoked Scallops, Smoked Cheddar Bourbon Soup, and artisanal smoked pancetta, all brought together as part of a larger smoked, bourbon tasting menu.

Yeah, my tastebuds almost fainted, I almost fainted, my family was inarticulate as they simply scarfed their share of our samples.

Brian Treitman, of BT’s Smokehouse, who you know I have blogged about before (An improbable meat nirvana in a BBQ wasteland, Criminally Good Smoked Salmon and Bacon – B.T.’s Smokehouse, Food Photo 101: Shooting BBQ) shared a delightful sneak taste of this scallop dish recently when I stopped by for my latest fix of his smoked salmon.

Wine connoisseurs speak of terroir – the notion that a particular wine has a unique taste that is gained from the ecology of a very specific location.

The wiki defines it as such:

Terroir (/t̪εʁwaʁ/ in French) (Spanish: terruño, pago) was originally a French term in wine, coffee and tea used to denote the special characteristics that geography bestowed upon them. It can be very loosely translated as “a sense of place” which is embodied in certain qualities, and the sum of the effects that the local environment has had on the manufacture of the product.

I am sure that this concept is nothing new to most of you.

Today I would like to suggest that there is another sort of terroir, one which is more complex in some ways, more fascinating to me (perhaps because I do not drink wine and I DO eat BBQ).

I think that each well-seasoned and well-used smokehouse smoker has its own distinct terroir. If you get close to the gaping maw of Brian Treitman’s smoker you will notice the build up of solid smoke and smoked meat essence.

It coats the interior and the racks.

Brian uses applewood from the MANY orchards that surround us in this region. He does a dry rub on many if not most of the meats (and tofu!) that he smokes. The smoke and the slowly cooking meat react and meld in a way that seasons the smoker to its own unique terroir.

This terroir is the lively organic memory of the many ribs and chickens and pork butts and bacons and salmons and turkeys of the past.

You can choose to utterly submerge yourself in a tongue electrifying miasma of smoke as you nibble on the bark of a long smoked pork butt.

You can get a wholly different but BT Smokehouse specific smoke essence when you eat one of the smoked scallops shown in this post.

This particular assembly of ingredients can be a part of a larger tasting that Brian can provide to foodies in the Massachusetts area. He works with you to identify a seasonal menu that also leverages the unique terroir of his smoker as well as local microbrew beers and smoke-friendly spirits like bourbon.

You can call Brian at 1-617-251-6398 to talk about your tasting. There is a minimum of 8-10 people, likely max up to 50 depending on your home situation. There is a 2-4 week lead time so plan ahead.

Here are the salacious details of this fantastic dish.

Moist plump scallops were cured in Brian’s spice rub and brown sugar for 4 hours and then cold smoked with applewood. You can special order these and their price is pegged to the scallop market price. Call in to get the details.

The soup is made with a sharp white cheddar cheese that he smoked as a block and then spiked the soup with bourbon. This alone would delight you in its mixture of the smoky terroir and the bourbon. He sells this at $8/pint.

The pancetta was cured for 5 days, lightly smoked, and then dried for 4 months. This goes for $10/lb.

The soup and the scallop, while both smoked, have a distinct flavor from one another. It may come from the lack of cure on the cheese, it offers a lovely layering of differentiation.

This is such a fantastic variation from the heavier beef and pork BBQ. I am just in love with it and I hope that you get a chance to work with Brian to bring a tasting that includes this offering to you and your loved ones this holiday season!

Five year old KD really enjoyed it all, could hardly wait for the shoot to be over. Notice that super mod hair cut? Yeah, she got a hold of some scissors and decided she needed to do the do.

Reach Brian at 1-617-251-6398 (Tell him Nika sent you)

Related Sites:

• B.T.’s Smokehouse – Southern Style BBQ

Related Posts:

• An improbable meat nirvana in a BBQ wasteland
• Criminally Good Smoked Salmon and Bacon – B.T.’s Smokehouse
• Food Photo 101: Shooting BBQ

I am utterly wiped. I just killed & butchered 6 chickens (5 meat chickens and one very bad sumatra rooster who had attacked my kids one too many times).

Two are now on to boil, to make stock and chicken sandwiches for supper. The other 4 will also be boiled to make heaping amounts of chicken soup that I will then can.

These chickens will be too tough to eat any other way. We will also be making soup from the feet.

As you may or may not have picked up, I am concerned about a phenomenon called Peak Oil (click here to learn about this very important issue).

The current problems in the stock market and mortgage world have synchronized and fed off the massive and unprecedented transfer of wealth from our pockets, through the gas pumps, to foreign hands.

We are in a position where we have very little resilience or ability to bend and cope. This is especially the case for the middle and lower income classes (most of us). We live lives where we are disconnected from our food production. Our grocery stores have at most 3 days supply food on hand if the supply chains are cut.

With this last week in the market, the absurd government response and the predictable slow motion collapse starting on Monday, it is absolutely time for all of us to be thinking about putting away food.

We have been skilling up on how to grow our own food and store it, care for and raise chickens for meat and eggs, tending our dairy herd of 9 for milk and cheese.

We just got our breeding boy goat who we named Flax. He is not related to any of our girls and he will be the sire of the next generation.

We have, through the extremely appreciated and deeply needed help of a family member, just installed a wood fired furnace for our heat, hot water, and to heat the greenhouse. We are now 100% oil-free. If I had $20,000 laying around I would be setting up a solar array for systems electricity.

I suggest that you consider doing what we are doing and what the Mormons do – lay in a well stocked pantry with enough to get you through a few months (Mormons go for a year goal) on your own and perhaps with some for friends who may need to lean on you in the coming hard times.

To this end, we will be stock piling some rice and beans because it is so easy to store and make (wheat or flour for bread = needing yeast and a functioning oven, etc).

Have you been thinking about this? Tell me what you have been doing to be ready for any instability we might see as the economy lists and takes on water.

We are enjoying our independence from the food chain. We get our eggs and our milk (and now cheese) from our backyard. We eat our salads from our backyard.

If you don’t now, what are you waiting for?!

If you think food prices are high now, you will be pale with shock soon enough. Think oil-based fertilizers, oil-based pesticides, oil-run tractors and trucks, think floods, think drought, think 2008.

The seed companies are reporting a 40% rise in seed sales this year (they were shocked, didn’t see it coming, these people need to get on the web more often).

Now that the baby goats are not such babies and are fully weaned, we have more goat milk to work with. We go through less than 1 gallon of fluid goat milk a day for Baby O (who adores goat milk and is sensitive to lactose in pasteurized cow milk).

Our milking doe, Torte, gives us about one and 1/2 gallons of milk a day. Over two days, we then have one extra gallon of milk, works out nicely.

You may or may not know that it is hard to make cream or butter from goat milk because the fat doesn’t separate out (because the fat globules are smaller and stay spread out, like its been homogenized). We could make it if we bought a $400.00 cream separator but thats not going to happen! I love goat cheese just fine.

We will be getting a jersey cow/calf to have super high quality milk, cream, and butter. I can wait for that.

Back to the topic for today.

It is VERY easy to make chevre but it takes a few days, you simply have to be patient.

We are using milk we pasteurized for this batch, we may go raw with he next batch.

We used a chevre starter from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, I can not recommend them highly enough.

This little packet is enough for one gallon of milk. This could not be easier, you just bring your milk up to (or down to as the case may be) to 86 F and sprinkle the starter in. Mix well and let culture at room temperature for 12-20 hours.

The curd sets up and excludes the whey.

You then slice it up a bit so that the mass of curd is broken up and more whey is excluded.

Remember that all of the equipment being used must be sterilized.

We bought the plastic chevre molds from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company which I cleaned very well.

These are well worth the cost and will last a long time.

Using a sterilized slotted spoon, you scoop out the curds and begin to fill the molds.

One gallon of milk yielded three molds worth of cheese.

Once they are filled they go on a wire rack over a pan or bucket to catch the dripping whey, cover the tops and let sit at room temperature or in the fridge for 2 days. They will shrink a lot.

After the two days, the cups were no longer dripping and the cheese was quite firm and much dryer.

This cheese tastes unbelievably fresh and, I think, uniquely ours. Its a fantastic feeling to sit down to a salad that we grew topped with chevre we made from our own goat. I watched Torte munching on tree bark in our backyard as I nibbled on the cheese.

Resources:

• New England Cheesemaking Supply Company
• Chevre Starter
• Plastic cheese molds
• Books on making cheese
• Classes on making cheese

Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes: Recipes from a Modern Kitchen Garden

Eating homegrown food is not only good for you and your bank account but it can be fantastically tasty and quite photogenic.

I recently received a review copy of “Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes: Recipes from a Modern Kitchen Garden” by Jeanne Kelley (published in April 2008 by Running Press Books). Kelley has decades of experience writing for Bon Appetit, Cooking Light magazine and many of her recipes have been published in LA Times Magazine, Natural Health, Islands and Spa Magazines.

Her professional life and her home life come together in Blue Eggs Yellow Tomatoes as she writes about how she raises some of her own food (chickens, vegetables) at her suburban home in Los Angeles and shares recipes that yield simply delicious concoctions that should satisfy anyone, whether you are growing your own food or if you go to the farmer’s market.

The book includes a charming mixture of fantastic food photography and the author’s own photographic glimpses into her family and backyard. She is not a professional photographer but her images are candid and enjoyable.

She covers various topics not necessarily found in your average cookbook, from how to garden in your own backyard to growing chickens to how to compost.

Nascent gardeners are given plenty of reasons to start growing their own food – 150 delightful recipes that span the range from salads to desserts in 10 chapters.

• Appetizers and Small Plates
• Soups
• Salads
• Sandwiches and Tartines
• Pizza and Pasta
• Fish and Poultry
• Meats
• Vegetables and Sides
• Desserts and Sweets
• Breakfast and Brunch

I found her salads chapter to be particularly enticing. They are quite beautiful and diverse, many interesting ingredient ideas. My attraction to the salads is also fed by a hankering for the veggies that have not even sprouted in my garden.

I really enjoyed the craftsmanship of this book. It is a large book (3.8 pounds) with bright white pages mixed in with country-home pages featuring a sunny palette of colors. As I mentioned before, the food photography is quite enticing.

Other attractions include a guide on pantry stocking and equipment choices, a kitchen garden primer, a section on how to use a recipe, and a guide for chicken keeping.

I am obviously biased positively toward anyone making an effort to grow their own food (veggie and animal). We have our organic garden, a flock of layer chickens, and a growing herd of dairy goats.

I would recommend this lovely cookbook to anyone who loves food and who is interested in pouring love and nurturing into their cooking.

Product Details:

• Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes: Recipes from a Modern Kitchen Garden
• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (March 31, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0762431830
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 9.8 x 1.3 inches
• Price: $23.10

First I want to thank all of you who have gone to the trouble of doing the egg price survey in my last post. I am going to post up a map with prices (from around the world!) and talk about some of the numbers and comments.

Today I am going to share some scenes from around our little growing homestead. We are shooting for full food independence this year and milk is a huge part of this.

As you know we have two baby goats and we also have one momma goat (named, Millet, Wheat, and Torte, respectively).

The pictures in this post show Q and KD milking Torte. We have since set yup a stanchion in the wood shed where the milking goes better. We get about 1/2 gallon of milk a day.

Enjoy the photos!

My mom got me a pasteurizer for my birthday (thanks mom!!) and I can not wait for the babies to be weaned so I can start making some chevre!

This is a question I honestly want your opinion on and I thank you all ahead of time for your time and answers.

Considering the rising costs of all foods and transportation, issues with food safety and such, what is a dozen of free-range brown eggs worth to you?

First, let me know where you are writing from (eggs will cost different amounts across the world), what sort of store you buy your eggs in, how much they cost you last time you bought (were they brown? White? Here in New England stores charge MORE for brown eggs even tho there is no difference between them). I have seen estimates of 28% to 45% INCREASE in egg prices overt the past few months to a year.

Do you usually buy factory farmed eggs or the organic or cage free “upscale” ones? What is the differential in your store from today’s prices and those a year ago?

I can’t tell you what eggs go for here in central Massachusetts because its been so long since I bought them. I can tell you that milk is simply astronomical (closing in on more than $4.50/gallon I think). This milk price coupled with the massive gas prices and having a baby who is tolerating cow’s milk now has pushed us to buying the milk at our convenience store where it is sold as a “loss leader” at just under $3.00/gallon. The gas is something like $3.40/gallon.

Soon we will be getting our milking doe and so we will be unhooking from the factory teat.

Kids, I have to tell you one last thing. Do you remember that car accident I had and all seemed well? Not so fast. My lovely car is moribund and not safe to drive on my commute. So now I am faced with getting another car. I am working this week to reach out to local restaurants to see if I can get their non-hydrogenated frying oil.. and then I think I am going to convert a diesel (VW?) to a grease car for my commute. In any event, I am going to have to find the money to get another car, this seems like an opportune time to take this plunge.

Do not forget to drop me a comment or email about your egg price point for local sourced farm fresh free range eggs.

Now, just because we have grown up eating seemingly innocuous chicken, pork, and beef bought from the grocery store, a practice handed to us by our own moms and dads, it doesn’t mean that we have provided knowing consent for the development of massive fecal lagoons on factory farms that greatly outsize even the most ambitious pool or swimming pond.

Never heard of fecal or manure lagoons? I love this description by Al Franken in his 2003 book “Lies And the Lying Liars Who tell Them”

“I want to draw you a word picture of a lagoon you may remember from Gilligan’s Is­land, where a caged lion or an Indian in a canoe might wash up just to get that week’s episode rolling. This lagoon is a rectangle the size of three football fields, lined with 40-mil high-density polyethyl­ene and filled, to a depth of thirty feet, with pig shit.

Now imagine that, at the bottom of the lagoon, pebbles have punctured the liner, allowing the liquefied pig shit to seep under and ferment. A bubble is growing. The polyethylene liner rises like a creature from the brown lagoon. It breaks the surface, spilling a pungent stew of untreated feces and urine into a nearby creek. An undocumented Guatemalan worker is ordered to puncture the liner with a shotgun blast. Retching, he fires. The swollen liner re­treats into the fetid depths. Mission accomplished.

The next day, however, one of the most magnificent sights in all of nature, a shit geyser, explodes into the afternoon sky. Those working nearby watch the pillar rise ten, then twenty, then thirty feet above the lagoon. It is as though the Earth itself is afflicted with a virulent case of projectile diarrhea.

Hold that image in your mind.” (Borrowed for educational purposes)

We do not usually visualize the high throughput nature of our meats – chickens, pigs, cows – all packed into densities that REQUIRE the use of antibiotics just to keep the animals standing long enough to make it to market. If there were not for rules requiring a standing animal (a characteristic of a supposedly healthy ENOUGH animal to eat) then the high throughput factory farms would likely push for genetically modified legless animals they could warehouse sorta like that scene in the Matrix where Neo wakes up in his bioreactor.

If nothing else, all body plans above aquatic sponges have evolved for mobility. Lack of mobility = compromised metabolism and reduced ability to fight off infection. Just look at your average 4th grade class and the obesity to see the effect of poor mobility on the body.

All of these things may not get you in the gut, I know that.

You may be forced to feel it in the gut soon though because there is now direct measured evidence of bacteria that THRIVE on antibiotics.

You heard me right kids – George Church – a world renowned geneticist at Harvard, reports in Science Magazine this week that they have identified, unexpectedly, bacteria sourced from soils exposed to manure from cows that have been treated with antibiotics absolutely LOVE to eat those same antibiotics.

See “Scientists find host of antibiotic-eating germs”

This is the link to the scientific article but its pay-per-view, sorry.

Antibiotics, those that are almost pumped into our dairy and beef cows, are now the food of choice for some bacteria.

You might say – well these are JUST soil bacteria – and you would be wrong in any sort of assumption that this means that we are safe.

Bacteria are nothing if not promiscuous.

Think of the soil bacterial ecology, exposed to manure with impossibly high levels of antibiotics. That ecology is like a testing ground filled with billions of little genetic Einsteins who each have a serious sex addiction. Brute force genetic selection leaves behind not only the resistant bacteria but also those who prefer to eat antibiotics for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Its unexpected yeah, but in no way was this an impossibility.

And that sex addiction? There is so much genetic cross talk that the bacterial genome is almost a meta-community. This is part of what makes them so successful. Not only can they pass their advantageous mutations to their downstream descendants, they can share these changes with their neighbors.

The sooner we move away the massive bacterial lallapallosa genetic testing grounds in and around and downstream of factory farm crap lagoons the sooner we can protect our children and theirs.

There once was, at the beginning of last century, a movement to have a small dairy in each small town. Think of it, a distributed milk model versus the concentrated distillery dairies that were pushed on America by city planners and those who wanted to profit from feeding the putrid effluent from big alcohol distilleries in and around big cities to cows who barely survived that toxic waste.

It would be fantastic if we could go back but we have been a bit too efficient ourselves in the genetic Einstein department.

I can not really say what the answer is for all but I can promise you that the bacteria will not be waiting around to find out.

Eating local, sustainable, rational, humanly produced meat is not just about taste kids, its about survival.

This is a call out to those of you out there who have some experience with setting up your own CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) activity.

I need your guidance and mentorship so any and all input is welcome and appreciated.

We are currently seriously contemplating setting up a trial run chicken CSA where the chickens will be raised naturally (the word “organic” is woefully deprecated and co-opted by money-grabbing certification types – I cant afford organic certification status right now, not if I want to actually get started that is).

We will raise slow-growth long bodied breeds of chickens like you see the French growing in their “Label Rouge” program. Our chickens will be forest dwellers like those in the Label Rouge program. There is no official “Label Rouge” program in the US but that’s ok because the First Principles of Label Rouge are attractive and to be emulated. We will be more like the organic Label Rouge where we will not use any sorts of chemicals or antibiotics, not because I think it’s the “in” thing but because I follow the golden rule in my cultivation and animal husbandry:

Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

Corollary: Treat your animals with the greatest respect possible – they are beings too

Life is absolutely too short to start something like this and not do it MY way. This is not to say that what the neighbor down the street is doing is wrong, its just that I need to do this my way.

I compromise on so much else; don’t we all!

What do I need?

I need to know how to find a local butcher and how that all works (in terms of costs and their capacity) – I have zero clue here. I need to know how best to find people who will want to buy these CSA shares – I fear raising a load of chickens which then are not pre-sold. These questions MUST be asked by any producer when they first start, I know, but I do sound sorta goofy not knowing the answers.

We are also going to be doing CSA egg shares (we just love them girl chickens so much!).

I hope that you all, with clues on this, will come out of the woodwork and drop me a note. When you leave a comment the system gets your email (confidentially I think) and then I can reply to you off-blog to have a longer convo on this.