Some Food Thoughts

Picking 30 lbs of local wild blueberries to get us through the winter

50 Mile Blueberry Apricot Pie

Cooking meals is a ritual we take very seriously. It is the closest we come to a religious experience in our house. We both love cooking and care deeply about the ingredients we use. Over the past few years we have come to care much more about our ingredients, thinking a lot about the far-reaching implications of each choice we make. For years,  I did not think much at all about where my food came from, I just knew I loved it. The shift came during a move from the city to an agricultural community. 

During the adjustment to this new environment, I also read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. This book has drastically altered the way I think about and consume food. It has sent me down an exciting reading path as well. Other books that have contributed to this shift are Pollan’s follow-up In Defense of Food, H.C Flores’ Food Not Lawns, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and a lot of books on gardening, permaculture, and foraging. 

A major impetus for leaving Brooklyn was a desire to see if we could grow some of our own food. Yes, we could have done this in Brooklyn at a community garden or on our fire escape, but we had some intense, romantic agrarian fantasies that needed to be worked out. Over the last five years we have begun to devote more and more time to our garden. We are complete beginners and learn a lot by trial and error. We make tons of mistakes and forget to weed a little too often.  But getting down in the dirt has restored the feeling of connectedness that I felt I had lost while living in NYC. To me there is nothing better than cooking a meal composed entirely of things you have grown or foraged yourself.  Someday, I would love to be able to grow everything we eat, but it is just not feasible right now with all of our other responsibilities and interests. I am so grateful that for six months of every year we can rely on the farmer’s market to supplement our bounty. 

Last night we watched the documentary Food, inc. which put everything I have been reading about these last few years into a very real, blow-to-the-stomach set of moving images. Most of the movie was a recap of the Omnivore’s Dilemma, but it did make us think even more about the laborers, many immigrant workers, who process much of the food in our supermarkets. We know which companies to avoid and what to look out for on labels, but this movie showed us, through worker’s cell phone videos, a grimmer reality than I had imagined.

While cooking dinner tonight, I had some of the usual pangs of anxiety that come with creating meals during the winter months in our house.  I found myself thinking “this parsley came all the way from California” and “maybe I should have used some of our frozen tomatoes instead of this can.”  Sometimes, I have to let go of guilt and realize that it’s impossible to be perfect when it comes to food. We can make the most responsible choices we can most of the time and hopefully make a small difference. We will continue to grow as much as we can in our garden, buy locally produced as often as possible, eat as seasonally as possible and also make every effort to buy organic. We know how lucky we are to be able to have good, healthy food. Every person deserves that, but it  is not always an option for many.  The jist of what I have learned is to think about every bite and be thankful for it.

Food goals for this year:

 -Follow our neighbor’s example and plant a patch of organic vegetables for the food bank.

-Learn more about putting food up for winter and possibly invest in a small chest freezer to go with our amazing vacuum sealer

-Transform an area of our barn and yard to raise a few chickens for eggs next year

Next on the reading list:

Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply by Vandana Shiva (one of my heroines!)

Bringing it to the Table by Wendell Berry

50 Mile Blueberry/ Apricot Pie

The ingredients I used for this pie were all in season and came from local sources 

1 1/2 cups wheat berries freshly ground into flour (Gill, MA)

1/2 - 3/4 stick Cold butter cut into pieces (Vermont)

cup of water with ice

1/4 granulated maple sugar (Shelburne Falls, MA)

1/8 cup maple syrup (Shelburne Falls, MA)

1/8 cup raw honey (Shelburne Falls, MA

3 cups wild blueberries (Heath, MA)

5 or 6 ripe apricots peeled and chopped (Shelburne Falls, MA)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Set aside 1/4 cup of flour and some of the butter. In a bowl add remaining flour and butter pieces and mix together with your hands squishing the butter until the two begin sticking together. Add chilled water in small amounts and mix until it sticks together and becomes somewhat dough-like. Press into a pie plate. In a bowl combine the blueberries, apricot, maple syrup and honey and mix well. Pour into pie plate. In a bowl, add the 1/4 of flour, granulated maple syrup and remaining butter (to your liking) and combine with your hands until a crumbly mixture forms. Scatter on top of the fruit. Bake for 25-30 minutes of until the crumble on top turn golden brown and fruit begins to release juices.  * Please note, when I made this pie I did not use exact measurements. You may need to adjust ingredient amounts slightly to your liking.