bamboozlement, or naught?

Greg Cox leads the Farmers' Market from the Co-op into the sun in Depot Park last May. For more pictures of the Farmers' Market move go here.

We spring out of the double naughts with a vengeance, some of us, calling it “an era best forgotten,” as Paul Krugman did. He also called 2009 “a year of zero gains.” Frank Rich marveled that we the people could have been so easily “bamboozled” by so many shallow, crooked, greedy powers-that-be over the last decade that came in with Enron and went out with housing foreclosures.

I like that word, bamboozled. It’s the only way to explain how we felt as the ‘big lies’ came at us faster and faster. Fools told them and the fool media reported them without question.

We were stymied, left juddering in place with frustration by the shoddiness of the era.

Bamboozle. Such a comic word. Reminds us of ‘shyster’ and ‘country bumpkin’. But we were not country bumpkins, were we, when we paid the banks to get back on their feet, those shysters, and they continued to pay out billions to their glassy-shod CEOs? We were just people, standing there sputtering, “But... but... but...!”

“Fool me once,” as the fool said!

And on the food front? Oh my goodness! E-coli in schoolchildren’s meat. Salmonella in the widely disparate crops of peanuts and spinach. The death of coral in the Caribbean because of the green-paving of the country’s mid-section and the resultant use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides seeping from field to river to sea.
Meat cattle, raised in bliss for mere months on grass in fields and then sent to huge concentrated animal feeding operations to wade in their own manure and feed on enormous amounts of antibiotic- and hormone-infused grains.
Dairy cows, who love to amble under the sun snatching green-grass for their feed, made to stand on cement floors all day, under roofs, surrounded by green fields, eating genetically modified grain.
Pigs, who love to forage in the forest and roll in the resultant dust, raised all their lives indoors in pig-squeezing grate-crates.
Chickens de-beaked for crowded living instead of scratching in dirt and grass for their bugs and worms. Lagoons of effluent.
Fallen cows prodded, kicked and dragged to the abattoir. Our food animals treated as machines instead of animals sharing the same biological life we super-special humans experience.

And ignorance? I can think of no better example than Garrison Keillor becoming euphoric about the glorious healthiness of ... Cheerios. Why does he do this? Well, he needs a sponsor, for one thing, and I suppose Cheerios is better than Fluff. So he hides his head in the sand.

But hiding one’s head in the sand does give one’s neighbor a broad rear canvas on which to launch any of a myriad of unsavory actions almost guaranteed to be unwelcome. Among those with proboscis most sandy, backsides most prominent, are, for instance, nutritionists who still recommend You-Know-It-Ain’t-Butter and its common tub-companions.

This is no longer a butter substitute, since anyone growing up in the last twenty or thirty years has forgotten, or never knew, that it was supposed to be, or that butter was ever considered to be a food. Tub spread is that kind of chemical sludge that a humongous not-a-food-company made a place for on our table. It is approximating and substituting for real stuff that people have forgotten ever existed. Why do we stand for it? Hmmph! Our noses are more than a little sandy as well.

The question is why don’t nutritionists, or even we, the common people, have enough basic interest in their work (or we in our health) to keep up with those scholars and writers who are checking the backstory of our declining health and the catastrophic fall of our food system? Have we even heard of Marion Nestle? How about Susan Allport? Gary Taubes? Surely we’ve read Michael Pollan?

***

And here is where the story of the decade takes a giant leap towards the light. In 2006, Michael Pollan published The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the backstory to our food plight, a most fascinating and very generous book. It brought the tale of our ravaged food system within reach of everyone. It was a beginning.

And here in Vermont, here in Rutland and in the county, we had Greg Cox and the Rutland County/Vermont Farmers’ Market, one of the most splendiferous in the state; it possibly would not be too much of an overstatement to call it world-class. Yes, we’ve had it for thirty years or more, but during this past decade it came into its majority. It became glorious.

Around Greg, the philosopher/farmer and kingpin, gathered a group of people who reasoned that on the national front we could only do what we could do and cross our fingers, but as for what happens here in Rutland County and in Vermont – well, we could make a great deal happen to improve our quality of life and we began to do that. We began to act locally even while thinking globally.

Now, for the third year, as well as the twice-a-week summer market in Depot Park, we have the Winter Farmers’ Market, accessed through the Co-op on Wales Street. We have been thrilled by that – by the festive Medieval atmosphere, by the year-around availability of fresh local vegetables, meats, cheeses and eggs, and by the web of friendships and loyalty growing up between vendor and customer. Here is food we can trust, that is delicious and fresh and healthy. Here is food that we grew up with, if we are old enough, and that we have been losing ever since.

In this last half decade we have given the Co-op new life, as we recognized that it is a necessary and potentially glorious link in that safe and, as much as possible, local food chain. We have supported RAFFL in its efforts to create a food hub and find land on which to create a learning venue for new farmers. We have participated in the marketing study that showed the Farmers’ Market and the Co-op as key in bringing national status to Rutland as the hub of farm and city. As well, we have supported the Paramount, the Chaffee and Brick Box and numerous other galleries to support our local artists and our hunger for the creative. The Creative Economy has done wonders for Rutland, as has an energetic and plain-speaking new government. Mr. Mayor Louras? Chris and Judy shop at the Farmers’ Market every Saturday and the Co-op in between, and not just because it is a festival – they shop there Very Seriously indeed.

Mayor Louras with radishes ready for the first radish toss to open the summer Farmers' Market

So we have not allowed a perfectly awful decade to go to waste, and we have been lucky in having the raw materials to work with to make it glorious in our own way. When Michael Pollan wrote in In Defense of Food, “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” he was not taking a vegetarian stance, but working on the assumption that most people in the world, in this country, do not have access to good grass-fed or pastured meat, but must rely on grocery store meat, unlocal meat, meat that has come through the big CAFOs and is therefore unsustainable to our health and our environment. CAFO meat does not only come from grocery stories, it comes from your favorite little butcher shop where the guys are so nice and such good cutters. That’s what it comes down to.

This is also why Susan Allport suggests using an arcane mixture of canola oil and flaxseed to provide Omega-3s. Omega-3s are found most richly and providentially in animal fats, but animal fats from CAFOS are full of very bad things. The author of The Queen of Fats assumes most people do not have access to good animal fat. And she is right.

But WE do. Locally, within forty miles of Rutland, we have access to half a dozen sustainable meat operations. Actually, make that a dozen. And we should buy that meat unless we are already vegetarians, because if we don’t buy it it won’t be there. The farmers will go out of business. It’s that simple. So, lucky us. We should take advantage of that fact.
We can’t become complacent – we still have much to do. We need to support RAFFL – volunteer time or donate money – in putting their Food Hub in place and to find and buy land for the incubator farm.

Talk to your favorite meat cutters and restaurants and entreat them to use, and offer, more local food. There is a tremendous reluctance to do so on their part, usually attributed to their customers not insisting on local food at the cost of a few pennies or dollars more. Let them know that you DO want it.

Get out and enjoy – and buy your food from – the Farmers’ Market (Saturdays 10-2), and the Co-op. Attend the Paramount and the Friday night Art Hops. Laugh a lot. Support the train. Dance. Volunteer. Help out! Do what you CAN do to make this next decade a success, and to assure yourself that in 2020 you don’t look back and say, “I feel so... USED... so... Bamboozled!”

To heck with that! Act Local! Beet the System!

This piece was published originally in the Rutland Herald 01/05/2010

squeezing out thanks

Judy Dow upper left and right, Mr. Labate middle,Justin Morse, new principal of Wallingford Elementary
on lower left, and Julie Kuhn Fredette, Wallingford's art teacher, lower right

It was a serendipitous time of year for my new friend Judy Dow to be holding a short residency at Wallingford Elementary School. It’s Thanksgiving season, after all, and Judy, as A Child of the Dawn, which is what “Abenaki” means, a Native American, one called Indian by most of America, and therefore a partner with the Pilgrims on that first Thanksgiving Day, was about to dispute some of our soft and mushy feelings about the history of that holiday that some of us might hold.
Judy pronounces Abenaki in a way I’d never heard before – ahBENicki. She told me in her soft, drole voice that the pronunciation depends upon which family you come from, what strain of Abenaki produced you, and hers is French from over the border.

In her early 50s, with a round face, large, expressive eyes, and dark braid that hangs down at least to her waist, Judy is a master teacher and an award-winning artist whose hand-woven baskets are currently on a three-year national museum tour. The art teacher at Wallingford, my friend Julie Fredette, wrote the Vermont Arts Council grant, funded by the Vermont Folklife Center and the National Endowment for the Arts, that brought Judy to Wallingford for a second residency to teach the third and the sixth grades weaving and other Native American arts, and, as well, a few home truths.

Friday afternoon I entered Chris LaBate’s 6th grade class and looked over some of Judy’s primary sources, such as the letters that William Bradford wrote when he was Governor of Plimouth (sic)Colony. I took some notes, while she handed out Thanksgiving story books to the children, and then she said, “Please open your books and find words or pictures that exemplify Myth Number 1 - that the First Thanksgiving occurred in 1621,” and the children did. Then Judy explained that for as long as people have existed they have given thanks and feasted in the giving of them and that “to refer to the harvest feast of 1621 as ‘the first thanksgiving’ disappears Indian peoples in the eyes of non-Native children.”

Regarding another myth – that the colonists came seeking freedom of religion in a new land – Judy explained that by 1620, hundreds of Native people had already been to England and back, most as captives, so the Plimoth colonists knew that there were people who lived on this land, but since they had not put up “private” and “no trespassing” signs or wrecked it in any way... but what Judy said was that “nevertheless, their belief system taught them that any land that was ‘unimproved’ was ‘wild’ and theirs for the taking; that the people who lived there were roving heathens with no right to the land.” Some religious freedom, huh?

She explained that when the storybooks tell of the “Pilgrims” (never did the Plimouth settlers call themselves “Pilgrims” – another myth), “found” corn they actually had found the seed corn that the Natives had buried to save for spring planting, and took it away with them. At the same time they “found” several graves and “brought sundry of the prettiest things away” from a child’s grave.

Myth # 11 says, “Thanksgiving is a happy time.” Judy explained that for many people Thanksgiving is a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, and of remembering the extermination of many Native people via disease and guns. “As currently celebrated in this country, Thanksgiving is a bitter reminder to Native peoples of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship and generosity.”

At the end, one little girl asked, “How did all these untruths get started, and why don’t we all know the real truth.”
Mr. LaBate said, simply, “The victor writes the history.”

As for the food the “Pilgrims” and “Indians” ate at that “First Thanksgiving”? It was probably venison (the Natives brought five deer), wild fowl, and a dried corn pounded and boiled into a thick porridge called nasaump, and, possibly, cooked, mashed pumpkin. There would have been no bread nor biscuits because there was no wheat. There were no potatoes nor even sweet potatoes, since they didn’t appear in New England until the 18th century. There would have been no fruit, for most had gone by, no clams because it was too cold to dig for them, no fish because the season was closed, and no boats nor traps for trapping lobster. There was no sugar, so cranberries were out except, perhaps, for the most dour, and no pumpkin pie.

Judy Dow returned home to Essex on Friday Evening. She expects a house full of extended family this weekend, and there’s something about building a longhouse.

...support your local restaurant, of course...

We find ourselves in the position of having to rescue businesses and people we didn’t want in our lives anyway. As far back as the sixties, I looked at those little beetle shaped cars that were appearing on the roads and said – that’s what I want! Guess what, American Car Companies never built them. ACC built BIG. ACC built gas-guzzlers. They built and aggressively sold those big honking vehicles with the enormous carbon footprints that make it impossible for our small cars to drive down the road without the fear of being runover by one teenager in charge of one of those things and a cellphone at the same time.
“And,” says Leo, “they sold like hotcakes!”
Well, there is that!

Nevertheless, there are some businesses we can support, and we’d better support them if we want them around when this awful spiraling mess is sorted out.
Talking to restaurant owners and chefs nowadays, I hear words like “shocking,” “flabbergasted,” and “floored,” about the downturn in business.
Say you usually go out to dinner on Friday night, and one Friday you look at the headlines about GM and investment bankers, and you say, “Hon, maybe we better tighten our belts a bit. Let’s see, what can we eliminate?” Say you usually toddle on down to Sabby’s, or Hemingways, or the Victorian Inn, or Tapas on Friday nights. You might say, “Hell, we don’t need to do that. We can cook something at home. If we get desperate we can go to MickieD’s and get us something cheap.” Say two or three parties have this discussion amongst themselves. SabSal’s Café Inn is now down three or six customers in one week. You think that doesn’t hurt? You think ONE doesn’t hurt?
It hurts.

So here’s my suggestion. While you’re having a candlelit conversation at your favorite restaurant, talk about continuing to support your local farmers and the financially challenged people in your neighborhood and state. Make out a check – for $50, for $10, for $5 – to the Vermont Foodbank , call your town office and find out what is being done to feed and help the poor people in your own community. You never know when it’ll be YOU who needs help.

Shop at the Winter Farmers’ Market and the Co-op – don’t leave your farmers in the lurch or they won’t be there when you deem your finances in order. And then, buy into the Localvore Thanksgiving that I wrote about last week or so.
Finally, we can’t forget to support the Paramount Theater with our presence. We’ve put a lot of effort into getting it on its feet but it doesn’t have a lot of resources in times of downturn. Comfort it with your presence and your money.

And then, adopt a cat – get rid of those mousetraps.

As my friend Wendy Jackson of the Red Brick Grill in Poultney told me with characteristic frankness, “We’d love to see you but, if we don’t, pretty soon you won’t be seeing us.”

...better times aren’t here again, but they’re on the way...

You may, like me, have read the Letter to the next Farmer in Chief that Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times Magazine on October 12 but, like me, you may not be able to keep the talking points close to hand. To that end, Michael Ruhlman, one of my favorite bloggers, writers, and food activists condensed those points and posted the following on his blog. Cut it out and hang it on your fridge:

1. —Train a new generation of farmers, spread them throughout the land, and make farming a revered profession.
2. —Preserve every acre of farmland we have and make it accessible to these farmers.
3. —Build an infrastructure for a regional food economy—one that can encourage and support the farms and distribute what they grow (rebuild or create regional distribution systems).
4. —Provide cities grants with which to build structures for year-round farmers markets.
5. —Ease federal production regulations, designed to control multi-national food companies but that hog tie small producers.
6. —Create local meat-inspection corps so that we can create more regional slaughter facilities, perhaps the biggest impediment to our being able to find local hand raised meat. (This is huge.)
7. —Establish a grain reserve to prevent huge swings in commodity markets.
8. —Require federal institutions that prepare food (school lunches, prisons, military bases, etc.) to buy a minimum percentage of that food locally.
9. —Create a Federal definition of food, to encourage people to think about what is food and what is not, stuff we consume that has no caloric value (“junk food” should not be considered food).
10. —Food stamp debit cards should double in value when swiped at a framers’ market; give farmers’ market vouchers to low-income women and children (why does he exclude men, I wonder; a different subject perhaps).
11. —Make changes in our daily lives: teach children how to cook; plant gardens in every primary school and equip them with kitchens; pay for culinary tuitions (or forgive loans) by requiring culinary graduates to give some service back to such undertakings such as teaching kids how to cook; increase school lunch spending by $1 a day; grow more of our own food and prepare and eat our food together at a table; accept the fact that food may be more expensive and eat less of it.
12. —Make our food production system as transparent as possible: have a second calorie listing how many fossil fuel calories went into its production so that consumers could discourage production of fuel expensive food by not buying it.
13. —Finally, there should be a White House vegetable garden and our President should set the first example. Our founding fathers were largely farmers. This would be a good symbolic return.

...now about that longhouse...

I asked Judy if her family and friends just ignored the 4th Thursday in November, and she wrote back to me Saturday morning: “We do celebrate thanksgiving. We always celebrate the weekend before the National Thanksgiving day. Of course we are thankful for a bountiful harvest just as others are. We moved out into the woods Friday night. We built a long house for about 15 people to sleep in. Most of the man power comes from my husband's boy scout troop. We spent the day building tables and preparing food for the feast tomorrow. I just came in to clean three 25 pound turkeys. Tomorrow about 5:30 in the morning we will start the turkeys, prepare the venison stew, cook the baked beans, squash, gravy, pumpkin fry bread, stuffing, wild rice and berries and desserts. Everything will be cooked outside over an open fire or in a ground pit. About 12:30 PM we will be joined by friends and family for dinner. There will be about 70 people. You are more than welcome to come if you would like.”

I would have loved to’ve been there, wouldn’t you?

good vermont farmer press in the new york times

Marion Burros has written about northern Vermont's vivid food scene in the New York Times today. Datelined Hardwick, Vt, she highlights Pete's Greens, High Mowing, Jasper Hill, Vermont Soy, and various other farmers and organizations dedicated to creating a thriving food economy. Nice to see farmers getting some good press.

And oh yes (added later), here is Michael Pollan's letter to the next president outlining food policy. It is excellent, and answers even more of our questions. It will appear this coming Sunday in the New York Times Magazine.

...for want of a hamburger...

Nick Ronfeld and Kim Stewart have their way with Chicken Marsala over Linguini

Where we used to TGIF immoderately and with great enthusiasm at the Back Home Café – the original – back in The Day, nowadays we’ve formed a habit of walking down to Sal’s South in Wallingford to have a carafe of red wine and a bite to eat. It’s a most enjoyable thing to do, as well as prudent if the carafe is a large one – we can walk home. Walking is good after celebrating, almost as good as dancing.

But the point of this whole thing is that I find myself unfairly stigmatized because I ordered a hamburger the other gorgeous evening, sitting on the big stone patio and watching the sunset. Yes, of course, Sal’s is known for their pasta dishes, the delicious Chicken Marsala (with mushrooms) over linguini, for instance. But sometimes a person just wants a bit of protein without all the starch and cream so, though I searched the menu over for that very thing and did not find it, I knew there must be a hamburger hiding there somewhere.

Not only that, but Kim, who once was my favorite waitress in the world, waited patiently while I said I wanted a hamburger, even egged me on, asked me, with one arched eyebrow, “And how would you like that done,” and stood by patiently as I decided that it would be medium instead of medium rare, and asked her – rather, told her – that of course that would be free-range beef, right? Maybe from Ann Tiplady’s farm down on Hartsboro. “Oh,” I added, no bun, of course, but “with a thick slice of onion?” Kim stood there with her pen held over her pad. I noticed she wasn’t writing. It was getting busy. She’d humored me enough. She has a baby at home, and a husband, and a life, and customers clamoring at every table before she could go home to them. Everyone was looking at me. “What?” I said. “What!”

“I’m waiting to find out what you’re really going to order,” said Kim.

“I’m ordering...” I began. God, I’m slow.

I ended up with an appetizer portion of meatballs, mostly because I’d held everyone up for too long already. They weren’t exactly what I was looking for. That would’ve been the dark, crusty, salty bite through the hamburger’s well-grilled outside to the spilling of pink-to-red juiciness inside, complemented by the crisp sweetness of the onion.

Well, Sal’s might never have stooped to serve a hamburger – as everyone and his brother have told me gleefully since – but times are’a changing, and maybe they should.

...jiggidy jig...

Perhaps you don’t know how Sal’s got its start. It was on Friday Nights at the Back Home Café – the real Back Home Café, started by Will Patten back in 1971 – when Sal Gullo started hand-making pizza with a genuine, hippy-dippy whole-wheat crust. Friday nights were live music nights at the BHC, and a pizza or two along with a jug of wine was the perfect stimulus to get you out on the floor dancing your fool head off, then back to the table for a sip and a bite. Some of you remember, eh? It was great fun, kids and all. We lived in Rutland then, on Oak Street, so it was by way of Shanks Mare or bicycle that we got home again, jiggidy jig.

In the way of things, that tradition ended but, soon afterward, Sal and Jack Elliott started Sal’s Italian Restaurant – somewhere around 1977 out on Woodstock Avenue – serving hearty home-made and home-inspired food in the Italian manner. Not too long after that they moved to their long-time home on West Street. Jack Elliot, who’s no longer involved, reminded me the other day that it was the first non-smoking restaurant in Rutland, maybe even in Vermont. And I do remember conversations revolving around that very thing: “Let’s go get a Sal’s pizza.” “Yeah, but you can’t smoke there.” “Oh, right.”

Jerry Kyhill, along with Steve (Rebo) Abraham, bought Sal out in ’81, then Nick Ronfeld bought out Rebo 11 years ago, and Jerry and Nick started the Wallingford’s Sal’s in 2001. Got that straight? Well, in any case, they must be doing something right. They’ve been around for a long time.
Stone patio at Sal's South in Wallingford

A few nights after my gaffe on the stone steps of Sal’s South, I told the story to a few friends over cocktails down at the beach. Carol said, thoughtfully, “We had some of Ann Tiplady’s hamburgers last night, and they were good, but I couldn’t really tell any difference between that grass-fed beef and what you get in the grocery store. A little more expensive.” As it turned out, Leo and I had Ann Tiplady’s hamburgers the night before, too. I thought they were juicier and also crumblier, probably due to the fact that store-bought meat is fattier and mushes together more. Otherwise I couldn’t tell the difference in taste between grass-fed and the best commercial hamburger that I used to get at the Locker, but I am perhaps more aware than most people of the way factory farmed beef is raised, and I am increasingly reluctant to buy it and eat it.

...w.a.w.w.e.e....

A pound of hamburger from the supermarket, or even from your local butcher, is not meat from one cow, but rather a mixture of several, possibly hundreds, with perhaps traces of thousands.

A typical beef was born out west somewhere, in Colorado or Montana or the Dakotas, and lived the life of Riley for the first 6 months, with its mother, nursing at will, roaming the grasslands it fed on as it was designed to do, free as a bird.

Then things began to get a little rough. First of all it was weaned, taken from its mother, put into a pen and taught to supplement its grass with grain and corn. After a month or so there, it was shipped to a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) somewhere, most likely Kansas, where it was confined in even more crowded conditions with huge numbers of other cattle, wading around not in grass but in excrement – they slept in it too – and were fed even more grain and corn.

The centerpiece of the CAFO is the feed mill. On one side of the mill, tractor trailers feed 50 tons of corn into it every hour upon the hour. On the other side, tanker trucks pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat – often beef fat, in spite of the danger of disease from cannibalizing beef – and protein supplements made of molasses and urea, which is a form of synthetic nitrogen made from natural gas, similar to fertilizer spread on corn fields.

All of this is mixed with synthetic vitamins and the hormone, estrogen, as well as the antibiotics Rumensin and Tylosin. A cow was designed to eat grass; making them eat corn and grain makes them sick. Most of the antibiotics sold in America today go into animal feed. It’s as simple as that.

This sludge is fed to the animals in confinement before they are slaughtered for our dining enjoyment. Immobile confinement and a diet of grain and corn and antibiotics and hormones gets a beef to slaughter in 16 months where it used to take anywhere from 2 to 5 years.

Read that again, and repeat after me: We are What We Eat and We Are What We Eat Eats, too.

In the grasslands, on the home ranch, the sun shone, the grass grew, the cattle ate it, created cow-plops which fertilized the grassland, completing the great cycle of nutrition naturally. In the CAFO the great lakes of manure created by these confined and poisoned animals cannot be spread on neighboring farmers’ fields for it burns and poisons them, too. What is done with it? Well, besides it seeping into waterways downstream, I don’t know – it’s a little like burying spent rods from Vermont Yankee on the bank of the Connecticut River. It creates big sores in the earth’s hide that are not capable of healing themselves, and the infection spreads into our waterways and air.

Michael Pollan didn’t seem to know either – he followed his steer and the corn it would die on, but he seemed not to’ve gotten too far with that manure lagoon. For this short outline of our meat’s origins, I am heavily indebted to Michael Pollan for his thorough research in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In it he outlines several different meals and traces the components of them from sun to grass to table. The industrial meal, involving corn and beef, is an eye opener involving the mass poisoning of the American people and their air and water and land by a few companies, notably Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland who, in the midst of hunger riots, recently announced record-breaking profits.

I’ve been quoting from the Omnivore’s Dilemma since it was published, and I’ve skipped around in it, but only recently sat down and read it from cover to cover. It’s absolutely breathtaking – I know a lot of you have it in your To Be Read pile, and I encourage you to read it now. The facts are so horrific in our food industry that sometimes your eyes glaze over because it’s like everything else – it’s too big, it’s too hard to grasp, “there’s nothing I can do!” But we can do something, we can not buy industrial food, we can vote with our pocketbooks.

Ann Tiplady’s Red Houses Farm beef spends its whole life, like the first six months of the industrial steer, munching grass. If she had her druthers, though, she’d rather have a portable slaughtering station so the beef wouldn’t be stressed out at the end of its life by being loaded on a truck and shipped to a strange, grassless place to be slaughtered. Ann sells her beef at the Rutland Farmers’ Market, both inside and out.

Ann Tiplady's ladies amble down the path to pasture

And that’s the hamburger I was envisioning as I sat out front of Sal’s South the other night. Owner, Jerry Kyhill tells me I might have to wait a long time. “We’re an Italian restaurant,” he says. “We don’t do hamburgers!” but then he tells me, “Give me some advance notice...” Please, Jerry, I’ll spend more for a grass-fed hamburger. All around me people are eating pasta or pizza for $8 to $15: I’d gladly buy into a really good hamburger for that! And sometimes I’d gladly go for Jerry’s favorite Shrimp Fra Diablo. “It’s spicy shrimp over spaghetti – nothing out of the ordinary, but tasty. Really good,” he tells me.

Leo loves the Fettuccini Alfredo, and we often order pizza, either out or in. Nick Ronfeld is the chef who divides his time, as does Jerry, between Sal’s South and Sal’s Rutland, and his favorite dish is Shrimp and Scallops in Spicy Red Clam Sauce over Linguini. Yup, I’d go for that, too, occasionally.

Kim Stewart (okay, I still adore her – who could resist the deadpan manner in which she led me on) says the pizza is great! She, and her husband, are excellent cooks, too.

...what if?...

If I had my ‘druthers, smaller local restaurants like Sal’s would use more local ingredients, including chicken and beef and other meats, as well as vegetables and fruit in season. Nick looks thoughtful at that heartfelt sentiment, and then repeats the mantra – “It’s a matter of cost – we can’t keep competitive unless everyone else used local ingredients too.”

Of course, what’s really expensive is industrial food. The system is not sustainable and it’s making the American people sick – both long term, with all the chronic diseases we have, which include diabetes, heart disease, obesity, hypertension, cancer, and depression, as well as the various psychic illnesses our kids are prone to, and it sickens the animals, the land and the economy, as well. At some point we will have to make other arrangements, and the sooner the better. What if all the smaller, local restaurants – Sal’s, Sabby’s, Back Home Again, Constantino’s, formed a little union and vowed to keep up with each other buying local food?

Someone tossed of a figure out to me the other day – one of our supermarkets sells $250,000 worth of produce a week, and ninety-nine percent of that money goes out of state and to big corporations. What if we in the Rutland area took even one quarter of that business and gave it to our farmers at the Farmers’ Market or the Co-op? That money would stay in the area and support our farmers, our health, and our landscape, as well as our economy. What if Diamond Run Mall allowed a farmer to put some cows to graze on that big grassy area that surrounds it? They’d save a whole lot of money on chemical fertilizers and lawn mowing, for sure. What if, instead of yet another MALL (yet another mall?) proposed for the area across Rt 7 from Diamond Run at the intersection of Rt 4 – what if there were cows and tracts of vegetable fields, and incubator farms? Even fruit trees? What a statement that would make to visitors coming into Rutland! What a reminder that would make to each and every one of us which side of our bread the butter is on! What a valuable resource for new farmers and people wanting to eat locally!

Yet another mall? As the same person commented rather inelegantly – “Who needs more CRAP?!” That made me remember an incident that happened a month or so ago when we were driving from Portsmouth up to Portland on 95 in a heavy, wet blizzard. Humongous trucks flew by us with all the confidence in the world, and the last, that added such insult to injury that we got off at the next exit and made the rest of the way on Rt. 1, was a Frito-Lay truck that completely whipped our small car with slush. Yup. Fritos gotta get through in spite of rain or sleet or snow.

But of course Nick has a point – Sal’s probably wouldn’t be able to stay in business if its prices were higher than other restaurants who continued to serve industrial food. Why don’t you guys get together and get with the program? I urge you to. We have to start somewhere.

...thank you, mr. pollan...

“So yes, you should eat mostly plants, but if you’re going to eat meat, your meat should eat mostly plants. And I think that’s really a big part of where we’ve gone wrong with raising cattle in this country: feeding them grain.” Michael Pollan in an interview by Gourmet magazine.

Solemn Celebrations

Reading the obituaries one recent morning I said, Awww, Mrs. Book died! Leo couldn’t recall a Mrs. Book, but I reminded him of taking a ride last fall, looking for the West Haven Nature Conservancy, getting turned around on the back roads of Benson and West Haven, and stopping at a porch sale at Book Farm on Book Road. Oh, now he remembered. The conductor of the porch sale was the lovely and energetic 87 year old Mrs. Frances Book, as she told me in our brief acquaintance.

“Of course we bought a book,” said Leo.

“Of course,” I agreed, “and a jar of concord grape jelly.”

I wouldn’t have bought the jam – I love wild concord grape jelly, and would have to hide it from myself – but Mrs. Book told me she had gathered the grapes with her own hands and cooked down the juices, and I like to honor that kind of thing. I remembered all this when I read Mrs. Book’s obituary, wondering, as usual, at the weird conundrum with which all humans live – that our days are numbered, and when you’re 87 you must be even more acutely aware of this sad fact. But Mrs. Book had been cheerful and bright on her old fashioned screened porch that day, with a definite sharpness to her conversation – one sensed she would not be chary with her opinions, and that she had a great deal to do with that farm being as beautiful and prosperous as it appeared.

A few days ago I was taste-testing a new product I’d found at the Winter Farmers’ Market – Castleton Crackers, made and marketed by Whitney Lamy. She has three varieties – Rutland Rye, Middlebury Maple, and Windham Wheat, all made by hand with Vermont grown ingredients. It occurred to me that the tempting (and addictive!) things could host something sweet as well as savory. I went to the fridge, rummaged around in the back of it and pulled out a jar of grape jelly. As I opened the half-full jar, I realized that this was Mrs. Book’s jelly – there was her name on the label.

It is a solemn celebration, eating something that one of us has made who has since passed away off this earth, and it reminded me of eating my grandmother’s mincemeat the Christmas after SHE was gone. Though they’re gone they continue to offer nourishment. And yes, Whitney’s crackers and Mrs. Book’s jam have definitely become a part of me, all too bodily.

Buttered crackers and jelly – now there’s a childhood treat – eaten while hunched over a book at your grandmother’s kitchen table, perhaps with a big glass of milk straight from the cow. And I’m here to tell you it tastes just as good when you’re 63 as it does when you’re 13 – and, I’d guess, at 87, too.

...food with dignity...

It’s doubtful that I have any vegetarian readers left. Or, for that matter, any readers who prefer not to associate their cryovacced porterhouse with the animal it came from. Apparently the photo of the poor rabbit corpses with their livers exposed just did some people in. It was bad enough, the marrow bones, and before that it might have been the chicken feet, and so I promise you I will not talk about the pigs’ head here. Instead, I will concentrate on celeriac, turnips, rutabagas, carrots, and potatoes. We have fresh spinach, too, at the Winter Farmers’ Market, which has been growing all season, since August and with no signs of ending between now and March, which used to be the hardest month. But this year, March will bring us fresh-grown greens of other kinds, the result of farmers knowing they would have a mid-winter market for their products. Hooray!!

I know that if you are a vegetarian you don’t eat things as big and messy as pig’s head, but when you say, “well, I’m eating vegetables and I am not harming a thing,” I wonder if you’re not thinking what a relativist statement that is. Anything that has to eat to stay alive eats other things that might wish to stay alive or have always just trusted that they WOULD stay alive. Perhaps – what do we know – even the turnip – not to speak of the little forms of life that are eating it, too.

I was up at the Farm Show in Barre the other day and picked up a bumper sticker from Rural Vermont’s booth: It reads Food with Dignity. What that means will differ, I dare say, with each of us, but what it means to me is, if you’re going to eat meat, please have the grace to see it in the field, on the hoof, and perhaps even participate in the process of taking it from the hoof to the table. And then? Eat it all! Even the livers.

...but I don’t eat meat...

And if you’re vegetarian or vegan? I like the way Sheryl Rapee-Adams thinks and writes in her blog, entitled Furry Learning Curve, at http://network.bestfriends.org/Blogs/Detail.aspx?b=1323 Although she was vegan for years and now lives mostly vegan along with a couple of carefully-sourced dairy and egg products, it is much to her level-headed credit that Sheryl is not content to rest on vegan laurels. Instead, she is thinking about what she IS eating while she’s NOT eating animal flesh or by-products. In a blog dated October 30, called “Vegan or Local,” she looks at some vegan products and their sources and compares them to the organic animal equivalents that are locally available to her. For instance, the “natural buttery-spread” she used instead of butter. Along with some down-to-earth comments on corporations and tracing the backgrounds of each of the ingredients in the “buttery spread” – each of which come from yet another corporation – she wonders, “Who am I really supporting when I buy Earth Balance? Am I helping animals by using this product instead of local, organic, Vermont butter from goats and cows with whom I am personally acquainted?”

Then she looks at Vermont Butter and Cheese, the company that makes the (delicious) butter she considered switching to. “The dollars earned for producing Vermont Butter & Cheese products support a small, private company and its Vermont employees... Spending dollars on their products also creates a demand for small operations that care about the animals who live and die for the products.”

In a blog entry named, “If you love animals called pets, why do you eat animals called dinner,” she writes, “Perhaps the quote should be something like, ‘If slaughterhouses had glass walls, the current predominant system for farming and slaughtering animals would change overnight.’ In another, she writes about Barbara Kingsolver’s book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” in which Kingsolver pokes some rather rude fun at vegans. While providing a thoughtful review of the book, Sheryl takes Kingsolver gently to task for those passages: “I believe that Kingsolver's values are compatible with my own, and that her book can be a powerful (and delightfully written) teaching experience for everyone who wants to consume more consciously and live a little lighter on the earth. I feel sad because in belittling vegans, Kingsolver may have lost a chunk of her sympathetic audience.”

Sheryl’s a delightful and thoughtful writer. Check out that blog!

...a fowl roasting...

A pang of envy used to shoot right through me when I read of the bodies of food one might buy if one were Lyonnaise, and able to attend the winter street market in that smaller French city. A poultry seller had quail, pigeon, three kinds of chickens, duck, guinea hen, fresh magret de canard (duck breast), fresh duck and goose fat by the pot, her own duck gizzard confit, fresh gizzards, livers, and hearts, chicken wings, duck wings, necks of all the birds (for stuffing), various poultry and game carved and placed on brochettes for grilling, stuffed and tied rotis and galettes, rabbits – whole and parts – and, in season, small wild game of every kind you can imagine.

Oh, you might say, but she is not dealing with an American buyer. And if you did say that, then you would be surprised at the little knots of excitement at different corners of the Winter Farmers’ Market every Saturday, and if you wandered over you might see, as I did a couple of Saturdays ago, a woman considering a little corpse of a guinea hen, or Pintade, as it is called in France. It was, as seller Sue Carey explained, New York dressed, which meant that the little naked head and skinny legs and feet were still intact. The reason? To keep the fowl moist. Apparently this was the dressing desired by certain New York City chefs.

Ever helpful, I explained to the prospective buyer that they would be useful in making a stock of the bones once the pitiful, bluish little thing had been roasted. She glanced at me imperiously above her glasses and said, “I am NOT without cooking experience,” and went back to examining the fowl. I zipped my lip.

Just by happenstance, standing along with us in front of the bowl of ice and guinea fowl, was Wendy Jackson from the Red Brick Grill in Poultney. One of their regular dishes is pintade, and she told us how to prepare it – with a little cider! “Won’t that wilt the skin?” asked my imperious predecessor, still worrying over her guinea fowl, head and feet attached. “Oh, my, no,” said Wendy, “and if you spoon the drippings over it a couple of times the sugar in the cider will make the skin even crisper!” I wasn’t convinced, but was curious.

There was only one guinea fowl left in the bowl of ice, and I snatched it up – a skinny, bluish thing wrapped in plastic, totally unprepossessing. And mine was not French Dressed.

For the Pintade: Wash under cold water, pat dry. In an earthenware casserole pour some cider, put in a grill to keep the guinea fowl above the cider (I used a flat pierced cast-iron piece that keeps a roast above the drippings in a cast iron frying pan. Be imaginative). Place the fowl on the grill, breast side up. Dab butter over it, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place around it 2 parboiled carrots cut in chunks; 1 shallot, sliced; and 2 cloves of garlic, sliced. Sprinkle fowl with cider. Roast at 375 for 20 minutes, baste with drippings, roast another 20 minutes. It will be glazed and crisp on top, cruelly white on the bottom. Turn it over, baste, and roast another 20 minutes.

This 2.08 pound thing turned out wonderfully, the skin mahogany colored and substantial, very crisp, even the breast that was closest to the steaming cider/broth for the last 20 minutes of cooking. The meat was tender and flavorful, with a faint appley sweetness, slightly darker, and possibly, but only slightly, chewier than chicken. It was moist, in spite of my having roasted it a full twenty minutes longer than Wendy instructed. I liked this dish very much, and Leo, with his discerning tastebuds thought it tasted like chicken.

...not pig’s head, but...

Later, I was glad to know that I had not scored the bird with the feet and head attached, because I found out that the entrails were also intact, as one horror-stricken buyer later informed me. I was puzzled by this, because although I am familiar with the practice of hanging a game bird whole for a week or so, until it smells foul and the feathers begin to fall out – this is called “developing the flavour” – I had never heard of a plastic-wrapped whole fowl, and could not begin to tease out the reasons for it.

Nor could Chef Robert of Café Provençe in Brandon, although, of course, that’s the way he had learned as an apprentice, in France. “My first dish in cooking school was a duck – which I had to clean. I had never cooked before and it made me a little sick.” But he mused that on his last trip to France, “no guts,” in the French kitchen. Musing on, Robert said, “The Chinese age ducks, but they are gutted.” And then he tells me something really interesting. “When you roast a woodcock the body is left whole and when it is done the entrails are taken from it and mashed with butter to make a little mousse, which is served on a crouton along with the roasted bird. But that is because every time a woodcock takes off it poops. So the entrails are very clean.” Now I’d known that woodcock entrails are meant to be eaten on a bit of toast (they are extremely small birds) but now I knew why!

...it all evens out in the end...

“So yes, you should eat mostly plants, but if you’re going to eat meat, your meat should eat mostly plants. And I think that’s really a big part of where we’ve gone wrong with raising cattle in this country: feeding them grain”... Michael Pollan in an interview in Gourmet Magazine.

...wait, wait, wait. what about that pig’s head...

I told you. I’m not talking about it!

This column was published in the Rutland (Vt) Herald on 02/05/08

Waiter, There’s a Hare on My Plate

...a waskally wabbit...

I am not a stranger to rabbit. I’ve hunted them, actually, long ago when my distaste for guns was not what it is now. And I was a pretty good shot, too. Nevermind. It was my dad who brought them home from the field and hung them from their hind legs against the wall of the barn and pulled their furry coats off in one mostly whole piece. What a picture that brings to my mind – my dad in his red and black checked hunting pants, his square-cut, exceedingly capable hands wielding the knife. My mother must have cooked them, but I don’t remember eating them. She must have told me it was chicken and, the way my mother cooked, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. We ate squirrel, too, with the same lack of differentiation. Gravy – red, brown, or, in my mother’s case, possibly white – covers a multitude of sins.

Jeff and Cathy McMurry sell rabbit, chicken, and sometimes eggs at their Sunset Farm booth at the Winter Farmers’ Market. Gazing down at the McMurry’s beautifully dressed, wrapped, and displayed rabbits brought memories to mind – the most recent, a walk up to the Victorian Inn at Wallingford a few years ago, and Soo whispering to Leo that Stanti had a limited amount of rabbit stew in the kitchen, which he had made for the family but was willing to serve Leo. Leo loved it – he savored the stew but he was no less pleased to be offered something ‘special’! And I was grateful, too, that the McMurry’s are offering us something different to go on our plates. A carnivore can get weary of the same ole, same ole – pork, beef, chicken, and sometimes lamb, although the fresh, free-ranged, grass-fed products of the Winter Farmers’ Market vendors offer revelations of full-bodied taste to anyone who is used to industrial, feed-lot meats.

So I bought a rabbit to experiment with. I knew I would be approaching Stanti for a rabbit lesson sometime in the future, but first, I wanted to try out my own rabbit intuition. I mistrusted my own ability to try out Jeff McMurry’s suggestion to grill it, and as I gazed down at the little pink body laid out on my kitchen counter I remembered the Red Brick Grill’s dish of rabbit ragu with porcini and their own house-cured pancetta. On the other hand, a strand of words in a NY restaurant review popped into my mind, suggesting that “cinnamon sweetens the delicate strands of pulled, braised rabbit,” and that was my inclination, too – a dark sauce, deep with the sweeter spices, perhaps sherry, possibly raisins. While I thought about the best way to proceed I discovered the liver and heart in the cavity, glossy and reddish brown.

The McMurrys are highly responsive to their customers’ ideas, desires and needs. When I expressed dismay that a glorious little chicken I bought from them did not have the giblets in the cavity, they immediately changed that practice. The livers are large, dark mahogany and evenly colored, healthy and extremely tasty. When I asked for some chicken feet the McMurrys came up with a ton of them, nicely cleaned. I spent an hour clipping toenails and paring off calluses afterward, and scrubbing them a little more, but now I have several packages – six yellow legs and feet per package – to add to my chicken bones when I make stock. And what a wondrous stock it is: from one 4 pound chicken, roasted, I simmered the bones and 6 legs and feet for possibly 4 hours, and ended up with a quart of very flavorful chicken jelly.

I was surprised to find the liver included with the rabbit, but I was glad to eat the whole of that little fella. Taking a life in order to eat, I feel, calls for wasting as little as possible. I put it, along with the heart, in a small frying pan with butter over very low heat for a short time, turning it once, salt and pepper, the same way I cook a chicken’s liver, and found it was delicious.

... in a chef’s kitchen...

Sure enough, there was Stanti, at the WFM one Saturday, bent over the case of frozen rabbits and chickens on ice, while Cathy and Jeff looked on. I’d known I’d see him at the Market, and I’d suspected he wouldn’t be able to resist the rabbits.

Since he first came to town – could it be almost 20 years ago??? – he’s searched out local foods, from cheeses to turnips. He attends markets, visits farms, and receives deliveries from local farmers. It’s the way he was raised and learned his trade in Switzerland, with the family inn and restaurant, the farm and the store. At first, when I saw the aerial photograph of that distant village, I’d thought it was Wallingford.

He selected two rabbits and said, “Yes. Certainly,” when I asked if I could watch him prepare them.

When I walked in the kitchen door at the Inn, the two rabbits were laid out on a cutting board. Several small pans were lined up with the other ingredients. In a row, mise en place, were flour, butter, salt and pepper, chopped flat leaf parsley, garlic, chopped onion, diced carrots, diced celeriac, tomato sauce, and glace de veau (reduced veal stock). A container of white wine stood on the shelf above.

He speaks American with a Swiss or at least European accent, and so we haggled over the name for the pan he took down. It turned out to be a braissier – “how would you say it in English,” he mused – for braising, natch, and he put it over the fire and melted some butter in it. Placing the rabbit pieces on a flat pan and strewing them with salt and pepper and then flour – “You don’t have to drench them in it,” – turning them and treating that side to the same, he then placed them into the butter, pointing out that the side that would show on the plate – the smoother, outer side – should be lightly browned first and, turning them when they were, he began to add the prepared vegetables in turn, “about a cup of the onions, carrots and celery (celeriac) for one rabbit. Half a cup of parsley for a nice taste. It doesn’t have to be tomato sauce, but maybe concassee,” he said as he emptied the sauce over the vegetables. Just chopped tomatoes, or cubed, if you’re meticulous. He reached up and pressed the button for white wine and poured it over the vegetables, then tipped the glace de veau over – about a cup of each for one rabbit. “The nice thing is,” he said, glancing at me, “everything you can get at the Winter Market.” I considered this and realized he was right. “Right down to the wine,” I said. He nodded, pleased.

While we chatted, the mixture simmered and, after we tasted and found the sauce very pleasant and vibrant – marinara-like, with the almost metallic taste of white wine and tomatoes – I left, promising to return for a photo when it was plated for that evening’s diners. As I took the photograph that evening, three orders for rabbit came into the kitchen. Looks like the menu at the Victorian Inn at Wallingford may have a new and possibly frequent ‘special’.

...or please, take my duck...

It’s Sunday afternoon now. I have a duck sitting in the fridge. I got it at the Winter Market, of course, entered through the Rutland Area Food Co-op on Wales Street in Rutland on Saturdays from 10 to 2. I’ve prepared duck perhaps once in my life. I’m already thinking about its preparation, the tastes, the accompaniments, how to get as much duck fat as possible to save for frying other things... And then I wonder – perhaps I can interest Stanti in doing duck!

...Tell Tale Heart...

An article by Gordon Dritschilo in the Herald on January 12 was brought to my attention by one of our farmers. Entitled Census counting on Vt. farmers, it quoted the spokesperson for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, who said, regarding the penalty for not completing the census form, “I’ve heard different terms... I saw at one point you can be arrested...” Not only is this incorrect, but it is significant that the first thing this spokesman for the Agency comes up with, off the top of her head, is punitive in an authoritarian kind of way. OUR Vermont Agency of Agriculture should consider themselves the farmers’ facilitator, should be helping our farmers to be more successful and creative in growing and raising food for their customers. Instead, this statement, while being more than a little wishy-washy, also contains an aura of threat, of authoritarianism and of paternalism.

In fact, what the article or law or whatever it is DOES say is: “(2) Refusal or neglect to answer questions: A person over 18 years of age who refuses or willfully neglects to answer a question, which is authorized by the Secretary to be submitted to the person in connection with a census under this section, shall be fined not more than $100.”

An often-forgotten fact about the government, its employees, and the political establishment, is that they are all public employees, that is, OUR employees – we pay their salaries and, in the case of elected officials, elect them – and their main job is not to be threatening and authoritarian but to work with the us – in this case with the farmers – in a partnership for everyone’s well-being.

Although farm census is not a new thing, and while it can be effective, it has always been a controversial action among farmers who do not wish to make themselves vulnerable to the long arm of a government that they might view as punitive. This is particularly true among present-day small farmers who rightly fear the partnership of the government with industrial-strength mega-farmers who wish, some think, to put small farms out of business. Control the food chain and you control the people.

That said, it’s encouraging that the Agency is working with farmers to get a mobile fowl slaughtering facility up and running, and a stationery slaughterhouse in southern Vermont. Rutland needs one, too, to replace the one that burned a couple of years ago. And hopefully they’re working closely with Rural Vermont on promoting a hemp industry and making farm fresh unpasteurized milk more available to people who want it. As a matter of fact the agency seems to be extremely active promoting local foods from our small farmers lately, which only makes a throw-away patronizing remark the more regrettable.

...on the subject of real food...

“But if real food – the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food – stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help.” From www.MichaelPollan.com

this column originally published in the rutland (vt) herald 01/22/08