Before a fortuitous encounter in a Berkeley supermarket last November, I had no idea of the existence of purple carrots. I’ve been sorta obsessed with growing them ever since.
On Tuesday, I finally did, along with 13 other varieties, in an exercise in tedium that will be rewarded in about 70 days when these miraculous creations are ready for harvest. I have a feeling they don’t taste quite as cool as they look.
Christof demonstrates the burn method of weeding. Sounds like an F-16 flying low over the garden.
Might not want to try this at home. But if you do, make sure the plants you want are still under the ground.
Sandor Katz has some interesting things to say about the revival of interest in fermented foods, but man does he have some distracting facial hair. As he talked this weekend at the Freestone Fermentation Festival (yes, there is a festival for fermentation; and yes, I drove nearly three hours to attend it), taking us on an etymological journey into the origins of culture and culture, I found myself transfixed by the fluffy muttonchops meandering down his face until, nearly reaching his chin, they veer back upwards, tracing an almost Nike-ish swoosh as they meld back into mustache. Truly extraordinary.
But anyway. If there is indeed a revival of interest in fermented foods, Katz is its ringleader. He literally wrote the book on the subject, and his incredible story of keeping his HIV in check through diet has no doubt added to the fervent claims of its health benefits.
But Katz’s comments to the hippied out crowd gathered in a field north of San Francisco touched on none of that. He talked about community and culture, of the “war on bacteria” and the need to preserve both the culture of food preservation and the value of communities, of humans and microbes.
That last point has been much on my mind lately. Organic growing methods take seriously the intricate web of microbial, plant and animal life on which we depend. The soil is literally alive, and so is the food that grows in it. Much of that life is then snuffed out – by conventional farmers dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, or through the vast network of middlemen and food processors through which most produce passes on its way to our bellies – before our bodies can benefit from them. Maybe some people need to be convinced of the stupidity of that, but to me it’s pretty obvious.
“If we succeeded in wiping out all the bacteria, we’d just be committing mass suicide,” Katz said. “That’s the context in which all life exists. That’s why fermentation is so universally practiced.”
Amen.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack took it upon himself last week to defend those perpetually threatened rural values.
Rural America is a unique and interesting place that I don’t think a lot of folks fully appreciate and understand. They don’t understand that that while it represents 16 percent of America’s population, 44 percent of the military comes from rural America. It’s the source of our food, fiber and feed, and 88 percent of our renewable water resources. One of every 12 jobs in the American economy is connected in some way to what happens in rural America. It’s one of the few parts of our economy that still has a trade surplus.
What set Vilsack off was this comment from the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein:
The overarching theme of [Edward] Glaeser’s book is that cities make us smarter, more productive and more innovative. To put it plainly, they make us richer. And the evidence in favor of this point is very, very strong. But it would of course be political suicide for President Obama to say that part of winning the future is ending the raft of subsidies we devote to sustaining rural living. And the U.S. Senate is literally set up to ensure that such a policy never becomes politically plausible.
So a couple urbanites declare cities superior by the only metric that really matters — wealth — and a top government official is forced to defend the honor of country folk. He neglects to mention of course that those values are struggling largely as a result of policies that have decimated small farms, driven millions to migrate to cities, and told our citizens that the only route to prosperity is though a college degree.
I’m hardly anti-city. Even now my pulse quickens when I cross the Whitestone Bridge and Manhattan emerges on the horizon in all its chaotic splendor. But no one needs to be told why cities are great. Our culture celebrates them, leaving it to politicians to pander to the unfortunates who still live in the sticks.
Klein is right on one point, though. It’s silly to celebrate rural American simply because it’s more patriotic, or because it is such an abundant source of military personnel. If you want more soldiers, pay them better.
But it’s even sillier to reduce country folks that way, perpetuating that sense of rural communities as simply resources to be extracted — food, water, bodies to fight our wars, whatever. It’s a shallow vision, eclipsing the deeper things we can learn from a life lived closer to the source.
Michael Solomonov won a James Beard award this week as best chef in the Mid-Atlantic region. I normally don’t much care for these sorts of high-brow foodie things. But I happened to meet Solomonov recently at a conference in Connecticut where, if memory serves, he prepared a curried butternut squash dish in front of 100 or so rapt Jewish women.
Solomonov’s renown results from his elevation of Israeli food into haute cuisine. The few people I know who’ve eaten at his Philadelphia eatery, Zahav, tell me it’s very good and very expensive. Which is cool. I’ve got nothing against anyone making money. But I have to wonder how many other high-priced Beard winners spend their weekends at rustic retreat centers putting on cooking demos.