Food, Inc.

As the news covers yet another food recall, food safety issues again come to mind. To learn more about these issues, we traveled over to Ithaca to the Cinemopolis Theater on the Ithaca Commons to see the movie Food, Inc. If you get a chance, I strongly recommend that you see this movie. It is a documentary about the industrialized food system we have created. There are only a few large agricultural companies that pretty much control our food supply. The movie covers issues of food safety, food nutrition, and animal cruelty. In addition, they offer some solutions and share what some are working on to improve and change the system.

One main message from the movie is that we can make quite a difference by simply making careful food choices. This includes growing a garden, no matter how small (maybe even on a truck bed?) as well as continuing to support our local small farmers. Purchase your meat from small, local farms that take care to treat their animals with the respect they deserve. When you go to local grocery stores, continually request local foods and ask that they clearly label the ones that they have. For example, I was pleased to see at the P & C in Cortland they are now carrying Windy Ridge Farm cheese made in Cazenovia. It was hidden in with all the Wisconsin specialty cheeses, but I was able to find it. As a former resident of Wisconsin, I find that our local NY cheese is just as tasty, and hasn't had to travel as many miles to get to us.

If you go to the Food, Inc website they have links to other advocacy opportunities including improving school lunch nutrition. Also, please contact your politicians to let them know that food quality and food safety are a concern for you and you want them to work on these issues.

Saturday Market Visit

My stop at the East End Farmers Market was a quick one as we had company on the way yesterday. I did manage to touch base with Tammie Whitson of Cold Brook Farm, one of the market organizers. She has been quite busy adopting 3 children from Russia. Beginning next Saturday, she'll be teaching short wool workshops at the market, introducing people to the process of turning a sheep's coat into someone's sweater.

Since I was short of time, It is was especially helpful to have all of these venders in one place. With one stop, I was able to get great looking steaks and ground beef, a variety of fresh veggies, a fresh loaf of whole grain bread, cookies, and potted herbs; all grown/made within 30 miles of Cortland! By the way, the East End Farmers' Market is able to take the EBT card for customers on food stamps, so pass the word!

To help you see the variety of products available at the market, here are my purchased from this week:
- Finally it is corn season in Central NY, so I was able to get a dozen ears of corn from Gladtime Farm Market located in Little York, NY. I also picked up a head of buttercrunch lettuce.
- More delicious organic carrots were on my list from Buried Treasures Organic Farm.
- I noticed that Tom Quinn of Quinns Irish Farm in Freetown had some nice looking blueberries – tempting, but we have plans to do our own picking at a friend’s place next weekend.
- From Sean Duffy of Rising Moon/Setting Sun, a new CSA in East Freetown, I purchased up some young leaf lettuce and mixed new potatoes (included white, red and blue potatoes). Sean has plans to put in a renewable power system to eventually power a walk-in cooler for all his produce.
- From the Coombs family of Shiloh Valley Farm, I picked up some peanut butter cookies. Their son was a great sales person, encouraging folks to try their samples.
- From Edgewood Bakery and Farm, I purchased a loaf of fresh whole grain Oatmeal bread.
- From Dayspring I picked up cucumbers. They also had a ton of great looking yellow squash and zucchini.
- From Karl Frost of Frosty Morning Farm, I picked up Elderberry Syrup (might come in handy this fall during flu season) and the herb Tansy which I’ve read is a great companion plant for potatoes (repelling potato beetles), can be dried and used to repel all those cluster flies I get in the fall and spring in my windowsills, and has pretty yellow button flowers, too!
- I also had time to meet Danielle Upton of Upton Farm in Cincinnatus. They raise pasture fed dairy beef that are at least 90% lean, with no antibiotics, hormones or steroids. I decided to try a couple of their steaks and some ground chuck. According to their website, they have a variety of ordering options from whole to split halves; to small, medium, and large bundles of meat that range from 15 to 40 lbs; and you can choose the time of year you would like your meat ready for pick-up.

Chicken Pickup Day

Friends and colleagues have often asked me where to go to find locally grown meat in Cortland County. As I’ve mentioned in earlier postings about our pork purchases (pork part 1 and pork part 2 ), we purchase most of our locally grown meat and eggs from Cobblestone Valley Farm in Preble, NY. The Knapp family provides us with local, healthy, humanely raised beef, pork, chicken and turkey.

Today’s visit to Cobblestone Valley Farm was to pick up our freshly processed organic chickens. I'll be cutting up these whole chickens into pieces to use for making chicken salad, chicken speidies, and fried chicken before I put any of the meat in the freezer. I'll also be making a large pot of chicken stock with some veggies to freeze for making soup later in the season. If you've never cut apart a whole chicken before, here is a YouTube video that shows you how to do it. (BTW - my chicken pieces tend to look a little mutilated after I cut them up. But each time I do it, the pieces look a little more recognizable.)



Some friends, Cindy Benton, Susan Stratton and her daughter Kendra met us at the farm to look around, learn the process, pick up some meat, and meet Maureen Knapp. Pat and John Pinto, also friends of ours, happened to stop by while we were there to pick up their chickens.

In addition to picking up our fresh chickens, we also purchased eggs, a “grilling special” which included 1 lb. of ground beef, 1 lb. of hotdogs, and 1 lb. of hamburgers, and a additional 3 lbs of hot dogs (can you tell we are expecting a LOT of company of the next few weeks – and I plan on grilling outside?) The hot dogs are new this year and in addition to being high quality, healthy beef, are nitrate free (oh and they are real tasty, too). We also picked up a new item they are offering - ring bologna, that is also full of flavor. It is precooked and tastes a lot like beef stick or summer sausage.

In addition to getting our meat and eggs from Cobblestone Valley, we also pick their organic strawberries and get organic compost for our garden. It is wonderful that we have famers such as Maureen and Paul Knapp in our area. They are wonderful resources for connecting local foods advocates, and have hosted a number of NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Association) activities and school field trips to their farm.

If you are interested in purchasing from the Knapps, please take a look at their website and send them an email.

ADK Sustainability Course and July Garden Update

This month, we took a little time away from the garden and spent a week in the Adirondacks teaching a field-based graduate course that included sustainability topics - things the students can use in both their personal and professional lives as well as what to include in their classroom (since most of the students were teachers). To see what we did, you can look at the course blog. We had a great group of students/teachers who, as you can read from their blogs which are linked to the course blog, are excited about focusing more on local foods, looking to join a CSA, and thinking about ways to incorporate the outdoors and sustainability topics into their classrooms.

So far it has been a fairly cool, damp summer. Our garden along with the fruit trees and shrubs are keeping us occupied. While walking the paths through our fields to pick wild raspberries, the scent of milkweed was sweet in the air. The wild flowers, especially the daisies, are having a banner year!

In addition to lots of weeds (most inedible) that seem to always grow well, we are managing to get a few things to eat from the garden. This is what is available to eat from the garden today:

Onions
Early Cabbage
Carrots
Beets
Peas
Broccoli
Swiss Chard
Lettuce
Turnips
Kohlrabi
Radishes

Coming in soon we should be adding:
New Potatoes
Zucchini
Red Cabbage
Royal Burgundy Beans

And a little slower this year:
Tomatoes (will they ever turn red?)
Eggplant
Cucumbers (I got a late start on these)
Brussels Sprouts
Pole Beans and Bush Green Beans (having a hard time this year and also a late start)
Winter squash (also having a hard time this year and also a late start)

Celery, late season cabbage, garlic, potatoes, shallots, and popcorn are all doing very well. This week I need to plant our winter or storage root vegetables. This would include beets, carrots, and turnips. And I also need to plant some late season broccoli and peas.

Our blueberries are just starting to come in. Especially those we just transplanted which were given to us by our friends Rand and Sharon Johnson in Chenango County. Along with the wild raspberries, our cultivated raspberries and black raspberries are ripening. Mulberries have been ripening a few at a time for the last week and we still have some strawberries ripening as well.

Because of the weather, which climate scientists predict will be come the norm for Upstate New York (as wetter, cooler summers are predicted as our climate changes), we are considering high tunnels and a larger greenhouse to get things going sooner and longer. By the way, as you can see by the article I linked to above, it is predicted that our winters will be what warms more significantly, less snowfall, less days below freezing. For some, you are probably saying, "Great, I don't have to move to Virginia for the milder winter weather. It will come to me". But along with these milder winters, we'll see more ticks and other insects and more invasive species. We'll see less blueberries, less maple trees, and even less apples. And also wet summer weather may be pretty dramatic, in other words more flooding, more often. That isn't even discussing the ocean level rise, which will force the relocation of millions of people downstate to probably, well, here I guess . . .

Lots of Cortland Activity Today!

The Cortland area was hopping today with quite a bit going on. It is Alumni Weekend for SUNY Cortland. For downtown Cortland it was the sidewalk sale, the downtown farmers market, and "Taste of Downtown". In Homer, it was their annual "Holiday in Homer". And of course being Saturday morning, I made my usual trip down to the East End Farmers Market in Dexter Park.

Once again I found wonderful purchases, listed to some great music, and was able to catch up with a few friends while there. I bumped into Kathy Arnold of Twin Oaks Dairy (where you can go in Truxton to purchase organic raw milk) who was going to give the natural cleaner from Lime Hollow Naturals a try and was hitting up Buried Treasures Organic Farm for some organic strawberries. I found some great tasting carrots from Buried Treasures Organic Farm from Groton, NY; purchased some cucumbers (also very tasty) from Dayspring farm out of Locke, NY; captured some cheery sunflowers from Lisa Lickona of Red Rose Farm in McGraw, NY; and choose some organically grown coffee beans from Coffee Mania. I also purchased a Pennyroyal plant from Karl Frost of Frosty Morning Farm in Truxton. Karl has a great selection of perennials and herbs. Pennyroyal has a great scent and as Karl explained, is used as a natural insect repellent. I am looking forward to planting it and giving it a try. In addition, I picked up some more of the granulated maple sugar from S & S Syrup of Marathon, NY; and touched base with Sean Duffy of Rising Moon/Setting Sun, a new CSA in East Freetown. He plans to invite potential customers out to the farm in a few weeks to have an "open house" so people can see the operation. He had some nice looking new potatoes and other items for sale at the market this week.

I also chatted with Kristin Avery of Lime Hollow Naturals about how word is getting out that there is a "green" community in Cortland that want locally made and natural products and local organic and gently grown/raised produce, dairy, eggs, and meat. I think the East End Farmers Market is helping us to find each other. From Kristin I choose to purchase some great smelling natural soap (Eucalyptus and Lemon Grass) and a "refill" bottle for the natural cleaner (rosemary and lavender scent is my favorite) that works so well.

To end this entry, I'd like to thank Tom Lickona for letting me use the photos he took at the East End Farmers Market on my blog.