Spring Greens with Field Roast Sausage

Last night was the fifth annual "Eat Local Now" Dinner, put on by Sustainable Ballard, along with BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.) The event paired local chefs with local food producers to create a truly memorable meal.

I contributed this dish of spring greens with a locally produced vegan sausage product called Field Roast. I cooked it with veggies from Nash's Organic Farm.

Here's the recipe, scaled down to serve 4:

1 tablespoon olive oil

3 leeks, cut lengthwise, cleaned and chopped

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 lb. Italian style Field Roast Sausage, sliced

8 cups chopped spring greens

1/4 cup water

1 tablespoon vegan Worchestershire sauce

1. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan. Add the leeks and salt, and cook for a few minutes, then add the Field Roast Sausage and cook for a few minutes longer, until it starts to brown.

2. Add the greens, a few handfuls at a time, adding more and mixing them together as they cook down. Drizzle in the water a little at a time as you cook the greens.

3. When all the greens are soft, add the Worchestershire, cook a minute longer, and serve.

Industrial Onions from Prosser

The wholesale food service grocery where I buy some of my supplies sells a 50 lb. bag of onions for $5. Do the math. That's cheap enough that something's got to be wrong somewhere: the farmer is selling them to the grocer for even less than that.

The onions are grown in Prosser, Washington, which is 192 miles from Seattle, so in a sense they are locally grown. I know farmers' market vendors who travel farther than that to the market.

I do use these onions during the winter and spring, and even sometimes during the summer when it's logistically difficult to buy as many onions as I need from farmers at the market. I'll pay five to ten times more for onions grown by a small scale operation, but I also use the cheaper ones sometimes.

I've always thought in terms of creating a reasonably pure product that's a great value, rather than an absolutely pure product, whatever the price. We all manage long lists of contradictions, whatever our ideals, and we look for ways to manage them without too much guilt or denial.

I do believe that we can make big changes without changing our diets or our habits one hundred percent, and that cutting corners sometimes can make it easier to keep improving overall. If I decide that I want to only eat food grown within a hundred miles of my home, and then I really want a particular item that's produced in Europe or Asia, I might me inclined to say, "To hell with this," and give up on the 100 mile diet altogether. But if I decide that I'm going to use as much local food as I can sensibly source and realistically afford, then I'm going to keep on trying, and keep on adding local items.

Lately there have been a couple of new food concessions at the markets that conscientiously source all of their ingredients. Growing Washington makes soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, Green-Go makes corn cakes with a variety of sauces, and Rolling Fire Pizza makes wood fired pizza.

I'm humbled by their endeavors. I'm going to stick to my own approach for now, but they do inspire me to cut fewer corners, and to always keep looking for better ingredients.

Cabbage Raab

This spring I've been having a good time with cabbage raab, or cabbage buds, grown by Nash's Farm. I asked one of the farmers exactly what part of the plant it came from, and she said it grew when the plant flowered, but before it went to seed. Apparently winter veggies get really sweet before they go to seed, while summer veggies tend to get bitter.

Since I discovered these tender greens, I've been seeing them everywhere. They're included in a local organic produce delivery service's box, they're featured on neighborhood blogs, and they're on the menu at fine restaurants.

It's possible that they've been around for years and I just never noticed them, but it's more likely that they've been catching on lately. I've seen this happen with all kinds of products: one farmer will successfully try something out, and before you know it, everyone's doing it.

Not that there's anything new about cabbage raab. People have probably been eating it for as long as they've been growing cabbage, until we rigidly settled into our modern conventions about which parts of the plant are acceptable to eat, and which should be thrown away.

Pros and Cons of the New Farm Bill

1. Congress has reached a tentative agreement on a new farm bill which takes a few baby steps in the right direction, but doesn't do much overall in the way of reversing some of the lousier policies behind our current food woes.

The Pros:

-There's a $1 billion a year increase in spending on food stamps and other nutritional programs.

-There's a $3.8 billion disaster relief program for farmers.

-There's a bit of a reduction in the amount of subsidies that large-scale farms can receive on their acreage.

-There's a small reduction in tax credits for ethanol processors.

Cons:

-The bill is still geared towards subsidizing the production of a limited number of commodities, rather than building a diversified agricultural system.

-The bill still includes tax credits for ethanol, even if they've been reduced a bit. The recent move towards using corn for fuel rather than for food is one of the reasons behind recent food shortages.

It would have been encouraging to get some more support from the powers that be, but it looks like, once again, the sustainable food movement is going to be forced to fall back on its own ingenuity and resourcefulness.

International Year of the Potato

A third of the year has already passed, and I just found out that the United Nations has named 2008 as the Year of the Potato.

They're looking to raise awareness about potatoes during a time of food shortages. Potatoes are a productive and cost effective crop, and they've helped to alleviate food shortages in the past, especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, soon after they had been introduced to Europe from the Americas.

They were a tough sell at first. Wealthy Europeans shunned them, finding them insipid and bland. The poor weren't interested in a food that held no appeal for the rich. An eighteenth century French public official named Parmentier got the French citizens to plant potatoes by convincing the king to plant a royal garden, surrounded by armed guards. After a time they stopped guarding the garden. The peasants then stole the potatoes, and planted them for themselves.

I think the potato is an important symbol to help us find a way out of our current predicament, which is being caused in part by rising standards of living in India and China, enabling more people to be able to afford meat. Meat production is much less efficient than production of plant based foods, which is one of the reasons why it has always been a high status food.

We can take a step towards finding our way out of today's food shortages by collectively learning to value foods differently. Like the French peasants who stole the potatoes out of the king's garden, we need to shift out perception of plant based foods, and to see them as special, rather than as something to eat when you can't afford meat.

In some ways this is starting to happen. The current enthusiasm for local, seasonal food represents a kind of transformation from a way of thinking where imported, exotic items are more special than fresh foods from our own neighborhoods. In some way, the perception of farmers' market food as expensive helps to create a special status for local foods, even though we can grow them inexpensively in our own gardens.

So let's celebrate the potato. Yukon golds, fingerlings, Ozettes, Desirees, butterballs, Purple Vikings, even the humble russet.

Gearing Up for Market Season

1. The hard core market season will be starting next week, although I'll be phasing in different events over the next month and a half. Columbia City starts this coming Wednesday, Wallingford and Mad-Cap start in the middle of May, and Magnolia, Lake City and Queen Anne will be starting in June. Ballard and the University District have been running all winter, of course.

It's a time for buying equipment, paying lots of money for health permits, and finishing up those winter projects that certainly aren't going to get done this summer.

Each market has a different rhythm. For me Columbia City, Mad-Cap and Magnolia peak early, while Lake City stays pretty steady throughout the season and Ballard is craziest in the fall. I'm grateful that they don't all peak at once, and I'm glad I've been doing this long enough to have some idea of what to expect.

I'm looking forward to trading with the farmers and catching glimpses of each new fruit and vegetable as it comes into season. By the time October comes around I'll be good and ready to slow down, but right now I can't wait to start.

Roasted Asparagus with Spring Garlic

1. I had to celebrate the season's first asparagus, which Magana Farms brought to the Ballard Market last Sunday. I roasted them with leeks and spring garlic, two other seasonal favorites.

1 lb. asparagus, trimmed and chopped into 2-inch lengths

1 bunch spring garlic, trimmed and chopped

1 leek, cut lengthwise, cleaned well, and chopped

12-15 calamata olives, quartered lengthwise

2 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Toss the chopped veggies with the olive oil and salt, then arrange them in a baking pan large enough to spread them in a thin layer. Roast them for 20-30 minutes, until they just start to brown.

Maude Barlow's "Blue Covenant"

I just finished Maude Barlow's most recent book, "Blue Covenant". It's a thoughtful, informative account of the global water crisis, covering the insidious organizations striving to privatize the ebbing global water supply, as well as the "water warriors" fighting the greedy corporations and working to keep the issue in the public eye.

1. We've been hearing so much about global warming, but the dwindling supplies of clean water pose at least as much of a threat to our future.

While this book made me realize that the global water situation is much worse than I knew, it also brought home to me just how safe and clean our tap water is. There's no reason to drink bottled water. It's a waste of plastic, and it's often no cleaner than what comes out of our faucets.

PETA's Language Barrier

The animal rights group PETA is offering a 1 million dollar prize to the first team of scientists to produce commercially viable meat in a laboratory. Their website declares that they have "overcome (their) revulsion to flesh eating," and are offering this prize as a practical solution--and olive branch--to join forces with those unenlightened individuals who just can't get past their addiction to eating animals.

This proposal reeks of the same cluelessness that makes it difficult for PETA and other militant vegans to bridge the gap with so many people who could be potential allies. As a species we're ripe for a change in our attitudes towards eating meat. Rampant food and water shortages are daily reminders that, unless we start eating less meat, there won't be enough food to go around. Methane gas from livestock is the single biggest source of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

But the PETA solution reminds me of US food aid missions that send peanut butter into communities where nobody's ever eaten peanut butter. People don't know what to do with the stuff, so they feed it to their animals. There's a culture clash and a language barrier here, and they're probably just going to end up wasting that million dollars which would be better spent on fake blood and chicken suits.

You don't reach out to people by calling their food disgusting, even if you're supposedly trying to help them find a more sustainable and humane way to produce their disgusting food.

Rockridge Cider Vinegar

Here's a great product I discovered recently. It's cider vinegar made by the folks at Rockridge Orchards, from their own cider, from their own apples.

They do some wonderfully creative stuff, making wines and hard ciders, and even growing tea. Personally, I'm looking forward to another batch of mead.

What's up With This @$%&* Weather?

It was snowing this morning at the U District market. That's so wrong. I've had a good attitude about the weather all winter, but I'm done. No more good attitude for me until we get some decent weather.

Historical Perspective on Food Riots

There's been a lot of talk in the news lately about food riots, with angry crowds taking to the streets from Haiti to Senegal.

Food riots are nothing new. Ancient Roman citizens rioted when their food supply was precarious, and food riots were among the causes that sparked the French Revolution.

On a visceral level there's something terrifying about people tearing through the streets wreaking havoc because they don't have enough food. But the people who are the most hungry are rarely the ones who riot.

Aside from the obvious fact that people who riot about food must be deeply concerned about having enough to eat, if not very hungry, food riots tend to grow out of discontent over government food policies. Nobody riots over a drought, because social unrest can't change the weather. Still, in times of drought people are most likely to be outraged about government decisions that leave them with less of whatever food is available.

In an age of globalized trade, with much of the land in poorer countries turned into plantations for industrial agriculture to grow crops that are shipped to wealthier nations, it is easy to see why the Haitians and Senegalese are angry at their governments.

Today's food riots may stop if the weather improves soon, but unless these agricultural policies start to change, new riots will flare up the next time there's a metereological crisis.

Pasta with Spring Greens

I love pasta with any kind of greens. Come to think of it, I love pasta with just about anything. You can substitute any kind of greens you want, but I do recommend sticking with the sorrel, which has a special, lemony flavor.

I used pasta from Divino, sorrel and garlic from Stony Plains Farm, cabbage sprouts and kale buds from Nash's Farm, and shallots from Pipitone Orchards. This recipe serves 2.

2/3 lb. fresh pasta

2 tablespoons olive oil

4 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup sliced shallots

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 bunch sorrel, trimmed and chopped

1 bunch cabbage sprouts, trimmed and chopped

1 bunch kale buds, trimmed and chopped

1. Boil water and cook the pasta for 4-5 minutes, then drain it well.

2. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a separate pan, then add the garlic, shallots and salt. Cook on low heat for a couple of minutes, until the shallots are transluscent.

3. Add the greens and cook medium high heat for about five minutes, until they're tender. Toss the pasta with the greens and serve.

Climate Change Chocolate

I came across this curious item while shopping at Shoreline's Central Market, and I figured I'd better bring some home with me and take a closer look.

In general, I'm suspicious of green marketing, especially when it doesn't have the slightest trace of subtlety. I also figured I should taste the stuff before I got snarky about it.

The chocolate itself was perfectly respectable, although I wish they had a variety with a higher cocoa content.

The inner wrapper had all kinds of helpful information to help you reduce your carbon footprint, like "Turn off the lights," and "Ride your Bicycle." (Gee thanks! I'd never thought of that.)

The chocolate bar is a collaborative effort between a New Zealand chocolate company named Bloomsberry, and the organization Terrapass, which sells carbon offsets, an arrangement where you invest in green projects in order to balance the damage your car is doing to the environment. The package says that for every chocolate bar you buy, Terrapass will purchase 133 miles worth of carbon offsets.

I went to their website and did the math. That's 66 cents worth of carbon offsets, out of the $5 cost of the chocolate bar. Now, I'll gladly pay $5 for a great chocolate bar, and this one certainly wasn't bad, but when I want to buy chocolate I'll buy chocolate, and when I want to buy carbon offsets, I'll buy carbon offsets.

Speaking of carbon offsets, a friend of mine likens them to the indulgences that the medieval church sold to sinners: pay this amount, and you'll be absolved!

It also struck me as odd that there wasn't a word on the package about the chocolate being organic or fair trade. Given the other heavy handed environmental claims, it's hard to imagine that they're using fair trade, organic chocolate and simply not saying so.

I buy plenty of chocolate that's not certified fair trade or organic. The way I see it, really fine chocolate takes love and care to produce, and it's not the kind of product that you can make with exploited workers or plantations that are so massive that you have to spray them heavily to keep the pests away. Still, it seems bizarre to me that these guys missed such an obvious opportunity to take their green marketing to a whole new level.

Biodegradable Takeout Containers

I was excited to discover today that the wholesale food service warehouse where I shop is now carrying bio-degradable and compostable takeout containers for a price that's in the same ballpark as styrofoam. They already carry one variety of unbleached, biodegradable takeout containers, but those are almost twice the price of these new ones. (And for some reason, the ones with compartments are significantly cheaper than the ones without.)

Washington state is trying to outlaw all styrofoam. I've been hearing restauranteurs complaining on the radio. Some say that they're going to have to instate a takeout surcharge now to pay for the extra expense.

I think that's a terrible idea. Many years ago Washington state passed a minimum wage law that required employers to pay waiters and waitresses the same wage as everyone else. (Before that they had their own, lower minimum wage, with the assumption that they'd make up the difference in tips.) One of my favorite restaurants raised all their prices by a percentage, and had a note on the menu explaining why. They ending up with prices like $6.34, the kinds of odd numbers that you never see on menus.

I stopped eating there. I felt that if they really needed to raise prices they should have done so on selected items that could bear it, and not even mentioned the wage increase. The awkwardness of the new prices and the note on the menu made me feel like they were whining about something that really wasn't a bad idea.

As restauranteurs, we're always finding ways to save money, at the same time that we're dealing with ongoing price increases. We don't lower our prices every time we figure out a more efficient way to do something, so why should we raise them when we're faced with a new expense, especially one that's in everyone's best interests? Of course it's inevitable that we have to raise prices at some point, but it's much more constructive to look for some graceful way to offset the expense, rather than complaining about a new, enlightened law.

Salmonella Cereal

The FDA announced this weekend that they've tracked 14 cases of food poisoning involving the same strain of salmonella that the Malt o' Meal company found in its puffed cereals earlier this month. The company issued a "voluntary" recall after finding the bacteria in their product during routine testing.

So far there's no word on how the salmonella got into the cereal. The process of puffing cereal involves heating it, then pressurizing it. So it seems that the product must have been contaminated between the time it was manufactured and the time it was packaged. Maybe someone wasn't washing their hands...

Can't blame this on on the Chinese.

Is It Spicy?

People are funny. I keep two kinds of homemade salsa on my table at the farmers' market, for people to eat with their tamales. Neither one is particularly hot. At least a dozen times a day I hear someone say, "I bet this is really spicy," or "Is this super hot?" They do this even when I put out a sign saying the sauces are relatively mild.

Next to my salsas I have a couple of jars of my neighbor's product, which happens to be quite spicy. People invariably pick up the jars without hesitation, and generously spoon the stuff onto their food.

I think they find the Zane and Zack product less scary because it's in a jar with a label. They're in for a surprise.

Sustainable Tongue

This is Charlie, from Sea Breeze Farm. They butchered a couple of cows last weekend and he was having a good time with the organ meats at the market on Sunday. I was looking on with a "boys will be boys" kind of attitude, but then it occurred to me to ask when was the last time they'd slaughtered a cow.

He thought about it for a moment, and said that they'd never done it before. He explained that grass fed cows have much longer life expectancies than cows on factory farms because they're much healthier. It doesn't make sense to kill them for their meat if they're still producing milk.

I saw a cow's tongue in a delicatessen when I was a kid. I was horrified. I think seeing this one up close helped me heal that experience. I touched it. It was scratchy, like a cat's tongue. Apparently that helps them get a better grip on the grass.

Sorrel with Parsnips

Lately I've been playing with creating lots of flavor without adding much seasoning. This dish uses early spring vegetables: the sorrel and parsnips add sweet and sour flavors. Young garlic has a brighter flavor than the mature plant. I served my meal with Bhutanese red rice, a personal favorite. You can serve it as a side dish, or add any kind of protein to make it into a main dish.

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 bunch (4 or 5 stalks) young garlic, chopped

3 parsnips, peeled and chopped

2 bunches sorrel, coarsely chopped

1/2-1 teaspoon salt

black pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil. Add the young garlic and cook for a few minutes on medium-low heat, until it's soft. Add the remaining ingredients and cook for 5 to 10 minutes longer, until the parsnips are tender.

Farmers Market Administration

Two groups run virtually all of the farmers' markets in the Seattle area. Their missions are mostly similar, but their styles can be very different.

The NFMA, or Neighborhood Farmers' Market Alliance, runs the U District, Columbia City, West Seattle, Lake City, Magnolia, Broadway, and Phinney markets.

Seattle Farmers' Markets has markets in Ballard, Madrona, Wallingford, and Queen Anne. They also run the Fremont Sunday Market, which is more of a craft and flea market than a farmers' market.

The NFMA is a non-profit organization with an office staff and a board of directors. Their markets are for food only, so there's no crafts. Until recently they didn't offer much hot, ready to eat food at their markets, although they've been relaxing that policy lately. (I just wish they'd done it when I was their only hot food vendor.) They're well organized, and they do a lot of marketing and outreach, which leads to plenty of media attention.

Seattle Farmers' Markets is run by a handful of dedicated, hardworking individuals. Their policies tend to be more fluid than the NFMA's, although they do have to have rules in order to keep things flowing. All of their markets include crafts and hot, ready to eat food. To me they feel more relaxed than the NFMA markets, although it can be harder to take care of practical, administrative details.

Whether they're run by individuals or by a board, working with these organizations always comes down to building relationships with the folks who are on site making decisions. I appreciate the mission that these organizations share: to support local foods and local farmers. I may bang heads with them from time to time because I want them to support my local foods rather than someone else's. But in the end, I have so much respect for what they do, that we can usually come up with a workable solution.

A Trip to Costco

My Costco membership is going to expire this month. I joined mainly because they have great prices on a lot of the equipment I need for my farmers' market booth. I probably won't be renewing.

I'm proud to say that, in the entire year that I've had the membership, I haven't bought a single food item.

I headed up there today to buy a few pieces of equipment while I still can. I figured that, while I was there, I should take a closer look at the food, to see if it defied any of my preconceptions. As far as quality, there were quite a few "industrial organic" items. I was glad to see them, but I wasn't tempted to buy any.

I was mainly interested in comparing prices with some of the other places I shop. The meat seemed really inexpensive, but I rarely buy meat, and when I do it's usually at the farmers' market and I'm more interested in quality than I am in price. (Buying it only occasionally gives you that luxury.)

I do look at a lot of produce prices in a lot of different places, so I figured that would be a good section to use for comparison. I found a 10 lb. bag of red potatoes for $5.29, pineapple for $2.99, a couple of small watermelons for $6.79 (they looked like they were about 5 lb. each,) and 5 avocadoes for $6.99.

After having my receipt scrutinized by the guard at the door, I headed up to one of my favorite produce stands, Country Farms, in Edmunds. They had 10 lb. bags of potatoes for $2.49, a 3 lb. pineapple for 98 cents a pound, and 10 lb. watermelons for 39 cents a pound. They had baby avocadoes at 5 for a dollar, so I couldn't compare that price precisely, but I do know that the last time I checked, Trader Joe was selling 4 avocadoes for $3.

I'm not denying that Costco has great prices on many of their items. But I do think that people who shop at big box warehouse stores often assume that any price they see there is cheaper than what you'll get elsewhere, and it isn't necessarily so.

And I'm left with the perennial question, if you spend less money on stuff you don't really need, are you actually saving money?

Twenty Cents Per Bag

I was waiting in line at the supermarket today. When the woman in front of me was asked whether she wanted her groceries packed in paper or plastic, she asked, "Do we have to pay that 20 cents per bag yet?"

I said that I thought that law was going into effect at the beginning of next year, and the guy behind me said, "The mayor should stick to some of his other brilliant ideas, like building a tunnel under the waterfront."

The woman in front of me said, "Will we have to pay 20 cents for garbage bags?"

The man said, "You won't be allowed to have garbage any more. We'll all have to eat our garbage."

For those of you who aren't from Seattle, the legislature is working on passing a bill imposing a 20 cent tax on all grocery bags, paper or plastic. I think it's a great idea. Apparently, not everyone agrees.

The Omnivore's Blind Spot

I just finished reading Francis Moore Lappe's Getting a Grip. It wasn't what I expected, from the glowing reviews I'd seen. ("She's done it again!")

The book's premise is that we can come to terms with our fears about the future by finding concrete entry points to start making changes. It wasn't that I disagreed with anything she said. I just craved some new insight, and I didn't find it here.

I'm a big fan of Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet. I didn't even read it until a few years ago, but its central idea--that there is enough food to go around, we just feed too much of it to livestock--had long been familiar to me by the time I cracked the its cover, no doubt because the book had such a strong impact on my generation.

There was an editorial titled "Grains Gone Wild" in today's New York Times by the economist Paul Krugman. He explains the current global food shortages as being caused in part by the rising standard of living in China, which has enabled more people to eat more meat, as well as by the the widespread cultivation of corn for ethanol and the rising price of petroleum products because of the war in Iraq. At the end of the article he calls for increased food aid for poorer nations, as well as a rethinking of policies promoting the use of biofuels. Not a word about eating less meat.

I'm afraid that we have a huge collective blind spot when it comes to our consumption of meat, even though many of us intellectually understand the connection between meat-based diets and food scarcity. Sustainably raised meat is one solution, in fact, virtually every argument I've ever heard for switching to a vegtetarian diet is weaker when you're eating grass fed and sustainably raised animals rather than livestock from feedlots. But there just isn't enough grass or space on the planet for everyone to eat sustainable meat on the same scale that we've been eating industrial meat. At some point we're just going to have to face the fact that we need to eat less meat.

I'm not a vegetarian, although I don't eat a lot of meat. Francis Moore Lappe isn't a vegetarian either. In the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Diet for a Small Planet she explains that she eats small amounts of meat, as a flavoring or as a component in a larger dish. As she explains, this is how most people have eaten for most of our history.

My business makes only vegetarian food. For the past twelve years I've been selling vegetarian food at farmers' markets, listening to people's comments when they learn that my food has no meat. Seattle is a pretty enlightened city, but I still encounter ambivalence--and sometimes outright hostility--virtually every day. I tell people that you don't have to be vegetarian to eat vegetarian food, just like you don't have to be Thai to eat Thai food, but many folks just aren't convinced.

I do a lot of work with vegetarian organizations. I deeply admire the activists I know who dedicate their lives to getting people to stop eating meat, but I'm not sure that this all-or-nothing approach is the answer. Even the groups that treat vegetarianism as a process to be approached in stages still operate with the assumption that the ultimate goal is to get people to give up eating meat, rather than persuading them to eat less.

Meat is a special food. It always has been special for us, even before the emergence of our unique species, homo sapiens. We were scavengers of meat before we were hunters, taking the leavings from other predators who were more skilled or better adapted. But even to our early ancestors, meat was a windfall. It kept its special status, through the generations who learned to hunt, and later among those who first domesticated livestock. In many prehistoric societies, meat was sacred, and only eaten when it was sacrificed to the gods.

I suspect that the most effective way to reduce our collective consumption of meat is to somehow make it sacred again. Its rising cost lately certainly contributes to its longtime status as a special food, a symbol of living well. But that also makes it more desirable. I think our best hope is to somehow rotate that blind spot into our field of vision, to eat less meat as a choice, and also as a necessity, a way to improve our collective odds for surviving as a species.

Ginger-Mint Iced Tea

I sell this unsweetened iced tea at my farmers' market booth. We only make it between April and October because it has a short shelf life and we don't sell enough to make it worthwhile during the rest of the year. People are always asking for the recipe so I'm posting it here, in honor of the fact that it's April now so we've started making it again.

1 quart water
2 peppermint tea bags or 1/2 cup fresh mint leaves
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh ginger (no need to peel)

Combine the ingredients in a medium-sized saucepan and bring them to a boil. Turn off the heat and steep for at least ten minutes. Strain the mixture and pour it over ice to cool it, or cool in in the refrigerator and then dilute it to your desired strength.

Spring Butter

I got some butter at the market today, from Golden Glen Creamery. It was only their second week at the U District Market, and I was thrilled to see them there.

You don't see much butter at our local farmers' markets. Spring butter in particular is special, because of the flowers the cows are eating, and also because of the unique flavor that the milk gets from spring grass.

HT Market

I love the HT Market. I love it in spite of the fact that it carries virtually no local or organic food.

I've never seen a place with such a wide range of ethnic foods, from the vast array of Asian staples which are their specialty, to the Eastern European, Hispanic, and African products that fill their shelves.

Wierd as it may be, considering my mostly-vegetarian orientation, I prefer to see entire pig carcasses hanging than antiseptic styrofoam trays of meat. They have the styrofoam trays as well, with specialties you don't find at Safeway, like pig kidneys and goat skins.

Outsourced Pickles

The Seattle PI ran a cover story yesterday about Nalley Foods shutting down their local pickle plant and cancelling their contract with northwest cucumber growers . Although the jars say "Northwest Grown", soon the product in the jars will have been grown in other parts of the country, and some will even come from India.

Here's my vision of a positive outcome for this story:

The farmers who lost their contracts will use their land to plant crops that they can market directly to consumers, charging a higher price per pound than they were getting from the pickle manufacturers. Maybe some of them will even start pickling their cucumbers themselves, creating a local, artisan product.

They'll transition their land to organic agriculture, again enabling them to earn more money for the work they do. They'll diversify their mix of crops, making their land healthier and ensuring they won't have to rely so heavily on a single type of plant, or a single buyer.

And maybe the Nalley company will discover that this wasn't a good move after all, once northwest shoppers stop buying their product, and they get hit with the price of shipping cucumbers from India.

Mozzarella and the Mob

Last week Japan suspended shipments of buffalo mozzarella from Sicily, after finding traces of dioxin in some of the product they were importing.

The problem can be traced to problems with garbage collection, a service that is controlled by the area's Mafia. The dumps are full and the trash hasn't been getting collected. People have taken to burning the piles that are accumulating in the streets. This adds pollutants to the air, which is breathed by the water buffalos whose milk is used to produce the area's famous mozzarella.

The Italian government and the European government have been pressuring the local garbage agency to to clean up its act. It's an unfortunate business: negative publicity about a product that's so strongly associated with the region's identity.

Pea Starts

This time of year, as the winter produce wanes and the spring offerings haven't yet stepped up to fill the gap, you see a lot of vegetable starts at the markets.

This gives the farmers something to sell, and it gives the die hard customers something to buy.

I'm not much of a gardener, but the past couple of years I've been buying a couple of plants and giving it a try.