CurtBlog : Sustainable Living

Food and me - a short history (part 1)

skills0 — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:04:55 GMT

Introduction

If you've known me for any length of time, you probably know I'm really into food and cooking. Heck, at least half my blog posts mention food in some fashion. I thought it might be interesting to chronicle my relationship with food throughout my life. There are a lot of different experiences I've had that have shaped the way I view food. So I'm going to start a series of blog posts about this whole topic. It will be a bit free-form and I'm not sure when I'll be finished, but hopefully it will be at least somewhat interesting.

Childhood memories

As many of you know, I was raised in a conservative rural Mennonite community. Mennonites weren't the only members of the community, but there were a bunch of us. Mennonites have had a love affair with food (both eating it and producing it) for a long time. The primary focus of most family gatherings was around food, almost all of it homemade and often with ingredients that were personally raised and/or slaughtered. My grandfather was a farmer and many in the family before him. When I was a young child, my dad drove a refrigerator/freezer truck for Burris Foods, but by the time I was in early elementary school he had gone into business as a chicken farmer, hatching eggs to be precise. My uncle was a hog farmer. These were both what I would know call "factory farm" operations, part of the vast supply chain where America gets most of their food. My grandfather, uncle and father also raised typical row crops, like corn and soybeans. My grandfather sold Growers fertilizer to various farmers, not sure if they are still around or not.

As far as food in our house, we always had a big garden every year and grew just about everything. I grew up both loving and hating it, spending many hours weeding, hoeing, picking and processing food. In retrospect I wish I would've paid more attention. My mom was a food canner and freezer, like most Mennonite women. Even during the winter, we would have a decent amount of food that we had grown ourselves. We would also go blueberry picking for a day every summer, bringing home enough blueberries to put in the freezer for much of the rest of the year. We would also pick peaches to be canned in light syrup for the winter. Most summers my grandparents would go pick up a trailer full of bushels of apples and the whole extended family would spend the day making applesauce, apple butter, cider and whatever else they could think of.

We knew where a good portion of our food came from. We would go pull milk out of a stainless steel cooling tank from a local farm. It was fairly normal for us to occasionally get a side of beef from my grandfather and later my uncle. Venison was plentiful, I was the weird boy who didn't like hunting. I did like venison though. We would even have squirrel on occasion.

Once my dad got the chicken house, gathering eggs was a daily chore. Thousands of them. A few times over 5000 eggs in a single day. These were hatching eggs, so there were roosters jumping on hens all the time when they weren't trying to pick a fight with us. If you went out to the chicken house at night most of the birds would be up on the slats roosting and sooner or later some big old rooster would come tearing down the floor of the chicken house attempting to spur your legs. Double yolk eggs were nothing special, we would get triple yolks fairly often as well. Some eggs wouldn't have a shell develop and would come out feeling almost like a rubber ball. Occasionally I would have an egg laid right in my hand as I reached into a nest. The big problem with that many chickens though is that the ammonia was terrible; it was dusty and hard to breathe.

My mom was really into nutrition, so I learned about stuff like wheat germ, carob and sprouts. She would make yogurt and granola, which is probably why it is somewhat comforting that my wife now does the same thing. We also had to eat practically every vegetable known to man (it's only recently I've been able to eat brussel sprouts again), except spinach because my mom hated it. I love it and it was one of those foods that I started eating after leaving home. We started helping out in the kitchen at a fairly young age and probably started baking cookies by ourselves around 10 or 12 years old.

Not that it mattered much as a kid, but there was never any alcohol in the house and almost none of the adults I knew drank. Most of our social engagements were with other Mennonites and we rarely went out to eat. Alcohol was considered a sin of course, so it took me awhile to even get to the point where I could go into a liquor store and not feel guilty. More on that later. My mother's Scotch-Irish background was eventually going to overrule my Mennonite/German father's ways.

In Part 2, I'm going to talk a bit about how I got started working in restaurants and some of my experiences there.

Trying out Square Foot Gardening

skills0 — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:37:00 GMT

Hard to believe after the harsh winter, but it's planting time again. We are pretty excited because last year by the time we got the garden plot created and planted, it was already fairly late in the season. We are back again at our friends place (Keith & Joni) trying to get some stuff to grow in the city for the second year. Partway through the growing season last year, Kristin brought home the Square Foot Gardening (Mel Bartholomew) book from the library. At first it seemed a bit gimmicky, but when I got into it the concept started making a lot of sense. And it seems perfect for the small plot we have to work with, where growing things in the standard row formation ends up only using about 40% of the useable space.

So this year we bought the latest edition of the book and we are trying the basic concept, although we aren't exactly using his soil mix. We are down in the "3 weeks before last frost" period in Chicago (at least I sure hope so), which means we can actually start planting some early vegetables. So this past Sunday I put my terrible carpentry skills to work and built a grid to lay out on the soil, a trellis for vertical growing using electrical conduit and nylon netting (an idea from the book) and a row cover made with chicken wire to cover 8 of the 1' square plots. Last year we had a lot of trouble with bunnies and/or squirrels (or a vegetarian cat) eating our lettuce, chard and other salad greens. So we are going to try to cover them this year and see if it helps. We are also going to try to grow up (vertical) more than last year to try to take advantage of the limited space AND sunlight in a better way.

We got a variety of greens into the ground and also some seed onions and potatoes. Curious to see how things do. One nice thing about the square foot method is you can start cooler season crops like lettuce early and then when it gets too hot later in the season you plant something else in that 1' square plot and move the lettuce further down in the shade. Kinda cool. We have limited space where we get really good sun and most veggies love sun, so we are trying to make the most of it.

Why suburbia is unsustainable

skills0 — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:47:05 GMT

Over the last couple weeks I've run into several folks who are leaving the city for the suburbs and at the same time I'm reading about permaculture, so it's creating some interesting juxtupositions in my head. This morning on NPR they had a story about a lady in the Chicago suburbs who is going around her neighborhood trying to get people to replace lawn with gardens. Their family also recently installed a wind turbine. I applaud her and I'm thankful that some people are making an effort, but ultimately the whole idea of suburbia isn't sustainable long-term, at least given what we know now.

Suburbs are a uniquely American concept, driven by an apparent excess of space, cheap oil and the drive of consumerism to make life as comfortable, private and lavish as possible. Bigger houses, the greenest lawn, strip malls providing all the comforts of the city, albeit in corporate chain stores and cookie-cutter restaurants. But if we really are hitting peak oil, then the current gas prices aren't some short term problem, but merely the beginning of a new reality. Nobody knows for sure, but to borrow an idea from Pascal, I would rather guess we are running out of oil and be wrong than the opposite. Either way, I win.

Some of the power needs of suburbia could potentially be met with alternative energies like wind and solar, but these will take time to ramp up and many suburbanites find the idea of these things in their neighborhoods rather distasteful. That still doesn't answer the question of trucking in all the goods necessary to keep the local economy running, commuting to where the work is and just needing a car to do anything or go anywhere. In Chicago, there is at least light rail to use to get to the city for work, but only major American cities have this option.

In addition, all those huge lawns are a major environmental issue. In addition to using up land that could be used to grow food closer to urban centers, many of them take massive amounts of water and chemicals because lawns are an immature ecosystem in a constant fight against nature. All the plants that are considered weeds in a lawn are simply nature's attempt to take back the soil and turn it into something usable again, to heal the land. If you instead have a diverse variety of trees, shrubs and plants, particularly perennials and native plants, water is conserved, the soil is renewed with all the green matter naturally and you won't need to use pesticides.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what the landscape of America looks like in 50 years. I predict massive moves to either cities or more integrated rural living incorporating alternate energies and food production. Suburbia may end up looking like an incredibly stupid experiment in America's history by the time it's all said and done.

Some quick catch-up stuff about farms and gardening

skills0 — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:24:09 GMT

There has been a ton of stuff going on this summer related to our research into farming and trying to learn new things. I'm getting behind on blogging about it, so here are a few highlights.

Over Memorial Day weekend, we visited our friends James and Esther our in Boulder Colorado. They work as one of the "live on the farm" couples for Haystack Mountain goat dairy. Haystack Mountain is a pretty well established cheese producer, having products in Whole Foods and other national stores. They make all of their fresh cheese at their main cheese factory and they buy much of the goat milk for that from various sources. James and Esther work on the farm where the artisan cheeses are made from goat milk produced right there on the farm. These include raw milk cheeses that are aged anywhere from 2 - 6 months or more. We got to help out with a fairly large cheese make on Memorial Day, Kristin and I were up to our shoulders in the curds and whey for awhile. We helped out with making the Red Cloud and Queso de Mano. You can see all the cheeses here.

We also got to visit a restaurant we've seen featured in some cooking magazines called The Kitchen. They are one of the most eco-friendly restaurants in the country, reusing or recycle almost 100% of their various types of garbage and sourcing about 80% of their food locally. They have a community night where you sit around a long table and eat family-style with about 60 strangers for only $35/person. It's pretty amazing and we got to meet some cool folks. We also visited the Boulder farmer's market, which has some pretty amazing people producing some cool food.

At home, we had the opportunity this year to dig up the backyard of our friends and neighbors Keith and Joni and create a small garden. While it could use more sun for best results, we finally have a small plot of ground to grow some veggies and herbs. We prepped the ground, some of which was under an old sidewalk that we had to break up, using a deep bed concept. We put some composted cow manure and mushroom soil, along with some blood meal and organic fertilizer in the soil as we prepared it. It seems to be working pretty well for the most part. We also added a bunch of our worm compost a week or so ago and noticed a big growth spurt in a lot of the plants, particularly the tomatoes and squashes. We also have several varieties of peppers, several types of basil, a lettuce mix, a mesclun mix, beets, chard, oregano, rosemary, thyme, leeks, beans, sunflowers and some other flowers to attract beneficial insects. I'm probably missing a few things. All in all, quite a nice mix for a small urban garden. So far the only thing we've harvested is some salad greens. We got a bit of a late start and also started a lot from seed, so we're still waiting for some things to really get started. This is mainly an experimental year, so we are learning a lot about how much sun things need, starting plants inside, fertilizer needs and so on.

We are also participating in a CSA this year with Scotch Hill Farms. We picked them partly because they also do goats and grow a number of herbs as well. It's been a bit of a rough start to the season with all the rain (they are just south of Madison), but we've been getting some good stuff and eating a lot more vegetables which is always good. They drop off at the Southport Green Market which is just south of us. They are a fairly new market and still a bit sparse to be honest, but it's great they are trying to do something in that community. A few weeks ago I got to meet Bob and Jenny from Harvest Moon Farms, another couple who are professionals from Chicago who just started farming a few years ago. So they are kind of a few years ahead of where we might like to be. They grow a lot of organic vegetables, including 15 kinds of garlic and plan to start doing pastured beef soon. They also represent a number of other farmers in the Madison area, so their stand at Southport has items from other farms like cheese, maple syrup, whole organic chickens and so on. We are planning to go up to visit them and help out on our way to a college reunion weekend with a bunch of Kristin's Wheaton friends in July. That should be a wonderful trip as we'll get to visit a couple farms and see a bunch of our favorite people.

Urbana farm trip - Prairie Fruits

skills0 — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:56:09 GMT

So I've gotten really behind on my blogging, my current project schedule isn't very conducive to blogging. I often blog on my lunch break, but I've only been taking a half hour lunch lately so I can leave work early enough to beat most of the evening traffic rush.

Anyway, the second farm we visited on our Urbana trip was Prairie Fruits. We were super excited to see their operation as they were the first farmstead goat Grade A certified goat dairy in Illinois. They sell their cheese at the Green City Market and also some Chicago cheese shops and restaurants. We got to hear a lot of stories about the travails of getting a small dairy certified, the current USDA system is just not built to really address the smaller sustainable farming operation. This is something that is ultimately going to need to be fixed if this country is ever to move away from the factory farm system.

Here's a prime example. Typically you have your large factory farm dairy operation with hundreds of cows. The milk is supposed to be tested for antibiotic residue, but due to the volume it really doesn't happen. They just do samples. And yet an operation like Prairie Fruits has to test every batch of milk they do and they don't really use antibiotics in the first place. They ended up getting their own license and certification as a lab so they can do their own testing because it's such a hassle for a small producer otherwise. Another bit of weirdness, you have to have a license to transport milk. So normally, a milk tanker truck pulls up to the farm and carries it off to wherever, sometimes a cheese factory. Since they do everything in the same location, they need the same license to move the milk from the milking parlor to the cheese make room and the two rooms can't share a wall. It's just ridiculous. That's Illinois, who has little experience with farmstead cheese making. Not sure if it's quite that bad in other states.

Visiting this farm was a pretty big deal for us, with a lot of firsts. First time to milk a goat for both of us. First time Kristin got to bottle feed baby goats. First time to use an automatic milking system. We also learned about small batch pasteurizers and some of the other necessary equipment. It gets pretty expensive. So I think we figured out a couple of things on this trip. One, we do really like dairy goats and a lot of the work involved with raising goats. Two, it's a huge time and money investment to get a real artisan farmstead cheese operation off the ground. So we need to do a lot more thinking about that. I've told a couple of people I feel like we learned more from that one day than from reading a book. There are a lot of practical things you really just have to see, like how goats are fed and housed, how long things take to do for a particular herd size, that sort of thing.

Urbana farm trip - Rush Creek Farms

skills0 — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:16:27 GMT

So actually a lot has been going on in our ongoing research of all things farming, organic and gardening. We are learning a lot, but there is still a lot to process and I don't want to do too much thinking in public. But I can at least talk about what we've been up to and what we have learned so far. I'll have to do a bit of catching up.

A few weeks ago we took a trip down to Urbana to visit a couple of farms. We drove down on a Saturday morning and spent the day with the Millers on Rush Creek Farm. We met the Millers at a slow food event on the farm where the heritage turkeys are raised that we have purchased for the last couple of Thanksgiving dinners. They both work pretty much full time, but also raise Kiko meat goats on about 10 acres of pasture. They also have some pastured poultry and a horse.

Some more pictures are here.

I've been talking to Kristin about chickens a bit on and off because I really want to have some fresh eggs even if we just do a small hobby farm. And maybe some fresh pastured chicken to eat as well. I grew up on a commercial chicken farm and I have no desire to do that, but heritage or specialty breeds on pasture does interest me. Kristin has never been around chickens and doesn't particularly like birds as a species, so she was skeptical. When we got to the Millers, we found out they had about 60-80 chicks about 8 weeks old in their garage. They were planning to move them out to a pen to get them ready to go on pasture, so we got to jump in and help them catch and move chickens. Kind of a trial by fire for Kristin, but she gamely stepped up and did it and it wasn't as scary as she thought it might be. It was really cool that she got a chance to hold some chicks and also just watch their behavior, which is fascinating. They are such funny creatures. Within about 5-10 minutes of being out of the garage, they were foraging around the small pen, scratching and pecking around and having a good old time. It's pretty obvious when watching chickens that they are really made to be wandering around plenty of pasture, finding worms and grubs and eating vegetation rather than being stuffed in a pen (or even worse a cage) hardly able to move.

As far as the meat goats, they aren't bottle fed and so they are tolerant of human contact, but don't exactly seek it out. The kids were playing up a storm though and reminded us of some extreme sports show as they played around on an old set of concrete steps. Meat goats are certainly not as loveable in general as dairy goats, but they are also quite a bit less work as we were to find out when we visited Prairie Fruits the following day. So the jury is still out for us whether we would ever go that route, but it was good to see what was involved even from just a practical standpoint, such as fencing, cost and type of feed, how they are pastured and so forth.

Technorati Tags: goat, farm, sustainability, pastured poultry, chicken, Urbana

The goats

skills0 — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:56:00 GMT

We finally made our first trip to a dairy goat operation this past weekend. Hopefully more details later, but in the meantime, enjoy a couple of photos.

Beautiful eggs

skills0 — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:29:30 GMT

One of my favorite cookbook authors, Suvir Saran, waxes philosophical on the wonder of home grown eggs. They have some of the South American Araucana hens, which produce eggs in wonderful shades of blue and green. The deep brown ones are quite lovely as well. Who needs Easter Egg dye when nature creates such a wonderful spectrum of design and color naturally?

Technorati Tags: eggs, Araucana, hens, sustainability

Thoughts on "The New Organic Grower"

skills0 — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:14:24 GMT

Over this past winter I've been reading a lot of books related to sustainable/organic farming and animal husbandry. One recent book I can highly recommend is The New Organic Grower by Eliot Coleman.

The book is chock full of dense, useable information, much of it applicable for even the backyard gardener with a small plot. Coleman focuses on the amount of land that can be readily maintained by a couple or small family, usually 5 acres or less. He is also a big proponent of using good hand tools and small garden tractors rather than buying a lot of specialized equipment that must be depreciated and cost capitalized before the farmer is making money off the equipment. In this sense, he would probably share a lot of views with Joel Salatin.

There are too many ideas to mention, so I'll just throw out a few highlights that really stuck with me.

There is still a lot of innovation in small organic farming techniques in certain parts of Europe, where small farms still account for much of the local food supply. Coleman has visited a lot of farms in Europe and in the rest of the world and has lots of tidbits learned from those farmers. In addition, he points out a lot of resources anyone can use to keep up with the latest techniques from these farmers. Also, farming is still considered a high art here and the farmer is considered a professional, a technician, a highly educated person who takes his job seriously and really has to be good at a lot of things to succeed. Contrast that with many modern North American farmers, where government interference, the incompetence of the USDA, the encroachment of chemical companies hawking fertilizers and pesticides as best practice and the loss of a relationship between grower and consumer has left them downtrodden, lacking passion and vision and barely scraping by.
Crop rotation is your friend. Coleman talks a lot about crop rotation and provides a lot of practical examples and schemes, lots of hints on what plants best follow other plants, the soil impact of various plants and so forth. This used to be standard operating procedure back in the day, but now on today's giant mono-crop farms this idea has been thrown away along with much other practical knowledge. Instead, the soil is treated as nothing more than a growing medium with no value of its own while a vicious cycle of pesticides and herbicides are required for growth. This leaves the soil more and more destitute of nutrients, while impacting the surrounding land and wildlife as well. Not to mention the food just isn't good for you. Instead, Coleman encourages the grower to think of the soil as the most valuable asset you have, one you need to nurture with plenty of organic material and educated care.
Weak plants attract pests. This was a very interesting concept to me. Coleman says that once you get healthy soil with the right balance of pH, organic matter, minerals, etc. and your plants are healthy, pests tend to be less of a problem. Pests typically attack plants that are already on an unhealthy trend. I'm curious to see if experience bears this out some day. It makes sense though, as much of the rest of nature works that way as well. Coleman doesn't say this will completely end the pest problem, but it goes a long way. Part of the reason as well is due to healthy soil with all the good organisms, as well as a micro-culture in the way you grow that attracts birds and other natural predators to help you keep pests under control. One thing I'm still not clear on, what do you do while you get to this state with your soil and environment. Typically you don't start with the best soil (unless you buy a working organic farm potentially) and it takes at least several years to get to where you want to be.

All in all, I quite liked this book and it gave me a lot of food for thought. It will be one I'm sure I'll return to when the time comes that I actually can put some of these principles into practice. In the meantime, I'm going to try some of the suggestions in our small back porch growing area. One thing we noticed last year is we bought some "cured" manure and it made a huge difference in our plants. This year we also hope to use some of our worm compost and "worm tea", as well as experimenting with some soil amendments if we get a chance.

Technorati Tags: gardening, organics, soil, sustainability

Thoughts on "You Can Farm"

skills0 — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:01:52 GMT

I just finished the classic Joel Salatin book "You Can Farm" and found it to be very thought-provoking. One of the things I like most about it is he doesn't just have good ideas and suggestions, I really like his philosophy. He talks about philosophy driving your decisions and while that sounds pretty much "no duh", it's amazing how hard it is to do consistently.

The book was mostly encouraging to me because a lot of his suggestions fall in line with the direction my thinking was already going as far as interests and approach. Some examples include the types of products and services that make money, the idea of using a layered approach to making money (don't do single crop farms) and also that is more important to go slow and make sure you can make money off a little land before you buy a lot of land.

One of the things I'm torn about is one of our main ideas is a dairy goat/artisan cheese farm, which does require a bit more capital and infrastructure. Many of Salatin's ideas are built around low-investment high-yield enterprises, like pastured broilers and hogs. The idea behind these enterprises is you get out more than you put in and you really don't need a barn, a tractor or even a ton of land to get started. One nice thing about goats is you can start small, even as more of a hobby at first. They do require pretty much the most extensive fencing of almost any domesticated animal because they are super smart and love to climb. The other great thing is they aren't particularly picky eaters, making them easy to pasture and they just don't take up nearly the room or feed requirements of larger animals like cows.

Some other important ideas from "You Can Farm": Make education an important part of your marketing scheme. Explain to people why your food is better and why it is worth more. Make sure you are making enough money per hour at whatever you are doing that it is worthwhile. Otherwise, what's the point. Be creative, think function more than form. Don't buy into the corporate farming "wisdom". Don't be a lone wolf, help everyone and accept help from everyone, even those whose methods you don't agree with.

Photogenic farms

skills0 — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:27:32 GMT

Some farm shots are up on Flickr, including our trip to First Farm Inn in KY just outside Cincinnati (when we went to the Over The Rhine album release party), a trip to More Than Delicious Orchard north of Chicago and our recent trip to Caveny Farm.

Technorati Tags: farm, orchard, turkey, horse, bed and breakfast, inn, sustainability

Garrison Keillor on bottled water

skills0 — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:25:50 GMT

A humorous, but spot-on take on the whole bottled water issue from Garrison Keillor

Technorati Tags: sustainability

Of your great grandpa's turkey, New Zealand goats and miscanthus gigantus

skills0 — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:59:00 GMT

Last year Kristin and I were having a big Thanksgiving dinner shindig at our place and wanted to do something different for the turkey. After looking at several options, we decided to purchase a heritage Bourbon Red turkey from Caveny Farms and picked it up at the Green City Winter Market. Simply slow roasted with a few herbs and butter, it was like no turkey I'd ever had. The turkey's
white meat actually had flavor and the dark meat was even more flavorful and juicy than usual. It actually tasted like meat compared to a traditional Butterball.

So we were excited a month or so ago to get an invitation to attend a picnic at Caveny Farm put on by the local Slow Food society near Champaign IL. In typical food geek fashion, we like nothing better than getting closer to the source of our food, plus with our interest in farming and sustainability it seemed worth the drive. So we went down yesterday for a visit.

We got there just in time for the tour with John Caveny and learned about how they raise the turkeys and got to see them up close. They were not enjoying the heat wave, being only about a month from slaughter size. Some of you may not know that birds pant to release heat, which I was used to from my days working in my dad's chicken house. These birds were getting a bit warm, but still wanted to flock together. Nobody ever said turkeys were the smartest bird on the planet.

Caveny Farms also does rotational grazing on grass, using the turkeys to graze down the fields and in turn supply it with natural fertilizer (bird sh*t to you). The manure will help the pasture grow for about 3 years before they need to rotate the birds onto it again, which seems like a pretty good return on investment. They are also growing test plots of miscanthus gigantus, a tall sawgrass from Asia that ends up being one of our best hopes for non-corn based ethanol as well as pellet fuel and natural gas substitute. Stephen Long at University of Illinois Champaign has been taking a look at this for awhile now. Very intriguing. It's a rhizome, so it needs to be propagated from root structures and it is taking a bit to get supplies up to the level where it is commercially feasible. They are also still doing research on the best method to convert it to ethanol, but this plant holds a lot of promise. Great yield, low carbon footprint and doesn't need a lot of water or fertilizer. I've been hearing a lot about switchgrass for some reason, but this plant is even better. And once it is producing, it's a better money-maker for farmers as well.

We also got to meet Andrew and Jennifer Miller from Rush Creek Farms who grow Kiko meat goats, a breed from New Zealand. Kristin and I are very interested in the idea of dairy goats, so it was great to talk goats with some real goat farmers. We discovered our research is apparently being fruitful, as they were surprised at some of the things we had already figured out and read about. So I guess that is encouraging. We are hoping to go down again to visit their farm and also to visit one of the large dairy goat and cheese operations that is only about 20 minutes from them. They used to live in the city as well, but decided about 5 years ago they wanted a change of pace. Kristin and I have been thinking a lot about how we can turn our love of food into a second career/early retirement, although that is still a lot of research, prayer and savings away. It's exciting to start looking at various types of homestead farming though and hopefully over the next several years we will start to understand if this is really something we are interested in pursuing. I'll have some pictures before too long.

Technorati Tags: turkey, goat, biofuel, ethanol, sustainability, heritage breeds, Kiko, Bourbon Red, Slow Food

Don't feed the birds

skills0 — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 11:36:00 GMT

So I was walking to work this morning and over by the river someone had put out a big pile of feed pellets for the pigeons. what the heck are they thinking feeding these ~~birds~~ sky rats? Who are they ... PETA-wannabees ... thinking they are being kind to nature? These birds carry disease, are overpopulated, crap on everything and are just generally annoying in public places begging for food. Newsflash: you aren't saving the planet when you feed city pigeons. We should import an elite squadron of fighter eagles into the city to take care of the problem once and for all. But fortunately or unfortunately, eagles don't thrive in urban environments while pigeons have adapted just fine to become the rats of the sky. But please people, do your part and don't ever feed the pigeons. Feed other wild birds as much as you can, like blue jays, cardinals and chickadees, but not pigeons. And please don't feed squirrels either, they are evil and must be destroyed. And judging by the ones in my neighborhood, appear to be overeating if anything.

Eating sustainable fish

skills0 — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 12:26:00 GMT

I just finished reading The Ethical Gourmet and found much of it very thought-provoking, but one thing that struck me is I don't think a whole lot about the fish I eat. I don't eat fish maybe as much as I should, but I do love sushi. I'm realizing I should be more careful in the type of fish I choose, since some popular sushi species are actually not being fished in a sustainable manner. In the worse cases, some species may be extinct in our lifetimes due to overfishing. One interesting anecdote in the book is that a 1500 lb tuna used to be considered a good catch, but now they are lucky to get 200 lb fish. What this shows is that tuna are not living nearly as long as they used to and not being given time to fully mature before they are caught. There are some species of tuna that are a better choice than others though, but you have to know your homework. The Blue Ocean Institute puts out a handy guide that gives full information on pretty much every fish you might eat, including whether they are farmed in a sustainable way under oversight of conservation agencies, etc. They even have a pocket guide you can keep in your purse or wallet. Check it out.