CT Green Scene

How to Green Your Thanksgiving

by Analiese Paik, Founder of the Fairfield Green Food Guide

Thanksgiving is a time for celebrating the harvest and giving thanks with friends and family for the food that sustains and nourishes us. This year I challenge you to choose at least one new way to “green” your Thanksgiving. Think of reducing your “foodprint” as a way of giving thanks to Mother Earth. Bonus Feature: A Guide to Buying Local and Sustainable Turkeys.

#1 Source locally grown foods and eat with the seasons. When we choose local, we know our “food miles” are low and our food is farm-fresh and delicious. Choosing locally-grown, seasonal foods supports family-owned farms, farm stands and farmers’ markets as well as the independent and specialty grocers that carry their products.  Keeping food dollars local supports the local economy while investing in the future of a local food shed. Additionally, many locally grown foods are not packaged at all since they are sold loose at farm stands and farmers’ markets, thereby cutting down on waste. Apples, pears, New York chestnuts so delicate they can be eaten raw, winter squash, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, Brussels sprouts, turnips, honey, maple syrup and artisan cheeses are available locally because we actually still have some working family farms. Yes we have turkeys in Connecticut! Please consult the Guide to Buying Local and Sustainable Turkeys below.

#2 Choose organic whenever feasible. Agricultural practices related to growing food are significant contributors to greenhouse gases. “Food miles”, however, are not the main contributors to food chain greenhouse gases, agricultural practices are and animal agriculture is a big percentage of that. Indeed, choosing organic and other sustainably grown and produced foods over conventional is an excellent means to further reduce one’s “foodprint”. Make your holiday meal extra special this season by choosing an organic, free-range or Heritage turkey since it will surely be the most delicious turkey you have ever served. Many farms, specialty grocers, and mail order businesses sell these gourmet turkeys, but please place your order early, expect to pay a price commensurate with the quality you are receiving, and follow the cooking directions specific to your breed for optimal results. Yes we have Heritage, organic and free-range turkeys in Connecticut! Please consult the Guide to Buying Local and Sustainable Turkeys below.

#3 Don’t buy more than you’re going to cook. Stop buying fruits and vegetables in bulk if you frequently find them in your refrigerator or on your counter going bad. We think we’re doing right by our family by saving money from buying in quantity, but throwing out food is just wasteful. To avoid spoiled leftovers, portion and freeze food from your Thanksgiving meal that will not be eaten in the next few days.

Goats: Not Great Gardeners, But the Cheese Is Great

by James Simpkins

This past Sunday on route 2E about ten miles southeast of Hartford, I realized that I spend very little time in that part of the state. This was not exactly a revelation since I spend most of my time in Canton in the opposite corner, but it is rather beautiful out that way. However, I wasn’t just out for the colloquial “Sunday drive” (though I wouldn’t have minded); I was on a mission. For goat cheese. 

While attending a party in Simsbury at a colleague’s house, I met a Latin teacher named Mark. Though he insulted the French language (pronouncing it “badly spoken Latin”), which normally removes people from the Christmas card list, he quickly redeemed himself by sharing some of the goat cheese be had brought. There were four different kinds of fresh chevre on the plate—chive, herbes de Provence, black pepper, and dill—and all were delicious. When I inquired where he acquired such bon fromage, Mark further endeared himself to this gourmand when he said “we made them at our farm.”

The “we” Mark was speaking of includes his husband Paul, the main cheesemonger and their farm—already well-known to more local residents—is called Beltane Farm located in Lebanon, CT. Mark and Paul breed, raise, and milk their flock of Oberhasli and La Mancha goats twice a day to bring lucky Connecticut residents their fresh goat’s milk and cheeses. And from my own experience, the goats appear really happy to be there, too. And why shouldn’t they be?

Food Fight

by Eileen Weber

Last night, the Wilton Library hosted a screening of the documentary Food Fight. Supported by the Fink Family Foundation and the green initiatives by the library community, the film is another look at how the food industry affects our lives.

But while previous films like Food, Inc. and FRESH looked at the industrial side of agribusiness with a heaping spoonful of animal cruelty, the documentary, produced and directed by Chris Taylor, takes a brief but hard look at how we got to this point. Rather than coming off as one big complaint about the food system, his film gives just a little glimmer of hope that supporting your local farmer and growing your own food may be the key to changing the way we eat.

Beside the ubiquitous comments from journalist and food writer Michael Pollan and a brief appearance from Will Allen, the famed founder of Milwaukee’s Growing Power as highlighted in FRESH, the real star in this film was Alice Waters.

Some may know her as a great chef. Some may know her restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. But anyone involved with food or cooking knows Ms. Waters as a visionary who started a food revolution.

Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner

by Eileen Weber
 
On a crisp, fall evening, I dined with some very dear friends of mine. Good wine. Good conversation. And some surprisingly good beef. Curious, I asked what kind of meat it was. Was it a special cut? Did it come from an exotic place? No, it was just grass-fed. Even more interesting, the slices next to the grass-fed beef were corn-fed. There was a distinct taste difference.
 
While the corn-fed was juicy, flavorful, and certainly had the beef taste I’ve grown accustomed to, it was definitely fattier. The grass-fed was leaner and had a cleaner, more concentrated taste. The grass-fed beef was less filling, too. With the corn-fed, I felt like I’d just downed a Thanksgiving dinner and needed to unzip my pants just to breathe a little better.
 
The health benefits of grass-fed beef are many. For one, it's high in Omega-3 fatty acids, the kind you find in certain oily fishes. And, grass-fed beef doesn’t come with a side of hormones or antibiotics. There’s no need to give them any. They’re not bulked up on grain to the size of a third world country to sell as quickly as possible. They graze on grass and gradually grow to a proper size. As John Morosani of Laurel Ridge Farm in Litchfield says, that’s what cows are supposed to do.
 
“Cows eat grass and they’re good at it,” he said. “Feeding cows grain is just a mad science experiment.”

Vegetarian What? (part II of at last II)

by James Simpkins

Last week I’m sure that there were more than a couple raised eyebrows or sighs of exasperation at my writing on the fake meat thing—and that’s fine. I actually didn’t realize I was so fired up about it until I read it again later. It’s funny how that works.

My personal truth about the whole fake meat topic is really “live and let live.” I don’t actually keep myself up at night worrying whether or not people should eat tofu shaped like a turkey. Honestly, though, I think it’s a little strange. Then again, if you saw the wildly un-hip sweatpants that I like to wear around the house, I should think to be understood at least as bizarre.

One of the comments on my previous article was by Julie Braun, of particular note as she mentioned something I don’t hear very often by folks trying to justify their weirdness. She pointed out the taste that she liked. Now here is the pickle that most of us are in: What costs the most in trying to eat (pick one) “green”, “organic”, “healthy”, “natural”, etc.—aside from perhaps succumbing to whim while shopping at Whole Foods Market—is loss of flavor. And meat tastes better than almost anything. Properly cooked meat is, gastronomically speaking, a much more pleasurable experience than most tofu, seitan (pronounced ‘say-tahn’) or tempeh I’ve ever had and you’ll waste your time trying to convince me otherwise. But, I regularly eat all of the meat substitutes listed above. I’ll get to why, later.

Fairfield Farmer

by Eileen Weber
 
Most people in Fairfield know Wyatt Whiteman. They just don’t know they do. He lives in an old farmhouse that dates back to 1760. He raises chickens, rabbits, ducks, and horses. He even has a tiny Dexter cow named Bridey. He grows an organic garden. He has his own beehive. And, all of this farm activity is done on one acre of land on a busy street.

But that’s not what people know Whiteman for. They know his house because of the gigantic carved pumpkins he puts out front every October. But his neighbors know him as the guy who sells them organic produce. They also know him as the guy who cooks meals over his fireplace and doesn’t use electricity periodically.

“Imagine what this was like even one generation ago, living off the land with an outhouse in back,” Whiteman said of the property he inherited from his family.

Standing tall not unlike a grizzly bear recently awakened from a long winter’s nap, he will tell you he prefers to live a simpler life from a simpler time. He remembers when life was without its technology and its gadgets. Today, however, his house comes equipped with computers and DVD players. He’s even got an above ground pool out back. “It’s for the kids,” he said of his three children, the youngest of whom is a toddler.

Meatless Mondays - Coming to a School Near You

by Heather Burns-DeMelo

I often wonder how old my son will have to get before his peers notice he's a vegetarian. He's in kindergarten, and so far, no one's the wiser that his "turkey sandwich" is made from spelt and soy-beans and his "hot dogs" are SmartDogs. It was no big deal last year when I could afford to send him to Waldorf, but this year we headed to, gulp, public schools.

Even so, I keep thinking that with a little luck (and global warming + overpopulation = not enough land for raising animals) being vegetarian will become the norm and he won't have to cope with being seen as different (doesn't every family have a bug relocation program?) Well, the Baltimore school system is one of the first to introduce Meatless Mondays, where they'll serve 80,000 kids up an all veggie menu. 

And they're not stopping there. From The Green Fork, "BCPS has teemed up with local farmers and distributors to provide students fresh, locally raised fruits, vegetables and milk. They’ve also introduced Great Kids Farm, a 33-acre teaching farm, home to chickens, goats and a variety of fruits and vegetables. Educators on the farm teach kids and adults how to produce home-grown fresh food, even in an urban setting."

I'm staying the course and letting the tides turn - and if they don't, he can go to therapy like nearly everyone else.

Old Rural, New Urban: Farm Fresh...Downtown

by James Simpkins

I grew up in suburbs, and no one ate very well there--but it wasn't a bad gig to live there. Still, great food wasn’t really an option—you just went to the grocery store and ate what they had. It turns out we had wonderful farms and plenty of freshly grown produce about the minutes from the house, but they weren’t exactly widely available. Twenty years ago, the farmers’ market of central Ohio amounted to a pick-up parked on the side of the road with its tail-gate open with bushels of corn or stacks of fresh beefsteak tomatoes in the back. The pick-ups are still parked out there during July and August, but nowadays you don’t have to cruise back roads to find farm fresh produce, you just get on the internet and find your closest farmers’ market.

Urban, especially sub-urban, places have started to see a change over the food landscape in recent years, and the in-roads of goods from the country to the city have started being not only more visible, but also more accessible. Historically, this is significant. I mean farmers have been taking their wares to market in the city since urban environments started springing up 6,000 years ago. But they faded out of view after the Industrial Revolution and the rise of our modern food distribution systems. But that’s changing, and for the rising number of urban and suburban gourmands, this can only be good news. Just look at Connecticut: Less than five years ago, we had a handful of farmers’ markets across the state—mostly nowhere convenient. As I have written before, the Collinsville farmers’ market started just a few years ago with less than five vendors. Now it is at capacity and the waiting list is long, not to mention there are more than 140 farmers’ markets across the state on every day of the week from June until October. If we take farmers’ markets as a sign of the demand for fresh food (and we do), this bodes well for getting more fresh, local food into our local supply chain. What I didn’t fully realize until the other day was that it is blurring the lines between rural and urban, farm and city, and bringing farmers into direct, personal encounters with the general public and forming mutually beneficial and sometimes exclusive relationships. (I know I won’t buy beets from anyone except Tom…a local farmer in Burlington, CT)

Learn By Doing

by Eileen Weber

Many of the farms in this state have been sold off to build housing developments. Some farms that are hundreds of years old have fallow fields from lack of use. Then there are the farms that serve a greater purpose: Educating our children.

Ambler Farm in Wilton is one of them. For the last few years, their educational programs for elementary and middle school children have grown. Ann Bell, President of the Friends of Ambler Farm, an organization that supports the farm and its historic buildings, said these kids are getting the full farm experience. They are taught how to run a farm from collecting eggs to gardening organically to learning how to cook with the food they grow.

Since the Town of Wilton purchased the land in 1999 after the death of Betty Ambler, the last original owner, Bell said there has been great support in making the farm a big part of the community. Not only do they have an ongoing partnership with the school system, but they also sell their fresh produce and maple syrup at their own farm stand as well as at the town’s farmers’ market. Next Sunday, they will have Ambler Farm Day with hayrides and pumpkin tossing.

Other farms in the state have also turned to education as a way to stay a vibrant part of their communities. There is Terra Firma Farm in Stonington, New Pond Farm in West Redding, and Auer Farm in Bloomfield. Each of them has their own educational programs for school-aged children to teach them about life on a farm. From math to science to art, there’s something for everyone.

Cooking Through the Autumn Blues

by James Simpkins

If you’re anything like me, autumn is merely a signal that the bounty of garden love and affection is about to hibernate. Cooking in the fall climate is a little rough after summer’s spoils, but perhaps a little guidance for you fair-weather cooks out there could help you avoid despair.

1) Do NOT give up on local foods after the farmers’ markets close.

While most of the CT markets will board up in October, there are plenty of folks around who milk Mother Nature for all she’s worth, even through the “killing frost.” While you’re going to have to give up on the tomato plants (if you hadn’t composted them already), basil, cucumbers and peppers pretty soon, you can look forward to leeks, squashes, beets, and heartier greens like escarole and my favorite post-frost buddy, kale. Actually, there’s a great website I found here that you can bookmark for easy reference. Not only can it aid you amateur gardeners in harvesting as well as next spring’s plantings, but all you foodies can start scouring your region for those who already have it down pat. Turns out, it’s pretty much good sense—notice I didn’t say “common?”). Look at a Brussels sprout plant: Did you really think it was going to fold after just a couple of cold nights? Not a chance.