food mindfulness, mindboggledness

Thank you Joanna for alerting me to this discussion on food miles and locavore practices in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. As far as I can work out, raising my own chooks and eggs and growing my own vegetables and fruit is all good. Anything involving the rest of the world is more complicated.

Indeed it is more complicated. I think food is a class issue. Of course not everyone is interested in talking about class in these post-modern times, but I'm a leftie who won't give up. The benefits of my university education, the time I spent travelling, the interests I have in reading about food and politics - all these things have given me a fairly middle class view of food issues.

But we live in a predominantly working class town and I like being part of our small town community. I want to participate in the life of our town. Doing so shows me very clearly the role of food in community endeavours and I can promise you that we don't talk about food mindfulness (as they do in the second link in this post) on the sidelines at Rugby League.

This morning I took the children with me to support our local high school's Kapa Haka group, which is fundraising to go to Australia at the end of this year and participate in a big indigenous peoples' festival. I know some of the young people in the group and I'm proud to watch them shine. They started off with a garage sale and I am in horror of garage sales these days as we have too much stuff already. But they did have a sausage sizzle out the front and Fionn was delighted with his hunk of processed meat wrapped in soft white bread and drizzled with bright red sauce. I bet there is a lot to criticise about such a food choice. But it was a way of supporting the project without cluttering up our house any further.

The Kapa Haka group performed in fine style and I also loved watching the pleasure my own children experienced watching them.

Then it was time to go to League, where today was something called fun day where all the teams get mixed up and play wearing different shirts and I nearly fell over with admiration for the adults who organised this rather complex process. At the end, everyone in Fionn's team was given a lollipop and later received a spot prize of a new mouth guard and a boots bag festooned with logos including the golden arches. Generous sponsorship by Solid Energy, which has several coal mines in our region, was acknowledged on the cones marking out the junior-sized playing fields. Pies, chips and hot dogs were for sale on the sidelines. I expect these are also fundraisers for the host club.

We paid $20 for the season for our son to play Rugby League and every single week I am bowled over by the generosity of the coaches, the sponsors and the managers. I have no wish to suggest that food, a commodity which has always oiled the cogs of community, must meet my personal standards.

All about grain

It is all about grain at the moment. This post is an attempt to get down in writing the large-ish number of grain-related thoughts and issues which have been sliding round my brain of late.

Bread.
In 2004, Felicity Lawrence published an excellent book called Not on the Label: What really goes into the food on your plate. Lawrence and Joanna Blythman (author of, amongst other excellent books, Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets) are two seriously good food writers (or food issue writers for want of a better term) who introduced me to some really shocking facts surrounding our modern food chain. No one since Lawrence and Blythman has come close in impact on me until now with Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Lawrence's book included a chapter on bread and introduced me to the the Chorleywood Bread Process. I took particular note of the increased yeast involved in the Chorleywood Bread Process as lots of yeast products disagrees with me generally, despite me loving nothing more than sitting down to read a good book with crusty white bread, red wine and blue cheese. Now, several years later, I'm thinking about it also in the light of the supposed gluten intolerance my eczema prone son has. I'll go back to the 'supposed' element later.

As regular readers will know, all three of you, I've been getting into breadmaking again recently. My sourdough bread tasted good yesterday and today (all one batch) and although I've made bread from scratch before (had a big phase in 1996 when we lived a long way from the shops in Dunedin with neither car nor public transport), I've never made it without shop bought yeast until now. So I have been thinking about whether gluten intolerance for some people is an intolerance to modern wheat and gluten processing methods. Fionn didn't respond adversely to the sourdough bread I gave him last night.

Corn
Michael Pollan's treatise on modern corn is mega frightening. Well it is if you acquire most of your calories from processed and pre-prepared foods. His discussion of the myriad ways corn can be 'reborn' with the aid of modern technology brings to mind a large octopus, reaching its tentacles down every supermarket aisle. I won't be at all surprised if there is an epidemic of corn allergies in the next decade. He mentions the way that products often say 'contains either soy, corn or canola oil' because whichever is cheapest is used on any given day. Corn products feature heavily in gluten free processed foods. Until now I've just partly hoped, partly presumed that these gluten free products are healthful and without deep ethical tarnish. Well I'm having to wake up on that one. Fionn is definitely intolerant of eggs (shame but true) but I'm considering keeping our household consumption low in gluten but including some slow-risen home made bread for everyone.

Biofuels and droughts
I find it utterly credible that we are paying higher prices for wheat in New Zealand currently because of the drought in Australia. This article is a good snapshot of issues surrounding grain prices worldwide. I'm suspicious of what is going on in the US after reading Pollan's book. The Us has a huge backlog of corn at least. Has ethanol really made that fast an inroad or is it a new context for hiking profits of the small but very powerful number of large grain processing companies?

Grains and food security in New Zealand
Today I collected the latest Organic NZ magazine from my local health food shop. This issue features several articles relating to grain and I'll be retiring to a bed, one with no children in or near it, very soon to read them.

One more
grain topic. I read a while ago though can't source exactly where, that commercial wholemeal flour is still highly processed as they separate the husk and inner part (please excuse the lack of appropriate terminology) and then add them back together again. In the UK I used to source varioous flour mixes for making bread from Infinity, a whole foods coop. That's not an option available to me now, but I have ordered from Biograins before and am considering ordering from Terrace Farm, an organic grain farm in Rakaia, mid Canterbury.

Actual achievements in the garden today. Emptied the beer traps and have caught heaps in the punga raised bed. Rescued one Purple Sprouting Brocolli seedling from the bold apprentice and transplanted it. Pulled caterpillar infested tomatoes from the vine and dunked them in the water-filled wheelbarrow to drown. I'm not in the garden as much as I want to be at the moment but things seem to be going okay. The nasturtiums (they grow wild here) are climbing over everything down the back of the garden in my invasive patch and also all round the letter box (which isn't actually on our land). I might buy some seeds of different colours in Spring and see if I can naturalise some more colours. Though maybe they'll all revert to orange and yellow. Fun and inexpensive to try.

seed sowing, local shopping, organic eating

blah blah. I'm feeling quite the earth mother today.

This evening I sowed eight different kinds of seeds:
1. arugula - which is like rocket but apparently is less inclined to bolt. My understanding of the catalogue description is that I can get growth year round with this seed.
2. calendula - I bought a dwarf mixed colour packet to add to my colour splashes as last year's calendula was so kind to me and flowered all through winter despite total neglect on my part.
3. violas - Heartsease Miss Helen Mount which I've been coveting a while..
4. Welsh Bunching Onions
5. Radish - a gourmet blend apparently
6. broccolli
7. kale - hopefully I won't throw a tantrum and destroy the broccoli and kale if I find a caterpillar like last time.
8. marjoram - cos we haven't got any and I want to see how different it tastes to our Greek Oregano.

Zucchinis are growing more strongly again which no doubt has nothing to do with me throwing wet piles of horse manure around the plants last week. Last August I made some horse poo brew and last August is really a long time ago now. I'd used the brew a few times and then forgot about it as the tree growth covered the brew bin. But since Favourite Handyman cut all bar one of the trees down and let in the light, the brew bin looked silly and like it should be used UP. So I sloshed it in lots of places and we'll see what happens next.

Today I collected a bulk order of sausages from the fabulous Blackball Salami Company, took delivery of some avocadoes from Doug at Eco Avo and discussed a first delivery with Dieter of Treedimensions.

Cos I'm on a foodie roll at the moment, chicken stock is bubbling gently as I write.

Exciting news also came in the form of an email about an organic co-op in the next town which is only 30 minutes' drive from me. It's up and running now and I'm itching to check it out.