From Dave Smith

Trick or Treat – Celebrity Pumpkins from History (The Ladybug Letter)
As a pumpkin farmer, I’m unqualified to draw a psychiatrist’s conclusions from these two stories, but hollowed out gourds have a long and honorable history of being used as vessels to carry water and food stuffs, so it’s no surprise they should also be filled with romance, myth and contradiction.

Cheese By Hand visits CKC Goat Dairy in Blanco, Texas
The whole family pitches in to support the CKC business. When we stopped by Chrissy’s father was busy painting the tasting room area that had just been completed. One of their local food heroes, Sibby Barrett is bringing a group of her culinary students out to the farm next weekend as part of her “Random Acts of Cooking” courses where the students visit a number of local farms and producers to gather the goods for their cooking lesson.

Tana at I Heart Farms Writes About Her Friends in San Diego
Just as I felt when watching images of Katrina flooding a city I love, I’m shaking and sad about the fires in San Diego, where I lived for six years. And where I’ve visited twice in the past two years, including visits to three beautiful little farms. I’ll show them here in more peaceful times, and may the prevailing winds soon shift.

Moo Juice – The Raw Versus The Cooked
I’m not much of a milk drinker. I rarely drink it by the glass, but I try to be mindful of what I put in my cereal or my coffee. I buy organic, I buy as local as possible, and I feel good about my choices. Early this fall, however, I found out that I was pregnant with my first child. And I started thinking about milk a little differently.

Organic Food a Far Better Health Option
Food produced organically have up to 40 percent more disease-fighting properties than non-organically grown produce, researchers have found. The research has revealed that milk from organic herds of cattle contained 90 percent higher levels of antioxidants than the milk from non-organic cattle – antioxidants are thought to prevent cancer and heart diseases. The study also revealed that organic food contained more beneficial minerals such as iron and zinc. According to Professor Carlo Leifert, the coordinator of the four-year study, the results of the research are useful because it demonstrates a way for people who do not eat the recommended portions of fruits and vegetables a day, to increase their intake of nutrients.

Why Healthy Foods Is The Least Expensive Option
If you haven’t already, I recommend that you read Michael Pollan’s book, the Omnivore’s Dilemma. Although I have some issues with the book, I believe Pollan has made some important contributions in raising the public’s awareness about our food chain, factory farming and how corn is in everything we eat and drink. Even the animals raised for meat are fed corn, with 80 percent of corn produced in the U.S. ending up as livestock feed. The rest is added to soda, burgers, chicken nuggets, chips, white breads, candy and all junk food in fast food restaurants and processed foods in grocery stores.

Winemaker a Pioneer in Organic Grapes
When Nick Lolonis used the powerful pesticide DDT in his vineyards in the early 1950s, it troubled him. He wanted to kill the bad bugs eating grapes in his Redwood Valley vineyard in Mendocino County, but the poison killed the good bugs, too. That’s when the seed was planted… to become a pioneer in growing organic grapes.

A Brief History of the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems
The Center’s history dates back to 1967, when English master gardener Alan Chadwick was hired to create a Student Garden Project on the fledgling University of California, Santa Cruz campus. Working only with hand tools and organic amendments, Chadwick and his student assistants transformed a steep, chaparral-covered hillside into a prolific garden bursting with flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees. The informal “apprenticeships” that students served with Chadwick would eventually lead to development of the Center’s current Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture training program.

Apartment Composting 101

Susan at Farmgirl Fare Does Onion-Rye Beer Bread
“Okay, you know I’m making this new beer bread. So I get the exploded beer all cleaned up off the counter and the floor, add enough water to the batter to make up for the beer I lost, put the pan in the oven, and am halfway done washing the dishes when I realize I forgot to put any rye flour in the rye beer bread.”Organic Earth Day Recipes
BBQ Peanut Butter Chicken
Braised Chicken in a Black Cherry Sauce
Corn Chowder
Grilled Spiced Apple Jamaican Jerk Chicken
Kid-Pleasing Macaroni & Cheese
Lomo de Puerco en Salsa Verde (Tomatillo-Braised Pork Loin)
Orange Mango Chicken
Organic Shrimp Louis
Papaya Marinated Tandoori Chicken
~~Dave Smith is author of To Be Of Use – The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work and lives in Mendocino County, North California.
Photo Credit: The Ladybug Letter
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From Lisa Barnes

You might think someone that promotes healthy eating wouldn’t like a holiday where begging for candy is involved. But I do. The “trick” at my house to avoid the (what’s on sale in the big bag) candy “treats” is that the Halloween candy gets “turned in” to mom and traded for a non-candy item of choice (usually a toy – but this year my son has already earmarked a pair of sweat pants). The practice of dressing up in costumes and begging door to door for treats on holidays goes back to the Middle Ages. Trick-or-treating resembles the late medieval practice of “souling,” when people would go door to door, receiving food in return for prayers for the dead on All Souls Day (All Hallows Day).

Fast forward to little ghosts and goblins (or firemen and princesses) going door to door expecting candy. A lot has changed! If you want to see something scary on Halloween read some of the wrappers on your child’s candy. There you’ll see partially hydrogenated oil, high fructose corn syrup, alkali, chemicals, artificial colorings and more. To decode these items and see a list of healthy sweet alternatives read the full story at Kiwi Magazine.

If you have ideas of a greener holiday check out this great article from the Lansing State Journal for suggestions on recycled costumes, fair trade chocolate treats, partyware, decorations and battery-free flashlights. For those looking for greener, non-candy items to pass out to trick-or-treaters here is an abbreviated list of suggestions from GreenHalloween.org:

• seed packets
• coins
• pencils
• stickers
• polished rocks, sea glass or seashells
• card games, tricks, jokes
• barrettes
• balls and spinning tops
• mini pumpkins

Speaking of pumpkins and staying away from candy…how about making the most of the jack-o-lantern by roasting the seeds…

Roasted Organic Pumpkin Seeds Recipe

My favorite part about carving a pumpkin at Halloween is getting my hands into the pumpkin to pull out the seeds and stringy goop. My son does not share the enthusiasm for the slimy, gooey mess. And my daughter just wants to eat the goop and seeds right out of the pumpkin. The reward for mom picking thru all the stringy stuff is enjoying the roasted pumpkin seeds while watching the candle flicker in the jack-o-lantern.

1 cup organic pumpkin seeds
1 teaspoon olive oil

Seasoning options:

½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon curry or
½ teaspoon granulated sugar and ½ teaspoon cinnamon

Heat oven to 300°F. Cut off top of pumpkin and scoop out insides. Rinse pumpkin seeds in colander with cold water. Remove as much of the pumpkin strings and flesh from the seeds as possible. Try to blot excess water with a kitchen or paper towel. In a small bowl combine seeds, oil and seasonings of choice. Stir until coated. Spread out seeds in a single layer on foil lined baking sheet. Roast until golden brown and dry, about 40 minutes. Stir seeds with a spatula, every 10 minutes during cooking. Let cool on a paper towel and store in an airtight container.
~~
Lisa Barnes is author of The Petit Appetit Cookbook: Easy, Organic Recipes to Nurture Your Baby and Toddler and lives in Sausalito, California.
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From Jesse Cool

This recipe was developed by Christine Guiterrez, a former pastry chef at my Flea St. Café. A twist on the classic Cheddar cheese and apple pie, this combination of apples with salty cheese and pepper may sound a bit unusual, but to me, it’s even better than the traditional.

Crust
1 1/2 cups organic whole grain pastry flour
1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup very cold organic unsalted butter
1/2 cup organic milk

Topping
1 cup organic whole grain pastry flour
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup (2 ounces) grated Asiago cheese
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
6 tablespoons very cold organic unsalted butter

Filling
6 large crisp organic apples (such as Granny Smith), peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

To make the crust: In a large bowl, combine the flour, thyme, and salt. Grate the butter into the mixture. Using your hands or a pastry blender, work the butter into the flour mixture until the pieces are about the size of peas. Add the milk, 1/4 cup at a time, and blend until a soft, moist dough is formed. Add a few more tablespoons milk if the dough seems dry. It should be somewhat sticky.

Form the dough into a ball, then flatten into a round disk. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

To make the topping: In a medium bowl, combine the flour, brown sugar, cheese, and pepper. Grate the butter into the mixture. Using your hands or a pastry blender, work the butter into the flour mixture until the pieces are about the size of peas. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Preheat the oven to 350°F. When the crust dough is chilled, place it on a well-floured surface and roll to about a 1/8″ thickness, turning and flouring the dough often to keep it well-floured. Fold the dough in half and place in a 9″ or 10″ pie plate. Turn under and crimp the crust.

To make the filling: In a large bowl, combine the apples, brown sugar, cornstarch, and nutmeg. Place in the prepared crust. Crumble the crumb topping over the apples.

Bake for 1 hour, or until the crust is browned and the apples are soft. Place on a rack to cool for at least 30 minutes before slicing.

Makes 10 servings.
~~
Jesse Cool is author of Simply Organic: A Cookbook for Sustainable, Seasonal, and Local Ingredients, owner of CoolEatz Restaurants and Catering, and lives in Menlo Park, California.
Photo by Lisa Koenig
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From Gene Logsdon

Chuck Walters is almost blind but, using electronic equipment that can render printed words into sound, he continues to keep a lively presence in his magazine, Acres USA: The Voice of Eco-Agriculture and to turn out book after book on farming and economics that make mincemeat out of the political and economic powers that he believes are reducing farmers to mere slaves operating food factories which are not sustainable. That’s why he is surely one of the most revered and most vilified leaders in the world of agriculture. I think he is a genius. Mega-agribusiness thinks he is a crackpot.

Mr. Walters grew up, literally, in the dust bowls of the 1930s. He remembers his mother putting wet sheets over the doors and windows of their home to keep out the dust and watching the sheets turn to panels of mud. He remembers children dying, literally asphyxiated with dust. He remembers “cows that died with balls of mud as big as softballs in their guts.” So when he writes about the ruination of the land by bad farming, he speaks from his own gritty experience. He served in both WW II and the Korean War, so when he talks about the stupidity of war, he talks from his own grim observations, He has an advanced degree in economics, so when he discourses on the dangers inherent in current banking policies and the in mega-consolidation of businesses and farming, he speaks from a position of authority. He was the journalist-publicity director for the National Farmers Organization (NFO) when it began, baring the scandals and injustices that made farmers fighting mad, so when he writes about the insidious manipulations of the oligarchies of power to turn farmers into “hog pen janitors” he knows the territory.

He is the author of several books on the organic principles of farming as laid down by scientists like William Albrecht and others, so when he sounds the alarm against the misuse of chemicals and technology in food production, he’s not just clacking his teeth. And he has been the first among many to protest the way big agribusiness is attempting to manipulate organic certification standards for its own ends, thereby rendering the definition of organic meaningless, so he demonstrates, always, that no one owns him except his personal devotion to what he perceives as the truth.

When I first started reading Mr. Walters, he seemed so fiery and fierce in his condemnation of the dangers he recognized in farming and indeed, in almost all areas of human behavior, that even I was a little afraid to get too close to him, if you can believe that. He was supporting farming practices and theories repudiated by mainstream university science. He was writing for the NFO while I was writing for Farm Journal, Inc., hardly a friend of NFO and definitely not a friend of the kind of seemingly strange farming ideas that Mr. Walters championed. But like all “far out” prophets who do their homework, he kept sounding a little more sane with each passing year, and finally I had to look him up and get acquainted. I found him calm and likable in person (unlike his combativeness in writing) and so widely knowledgeable that it was impossible not to respect him. He could quote about every famous person in history from Plato to “Bush 43” as he referred, not at all approvingly, to the current President.

Recently I caught up with him again, interviewing him and reviewing his writings for my latest book, The Mother of All Arts. He was still going strong, bubbling over with enthusiasm for his new book in progress, a novel which is “sort of autobiographical”, as he puts it. His “wild” organic and agronomic theories are no longer ridiculed and his economic predictions, in light of the current banking debacle, are eerily right on target. Although Chuck Walters will be known mainly for his untiring pursuit of sustainable advances in food production, he is also a most potent social critic — he knows that we can develop a sustainable farming system, but if economic and war policies from on high work against such a system, success is hardly possible.

Anyone who has been reading Walters for the last thirty years is not a bit surprised at the current chaos in our financial institutions because of the sub-prime crisis and hedge fund mania. He has predicted it all, and has spelled out the reasons why it is happening. The clever attempt in the last fifty years to transfer the basis of wealth from real goods like food and fiber and natural resources and real work to paper money and make-believe paper work can lead only to catastrophe. As he sums up in his latest newsletter in Acres in October, 2007: “If this letter is strong tonic, so be it — just remember the brew was fermented in the day that public policy decided to empty the countryside [of farmers] and substitute debt for earnings so that now America can’t even feed itself.”

I think nearly everyone in the field of organic food has been reading Mr. Walters, but if you haven’t, and especially if you are not into organic food production, check him out. And for those who have learned to be cautious of the printed word, this is not a paid or unpaid ad. I have no business connection whatsoever with Mr. Walters, nor does he even know I am writing this.
~~
Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Author: The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land)
Gene’s latest book: The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life
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From Jeff Cox

Back in the 1970s when the big soft drink companies were seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration to put their drinks in plastic bottles, I did an investigative piece for Environment Action Bulletin about those bottles. The soft drink companies called the plastic acrylonitrile. It occurred to me that acidic colas and other carbonated drinks might leach chemicals from the plastic into the drinks, so I called a biochemist at Harvard who was researching the effect of acrylonitrile on lab animals. He said that some of the plastic definitely leaches into the contents of the plastic bottles. “And you know the other name for acrylonitrile?” he asked. “Vinylcyanide—and it’s an endocrine poison.”

So I called FDA and asked if they were aware that the plastic bottles they were being asked to approve were made of an endocrine poison that leaches into the drinks inside. No, the FDA’s spokesperson said, they weren’t aware of it. A few weeks later, the use of vinylcyanide bottles was approved. Now, over 30 years later, it’s hard to find the major soft drinks in glass. Almost all are packed in vinylcyanide.

And there’s a new threat from plastic packaging that’s even more troublesome than vinylcyanide: bisphenol A, also known as BPA. This compound is one of the highest volume chemicals in commercial production, according to Janet Raloff, writing in the September 29, 2007, Science News. It’s used to make polycarbonate plastics—the hard, clear plastics of baby bottles, watercooler bottles, the work bowls of food processors, and flatware, among many other everyday items.

BPA is an essential ingredient of epoxy resins used to line food and beverage cans, and even to seal cavity-prone teeth. “Hundreds of animals studies have shown that this largely unregulated pollutant can tinker with the development and function of a wide range of tissues,” she writes. “These studies show, among other effects, that BPA can alter rodents’ and other lab animals’ sex-specific behaviors, perturb developmentally important hormones, boost fat cell numbers and their accumulation of fats, foster precancerous changes in cells, and induce insulin resistance, a harbinger of diabetes.” Her article is accompanied by a photo of a normal mouse– dark brown coat, sleek body–and a mouse exposed to BPA. The exposed mouse is very obese and its coat color has changed to a light reddish-tan.

Plenty of animal studies show that BPA can harm lab animals at concentrations below those already occurring in people. And BPA is found in just about everyone, according to a panel of 38 scientists working as part of the National Toxicology Program. This panel concluded that BPA exposure in the womb can permanently alter the genes of animals to diminish sperm production, heighten sensitivity to carcinogens, impair the immune system, and diminish insulin sensitivity.

One of the scientists, Randy Jirtle of Duke University, said, “If I was a woman who was pregnant—or thinking about becoming pregnant—I would try hard to avoid exposure to BPA.” Avoiding exposure is not easy, because most household and commercial clear plastic—cups, pitchers, bowls, canned foods, clear plastic bottles, eating utensils—contain it. BPA leaches faster when heated, especially when microwaved, and when it ages and starts to crackle.

Organic-minded folks should avoid clear plastic that comes in contact with food like the plague. Because if we look around us, we see a plague of obesity and increasing incidence of Type 2 diabetes in younger and younger people. These are the very symptoms showing up in hundreds of studies of BPA on lab animals at concentrations less than the exposure already present in people. It looks like the FDA, as with vinylcyanide over 30 years ago, is once again failing to do its job to protect the American people.
~~

See also: California OKs phthalates ban on children’s products

The Bisphenol-A Debate: A Suspect Chemical in Plastic Bottles and Cans

Jeff Cox is author of The Organic Cook’s Bible and lives in Sonoma County, California.
Photo Credit: National Geographic Green Guide
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