Thanks to an agricultural education collaborative that's planted the state's leading crops between the State Capitol and the North Carolina Legislative Building, North Carolina's halls of power are lined with cornstalks and tobacco leaves.
"It's been a great way to take the museum outdoors and let people reconnect with where their food comes from," says North Carolina Museum of History youth and family programs coordinator Emily Grant, who worked with the state's Department of Administration and Department of Agriculture to create a series of agricultural vignettes in decorative planters where maple trees and azaleas once grew.
"Our standard landscape planting was starting to die out from the drought," Grant says. "We thought we could pick out plants from North Carolina to talk about plant use and abuse."
The project this year took more than five planters of varying sizes. "We don't have a big lawn where we can just plow the back," Grant says of the urban museum, sowing seeds for a Three Sisters garden of beans, corn and squash; cotton; tobacco; sweet potatoes and peanuts.
A national organization devoted to combating hunger has found a way to wring good works from the South's most notorious prison farms.
The Mississippi office of the Society of St. Andrew, which identifies itself as "America's premier food salvage ministry," last month joined with the Mississippi Food Network to start collecting surplus produce from the Mississippi State Penitentiary -- commonly known as Parchman Farm -- and distributing it to 350 food pantries across the state.
"It's a win-win situation," program coordinator Jackie Usey reports. The program has already collected 40,000 pounds of squash from Parchman's fields.
Farming may be an endless tale of drought, pests and blight, but North Carolina agriculture officials are encouraging their state's farmers to find more succinct ways to tell their stories.
The state recently held a social-media seminar for farmers, a group that's been notably reticent in the tweet department. While experts aren't sure whether to blame spotty network coverage in rural areas or the exhaustive pace of farming for farmers' near-invisibility in Twitterville, they're hoping to encourage growers to join chefs and restaurant owners in promoting their products via online networks.
Farmers Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell. Photo: Michael Hnatov.
Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, gorgeous photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season. Here's how they got their start!
One evening last winter we sat down to dinner in a little pied-a-terre on the Upper East Side of Manhattan: Beef roast braised with rosemary and onions; pureed celery root and parsnips; crackling-fresh sautéed green beans. For dessert it was goat milk cheesecake with elderberry coulis. We washed the whole thing down with bottles of hard apple cider.
Had we ordered in -- stereotypical Manhattanites -- from the overpriced local gourmet grocery? Nope. Everything we consumed we had raised, herded, grown, plucked, cultivated, canned and cooked all by ourselves.
Could any other of the millions of inhabitants of New York City make that same claim that night? How about anyone else in the United States? OK, probably a couple, but for us, this was a meal just about 40 years in the making.
A photo of the farm and the rest of the introduction, after the jump.
Sunday afternoon, midwesterners packed a small independent movie theater in Kansas City, Mo., for a screening of the new documentary "Fresh," which takes a close and at times disturbing look at factory farming in the United States. Along with its director, Ana Sofia Joanes, "Fresh" (click the trailer above) is wending its way across the country in the hopes, Joanes said at a panel discussion between two sold-out screenings, of "changing the misconception that we need the industrial food system." This isn't the first new anti-BigFarming flick to hit the silver screen, so we're calling a trend.
"Fresh" follows the lives of four farm families, including a Missouri hog farmer who exterminated his industrial stock after being gored by one of his hogs and doctors found that he was resistant to most antibiotics. Michael Pollan and John E. Ikerd, Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics at the University of Missouri, make cameos as talking heads.
The real star, however, may be the swoon-worthy (if you like the rugged type) sustainable Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, who has the vocabulary of a professor and no shame about embracing "the chickenness" of his hens when greeting them with a "Good morning, girls!" each day.
Foodies are familiar with the term "farmstead," which implies grown and made by the same hand. Farmstead goat cheese, for example, is made by the same person or people who raise and milk the goats. Now importer Anthony Nicalo is bringing the farmstead concept to the wine world with his Farmstead Wines, working with European grape growers and winemakers to source the best handcrafted wines for distribution in Canada and soon the U.S.
In French wine terms, a rough equivalent for "farmstead" would be vigneron, which refers to the farmer and winemaker as one and the same. That's not always the case over there or over here: often farmers farm, and winemakers winemake, sourcing their grapes from elsewhere. Going back to the cheese example, that would be the same as a cheesemaker getting milk from another source and then using it to make his own cheese brand.
Not that there's anything wrong with that method. It also has been used for generations, and when you're a budding winemaker without the resources to score ever-more-expensive vineyard land, it's sometimes the only option to realize a dream. But Nicalo believes that the farmstead concept, whether in food or wine (he's a trained chef), creates a better end product because the one person, the creator and grower of the food or wine, has control over the process from the very beginning. He calls his winemakers artisans.
Continue reading "Farmstead Wine - Wine of the Week" after the jump.
New trend alert, courtesy of the New York Times: the "lazy locavore."
In some cities, freelance farmers will plant and tend organic vegetable gardens in your yard, so you can have nice heirloom tomatoes and sun-warmed lettuce without getting your fingernails dirty. San Francisco resident Trevor Paque will plant an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the veggies for you and put them in a box by the door. Don't have space for a garden? Other services will deliver organic, sustainably-grown local fruits and veggies directly to your office cubicle. But what if preparing and cooking these organic delights is too much work? Other services will cook stews of organic local vegetables and pork, ladle them into glass jars (recycled, I hope) and deliver them to your house.
Up next: A service that sends someone to your home to wipe your mouth with an organic, locally-harvested hemp fiber napkin?
Some people are worried that in the not too distant future, chocolate could become much more rare and expensive... and it's not because of global warming (at least not for the most part). In fact, John Mason, of the Nature Conservation Research Council (based in Ghana), says that "in 20 years chocolate will be like caviar."
This terrible fate is possible mostly because of poor farming practices in Western Africa, where most of the world's chocolate is grown. According to this article from CNN online, farmers clear cut sections of rain forest and work that land to death. The problem with that method of farming is that it is not sustainable: cacao trees (from which chocolate is ultimately produced) on the clear cut land live about 30 years, compared to 75-100 years in the regular rain forest. The farmers would have to then clear another section of rain forest to grow trees on.
There may be hope, though. A handful of different groups have come together to try and solve this problem, including farmers, environmental groups and Cadbury, the British chocolate maker. The interests of each group intersect, and so they've created a scientific research unit to study ways to farm cacao trees sustainably. There may be hope for humanity (and chocolate) yet.
Writing in Slate, urban farmer L.E. Leone describes her emotions when killing one of her own chickens: "I kneel in the dirt, holding the body still while it flutters, and hyperventilate... I feel alive and in love and closer than ever to death."
Which got me thinking: how would I feel if presented with a live bird and a sharp ax?
I'm pretty darn sure I could do it. I certainly eat enough meat that I should be able to deal with where it comes from. While, like many people, I've got issues with the meat industry as it exists in America today, I'm pretty comfortable with the concept of the food chain. I don't get grossed out by blood. I used to drive an ambulance. I grind my own sausage. But I've never directly killed anything bigger than a trout. Would it be weird? Would I cry, as Leone claims she does each and every time? If I didn't get teary, would I feel guilty for being an insensitive killer?
Olives are such a Mediterranean product that it's hard to think of them as being grown, in mass quantities anywhere else. That could soon be the case, however. Israel is sending a million trees to Rajasthan, in northern India. It's a deal that the leaders of India hope will spark a new era in agricultural production, as well as bring some much needed revenue, in the country.
Diplomats are finalizing a three year deal now, and it is hoped that India could start exporting olive oil by 2011. While it is a good thing for India, Israel isn't just in this for the warm fuzzies. Israeli companies will benefit from the deal, both in farming and in designing an irrigation system that will allow the farming to happen in the first place, as northern India is a desert. Overall a win win for both countries, at least it seems that way. What do you think about India olive oil?
Are wine-lovers pretentious, easily-manipulated fools who can't tell Two-Buck Chuck from a pricey Napa cabernet? Eric Asimov inquires.
Urban farmers: now selling at your local farmer's market.
The myths and realities of organics - Curious Cook Harold McGee looks for some real information and comes up kinda empty-handed. Seems everyone has their biases.
The Minimalist does crustless quiche, in cute little ramekins. OMG, the one with sauteed mushrooms sounds so good!
Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer accidentally breeds tobacco and tomatoes, calls the resulting hybrid a Tomacco and gets rich?
Unfortunately, the tomacco, albeit a cartoon invention, was the first thing that came to my mind upon hearing about the stramato.
A hybrid of - you guessed it - a tomato and a strawberry - its inventors are saying that their cocktail tomato" boasts a "beautiful strawberry shape, naturally sweet taste and a rich, deep red color."
Eh - I mean, it sounds good, but did the world really need another cocktail tomato? What was wrong with the old ones? Or just plain ol' cherry, for that matter?
"Milk In the Land: Ballad of an American Drink," a documentary about the ubiquitous white beverage, has shown at several film festivals across the U.S. and is now hitting Philly. Directors Ariana Gerstein and Monteith McCollum show us the ins and outs of the cow's milk industry, revealing its interesting past. But don't expect a thoughtful retrospective on the Great American Drink - this film unearths often grimace-inducing secrets about milk, questions its nutritional value, and spotlights the milk extraction process in farms run by agribusiness corporations.
The film features several theatrical elements, including testimonials by industry professionals and stop-motion animation, to explore the drink inside and out. It has been called "fascinating" by some critics, but one FilmCAN reviewer was pretty disappointed, saying the film lacked detail and that the interviewees provided stuttered, unconvincing arguments.
Despite the occasional bad review, Milk sounds pretty worthwhile - similar to the string of string of recent documentaries on the underbelly of the food industry, even if the film itself isn't the best, you'll undoubtedly walk out of the theater with some newfound food and business knowledge under your belt.
As mentioned in a recent post, maple syrup prices are soaring due to high fuel oil costs and a shorter season due to climate change.
But if you want to indulge your maple syrup-tooth right now, and happen to be in the Angelica, New York vicinity (about two hours from Buffalo), try Cartwright's Maple Tree Inn. The Cartwrights, a family of longtime maple syrup producers, began serving pancakes and syrup for a few weeks during the harvest season in 1963. They've been selling stacks of buckwheat pancakes ever since, to tourists from as far away as Germany and Japan. The restaurant is only open for two months - from February 12 through April 13 this year. How's that for local, seasonal eating?
The Cartwright's pancake recipe is a family secret, but here's a link to The Minimalist's Pancake Primer - his ricotta pancakes are killer (in case you can't make it to Angelica before April 12).
We're in the thick of the maple syrup harvest season right now, but high fuel costs will likely lead to price increases of around 30 percent, according to an article in the Boston Globe.
Fuel prices - sugarmakers use fuel oil to boil the harvested sap into syrup - combined with already low syrup reserves from several poor harvest seasons are driving up retail prices. Warmer winters due to climate change have shortened the season, causing historically low output. Plus, there's an increased demand for maple syrup as consumers grow increasingly hip to its superiority over the faux corn syrup-based pancake syrups.
Some people are worried that in the not too distant future, chocolate could become much more rare and expensive... and it's not because of global warming (at least not for the most part). In fact, John Mason, of the Nature Conservation Research Council (based in Ghana), says that "in 20 years chocolate will be like caviar." 
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We're in the thick of the maple syrup harvest season right now, but high fuel costs will likely lead to price increases of around 30 percent, according to an article in the 
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