Local Food Movement comes to the White House: Obama Plants a Garden!

For months, numerous groups and individuals have been petitioning the new administration to be the symbol for all American's the follow -- to lead by example and plant an organic food garden at the White House. Well the dream is becoming an reality.  Tomorrow (March 20th, the first day of Spring), Michelle Obama will break ground on a new garden on the South Lawn of White House.

As reported by The Washington Times, the 1,100 square foot garden will include 55 kinds of vegetables, berries, herbs and two bee hives for honey that will be tended by a White House carpenter who is also a beekeeper. The list of produce was chosen by White House chefs and the harvested food will be used to feed the first family daily, for state dinners and other official events.

Better yet, the garden will be organic using only organic seedlings, soil and fertilizers.  The total estimated cost for all the materials...$200.  

As reported by the New York Times, the plots will be in raised beds fertilized with White House compost, crab meal from the Chesapeake Bay, lime and green sand. Ladybugs and praying mantises will help control harmful bugs. 

Don't we all wish we had this garden?

Alice Waters has been lobbying the White House for a garden since 1992. "It just tells you that this country cares about people's good health and about the care of the land," she said. "To have this sort of 'victory' garden, this message goes out that everyone can grow a garden and have free food."

“A real delicious heirloom tomato is one of the sweetest things that you’ll ever eat,” said Michelle Obama. “And my children know the difference, and that’s how I’ve been able to get them to try different things." 

I hope all American's will take this lead, plant and garden and find out what a real tomato taste like. 

Gardening in the Suburbs: Keeping it Local

My family and I are strong believers in eating locally and organically.  In the late fall, winter and early spring, we get food deliveries from a services called Door-to-Door Organics and in the late spring, summer and fall we are members of a local CSA called Asbury Village Farm.  

However, the most local you can get is to grow in your own yard. One of the things my husband and I were excited about when we moved to the suburbs 5 years ago was to have our own vegetable garden.  However, as it happened, the house we bought has a backyard that is totally wooded -- almost 85% shade. Not very promising for tomatos and other veggies that need full sun. We could grow them in our front yard but these fruits and vegetables would be great eats for the plentiful deer, rabbits and groundhogs that inhabit our neighborhood (makes two liberals want to go out and get a gun!)

So after living in our town for about a year, we were going to the local playground with our son. We parked right in front of a community garden. The gate was opened and we walked in to see approximately 70 or so -- 10 feet x 15 foot plots--  filled with gorgeous vegetables, berries and flowers.  Wow, so cool -- we had find out how we could get a plot of our own. A small sign at the gate gave the address of the garden club that ran this community garden. My husband wrote a letter telling our story and requesting a plot to tend. While we waited to hear back we talked to everyone and anyone to find out who we could call t0 speed and influence the decision making process. I tracked down the woman who ran the club and we called her. We were told that there was a long waitlist for the garden and that someone had to give up their plot to for us to get one -- but once you get one you can keep it for life!  So,  disappointed, we waited.

Then one spring the phone call came. There was a plot opening up and it was ours if we wanted it. The garden organizer warned us that it was next to a tree and was shaded, but the last person who tended it had pretty good success growing tomatoes and other veggies. We jumped at the chance to grow our own food. That was three years ago and this summer we were given a second plot, this one in full sun.  

Our growing season this year has been awesome and our gardens include tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis, peppers (a few variety), bok choy, broccoli, raspberries, beans, eggplant, asparagus, pumpkin, herbs, grapes and sunflowers.

What I think we like best about the entire experience, besides getting great tasting food, is how our children love it. They come to the garden and delight in how things are growing and graze on tomatoes, beans, raspberries and more. We believe that it is very important that our kids learn where their food comes from and how it gets to the table. We even took our 5 -year-old to our CSA farm to help weed, and he had a ball. He got meet the farmer and see the animals and taste the first heirloom tomato of the season. Bigger then a baseball, he ate the entire tomato like an apple (see photo above). Our kids will grow up knowing that food does not just come from the supermarket. They will understand from "farm to plate" not "store to plate." Hopefully this will encourage them to be both better eaters, and more adventurous ones too.

There was an article in the New York Times on July 22nd entitled "A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss." It talked about how people are paying someone to come to their house to plant, take care of and harvest an organic garden or they have their personal chefs buy local. Now that is great that they are eating this way but isn't that just keeping them removed from their food? They are "locavores" in action but not emotion.  

We grow it ourselves, and hopefully you'll find a small plot to try this out yourself.  Our next step is to try and store what we grow to enjoy the "fruit of our labor" throughout the winter.  I have been reading How to Store Your Garden Produce by Piers Warren to learn all about it. 

What's your experience with growing your own food?  Any good suggestions for storing for the winter?

Green in Paris

So I think I have used up my allotment of fossil fuels for at least the remainder of this year or more likely the next decade. Why? My husband surprised me with a birthday trip to Paris last weekend. 

American's have a love/hate relationship with the French. So of course as an American and a Greeniac, I had to do some hardcore observations of Parisian "green" habits and compare them to what we do here.  What I discovered from my four days in the "City of Lights" is as follows.

(1) Recycling
There is a recycling program in place in Paris, but I am not sure if the Parisians are interested in recycling. On some streets they have huge recycling bins for bottles and cans but most of them were covered with graffiti (which happens to be all over the city). In the parks, they do have recycling bags next to the the garbage bags but as you can see in the picture,  recyclables are also placed in the garbage bag. On a walking tour the Marias, I asked our tour guide about how well the Parisian recycle. She said they are horrible and during our tour she opened a recycling bin from an apartment building to show us what she meant. It was filled with recyclables and non-recyclables.

(2) Reusables
My husband and I went in a few supermarkets (which I love to do whenever I travel abroad) and outdoor markets and I think I saw maybe 5 people using resusable bags. The worst was in the outdoor markets where you can buy fruits, vegetables, meats, cheese, bread, fish, flowers and much more. The biggest one we went to was in Versailles, and everything was put in a plastic bag. Many did bring there own reusable bag but those bags were then stuffed with plastic bags. It appeared to me that they may use more plastic bags than we use.

(3) Transportation
Paris is a very busy city with lot of traffic. But I would not say that they have any more traffic then New York City. They do drive smaller, and most likely, more efficient cars (I didn't see 1 hummer or SUV) and many people do ride bikes and take the subway. I think more people ride bikes in Paris then they do in Manhattan--but not as many as in Beijing. But the most ingenious thing that we observed in Paris was a bike rental system called Velib. The system began in July 2007, with 10,000 bikes, and now they are up to 20,000 bikes all over Paris. Riders can buy monthly, daily or hourly passes to rent bike stationed at more than 1,400 automated stations across the city. A bike can be rented from one station and returned to another. From what we saw, and from the doubling of the number of bikes in use, it appears that the Parisians love the system. My husband and I wished we had more time to try it out. Its funny, the first few days in Paris we weren't sure what these bikes were. Initially we thought they were motorized, then we didn't understand the rental system. By the time we figured out what was what it was it was time to go. I wonder if this would work in NYC.   

(4) Food
So those of you who read my blog know that I have an obsession with food.  Our trip there had some gastronomic highs--the picnic in Versaille and some lows--dinner at Chez Andre off the Champs-Elysées.   So of course I had to d find out where the French food comes from. Well I think this is a department that they really do better than we do. French farmer say no to GMOs--they even strike and riot to oppose them on a semi-regular basis. None of the fruits or vegetables grown in France are from genetically modified seeds. NONE! We can't say anything like that here. You can also find organic produce in Paris. We spoke to some butchers and they insisted that none of the meat is treated with antibiotics or hormones and that beef is grass-fed.  One of the butchers we spoke with even made a stink face when referring to grain fed beef.  I could not find anywhere on the internet to confirm or deny this so I have to take their word, for now. I did ask Shannon Hayes, a grass-fed beef farmer, of Sap Bush Farms and she said "It is my understanding is that not all meat in France is grass-fed. But a fair amount is. Quite often it depends on the breed - charolais beef, for example, is supposed to be exclusively raised on grass. When I was there I saw a lot of cattle grazed and fed in the barn - a model that is infinitely more sustainable than factory farms, but not, according to our strict definitions grass-fed. The meat is also much more likely to be raised on small farms, not from confinement facilities."

So what do I take from my trip to Paris.

1-  Thank you Lewis...I didn't thank you when I was there, but I'm thanking you now.

2- The food there was at times over rated, and at times sublime.  The baguettes in Versailles where the best I've ever had.

3- We might do a better job in recycling, and in moving towards a bag-less shopping experience, but I'm not sure.

4- The quality of the produce in Paris far surpasses what we have here.  I was thrilled by the freshness, the quality and the shopping experience.

5- Four days is just not enough time to be in Paris, but we missed our kids, and wanted to come home.

I'd love to hear about your "green" international observations.

There is something fishy with salmon.

I don't know about you but I am always very confused when it comes eating salmon.   Should I eat farmed or fresh? Most articles about eating fish publish charts on safe fish and fish to avoid and I find that salmon makes it into both columns.

Last week my friend and I were discussing the issue, because she, like I, is obsessed with food these days. Our list of foods we eat is ever dwindling.  We were wondering what salmon is best for the environment and our health.  Subsequent to our conversation, she called me up to say that she had just read an article in Eating Well Magazine on the fresh vs. farm salmon debate that helped bring some clarity.  

So I quickly grabbed the March/April issue and began to read the article entitled "The Wild Salmon Debate."  The piece was written by David Dobbs, a salmon angler and author of The Great Gulf, about the decimation of the ocean fisheries.  Dobbs is "a sort of salmon-expert-for-the-day." In his article, Dobbs discussed the differences between types of salmon, location caught and farmed vs. fresh. 

Wild salmon today is all from the Pacific. Why? Because the Atlantic salmon are now on the Endangered Species List.  Salmon from the Pacific can be found in Alaska, British Columbia, Northern California and the Pacific Northwest.  

All Atlantic salmon species are farmed and live in net pens of tens of thousands of fish. These fish are vaccinated against diseases because they live in crowded confinement and fed fish pellets of food and additives to make their flesh pink like their wild fishy friends in the Pacific. 

As Dobbs reports, "Farmed salmon holds about 2 to 10 times the levels of PCBs, DDT, dioxins, pesticides, mercury and some other suspected carcinogens that most wild salmon do, apparently because the rich meal they eat contains bits of oily fish in which these contaminants tend to concentrate." These levels are still low (relatively) and that the benefits of eating salmon out way the cost of these contaminants unless you are pregnant, nursing or young. 

 

However, as he points out, there is a bigger picture to the farmed salmon. Farming salmon is wreaking havoc on the environment.  With the expansion of farmed salmon, there appears to be more and more problems emerging.  Many of the fish escape and disrupt the spawning of the wild salmon.  Sea lice that have infested farms are now spreading to wild populations killing many wild salmon.

Dobbs concludes that wild salmon is the way to go. It may be seasonal, inconsistent in taste and more expensive, but these trade offs are small in the whole scheme of things.

So I thought I was set.  Wild salmon was all my family would eat.  But then last week the Pacific Fishery Management Council stated that the wild salmon in the Pacific West fisheries, were at an all time low.  The managers are discussing cancelling the early seasons of ocean fishing for chinook salmon off the coast of Oregon and Northern California because of a collapse in stock. 

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 12th, "only 63,900 fall run salmon were documented spawning in the Sacramento River in 2007, far below the 122,000 to 189,000 objective the council had set."  And to make matters worse, the number of jacks (two year old fish that return to the river to spawn) are at an all time low. Frighteningly, officials expected 157,000 jacks but only counted 6,000.

So now I was really in a tizzy. First I moved my family to eating more fish. Then, only wild salmon. Now, heck, what am I supposed to do? The salmon stocks in the Northwest are collapsing, I can't figure out which way is up.  So stealing a line from Dr. Suess, one fish, two fish, red fish, who knew fish?  

So I decided to contact Dobbs and get his take on the issue. Dobbs, who in addition to writing for Eating Well and other outlets, writes his own blog called Smooth Pebbles where he covers various health issues. 

He explained to me that this truly is a confusing issue. "To make it easy, just think Wild Alaskan Salmon -- these are Pacific salmon but unlike Pacific Northwest salmon, the Alaskan salmon have habitat undamaged by dams (which are doing in many salmon) and are extremely well-managed so that they are not overfished."

Dobbs told me he considers farmed salmon disastrous and the only salmon he eats is wild Alaskan.  And now so do I.

So next time I go shopping, I'm looking for the mukluks on my fish.