Today, Maclovia Quintana ‘11 on keeping it fresh when the soil outside is frozen, with plants grown in paper cups.
Saturday’s frigid weather deterred all but the bravest from coming up to the farm for the paper cup gardening skillshare. Compared to the below-freezing temperatures outdoors, the prop house felt almost balmy, and our group had a great time filling paper coffee cups with soil and selecting herbs to grow in them: basil, cilantro, chives, oregano, and others. Each participant was able to take home several coffee cups filled with a variety of leafy herbs. Hopefully these will thrive in warm windowsills in their homes and dorm rooms!
This is a great way to grow herbs if you are short on space, time, and warm weather— and have an excess of paper coffee cups! It’s also a good way to start seedlings for eventual planting in outdoor gardens. And fresh herbs can make all the difference when cooking: imagine grabbing a handful of basil, straight off the plant, to garnish a salad.
Thanks to everyone who came out for this! And for more tips on indoor gardening, check out <a href=”http://www.yale.edu/sustainablefood/Onlinegardeningguide-final.pdf”>this</a> YSFP guide to keeping your plants alive throughout the winter.
At the beginning of the academic year, with unfortunately far more excited students than it had available job positions, the YSFP launched the Student Volunteer Coalition to serve as a support framework, to all Yale students, for projects and causes relating to food and agriculture. Because of the SVC, there will soon be mushrooms growing at the Yale Farm, there are plans to build a chicken coop, and there have been many, many cooking classes. These classes take the form of “skillshares,” in which an SVC member shares his or her knowledge with peers, whether that knowledge is about making kimchi, building a table, identifying local fauna and flora on a tree walk, or as we see below, knitting.
Here we present an illustrated post (our first, but hopefully not the last!) on the SVC’s recent knitting skillshare, led by Calhoun Fellow Corinne Wesh and reported here in drawings by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff ‘13:
First: everybody gets a ball of yarn and needles.
Then: we all sit around small tables so we can see each other’s hands and talk. (I don’t quite have it down.)
Corinne explains: the KEY to knitting is to be FEARLESS! “What are these things but little sticks and string anyhow?” Then she says, “At the rate you guys are going, you’ll be knitting sweaters in no time!”
I think: how great it would be to wear my own knitted sweater…or give it to someone I really like.
We hope you love Rachel’s drawings as much as we do! To download a single-page PDF of these illustrations, click here.
New Haven resident Vince Kay is already known for his Swords into Ploughshares honey, sold at local groceries and farmer’s markets all throughout Connecticut, as well as for his infamous chickens, technically illegal until a city ordinance allowed them inside city limits this past fall. Kay is an excellent example of someone who leads a local and sustainable life in every way possible — this past Saturday, several YSFP staffers got to share that local and sustainable philosophy in the form of a gala meal at the Waucoma Yacht Club.
We entered the lodge, set on the water with boats all around, to find the room packed with diners. Hors d’oeuvres were under way: there was pheasant pate, venison kielbasa, local baguettes from Chabaso bakery, and more.
The dinner continued — below we have venison chili (accompanied by a duck gumbo), a type of “venison bourguinon,” and a goose sausage cassoulet. And that’s not mentioning the various types of fish entrees. The food was delicious, unusual, and unbelievable: unbelievable, that is, that the game we were sharing was all from Connecticut.
Kay himself was curiously absent as everyone in the room became more and more full, but finally at dessert (a selection of goodies baked by members of the Waucoma Yacht Club), he emerged with Yale student Emily Casaretto and her father, all of them wearing aprons and looking only a little disheveled.
As the room filled with cheers (Emily’s father flew from California to help prepare the enormous meal!), Kay reminded us all about the importance of taking to heart the decision to eat local, sustainable food, and that making such a choice should never have to be a compromise of taste. Our meal at the Sixth Annual Wild Game Dinner was proof of just that.
During his cooking demo and Master’s Tea, Bryant Terry talked about the spread of “food deserts” in America, urban areas that are isolated from the grocery stores and farmer’s markets that many of us take for granted, where the primary sources of food are often corner stores or bodegas that don’t sell fresh produce. We’ll continue that discussion this Thursday, January 28, at 4:00 pm in Yale’s Dwight Hall with a panel on food justice. We’ll learn about food access, nutrition, and affordability, as well as efforts to improve food justice in New Haven and New York. Here’s a little more information on our guests, Ian Marvy of Added Value in Brooklyn, Jacquie Berger of Just Food in New York City, and Billy Bromage of Harvest Haven here in New Haven.
A Farm Grows in Brooklyn
Ian Marvy co-founded Added Value, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping disadvantaged Brooklyn youth by providing work opportunities at their 3-acre farm in Red Hook, South Brooklyn. The farm, which grows over 40 different crops, is tended by volunteers from the community, and the farm’s harvest is sold exclusively at the Red Hook Farmer’s Market, opened after the area’s only grocery was suddenly closed. The food desert solution, in this case, is to not only provide fresh produce, but also the means by which to grow it.
Just(-ice) Food
As Executive Director of Just Food, Jacquie Berger helps improve New York City residents’ access to fresh, locally grown produce in a variety of ways. By managing the nearly 100 different New York-area CSAs (“Community-Supported Agriculture,” programs that connect consumers directly to farmers for a full season’s worth of harvest), Just Food helps bring both nutrition to urban New Yorkers, and a guaranteed income to local farmers. In addition, they support urban farms and community gardens in the city proper, teach cooking classes on how to use fresh produce, are active in the policy decisions being made in New York, and last but not least connect local farmers with a variety of food banks and shelters to make sure that nothing goes to waste. What a list!
New Haven, Fellowship Haven
In addition to his work at New Haven’s Fellowship Place, a treatment shelter for the homeless and mentally ill, Billy Bromage helps provide access to local food through the Harvest Haven program. It’s easy to forget that food deserts can be found in our own backyard here in New Haven.
The panel promises to be fascinating — with a variety of guests, whose work ranges from truly local to statewide, it’ll be so exciting to learn about how we can help improve some of the food access problems so prevalent in our urban areas.
This past Monday, cookbook author and food justice activist Bryant Terry came to Pierson Dining hall to teach us a little something about collard greens. Or, at least, that’s what I thought I’d get out of the cooking demo. As someone who had never gone to a cooking demo before, Terry surprised me. I expected to sit down and watch as a talented chef of his own tastes cut, seasoned, and sauteed various dishes in the span of about twenty to twenty-five minutes. It was going to be like watching a Food Network show live, right? Wrong. And I’m glad that Terry’s presentation was nothing like the quick-fire of syndicated television.
Terry began with a brief introduction to his food philosophy: food as grub. “When I say, ‘Eat!’ you say, ‘Grub!’” “Eat!” “Grub!?” After the first energetic, but rather confused response from the audience, Terry explained that for him the word grub means more than a casual referral to food. He and his co-author, Anna Lappe, defined the term in their book, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen(Tarcher, 2006). Grub, he continued, is healthy, sustainable food that supports the community and is available to everyone. Terry and Lappe chose to talk about their food as “grub” in order to bend the elitist connotations that the terms “urban organic kitchen” might evoke in their target audience. They wanted to remind people that their recipes were for everyone and that good, fresh produce should be available to everyone as well. Hence, the colloquial term, grub. Ah! The audience seemed to understand. The second time around, “Eat!” was followed by, “GRUB!”
Which brings me to Terry’s next, and most recent publication, Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine (Da Capo Press 2009). This was the only book of his I had actually looked through, and I found myself wondering who his intended audience was. Did anyone believe that soul food could be vegan? Terry, of course, was aware of the hesitance that most people would have to this concept of “veganizing” Southern cuisine. His response was articulate and well-researched. His approach was based on the history of food, gardens, and small-scale agriculture in his grandparents’ neighborhoods in Memphis, where he grew up. Soul food is more than the stereotypical comfort dishes we think of when someone mentions the South. Soul food really is, and encompasses, dishes that nourish the mind, body, and soul. Southern food should not be looked at in terms of stereotypes, but rather as its own iteration of cuisine–and if we think about it, most cuisines include both objectively healthy dishes and unhealthier ones that we refer to as “comfort food.” I realized then just how ignorant I had been about the real traditions of Southern cooking. No thanks to Paula Deen, I was convinced that a pat of butter meant half a stick, that all root vegetables were doused in sugar and candied, and above all, that these dishes were eaten on a daily basis. 
And, after his thought-provoking presentation, Terry got to making those collard greens. His recipe? Cut the stems off the collard greens, roll them up, and chiffonade them by cutting the roll into slices. Heat a pot of boiling water and cook them for 8-10 minutes. Put them in cold water for 5-6 minutes to help them retain their greenness. Drain them. Heat the olive oil and garlic up together, to avoid burning the garlic. Add collards, some raisins, salt to taste, and a little bit of orange juice for zing.
Of course, I’m quite sure that Terry wouldn’t consider his recipe to be the most authentic representation of collards, but both he and I believe that his recipes come from an authentic place; the desire to rebuild and reshape the way people view and eat Southern food. As an active food justice advocate, Bryant Terry believes that healthy, fresh produce should be available to everyone and that making it available to low-income areas is the key to showing them that it’s their right to be well-nourished and to remind them that dishes that include vegetables and could be considered vegan are not just “‘white people’s food,’” as his teenaged students in Oakland used to say.
For more information on Terry’s community work and interests, check out Nozlee’s interview with him!
A guest post by YSFP alumna Zan Romanoff ‘09 on the recent Atlantic piece on edible schoolyards. Agree? Disagree? Comment and tell us about it!
Organic agriculture is a subject on which people often have Opinions; I have spent the better part of the last couple years learning to politely ignore them in favor of trying to get on with productive work. Caitlin Flanagan’s recently published piece in The Atlantic, however, is too fascinatingly awful not to address. It is a vitriolic screed founded on seemingly nothing but the author’s self-regard and immense irritation at the (admittedly sometimes irritating) grandstanding of Alice Waters. At least it takes a sort of novel premise, reversing the usual claim that slow food is primarily interested in making everyone into a white yuppie. Instead, Flanagan insists that we are condescending to the underprivileged and people of color by imagining that they might want to be educated about and involved with the production of their food. She misses the entire point even as she quotes it: per Alice Waters, “gardens help students to learn the pleasure of physical work.”
Flanagan somehow manages to do slow food one better, taking an even more embarrassingly upper-class white position than it is usually accused of by claiming that the only lessons worth learning are those that will make immigrants just like her. There will be time enough for their health when they can succeed as she sees it. Flanagan’s solution “lies in an education that will propel students into a higher economic class, where they will live better and therefore eat better.” This nakedly classist assessment of the situation reveals Flanagan for the stridently prejudiced thinker she is: she honestly believes that we ought to just ignore the plight of the poor until they’ve proven they can work up to her level. Indeed, attitudes like Flanagan’s could well be seen as part of the justification for migrant laborers’ current woes: as long as we believe that physical labor is drudgery with no redeeming value, we will continue to treat those who do it poorly, undervaluing those jobs instead of trying to find ways to make them safe, humane, and perhaps even desirable.
I’m not saying that these students wouldn’t be well served by learning to read and write English; if I thought that school garden programs were adversely affecting their chances to do so (and if Flanagan had ANY evidence to suggest that this was the case), I might be willing to reconsider. But the sad truth is that schools are failing impoverished minority students across the country and that precious few of them have school gardens. The issues plaguing our educational system are myriad and deeply-rooted and not likely to be solved before today’s kindergarteners make it out of high school. So isn’t it worth it to improve what we can in the mean time, offering these students something more than rote memorization and the skills to pass arbitrary tests? Is she actually trying to claim that there is no value in forging a connection to your food, knowing how it was grown and prepared, taking an active and thoughtful role in caring for your body, your land and your community?
Further, there are connections to be made between garden and classroom beyond the recipe-writing Flanagan dismissively mentions as the probable reason for an improvement in the grades of children at King Elementary. Natural science is obvious but then there’s American history, economics, health class, and maybe even parts of English, too. The first farm I worked on was run by a man with a degree in philosophy.
There’s more to say but it honestly isn’t worth it; the article is basically nasty, interested only in tearing down rather than suggesting substantive, positive change. Perhaps Caitlin Flanagan would benefit from visiting a school garden herself and spending an afternoon getting her hands dirty, seeing how actual children respond to the experience of the outdoors. I’d be happy to buy her a plane ticket to McAllen, Texas, where a close friend from college is struggling mightily to teach English as a Second Language to high school students in a town that has no agriculture, sustainable, organic or otherwise. Maybe she’d come to see that almost no one has yet found a good solution to the problem of getting non-fluent teenagers up to speed with peers born into affluent, educated English speaking homes. Until she’s put in the time, however, until she’s ready to offer something other than they can eat well when they read well, I suggest we carry on as before: ignore her, and get back to work.
In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, writer (and mother, I might add) Caitlin Flanagan takes on edible schoolyards. Flanagan attempts to challenge the argument that edible schoolyards are not only instructional and educational at an intellectual and academic level, but that they are also vital to a student’s comprehension of where they stand in the larger ecosystem and their immediate communities. In addition, she seems to write off the positive impacts that edible schoolyards have on improving and informing low-income children’s perceptions of dietary needs and nutrition. For years, research has indicated that obesity, Type-II diabetes, and heart disease amongst low income families and children are directly linked to their majority consumption of fast food, which to families struggling to pay the bills, offers a cheap and quick solution to breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Flanagan attempts to paint the edible schoolyard movement as racist and insensitive towards the children of migrant farm workers who may be embarrassed about what their parents do and may take hands-on agricultural education as insult, as a way for elitist Americans to suggest to them that weeding and harvesting is the only future they have. Though this is just one example that Flanagan provides, this is a complete misreading of Alice Waters’ intentions and of the goals that edible schoolyards hope to achieve (some goals: encouraging better dietary practices, appreciation of what farm labor is and the effort it takes to grow food, and access to fresh, mostly organically grown produce). If anything, edible schoolyards intend to erase the shame any Americans associate with farming and take our nation’s food supply and resources from pesticide-spraying airplanes, rows and rows of monocrop failure, soil nutrient depletion, corporate dependence and price-setting, and back into (more) caring human hands. Farming is important and it is something we should be proud of and are grateful for–and it’s hard to be either unless we experience it for ourselves. Flanagan believes that edible schoolyards are an unnecessary tumor feeding on California’s poorly funded and managed public school system, traditionally stereotyped as having incompetent teachers and apathetic students. Instead, I see it as a way to encourage students to care about themselves, and by extension, their futures and education. I realize that it is difficult for parents and single parents working multiple jobs to buy produce and have the time to make food–but at these schoolyards students are learning how to cook for themselves–and in the long run, when you add up medical costs and stress, paying a dollar for celery is probably better than the thousands you’ll end up needing to spend if you get sick when you’re older. Those costs will probably be more difficult to meet, particularly with jobs most low-income parents have.
For other opinions: several bloggers have responded to Caitlin Flanagan’s Atlantic piece in greater detail at Serious Eats and Civil Eats.
Thus ends my short and condensed introduction to Flanagan’s piece. I couldn’t help but voice my own opinions on the matter, but if you’ve got something to say about it and would like to respond on the YSFP blog, email us!!!!
I tend to get really thankful around Christmas. I guess I’m too busy thinking about pumpkin pie and watching the leaves turn at Thanksgiving or something. Of course, in reality, the reason I’m so excited to be home and so glad to spend time with my family and old friends is the fact that winter break gives me more time to enjoy their company. And with more time I get around to reminiscing, laughing, eating, and watching French films. I saw La vie en Rose, Aux Revoirs Les Enfants, Paris Je t’aime, Coco avant Chanel, and watched Ratatouille and Amelie for the fifth time. Now of course I know Ratatouille is a Pixar/Disney creation, just as I am well aware of the fact that Julia Child’s My Life in France was published in plain English. But I read and watched and loved both as though they were really French because both have that je ne sais quoi that invigorated my passion and hunger for life and my belief in romance.
And as I sat there reading, with my stomach grumbling, I couldn’t think of a better way to bring France into my Californian world than to recreate a French recipe. I’d been wanting to try my hand at roasting a chicken for quite some time–I’d never done it before and was nervous that I might undercook it and send my brother to the hospital with salmonella poisoning, so I did a little research to find the perfect recipe that would give me a flavorful, juicy chicken with a crispy skin, bacteria-free. When I saw the ingredients for “Roast Chicken Provencal,” I knew I’d found my mark. While I was scouring the internet for dish prep ideas, I came across rave reviews of Judy Rodgers’ roast chicken recipe featured in her restaurant in San Francisco, Zuni Cafe. I decided to marry the flavors of Provence to the style of Zuni’s bird and hoped I would get the chicken I’d been dreaming about for months.
I was happy to discover that Rodgers’ directions were so simple they’d be difficult to mess up; the secret to a chicken with a crispy skin and tender flesh is apparently to just pat it dry and season it with salt and pepper a couple days in advance. Then you slit the skin in strategic spots and insert your herbs–they’ll release their flavors into the chicken during the roasting process. Since I’m a flavor freak, I tucked pockets of rosemary, sage, thyme, and marjoram underneath as much skin surface as I could manage without tearing the skin off the meat, which would make those “bald spots” prone to getting dried out in the oven. I also stuck five thin slices of lemon underneath the skin of the chicken breasts for a little extra zing and put my remaining fresh herbs, half a lemon, and half an onion into the chicken’s cavity–all deviations from the original Zuni Cafe recipe, but I just wanted a little extra insurance against the possibility of the chicken drying out in the oven. Results after the jump–although I imagine the picture here tells you enough about how it turned out! read more…
The forecast predicted snow for the day before I flew home for winter break, but when I woke up the sky was clear, even though it was freezing. Which is why I somehow thought it was a good idea to go to the CitySeed farmer’s market in Wooster Square that morning — I hadn’t been in a week or two and besides, it was the last of the weekly markets before winter set in.
Dressed warmly, I set out with a friend and arrived a little sniffly, but okay. It was worth it: the winter produce like brussel sprouts, kale, leeks, and turnips were all beautiful. But I was leaving (on a jet plane) in less than 24 hours! I couldn’t help but buy three enormous leeks anyway. As our fingers froze, we thankfully got a ride back from market with a friend. But what was I going to do this the leeks?
It snowed eight inches that night, but I got home just fine. My leeks may have made it through airport security, but they also had lost their status as “local” produce. I was still happy to share the bounty of Connecticut with my family, however, and decided to pair it with a local organic butternut squash my parents had bought.
With Connecticut and Oklahoma combined, I decided to make a galette. Like the delicious offspring of a pizza and a pastry, it was the perfect savory answer to the winter cold. I mixed the dough and set it to chill while the cubed squash roasted in the oven. I mixed them with the beautiful sauteed leeks, some crumbled goat cheese, and a little bit of cayenne pepper.
Folding the dough over to get the galette’s signature pleated edge, I thought about the work required by so many hands from two different states to grow the vegetables that went into it. While I wouldn’t recommend shipping produce across state lines as a regular practice, our galette was delicious. The recipe is below!
It’s that time of year again, when the frosty wind whips your already-frozen cheeks and the frigid air surprise-shocks your lungs when you inhale. Before I came to New England for college, I never appreciated the joy of warm logs roasting on a fire (we have faux gas “fireplaces” in California anyway), I drank hot chocolate as if it were an a-temporal dessert rather than as if it were a soul-warmer, and I thought snow was made of pretty white flakes of Christmas. I’d say that I know a little more about cold weather than I used to. I no longer wear flip flops to walk from my room to the campus convenience store. I’ve stopped draping polyester blankets around me when I’m outside because I now have a squishy down coat. I’ve realized that keeping warm means cider in the fall and mulled wine in the winter. I understand now what I couldn’t comprehend growing up in California, that Paula Deen’s obsession with sticks of fat is only her wisdom trying to teach me a lesson. Butter does a cold body a good layer of winter fat.
Since I moved out here for college, I would say that for four years running, the first thought that crosses my mind when I wake up every morning from December through February is, “Gee, I wish it would just be 50 degrees again.” It’s never happened. So, in order to cope, I’ve come up with a defense mechanism that I think works pretty well. It involves staying inside and never going outside. Like most of my other defenses, however, this one defies logic and ceases to work whenever I get hungry.
And so, like many other sun-lovers, I’ve learned to take refuge in layers upon layers of clothing. I remember watching movies on TV during Christmas break with my family when I was still in the single-digits. The plot lines were always annoyingly disrupted by token holiday ads whose points I couldn’t relate to. Every year in the Campbell’s soup commercial Frosty the Snowman would walk into the kitchen and sit down at the table. After one bite of steaming-hot soup, his snowy exterior would melt away into an adorably smiling child who was happy to be inside and warm again. I disliked that little boy. He came between me and my Charlie Brown Christmas too many years in a row. Who needed soup when Christmas meant cookies?
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