Bringing Back the Bodega Red Potato

By Slow Food USA Biodiversity Intern Regina Fitzsimmons

You may already know about the project in Sonoma County to save the Sebastopol Gravenstein apple.  But, in upcoming years, a new project is going to hit California farms and backyards.
When Elissa Rubin-Mahon, a member of Slow Food Sonoma County, heard rumored stories of Bodega Reds growing in her California neck of the woods, she didn’t rest until she uncovered the full history.  The Bodega Red, according to folklore, was brought by a Peruvian to Sonoma County where it grew near the coast in Bodega.  Sonoma County was once the potato capital of California—there’s even a California sandbar named after the Bodega Red and a lookout named “Spud Point.”  But after some time, the Bodega Red started falling off the map.  Genetically similar potatoes, like the Burbank, even died out.  The Burbank became extinct because of potato blight and infestations of viruses.  And, not helping matters, Elissa discovered that growers used to eat and sell the high quality potatoes, and plant the worst ones, thus propagating genetically weaker and weaker potatoes.

Elissa was especially intrigued by the Bodega Red because it was one of five or six potatoes introduced to the United States directly from the potato motherland: South America.  Most potatoes sailed to Europe where they were grown and eaten and then sent to North America during the time of European colonization.  Bodega Reds didn’t make that extra boat ride.  Like the Makah Ozette potato, they made their way all the way up the West Coast and into Alaska. 

More after the jump

Royal Vegetables in the Queen’s Backyard

by Slow Food USA intern Regina Fitzsimmons

Last week, Prince Philip dined on Cambridge Favourite strawberries to celebrate his 88th birthday.  But he didn’t eat just any strawberries—these were picked fresh, from just outside the Palace doors.
 
The Queen’s new garden harks back to Britain’s 1939 “Dig for Victory” campaign and Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1943 “Victory Garden.”  By setting an example of growing food, the White House and Palace encouraged families to start their own gardens and use all available land for produce production—from golf courses to the Tower of London moat! 

Today Queen Elizabeth II and Michelle Obama are bringing fresh vegetables back to the White House and Palace lawns, encouraging local economic-growth as well as eating healthy foods. 
The Queen is also encouraging the preservation of endangered foods by growing out some royal varieties: word has it that the French bean Blue Queen and the dwarf French bean Royal Red have already been planted in her garden.  And there are more endangered varieties soon to go into the ground: the Northern Queen lettuce and the Golden Queen, the Queen of Hearts and the White Queen tomatoes! These heirlooms were provided by Garden Organic, the UK’s leading organic growing charity organization. 

We applaud the Queen’s attention to endangered varieties, and hope that our First Lady will take a cue from her by adding, say, some Ark of Taste varieties to the White House patch.

Check out this Daily Mail article to see a photograph of the Queen’s tomatoes, runner beans, and potatoes!

For a refresher about Michelle Obama’s White House Gardens, visit our previous blog post.

Growing Out Magic Beans

by Anne Obelnicki, Chefs Collaborative RAFT Grow-Out Coordinator

Like most Tuesdays, I was working from home yesterday.  At lunchtime I took my two dogs out for a quick stroll around the three wooded acres where we live.  When we approached my tiny patch of sunlit garden nestled among the trees, I was surprised to see something that definitely hadn’t been there the day before: Five little Marfax bean seedlings had broken through their covering of compost, still bean-capped, leafless and bent over, they were nevertheless making their way towards the sun.  I’ve been gardening for years, and I love it, but I surprised even myself with the childish glee with which I observed the seedlings.  There is a reason there are so many cliché sayings about planting seeds.  I could suddenly see my whole bean-filled summer garden unfolding before my eyes, and I had equally vivid images of my bean-filled belly come harvest-time this fall!

All over New England, this little bean miracle is playing out on a much larger scale than in my tiny garden.  Marfax beans are one of the sixteen varieties of heirloom vegetables we’ve asked twenty-eight farmers in the Providence, Portsmouth, and Boston areas to grow for the RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) Grow-Out project Chefs Collaborative is piloting this year.  When their much larger fields of Marfax beans are mature, we have thirty-five chefs lined up, eager to buy, feature and promote them on their menus.  At Chefs Collaborative, we hope that the community building we’re promoting during the Grow-Out establishes connections between farmers and chefs that grow beyond the bounds of the project.  But community building will not be the only source of interesting connections to come out of this project; growing Marfax beans establishes a significant connection between all the participants and the rich agricultural history of New England.

More after the jump

Sustainable Food Producers and Conservationists Need to Co-Exist

Marin County Oyster Farmer at Crossroads with National Park Service

A major debate is bubbling up in Drakes Bay in Marin County, Calif., testing the ideals of sustainable farmers, ranchers, fishers and foragers leasing Federal lands for their operations, especially when those lands are set aside for conservation.

Kevin Lunny, a local rancher, purchased his oyster farm – Drakes Bay Oyster Company – in 2005.  As part of his purchase he received a special-use permit from the California Coastal Commission. Since the Lunny’s began to manage it, Drake Bay Oyster Company has focused on sustainable aquaculture methods for Pacific oysters. They have also collaborated with researchers, planning the recovery of Olympia oysters, purple-fringed scallops, and snowy plovers. Lunny Farms also raises certified organic, pasture-fed cattle on the land surrounding the Drake Estero.  Drake’s Bay Oyster Company has been honored by the National Park Service itself, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Society for Range Management for its sustainability initiatives.

Nevertheless, the Park Service has for the last two years taken actions to close Drakes Bay Oyster Company in 2012, when its lease expires, to officially designate the area as wilderness. But Park Service judgment was recently called into question when a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel released a report finding the federal government lacked scientific evidence to back assertions the company is harming the waters or wildlife of Drakes Estero. In fact, in a breech of scientific integrity, Park technicians fabricated data on marine mammal disturbances in an attempt to evict the oyster company from Point Reyes National Seashore.  Sen. Dianne Feinstein supported efforts to allow Drakes Bay Oyster Company to continue operating by recently sending a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

As Gary Nabhan, RAFT co-founder and a University of Arizona scientist states, “We are at a critical moment in this controversy and need reconciliation not further conflict. National Park Service regional director Jon Jarvis has the opportunity to demonstrate his leadership position in driving collaboration between farmers, ranchers, fishers and foragers – and conservationists – to ensure sustainable food production that reduces our carbon footprint and is not pitted against conservation.”

Leaders in sustainable agriculture are getting on board to help mediate the situation between the National Park Service and Drakes Bay Oyster Company.  However, we’re interested in your thoughts about this debate. What are the challenges to developing a symbiotic relationship between sustainable farmers and conversationists?  Legislative challenges?  Perceptual challenges? What level of scientific integrity and collaboration should we expect from the Park Service?  How would you resolve this specific situation? 

Spring Ushers In Unusual Edibles

Lynn Peemoeller is a food systems planner and president of Slow Food Chicago

Spring hits Chicago like an overdue baby. It’s a welcome relief when buds start to blossom and life shoots up from the earth. At the first outdoor farmers market this week, I was pleased to find fiddlehead ferns (foraged in Indiana) among the verdant edibles. But these are not the frosted brown coils of fern tasting of forest that I have had in the past. These thin fronds fall loosley from their stem cascading like curly split ends. They taste more like nutty asparagus and behave like Chinese long beans. This is a head scratcher. Just how many types of edible ferns are there? I had wrongly assumed there was only one variety of this unusual treat. But how delightful to discover I was wrong. Mother nature enchants me with her vast biodiversity of edibles. Just what is the variety of these ferns anyway? And who was the person responsible for getting them to market so they could make their way to my plate? What is the history of foraging fiddlehead ferns? Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste and the RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) alliance are working with farmers and breeders to capture the most delicious of regional and seasonal food traditions to prevent such rarities from going extinct.  Edible ferns are not a turn-on to everyone. (My Dad responds with a shudder.) But, the world is full of other foods with vast genetic and cultural histories that elicit joy and intrigue – many of which never make their way into conventional grocery stores. Some of the most iconic heirloom foods in the Midwest are tomatoes, potatoes, apples and livestock like heritage poultry and pork. Slow Food Chicago is working with regional farmers to expand the endangered vegetable varieties being grown in the Midwest. Our goal is to catalog all the Ark of Taste varieties that are being grown for market in Chicago and host tastings for consumers and chefs. We are lucky to have many farmers who have upheld foraging and farming traditions as well as experimenting with growing heirloom and heritage crops. This supports regional biodiversity and creates demand for these unusual and delicious varieties. After all, it just takes one Cherokee Purple to get you hooked on heirloom tomatoes for life. This summer we are also promoting homegrown heirloom tomatoes. We have over 400 seedlings that we will be selling at farmers markets in late May. We hope to encourage our members and all tomato enthusiasts to commandeer precious urban outdoor space to try to grow their own. In the fall we will celebrate the harvest with a tomato festival; a tomato-themed potluck; and a weeklong heirloom BLT theme at a number of restaurants throughout the city. Extra credit goes to the chef who manages to produce a BLT entirely from Ark products! Another local program that we are supporting is a fledgling urban orchard called the Chicago Rarities Orchard Project (CROP). This non-profit is raising hundreds of varieties of heritage fruit trees (apples, pears, paw paws, persimmons, raspberries) on urban land and acts as a fruit-oriented community garden. Although many trees are grafted and safely nursed on a temporary site, the organization is seeking a permanent location for its orchard and education center. This fall, Slow Food Chicago is thrilled to play host to the third in a series of RAFT Midwest heirloom fruit and heritage orchard restoration workshops. Our goal is to bring people together to capture and explore the local flavors and traditions of these well-loved fruits. We will be working with our local growers to procure delicious and unusual varieties for tasting, and help encourage more people to grow heirloom varieties. I think apples are a much easier sell than fiddlehead ferns, at least for an educational and tasting series. What’s great is that the RAFT alliance and the Slow Food Ark of Taste celebrate nature’s biodiversity in its many forms. Whether food comes from the land or on water, in trees or from the forest floor, edibles are all around us and the traditions of hunting, harvesting, preparing are all part of our collective history as the human species as much as it is as our regional culture. We hope that Slow Food Chicago will be able to contribute to the preservation and promotion of food culture of the Midwest through our work with local farmers and consumers. So what about those ferns? I give in to simplicity; just parboil in salt water. Munching those forest fronds is like a vacation from the modern world, taking me back, way back to the hunter-gatherer in my soul.

Oh, That’s a Heritage Chicken

On April 17, our RAFT partner, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, publicly unveiled a Heritage Chicken Definition.

Generally, we think of heritage as meaning foods that are naturally produced in traditional ways, often tied to a particular geographic region. But ALBC is taking it a step further—like they did for heritage turkeys—by defining the term in order to create a standard understanding among breeders, producers and consumers of what heritage means for a particular species.

So, what’s a heritage chicken? In short, it’s a standard breed of chicken (as defined by the American Poultry Association)—like the Buckeye, the Java or the Jersey Giant — that can reproduce naturally, grow slowly, and thrive outdoors. These birds were once raised by small-scale family farmers around the country and bred for hardiness, survivability and flavor. They are now in danger of extinction because of mass-market industrialization.

At the beginning of the twentieth century almost 90% of farms had chickens. By 1992, only 6% of farms had any poultry at all. Today, 90% of the chickens we consume are industrial hybrid varieties (mainly a single variety) that are bred to grow fast on minimal food in a confined environment. These are birds with no disease resistance, having been bred to such extremes that they could never survive outdoors on a farm.

People are starting to wake up to the horrors of industrial meat and poultry production and beginning to demand that the meat they buy is not only better for their own health, but better for the animals’ health and the health of our environment.

But how do we, as consumers, know what we’re buying?  If I want to eat humanely raised chickens and don’t keep chickens myself or buy them directly from a farm or farmers’ market, I have to rely on the packaging. For now, no one is policing the term “heritage chicken” but ALBC is working with the Standard Bred Poultry Institute and Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch to educate and advocate for the honest use of the term.

This is a great first step but until there are “heritage” labeling standards, it will be challenging for us as consumers to be assured of the authenticity of a label. As the market for sustainably raised meat and poultry grows, the food industry has been very quick to co-opt terms like “cage-free” and “natural”. Even USDA certified terms like “organic” and grass-fed” don’t necessarily mean what you think. American Grassfed Association has their own grass-fed certification and label, in collaboration with the Animal Welfare Institute, because some cattle raised in confinement and fed antibiotics are allowed to be labeled USDA grassfed.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. The first step (and ALBC’s forte) is recovering the numbers and productivity of these endangered breeds—selecting desirable production characteristics within each breed, and growing a solid group of committed breeders and products to increase breed populations. They have developed a suite of online heritage chicken resources for folks interested in raising these breeds, and they lead breed workshops around the country to train the next generation of breeders and producers.

When it comes time to promote these birds in the marketplace, our goal will be to not only educate chefs and consumers about “heritage” chickens but get consumers acquainted with the unique characteristics of each individual breed. As Marjorie Bender of ALBC says, we want the meat case in the grocery store to look like the cheese case. It shouldn’t just say pork chop or chicken breast, but Red Wattle pork chop and Buckeye chicken breast.

To read some recent press about ALBC’s work to save heritage chicken breeds, click here and here.

Welcome to Our New Biodiversity Experts

We’re pleased to announce the election of Anson Mills’ Glenn Roberts and agricultural ecologist Kraig Kraft to Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste Committee,  the group that reviews nominations to Slow Food USA’s catalog of over 200 delicious foods in danger of extinction. By promoting and eating Ark of Taste products Slow Food is making sure these foods remain in production and on our plates.

Glenn Roberts is a natural fit for the Ark Committee. While he is best known for his small-batch, artisanal, heritage grits and polenta that appear on ingredient-conscious restaurant menus around the country, Roberts spends much of his time and resources on the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, which works to advance the sustainable restoration and preservation of Carolina Gold Rice and other heirloom grains and to raise public awareness of the importance of historic ricelands and heirloom agriculture. His work as an entrepreneur and as a seed-saver has made him absolutely essential in the preservation of Southern grain heritage. (to read more about Glenn and see pictures from his mill, click here).

“I love the challenge of making relevant nearly forgotten or little known aromas, flavors and textures of the extraordinary foods of America, both past and present,” says Roberts. “That these foods are without exception culturally vital, local, low input, low fuel and reach perfection only with careful and slow preparation seems astonishingly fitting for our time.”

Kraig Kraft’s expertise as a scientist and researcher make him a perfect addition to the Committee. Kraig is a PhD candidate at UC Davis, where he studies the genetic diversity of chile peppers, tracing the lineage of our domesticated peppers to their ancestral wild populations. His career has included education and program leadership for numerous international development projects in sustainable agriculture, technology transfer, and grassroots community development, and his expertise has been recognized and supported by numerous awards. He has a passion for not only food but the related traditions and landscapes in which they are rooted. For Kraft, “The Ark of Taste represents an important effort towards the conservation and preservation of agricultural diversity and their association culinary traditions. The stories of these foods and crops tell our own histories. They are part of our cultural heritage that we need to remember and renew.”

Rare Breeds Recipe Contest

Once raised by small-scale family farmers and bred for hardiness, survivability and FLAVOR, many heritage breeds have been lost to mass-market industrialization. Our RAFT alliance partner, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, is leading the way to bring these rare, diverse breeds back to US farms and tables.

Rare breeds have unique qualities that make them suitable to small farm pastures. That also means they need special (or at least different) treatment in the kitchen. Just like we’re learning that we can’t prepare a grass-fed burger like a grain-fed one, we can’t prepare a Pineywoods steak like an Angus, or roast a Buckeye chicken like an industrial one.

How do we learn what to do?  Before you start raiding the shelves of used bookstores looking for pre-1950’s cookbooks, ALBC is coming to the rescue later this year with a Rare Breeds Recipe Book. They are creating the book by hosting a rare breeds recipe contest. 

Are you already familiar with cooking a particular rare breed? From now until September 1, you can submit recipes to ALBC. The first place winner will receive a free registration to their national conference this November in Houston. To learn more about the contest, click here.

If you’re the experimental type and want to test your rare breed recipe creation skills, use LocalHarvest to find a producer of a rare breed on Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste and start cooking!

America’s Apple Traditions Renewed

by Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan
(all photos courtesy of Mark Dohm)

Perhaps it was hard at first to know whether the “antique” in the phrase, “antique apple experts,” referred to the apples or to the experts. But when the Hall of Famers of the Heirloom Apple Kingdom gathered on March 19th at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum outside of Madison, it was clear that the so-called “old-timers” invited had much to say about the current status of and future prospects for old-timey apples. Between them, they had more than 350 years growing, pruning, propagating and tasting uncommon American apples, thereby constituting a sort of Buena Vista Social Club for these forgotten fruits.

And so, the Forgotten Fruits Summit organized by the Renewing America’s Food Traditions alliance became the first full gathering of America’s most accomplished back-country fruit explorers, veteran orchard-keepers, horticultural historians, pomological propagators, natural-born nurserymen and hard cider-makers concerned with the destiny of Malus X domestica, the single fruit most imbedded in the American identity.  Their task was to determine the best means of restoring apple diversity to our farms, roadhouses, backyards and kitchens, and to revive “apple culture” in all its dimensions on this continent.

More after the jump

Cooking, N’Awlins Style

Today I’m interviewing Poppy Tooker.  Poppy is the founder of Slow Food New Orleans, a chef, a food activist, the chair emeritus of Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste Committee, and the author of the just-released Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook—among other things.  I mean, what hasn’t this woman done?

The book is self-published by marketumbrella.org, an independent New Orleans-based non-profit that brings vendors and shoppers together to preserve local culture, generate wealth and support the local economy, with its central axis being the Crescent City Farmers Market. When you buy your copy of the book from marketumbrella.org,  not only will 100% of net proceeds go to benefit the work of marketumbrella.org; in addition, you can request that Poppy personalize your book with a message!

Q: Reading the cookbook, I was struck that what you have there in New Orleans is not just a market, but a community built around food.  Can you tell us a bit about that community, and how it came to be?

Tooker: People in New Orleans truly live to eat. When visitors come to the city they find that hard to believe…I’ve had people say that they just stand still on a street corner and listen to the conversations of people as they walk by and what they are all talking about is food.  As arguably the greatest food city in the US, it goes hand in hand that we would also care about where our food comes from.

Richard McCarthy [Executive Director of marketumbrella.org] knew that we needed a real food market that could create a real sense of community, more than a place to just buy food.  We created guidelines that in order to be part of our market, you have to produce the food that you bring, and we only sell food at our market.  The farmers from the Northshore were very suspicious about coming across the lake, but Richard sweet-talked them and that is how our little food community began.

More after the jump