Everyone Needs Safe Food!

Sunday, October 16, 2011
Blog Action Day

44° here on the mountain with a 6 mph wind that offers up gusts with much greater speeds. At 5:15 AM it's darker than a pocket and I can hear rain on the standing seam roof. Karl the Wonder Dog is laying on the rug in front of the soap stone wood stove, still warm from last night's fire. He snores loud snores for his size and occasionally does dog mumbles during obvious dog dreams.

Today is Blog Action Day, a world wide event that brings together comments from around the world about a single subject. I try to participate but haven't made it every year. This year's topic is food and there probably could not be a more important consideration after the disasters that have occurred not just in Vermont but world wide this year.

Vermont is an agrarian state and it has been one since the early 1700s when new villages formed and farms sprang up in river valleys and on mountain tops. By the end of World War II tiny Vermont had over +10,000 dairy farms, cows were still hand milked and milk was shipped to processing plants in 40 quart milk cans. Unpasteurized milk was the norm and rural neighbors took their jugs every couple days to farms for a fresh supply and often added a couple dozen eggs or a couple pounds of homemade butter to the journey back home. Fast forward to 2011 and there are well under 1000 dairy farms in Vermont, many well automated, some organic, most not, some as small as a dozen cows, some exceeding 400 milkers. Things have changed!

Along with the dairies are CSAs, Community Supported Agriculture opportunities at their finest. These are growers and producers who offer vegetables, fruits, flowers, cheeses, meats, trout....anything you can grow, raise, produce or preserve offered up for an annual price over the summer season or more recently almost year round. In Vermont there is an extensive and growing number of CSAs but their popularity has now reached out to even the largest cities. Vermonter growers now travel weekly to places such as New York City and city folks have organized CSAs, farmers markets and traveling markets that stop at apartment complexes and senior housing facilities to extend the reach of good food for everyone.

Discussions about food have broadened of late and concern for safe food is real big. It should be. Although family dairy farms continue to diminish and large, bazillion cow farms replace them, we still have to be vigilant about the food we offer up for sale. Bigger doesn't always mean better. Up the river from my village of Marshfield is Cabot, Vermont, the home of Cabot Creamery. This is a milk cooperative that buys dairy farmers milk at a good price and turns out a variety of award winning cheeses that make cheese lovers smile. But Cabot Creamery is only one of many cheese producers in Vermont. In fact cheese is so big in Vermont that the Vermont Cheese Council has prepared a marketing scheme named The Vermont Cheese Trail to help residents and visitors learn about all the great cheeses we produce in Vermont.

But CSAs, great farmers and special cheeses is only part of Vermont and safe food is dear to Vermonters. Also in Cabot is a young writer named Ben Hewitt. Ben is one of those off the grid kind of guys, a family man who farms about 40 acres where dairy, beef, pork, lamb, vegetables and berries prevail. Ben's first book, The Town That Food Saved told about Hardwick, Vermont and how food and people became so important to each other in a struggling Vermont town that was stepping boldly into the future. I liked the book a lot and you will too but perhaps his latest book is spot on to my title Everyone Needs Safe Food!

Making Supper Safe: One Man's Quest To Learn The Truth About Food Safety
is Ben's second book. It informs and scares at the same time. It's not a Halloween scary book it's a "do things right or get sick or die" kind of book. It contains tales, research, and discussions that are so accurate that a few times I stopped reading and went to the kitchen and rewashed fruit and vegetables from the grocery store. It's a book to read and it offers some clear thinking about some things that need to change.

Here in Vermont we are a small state of 630,000 people. But we love our farms and farmers and we love buying locally produced food. The food needs to be safe and we are on track here. No matter where you live or how you eat, remember that everyone needs safe food and part of that experience is knowing where your food comes from and how to handle it. Those might be topics you have overlooked but try reading Making Supper Safe and I'll bet you sees things differently.



Writing from the mountain above Peacham Pond where a couple stars still twinkle outside my office window. Canada geese compare breakfast notes and talk loudly on the pond, waiting patiently for first light so they can become airborne and continue their journey south. I'm off to the kitchen to make an apple cake for breakfast...with local apples, butter, milk, eggs...most everything local but the cinnamon and nutmeg. Be safe, eat safe, everyone needs safe food!

George Africa
The Vermont Gardener
Vermont Flower Farm
On Facebook as Vermont Flower Farm and Gardens and also as George Africa
On Twitter as vtflowerfarm

Water

34.2 degrees this morning here on the mountain. A sliver of light is reaching up from Peacham Pond and a light fog holds tight over the little valley below my office window. The goldenrod and insidious colts foot that surround the platform bird feeder still drip from last night's rain as humidity stays at 98% and the birds eat wet seed for breakfast.

Karl the Wonder Dog and I walked down the main road and out the forest road this morning hoping to encounter the big buck that comes through most nights. He's an awesome animal and I'm happy even if I just see his footprints in the mud. We had to settle for the six turkeys under the apple trees but still it was a pleasant morning hello.

A couple years back someone suggested I write a piece for Blog Action Day, an annual October event with a changing theme. The theme in 2008 was Poverty and I tried to offer local color to a topic that was dear to me having lived through very poor times in Vermont of the 50s. In 2009 the topic was Climate Change and as I reread what I wrote then, I am immediately reminded that 2010 experienced the first 9 months in a row with above average temperatures. Currently we are running at about 40" of precipitation for the year. That is clearly change.

The blog topic for 2010 was water, and rain during the past month or so has given us enough to think about. I got tied up planting at the nursery and just couldn't participate in Action Day as I wanted. Just the same I have given a lot of thought to water and a recent visit to a museum exhibit reinforced my concerns. Read on.

Many readers are probably familiar with the photographic chronicles of Edward Burtynsky but I never saw his work until attending a recent exhibit at the Shelburne Museum. I had never even heard of ship breaking before and as I told a friend about this he told me I should leave the plants alone and get out a little more. Burtynsky's photos were striking enough because of their physical size but the images hit me like bricks when I learned how and where ship breaking was accomplished. My mind raced from thoughts of Gaylord Nelson and Earth Day 1969, the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and this year's BP spill in April. But then there was this ship breaking thing where "past-their-prime" ocean going ships of all types are floated into the Mouths of the Ganges in Bangladesh at high tide and dropped in the mud flats. There they are cannibalized from end to end by laborers using cutting torches without eye or safety protection as every thing within the ships becomes part of the ocean at the next tide. Pollution as big as BP but without the fanfare of the media.

Vermont has great water and our water here on the mountain is the best. A trip to any city with a drink from a faucet will remind me how much I want to get home where water doesn't smell of chemicals or pollution. It is something to covet and protect.

As gardeners we consume a lot of water. Some use chemicals in their gardening and many are somehow affected by other gardeners or farmers or businesses chemical use. Here in Vermont we are sadly reminded too often of different degrees of pollution at Vermont Yankee, a nuclear power plant. A few years back Cabot Creamery spilled ammonia into an upper branch of the Winooski River that killed everything for miles. But we never hear about big commerce on the Winooski in Essex or along the shores of Lake Champlain. ...or along the Mississiquoi River, Otter Creek, the White River, Passumpsic ....Have there ever been negative water events we have not heard about?


Water is a valuable resource. You cannot garden or live without it. Although I missed the deadline for writing for Blog Action Day, I didn't forget the value of our water supply. When you raise the next water glass at your house, think about how you can protect the resource. It's bigger than growing nice tomatoes--I guarantee it!


Writing from the mountain above Peacham Pond where the fog has not moved and the sun has not broken through. One grosbeak and one blue jay challenge each other for the balance of yesterday's sunflower seeds. The picture up top is a spring on our property.

George Africa
The Vermont Gardener
Vermont Flower Farm
Writing on Facebook as George Africa and also Vermont Flower Farm and Gardens
On Twitter as vtflowerfarm
Social networking spreads good gardening thoughts around the world! Try it.

Blog Action Day: Poverty 2008

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

If you have been following The Vermont Gardener, you might have noticed a banner on the right side of my page. It sponsors Blog Action Day which this year honors the topic of poverty. Blog Action Day affords interested bloggers the opportunity to share their thoughts on a special day and a special topic. Poverty is an issue we hope did not exist, in America or in the world. Trouble is, this is a tremendous issue that requires our help.

Here in Marshfield, Vermont our small community of 1500 members tries to work together to exist in this difficult world. We have a community center which serves as our library and the office of our village and town government. The center is a meeting place for a number of ongoing activities and it also provides space for our Food Shelf.

Eighty year old Winnie Mundinger is in charge of the Food Shelf which she manages with a smile and an enthusiasm big enough to take on any challenge. Food deliveries arrive on scheduled Saturday mornings and Winnie's volunteer crew arrives to unload the truck and prepare food goods for a waiting line of needy community members.

As if this isn't a big enough challenge, Winnie helps manage and cook for the Senior Meals Program three days a week, she helps schedule a foot clinic for seniors, and offers special activities to keep them mentally fit too! Although the Marshfield Food Shelf is part of our community, members from surrounding communities can obtain services too. With Winnie at the helm, no one is ever overlooked.

Volunteering to help your local food shelf is something you and your family members can do no matter where you live. There are other activities related to social services which you can provide too. I'll always remember a winter day years ago when I found Gail and Alex putting together a food basket. I inquired who it was for and Gail replied "Sam". "Sam?????" I didn't know any Sam. Gail explained that Sam was the little old man who lived down the road in the fallen down home with the rusty car and the little fluffy dog. I usually saw him at the spring by the side of the road filling plastic water jugs as he didn't have running water.

Gail didn't know his name but she thought the winter had been long enough already and with holidays approaching, he needed something, unexpected and unasked for. Gail said she wanted Alex to be a part of the process so he could begin to understand our responsibility to others we don't even know. They finalized the gift with some little doggie treats wrapped in a bow and away they went to meet a person neither knew.

The visit was a great success and Gail said the smile on Sam's face was committed to memory with her and Alex forever. Not too much later, Sam had to move to a nursing facility and then he passed on. But for a brief time, the ray of light brightened the loneliness of poverty and an old man smiled and shared conversation that made for a better day. Each of us can recreate this same scene time and again if we just take the first step. Reread this little story and make a plan. Your reward won't be measured in dollars or cents but it will be immeasurable!


Writing from the mountain above Peacham Pond where each member of our community has a gift that needs to be shared.

George Africa
The Vermont Gardener
Vermont Gardens
Vermont Flower Farm


Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty was a huge success! Try http://blogactionday.org
for follow up.