Following the close of the Downtown Farmers Market at the end of October, Local Roots Market opened as an indoor farmers market on November 7 with a roomful of tables for local produce and baked goods as well as individual freezers for producers' meats. Customers kept the market humming with enthusiasm and good energy as they visited with farmers and bought their weekly supplies of food. Each week we had more people express interest in becoming members, and each week we found more producers setting up shop.

Our film series in November brought out a number of new faces, people we hadn't yet seen in the market but who seemed very interested in learning more about local foods as well as about our current food system. We had a discussion after "Food, Inc." that allowed people to reflect on what they learned from the movie and to raise questions about how the system might be changed. A different crowd joined us for the showing of "PolyCultures," but engaged in a similarly thoughtful examination of the issues surrounding our food. Encouraged by the response, we hope to organize another film series for this year.

By Thanksgiving, we had switched over to "holiday" market mode, with complimentary coffee and cider for shoppers, local musicians providing sweet sounds, and even activities for kids, such as balloon sculptures and butter churning demos. On November 21, our original holiday market, we welcomed Gene and Carol Logsdon as our special guests, and Gene sold a number of his books while talking with local farmers and other fans of his writing. (Gene went on to spread the word about Local Roots on his own blog — a nice bit of PR we really appreciated!) We also made room for our "crafty" producers, including the local Fiber Arts Guild, a professional photographer who has volunteered her time to photograph our producers' farms, and other artists selling food-themed note cards, hand-crafted wooden gifts, and much more.

The holiday market turned out to be such a success that we decided to make the remaining market days for the year (Saturdays from after Thanksgiving to December 19) holiday markets as well. We averaged well over 40 producers participating each week, which meant that we expanded the market space into our meeting room and into the lower "garage" bay area. We put out new advertising flyers to spread the word, and people kept coming through the doors, looking for their holiday gifts and enjoying good food.

Knowing that we would need to close over the holidays for renovations, we encouraged producer members to bring even more samples of their items for a tasting market on December 19, dubbed "A Taste of Local Roots." Customers had the chance to sample products such as maple cream, an herb dipping mix, orange chocolate baklava, German cheesecake, locally-roasted coffee, grass-fed burgers, artisan cheeses, honey jams, goat- and sheep-milk fudges, popcorn, eggnog, and much more. No one needed to pack a lunch that day!

By the time we closed our doors (temporarily), we had nearly achieved our initial goals of 300 members and 50 producer members, at 270 and 55 respectively. Over the course of seven Saturdays, the gross sales at the market topped $35,000, 10% of which remained at the market to cover operations, mainly utilities. As you might guess, it was a very happy holiday season for Local Roots!

Floored by success

After Christmas, though, we had to get down to work. Our grant money from the Ohio Department of Agriculture had finally been freed for us to purchase equipment, and we needed to make certain renovations to the building in order to receive our Retail Food Establishment (RFE) license from the Wayne County Board of Health. So we made a list of projects, checked it twice, and called on volunteers both naughty and nice to help. Electrical and plumbing work had to be handled by contractors, of course, but we started off with a post-holiday crew gathered to rip up the old carpet in the retail space and meeting room and to scrape down, grind, and refinish the concrete floor.

If you've ever done any kind of renovation project, you know that things never go quite as smoothly as planned. Such was the case at Local Roots: the concrete directly underneath the carpet was so webbed with cracks that it could not be refinished. So the work crew jackhammered through that layer to discover a lower level of concrete. Not only was that concrete solid, needing only patching and sealing, it revealed a dusky red flooring that gave the room a warmer look.

Around the same time, one wall of the retail space had to be torn down in order for new wiring to be installed to accommodate our new freezer and coolers, which had been purchased with grant money. A local producer member came in with his son to replace the wall with new drywall, but that then prompted board members to ponder painting the whole room, only two months after the first paint job, and to decorate with a color scheme that coordinated with our now-locally-famous carrot logo. (One customer has said it feels like we're inside the logo.)

The plumber came in to install new pipes and such for the commercial sinks we needed for our RFE license. When he jackhammered a trench in the floor for the plumbing, though, he found a gaping hole beneath the concrete. After a bit of excavation, the architect on our board climbed down to discover a brick archway leading to a space under the retail room. He said he felt like Indiana Jones looking for treasure; alas, none could be found. County records are sketchy on details of the building, but we assume we discovered a long-forgotten basement…perhaps a Roots cellar? After determining that there would not be a problem with subsidence, the hole was filled back in, and the plumbing work proceeded as planned. The episode did open up questions about the building's history, though, and we hope to look into that in more detail soon.

Among our many volunteers, we were fortunate to find a couple of experienced carpenters who had the time to build a new coffee bar at the back of the retail space, using door panels and assorted cabinetry. One of our members has decided to scale up his home coffee-roasting equipment in order to sell coffee at the market, both by the cup and in bulk, so we will have one of our "anchor" vendors sooner than we had dreamed possible. Though we are unable yet to have a cafe, since we have no commercial kitchen, the coffee bar includes a donated glass pastry case where bakers can feature weekly specials.

The same carpentry volunteers also built two checkout lines for the lower bay, and our grant funds allowed us to purchase the needed computers and cash registers for our point-of-sale system. While these items were not fully finished by re-opening day, they definitely provided a step up from folding tables and a cash box.

During this time, we knew we needed to keep people thinking about Local Roots so that they would be ready to return to the store once we re-opened. Problems with renovations kept making our set dates look a little dicey. We had scheduled an old-time dance in the market for January 23, and up until hours before the event, we were short a working restroom. Happily, that was corrected in time, and our dance turned out to be a huge success, drawing in nearly 100 people to "break in" our refinished floor with called square, circle, and contra dances for all ages — an event that many hope will be repeated again yet this year.

Cultivating community

We set our re-opening day as January 30, and after our marketing committed us to that date, many of us on the board fretted that renovation obstacles would keep us from passing health inspection. Volunteers stepped up their efforts in the week leading up to re-opening, and thanks to them, we managed to get everything done to the health inspector's approval two days shy of our target date. More volunteers came in the day before re-opening and scrubbed, washed, wiped, and generally spruced up the market from top to bottom. Producers started bringing in their goods to sell on Friday night, with the rest trickling in on Saturday.

Re-opening day brought the level of energy back up among everyone there: new producers brought new items — our local dairy has signed up to sell their milk and butter — the new arrangement put similar items together, and the online order system is up and running for the first order cycle. While the crowd of shoppers stayed at a lower level than at our holiday markets, a steady stream of customers came in for the fresh winter produce of roots (those delicious and sweet Hakurei turnips!) and hearty greens, meats and cheeses, and their daily breads. Many lingered over their coffee samples and selections from the pastry case, enjoying the community spirit that has carried over from our earlier market design.

Our schedule of events continued with a discussion of community gardens held in our meeting room and led by representatives from a few area gardens. Those who attended expressed interest in developing new gardens and asked many insightful questions so as to learn from others' experience. Since Local Roots will host a number of gardening workshops this winter and spring, this discussion gave people plenty to consider before they get down to the details of doing the work.

A few days after our re-opening, we had the thrill of holding a members-only reception for special guest Deborah Madison, who had come to talk as part of The College of Wooster's Wellness Series.  Steering committee members gave her the full tour of the market, and she expressed her delight with and support for what we have accomplished thus far. (She even bought a few things to take home on the plane, and we know that made the producers happy.)  Her visit fit perfectly with the topic of her talk on campus, which emphasized the connections between food and culture — and the pleasures of reconnecting with our food.

As our official t-shirt logo says, Local Roots is all about "cultivating community." We're finding many different ways to do that, even beyond the obvious goal of bringing together farmers and shoppers. The response thus far has been sweet music to our ears, and we're excited about the new growth that springtime will bring at the market.

I was intrigued enough to pay the $1.99 to download it. Like most of you guys, I eat very little processed food, figuring that "if it comes from a plant, eat it; if it is made in a plant, don't" was a good rule of thumb long before Michael Pollan blessed it in his latest book, "Food Rules: An Eater's Manual." However there are times when I have to ingest something with unrecognizable chemical compounds in it — more about one such situation later — and I would love to have information on them at my fingertips like this.

The website for Don't Eat That did not reveal who was behind the app or where the data came from, so I emailed the press contact. Interestingly, the creator is a San Francisco guy named Dwayne Ratleff who runs a small housecleaning business in San Francisco. According to Jennifer Kutz of Vantage Communications, he has no "food or nutrition educational background — he was inspired to create the app after deciding to get healthy on his 50th birthday last year and realizing he had some big changes to make. Since then he's spent upwards of 1,000 hours compiling the Don't Eat That database and working with a developer to build the app."

Fair enough. So what raw information did Ratleff plug into this massive database, which from a few days' use does look quite comprehensive and robust? Apparently he sucked in data from the Food and Drug Administration, European Food Safety Agency, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, American Cancer Society, International Agency For Research On Cancer, World Health Organization, Center For Science In The Public Interest, and several websites such as Foodallergy.org and Celiac.com.

In the app, the information on each ingredient is presented simply, which I appreciate, but alas it isn't footnoted or sourced in any way. I'd like to know which organizations consider something a likely carcinogen, for example, not just that some do. "Dwayne simply compiled all the info and edited it for length — not editorializing at all; really leaving it up to the consumer to make the decision about whether or not a particular ingredient was good for them or not," wrote Kutz in an email to me.

Sometimes you just have to eat crap, or at least you think you do. Last week was one of those times for me. I had to go to Kaiser to take a "glucose challenge test" for gestational diabetes. (I am 7 months pregnant.) All I knew was that I would be drinking a sugar solution and an hour later my blood sugar level would be measured.

Well, I really wasn't prepared for the nasty soda-like drink I had to down. In the past few years I can count the number of sodas I have had on one hand: an occasional Mexican sugar-sweetened Coke or nostalgic Dr. Pepper. The ingredient list on this Fisherbrand Glucose Tolerance Test Beverage made me shudder, and I took a picture of it out of amazement that a toxic cocktail such as this could be prescribed in a hospital. I wondered whether my body would even be able to process it. And in fact, I felt severely nauseated during my hour of waiting, and for long afterward — I went to bed when I got home, and slept for most of the afternoon.

For fun, I just plugged in those ingredients into the Don't Eat That app. Those in red indicate various concerns. Here's what Don't Eat That told me I ingested:

Dextrose is glucose or a simple sugar usually made from corn. This substance is most likely made from genetically modified corn. In the US over 80% of the corn crop has been genetically modified. Only products labeled 100% organic contain no genetically modified substances.

Natural Flavors are derived from natural sources and are the essence of the original natural flavors. Their main function is to flavor food, not to add nutrition. The FDA does not require Natural Flavors to be listed on food labels as they are considered trade secrets. Individuals with asthma and food allergies should avoid Natural Flavors because it is difficult to identify the original ingredients.

Citric Acid is an organic acid found in all living organism and is gives [sic] many foods their sour taste. It is used as an acidity regulator which keeps acid levels in food consistent.

Sodium Benzoate is the sodium salt of benzoic acid and is used in food as a preservative. Some individuals have reported allergies. May be problematic for asthmatics.

FD&C Yellow No. 6 is a yellow azo dye (synthetic compound) derived from coal tar. It is used as a color additive in foods. This additive may cause hyperactivity and other behavior problems in some children. Some individuals are allergic to this. It is prohibited in some countries such as those of the European Union. Coal tar is a known carcinogen.

FD&C Red is synthetic red colorant. It is used as a color additive in foods. This additive may cause hyperactivity and other behavior problems in some children. It is a debated carcinogen. It is prohibited in some countries such as those of the European Union.

Lovely. Thanks, Kaiser!

The Don't Eat That app is $1.99 from the iPhone store. Another app I rely on, which provides a more holistic assessment of not only personal health risks but also the product maker's environmental and social records, is the free iPhone app GoodGuide from the awesomely great organization of the same name.

Robin Wheeler explores that question in her book "Food Security for the Faint of Heart," which emphasizes the need to bring control of our food supply back home through gardening, preserving food, stocking up on basics, supporting local growers and community organizations, and sharing with others when disaster strikes. Many of her reasons for encouraging people to develop this home-grown food security are familiar — the bumpy effects of the global economic crisis, the need to wean oneself from dependence on fossil fuels, and the desire to avoid GMOs and pesticides. She also stresses, however, the community-building aspects of keeping money local and becoming "a new community asset" through sharing skills and resources.

Less than a hundred years ago, Wheeler points out, maintaining home gardens, preserving food, and keeping a full pantry used to be merely common-sense planning, not tarred with the damning label of "stockpiling." Homes of the time were built with "that wondrous space" — whether a pantry closet or a basement room or a root cellar — "where you just fling a door open and rows of cans and jars shine out at you."  Despite the trend over the years away from such storage to quick-fix meals, she assures us that we, too, can become food secure.

A handful of chapters cover the obvious techniques of developing garden skills and preserving the back-yard harvest for winter, but Wheeler also goes further. To cover all the bounty provided by nature, she adds a chapter each for herbs, edible flowers, foraging, and medicinal plants, all useful categories to help people identify additional food (and emergency) resources when the usual ones have dwindled.  She also covers water storage (a vital but often overlooked part of emergency planning), buying pantry staples on a budget, and working with others in your community to spread the means to develop food security.

In each chapter, Wheeler offers plenty of ideas, to-do lists, and goals, opening readers' eyes to the possibilities in community gardens, gleaning, sharing knowledge and tools with others, and more.  She encourages joining with friends and neighbors to pool diverse skills and to work cooperatively on projects such as building raised garden beds or compost bins, not to mention canning or drying an abundant harvest.  Instead of remaining at "the bottom of our food chain" and subject to the "choices" made for us by corporations, she says, we can choose to grow and cook our own food and to prepare ourselves for hard times in a way that "will actually make our world a better, safer place."

While the book offers a sprightly overview of the topic of creating food security at the individual and community levels, it lacks depth in key areas. For example, I hope readers will exercise caution in embracing the chapter on canning: Wheeler offers information that is somewhat incomplete or questionable, including information on processing times, washing the food before canning, and storage.  (Her recommendation for home-canned goods -– "It is safe from bugs and mice, which means it can even be stored in a ratty old crawlspace" — ignores the fact that vacuum-sealed glass jars may not take kindly to the potential humidity or extreme temperature fluctuations found in such spaces.)  If you are looking for a real how-to introduction to food preservation, you'll want to revisit our earlier review of some key canning, drying, and other preservation books. If you simply want to explore the ethics and the social implications of food security, though, Wheeler provides plenty of good ideas to consider.

"If I was dishing out advice," Wheeler muses, "it would be to always plan for an emergency food supply several months before an unpredicted disaster. It would be much better if many people knew how to garden for themselves, and how to choose nutritious crops that last (or can be stored) over a long period." Add to the pot knowing how to cook and preserve food, keep a well-stocked pantry, and work amiably with others in the community, and we can all cross food security off our list of worries that keep us up at night.

I learned about this intriguing idea on Quest, a science program produced by KQED in San Francisco (with all programs available for on-line viewing). One of the segments is all about asthma: what it does, how to prevent it, and why the incidence has been rising rapidly in recent years (they state that rates more than doubled in small children in the U.S. between 1980 and 1994). Asthma's underlying cause and triggers are still a mystery — as yet, no one has found the "magic allergen" or markers of genetic predisposition — and so researchers are looking at diet, stress, air pollution, early exposure to allergens and more. (For more information, consult a series of papers in Environmental Health Perspectives examined how the environmental influences asthma, and a recent study from the Health Effects Insitute found a causal relationship between traffic-related air pollution and exacerbation of asthma in children.)

One thing that stands out is that asthma rates have been rising in industrialized societies like the U.S., Western Europe, Australia and Japan. And one thing that these places have in common is more time spent inside, more concrete, more cars, fewer farms, and less exposure to the natural world.

This leads us to one of the intriguing ideas about asthma and other allergies (and even diseases related to chronic inflammation, as New Scientist reports): the "hygiene hypothesis." This hypothesis, first proposed a few decades ago, suggests that as our environments become cleaner and we spend less time around "dirty" things like animals and the natural world, our bodies aren't being exposed to enough microorganisms and therefore don't develop the proper defenses (or, in the case of asthma, don't overreact to external allergens).

The program mentions a study of children in Germany, Switzerland and Austria that supports the hypothesis. In rural communities, researchers found lower asthma rates in children whose sleeping quarters were close to the livestock stables than those who lived in town, away from the animals. One possible explanation for the difference is that exposure to the microbes found in manure and stables protects a child from developing asthma by causing favorable changes to their immune system. (Although the exact study is not mentioned in the Quest piece, I suspect it is one in the New England Journal of Medicine that concludes "Endotoxin levels in samples of dust from the child's mattress were inversely related to the occurrence of hay fever, atopic asthma, and atopic sensitization.")

The hygiene hypothesis and its connection to livestock are still only hypothetical at this time — there are a number of confounding results, like higher asthma rates among low-income children in allergen-laden urban areas and the link between asthma and exposure to tobacco smoke at a very early age. If it turns out that early exposure to livestock reduces the chance of developing asthma, it could be a benefit above and beyond the urban farming's main benefits of good, clean and local food.

Editor's note: Robyn O'Brien's fantastic 2009 book, "The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick - And What We Can Do About It," offers an alternative to the hygiene hypothesis when it comes to asthma. (Alas, "The Unhealthy Truth" is one of many sitting in a teetering pile Ethicurean headquarters that got read and should have been reviewed by now … and that we continue to hope will someday still be.) O'Brien talks to Harvard Medical School pediatrician David Ludwig, author of "Ending the Food Fight: Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/ Fake Food World," who believes that it is the U.S. dietary shift toward fake food that has sabotaged our immune systems, both by subjecting us to an onslaught of evolutionarily-novel compounds in the form of artificial and/or genetically modified ingredients, and by depriving us of the essential nutrients to mount a defense. In this fake-food hypothesis, farm kids and those whose parents keep urban livestock would have lower asthma and food-allergy rates because they grow up in a family food culture less dependent on processed food.

Photoillustration: Livestock breeds image created by W. Layman in 1911, archived at Michigan State University Museum.

A monkfish (Wikimedia Commons)

In the January 2010 issue of Food & Wine magazine, former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni visits top-rated Le Bernardin (3 stars from Michelin, 4 stars from the New York Times) and acts like an ass to the sommelier as he eats his multicourse meal*. If you're into restaurant drama, or food and drink pairings, you'll probably find the article delightful. For me, it elicited only ho-hum emotions. That was, until I got to the recipe collection that chef Eric Ripert and pastry chef Michael Laiskonis** contributed to the story.

One of the recipes features monkfish, also known as angler fish, which has an "avoid" rating from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch and the Shedd Aquarium (PDF). The reason for this rating is not so much the monkfish itself, but how it is caught. The Seafood Watch page says that "monkfish are usually caught using bottom trawls, a method that can damage seafloor habitat and often results in high bycatch. ("Bycatch" is the non-target species that are caught along with the target species.) Monkfish are also caught using gillnets, and this can result in the accidental catch and death of sea turtles and marine mammals." (The Good Catch Manual from the Seafood Choices Alliance has a superb primer on fishing methods.)

In the New York City chapter of Taras Grescoe's "Bottomfeeder," a must-read book that I reviewed for Ethicurean in 2008, Grescoe talks with Eric Ripert about his seafood sourcing, and notes that Ripert was one of the first chefs to take swordfish and Chilean sea bass off of his menu. In the interview, Ripert says, "We still serve some fish that are on the list, but these ones we get from dayboats. It is difficult to know where your fish is coming from, of course, if you are not catching it yourself. But I have confidence in my purveyors. Rod Mitchell buys line-caught fish, fish from dayboats. I think there's a big difference between a cod, for example, that is caught in one of those giant boats in the middle of the ocean, and one that has been caught by a local fisherman in a little boat."

So it's possible that the fish served to Bruni was caught in an acceptable fashion, with limited bycatch. But when a monkfish recipe appears in a mass-market magazine, all bets are off for sustainable sourcing. And it makes me wonder what Food & Wine was thinking when they approved Ripert's monkfish recipe. Do they not consider the status of fish and seafood that appear in their magazine? Or was this a case of being dazzled by Le Bernardin's galaxy of stars? Food & Wine is no stranger to the issue of sustainable seafood — their website features a slideshow on the topic — but their attention appears to have strayed, much to the detriment of the creatures that live in the monkfish's habitat on the Atlantic sea floor.

Food & Wine could learn from another ostensibly enlightened publication that temporarily fell off the sustainable-fish wagon. A few months ago, the New York Times' Mark Bittman published a recipe for red snapper with fruit salsa in his weekly column. Grist's Tom Philpott called out Bittman for his use of the fish, which is highly endangered, rating an "avoid" from Seafood Watch unless they come from the NW Hawaiian islands. Philpott reminded Bittman and other food writers that they have higher calling than simply creating delicious recipes. To his credit, Bittman responded with a mea culpa and a thoughtful explanation of his recognition that the seafood situation can be agonizingly complex at times for food writers, as much of the "best choices" list includes farm-raised fish, fish that are difficult to obtain, or fish that are not well liked these days. In a later issue of the Times, Bittman took a step back to consider the big picture: fish farming,  endangered oceans, fishmeal, and the prospect of recovery for seafood stocks.

Magazines and newspapers have a lot of influence on what we cook and eat: they create trends, or help bring them to a halt; they act as cooking teachers, introduce us to new ingredients, and give us inspiration in the kitchen. When it comes to seafood, they can stick with the old ways, indiscriminately publishing recipes for fish without considering their populations or how they are caught or raised, or they can be part of the solution by writing about the best ways to use the seafood on the "best choices" list. At the very least, Food & Wine could start by amending the Web version of the recipe and printing a correction that acknowledges the monkfish's Seafood Watch rating.

* The final savory course in the meal was an "upscale surf and turf of grilled escolar and Kobe beef with pungent anchovy-butter sauce."  Escolar, you might remember, is a fish that can be challenging for some people's digestive system and is sometimes mislabeled as "white tuna" at sushi restaurants, as one of my recent posts discussed.

** Pastry Chef Michael Laiskonis and his crew run a fascinating blog called  Workbook in which they explore the creation of magnificent plated desserts, interesting ingredients, and technique. On his own, Laiskonis also writes Notes from the Kitchen, a project that contains more ponderous writing about art, time management, and of course kitchen life.

Monkfish (Lophius piscatorius) image is from Wikimedia Commons, originally published in the 1896 book Oceanic Ichthyology by G. Brown Goode and Tarleton H. Bean.

Coleman has established himself in recent years as an innovative organic farmer working in challenging conditions and finding ingenious solutions. His key suggestion for growing fresh crops throughout even the harsh Maine winters involves the use of unheated greenhouses paired with floating row covers to increase the temperature around tender crops. This system has evolved to include movable cold houses that can be shifted from summer hot house crops such as tomatoes over to summer-started winter crops of greens and roots. By getting a jump start while the days are long enough to promote growth, the plants reach near-maturity before the days shorten significantly, and they can then be picked in succession throughout the winter months.

"In other words," Coleman explains, "we were not extending the growing season as one hopes to do in a heated greenhouse but, rather, we were extending the harvest season."

Over the past few decades, he has tried other solutions, such as brief minimal heating in the greenhouses and a wider variety of crops, and "The Winter Harvest Handbook" brings his previous books (especially "Four-Season Harvest") up to date. Through all the testing and use of different methods, he has kept the goals of simplicity, low cost, and energy efficiency in mind. The farm's processes have also been organized carefully: "We aim for a goal of never leaving a greenhouse bed unplanted, and we come pretty close."

Coleman makes a solid case that all of this experimentation has proven worthwhile, and "The Winter Harvest Handbook" offers extensive details for everything from preparing the beds to maintaining and harvesting the crops. The methods outlined can be translated elsewhere to continue to provide healthful fresh food throughout the year as well as to increase the profits of "dedicated local grower[s]... selling a premium product."

Given that the winters in northeastern Ohio can be equally daunting — while we may not have as much snow or as frigid temperatures as Maine, we get a lot less sunshine — it's no wonder that local farmers have picked up on Coleman's techniques and begun to implement them in their own production methods. And with a growing demand for local foods all year round (such as we're finding now at Local Roots Market), farmers who have begun to plan their own winter harvests can easily expect to gain a faithful following.

Phil and Mindy Bartholomae of Breezy Hill Farm and Kevin and Amy Leamer at Por-Bar Farm have dazzled Local Roots shoppers each week with their selection of winter greens, root vegetables, and lingering summer crops such as tomatoes and hot peppers. (Personally, I love the Bartholomaes' Hakurei turnips, seen here at right, and was delighted to find that the Leamers had rutabagas available for the holiday season!) Since we're heading into the slow harvest months, I asked both couples about their winter crops and Coleman's influence.

What crops have you planted for this winter?

The Bartholomaes: We have leaf lettuce, spinach, bunching onions, radishes, Hakurei turnips, beets, carrots, tatsoi, mizuna, parsley, cilantro, rosemary, and mint in the tunnels.

The Leamers: Asian greens, European greens, lettuces, cabbages, root crops, peas, fava beans -- and constantly acquiring other varieties for winter starting in our greenhouse and transplanting into our high tunnel beds.

How and when did you first encounter Eliot Coleman's work?

Mindy and Phil Bartholomae

Phil and Mindy Bartholomae: We had always dreamed of getting into farming big time; we always hung out at our favorite farmers' stands at our Saturday market when we lived in Cleveland. We then were transferred to Chicago in 2006, and though we knew the farm dream would have to be put on hold, we vowed to get every book available on the subject and study, study, study! I then enrolled in the University of Illinois Extension Master Gardener program and lapped up the sections on organic farming. I attended organic farm tours and then a weekend conference with Coleman as the keynote speaker. He was so understated, but so resourceful and full of knowledge about these very old methods of intensive gardening/farming with no outside input and season extension.

Kevin and Amy Leamer: We discovered him approximately 9-10 years ago via the Internet (especially the Johnny's Selected Seed site) when we started researching organic farming. We found his books and eventually purchased "Four Season Harvest."

What parts of what you read carried the most weight?

The Bartholomaes: The biggest revelation for us was how critical soil health is. We take it for granted as simply a medium for roots to form in and be supported. And then we add fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, etc., when the plants don't look healthy! Our produce is nothing without balanced, complete soil, achieved only by mimicking nature as best as possible, i.e., adding humus through animal or green manures and rotating crops so as not to deplete soil nutrition by one crop's demands.

The Leamers: Eliot's examples gave us the courage to act on our "instinct" that a viable small farm operation could succeed with polyculture methods, contrary to the naysayers suggesting that large monocultures were the only profitable agriculture model for the modern economic climate. Trading expensive chemical inputs for good ol' labor and working with nature just made sense to us. When we started outlining our farm plan, we referred to Eliot's variety recommendations and season extension methods. We were inspired and encouraged by information he gathered from trips to the south of France where he encountered much fresh produce available in the middle of winter.

What methods/tools/crops of his do you use on your farm?

The Bartholomaes: We have 2 high tunnels, one a "cold" tunnel with 2 layers of plastic and no added heat, and the other with some added heat to keep above 26. We also have used row covers of spun polyester out in the field to protect established crops from cold as well as to protect seedlings from insects.

Kevin and Amy Leamer

The Leamers: We have (2) 24' X 48' plastic covered (inflated double layer) greenhouses and (2) 30' X 120' plastic covered (single layer) high tunnels. The tunnels each have (7) 3' X 120' raised beds giving us approx. 1,600 row feet for our crops. This provides us valuable season extension and year-round growing capabilities. Our growing system utilizes only passive solar heating and non-powered mechanical ventilation and wind for cooling.

We combined his seasonal variety suggestions (with our own personal tastes considered), crop rotations, Integrated Pest Management practice (intercropping, something we learned from Joe Kovach and his test plots at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster), and various information amassed over a good part of 10 years or more through our own large gardening/small farming experiences.

We constantly replenish our soil ecosystem with Eliot's green manure crop strategies, and our favorite "farm machinery" is his broadfork that we use for gently working our raised bed soil.

What have been your results so far?

The Bartholomaes: We moved to the farm last October, got our first tunnel covered by November, seeds started indoors in December and January for planting in the tunnel in February, and with the increasing day length at that point, things grew like mad. It was so gratifying! We harvested spinach, greens mixes, lettuce, radishes, beets, carrots. We then transitioned to warm weather crops in the tunnel: peppers, eggplant and tomatoes. This summer we sold at two farmers markets and for Fresh Fork online, and this winter we are selling at two markets.

The Leamers: We've witnessed the obvious advantages of having fresh "out of season" varieties available, improved plant/fruit quality, and excellent natural pest/disease control. The most rewarding aspect has been the positive interactions with market customers who seem to share our enthusiasm for a "fresh" approach to farming. We are quite humbled, yet motivated by the praise and encouragement given by quite a diversified age range and demographic of our customer base.

How did you get interested in the Local Roots market?

The Bartholomaes: I think it was through Dave Benchoff whom we had met at last year's Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA) Conference. [Note: Dave is a member of the Local Roots board, past president of the local OEFFA chapter, and co-owner of Banzhaf Garten Organic Farm.] We are just so excited to be able to provide beautiful produce in the winter and are thinking this will ultimately be our greater focus than growing during the height of the summer season, when competition is stiff and there's a glut of produce. We are thrilled that all the amazing folks at Local Roots have made this really happen and are excited to have a regular outlet for our produce!

The Leamers: We learned about Local Roots from a producer member at the Medina Farmers' Market this summer. We visited the web site and were immediately impressed with the professional, well-organized, progressive approach to providing fresh local food. We joined promptly. Local Roots will provide us an excellent opportunity to expand our market potential year-round to provide fresh local food especially during the traditionally dormant Ohio winter.

Photos courtesy of the Bartholomaes and the Leamers, used with permission.

This is one of the disturbing findings in a new paper in the open access journal PLoS ONE (hat tip to Tom Laskawy): "The Real maccoyii: Identifying Tuna Sushi with DNA Barcodes – Contrasting Characteristic Attributes and Genetic Distances." (A note on the title's wordplay: Maccoyii is the species name for the southern bluefin tuna, Thunnus maccoyii, and plays on an old expression meaning the "genuine article" — one that has a  murky origin, says World Wide Words.) The authors and their collaborators collected 68 samples of tuna sushi from 31 restaurants in New York City and Denver. Whenever a tuna species was listed on the menu — "bluefin," for example — the team ordered it. At restaurants that did not list the species on the menu, they went for "regular" (akami) and "fatty" (toro) tuna. If the menu didn't list a species, they first asked the staff, "What kind of tuna is it?" and then "What species of tuna?" if the answer the to first query was not a valid species ("red tuna," for example).

DNA analysis was performed on each sample to determine the species of fish, as well as to develop a "cytochrome c oxidase subunit I character-based key" to assist others in speciating tuna samples. Not surprisingly, they discovered numerous problems:

• Vagueness and/or ignorance: 79% of the menus did not list any species of tuna. When staff was asked for a clarification, 32% of the clarifications were incorrect and 9% were not helpful (for example, answering with a non-existent species).
• Mislabeling (or perhaps outright fraud): On numerous occasions, the restaurant staff told the customer that the fish was bluefin but served much cheaper bigeye tuna. (But all eight times when the menu specified bluefin tuna, bluefin was actually served.)
• Hiding the unpleasant truth (or avoiding controversy): Several restaurants served northern bluefin tuna (T. thynnus) or the critically endangered southern bluefin tuna (T. maccoyii) despite a generic menu listing of tuna and a verbal clarification of "bigeye." The authors postulate that selling the more expensive bluefin as a lesser grade tuna was a way of avoiding controversy, like the one that has been facing the Nobu chain of restaurants (previously covered at the Ethicurean and in links therein).
• Revolting food: Five of the nine times they ordered "white tuna" from the menu, instead of receiving the expected albacore (T. alalunga), the researchers were served escolar (Lepidocybium flavorunneum). Escolar is banned for sale in Italy and Japan because the high level of wax esters in the fish's flesh can cause serious side effects including "mild and rapid passage of oily yellow or orange droplets, to severe diarrhea with nausea and vomiting. The milder symptoms have been referred to as keriorrhea [i.e. flow of wax in Greek]." Although the fish can be sold legally in the U.S., Annex 2 of the FDA's Hazard Analysis & Critical Control Point (HACCP) manual for operators recommends that "Escolar should not be marketed in interstate commerce." So you might want to think twice before ordering "white tuna" when you next go out for sushi. (Wikipedia has more about escolar.)

Despite the article's "gotcha" feeling, the research has very important implications for the survival of bluefin tuna. One of the prerequisites for a Convention on International Trade Endangered Species (CITES) listing is that the species needs to be identifiable in trade contexts so that violations can be reliably detected. The authors claim that their method reliably identifies all species of tuna, thus meeting the CITES prerequisite. Monaco has formally proposed that northern bluefin tuna be added to Appendix I of CITES during the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES that will be held in March 2010 in Doha, Qatar (PDF). And just last week, a majority of an FAO advisory panel agreed that the available evidence supports Appendix I listing (via La Vida Locavore). If listed, trade of the fish will be permitted "only in exceptional circumstances."

The authors recommend that FDA modify the Seafood List, which recognizes appropriate "market names" for most of the seafood species sold in the U.S.  Currently, the FDA allows seafood marketers to use the term "tuna" to describe all species of the genus (and several other fish outside of genus Thunnus). A requirement that bluefin tuna must be marketed as bluefin tuna would reduce uncertainty and protect against fraud.

At a more local level, sushi eaters can help the bluefin by not ordering any tuna sushi except when you have exceptional confidence that the restaurant can confirm that bluefin tuna is not being served.

Photo of sushi from www.bluewaikiki.com's flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License. Photo of Tuna at Tsukiji market by Jenny Webber, used with permission.